Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar) Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Marianne Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) with the subject heading “Novel and Feminist Theory seminar.” In your message, include basic information: 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.

Instructor: M. Velikonja

Balkan studies are recently developed discipline between social sciences and humanities that deals with different aspects of history and present of the Balkans, and with its ideological construction and reception. Although the region is scientifically researched in different ways for a long time, this new approach was established some fifteen years ago with the ground-breaking study of Maria Todorova “Imagining the Balkans” (1997).

Main research topics of the Balkan studies is not only the present situation in the Balkans, but mainly ideology of Balkanism as a discourse and practice of negative and stereotypical views on the Balkans in different fields of social reality: (pop) culture, politics, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and mentalities.

Instructor: G. Zinman

An advanced introduction to theories of media, technology and culture as they relate to the study of cinema, focusing in particular on cinema in the age of “new media” or computer technologies. Film studies has tended to take the projected live-action narrative feature film as its object, but increasingly new forms of technology are transforming the way we perceive and interact with moving images. Survey of central concepts and major theoretical debates associated with cinema in relation to new media, putting these debates in the context of film’s relation to other now older media such as photography, television and home video.

Topics will include: indexicality in relation to digital technology, remediation, the virtual, information theory, convergence culture, software studies, digital animation and special effects, gaming and interactivity and YouTube.

Please note: This course is required for ICLS graduate students, and priority will be given to these students. Contact the ICLS office for more information at (212) 854-4541.

Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics include: oral, print, and visual culture; epic, novel, and nation; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; sex and gender transformation; the human/inhuman; writing trauma; urban imaginaries; world literature. Open only to students intending to declare a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medicine, Literature, and Society in spring 2013.

This course introduces literary and cultural theories from the 20th century to the present with a focus on comparative reasoning, intellectual and formal rigor, historical sensibility, and universalist aspirations. Our goal is to develop methods for analyzing the literary and cultural productions of East Asian societies in conversation with other traditions and, in particular, understanding the global processes in China, Japan, and Korea. Topics of discussion range from text, genre, writing and orality to problems of translation, media technology, visual culture, social imaginary, and imperial/colonial modernity. Our readings include narrative theory, structural linguistics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, critical translation studies, postmodernism, and postcolonial scholarship. Select literary works and films are incorporated to facilitate our understanding of theoretical issues and to test the validity of all universalist claims we encounter in the course.

Students are strongly encouraged to think critically and creatively about any theoretical arguments or issues that emerge in the course of our readings and discussions rather than treat theoretical idiom as an instrument to be applied to a literary text. Our expectation is for students to develop interpretive and analytical skills that are essential to the task of interpreting literary, cultural, and historical texts as well as society and the world.

A survey of the most influential literary theories of the twentieth century, this seminar will discuss seminal contributions to hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, discourse analysis, and gender theory. Each section will juxtapose two representative authors whose texts either complement or contradict one another. Based on close readings of exemplary texts, we will explore basic concepts of these theories and examine their intersections and differences. A second focal point of the seminar will be on applications of theory to literature. We will analyze their reformulation as methodologies in literary studies and discuss how they influenced different approaches to literature. The aim of the seminar will ultimately be to scrutinize critically these “applications” of theory to literature.  Readings and discussions in English. No prior knowledge of literary theories required.

This course will investigate the connections between literary/cultural production and petroleum as the substance that makes possible the world as we know it, both as an energy source and a component in the manufacture of everything from food to plastic.  Our current awareness of oil’s scarcity and its myriad costs (whether environmental, political, or social) provides a lens to read for the presence (or absence) of oil in texts in a variety of genres and national traditions.  As we begin to imagine a world “beyond petroleum,” this course will confront ways in which oil shapes both the world we know and how we imagine the world.  Oil will feature in this course in questions of theme (texts about “oil”), of literary form (are there common formal conventions of an “oil novel”?), of interpretive method (how to read for oil), of transnational circulation (how does “foreign oil” link US citizens to other spaces?), and of the materiality (or “oiliness”) of literary culture (how does the production and circulation of texts, whether print or digital, rely on oil?).