Comparative Literature (COLIT-UA)

For a course description, please see the Comp Lit web site at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

The aim of this course is to introduce students to some key texts and issues in the history of translation theory that help us situate translation in an expanded field of comparative literary studies, cross-cultural analysis, world-making, epistemological borders, ecologies of language, politics, and media theory. Topics include: the figure of the translator/interpreter/mediator as a go-between or suspected traitor in key literary works; a brief history of translation theory; translational afterlife: questions of survival and cultural memory; debates in translation studies relating to the politics of difference and untranslatability in world literature; the politics of translation in relation to questions of nationalism, cultural appropriation, linguistic apartheid, accent tests (linguistic passporting), and outlaw dialects; the emerging field of linguistic ecology, with a focus on vocabularies of nature, planet, cosmos, ecocide, and extraction; and translation studies in the era of AI, machine translation, and computational humanities (what is a unit of translatability? How are concepts of what a language is changing? Are memes a new media language? Can algorithms be considered a language?)

For course description, please consult the Department of Comparative Literature website: http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the Comparative Literature website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the Comparative Literature website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the Comparative Literature website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the Comparative Literature website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the Comparative Literature website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the Comparative Literature website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the Comparative Literature website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

The course will compare a set of Chinese and Japanese pre-modern dramas, mainly as literature but also as performance, by exploring the contrasts and parallels of incident, character, plot design, and theme of the two theatrical traditions. Attention will be given to the historical background of each work and to the social conditions and customs that each reflects. The cultural salience of each work is also considered. Where possible and appropriate scenes or entire plays will be screened for the class or assigned for viewing.

For a course description, please see the Comp Lit web site at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.undergrad.courses

In this course we focus on four contemporary novels in which the world of the character, the narrator, or the author, is read through the lens of a literary classic. In each case, the reading and rewriting of the primary text involves temporal and spatial displacements (from the 18th to the 20th century, from Europe to the Caribbean and to the South Pacific) that generate shifting perspectives and a constant reshuffling of center and periphery. Between a reverential affiliation to the past and a creative misreading and rewriting of it, these intertextual encounters with « great » Western literary works insistently raise the questions of identity, originality, and “writing back”. Exploring these questions will therefore also involve drawing on comparative, translation, and postcolonial studies.

The course is focused on exploring Franz Kafka’s work – stories, novels, diaries and letters – in the context of fin de siècle Prague and the birth of modernism. We will take a closer look at the cultural and social context of Central Europe (literature and the arts, but also the Modernist architecture of Adolf Loos, Simmel’s sociology of the metropolitan life, Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, Brentano’s psychology, the resonance of Nietzsche’s philosophy, or the emergence of new media like phonograph and silent film) in the first two decades of the 20th century. In addition, we will discuss the adaptations of Kafka’s work and its impact on later art, fiction and film (Borges, Welles, Kundera, Roth, Švankmajer). The topics discussed through Kafka’s writings and other related works include: man and metropolis, family, estrangement, authorship, time, writing and media, travelling, territories and identities, languages, animals, art and pain. We will be especially interested in how these phenomena transform when represented in and through the medium of literary fiction.

Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist writers in both Britain and the United States were fascinated by Italy. Shelly and Byron were inspired by the hope of a new political dawn in the Italian Risorgimento. Robert Browning, George Eliot, and E. M. Forster saw the transition from Medieval to Renaissance culture in Florence as mirroring and offering an example for their own struggles to free themselves from the repression and religious orthodoxy of Victorian England. Henry James and Edith Wharton saw Italy as beautiful and dangerous in equal measure and used it as the setting of stories about the clash of old world and new world cultures. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were both profoundly influenced by Dante. As you can see, the "Italy and Italians" of the title refers not only to images and characters in the works of the British and American authors we will be reading but also to the influences of Italian literature on literature in English. Recurring themes in the course will be history and its uses in literature, gender and sexuality, democracy and aristocracy, language and power, and religion as an instrument of sexual repression. There will also be theoretical components, introducing you to various critical approaches to literature: psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies, post-colonial studies, and Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence.

African Women Playwrights is a reading-intensive course that focuses on the structural and narrative diversification of the theatrical texts written by women from the continent in the 20th and 21st century. We’ll critique the plays as both literature and dramatic texts intended for production. What is clearly evident in African women playwrights’ writing is its focus on women’s agency; generational legacies; tensions among tradition, colonialism, and modernism; unresolved issues between tribal and national identities; family relationships; intimacy and commitment; the spiritual conflicts set from among the worlds of rituals, polytheism and monotheism; the challenging coexistence among Christianity, Islam and Judaism; the impact of the global diaspora on African identity; and the intersecting issues of blackness, Africanness and womanhood.