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.

Course Page

The course provides a lively, in-depth introduction to fascism, its philosophical and political roots, its critique of liberal democracy and socialism, and the traces fascism has left on the contemporary cultural-political scene. It begins with readings from key fascist thinkers and theorists, before surveying a series of domains where artists, writers, architects, film-makers, and engineers sought to interpret and embody the “fascist revolution” not just in Italy but worldwide. Among the figures considered are mystical nationalists like Gabriele D’Annunzio; Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder and leader of the Futurist movement; the American poet Ezra Pound, author of the Cantos, one of the masterpieces of 20th century American poetry; Leni Riefenstahl, the film director of classic documentaries such as Olympia and Triumph of the Will; the architects Marcello Piacentini and Adolf Speer, the former Italy’s leading designer of public monuments and buildings during the Mussolini era, the latter Hitler’s preferred architect; and the engineer Gaetano Ciocca, creator of everything from Corporativist pig farms to mass-produced worker housing to mass sports stadia. Course themes will include: fascism vs. nazism; collectivism vs. individualism; radical right attitudes towards technology and industrialization; and examinations of the convergences and divergences between mid-20th century fascisms and the sub-cultures of today’s alt-right.

Course Page

What makes Jewish American literature Jewish?  What makes it American?  This course will address these questions about ethnic literature through fiction, poetry, drama, and other writings by Jews in America, from their arrival in 1654 to the present.  We will discuss how Jewish identity and ethnicity shape literature.  We will consider how form and language develop as Jewish writers “immigrate” from Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages to American English.  Using the collection, Jewish American Literature:  A Norton Anthology, we will read a variety of authors, including Isaac Mayer Wise, Emma Lazarus, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Celia Dropkin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Allegra Goodman.  Students who take this course will explore the ways that Jewish culture intertwines with American culture in literature.

Course Page

One of the towering literary figures of the 20th century, Italo Calvino is remembered for his inventiveness, versatility, philosophical acuity, and interest in exploring combinatorial and computational approaches to creative practice. Using as its point of departure his 1967 lecture Cybernetics and Ghosts, the course is built around readings of some of Calvino’s most celebrated novels, among them: The Castle of Crossed Destinies, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and Invisible Cities. But we will also read from his Six Memos for the Next Millennium and critical writings, from writings by figures in contemporary cybernetics and communication theory, and from the Italian structuralist tradition, Oulipo, and the Programmed Art movement of the 1970s. Class assignments will involve the speculative, creative, and critical use of Generative AI tools and the generation of plausible “new” works by Calvino forty years after his death.

Course Page

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?

Course Page

The poetics (or songmaking) of Sappho will be studied from a wide variety of perspectives, suited to the interests of the students enrolled.

Note: For those taking the course as COMPLIT 235, there are no particular language requirements. The emphasis for students, in this case, is to engage creatively with Sappho’s songmaking in a variety of English translations, or to compare with other poetry or songs (composed in whatever language). Students are free to bring into the educational experience a pursuit of their personal interests. For graduate students taking the course as CLASPHIL 235, research will involve reading the original texts in Greek, and comparing texts of other classical Greek and Latin poets like Euripides and Catullus.