COLT 103 Intro Comparative Literature

• Winter 2024
• by Dawn Marlan
• Study of visual culture from around the world.

COLT 211 Comparative World Literature, World Literature and the Oceanic Turn

• Winter 2024
• by Mus’ab Abdul Salam
• In its celebratory iteration, world literature demarcates a space where diverse national literatures of the world come together. While some scholars find this a promising notion, others understand world literature to be an imperial and violent project that homogenizes the literatures and related practices around the world. In this course we will look at different sides of this debate to consider if and how a comparative perspective can inform a position vis-à-vis World Literature. In the process we will ask the following questions: is literature a universal category? What is entailed in reading a work belonging to a different language, period, or culture? What does it say about the reader and our practices of reading? What does the circulation of texts outside of its home culture tell us about texts, logistics of movements, as well as its readership? In what ways do literary studies converge or diverge from other disciplines? And finally, is there a methodology appropriate to literary studies? By engaging with these questions, we will read literary as well as non-literary works from diverse backgrounds, with an emphasis on what has come to be called the oceanic perspective. Moving away from the terracentrism of much world literature scholarship, an approach that ‘faces the ocean’ helps imagine the worlds and literatures as necessarily connected, messy and constituted as much by vagaries of ‘nature’ as by shifting and durable relations of power. The works included in the syllabus are meant to be taken as a springboard for further reading and discussion and not as exhaustively representative of languages, cultures, genres or scholarly positions.

COLT 211 Comparative World Literature, Reading for Reading: A survey of the idea and practice of “reading literature”

• Winter 2024
• by Jean-Baptiste Simonnet
• Our goal in this course will be to gain critical insight on the terms and conditions upon which “reading” depends as well as those it cultivates, and this through a variety of scopes. We will read other people reading literature and try to gradually grapple with some of those questions: what is “reading”? how do we learn to read literature? what ideas is “reading” a vehicle for, and how? what does the practice of “reading” itself imply, involve, or demand? what does reading “literature” – and “world literature” – mean if we look at our reading practices and conditions in this class, in this society, or
  under the capitalist mode of production?
  In the first half of the term, we will consider together foundational arguments and concepts involving the ideological and discursive uses of “reading” (the stakes and meanings given to “reading” and to the forms and situations of its practice) from the fields of literary studies, ethnic studies, history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy. We will turn to what may be called materialist considerations in the second half (the conditions for and the constituents of “reading” as well as of the forms and situations of its practice), from physiology to media, paper, production relations, linguistics, all the time keeping in mind (and with the purpose of looking back upon) our initial survey.

COLT 211 Comparative World Literature, Travel Narratives in World Literature

• Winter 2024
• by Feba Rasheed
• Focusing on some of the theoretical concerns in world literature and postcolonial studies, this course seeks to understand the history of travel writing in English and its relationship to colonial and postcolonial worlds. Understanding travel as critical to the formation of a number of modern disciplines, this course will explore the following questions: what are the ways in which travel narratives influence our perceptions about other cultures? Is it a distinct experience from that of reading other forms of literature? In what ways did colonialism affect the production and consumption of travel writing? How did the accounts of travels produced during ‘the age of discovery’, considered a watershed moment for European colonial endeavors around the world, contribute to conceptions about colonial ‘others’? How has media, that takes the condition of travel as an implicit feature, transformed our perceptions of different places in modern times? In thinking through these questions, students will read novels, travelogues, short fiction and films (including translated works) falling within the broad framework of travel literature.

COLT 212 Comparative World Film

• Winter 2024
• by Pearl Lee
• Introduces the principles of comparative analysis, exploring the aesthetic, ideological, and socio-economic exchanges between national cinematic traditions. Themes vary by instructor. Recent themes include Melodrama, Zombies, Queer Cinema.

COLT 212 Comparative World Cinema

• Winter 2024
• by tba
• Introduces the principles of comparative analysis, exploring the aesthetic, ideological, and socio-economic exchanges between national cinematic traditions. Themes vary by instructor. Recent themes include Melodrama, Zombies, Queer Cinema.

COLT 232 Literature and Film, “Slavic Vampires”

• Winter 2024
• by Katya Hokanson
• The figure of the vampire, so powerful in contemporary popular culture, goes back in Eastern Europe to at least 1047, where it is attested in the Russian Primary Chronicles.  Its most famous iteration is doubtless in the form of Dracula, or Vlad Tepes, “The Impaler,” a Wallachian ruler of the fifteenth century.  Utilizing literary, folkloric, artistic and filmic texts, the class will explore the figure of the vampire in its Slavic context and development in the cultures of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and examine the kinds of creative works informed by the tradition.  Students will read and analyze primary sources and compare them, in some cases, with filmic adaptations.  Issues of gender, class, religion and ethnicity play an important role in the development of Slavic vampire literary and visual lore.  The figure of the vampire is a complex one, raising such issues as the ethics of human behavior, the implications of human reaction to disease, death, and those considered, in myriad ways, “the other,” and the scapegoating of figures seen as outsiders. Students who complete this course will develop a broad general understanding of the development of the mythology of vampires and their historical and cultural origins.  They will become familiar with, and use, important terms relating to both texts and films.  

COLT 301 Approaches Comparative Literature

• Winter 2024
• by Katherine Brundan
• Introduction to theory and methods in comparative literature, with some attention to the history and problems of the discipline.

COLT 360 Gender and Identity in Literature, “Constructing Otherness: Literature of Nonconformity” 

• Winter 2024
• by Matthias Kramer
• How do we come to know something to be different? What makes one identity “normal” and another nonconforming, and how is this decided? How do identities become represented in literature, and how does representation condition identity and vice-versa? How does otherness come to be gendered, racial, classed, and/or based on (dis)ability, and how do these categories overlap and compound one another? In short, how is otherness constructed? In this mid-level Comparative Literature course, we will begin to answer these and other questions by reading and comparing literary and filmic texts from around the world that illustrate, dramatize, or symptomize the conditions of otherness and nonconformity. We will supplement these primary readings with selections from secondary theoretical and critical texts that will shine light on the underlying stakes of identity and difference. These secondary texts will include the writings of foundational thinkers of feminist criticism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial and decolonial thought, and area studies.

COLT 360 Gender and Identity in Literature

• Winter 2024
• by Tze-Yin Teo
• Introduction to the study of gender in literature, from Asia to Europe to the Americas, and from the classics to the late 20th century.

COLT 380 Topic, Tokyo Cyberpunk (WEB)

• Winter 2024
• by Steven Brown
• Introducing the history, forms, and discourses of Japanese “cyberpunk” in contemporary film, anime, and other forms of visual media, this course explores the urban dreams (and nightmares) that constitute cyberpunk’s posthumanist vision of Neo-Tokyo. Viewed not as a reflection of contemporary Japanese society but rather as its defamiliarization, Japanese forms of cyberpunk are investigated alongside Western examples of posthumanism as sites of contestation for competing ideologies and the delineation of new possibilities of existence, new forms of being, at the intersection between carbon- and silicon-based forms of intelligence and data-processing.
  Treating Japanese cyberpunk not merely as a literary movement or aesthetic style but more importantly as a philosophical discourse with distinctive questions and premises—i.e., as a philosophical “problematic” with its own sociohistorical specificities and transnational trajectories—we will investigate the cyberpunk city as an “abstract machine,” the cyborg’s “organs without a body,” and the rhizomatic processes of cyberculture..

 COLT 410 Surrealism & Psychoanalysis

• Winter 2024
• by Jeffrey S. Librett
• Surrealism was an avant-garde movement in literature, the visual arts, and film that arose in the France of the 1920s, in the wake of the manifold horrors and disillusionments of World War I. Led by André Breton, the surrealists aspired to fuse dream with reality, giving rise to a higher reality, a “sur-reality” they endowed with revolutionary significance. One main source of inspiration for the movement was Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, a theory of the human that posited the unconscious mind as the center of the psyche, and the dream as the “royal road” to the unconscious. Thus, one cannot understand surrealism without having a firm grasp of psychoanalysis. Accordingly, we will study Freud’s theory of dreams and the unconscious, and then its application and displacements in surrealism. We’ll examine key works of literature (poetry and prose) and theory by André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Leonora Carrington, and works of art and theory by Salvador Dali, René Magritte, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Louise Bourgeois, and other visual artists of the movement. We’ll also view and study several key surrealist films by Luis Bunuel, David Lynch, and more recently Crispin Glover. Having begun by considering the way in which psychoanalysis enters into the aesthetic-political discourse of surrealism, we will conclude by exploring the manner in which the aesthetic-political discourse of surrealism, for which Freud himself had little appreciation, re-enters psychoanalytic discourse by influencing powerfully the work of Jacques Lacan, who renewed psychoanalysis in France after World War II. Graduate students will be expected to read also key works of secondary theory of surrealism by Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and others. Analytical writing as well as some creative-experimental assignments, will supplement the reading and class discussion as course requirements. While students will be expected to complete all assigned reading and viewing, they will have room to focus on their chosen surrealist artefacts and theory outside the list for some writing assignments.

COLT 470 Topic, Race and Critique

• Winter 2024
• by Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
• In this course we will analyze two different approaches to the main concepts of our class by considering both a critique of race and race as critique. We will be working with the premise that genuine “thought” always implies theory and praxis: it is not only important to do conceptual work on both of these terms but also attempting a transformation of the world that allows for racism to exist. Class material includes works on philosophy of race, literary texts, works of art, political and social interventions, and analyses of social movements and organizations.

COLT 510 Surrealism & Psychoanalysis

• Winter 2024
• by Jeffrey S. Librett
• Surrealism was an avant-garde movement in literature, the visual arts, and film that arose in the France of the 1920s, in the wake of the manifold horrors and disillusionments of World War I. Led by André Breton, the surrealists aspired to fuse dream with reality, giving rise to a higher reality, a “sur-reality” they endowed with revolutionary significance. One main source of inspiration for the movement was Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, a theory of the human that posited the unconscious mind as the center of the psyche, and the dream as the “royal road” to the unconscious. Thus, one cannot understand surrealism without having a firm grasp of psychoanalysis. Accordingly, we will study Freud’s theory of dreams and the unconscious, and then its application and displacements in surrealism. We’ll examine key works of literature (poetry and prose) and theory by André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Leonora Carrington, and works of art and theory by Salvador Dali, René Magritte, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Louise Bourgeois, and other visual artists of the movement. We’ll also view and study several key surrealist films by Luis Bunuel, David Lynch, and more recently Crispin Glover. Having begun by considering the way in which psychoanalysis enters into the aesthetic-political discourse of surrealism, we will conclude by exploring the manner in which the aesthetic-political discourse of surrealism, for which Freud himself had little appreciation, re-enters psychoanalytic discourse by influencing powerfully the work of Jacques Lacan, who renewed psychoanalysis in France after World War II. Graduate students will be expected to read also key works of secondary theory of surrealism by Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and others. Analytical writing as well as some creative-experimental assignments, will supplement the reading and class discussion as course requirements. While students will be expected to complete all assigned reading and viewing, they will have room to focus on their chosen surrealist artefacts and theory outside the list for some writing assignments.

COLT 570 Topic, Race and Critique

• Winter 2024
• Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
• In this course we will analyze two different approaches to the main concepts of our class by considering both a critique of race and race as critique. We will be working with the premise that genuine “thought” always implies theory and praxis: it is not only important to do conceptual work on both of these terms but also attempting a transformation of the world that allows for racism to exist. Class material includes works on philosophy of race, literary texts, works of art, political and social interventions, and analyses of social movements and organizations.

COLT 615 Comp from the South

• Winter 2024
• Lanie Millar
• Survey of contemporary literary theory.