Comparative Literature and Culture Program

T,F 11:10 AM–12:30 PM, Pu Wang

[DJW, HUM]

Exploring the linkage between Marxism and global modernity, this course emphasizes the deep entanglement of Marxism with twentieth-century literature and culture in both the so-called “advanced West” and the vast world of “underdevelopment” (such as China, Africa, and Latin America). In this course, students will see how Marxism has evolved as a revolutionary praxis in the crisis-fraught capitalist world system, and how it has inspired international literary movements and cultural debates aimed to subvert that system. With case studies drawn from across the world and readings selected from Marx’s century all the way to our own, we will study the development of the international cultural left. We will also try to decenter (deprovincialize or de-Westernize) Marxism and understand it as an integral part of the translingual/transnational search for a different world—a world of common good and cultural equality.

T,Th 2:20–3:40 PM, Steve Dowden

[HUM, Cross-listed with ECS & ENG]

Explores novels on the fringe of literary respectability, books that have won passionate, if not necessarily large followings (hence the ambivalent praise implied in the term 'cult book'). Works by Renate Adler, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Bernhard, Osamu Dazai, Wei Hui, Chester Himes, Fleur Jaeggy, Anna Kavan, William Kotzwinkle, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Georges Perec, Hunter Thompson, Robert Walser, Shuo Wang and others.

M,W,Th 10:10–11:00 AM, Steve Dowden & John Burt

[HUM, Cross-listed with GER]

That the poetic imagination could be not merely a source of pleasure, instruction, and inspiration, but a source of insight into the meaning of being, a way of connecting the outer world of nature and the inner world of the spirit, a source of ontological, ethical, and political truth, was a conviction entertained by many poets in English and German from the Romantic period to the present day. The course will consider these ideas in the poetry of Blake, Novalis, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Keats, Whitman, Rilke, Eliot and Celan. Special one-time offering, fall 2024.

M,W 4:05–5:25 PM, Caren Irr

[DJW, HUM, OC, Cross-listed with CAST, ECS, & ENVS]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art.

M,W 2:30–3:50 PM, Robin Feuer Miller

[HUM, Cross-listed with ECS, ENG, HOID, and IGS]

Selected novels and writings of Austen, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Woolf will be read to trace both the evolution of the novel and the meanings, contexts and depictions of the family. The family novel encompasses such larger questions as how we regard the pain of others and how we define community.

• ARBC 103A 1 (Lower Advanced Arabic)

• CHIN 120A 1 (Readings in Contemporary Chinese Literature: Advanced Chinese Language)

• GRK 115B 1 (Ancient Greek Drama and Comedy)

• HBRW 146A 1 (The Voices of Jerusalem)

• HBRW 164B 1 (Israeli Theater Within the Framework of U.S Cultures)

• HISP 111B 1 (Introduction to Latin American Literature and Culture)

• ITAL 128A 1 (Mapping Modern Italian Culture: Inherited Conflicts)

• LAT 115A 1 (Roman Drama)

More information coming soon. For the up-to-date schedule, view the full course list on the Registrar's site.

• AAAS 134B 1 (Novel and Film of the African Diaspora)

• CLAS 170A 1 (Classical Mythology)

• NEJS 157B 1 (Arab-Jewish Modern Thought and Culture)

More information coming soon. For the up-to-date schedule, view the full course list on the Registrar's site.