Taught by Brent H. Edwards

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.

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.

This course’s first meeting is in the Board Room of the Heyman Center, Thursday’s meeting is in the Komoda Room of the Heyman Center (East Campus).

Instructor: Grant Wythoff

Over the past decade, digital media have made strange the very fabric of our conversations, movements, aesthetic experiences, and political consciousness. These changes were prepared for by information theorists in the 1940s, cyberneticians in the 1950s and 60s, and the architects of networked computation in the 1970s and 80s. But only now have we begun to live out the futures that were dreamed of by these technologists. Today with our digital devices, we experience their dreams as habits, beliefs, and compulsions.

This class will introduce students to the history and theory of digital media. We will begin by examining the historical roots of the concept of “information,” and then proceeds with units on each of the following key concepts in digital studies: platforms, networks and power, code, interface, and theories of the self. Each of these concepts will be explored through a comparative framework, using readings from across the disciplines and hands-on lab activities. We will think historically (how have media been experienced as “new” at different moments in time?), theoretically (how exactly do we address “medium” as an object of study), and tactically (how can we use our local experience of digital devices as a framework for thinking global networks?).

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 2017.

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 will examine the coincidence, as well as the discrepancy, between modernist poetics and the nationalist imagination. It will ask how literature constructs national consciousness and whether, and in what ways, it ever exceeds it.

An introduction to the work of Laplanche. The emphasis will be on his recent work which is the culmination of this theorizing and is accessible even to those unfamiliar with French psychoanalysis.  By the end of the course students will be thoroughly familiar with Laplanche’s central concepts, their origins in Freud and in Laplanche’s own development, and their relation to other psychoanalytic theorizing on the same topics.  The central themes include “the Generalized Theory of Seduction”, “the Fundamental Anthropological Situation”, and “the Translational Model of Repression”.  Some familiarity with Freud is expected and reading or re-reading certain of Freud’s texts will be helpful.

Instructor: Robert E. Pollock

This seminar is designed to provide opportunities for readings and reflections on the experience of volunteer service work in the At Your Service program at Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center. Students will learn how to critically reflect on their experiences at the health care center in the context of questions raised in the texts read in the seminar. Shared experiences and reflections on texts and interactions at TCC will enhance the critical reflection of all students engaged in the course. Students will experience what it means to be a long-term or short-term patient in a nursing home. Students will provide assistance and support, whether emotional or recreational, or by simply serving as the person consistently there for someone during chronic illness or at the end of their life.  At the core of this framework is the patient; however, it is important to think about the impact this will have on the student as well. Students will develop skills necessary to critically reflect on the significance of emotional care as a medical practitioner, as well as form a deeper understanding of the role of palliative care and comfort care in a life cycle of care.  Students are required to read The Anatomy of Hope by Jerome Groopman, M.D., and What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine by Danielle Ofri, M.D. Ph.D. At least one prior semester of volunteer work in a clinical setting relevant to the syllabus is recommended. Application required. Please send the completed application to Jenny Davis, the TA for the course, at jld2203@barnard.edu.

Instructor: Brian D O’Keeffe

Instructor: Aleksandar Boskovic

Readings and discussion of the most important works of the South Slavic writers from the second half of the 19th Century to the present.

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. Limit 25