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

Topics vary by semester.

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.

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

Crucial periods and events in German cultural history since the Enlightenment and important figures in modern intellectual and aesthetic history. The philosophies of Kant and Nietzsche; the music of Mozart and Wagner; the literary contributions of Lessing, Goethe, Fontane, and Brecht; and the art movements of Dada and Bauhaus all serve as the basis for a discussion of the complex constellation of Kultur, politics, and power in the German intellectual tradition.

Examines the work of these three seminal authors by focusing on their notions of interpretation, history, subjectivity, politics, religion, and art. The seminar does not present their work chronologically, but rather creates a dialogue between the authors around each topic and, thereby, delineates the origins of much modern thought.

Focuses on crucial theoretical developments in German literary and philosophical discourses. Introduces students to contemporary theoretical issues at the forefront of academic debate and seeks to give students a grounding in the origins of current discussions. Includes considerations of literary phenomena, critical legal studies, feminist and deconstructive theories, the Frankfurt School, and psychoanalysis.

Students study The Divine Comedy both as a mirror of high medieval culture and as a unique text that breaks out of its cultural bounds. The entire poem is read, in addition to selections from the Vita Nuova and other complementary minor works.

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.

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.

Topics vary by semester.

"Despite having written nothing himself, Socrates is—if not the most influential—certainly one of the most influential intellectual figures in the Western tradition, for it is with Socrates that “philosophy” seems first to move from natural history to an explicit concern for human affairs. Indeed, so great is the magnitude of this change that we continue to term earlier thinkers “pre-Socratic philosophers.” His stature is marked again in the name given to a distinctive form of philosophical literature, the Socratic discourse, and an approach to philosophical inquiry and instruction, the Socratic method. In antiquity, his thought, importantly, inspired Plato, Xenophon, the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Cynics, beyond those thinkers stretching to influence in Rome and Judea...and four centuries before the presumed time of Jesus, Socrates had already suffered martyrdom for his idiosyncratic political, philosophical, and religious views. In modernity, his life both fascinates and repels the attention, notably, of Nietzsche; though criticisms of his mode of existence he had already endured in his own time at the hands of the comedian Aristophanes, among others.

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.

Explores changing trends in literary writing and how this relates to the social and historical contexts of the period. Literature as reflection on/of the culture and self-understanding of modern China.

Topics: “imaginative geography”; Greek versus Barbarian; the Hajj; Orientalism, Occidentalism, and ethnography; transnationalism in relation to class and gender; tourism; migrant workers; and exile and narratives of return. Representations of travel in different genres and contexts.

Explores the body of imaginative literature (novels, short stories, poetry, and drama) written by American Jews. Links these literary works to the changing position of Jews within American society.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Requires permission of the director of undergraduate studies. Contact the department for more information.

Requires permission of the director of undergraduate studies. Contact the department for more information.

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.