Past Courses – (TEST)

   

Spring 2015
COURSE TYPE : Joint
COURSE CODE : G4733
(4.00 PTS.)
Iran: Film, Fiction, Poetry, History

Fall 2015
COURSE TYPE : Joint
COURSE CODE : G4248
(4.00 PTS.)
Iraq: War, Love and Exile

Instructor: M. Al-Musawi

This course explores three major thematic concerns that distinguish Iraqi narrative after 2003. War, love, and exile are at the center of Iraqi writers’ narrative which has been winning the attention of very large audiences in Iraq, the Arab world, the US and Europe. These narratives demonstrate richness and dexterity and have been winning high acclaim as great writings of war, estrangements and love.


Spring 2015
COURSE TYPE : Joint
COURSE CODE : G4248
(4.00 PTS.)
Iraq: War, Love and Exile (Postoccupation Iraqi Narrative)

This course explores three major thematic concerns that distinguish Iraqi narrative after 2003. War, love, and exile are at the center of Iraqi writers’ narrative which has been winning the attention of very large audiences in Iraq, the Arab world, the US and Europe. These narratives demonstrate richness and dexterity and have been winning high acclaim as great writings of war, estrangements and love.


Fall 2015
COURSE TYPE : Joint
COURSE CODE : G6905
(4.00 PTS.)
Issues in Comparative Literature: Post-Colonial Theory

Fall 2015
COURSE TYPE : CPLS
COURSE CODE : W3949
(3.00 PTS.)
Land, Nomad, Nation: The Making of Indigeneity

Given that “indigenous” is a category without clear demarcations-that can only be formulated in relation to something deemed less indigenous-this course explores how claims to indigenity have been represented in relation to land and governance, focusing on media of representation, including art, literature, and architecture. In light of recent international movements seeking to establish a framework of “indigenous rights” within the rubric of “universal rights”, this course takes note of certain aesthetic corollaries to this negotiation of the universalizable exception. Specifically, we will ask how art and architecture-often associated with place, stability, and longevity-operate in relation to the movements of people or their re-settlement. Relatedly, we will ask how literature both unites people under the rubric of nationality while also operating across national boundaries. Readings will focus on forms of land use, aesthetic representations of land, and relations between land and nation. Finally, we will ask whether claims to political rights and participation must always be rooted (so to speak) in practices of land tenure. The scope of the course is broadly global and focused mostly on the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, although several readings deal with more distant eras.

This seminar is open to undergraduate students from all disciplines and should be of especial interest to students of history, anthropology, art history, engineering, and the biological sciences. Open to graduate students with permission from instructor.

This course is intended to expand students’ historical and critical perspectives on an issue of pressing contemporary importance, touching on the future of rights of both “indigenous” people and migrants. Students will research a topic of their choosing in greater depth and develop maps and texts that illustrate overlapping and perhaps conflicting approaches to land use.


Spring 2015
COURSE TYPE : Joint
COURSE CODE : G4210
(4.00 PTS.)
Laplanche

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 work, not merely secondary sources, is expected and re-reading certain of his texts will be helpful or even necessary during the course. Some familiarity with Freud is expected and reading or re-reading the works of Freud which Laplanche addresses will be helpful although perhaps not essential.


Spring 2015
COURSE TYPE : Joint
COURSE CODE : W4101
(4.00 PTS.)
Literature and Culture Theory: East/West

This course examines the universalism of major literary and cultural theories from the 20th century to the present with a focus on the centrality of comparative reasoning (commensurability/incommensurability, the logic of inclusion/exclusion, etc.) that sustains such universalism. Our goal is to develop methods for analyzing the literary and cultural productions of East Asian societies in conversation with other traditions and for understanding global processes in China, Japan, and Korea in particular.

Topics of discussion include, for example, text and context, writing and orality, genre, media technology, visual culture, problems of translation, social imaginary, imperial and 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.


Spring 2015
COURSE TYPE : CPLS
COURSE CODE : W3944
(3.00 PTS.)
Literature and Medicine: Imagining Illness

Fall 2015
COURSE TYPE : Joint
COURSE CODE : W3937
(4.00 PTS.)
Literature and Oil

(Seminar). 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,” we will confront ways in which oil shapes both the world we know and how we imagine the world. Oil will feature 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?).


Spring 2015
COURSE TYPE : Joint
COURSE CODE : V3660
(3.00 PTS.)
Mafia Movies

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


 The Heyman Center for the Humanities, Room B-101
74 Morningside Drive
New York, NY, 10027
  (212) 854-4541
  (212) 854-3099