This is a general introduction to comparative literature, and to contemporary theory and criticism. Its purpose is to offer all incoming MA and PhD students exposure to key issues in the discipline. Organized around the broad theme of "Bases for Comparison," each of our meetings will explore a particular issue or problem addressed in contemporary scholarship. After briefly reviewing the history of the discipline, we will interrogate a number of the categories foundational to it: language, literature, aesthetics, theory, humanity/humanities, relation, and comparison. We will conclude by reading some exemplary new work in comparative literature, through which we will chart possible directions for our own scholarship, and new challenges for the field.

This is a self-driven reading course. Please consult with the unit for details and enrolment.

This is a self-driven reading course. Please consult with the unit for details and enrolment.

This is a course taught by a Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory, who is selected annually by the Centre for Comparative Literature.

After the completion of coursework, the next step for PhD students is the Field Paper and Exam. It is designed to prepare them for thesis writing. The Field Exam consists of three components: a Field Proposal, a Field Paper, and an Oral Field Exam

Bertolt Brecht played a specific role in the paradigm shift of the art which began at the end of the 19th century. He advanced this change by trying to connect art to its social and political functions and structure with the positive acceptance of the industrial revolution and by trying to transform it with the help of the new technological media.

In this course, we will focus on issues that are situated at the intersection of four major trends in contemporary feminist literary studies: 1) the unprecedented interest in autobiographical writings, sparked by a profusion of the actual publication of such texts and by the development of a large body of criticism dealing with the numerous forms of life writing; 2) the rapid evolution of specifically feminist theories of autobiography (Gilmore, Smith, Watson) over the past twenty years; 3) current feminist theories of agency and subjectivity (Butler, Druxes, Mann); 4) the recent theoretical inquiry into the category of gender (Butler, Robinson, Scott), especially as it is represented in the literary text.

The seminar will begin with a critical study and problematization of the principal concepts outlined in these four theoretical groupings. We will then proceed with close readings of several works of contemporary life writing, drawn from the French, Québécois and German literary contexts, emphasizing the diverse textual strategies by which female autobiographical subjects are constructed and, in turn, make a claim to agency. In many instances, textual subjects merge both fact and fiction in an effort to become subjects-in-process, subjects with multiple facets that challenge androcentric theories of the supposedly unified, sovereign autobiographical subject (Gusdorf), while juxtaposing the personal, the political and the social in their texts. Notions such as the relational self, the writing of trauma and illness, performativity in autobiographical writing, the "death" of the subject and the author, and the problematics of memory (personal, historical, cultural, etc.) will be examined. While the focus will be on various forms of women's life writing, we will also analyze one male author's AIDS diary, not simply to further investigate the gendered basis of all writing, but also to examine the particular forms of agency mobilized in autobiographical accounts of illness.

This research seminar will explore methods of analyzing narratives of survival which emerged out of experiences of repression in different historical contexts, such as the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, the Chinese system of "re-education through labour," and trauma following personal abuse in America. During the course, various theoretical and methodological approaches will be engaged to examine how diaries, memoirs, literary works, and film confront past and present.

Readings include Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (1992), Shoshana Feldman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (1995), Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1996), Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (1995), Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986-1991), Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book (1997), Zhang Xianliang, Grass Soup (1995), and Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina (1993). During the course, students will also prepare and discuss their own topic of research, leading toward a final research paper.

This course will explore how feminist theory has influenced the way medieval literature is read. The pluralistic and shifting nature of a feminist theoretical orientation which struggles with the politics of subject and gender identity, race, class, sexuality, and the body is particularly apt for the exploration of the medieval literary text whose instability and variability render it resistant to critical authority and open to multiple readings. We will attempt to understand how gender structures medieval thought and its literary expression through selective readings from a variety of feminist theoretical perspectives such as psychoanalytic theory, French feminism, and postmodern theory of the body. The main focus of the course, however, will be on opening up medieval literary texts to new meanings. Texts to be studied will be drawn from a wide crosssection of medieval literary discourses such as epic, romance, courtly lyric, fabliaux, Marian literature, hagiography, and drama and will include examples from writings by medieval women such as The Book of Margery Kempe, and Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies.

"In my view, text and image complement, rather than supplement, each other; since reference is not secure in either, neither can compensate for lack of stability in the other. Because both media are located on the border between fact and fiction, they often undercut just as easily as they reinforce each other." (T. Adams).

In the "fictional" and "non-fictional" autobiographical narratives chosen to explore the various ways in which text and image can interact with and reflect on each other, the writers use a highly metalinguistic discourse to discuss the problems of self-referentiality in language and in images and to reflect on the use of paintings and photographs in their visualizations and articulations of selfhood. Marie-Claire Blais, Sophie Calle, Jacques Poulin, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields all express an awareness of the autobiographical self as decentered, multiple, fragmented, and divided against itself in the act of observing and being. The use of paintings and photographic images (portraits and self-portraits), operate as visual supplements (illustrations) and corroboration (verification) of the autobiographical subjects and their narratives. The introduction of images (paintings, photographs, drawings) in autobiographical and fictional autobiographical texts problematizes the status of the autobiographical genre, referentiality, representation, the relationship between self-images and life-writings, etc. The study of theoretical texts pertaining to autobiography, painting, photography and the relationship between words and images will serve as a basis for our analysis of Blais, Calle, Ondaatje, Poulin, and Shields autobiographical and fictional narratives.

The concept of two avant-gardes refers to the "historical avant-garde" (Burger) and the neo-avant-garde (Buchloh, Foster). However, this course will also compare two broad contexts for the return of the avant-garde after WWII: the context of late capitalism — in the U.S. and Western Europe — and that of late socialism, in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Historical movements such as Dada and Surrealism, Futurism, Suprematism and Constructivism did not simply exhaust the avant-garde project: neo-avant-garde art arguably comprehended that project for the first time (Foster). However, if we must read avant-garde gestures in their historical moment(s) we must also read them in their socio-political contexts. We will discuss how the avant-garde challenge to bourgeois principles of the autonomous work and the expressive author/artist took on new significance in the post-war late capitalist west. We will compare that western return to the return in late socialism, in which the civic and spiritual energy derived from the lost avant-garde legacy was channeled toward non-conformism and anti-utopian critique (Groys). We will consider what this highly mobile international legacy of avant-garde experimentation might reveal vis-à-vis critique, solidarity, and social transformation in the contemporary moment.

This course will examine theories and literatures of affinity in order to ask questions about community, love, family, friendship, intimacy, belonging, responsibility, and social change from the nineteenth century to the present. What are the politics of shaping oneself in relation to others, and how do affinities — to people, places, ideas, and things — lend a legal, biological, affective, and moral imperative to community and association? How do we experience the proximity of bodies, sentiments, and ideas, and what does it mean to live politically with others? In reading novels, essays, manifestos, and treatises, as well as examining cultural production, we will look at the forms of affinity that get constructed between the different texts themselves and between their readers and consumers. The course will be constructed by investigation around the vectors of two periods, fin-de-siècle European radicalism (Fabian socialism, William Morris, Bloomsbury, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Barrie, Emma Goldman, etc), and the present era (activist movements, theorists of hospitality, community, cosmopolitanism, stranger intimacy, affect, insurrection, commonality — e.g., Hardt, Zizek, Agamben, Berlant, Tiqqun, Berardi).

This course will be devoted to a close reading of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's unfinished and posthumously published montage of fragments, quotations, and aphorisms on the urban culture of Second Empire Paris — "capital of the nineteenth century." Both the birthplace of consumer capitalism and the site of numerous failed revolutions, nineteenth-century Paris crystallized, for Benjamin (writing during the rise of European fascism) the numerous ambiguities of modernity itself. Many of these ambiguities were registered in disorienting new experiences of space and time. While exploring Benjamin’s reading of the various strands of nineteenth century visual, literary and architectural culture — fashion, photography, advertising, lighting, furniture, railways, exhibitions, department stores, catacombs, museums, etc. — we will consider the implications of his approach for thinking about history, memory, and politics today. Our reading of the Arcades will be supplemented with readings from Baudelaire, Blanqui, Fourier, Marx, Adorno, Brecht, Aragon, Simmel, and Freud as well as contemporary critical theorists. No specific background is required, but it would be helpful to have read Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire beforehand.

This course will examine the dynamics of cultural exchange between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in medieval Iberia as manifested in the literatures produced by each group. Beginning with an introduction to theories of alterity and postcolonialism and their relevance to the medieval past, the course, through readings of Hebrew (in translation), Arabic (in translation) and Castilian literary sources will consider the way 'others' are represented, as well as the ways in which cultures come into contact in these texts through adaptation or hybrid literary forms. The course will move from Islamic Spain where cultural cross-fertilization produced such innovative, hybrid forms of poetry as the muwashshahat in Arabic with their accompanying Romance jarchas, and Jewish poets like Todros Abulafia who struggled to define himself and his writing within the dominant Arabic literary culture, to Christian Spain where the complex models of literary translation and transmission placed Arabic models at the centre of European intellectual culture. The course will follow the trajectory of Spanish history as Muslims and Jews were assimilated, converted or expelled by exploring the dynamics of conversion in poetry written by converted Jews in the 15th century and the domestication of the 'other' in such 16th-century Castilian texts as the Abencerraje. In addition to texts already mentioned, other readings may include Shem Tov’s Moral Proverbs, selections from the romances, and Juan Manuel’s El conde Lucanor. A reading knowledge of Spanish is required.

This course explores the cross-fertilization of cultures and literatures in medieval Iberia, a focus that is central to the mandate of Comparative Literature. The study of Hebrew, Arabic, Castilian and Latin literatures in the Spanish Middle Ages is more usually carried out in separate departments of Spanish, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, or Medieval Studies. The offering of this course through Comparative Literature enables a much fuller and richer exploration of medieval Iberian literary culture.

In experimental critical writing, generic distinctions between poetry, essay, manifesto, and philosophical query are blurred. In this course we will attend to form and to writerliness in the work of contemporary critics and thinkers that write on the edge of institutional and disciplinary constraints; e.g., Fred Moten, Claudia Rankine, Christina Crosby, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Denise Riley. But reading takes second place to writing in different forms and genres. You will engage in writing exercises around voice, genre, collaboration, multimedia, and image as you articulate your own critical voice. Each week, you will submit a 750- to 1,300-word assignment to the class, and the bulk of class time will be devoted to workshopping each other's writing.

Translation Studies is a young field that has gained considerable momentum over the past 20 or so years (especially with the emergence of Postcolonial Studies). Comparatist by nature, translation is a good a gateway as any into the discipline of Comparative Literature and some of its principal concerns.

This course will combine the historical, theoretical and pragmatic dimension of translation (all of which overlap to a certain extent). On the historical side, there will be detailed and historically contextualized study of some main reflections on the problem of translation (including texts by Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Venuti, and Apter) as well as specific broader case studies of the translation history of certain works (including the Bible, Virgil, and Sophocles). For the theoretical dimension, Munday (2008) will serve as a guide to a critical discussion of particular approaches and models developed by current Translation Studies. The litmus test will be the pragmatic dimension: hands-on, detailed, and theoretically informed analyses of specific translations (usually short passages), mostly to be chosen and presented by the seminar participants themselves.

This course will look at six metropoles (Berlin, London, Paris, New York, St. Petersburg, Shanghai) from the perspectives of Japanese visitors such as Mori, Natsume, Nagai, Yokomitsu, Tanizaki, Gotô, Tawada, and Horie, and from those of natives and immigrants (e.g., Benjamin, Döblin, Nabokov, Woolf, Conrad, Rilke, Pushkin, Gogol, Shi). Those writers' accounts of cities in the span of time between the late nineteenth century and late twentieth century are inflected by the itineraries of their movement before and after their experience of the cities and by their peripatetic as well as optical experience of urban spaces of varied historical, social, material, and geopolitical conditions. They reveal cities not as cartographical spots but as sites in the traffic of bodies and sensations. The readings (all assigned are available in English, with additional materials to be introduced by the instructor) shall be arranged in such a way that participants can compare each city's literary mediations by variably invested observers. Accompanying theoretical, critical, and photographic texts (e.g., Apter, Atget, Benjamin, Brandt, Brassaï, Burgin, de Certeau, Doisneau, Gleber, Maeda, Ronis, Walker) shall define a conceptual framework for each session.

Jean-Luc Nancy's work on art, aesthetics, and sense has achieved widespread significance in contemporary philosophical, art historical, and theoretical discussions and debates on the relations between art, politics, and ethics. This course provides students with an opportunity to engage with close readings of his work, in order to develop an understanding of the specific priority granted to the praxis of art and aisthesis in his thinking on sense, existence, and being-with. Books by Nancy such as The Muses, The Ground of the Image, Being Singular Plural, Corpus, The Pleasure of Drawing, and Noli Me Tangere, will be read along with the work of other philosophers who have informed Nancy’s own thinking (e.g., Hegel, Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot and Derrida).

Every now and then we sense a world beyond the capitalist one in which we live. Maybe it is a society without punishing inequality. Or a self without anxiety. Or an ecosystem without human rapaciousness. This sense (feeling, impulse, drive) can be as banal as a quiet moment alone, or as go-for-broke as a revolutionary act together. Like death, it is something we already know and something beyond our wildest dreams. Like love, it is in us more than us. Sometimes we attempt to shake open this otherness by the sheer force of our imagination or collective will; other times we meet it without any intention, without any focused desire or recognition that we are actually engaged in such a radical act. Regardless of whether such post-capitalist worlds are possible or whether such desires are naïve or hysterical, our encounter with them — with these speculative futures — is promising. But promising of what? We will engage theories of utopia, temporality, fantasy, political-economy, historiography, subjectivity, aesthetics, and representation.

This course will reflect on representations of acts of revenge and resistance that are produced in historical contexts that privilege law's rule. How is revenge — or its more civil counterpart, "retribution" — related to or differentiated from resistance, whether personal or political, individual or collective? If revenge is disparaged, how is its objectionable character established? In what contexts and by what means is resistance represented as legitimate or even positive? We will explore questions such as these by discussing relations among revenge, resistance, and "race" (in the earlier sense of "inheritance" or "nation" as well as in racialized regimes of oppression) as they appear in a variety of literary texts from three eras: ancient Athens and Rome; early modern England, France, and Spain; and the age of Revolutions. Of interest will be the rezeptionsgeschichte of texts — or, in the case of the Haitian Revolution, events — in which relations among revenge, resistance, and "race" are unstable, have frequently been revisioned, or have been interpreted in radically different terms.

Texts will include: Aeschylus's Oresteia, Euripides' Medea and Hecuba, and Livy's narrative of Rome's founding in History of Rome; variants of the tale of Rodrigo and La Cava, related to Islam's conquest of Spain, selected essays by Montaigne, Shakespeare's Lucrece, Othello, and Hamlet, and Milton's Paradise Lost (selected books); Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal; von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas and Die Verlobung in St. Domingo; M. Shelley's Frankenstein; P. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and both poetry and prose written in response to the Haitian revolution.

In this seminar, we will examine the writings of Sigmund Freud in their historical context, starting with the intellectual and political milieu of fin de siècle Vienna that set the stage for the invention of psychoanalysis. From here we will investigate aspects of Freud's entire career, grouped roughly in four stages: his early 1890s writings on hysteria and his experiments with hypnosis, which led to his discovery of the "talking cure" and, eventually, the "secret of dreams" (in Interpretation of Dreams [1900]); his 1900s creation of the major concepts of sexuality theory (his early case studies as well as "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"); his central writings before, during and after the First World War, from Totem and Taboo and "The Uncanny" through to his seminal work on shell shock, repetition compulsion, and the death drive, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; and his attempts to diagnose wide-ranging pathologies of society and culture in late 1920s and 1930s (e.g., The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism). The goal of the course is to present a broad critical introduction to Freud's work and to key concepts of psychoanalytic theory.

In discussing sovereignty, contemporary political theorists inevitably refer to Hobbes, reference to whom often legitimates or critiques contemporary conceptions of governmentality or power. Known as an apologist for royal absolutism in his own time, Hobbes is now usually regarded as the first theorist of the modern state and of liberalism. What is the significance of this often tacit re-evaluation? Further questions to be explored include, what understanding of "liberty" and the “political” do various 20th and 21st century theorists bring to their readings of Hobbes's texts? What specific textual interpretations, if any, do they provide for their readings? What do later philosophers make of Hobbes's view that sovereignty originates within the household, where it is held by the father, and/or slave-master? Is recent interest in "sovereignty" in any way connected with 9/11? In this course, we will read Hobbes's major political treatises alongside the major 20th and 21st theorists who have drawn on him. Efforts will be made to situate Hobbes's treatises historically with reference to seventeenth century debates on sovereignty and selected contemporaneous political theorists. Throughout the course, we will explore tensions between the readings produced by historical contextualization and those presupposed or developed by modern theorists.

This course examines new forms of textualities and textual practices that are emerging in the digital era. It highlights an understudied dimension of the text, i.e., the medium that forms its material and technological infrastructure such as scroll, codex, book, CD, e-book, the Internet, and smartphone. The course starts with a historical investigation into the printed text and print culture. Then it moves on to the question of how digital technologies shape reading and writing as well as other text-based cultural practices. While the course revolves around the mediality of the text, it distances itself from technological determinism by stressing the facts that digital technologies are always embedded in and shaped by historically specific political, social, and cultural conditions. This course is designed for students who are interested in questions and issues related to literary production in the digital era and more generally the materiality of the text. Theoretical and scholarly works we will engage with in this course include, but not limited to, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (McLuhan, 1964), The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Adrian Johns, 2000), Writing Machines (N. Katherine Hayles, 2002), Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (Jay David Bolter, 2001), Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (Mark Hansen, 2006), The Interface Effect (Alexander R. Galloway), The Language of New Media (Lev Manovich, 2002), Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009).

This course considers the formation of publics and public intellectuals, according to some leading theorists. We will examine the nature of a public, its constitution and elaboration through shared texts, private reading, public interventions, media and social networks. Participants will be encouraged to look critically at assumptions about public vs. private, author vs. reader, and producer vs. consumer, as we think about how autonomy and a critical stance toward power could be forged in historical contexts and in the contemporary globalized world of social networks. We will talk about how filiation and affiliation work, consider the way citizenship and membership in a community are constituted, and ask what publics might mean for the past and future of democracy. Readings will include selections from Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Edward Said, Michael Warner, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yascha Mounk, as well as from Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, Russian futurists, and neo-futurists, and others.

In this course, we will examine literary representations of trauma from the early nineteenth century (the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars) to the aftermath of World War I, when "shell shock" brought trauma irrevocably into the public eye. We will begin by examining the discourse of unrepresentability and doubt in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century medical literature, especially in Freudian psychoanalysis: if we can find no somatic source for trauma, how do we know that it exists? We will then investigate how the literature of this period — "modernism" — both reacted to and helped to shape this discourse. Rarely focusing explicitly on traumatic events, this literature only hints at traumatic occurrences – foregrounding instead the problem of representability at the heart of the modern age. Just as the traumatized body no longer points back to a physical pathology, so too does language itself seem to be severed from the object it aims to describe.

We will read literary and theoretical texts by writers such as Freud, Kafka, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Laplanche, Catherine Malabou, Shoshana Felman, and Cathy Caruth.

This course explores theoretical and literary texts on and of sports as participatory and spectatorial events in terms of translation between physical and textual practices, the temporality, spatiality and agency in playing and watching of sports, the body, tools and environment in sport activities, the instrumentality of sports to the promotion of ideologies, the engagement of sports in bildungsroman, the media and fan culture, and the relationship between narrative modes and the rules of the game in various sports. Both theoretical (e.g., Adorno, Barthes, Bourdieu, Derrida, Eco) and literary (e.g., Hornby, Murakami, Ogawa) readings will be available in English.

This course examines recent work in Queer Theory, Philosophy, Literature, and Visual Culture, in which questions of ethics and aesthetics are of principal concern in thinking about friendship; sexual pleasure; intimacy; decision; anonymity and identity; social encounters and relations. We will read works by: Leo Bersani, Tom Roach, Tim Dean, William Haver, Michel Foucault, Herve Guibert, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lauren Berlant, and others.

Ever since its creation in classical Athens, tragedy has been more than 'just' theatre: it has been a template that proved to be extraordinarily 'good to think with,' from Plato and Aristotle through, for instance, German Classicism and Romanticism (Schiller, Nietzsche, Wagner) and 19th-century Naturalism (Strindberg, Ibsen) to 20th-century artists working in high-brow culture (Brecht, Beckett, Miller, Sarah Kane) and in the Hollywood machine (Francis Coppola, George Lucas and the collectives creating shows like '24' or 'Breaking Bad'). What exactly has constituted this persistent allure of tragedy to artists working in disparate media across cultures and centuries? What is there to learn about them (and for us) from their modes of engagement with tragedy? And what does the comparatist method contribute to our understanding of these dynamics which other, more isolated approaches would not be able to deliver?

For the pursuit of these questions this course will follow a tripartite structure. ‘Foundations’ will centre on a close reading of the foundational text for thinking about tragedy, Aristotle's Poetics (including critical responses to it such as Brecht's Small Organon for the Theatre or Arthur Miller's Tragedy and the Common Man). The module 'Instantiations' will scrutinize select works of art/theoretical writings from theatre, philosophy, and opera, including Strindberg Miss Julie, Nietzsche Birth of Tragedy, selections from Schiller's theoretical writings as well as Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung, Bizet's Carmen, Enescu's Oedipe and Weill/Brecht Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The final module 'Challenges and survivals' looks at modes of resistance to tragedy (e.g., Brecht The Good Person of Sezuan, Glass/Wilson Einstein on the Beach) or other noteworthy 20th/21st-century appropriations in cinematic popular culture (e.g., Godfather, Star Wars, 24) and in theatrical high culture (e.g., Beckett Krapp's Last Tape and Endgame, Sarah Kane 4.48 Psychosis and Phaedra's Love, and performance art responses to the 9/11 terror attacks).

This course should be of interest not just to comparatists but to participants from a wide range of philologies, theatre studies, cinema studies, philosophy and music. Ample opportunity will be given to course participants to integrate own interests both into the course work and the mandatory research paper.

What changes are necessary in order to impede or even counteract the effects of climate change? This course argues that it is not through science and technology that a shift in our society can be enacted, but rather through an examination of who we think we are, what we think we need and want, and which of our habits and addictions are killing us and our planet. Catherine Malabou argues for what she calls “new addictions” as a way to think our relationship to history and to our actions. This course focuses on addiction as it interrogates the concept of subjectivity. Addiction undermines a neoliberal and agentic idea of the subject by putting into question ideas of self-aware freedom and consciousness. By examining critical theory, (science) fiction, essays, and visual art we will articulate a critique of self-possession and ask what addictions we need to cultivate in order to adapt to a new history. Theoretical texts will include William James, Malabou, Elizabeth Povinelli, Amitav Ghosh, and Andreas Malm. Primary texts could include Jeff Vandermeer, Rachel Kushner, Nnedi Okorafor, and various contemporary visual artists.