Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings includes novels, historical studies, and film criticism.

Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings includes novels, historical studies, and film criticism.  (NOTE: This is the graduate section of CLIA GU3660 which meets W 6:10p-10:00p)

Instructor: Samuel K. Roberts, Jr.

There is a significant correlation between inequality and health in the United States. For example, people of color and those from underserved populations have higher mortality rates and a greater burden of chronic and acute disease than their white counterparts.

Students will gain familiarity with a range of historical problems where health and health politics engage with ethnic(racial), sexual, class, and other subject formations; political economy; and technological networks and since the late 19th century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, women of color & health movements; (im)migration; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; illicit drug policy; public health and mass incarceration; “benign neglect,” urban renewal, and gentrification; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; and environmental justice.  No course prerequisites necessary, but there is an application process (see https://goo.gl/forms/mm5DsSHEjHItR30m2.) Deadline to submit the application will be January 15. However, we will be reviewing applications on a rolling basis. It will be better for you to submit sooner rather than later.

Through a program and with staff provided by the Research Cluster in Science and Subjectivity (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/rcss/), students will be placed in volunteer positions with various community organizations. The RCSS describes this work in this fashion:

‘In addition to the seminar, there will also be a significant service component. Students will be expected to volunteer at a community organization for a minimum of 3 hours a week. This volunteer work will open an avenue for students to go beyond the walls of their classrooms while learning from and positively impacting their community. This work will inform class discussions and allow students to develop a practical understanding of topics discussed’.

Along with Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have radically altered what and how we know; about humans, language, history, religion, things and life. Because their thought has shaped our sense of ourselves so fundamentally, Michel Foucault has referred to these three authors as discourse-founders. As such they will be treated in this class. Special attention will be paid to the affinities and competition among their approaches. Secondary sources will be subject to short presentations (in English) of those students capable of reading German.

Instructor: Arden A Hegele

Literature and medicine have always been in dialogue: Apollo was the god of physicians and poetry, while some of the greatest writers, such as John Keats and Anton Chekhov, were trained as doctors. In our time, literature and medicine have become ever more entwined in Susan Sontag’s formulation of “illness as metaphor,” and in the emergent fields of “medical humanities” and “narrative medicine” that bridge the practices of writer and doctor. This course, which is open to students in both medicine and literature, aims to introduce students to how literary fiction—from the 19th century to the present day—reveals the historical interplay between physicians and writers. We examine how medical professionalism is portrayed in literature, how writers and doctors negotiate the clinical encounter, and how narrative shapes the physician’s practice. As we move through shifting paradigms in both medical and literary history, we explore how thematic, generic, and ethical concerns transcend the divisions between the disciplines: new fields like epidemiology, pathology, and psychiatry influenced the familiar form of the novel, while the case history and gothic fiction display unexpected commonalities. We consider, too, how problems of gender and sexuality recur across medical fictions, and how medical ways of knowing lend themselves to great artistic movements. As we read, we will strive to answer a broader question: why is medicine so often represented through tropes of the supernatural? Writers include Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sylvia Plath, and Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as critical readings by Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Oliver Sacks, Michel Foucault, and Donna Haraway. The class will also attend a reading of a new play, Krista Knight’s Lipstick Lobotomy. Both literature and medical (or pre-med) students are invited to apply; medical students may take this course for R-credit or as a substitute for their Narrative Medicine requirement. This seminar will particularly suit students who are interested in British literature, literature post-1800, prose fiction, social justice, and the medical humanities.  To apply, write to the course instructor with a brief statement of interest.

Instructor: Roni Henig

Exploring a rich variety of literary prose fiction, this course focuses on the emergence of modernism in Hebrew literature at the turn of the 20th century. Ever since the 19th century Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Hebrew literature has played a major role in the processes of permutation and transition within Jewish society, articulating new modes of thinking on matters such as body, identity, sexuality and language. In both its themes and aesthetics, Hebrew literature not only reflected these processes, but in fact created and shaped the public sphere within which these new ideas emerged. Identifying literature as an institution of the modern, intertwined with the rise of nationalism, this course examines the coincidence, as well as the discrepancy, between modernist poetics and the nationalist imagination. It asks how literature constructs national consciousness and whether, and in what ways, it ever exceeds it. Our weekly sessions will be dedicated to reading diverse texts (short stories, essays, novels and literary theory) and tackling some of the recurring issues they raise, including gender and sexuality, ideology, psychological narratives, secularization and immigration. We will acquire methodologies of literary analysis, pay attention to rhetoric and style and practice close reading. The course will use digital media and interactive online platforms including films, photos, recordings and other audiovisuals, as well as an interactive discussion board. No prior knowledge of Hebrew is required. All texts are available in English translation.

ALSO JWST W4537

We can’t talk about human rights without talking about the forms in which we talk about human rights. This course will study the convergences of the thematics, philosophies, politics, practices, and formal properties of literature and human rights. In particular, it will examine how literary questions of narrative shape (and are shaped by) human rights concerns; how do the forms of stories enable and respond to forms of thought, forms of commitment, forms of being, forms of justice, and forms of violation? How does narrative help us to imagine an international order based on human dignity, rights, and equality? We will read classic literary texts and contemporary writing (both literary and non-literary) and view a number of films and other multimedia projects to think about the relationships between story forms and human rights problematics and practices. Likely literary authors: Roberto Bolaño, Miguel de Cervantes, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Slavenka Drakulic, Nuruddin Farah, Janette Turner Hospital, Franz Kafka, Sahar Kalifeh, Sindiwe Magona, Maniza Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Alicia Partnoy, Ousmane Sembène, Mark Twain . . . . We will also read theoretical and historical pieces by authors such as Agamben, An-Na’im, Appiah, Arendt, Balibar, Bloch, Chakrabarty, Derrida, Douzinas, Habermas, Harlow, Ignatieff, Laclau and Mouffe, Levinas, Lyotard, Marx, Mutua, Nussbaum, Rorty, Said, Scarry, Soyinka, Spivak, Williams.

We will read a range of 19th- and 20th-c. works, mostly novels, about war and about peace, written by Russian, U.S., English, French, and German authors between 1837 and 1938.  Anchoring the course will be Leo Tolstoy’s early and late war (and anti-war) stories and his epic novel.

Prerequisites: Instructor’s permission (Seminar). Although Socrates takes a notoriously dim view of persuasion and the art that produces it, the Platonic dialogues featuring him both theorize and practice a range of rhetorical strategies that become the nuts and bolts of persuasive argumentation. This seminar will read a number of these dialogues, including Apology, Protagoras, Ion, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Menexenus and Republic, followed by Aristole’s Rhetoric, the rhetorical manual of Plato’s student that provides our earliest full treatment of the art. Application instructions: E-mail Prof. Eden (khe1@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.