Instructor: E. Grimm

Designed for students writing a senior thesis and doing advanced research on two central literary fields in the student’s major. The course of study and reading material will be determined by the instructor(s) in consultation with students(s).

Students who decide to write a senior thesis should enroll in this tutorial. They should also identify, during the fall semester, a member of the faculty in a relevant department who will be willing to supervise their work and who is responsible for assigning the final grade. The thesis is a rigorous research work of approximately 40 pages (including a bibliography formatted in MLA style). It may be written in English or in another language relevant to the student’s scholarly interests. The thesis should be turned in on the announced due date as hard copy to the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Students who decide to write a senior thesis should enroll in this tutorial. They should also identify, during the fall semester, a member of the faculty in a relevant department who will be willing to supervise their work and who is responsible for assigning the final grade. The thesis is a rigorous research work of approximately 40 pages (including a bibliography formatted in MLA style). It may be written in English or in another language relevant to the student’s scholarly interests. The thesis should be turned in on the announced due date as hard copy to the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Instructor: A. Boskovic

This lecture course will provide a punctual survey of the major trends and figures in the interwar visual culture and avant-garde poetry of the Soviet Russia and East Central Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia), including the opulent field of their intersection. Topics include various interfaces of visual culture and graphic arts, such as public spaces, walls, propaganda trains, windows, postcards, posters, books, and screens. The course will address the innovative use of typography and photography, typophoto and photomontage, as well as the short written and hybrid genres such as manifesto, cinepoetry, photo essay, and photo frescoes. We will discuss poets and artists such as Mayakovsky, Lissitsky, Rodchenko, Klutsis, Vertov, Teige, Nezval, Sutnar, Štirsky, Szczuka, Stern, Themersons, Kassák, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Goll, Micić, Vučo, Matić. Each session will include a lecture followed by discussion.

Instructor: Konstantina Zanou

What does it mean to enter history through a life? This course will combine the Italian historiographical tradition of microstoria with the global turn in historical studies, in order to explore a series of microhistorical and biographical works.

We will look at the biographies of people from the 15th to the 19th centuries who lived their lives on the move between empires and nation states and across continents and seas (such as Leo Africanus, Elias of Babylon, John Hu, Ugo Foscolo, Elisabeth March, Giuseppe Garibaldi, the early modern Jewish merchants of Livorno, captives, collectors and career makers in the British empire, as well as 19th-century intellectuals and migrants between the Mediterranean shores). But we will also deal with figures who never left home but had something interesting to say about how their world went (such as Domenico Scandella, Martin Guerre, Martha Ballard or Stephanos Vogorides). Through the micro-perspective of these individuals, the course will trace some of the big themes of the early modern and modern periods.

Students will be invited to reflect on the possibilities opened up by the new trend of ‘global microhistory’, on the prospects and limits of biography, on the autobiographical connotations of historical writing, on combining narrativity with scholarly argumentation, and on the authority of experience.

Instructor: Ivan Sanders

Examines prose and poetry by writers generally less accessible to the American student written in the major Central European languages: German, Hungarian, Czech, and Polish. The problematics of assimilation, the search for identity, political commitment and disillusionment are major themes, along with the defining experience of the century: the Holocaust; but because these writers are often more removed from their Jewishness, their perspective on these events and issues may be different. The influence of Franz Kafka on Central European writers, the post-Communist Jewish revival, defining the Jewish voice in an otherwise disparate body of works.

Instructor: Emily Sun

Study of the forms and functions of narrative through engagement with the modes of detection, confession, and digression.  Examination of how storytelling takes place in various media and genres and across fiction and non-fiction, studying short stories, a novella, novels, a poem, films, scholarly essays, autobiography, and a psychoanalytic case history.  Attention to cultural differences, historical shifts, and philosophical questions such as the writing of the self, the nature of memory, the experience of time, and the relationship of truth to fiction.  Readings include Conan Doyle, Borges, Sophocles, Freud, Hitchcock, Augustine, Coleridge, McEwan, the compilers of The Arabian Nights, Diderot, Calvino, and Lispector.  No prerequisites.  Preference to first-years and sophomores; students at all stages are welcome.

Instructor: TBA

(Seminar). In the past decades, feminist and queer literary theorists have found in the novel a template ripe for critical reflections on key literary, cultural and theoretical questions. The seminar will revisit a number of feminist and queer classics in literature and theory as well as recent novels that have engendered new theoretical imaginings. We will grapple with debates about the crossings of embodiment, difference, power, colonization, and globalization, as well as the queer and gendered inflections of narrative, performativity, reading, authorship, plot, time, and space. Readings will include works by Charlotte Brontë, Cixous, Cliff, Coetzee, Duras, Flaubert, Freud, Henry James, Kincaid, Larsen, Morrison, Rhys, Winterson, as well as Abel, Butler, Eng, Gilbert and Gubar, Halberstam, Hartman, Irigaray, Kristeva, Love, McClintock, Puar, Sedgwick, Spivak.

Application instructions:

Please email Professor Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) for permission to enroll.

Instructor: M. Al-Musawi

This course studies Sufism as it has emerged, developed, and assumed its presence in Sufi autobiographies and religious and literary writings. The Sufi Path is traced in these writings that include poems like ibn al-Farid’s Poem of the Way. Sufi States and Stations are analyzed to understand this Path that reaches its culmination in an ecstatic sense of Oneness. Sufism is also a social and political phenomenon that unsettles formal theologies and involves Sufis in controversies that often end with their imprisonment and death.