In 1955, an American writer of Russian descent published in Paris a thin book that forever shaped English language, American culture, and the international literary scene.  That book, of course, was Vladimir Nabokov’sLolita. We will speak of exile, memory and nostalgia, of hybrid cultural identities and cosmopolitan elites, of language, translation and multilingualism.  All readings will be in English.

Instructor: Valentina Izmirlieva

Narrative medicine – its practice and scholarship – is necessarily concerned with issues of trauma, body, memory, voice, and intersubjectivity. However, to grapple with these issues, we must locate them in their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Narrative understanding helps unpack the complex power relations between North and South, state and worker, disabled body and able-body, bread-earner and child-bearer, as well as self and the Other (or, even, selves and others). If disease, violence, terror, war, poverty and oppression manifest themselves narratively, then resistance, justice, healing, activism, and collectivity can equally be products of a narrative based approach to ourselves and the world.

Instructors: Eric Marcus and Andrew Gerber

M 7:00pm-8:50pm, January 22-February 12 (.5 pts)

A four-session mini-seminar on the following topics:

1. Epistemology and methods of neuroimaging for scholars

2. Neuroimaging of drives and affects

3. Neuroimaging of perception and representation

4. Neuroimaging of social cognition and therapeutic change

The course will discuss how filmmaking has been used as an instrument of power and imperial domination in the Soviet Union as well as on post-Soviet space since 1991. A body of selected films by Soviet and post-Soviet directors which exemplify the function of filmmaking as a tool of appropriation of the colonized, their cultural and political subordination by the Soviet center will be examined in terms of postcolonial theories. The course will focus both on Russian cinema and often overlooked work of Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, Armenian, etc. national film schools and how they participated in the communist project of fostering a «new historic community of the Soviet people» as well as resisted it by generating, in hidden and, since 1991, overt and increasingly assertive ways their own counter-narratives. Close attention will be paid to the new Russian film as it re-invents itself within the post-Soviet imperial momentum projected on the former Soviet colonies.

This course will examine the major debates, contested genealogies, epistemic and political interventions, and possible futures of the body of writing that has come to be known as postcolonial theory. We will examine the relationships between postcolonial theory and other theoretical formations, including post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism, and Third Worldism. We will also consider what counts as “theory” in postcolonial theory: in what ways have novels, memoirs, or revolutionary manifestos, for example, offered seminal, generalizable statements about postcoloniality? How can we understand the relationship between the rise of postcolonial studies in the United States and the role of the U.S. in the post-Cold War era? How do postcolonial theory and its insights about European imperialism contribute to analyses of contemporary globalization?

The course explores the unique period in Czech film and literature during the 1960s that emerged as a reaction to the imposed socialist realism. The new generation of writers (Kundera, Skvorecky, Havel, Hrabal) in turn had an influence on young emerging film makers, all of whom were part of the Czech new wave.

View the syllabus here.

This is a year-long course. All GSAS students must register for both the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 sections to receive credit. Grades will not be issued until the end of Spring 2019.

This seminar will focus, each year, on a different topic central to contemporary critical thought. During the 2015-2016 academic year, the seminar focused on Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures and produced the Foucault 13/13 series. During the 2016-2017 academic year, the seminar focused on critical readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and produced the Nietzsche 13/13 series. During the 2017-2018 academic year, the seminar focused on modalities of uprisings and produced the Uprising 13/13 series. In 2018-2019, the seminar will focus on critique and praxis.

The graduate student seminar will be structured to frame a series of 13 formal seminars at which two or three guests, from different disciplines, will be invited to discuss the readings and present on the themes of the seminar. Each formal seminar will host specialists from across the disciplines from Columbia University and from outside campus. It will also frame and interrelate with a Paris Reading Group that will run alongside the seminar. The graduate student seminar thus will serve as the vehicle to enrich the formal 13/13 seminars and support the intellectual apparatus that will accompany those formal seminars. It will prepare entries for the blog, host the scholars invited to participate, and prepare questions and comments for the formal seminars. This seminar will function as an advanced graduate research seminar.

Through an analysis of far-flung examples of comic Jewish literature created by Jews over three centuries and three continents, this course will attempt to answer two questions. First, are there continuities in Jewish literary style and rhetorical strategy, and if so, what are they? And second, can Jewish literature help us to understand the tensions between universality and particularity inherent in comic literature more generally? Works and authors read will include Yiddish folktales, Jewish jokes, Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, and selections from American television and film, including the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David.

This seminar will focus, each year, on a different topic central to contemporary critical thought. During the 2015-2016 academic year, for instance, the seminar focused on Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures and produced the Foucault 13/13 series. During the 2016-2017 academic year, the seminar focused on critical readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and produced the Nietzsche 13/13 series. During the 2017-2018 academic year, the seminar focused on modalities of uprisings and produced the Uprising 13/13 series. Similar topics will be broached in future years. Please see the CCCCT website for more details on future topics. The graduate student seminar will be structured to frame a series of 13 formal seminars at which two or three guests, from different disciplines, will be invited to discuss the readings and present on the themes of the seminar. Each formal seminar will host specialists from across the disciplines from Columbia University and from outside campus. It will also frame and interrelate with a Paris Reading Group that will run alongside the seminar. The graduate student seminar thus will serve as the vehicle to enrich the formal 13/13 seminars and support the intellectual apparatus that will accompany those formal seminars. It will prepare entries for the blog, host the scholars invited to participate, and prepare questions and comments for the formal seminars. This seminar will function as an advanced graduate research seminar. This is a year-long course (Y course). Columbia GSAS students will be required to take both Fall and Spring semesters of this course. No grade will be issued for the Fall semester, the credits are broken up across both semesters, 4 credits total, 1 in Fall and 3 in Spring. This course co-convenes with LAW L8866 001.