Instructor: Alfred Mac Adam

The novella, older than the novel, painstakingly crafted, links the worlds of ideas and fiction.  The readings present the novella as a genre, tracing its progress from the 17th century to the 20th.  Each text read in the comparative milieu, grants the reader access to the intellectual concerns of an era.

Instructor: Molly R. Avila

This course introduces students to the innovative and influential plays of Anton Chekhov. At the turn of the century, Chekhov’s plays challenged established tropes of what constituted the “theatrical,” rejected explicit requirements for “comedy” and “tragedy,” and questioned received knowledge about what makes a subject or person worthy of our attention, thereby transforming our notions not only of theater but also of the human experience. What was the new “stage” that Chekhov’s plays created and what was his role in theater’s development toward realism and modernism?In this course, we read eight Chekhov plays, focusing principally on his four masterpieces The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Our reading is supplemented by sources that place Chekhov into his cultural context, concentrating particularly on his fraught relationship with those who first produced his plays-the Moscow Art Theater and the director Constantin Stanislavski.Through close reading and contextualization, students will attain an intimacy with Chekhov’splays and a broader understanding of how Chekhov’s innovations in realist theater have influenced contemporary drama. This course features three field trips to theaters and communities that regularly work with Chekhov’s plays, including the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, a direct inheritor of Stanislavski’s “method” technique, which was highly influenced by Chekhov’s plays.This course will satisfy the Slavic Department’s requirement for a course in Russian literatureor culture, and as a CLRS course, requirements in Comparative Literature as well.

Instructor: Robyn M. Jensen

How do we represent the self? This comparative course explores different visual modes for representing the self in autobiographical writing. We will look at how authors visually represent themselves in autobiographies that include photographs, graphic memoirs, and autobiographical films to investigate questions about self-creation, referentiality, and the tension between fact and fiction inherent in any autobiographical project. Throughout the course we will focus on the relationship between word and image,the trope of the photograph album and the attempt to understand the self in relation to the family, and the use of images to imagine or invent the past. Themes of memory, imagination, fantasy, nostalgia, trauma, and loss will demand our attention, and we will chart how these concerns transform across the different media. We will explore these themes across a range of materials, including: texts by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Gary Shteyngart, Alison Bechdel, Nina Bunjevac, and Art Spiegelman; films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Federico Fellini, Dominique Cabrera, and Jean-Luc Godard; and theoretical texts by Philippe Lejeune, Paul de Man, André Bazin, and Susan Sontag. No prerequisites required. All readings will be in English

(Seminar). Modernism can find its roots anywhere from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the turn of the 20th century; and it finds them differently depending on whether one refers to “modernism” or “modernity.” For the purposes of this class, modernism’s beginning will be situated in about the middle of the nineteenth century, in Baudelaire’s use of the neologism modernité to describe the new urban (and colonialist) sensibility that emerged in the Paris of the time, and more particularly in the seismic poetic shifts that then began to take place. And although many versions or trajectories of poetic modernism can be traced, we will attempt to follow a series of lines that tie the French version of it to the emergence of diverse American voices. Poets to be discussed will include Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Ponge, Crane, Hughes, Eliot, Moore, Stevens and Williams.

Instructor: Orlando Bentancor

Corequisites: Enrollment limited to 15.

This course will move across and over the geopolitical landscape of the Tudor and Habsburg Empires in Europe and the New World in order to explore and compare the diverse symbolic and political roles the colonial encounter had in the signification of the relationship between the subject and the landscape.

Knowledge of Czech not necessary. Parallel reading lists available in translation and in the original.

In recent years there has been a growing impatience with the sort of formalistic morality one finds in Immanuel Kant and John Rawls.  As a result, we have witnessed an attempt to formulate a thicker and more robust conception of ethics in a number of fields, including philosophy, critical theory and feminism.  The developments in psychoanalysis over the last half a century that we will examine in this class can make a major contribution to this new ethical discourse.  Because of his pessimistic anthropology and critique of civilization, Freud’s ethics might be seen as “Protestant,” in that they centered on repression and renunciation.  The developments that have occurred in the field since his death, however, which have centered on pre-Oedipal development, provide abundant material for envisioning a less gloomy and more positive vision of a “fulfilled” life.  In this class we will attempt to integrate those findings with developments in other fields in order to explore the contributions psychoanalysis can make to the current discussion of ethics.

PLEASE NOTE:
Admission to this course is limited, and an interview is required. 15-20 minute interviews will be held in late November through late December. Please contact Kristen Reichardt at ker2152@columbia.edu to arrange an interview time slot. ICLS students must show acquaintance with German and French texts. A knowledge of German is strongly preferable.

Some important texts by Marx will be carefully read with special emphasis on problems of translation. We will refer briefly to texts of Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Western Marxism, Marxist-Feminism, Black Marxism, and the contemporary turn.

Required of all comparative literature and society majors. Intensive research in selected areas of comparative literature and society. Topic for 2016: TBA

Required of all comparative literature and society majors. Intensive research in selected areas of comparative literature and society. Topic for 2016: TBA