Global & Comparative Literature (GCPL)

The Lure of Italy: Travels to Italy in German and European LiteratureThis course explores the unique attraction that Italy has held for those hailing from lands north of the Alps over the past centuries. In particular, the course focuses on how this “spell of Italy” is reflected in travel writing by German, British, and French writers, with an emphasis on the German tradition. Travel literature, in this context, is understood broadly to encompass a variety of genres from letters, travel accounts, and guidebooks to fictional works such as novels, novellas, and poems. Given that travel writing is inherently transcultural and transnational, the course lends itself to comparative analyses of such central issues as national identity, cultural practices, gender, and class in European travel literature.

The purpose of "Introduction to Global Literature" is twofold: to make students familiar with different methodologies that can be adopted to analyze literary texts, and to examine what it means to compare literary texts from different cultural traditions. Through representative essays, the course will offer a systematic exploration of the major theoretical approaches to literature, from structuralism and post-structuralism through psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, and cultural, race, and sexuality studies. A selection of literary works belonging to a variety of national, cultural, and linguistic traditions will also allow us to apply and test literary theory in a comparative perspective. As a writing-intensive course "Introduction to Global Literature" also aims at helping students develop skills in the domain of academic writing. Meetings will be a combination of lecture and seminar format, depending on the topic and the purpose of each class.

Since 1704, the year in which Antoine Galland embarked on his popular translation of a 14th c. Arabic manuscript of Alf layla wa-layla, The Thousand and One Nights (or Les mille et une nuits, or The Arabian Nights, etc.) has captivated Western audiences. By all its modern names, this collection of stories has played a huge role in the development of fictional prose narrative in the West, and provided countless themes and images for its popular cultures in print, theatre, music and film. Yet, for all its enthusiasm, the Western reception of the Nights usually ignores issues raised by the text’s Arabo-Islamic context, not only the classical Islamic era in which it first emerged or its reception through later centuries, but also in the modern period. Indeed, it is strange how often these stories are read without consideration of how they converse with basic issues of Islamic theology, kingly conduct, or the world of Indian Sea mercantile culture. But reference to the text’s Arabo-Islamic context raises more questions than its answers, for its standing in the West far outshines its reputation in the Arab world. Thus, while it is true that from its earliest Arabic-language inception Alf layla wa-layla was central to popular forms of story-telling in the Arab world, its status within the classical Arabic literary tradition has always been quite ambiguous. Alf layla wa-layla is both critical within the development of Arabic literature and marginal to it; it is both a cornerstone of the Arabic literary canon and a footnote within it. These ambiguities notwithstanding, reading Alf layla wa-layla within its Arabo-Islamic context reveals critical aspects of the text that most Western adaptations miss. This course investigates The Thousand and One Nights through a variety of critical and methodological lenses. First, we will philologically trace the Persian, Indian and Pharaonic origins of some of the stories while also paying attention to issues that arise with medieval recensions, modern translations, and cinematic adaptations. Second, we will investigate the formal and rhetorical structures of the core stories of the text, as well as how they have been conserved (or ignored) in modern adaptations. Finally, we will consider the ways in which the text’s colonial and postcolonial receptions—both in the West and in the Arab world—have been linked to questions of political ideology, especially Orientalism.

As its very name suggests, noir has always been a polyglot and traveling genre. Its dark cosmopolitanism is remarkable, considering that the genre is so grounded in particularities like location, local speech, local law, and local procedure. While the roots of the genre go back many decades to pulp print and mass cinema, never before has the genre been so ubiquitous, and so polyglot. From Pépé le Moko to Blade Runner to Dexter, from John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow to Haruki Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland to Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster Millenium trilogy, noir permeates pop culture around the globe. This course surveys classic and contemporary works of noir fiction and film in a broad range of languages and national canons. The main theoretical issues we will cover are problems of genre, narrative and language, as well as questions of urban literature, aesthetics and the commercial market, morality and crime.

Literature, Authority, and the State This course proposes a transnational exploration of the ways in which novelists have attempted to grapple with state power. How is state authority depicted in literary texts? What is the role of the individual in such texts? How have these texts been received and what controversies have they spurred? What is, or will be, the legacy of these texts? What specificity can we ascribe to the novel as a means of depicting or critiquing state authority? Alongside novels, we will read a variety of historical, theoretical, and critical texts that will facilitate and deepen our analysis. As a writing-intensive course, this class also aims to help students develop their academic writing skills. Meetings will be a combination of lecture and seminar format, depending on the topic and the purpose of each class.

Literature, Authority, and the State This course proposes a transnational exploration of the ways in which novelists have attempted to grapple with state power. How is state authority depicted in literary texts? What is the role of the individual in such texts? How have these texts been received and what controversies have they spurred? What is, or will be, the legacy of these texts? What specificity can we ascribe to the novel as a means of depicting state authority? Alongside several novels, we will read a variety of historical, theoretical, and critical texts that will facilitate our analysis. As a writing-intensive course, this class also aims to help students develop their academic writing skills. Meetings will be a combination of lecture and seminar format, depending on the topic and the purpose of each class.

Since 1704, the year in which Antoine Galland embarked on his popular translation of a 14th c. Arabic manuscript of Alf layla wa-layla, The Thousand and One Nights (or Les mille et une nuits, or The Arabian Nights, etc.) has captivated Western audiences. By all its modern names, this collection of stories has played a huge role in the development of fictional prose narrative in the West, and provided countless themes and images for its popular cultures in print, theatre, music and film. Yet, for all its enthusiasm, the Western reception of the Nights usually ignores issues raised by the text’s Arabo-Islamic context, not only the classical Islamic era in which it first emerged or its reception through later centuries, but also in the modern period. Indeed, it is strange how often these stories are read without consideration of how they converse with basic issues of Islamic theology, kingly conduct, or the world of Indian Sea mercantile culture. But reference to the text’s Arabo-Islamic context raises more questions than its answers, for its standing in the West far outshines its reputation in the Arab world. Thus, while it is true that from its earliest Arabic-language inception Alf layla wa-layla was central to popular forms of story-telling in the Arab world, its status within the classical Arabic literary tradition has always been quite ambiguous. Alf layla wa-layla is both critical within the development of Arabic literature and marginal to it; it is both a cornerstone of the Arabic literary canon and a footnote within it. These ambiguities notwithstanding, reading Alf layla wa-layla within its Arabo-Islamic context reveals critical aspects of the text that most Western adaptations miss. This course investigates The Thousand and One Nights through a variety of critical and methodological lenses. First, we will philologically trace the Persian, Indian and Pharaonic origins of some of the stories while also paying attention to issues that arise with medieval recensions, modern translations, and cinematic adaptations. Second, we will investigate the formal and rhetorical structures of the core stories of the text, as well as how they have been conserved (or ignored) in modern adaptations. Finally, we will consider the ways in which the text’s colonial and postcolonial receptions—both in the West and in the Arab world—have been linked to questions of political ideology, especially Orientalism.

What is the relationship of movement to storytelling? Does travel across space beget stories, or do stories move us, make us travel? This course investigates the complex relationship of movement and narrative through renowned works of world literature, from Homer’s Odyssey and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, to the recent Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights and Yun Ko-eun’s The Disaster Tourist. We ask what transnational narratives do to our perception of reality, other people, and ourselves, as we consider travel narratives motivated by pilgrimage, exploration, education, and leisure, as well as stories exploring the violence of forced displacement and exile due to wars, ethnic, religious and sexual persecution, and climate change. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to engage with materials through analytic and creative assignments.

This course proposes an exploration of the way writers and filmmakers engage with food as a metaphor and memory as organizing strategy for storytelling in different contexts and through different genres. Warren Belasco suggests that “memories [about food] become a way of preserving identities […] perceived to be endangered by migration, mobility and suburban mass culture (31)”. Early on in Critical Food Studies, Arjun Appadurai signaled with the capacity of food and food related storytelling to mobilize strong emotions (494), leading to the definition of Gastro-politics as “conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic resources as it emerges in social transactions around food” (495). In a globalized world, food, recipes and culinary techniques are banned, exotified, appropriated and/or dismissed in order to negotiate cultural heritage and identity. Exploring these issues in fiction, non-fiction and film, this course seeks to answer How do food memories negotiate between the preservation of the past and the construction of new identities? To what extent does food offer a road map for understanding and expressing lived experience? How food, memory and storytelling provide a road map for coming to terms with the history, the experience and the consequences of displacement? Ultimately, by focusing on the stories around food the course opens up to notions of identity and belonging through texts that explore personal and emotional journeys. As a writing-intensive course, this class also aims to help students develop their academic writing skills and explore their creative non-fiction abilities. Meetings will be a combination of lecture, seminar format and hands-on creative production, depending on the topic and the purpose of each class.

How does one tell a fictional story about themes that impact not only individuals, but thousands or millions or even billions of people stretching across borders, oceans and hemispheres? Put differently, how does an artist craft a narrative about ethnic conflict, the displacement of refugees, environmental catastrophe, gender-based violence, human sexual trafficking, colliding –isms, religious extremism, the international drug trade, and the militarism of state and non-state actors, among other issues?

To investigate this topic, we will concentrate solely on intellectually and aesthetically rigorous short stories, novellas, novels, and graphic novels. We will supplement our analysis by consulting scholarship, both in the literary and international relations spaces, that engages this art.

Our inquiry will canvas leading writers from Africa (e.g., Adichie, Mengiste, Dangarembga, Thiong’o), Latin America and the Caribbean (e.g., Garcia Marquez, Oloixarac, Marlon James, Allende), India and Pakistan (e.g., Solanki, Roy, Adiga, Rushdie), China and Korea (e.g., Hao Jingfang, Gene Yang, Chin-Sun Lee) as well as Western writers who confront these problematics (e.g., Roth, Houellebecq, Kipling, Atwood).

Some of the questions we pursue are: How does one represent, through the medium of literature, events that affect not only individuals but entire societies, if not the world itself? Is every macro-political story really a micro-story about human passions and frailties? What are the limits of fictional representation? What can fiction not capture about politics and global affairs?