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.

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.

Sexual predators purchase secrecy from their victims, billionaires hide obscene wealth in off-shore bank accounts, government spies conduct counter intelligence under false identities — so many dirty truths are managed today by what we might call "non disclosure acts." But the double negative contained in the category of the "non disclosure" figures a limit to these agreements and opens up to the most pressing aesthetic, philosophical, and political questions regarding what constitutes truth and representation. In this seminar, we will focus on the category of disclosure as a way to question such key modern binaries as public-private, exposure-concealment, knowable-unknowable, conscious-unconscious, reform-revolution, and guilt-innocence. We will study theorizations of disclosure by such thinkers as Heidegger (unconcealment), Marx (ideology critique), Derrida (deconstruction), Lacan (the real), Butler (performativity), Barad (quantum entanglement), Karatani (transcritique), Zizek (the parallax) and Badiou (truth procedures). We will also study artistic engagements with disclosure, ranging from film and performance art to the novel and dance.

This seminar will be dedicated to one philosopher and to one artist from different national situations and different historical generations. We will carefully work through the corpus of each figure and experiment with creating unlikely connections. In the process, we will question the boundaries of philosophy and art as well as the limits and possibilities of comparison. The idea is this: what kind of connections-comparisons (and what kind of theory of comparison) will emerge when we dedicate to two figures at the same time — even though these two figures have no obvious connections and have, most likely, never been thought together. Example pairings include the French philosopher Alain Badiou and Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul or American literary theorist Fredric Jameson and Japanese dancer Min Tanaka. For Fall 2024, we will focus on the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro and either American conceptualist artist Dan Graham, Canadian artist Michael Snow, French filmmaker Claire Denis, Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, American artist Bruce Nauman, or American novelist Octavia E. Butler. Check in over the Summer to confirm.

This course critically examines the spatial, temporal, and aesthetic parameters of global literary modernism. The "global" turn in modernist studies has expanded the spatial terrain of the field and the time of modernism itself. In this course, we will read a range of modernist fictions that break our geographical and temporal expectations of what qualifies as a modernist text. Our focus will be on how interpreting modernism as a movement of multidirectional flows and exchanges has fundamentally reconstituted the traditional canon and has redrawn notions of modernist style, genre and periodization. The course's transnational approach considers how the contact zones of the colonized "periphery" were instrumental to the making of European modernism. In our examination of global modernisms, we will focus on the relationship between anti-colonialism and modernism and the ways that colonial intellectuals repurposed modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy to agitate against colonial domination. By reading modernist texts from a range of colonial literary traditions (African, Arabic, Caribbean), we will excavate how the aesthetic qualities of modernism have been redefined to accommodate anti-colonial and post-colonial literary modernisms. Colonial writers and artists appropriated indigenous cultural forms to stylistically dissociate their aesthetic production from European art and literature. Therefore, a significant component of the course addresses how stylistic qualities traditionally associated with modernist aesthetics — self-consciousness and interiority, formal adventurousness and textual obscurity, fragmentation and ambiguity — are reconstituted and often abandoned in modernist fictions of the colony and postcolony.

In the era of the Anthropocene, we find ourselves increasingly seeking new forms through which to understand the effects of climate change. The climate nowadays not only indexes the atmosphere, but in fact all of human history. Because of this, the question of how to represent the climate has become more urgent. Many cultural producers across the globe are seeking new forms and genres to portray the scope and scale of anthropogenic climate change. In this course, we will examine various genres from different geographic locations in order to discuss the limits and possibilities of communication, knowledge dissemination, affective response, prescription, or witnessing that each one affords. Genres such as climate fiction, solar punk, indigenous literature, documentary, IPCC reports, papal encyclicals, scientific popular prose, policy documents, memoir, lyric essay, environmental reportage, critical and cultural theory, and visual art will be included.

This seminar provides an overview of scholarship in the spatial humanities, with a focus on the ways that theorizations of space and place have informed aesthetics, culture, and politics. The "spatial turn" in critical theory designates an increased focus on space, place and spatiality across various disciplines to emphasize a geographic dimension as an essential aspect of the production of culture and experience. In the first half of the course, we will read seminal theorists of space whose work reinserted spatiality as essential to the discursive constructions of the categories of modernity and postmodernity. We will then examine how their challenges to historicism transformed understandings of the space-time experience of global capitalism and provided frameworks for expanded and revised theorizations of colonialism and imperialism, gender and sexuality, urbanization and architectural history, geocriticism and ecocriticism, and literary studies. We will investigate how the spatial turn has in recent decades resulted in attempts to map new historical geographies of literary production, and we will consider the methodological implications the spatial turn has had on the transformation of theoretical interventions in literary studies, particularly in postcolonial theory. Authors will include Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, Nuruddin Farah, Amitav Ghosh, Assia Djebar, and Mahasweta Devi.

This seminar will explore the constellation of dialectics, theatre, and politics in (and in the wake of) Hegel. We'll be thinking about some repercussions of Hegel's infamous pronouncement of the "end of art." Why does Hegel say that art "no longer counts" as the expression of truth, and what does this imply for the practice of philosophy and for political practice? We'll look at the ways in which art stages (literally) its own undoing in theatre and the peculiar afterlife of theatre in philosophy as a scene of pedagogy, a performance, and a political spectacle. The first part of the course will focus on selected portions of Hegel's Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit. We'll then consider Marx's deployment of the Hegelian dialectic in the Eighteenth Brumaire as he searches (in vain?) for a new revolutionary subject amidst the "farce" of the post-1848 counterrevolution. Finally, we'll consider some surprising reverberations in Beckett's Endgame. While the main authors will be Hegel, Marx, and Beckett, we'll also have occasion to think about other writers (including C.L.R. James, Adorno, Benjamin, Badiou, Karatani,).

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).

Beckett was notoriously skittish about philosophical approaches to his work, and this reticence has naturally made him even more adorable to philosophers of all stripes. This course will be exploring the fraught relationship between Beckett and philosophy, trying to think about what might be at stake in his recalcitrance. We’ll be reading a variety of Beckett’s works, from his early poetry and fiction to his late experimental texts — the stories; the poetry; the novels; the stage plays and "dramaticules"; the work in radio, film, and television; and the unclassifiable remainder — paying particular attention to the ways in which his writing puts pressure on the concepts of genre, medium, language, translation, history, and politics. We'll also be considering some of Beckett's philosophical interlocutors, including Bataille, Blanchot, Lukacs, Adorno, Kristeva, Badiou, Cixous, and Deleuze.

The humanities have been instrumental in critiquing the idea of the Anthropocene and in interrogating questions of responsibility and human-nonhuman relations. It seems, however, that these examinations do not afford us tools that can respond to the scale and urgency of climate change. Youth mobilizations, worldwide protests, and the Extinction Rebellion enact different forms of response. What then, is the role of Environmental Humanities today? What will be next in the examinations and advances that emerge from scholars in the field? Is cultural and literary criticism effective in awakening activism and shifting societal norms? How is the scholarly field shifting in order to respond in a more timely fashion to climate change and loss of biodiversity? In this course, we will examine the work of scholars, critics, artists, and writers in order to navigate this shifting field. Focus will be given to the energy humanities, new materialisms, and climate fiction studies.

Time period: Modern/Contemporary. Geographic region: Western.

This seminar reads a series of contemporary novels and short stories by women authors in the context of current discussions and debates on intimacy and violence; misogyny; desire, fantasy, and the pornographic. The course will consider the ambiguity of desire and pleasure's contradictions; transgression and consent; rape; female friendship; sex talk; the stories of young women; and readership and audience. African-American, Indigenous, Canadian, Irish, Moroccan, and American authors will be read: Roxanne Gay, Kathleen Collins, Katherena Vermette, Miriam Toews, Eimear McBride, Leila Slimani, Diane Williams, Jamie Quatro, and Mary Gaitskill, amongst others. The focus will be on stories that are intentionally unsettling and operate without clear moral lessons. What is it that fiction can do, that non-fiction cannot, precisely when absent of general accusation, but instead is filled with detailed observations of the "inconsistencies and incoherence" of sex?

We'll be thinking about some repercussions of Hegel's infamous pronouncement of the "end of art." Why does Hegel say that art "no longer counts" as the expression of truth and what does this obsolescence imply for the practice of philosophy and for political practice? We'll look at the ways in which art, according to Hegel, stages its own undoing at every stage and in every art form (sculpture, painting, music, etc.), but especially in theatre, which Hegel presents both as the "highest" art form and the scene of art's ultimate undoing. Why does theater occupy this privileged position? And what comes next? We'll be focusing on selected portions of Hegel's Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit, alongside other contemporary writings, such as Lessing, Schelling, and Hölderlin. And we'll be reading some of the plays — mostly, but not always, tragedies — they were watching (or at least reading, or imagining watching): Sophocles, Euripides, Schiller, Goethe, Diderot, Aristophanes. And finally, we'll consider the peculiar afterlife of theatre in philosophy — as a scene of pedagogy, a performance, and a political spectacle.

Philosophy has always had a special interest in tragedy, and has often used it as either a negative or positive foil (sometimes both at once) to construct its own self-image. Plato famously banned tragedy; Aristotle recouped it; German idealist philosophers saw in "the tragic" a mirror-image of philosophy's own preoccupations; Nietzsche blamed philosophy for tragedy's demise; Marx saw in tragedy's own (tragic) slide into farce a symptom of practical-theoretical enervation.

In this semester we’ll explore the entanglement of philosophy and tragedy after Hegel, and in the light of the failed 1848 revolutions, with focused attention on how later thinkers raise the political stakes of this entanglement. We'll be exploring the links between tragedy and sovereignty; tragedy and revolution; tragedy and gender; the predicaments of decolonial tragedy; the relationship between genre and medium.

Readings to include: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit and Sophocles, Antigone; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire; Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy; Brecht, Short Organon and selected plays; Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel and "What is Epic Theatre?"; Adorno, "Trying to Understand Endgame" and Beckett’s "Endgame"; Eisenstein's Notes towards his (unrealized) film version of Capital; C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins and his Toussaint Louverture (the play); Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning; Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim; Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy.

"Poetics of Personhood" considers a problem raised several decades ago by Barbara Johnson, which remains understudied: what is the relationship between the poetic person and the legal person? Students in this course will examine theories of personhood, drawing on Enlightenment and liberal accounts by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, G.W.F. Hegel, and C.B. MacPherson; and critiques of personhood leveraged within the interdisciplines of critical race theory and Black studies by Sylvia Wynter, Cheryl I. Harris, Hortense Spillers, and Alexander Weheliye. Alongside these, we will read key texts on lyric poetry that consider the place of the person within this genre: selected critics will include John Emil Vincent, Jonathan Culler, Virginia Jackson, and others. The course will culminate with three case studies of poems drawn from different national/linguistic traditions: possible texts include Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip (Tobago/Canada), Freedom & Prostitution by Cassandra Troyan (US/Sweden), and Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil (India/UK).

Blood, both as subject and method, provides highly productive opportunities for reading the Caribbean. Blood, bloodlines, bloodshed, and bloodwork are indispensable as conceptual conduits through which to explore the complex histories and intricate cultural processes which constitute the Caribbean. Working with blood as the principal investigate strategy, this course will examine the pivotal role that questions of genealogy and violence occupy in the literatures of the English, French, and Spanish Caribbean. We will also study Caribbean literary responses to imperialist medical discourses and colonialist approaches to epidemiology which located the Caribbean of the nineteenth century as a pernicious site of disease, a locus of bad blood. Reading the Caribbean through blood invites comparative reflection on other societies within the global south whose literatures bear witness to similar histories of cultural or political violence. Additionally, this method facilitates reading connections between wider experiences of conflict and the restorative potential of cultural production. The course will focus on specific Caribbean histories, but it will also engage with a wide range of related fields such as memory studies, peace studies, trauma studies and the medical humanities. Alongside the main literary texts, we will read essays by scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Hannah Arednt and Hortense Spillers. Key texts to be studied include Abeng, (Michelle Cliff), Sweet Diamond Dust (Roasario Ferré), The Book of Night Women (Marlon James), The Drifting of Spirits (Gisèle Pineau), Love, Anger, Madness (Marie Vieux-Chauvet) and Cecilia Valdés (Cirilo Villaverde) [trans. by Helen Lane].

This course combines questions and methods from book history and comparative literature to examine what happens to textual objects when they travel (or fail to travel) across geographical and temporal borders. Seizure and prohibition, fire, theft, bombing, and physical decay are among the factors that may threaten the life of books. How do publishing and self-publishing, distribution, collection and restoration in institutional, private or clandestine libraries reflect interests in cultural production, preservation, and transmission? What have people considered to be the books and texts worth saving and why?

We will take up B. Venkat Mani's challenge to abstract and cloistered concepts of world literature and examine as he does the life and death of the material text in concrete locations. This means critically interrogating what David Damrosch described as the "detached engagement" with world literature. It also entails nuancing broad claims by critics including Emily Apter and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak about power imbalances. We will look at the range of values and circumstances that influence the life of books in locations where war, disaster, authoritarian governments and regime change may impact what and how people read. We will develop our analytic toolkit by moving from Darnton’s communication circuit toward a socialized and material understanding of the text's lives and afterlives as outlined by scholars including Peter McDonald, Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie. We will consider examples such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the clandestine book trade in pre-revolutionary France, attempts to save books and manuscripts during WWII, literary censorship in South Africa, literature smuggled across Soviet borders and the restoration of damaged medieval manuscripts. Students will be encouraged to hone their analysis of material and social aspects of texts that interest them in light of questions about cultural production, transmission and preservation.

Over the last four decades, a growing body of literary works which specifically engage the aftermath of political conflict has been produced by writers from different societies across the globe. Emerging from the space of horror left by ethnic, religious, intra-state and /or border conflicts, these works highlight the significant role that literature can play in the negotiating of peace and resolution of conflict. In addition to participating in the process of attenuating conflict and building peace, post-conflict literatures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries become crucial in rebuilding filial, social, and communal relations. Significantly, post-conflict literatures also serve as conduits through which diasporic communities negotiate politics of identity and belonging with 'home' territories.

In this course we will study post-conflict narratives from Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic and Colombia. Drawing on recent theoretical conceptions of conflict geography, biopolitics and necropolitics, we will examine issues such as religious and state violence, violations of human rights, trauma, genocide, and post-traumatic memory. But we will also be examining the therapeutic potential of imaginative literature as well as its role in facilitating processes of truth and reconciliation. Additionally, the course analyzes the variety of creative strategies employed by the different genres within post-conflict literatures (memoir, autobiography, autofiction, science fiction, crime drama) to make sense of the past and map a new future.

In exploring post-conflict literatures, we will draw on ideas from a wide range of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Achille Mbembe, Antonio Negri, and Sylvia Wynter, among others. The main texts for study will include Wendy Erskine Sweet Home (2019) [Ireland], Steven Galloway The Cellist of Sarajevo (2009) [Bosnia and Herzegovina — Canadian Author], Scholastique Mukasonga Our Lady of the Nile (2014) [Rwanda], Chinua Achebe There Was A Country (2013) [Nigeria], Evelio Roserio The Armies (2009) [Colombia] and René Philoctète Massacre River (2008) [Dominican Republic].

Why do humans engage in combat sports? And why was wrestling our first sport, followed quickly by boxing? Scholars of antiquity claim that this was to honour the gods. Experts on today's professional wrestling contend that it satisfies our need for melodrama. In this course, we will examine fighting's historical arc, asking ourselves why its delirious mixture of violence, competition, and sex has captured our imagination since the beginning of time. When ancient cultures made grappling their first sport, they aimed to stage and contain their most primitive urges: two people embraced aggressively yet did not try to kill or rape the other. The strangeness of this attracted observers and explains why wrestling to this day still draws crowds — and participants — from across humanity.

We will analyze historical artefacts, literature, and visual art — beginning with accounts of hand-to-hand combat among the world's major gods and heroes: Gilgamesh, Heracles, Odysseus, Krishna, and Muhammad. We will discuss Jacob's wrestling in the Bible, as well as Socrates, Plato, and the most famous protagonists of medieval literature: Beowulf and Siegfried. Even the Miller in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is known for his "wrastlynge." We will engage with indigenous traditions and African literature and study the female fighters who have subverted the masculinist stereotype: Atalanta, Palaistra (the Greek goddess of wrestling), the mighty Brunhild, and today's women's MMA and Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW). Theoretical texts by Plato, Roland Barthes, and Jennifer Doyle will augment our analyses. The aim is to catalyze new thinking about sport, combat, and civilization itself.

The Palliative, in medicine, is generally understood as that period of time after a person is no longer searching for medical interventions to extend life and before the patient dies. The question we will consider in this seminar is what radical possibilities can come between death and dying? However, we will not restrict ourselves to thinking about this question in terms of a human life, but extend the question to all forms of "endings" — other species, a language, a cultural form, a town, an economic system, a planet, a poem. We will consider what the palliation of everyday life might look and feel like and how might it function as a model for radical politics and art.

Many queer theorists have been asking similar questions, such as Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure and Lee Edelman in No Future. In addition to this, Buddhist Philosophy also touches on this question of the formlessness of death. As does recent work in Afro-Pessimisms, such as Fred Moten's work that mobilizes the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro.

In addition to these above-mentioned works in Queer Theory, Buddhism, and Japanese Philosophy students could expect to encounter current palliative and "end-of-life" debates within medicine. In terms of the aesthetic, novels, films, and other cultural works that specifically confront their own ends would also be assigned, such as Roberto Bolano's novels and films by JL Godard, who was a palliative artist par excellence in the way he repeatedly killed off his own works, not to mention the very field called cinema itself.

This seminar examines past and present interactions between the sciences and the theatre from two different yet complementary angles. The first analyzes how scientists continue to theatricalize themselves and their modes of inquiry in order to communicate with the societies around them. The second focuses on how 'science plays' (and operas) re-shape and respond to science and scientists: their methods, their value systems and their insights. We will also inquire to what extent strategies of theatricalization are necessary, especially when scientific results require broad societal consensus if they are to have any transformative impact (e.g., as regards climate change or matters of public health).

A wide range of periods and fields of knowledge will be visited. To mention but some: Foucault’s pendulum experiment; practices of autopsy; the discovery of DNA and its double-helix structure; the (very recent) discovery of gravitational waves; environmental sciences; and exploring implications of the growth of AI. Historical figures of interest will include Socrates, Galileo, Gaust, Oppenheimer, and Rosalind Franklin. Theatre works discussed will feature canonical plays and operas (e.g. by Aristophanes, Marlowe, Goethe, Brecht, Capek, Dürrenmatt, Glass, Adams, etc.) but also more recent work by Edson (W;T), Ziegler (Photograph 51), and Soutar (The Watershed). Outside researchers, including scientists, may be invited for select sessions.