Self-Translation as Method investigates the process, aesthetics, and politics of literary self-translation and transmediation worldwide. Self-translation refers to the process through which authors translate their own writing into another language; such a translation may be undertaken at the same time as the original is composed or long after it is completed, but it always represents a self-reflexive relationship between the author and their own work. Because the self-translator has access to the original’s authorial intentions, they are empowered to take creative liberties that a conventional translator might shy away from. Through these creative liberties, self-translators enrich the cultural capital of both their native and adopted language and culture. Self-translation, in this way, often involves writing oneself into world literature, creating cosmopolitan palimpsests that reveal, in their dialogue with diverse cultural traditions, the nonlinear forms of modernity. In this course, we will delve into case studies of self-translation from East Asia, East Africa, Latin America, North America, and Italy. We will also investigate the implications of self-transmediation, which occurs when an author adapts their own work into another medium, transporting that work from the page to the stage to the screen, for instance. For the final assignment, students will produce their own work of self-translation or transmediation.

How does modern Sinophone sci-fi reveal the “dark side” of China’s rise to power? How does Sinophone speculative fiction and its transmediated afterlives chart a reparative vision in the face of ongoing ecological and political crises? How do memories of past traumas intersect with future catastrophes in short stories and novels by Sinophone creators? How does speculative fiction produced by women and nonbinary creators forge an alternative path for human-AI collaboration? How do queer, transgressive, and non-human desires coalesce into a flora-fauna-AI symbiosis? How does contemporary Sinophone sci-fi advance inclusive futures for queer, crip, rural, neurodiverse, non-Han, and otherwise disenfranchised individuals in the face of ongoing exploitation? How do translators of Chinese-sci-fi employ a reparative praxis to transmediate trauma for global audiences?

In this course, we encounter an array of sci-fi and speculative fiction authored by Ken Liu, Cixin Liu, Han Song, Regina Kanyu Wang, Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Gu Shi, Wang Nuonuo, and Chu Xidao, alongside selections by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Italo Calvino, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov (reading selections subject to change). We will also examine multimedia adaptations of contemporary Chinese sci-fi, examining the work’s evolution from page to screen to stage. All readings will be available in English and films will be available either dubbed or with English subtitles. By engaging with material through a variety of written, oral, and multimedia responses, you will co-create reparative futures alongside these speculative creators.

This course looks at contemporary Indigenous Latin America through literature. It focuses primarily on texts written by Indigenous authors in different genres and languages; and it includes some texts depicting Indigenous peoples from other vantage points, whether it’s in attempts to build solidarity or to revisit historical accounts of national formation––we will ask to what effect. We will analyze the texts’ genre structures and aesthetic devices, as well as situate them in a broader set of literary conversations and traditions. Throughout the course, we will discuss the political stakes of the literary texts we read. We will see the works operate in many ways: for instance, they may build power and resistance, bear witness to the brutalization of Indigenous peoples, or uphold narratives of Indigenous erasure. Land is constantly present in the texts as a position of enunciation, a site of struggle, and a topic of reflection. And so, we will ask: what does it mean to write on stolen land?

Does love have a history? This course will explore a particularly rich, multisecular episode in the literary history of this emotion: the efflorescence and varieties of love poetry, both lyrical and narrative, in Europe and the Middle East from the Middle Ages through the 16th century. Weekly discussions will center on close readings of selected love poems and versified narrratives from a variety of literary traditions, including: Provençal troubadour lyric; French chansons, the Germanic Minnesang and the Galician-Portuguese cantigas (the question of amour courtois); Ibero-Romance and colloquial Arabic jarchas; the Italian dolce stil novo; the Petrarchan sonnet and its early modern heirs in Portugal, England and Spain; Arabo-Andalusian and Hispano-Jewish qaṣā’id and muwashshaḥāt, medieval Latin love lyric; Persian Sufi and Christian mystical love poetry; Dante’s Vita nuova; and selections from two other erotological classics in narrative verse, Libro de buen amor and Roman de la Rose. Discussions will be framed by an overview of both premodern discussions on love – how love is conceptualized at the intersection of philosophy, theology and medicine by Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers– and contemporary scholarly debates on the origins and development of medieval love literature.

This bi-weekly writing workshop is designed as a space to practice writing and presenting in different academic genres: such as journal articles, job market materials, conference presentations, or job talks. We will have each participant submit one chosen piece each semester, and discuss two pieces at each session; written texts will be circulated beforehand, and talks can be presented during the session. Everyone will offer feedback for each other’s work, which we will discuss during our meetings. While the workshop will primarily allow the participants to practice these professional genres, it can also serve as a motivation to stay on track with one’s own writing goals, and a way to get experience with giving feedback to others’ work.

Since at least the nineteenth century, computation and capitalism have co-evolved with each other. In many respects, computers have served the interests of capital, by creating new modes of accumulation and means of automating, managing, and outsourcing labor, as well as new tools for researching, advertising to, and transacting with customers. However, computers have also been described as fundamentally changing or even overcoming capitalism–both for better and for worse. Theorists have credited computers with eliminating work or turning it into play and transforming market exchanges into gift exchanges. Contemporary platforms and artificial intelligence inspire dreams of “fully automated luxury communism” and fears that law and contracts are being replaced by code and neo-colonial or neo-feudal forms of coercion.

In this seminar, we will engage with an outpouring of recent scholarship that attempts to describe and theorize digital capitalism and culture, pairing recent texts with excerpts from canonical works that their authors cite and build upon. In the process, students will gain exposure to key concepts, debates, and methods in the emerging field(s) of critical data studies, new media studies, and platform studies. We will also reflect upon the nature and purpose of theorizing. A series of assignments and workshops over the course of the semester will guide students through the process of identifying a promising research topic, reviewing scholarly literature, articulating an original research question, and writing a review essay or research paper.

A close study of Kafka’s major stories and novels, and how this body of work was received, explicated and interpreted by key figures in post-war France. Relevant excerpts from Kafka’s diaries and correspondence supplement the primary texts, as well as discussions relating to French Existentialism, the Student Movement, and Post-Structuralism.

Recent years have seen attempts to rethink modernism as a global phenomenon rather than a mostly Anglo-American and West European movement. Center-periphery relations have often been foregrounded in these efforts, and in critiques of them. Building on theoretical statements by Jorge Luis Borges, Oswald de Andrade, Pascale Casanova, Susan Stanford Friedman, Franco Moretti, Oe Kenzaburo, and Roberto Schwarz, this seminar will explore the politics of language, representation, and center-periphery relations in works by Antonio Machado de Assis, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Higuchi Ichiyo, James Joyce, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Franz Kafka, Eileen Chang, Clarice Lispector, Lu Xun, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer.ars have seen ambitious attempts to rethink modernism as a global phenomenon rather than a largely Anglo-American and West European movement. Center-periphery relations have often been foregrounded in these efforts, and in critiques of them. Building on theoretical statements and critiques by Jorge Luis Borges, Kenzaburo Oe, Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, Emily Apter, Eric Hayot, and Susan Stanford Friedman, this seminar will explore the politics of language, periodization, and center-periphery relations both within and beyond the West, in works by Higuchi Ichiyo, James Joyce, Lu Xun, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Borges, Kukrit Pramoj, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Derek Walcott.

This course will examine uses of ancient Greek and Roman Classics in the literatures, arts, and thought of Africa and the Black diaspora. We will analyze how African and black diasporic authors and intellectuals have engaged with, revised, and re-imagined the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, both to expose and critique discourses of racism, imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy, and as a rich source of radical self-expression. At the same time, we will study the emergence of scholarship on black classicisms in the last thirty years and the theoretical underpinnings of this field. The course is offered as a research seminar with an incorporated pedagogy workshop: one of the coursework assignments is to develop a syllabus for a course on an aspect of Black classicisms that you might teach in the future and seminar discussions will involve short segments on pedagogy.

The syllabus is arranged thematically, taking in uses of Classics in literature, art, journalism, and politics. Writers, artists, and politicians whose work and ideas we will study include Phillis Wheatley, William Sanders Scarborough, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Romare Bearden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Rita Dove, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Ola Rotimi, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Wole Soyinka, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Austin Clarke, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Edwidge Danticat. In addition to works by individual authors we will also consider the circulation of Greek and Roman classical myths, history, and thought in vernacular cultures. Throughout, we will be attentive to the relationship between national contexts and transnational histories and networks, and the phenomenon of classical appropriation in invented modern traditions.

The crisis of representation in postmodernity—closely connected with social and existential alienation and technological development—often manifests itself in terms of “hyperreality,” where any distinction between “the real” and “the simulacrum” is blurred. The boundaries between “reality” and “non-reality” and relevant concepts (e.g. originality, authenticity, mimesis, simulacrum) have been explored and challenged from different but comparable perspectives in philosophy, art, and literature since classical antiquity. This seminar will investigate discourses on, or inspired by “hyperreality” and its epistemological, ontological, and political implications, from antiquity to postmodernity. Authors and thinkers to be discussed include Plato, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Umberto Eco, Fredric Jameson, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Grosz, Niklas Bostrom, Lucian, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Christine Broke-Rose, Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes.

The seminar is built around a sequence of fundamental questions regarding the literary disciplines and media studies, their history and epistemology. Discussions are instigated by readings in philology, stylistics, the history of ideas, semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, film and media theory, genetic criticism, literary sociology, cultural studies, and digital humanities.

This course will introduce students to the major writers, canonical works, and important literary movements of Arabic Literature from late antiquity up to the modern period. The course will be structured thematically with special focus on the historical context and cultural tradition within which literary works fit and resonated. The course will consider the development of various literary genres over time (poetry and qasida form, narratives, fiction, Belles-lettres, maqama, shadow plays and Drama, etc.). Selected works of literature will be read in translation, but students with Arabic can work with the original texts in a separate section. Texts will often be discussed vis-à-vis parallel themes in other works of literature whenever relevant (e.g. The Qur’anic and Biblical Joseph, Maʿarrī’s Epistle of Forgiveness and Dante’s Divine Comedy, Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo’s travelogues, etc.) with special attention to the influence of Western Literature on Modern Arabic poetry and prose.

The course is open to both undergraduates and graduate students.

Have you ever fantasized of turning the pages of a Gutenberg Bible with your own fingers?   Or a medieval illustrated Book of Hours?  Or touching a papyrus fragment of Homer?  Or a First Folio edition of Shakespeare?  Or seeing close-up Copernicus’ diagram of the heliocentric universe?   The Houghton Library of Harvard University is one of the world’s greatest repositories of ancient scrolls, papyrus codices, illuminated manuscripts on parchment and paper, early printed books, rare books published since the sixteenth century down until today, and stunning prints and other types of graphic art. In this freshman seminar, we will utilize Houghton’s extraordinary holdings to study first-hand the history of the book in the West as a material artifact from its beginnings in the ancient Near East down to the present day. Each week we will focus upon a cluster of books.   Before class, students will be asked to examine selected books in Houghton’s Reading Room as well as online.  During class-time, we will study the books again as a group. Visiting experts will demonstrate how to unroll a papyrus codex, the technology involved in creating a codex and printing on a hand-pulled press, and the techniques modern conservators use to preserve manuscripts and books. You will emerge from this seminar with a heightened understanding of what a rich thing a book is, and so much more than just a text. And you will have seen and studied close-up some of the most visually spectacular and culturally significant books in all Western history.

Class Notes:

First-Year Seminars are available only to first-year students. You may apply to both Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 First-Year Seminars via the FYS lottery between July 7 and August 7, 2025 at 11:59PM-midnight.

You may apply to as many seminars each term as you would like, but we recommend you apply to at least six in fall and three in spring.

As part of your application, you must provide a brief statement on why you are interested in each seminar. You will be notified of lottery results for both fall and spring seminars at 10am on Mon, August 11^th. If you are unsuccessful in the lottery, you may still join any seminar with open seats. A list of open seminars and instructions on next steps will be available on the First-Year Seminar Program website August 11^th at 12 Noon.

With gender inequities and biases pervasive within and across cultures worldwide, and the global pandemics of gender-based violence and structural violence further intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, how have individuals, groups, communities, and nations globally fought for (and against) gender justice? How have struggles against gender injustice intersected and conflicted with struggles against racial, ethnic, environmental, health, LGBTQIA+ and other forms of injustice?

Gender justice, as is true of justice more broadly, is often discussed in the abstract, or as a matter of law, political history, protest movements, enfranchisement, and similar phenomena. Yet at its core, justice involves individuals and their experiences – both their suffering and their triumphs – experiences most directly accessed through stories. In this seminar we’ll explore a range of stories and different forms of storytelling on gender justice, from novels and films to memoirs/personal histories, histories, and creative nonfiction. Some narratives with which we will engage are Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ito Shiori’s Black Box: The Memoir that Sparked Japan’s #MeToo Movement, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, and Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Students will be encouraged to write their own stories on gender and justice.

How did ancient Greek heroes, both male and female, learn about life by facing what all of us have to face, our human condition?

How to face death? Concentrating on this central human question, we will explore some of the greatest works of ancient Greek literature in English translation. For the Greeks, a special way to address the problem of death was to think long and hard about what they called heroes in their myths. Our purpose in this course is to extend that kind of thinking to the present. Assignments invite you to engage in personal reflections on the meaning of life and death in the light of what we read in Greek literature about the ordeals of becoming a hero.

The cross-listed course introduces students to Soviet history through several famous works of literature and film. Key periods and events include the Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, WWII, the post-Stalin Thaw, the Brezhnev years, Glasnost’ and Perestroika, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Along with short historical readings, we will examine works of popular culture, as well as book and films that were unable to be published and shown until Glasnost’ and the post-Soviet period. Among the readings will be Babel’s Red Cavalry, Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, and works by Zamyatin, Solzhenitsyn, Alexievich, and others. Films include, for example, works by Vertov, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Kalatozov, and Balabanov.

A survey course on major works in German literature, philosophy, and critique from the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth century. Close reading of representative texts opens onto broader ramifications in cultural and intellectual history with further consideration of societal and political tensions.

In recent years, it has become commonplace to hear that new technologies are threatening humanity–that “we” must struggle to “stay human” in the face of novel threats ranging from autonomous weapons to addictive social media apps and gene editing to generative AI. At the same time, the “AI boom” has raised profound questions about creativity as an essentially human trait and inspired widespread concern about AI impacts on human and nonhuman environments–or all creation.

Observers often describe the moral and existential challenges that such innovations present as new and unprecedented. But, in fact the concern is at least several centuries old.

Drawing on canonical works of literature, philosophy, and cinema, this course will offer an introduction to the long history of thinking about, and working with, new technologies in the arts and humanities. In addition to close reading and analysis, students will engage in a series of “critical making” projects using historical artifacts housed in Harvard’s collections and brand-new generative AI tools developed specifically for us. The final assignment will be a short paper that reflects on one of these creative endeavors and connects it to course themes.

Examines how the1001 Nights, popularly known in the West as the Arabian Nights, is transformed and adapted for different media and genres. Focuses on a variety of films, (e.g., The Thief of Baghdad, Chu Chin Chow, Aladdin), illustrations/images (e.g., Doré, Chagall, Matisse), musical and balletic renditions (e.g., Rimsky-Korsakov, Fokine), translations (e.g., Galland, Lane, Burton, Haddawy), and re-tellings of stories (e.g., Poe, Barth, Mahfouz, Sebbar, Zimmerman). Also considers the role of the 1001 Nights in contemporary popular culture.

In this course, students will read English translations of novels that have won major prizes. In addition to exploring themes of contemporary literature from around the world, special attention will be paid to the role of translation in shaping the work and its reception, and to the question of what makes for a prize-winning translation. Each week students will read a prize-winning translation alongside reports from the prize committee, reviews of the translation, and what the translators say about their work.

Assignments:

Write a 2000-word analysis of the translation decisions in a novel translation, with reference to the source text and to the translator’s stated goals, if available.

Write a 1000-word book review of a translated novel, including a discussion of the translation.

Imagine that you are one the committee for one of the prize-winning novels we have read. Write a 2000-word argument for one of the short-listed titles to be chosen in its place.

This course satisfies the Arts & Humanities distribution requirement, counts towards the Secondary in Translation Studies, and may be taken pass/fail upon application. Reading knowledge of one language in addition to English is required.

This course reviews the influential major films of Stanley Kubrick—Paths of Glory (1957), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), among other earlier films and his unfinished project A.I. Artificial Intelligence (dir. Spielberg 2001). The films will be considered in their historical, cultural, and film studies contexts. Topics include Cold War politics, literary adaptation, the depiction of violence on screen, and the relationship between popular culture and scholarship. We will pay special attention to Kubrick’s interest in war, science fiction, and technology, including artificial intelligence.

35mm screenings of the films will be held at the Harvard Film Archive as part of this course.

No prerequisites.

A re-examination of “Lyric” as occasion as well as genre. Central questions to be explored will include: how do the “lyrics” of composed song come alive in performance? For example, how do the two librettists of Puccini’s opera La Bohème contribute to the making of a masterpiece in song? Shared readings include The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins. Students are free to select as their focus of research any particular “lyric” traditions, composed in whatever language. No previous knowledge of literary theory is presumed.

It has been argued that the poetic “I” in premodern literatures is not a vehicle for self-representation, but an archetype of the human. The course will examine this thesis against the rise of autobiographical writing in medieval and early modern Europe. Readings include spiritual autobiographies (Augustine, Kempe, Teresa of Ávila), letter collections (Abelard and Heloise), Arabic and Hebrew maqama literature, Provençal troubadour lyric, Hispano-Jewish poetry (Samuel ha-Nagid, Judah Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol), prison poetry (Jacopone da Todi, al-Mutamid of Seville, François Villon), pilgrimage narratives, travel literature, Petrach, Dante (Vita nuova and selections of the Commedia), Ibn Ḥazm of Córdoba, Latin American chronicles, and the picaresque novel (Lazarillo de Tormes). Theoretical perspectives by Spitzer, Lejeune, Zumthor, and DeCerteau.

Course note: This course counts for the Romance Studies track in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Using as its point of departure Italo Calvino’s essay Cybernetics and Ghosts, the course explores combinatorial and computational approaches to creative practice in the context of Surrealism, Oulipo, and the Programmed Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The central focus will be on Calvino’s own experiments from The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) to Invisible Cities (1972), but readings will also include selections from the Italian Structuralist canon like Umberto Eco’s The Absent Structure (1968) and from proximate authors such as Gianni Rodari and Bruno Munari.

Course Video

In this course we will examine how media and communication technologies both drive and depict the complex set of processes known as globalization. We will explore case studies from sixteenth century maps to twenty-first century supply chains, as well as Huallywood, Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood films. In the process, we will grapple with major questions and tensions that have defined the modern era. Why have human societies become more closely connected over the past few centuries than at any prior time in human history? How has this interdependence changed the ways that we understand ourselves and one another? What new visions and freedoms has it created? Why has it made us more unequal than ever before?

By the end of the semester, students will have gained skills necessary for analyzing media that are produced and consumed across national and linguistic borders. You will have earned familiarity with a number of key analytical and historical categories that will prepare you for advanced coursework in the humanities and social sciences. And you will have applied and developed course concepts and skills through both creative and critical projects.

Above all, you will have learned new ways of thinking. Today, when the words on this page can reach you after traveling, as data packets, through undersea cables or outer space satellites, all media are global. At the same time, increasingly ubiquitous networked computation has turned almost everything on earth into a medium of data. Throughout this course, we will seek to unsettle what we think we know about who, and where, we are–gaining insights into how our lives connect to others, past and present, near and far.

We read a range of historically important works of literature from around the world—twice! We read everything carefully in more than one translation to learn the art of rereading, as well as how to enjoy and critique translations, not just read “through” them. We also learn about the structure of a range of languages, and think about how those languages shape their literatures. This is a great class to take if you’re thinking about learning a new language in the future. It’s also a good entryway to other literature and language classes for first- and second-year students, as well as for students concentrating in fields outside the humanities. Through a sequence of assignments in analyzing what translations do, we hone your writing for clarity, economy, and logic. This course also counts toward the Secondary Field in Translation Studies. Taught in English; no other languages required (just curiosity).

This bi-weekly writing workshop is designed as a space to practice writing and presenting in different academic genres: such as journal articles, job market materials, conference presentations, or job talks. We will have each participant submit one chosen piece each semester, and discuss two pieces at each session; written texts will be circulated beforehand, and talks can be presented during the session. Everyone will offer feedback for each other’s work, which we will discuss during our meetings. While the workshop will primarily allow the participants to practice these professional genres, it can also serve as a motivation to stay on track with one’s own writing goals, and a way to get experience with giving feedback to others’ work.

Eileen Chang (1920-1995), dubbed “the Greta Garbo of modern Chinese letters” and “the pioneer of desolation”, is known for her acerbic psychological forays into her characters’ inner turmoil during times of war and upheaval. This course pairs Chang with the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), known for her strikingly modernist short stories and poems delving into her characters’ inner psychology. Though the two never met in person, Chang had likely encountered Mansfield’s works through a translation rendered by Xu Zhimo (1897-1931). Both authors describe natural images with poetic lyricism, internalize conflict, employ symbolic motifs to externalize emotion, and use writing to dispel personal and national trauma. In this course, we will pair excerpts from Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) with Eileen Chang’s Love in A Fallen City (1943/2007) and Lust, Caution (1979). All readings and discussions will be conducted in English.

This seminar explores the development of the concept of imagination in diverse premodern and modern philosophical/theoretical and literary contexts. Emphasis will be placed on Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonic philosophers, medieval Christian readers of antiquity, Kant, Fichte, the Romantics, Lacan, Iser, Todorov, and Castoriadis. This seminar will also develop an interdisciplinary approach to the topic by drawing on cognitive sciences and cognitive anthropology.

An introduction to the discipline of comparative literature, looking at major issues in the history and current practice of the discipline as practiced in the USA, with special emphasis on seeing how comparatists enter into ongoing debates concerning theory and method. Several of our faculty will join us for the discussion of their work. Additional readings will include selections from Herder, de Staël, Adorno, Auerbach, de Man, Glissant, Said, Spivak, Apter, Venuti, and Heise.

Narrative Negotiations: How do Readers and Writers Decide on What are the Most Important Voices and Values Represented in a Narrative?

Narrative Negotiations explores narrative “voice” in a wide range of literary and cultural texts. Narrative voice is a lively dialogue between the author and the reader as they engage in the experience of determining the value and veracity of the narrative: whose story is it anyway? The writer creates the imaginative universe of character, plot, emotions and ideas—she seems to be holding all the cards; but it is the reader who rolls the dice as she draws on her human experience and moral values to question the principles and priorities of the storyteller. The game of narrative becomes deadly serious when storytelling confronts issues of colonialism, slavery, racial profiling and gender discrimination. Is the right to narrative restricted to those who have suffered the injustices of exclusion? What is my responsibility as a storyteller—or a reader—if I am a witness to violence, or an advocate against injustice, but my life-story is one of privilege, protection and security? What is the role of the politics of identity or cultural appropriation in determining whose story is it anyway? Throughout the seminar students will be encouraged to draw on their own histories, memories and literary experiences as the enter into the world of the prescribed readings. For the final assessment I hope students will choose critical and creative ways of telling their own stories, or the stories of others who have captured their imaginations. Seminar participants will be required to come to each class with two questions that pose issues or problems based on the texts that are important for them, and may prove to be significant for their colleagues. I will invite members of the group to pose their questions and start a discussion.

What is the nature of the object that has been the focus of your education since you began to read–and at the core of Western culture since its inception– and why is it important to understand and appreciate its presence before your eyes even if it’s all but transparent?

You have spent much of your life since kindergarten (and perhaps earlier) reading books; and you will spend much of your time at Harvard continuing to read them. But do you even know what a “book” is? Is it merely a conveyor, a platform, for presenting a text? Can a book have a use other than being read? Does the nature of the material artifact inscribed with words shape or influence the way you understand their meaning? Do people read a scroll differently than they do a book with pages? Or a digital text on a screen? Why does the physical book persist in the digital age? To answer these questions, we will study the many different material forms in which texts in Western culture have been inscribed—from tablets to e-books—and the technologies that have enabled their creation. We will also explore every possible aspect of the object we know as a “book,” from the title page to the index, and from the layout of a page to the use of illustrations and decorations—and what each of these features of the book can tell us about its historical role, how readers have used the book, and what it has meant to them. Books we will look at will range from the Bible to Vesalius, from Homer to Harold and His Purple Crayon. Sections will visit the Weissman Preservation Center, Houghton Library, Fine Arts Special Collections, and the Harvard Art Museum, and all students will be required to study a manuscript close-up and participate in a printing workshop. The book as a material object is the focus of the course. The capstone project will be the creation of a (short) book by each student and an accompanying paper explaining its place in the history of the book in the West.

After taking this course, you will never look at a book in the same way.