Please note: This course is required for ICLS graduate students, and priority will be given to these students. Generally the course fills with ICLS students each semester. Students MAY NOT register themselves for this course. Contact the ICLS office for more information at icls.columbia@gmail.com. This course was formerly numbered as G4900. This course introduces beginning graduate students to the changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, paying special attention to the range of interdisciplinary methods in comparative scholarship. Students are expected to have preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Our objective is to broaden the theoretical foundation of comparative studies to negotiate a conversation between literary studies and social sciences. Weekly readings are devoted to intellectual inquiries that demonstrate strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from a multiplicity of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, architecture, political theory, philosophy, art history, and media studies. Whenever possible, we will invite faculty from the above disciplines and fields to visit our class and share their perspectives on assigned readings. Students are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities and explore fields and disciplines outside their primary focus of study and specific discipline.

Instructor: Bruno Bosteels

Please note: This course is required for ICLS graduate students, and priority will be given to these students. Generally the course fills with ICLS students each semester. Students MAY NOT register themselves for this course. Contact the ICLS office for more information at icls.columbia@gmail.com. This course was formerly numbered as G4900. This course introduces beginning graduate students to the changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, paying special attention to the range of interdisciplinary methods in comparative scholarship. Students are expected to have preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Our objective is to broaden the theoretical foundation of comparative studies to negotiate a conversation between literary studies and social sciences. Weekly readings are devoted to intellectual inquiries that demonstrate strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from a multiplicity of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, architecture, political theory, philosophy, art history, and media studies. Whenever possible, we will invite faculty from the above disciplines and fields to visit our class and share their perspectives on assigned readings. Students are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities and explore fields and disciplines outside their primary focus of study and specific discipline.

Instructor: Ivan Sanders

This course introduces beginning graduate students to the changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, paying special attention to the range of interdisciplinary methods in comparative scholarship. Students are expected to have preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Our objective is to broaden the theoretical foundation of comparative studies to negotiate a conversation between literary studies and social sciences. Weekly readings are devoted to intellectual inquiries that demonstrate strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from a multiplicity of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, architecture, political theory, philosophy, art history, and media studies. Whenever possible, we will invite faculty from the above disciplines and fields to visit our class and share their perspectives on assigned readings. Students are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities and explore fields and disciplines outside their primary focus of study and specific discipline.

Please note: This course is required for ICLS graduate students, and priority will be given to these students. Generally the course fills with ICLS students each semester. Students MAY NOT register themselves for this course. Contact the ICLS office for more information at icls.columbia@gmail.com. This course was formerly numbered as G4900.

Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics may 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; medical humanities. Open only to students intending to declare a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medicine, Literature, and Society in Spring 2018.

Through varied exposure to Iranian film and fiction, and Persian poetry, this course is designed to introduce students to critical themes and creative effervescence of modern Iranian culture. The course will concentrate on Iranian cultural history of the last two centuries, with particular emphasis on contemporary issues.

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing A study of the genre of elegy across time and cultures. Emphasis on how poets express grief and relate to literary traditions. Comparisons of European, Chinese, and American elegies (by Theocritus, Milton, Qu Yuan, Holderlin, Wordsworth, Whitman, Bishop, and others) and discussions of the relationship between singular and collective life.

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.

The term “intersectional feminism” has seen renewed currency in the last year or so, but the methodologies and theories of intersectional feminisms have a much longer history. Kimberlé Crenshaw first theorized “intersectional feminism” as a critical framework in the 1990s. Crenshaw’s initial formation, however (as she herself has recognized), was conversant with a longer history of woman-of-color, transnational, and postcolonial feminisms. This seminar focuses on historicizing and examining contemporary literature through an intersectional approach that combines woman-of-color feminisms, transnational and global feminisms, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and disability studies. How do these texts imagine these crossings? What possible complexities, conflicts, or coalitions emerge? Since formal innovation has long been critical to foundational work in gender and sexuality studies scholars and writers, who often weave together art, practice, and politics, we will read theory as literature and literature as theory, and we will closely analyze links between intersectional feminisms and form, aesthetics, and genre.