Department: Comparative Literature

Code Name Description
COMPLIT100 CAPITALS: How Cities Shape Cultures, States, and People This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities, at different moments in time: Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, Colonial Mexico City, Enlightenment and Romantic Paris, Existential and Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Roaring Berlin,...
COMPLIT101 What Is Comparative Literature? What makes comparative literature a distinct field? More than simply reading literature from different places and times, at base comparative literature emerges from a cosmopolitan and anthropological project, attempting to use literature (as an aesth...
COMPLIT102 Film Series: Understanding Turkey Through Film Join us in our quest to understand the great transformation in Turkey and its impact on its people through cinema. Set against the backdrop of the expansion of capitalism and the fundamental cultural, political and social change in the last decade, t...
COMPLIT104 Reading In Depth: Deep Time in Theory, Literature and Visual Art What can the humanities teach us about deep time? Can human beings even conceive of the vast and unfathomable timescales presupposed by geology? The challenge that deep time poses to the human imagination - a challenge that has grown all the more urg...
COMPLIT104A Voice, Dissent, Resistance: Antiracist and Antifascist Discourse and Action The rise of right-wing movements in the United States and in Europe signal a resurgence of nativist and ethno-nationalist politics that rely heavily on racism to advance fascist politics. This course will explore these phenomena both in terms of the...
COMPLIT107 Why is Climate Change Un-believable? Interdisciplinary Approaches to Environmental Action The science is there. The evidence is there. Why do people still refuse to recognize one of the greatest threats to human existence? Why can't, why won't they believe the truth? The time to act is slowly evaporating before our eyes. To answer this...
COMPLIT107A Ancient Knowledge, New Frontiers: How the Greek Legacy Became Islamic Science What is the relation between magic and science? Is religion compatible with the scientific method? Are there patterns in the stars? What is a metaphor? This course will read key moments in Greek and Islamic science and philosophy and investigate the...
COMPLIT109A Murder, Mystery and Memory: Istanbul in Historical Fiction This course serves as an introduction to the genre of historical fiction with a focus on Istanbul as its setting. After a brief overview of the origins of the genre in the early nineteenth century to its worldwide popularity in the twenty-first centu...
COMPLIT10N Shakespeare and Performance in a Global Context Preference to freshmen. The problem of performance including the performance of gender through the plays of Shakespeare. In-class performances by students of scenes from plays. The history of theatrical performance. Sources include filmed versions of...
COMPLIT10SC The Cult of Happiness: Pursuing the Good Life in America and China The 2006 film "Pursuit of Happyness", an unabashed celebration of the American Dream, was enthusiastically embraced by Chinese audiences. It seems that the pursuit of happiness has become truly globalized, even as the American Dream is slipping away...
COMPLIT111K From Colonialism to K-pop: Race and Gender in South Korean Culture Some may associate South Korea with the following: BTS, North Korean nukes, Samsung, Hyundai, Squid Games. Some may repeat what South Korea has said about itself: that it is racially homogenous, an ethnic community that can trace their ancestry back...
COMPLIT111Q Texts and Contexts: Spanish/English Literary Translation Workshop The Argentinian writer and translator, Jorge Luis Borges, once said, 'Cada idioma es un modo de sentir el universo.' How are modes of feeling and perception translated across languages? How does the historical context of a work condition its translat...
COMPLIT114 Masterpieces: Kafka This class will address major works by Franz Kafka and consider Kafka as a modernist writer whose work reflects on modernity. We will also examine the role of Kafka's themes and poetics in the work of contemporary writers.
COMPLIT115 Vladimir Nabokov: Displacement and the Liberated Eye How did the triumphant author of "the great American novel" "Lolita" evolve from the young author writing at white heat for the tiny sad Russian emigration in Berlin? We will read his short stories and the novels "The Luzhin Defense, Invitation to a...
COMPLIT118 The Gothic in Literature and Culture This course introduces students to the major features of Gothic narrative, a form that emerges at the same time as the Enlightenment, and that retains its power into our present. Surveying Gothic novels, as well as novellas and short stories with Got...
COMPLIT119 The Turkish Novel Designed as a survey, this course will examine the modern Turkish novel from the early days of the Republic to the present day. We will examine the aesthetic, political, and social aspects of the Turkish novel by reading major samples of national, hi...
COMPLIT11Q Shakespeare, Playing, Gender Preference to sophomores. Focus is on several of the best and lesser known plays of Shakespeare, on theatrical and other kinds of playing, and on ambiguities of both gender and playing gender.
COMPLIT121 Poems, Poetry, Worlds What is poetry? What can Poetry do? What can we do with Poetry? How does it speak in many voices to questions of philosophy, history, society, and personal experience? Why does it matter? The readings address poetry of several cultures in comparativ...
COMPLIT122 Literature as Performance: The course re-embeds great dramatic texts in history, theory, and philosophy of performance. We counterpoint Plato's Symposium on Eros with the performative tradition of the Persian love lyric, and continue to develop fruitful comparisons across a ra...
COMPLIT122A Radical Poetry: The Avant-garde in Latin America and Spain The first few decades of the 20th century ushered in a dynamic literary and aesthetic renewal in Spain and Latin America. Young poets sought a radical change in response to a rapidly changing world, one marked by the horrors of World War I and the ri...
COMPLIT123 The Novel This course will trace the global development of the modern literary genre par excellence through some of its great milestones from the 18th century to the present. Includes works by Flaubert, Bulgakov, Baldwin, and Bâ.
COMPLIT123A Resisting Coloniality: Then and Now What are the different shapes that Western colonialism took over the centuries? How did people resist the symbolic and material oppressions engendered by such colonialist endeavors? This course offers a deep dive into history of the emergence of West...
COMPLIT126 Persian Poetry: Text, Space, and Image Featuring several sessions led by distinguished artist Ala Ebtekar, this course traces the nexus of word and image across a millennium of Persian poetry. Our aim is to look at how texts have been represented through images and enacted in public perfo...
COMPLIT126C Literature, Data, and AI What kind of data is literature? What different methods are available to scholars who work with it, and what are the philosophical assumptions that underpin those methods? In this course, we will survey major critical approaches to literature from th...
COMPLIT127B The Hebrew and Jewish Short Story Short stories from Israel, the US and Europe including works by Agnon, Kafka, Keret, Castel-Bloom, Kashua, Singer, Benjamin, Freud, biblical myths and more. The class will engage with questions related to the short story as a literary form and the hi...
COMPLIT128 Literature of the former Yugoslavia What do Slavoj Zizek, Novak Djokovic, Marina Abramovic, Melania Trump, Emir Kusturica, and the captain of the Croatian national football team have in common? All were born in a country that no longer exists, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugosla...
COMPLIT131 Coming of Age in the Middle Ages It is often said that adolescence is a modern invention, and that people in earlier times expected children to act like adults as soon as they were physically able to do so. But the literature that survives from the European Middle Ages reveals a dee...
COMPLIT132A Nostalgia as a Global Form The course will explore the waves of nostalgia that have swept the globe in the past decades. We will look at contemporary expressions of nostalgia across different media, including literature, cinema, art, spoken word, street art and social media. W...
COMPLIT133A Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connectio...
COMPLIT134A Classics of Persian Literature Why do poems that were written hundreds of years ago still capture the imagination? How is love configured in the texts of a distant culture? Who sings the tales and who are the heroes? This course offers an introduction to the central works of Persi...
COMPLIT137 Love, Loss, and Devotion in Indian Literature Why are human cultures perennially preoccupied with love, and with what happens when it vanishes? Classical theorists in India have argued, at least, that love is the very foundation of aesthetic experience, and that love has something fundamental to...
COMPLIT138 Literature and the Brain How does fiction make us better at reading minds? Why do some TV shows get us to believe two contradictory things at once? And can cognitive biases be a writer's best friend? We'll think about these and other questions in the light of contemporary ne...
COMPLIT139A Jaguars and Labyrinths: A Survey of South American Short Fiction 10 South American short stories in 10 weeks. We will read tales of jaguars and octopuses, labyrinthic cities and eerie parks, magicians and mediums, time loops and spatial stretches. Each of the works will offer a unique insight into South American l...
COMPLIT140 The Pen and the Sword: A Gendered History As weapons, the pen and the sword have been used to wound, punish, and condemn as well as to protect, liberate, and elevate. Historically entangled with ideals of heroism, nobility, and civility, the pen and the sword have been the privileged instrum...
COMPLIT141 Songs of Love and Longing This course will take us on a journey from the Balkans to South Asia as we explore the nexus of poetry and song practiced by bards across a vast geographic and cultural space. Specifically, we will survey the Persianate genre of ghazal lyric, the sto...
COMPLIT142 The Literature of the Americas This course will focus on identifying moments of continuity and discontinuity in the literatures of the Americas, both in time and space. We will look at a wide-range of literatures of the Americas in comparative perspective, emphasizing continuities...
COMPLIT142B Translating Japan, Translating the West Translation lies at the heart of all intercultural exchange. This course introduces students to the specific ways in which translation has shaped the image of Japan in the West, the image of the West in Japan, and Japan's self-image in the modern pe...
COMPLIT145 Reflection on the Other: The Arab Israeli Conflict in Literature and Film How literary works outside the realm of Western culture struggle with questions such as identity, minority, and the issue of the Other; How the Other is viewed in literature, film, and music about the Arab Israeli Conflict. Historical, political, and...
COMPLIT147 Facts and Fictions: Writing the New World in Early Modernity (1500-1700) How was knowledge about the colonies in America established? What was the role of fiction in this process? This course introduces students to major problems at the intersection of literature and history. It provides students with an overview of histo...
COMPLIT148 Transcultural Perspectives of South-East Asian Music and Arts This course will explore the links between aspects of South-East Asian cultures and their influence on modern and contemporary Western art and literature, particularly in France; examples of this influence include Claude Debussy (Gamelan music), Jacq...
COMPLIT149 The Laboring of Diaspora & Border Literary Cultures Focus is given to emergent theories of culture and on comparative literary and cultural studies. How do we treat culture as a social force? How do we go about reading the presence of social contexts within cultural texts? How do ethno-racial writer...
COMPLIT155 Rivers That Were: Latin American Ecopoetry For over a century, poetry in Latin America has been tracing the connections between the human and the nonhuman. We will examine closely the ways in which such poetry registers environmental degradation and its disproportionate impacts along axes of...
COMPLIT156 Stories at the Border How authors and filmmakers represent the process of border-making as a social experience? How do the genres in which they work shape our understandings of the issues themselves? We will explore several different genres of visual and textual represent...
COMPLIT158 Rebelión: Black Resistance in the Caribbean In 1978, Afro-Columbian artist Joe Arroyo recorded his hit song `Rebelión,' including lines such as "esclavitud perpetua," a reference to the 1452 Dum Diversas Papal Bull, and lines like "No le pegue a la negra," which evince a slave resistance based...
COMPLIT15SC Who Belongs at Stanford? Discussions of a Different Sort of Education You've finished your first year of university. You have taken the required first year courses, you hope you have explored enough, you are anxious about choosing a major. You know the campus fairly well, you have perhaps made some friends, you have so...
COMPLIT161E Narrative and Narrative Theory An introduction to stories and storytelling--that is, to narrative. What is narrative? When is narrative fictional and when non-fictional? How is it done, word by word, sentence by sentence? Must it be in prose? Can it be in pictures? How has stor...
COMPLIT165 Intro to English III: Latinx Literature Emerging from the demographic, political, and cultural shifts of the late twentieth century, LatinX Literature flourishes in the twenty-first century as a hemispherically American corpus of texts. Like both ChicanX and Puerto Rican literatures before...
COMPLIT178 Metamorphosis and Desire: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton A recurring motif in the myths of poetry's origins is a metamorphosis provoked by erotic desire, from the nymph Daphne transformed into a laurel tree as she escapes the god Apollo to the bard Orpheus dismembered by impassioned Maenads. This course ex...
COMPLIT179 Rumi: Rhythms of Creation This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the thought, poetics, and legacy of one of the towering figures of Persian letters, Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273). After discussing the literary ancestors (Sana'i, `Attar), we will trace the...
COMPLIT181 Philosophy and Literature Can novels make us better people? Can movies challenge our assumptions? Can poems help us become who we are? We'll think about these and other questions with the help of writers like Toni Morrison, Marcel Proust, Jordan Peele, Charlie Kaufman, Rachel...
COMPLIT184A Poetry and Mysticism This course explores the interfaces of poetic and mystical speech across times and cultures. Topics include performance; subjectivity; spiritual/erotic love; linguistic fragmentation; the limits of language; and, finally, the question of apophasis a...
COMPLIT186A The Art of Self-Portraits What is a self-portrait? The simple answer is that it is a portrait of the self. The complex answer is: anything that a person finds relevant to one's identity. Sometimes self-portraits are built around a positive idea, sometimes around a sense of lo...
COMPLIT188 In Search of the Holy Grail: Percival's Quest in Medieval Literature This course focuses on one of the most famous inventions of the Middle Ages: the Holy Grail. The grail - a mysterious vessel with supernatural properties - is first mentioned in Chrétien de Troyes' "Perceval," but the story is soon rewritten by autho...
COMPLIT188A Women, Wheat, and Weather? Lessons from Italy and the Global South for the 21st Century The Global South - a symbolic Mediterranean stretching from the Caribbean to India - lures the civilized man with the promise of excellent weather, voluptuous women, and good food. Already in antiquity, Sicily, the southernmost province of what is to...
COMPLIT194 Independent Research (Staff)
COMPLIT199 Senior Seminar What is theory, and how (and why) do we do it in Comparative Literature? Senior seminar for Comparative Literature Senior majors only.
COMPLIT202 Feminist and Queer Theories and Methods Across the Disciplines (Graduate Students register for PHIL 279A or FEMGEN 203) This course is an opportunity to explore a variety of historic and current feminist and queer perspectives in the arts, humanities, and social science research. NOTE: This course must be taken...
COMPLIT204A Digital Humanities Across Borders What if you could take a handwritten manuscript, or a pile of 100 books, and map all the locations that are referenced, or see which characters interact with one another, or how different translators adapted the same novel -- without reading through...
COMPLIT205 The Power of Myth Is myth a form of thought or is it that which opposes thinking? How does myth create worldviews and engage the emotions? Is myth a universal language or is it a set of cultural dialects? In this seminar myth will be approached from several directions...
COMPLIT207B Emergent Thinking: Abolition and Climate Change Gesturing toward adrienne marie brown's notion of 'emergent strategy,' this course asks us to think in the most radical and imaginative ways possible about two systemic failures that animate what Achille Mbembe has called 'necropolitics' decisions on...
COMPLIT208 The Cosmopolitan Introvert: Modern Greek Poetry and its Itinerants Overview of the last century of Greek poetry with emphasis on modernism. Approximately 20 modern Greek poets (starting with Cavafy and Nobel laureates Seferis and Elytis and moving to more modern writers) are read and compared to other major European...
COMPLIT210 Poetic Forms A comparative discussion of the development and history of major poetic forms, from the Sonnet to Terza Rima and to prose poems. Special attention will be given discussing different rhythms and rhymes, and to translating forms. The readings will incl...
COMPLIT212A Desiring Machines: Buildings, Maps, and Clouds Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire f...
COMPLIT214 Shipwrecks and Backlands: Getting Lost in Literature This course takes students on a journey through tales of getting lost in the Portuguese and Spanish empires. We will read harrowing stories of being caught adrift at sea and mystical interpretations of island desertion. The course begins with sea-dom...
COMPLIT218A Japanese Performance Traditions Japanese performance traditions present a distinct challenge to modern Western concepts of gender, performance, self-expression, and even the human body itself. This course introduces the socio-historical underpinnings of these traditions, and invite...
COMPLIT220 Renaissance Africa Literature, art, and culture in Central/Southern Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasis on forms of exchange between Europeans and Africans in the Kingdom of Kongo and Angola. Readings in Portuguese and English. Taught in Eng...
COMPLIT221 Giambattista Vico An intensive reading of Vico's book - New Science. Emphasis will be on Vico's philosophy of history and theories of poetic wisdom, myth, and language. Vico will be put in dialogue with René Descartes, Rousseau, Auguste Compte, Claude Lévi Strauss,...
COMPLIT222 Narratives of Modern and Contemporary Korea This introductory survey will examine the development of South and North Korean literature from the turn of the 20th century until the present. The course will be guided by historical and thematic inquiries as we explore literature in the colonial pe...
COMPLIT222A Myth and Modernity Masters of German 20th- and 21st-Century literature and philosophy as they present aesthetic innovation and confront the challenges of modern technology, social alienation, manmade catastrophes, and imagine the future. Readings include Nietzsche, Fre...
COMPLIT225 Word and Image What impact do images have on our reading of a text? How do words influence our understanding of images or our reading of pictures? What makes a visual interpretation of written words or a verbal rendering of an image successful? These questions will...
COMPLIT226 Persian Poetry: Text, Space, and Image Featuring several sessions led by distinguished artist Ala Ebtekar, this course traces the nexus of word and image across a millennium of Persian poetry. Our aim is to look at how texts have been represented through images and enacted in public perfo...
COMPLIT228 Critical Translation Studies This course does not teach students how to translate, but rather how to incorporate translation into their critical thinking. Critical translation studies comprises wide-ranging ruminations on the complex interplay between languages, cultures, power,...
COMPLIT229B Camus "The admirable conjunction of a man, of an action, and of a work" for Sartre, "the ideal husband of contemporary letters" for Susan Sontag, reading "Camus's fiction as an element in France's methodically constructed political geography of Algeria" fo...
COMPLIT231B Cultural Hybridity in Central-Eastern Europe Historically shaped by shifting borders and mixing of various cultures and languages, identities in-between have been in abundance in Central-Eastern Europe. This course offers a comprehensive study of the oeuvre of several major Central-European aut...
COMPLIT233A Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connectio...
COMPLIT234 Classics of Persian Literature Why do poems that were written hundreds of years ago still capture the imagination? How is love configured in the texts of a distant culture? Who sings the tales and who are the heroes? This course offers an introduction to the central works of Persi...
COMPLIT235E Dante's "Inferno" Intensive reading of Dante's "Inferno" (the first canticle of his three canticle poem The Divine Comedy). Main objective: to learn how to read the Inferno in detail and in depth, which entails both close textual analysis as well as a systematic reco...
COMPLIT236 Literature and Transgression Close reading and analysis of erotic-sexual and aesthetic-stylistic transgression in selected works by such authors as Baudelaire, Wilde, Flaubert, Rachilde, Schnitzler, Kafka, Joyce, Barnes, Eliot, Bataille, Burroughs, Thomas Mann, Kathy Acker, as w...
COMPLIT236A Casablanca - Algiers - Tunis : Cities on the Edge Casablanca, Algiers and Tunis embody three territories, real and imaginary, which never cease to challenge the preconceptions of travelers setting sight on their shores. In this class, we will explore the myriad ways in which these cities of North Af...
COMPLIT237 Fascism after Fascism When World War II ended, most of the states that described themselves as "fascist" ended with it. Nevertheless, fascism haunted postwar democracy as an ever-present threat. The question of what exactly had characterized fascism, and what parts of it...
COMPLIT238 Literature and the Brain How does fiction make us better at reading minds? Why do some TV shows get us to believe two contradictory things at once? And can cognitive biases be a writer's best friend? We'll think about these and other questions in the light of contemporary ne...
COMPLIT239 Queer Theory Do we really need a theory in order to be queer? Queer Theory emerged in response to feminist thought, and the study of the history of sexuality, building on their insights, but also uncovering their blind spots. Without Queer Theory, few of the disc...
COMPLIT240 Rainer Maria Rilke: Poetry and the Meaning of Life One of the greatest poets of the modern era, Rilke offers in his poetry lasting images of nature, love, and aesthetic beauty. At the same time, Rilke's poetry is a unique form of human thought. Many of his poems are poetic meditations on the meaning...
COMPLIT240C Dreams and Visions: A Comparative Poetics. This course offers an introduction to esoteric narratives of dreams and visions from antiquity to the present. Sources include the ancient Babylonian dreams of Gilgamesh; Jewish Merkabah mysticism; Cicero's Dream of Scipio and its resonance in mediae...
COMPLIT241B Songs of Love and Longing This course will take us on a journey from the Balkans to South Asia as we explore the nexus of poetry and song practiced by bards across a vast geographic and cultural space. Specifically, we will survey the Persianate genre of ghazal lyric, the sto...
COMPLIT242 Poetry Workshop in Spanish Latin American and Spanish poetry approached through elements of craft. Assignments are creative in nature and focus on the formal elements of poetry (meter, rhythm, lineation, rhetorical figures and tropes) and the exploration of lyric subgenres (e....
COMPLIT243 The Age of Beloveds: Inflections of Desire in Persian and Ottoman Literature This course follows the trajectory of Islamicate love poetry from its emergence in medieval Persian letters to the court of the Ottoman Sultans. Our point of departure will be the emergence of a unique doctrine of love in Persian literature between t...
COMPLIT243A From Idol to Equal: Changing Images of Love in 20th-Century Persian and Turkish Literature This course will explore the changing images of love in pivotal works of modern Persian and Turkish literature. Classes will include close readings and discussions of poems, short stories, and plays with particular attention to the constellation of l...
COMPLIT243B Arabic Poetry: Advanced Readings in Arabic Literature and Science II Arabic poetry from the present day to the 500s. This class will be taught entirely in Arabic. Open to undergraduates with four years or more of Arabic.
COMPLIT243G Adab and Ilm: Advanced Readings in Arabic Literature and Science I Sufism, Quranic exegesis, adab, hands-on manuscript work in Special Collections, and more. Texts will be in Arabic and discussion will be in English. Advanced reading in Arabic literature (adab) and science (ilm) for graduate students. Open to underg...
COMPLIT244 Literature and Technology from Frankenstein to the Futurists Overview of defects and disorder across crystalline, amorphous, and glassy phases that are central to function and application, spanning metals, ceramics, and soft/biological matter. Structure and properties of simple 0D/1D/2D defects in crystalline...
COMPLIT244 Modern Persian Poetry Drawing on poems, songs, and films in addition to theoretical texts, this course retraces the struggle for a modern poetic language in Iran from the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1905/6) to the Islamic Revolution (1978/79), and beyond. Topic...
COMPLIT245 Introductory Ottoman Turkish This course is an introduction to basic orthographic conventions and grammatical characteristics of Ottoman Turkish through readings in printed material from the 19th and 20th centuries. Selected readings will range from poetry to prose, from state d...
COMPLIT248A Reading Turkish I Reading Turkish I is an introduction to the structures of the Turkish language necessary for reading. It is designed to develop reading competence in Turkish for graduate students. Undergraduates should consult the instructor before enrolling for the...
COMPLIT248B Reading Turkish II This course is the continuation of COMPLIT 248A Reading Turkish I, which served as an introduction to the structures of the Turkish language necessary for reading. It is designed to develop reading competence in Turkish for graduate students. Undergr...
COMPLIT248C Advanced Turkish-English Translation This course is the continuation of COMPLIT 248A Reading Turkish I and COMPLIT 248B Reading Turkish II. Refining advanced grammar, reading, and translation skills in modern Turkish through intensive reading and translation from a variety of source tex...
COMPLIT249 Rumi: Rhythms of Creation This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the thought, poetics, and legacy of one of the towering figures of Persian letters, Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273). After discussing the literary ancestors (Sana'i, `Attar), we will trace the...
COMPLIT249A The Iranian Cinema: Image and Meaning This course will focus on the analysis of ten Iranian films with the view of placing them in discourse on the semiotics of Iranian art and culture. The course will also look at the influence of a wide array of cinematic traditions from European, Ame...
COMPLIT249B Iranian Cinema in Diaspora Despite enormous obstacles, immigrant Iranian filmmakers, within a few decades (after the Iranian Revolution), have created a slow but steady stream of films outside Iran. They were originally started by individual spontaneous attempts from different...
COMPLIT249C Contemporary Iranian Theater Today, Iranian plays both in traditional and contemporary styles are staged in theater festivals throughout the world and play their role in forming a universal language of theater which combine the heritages from countries in all five continents. De...
COMPLIT250B The Oceanic Novel: Woolf, Conrad, Duras, Tournier, Condé, Ortese This course will examine novels situated by, on, or in the sea. Its guiding questions: how do the immense breadth and depth of the sea relate to human interiority, self-discovery, and the shadow world of dreams? Does the sea mark a boundary, or a d...
COMPLIT251A Iberian Expansion Through the Looking Glass: One World or Many? The conquerors, missionaries, and historians who reflected on Iberian overseas expansion during the early modern period often asked themselves a crucial question: was there only one world or many? Were the Americas a 'New World,' unknown to the ancie...
COMPLIT252A Great Arabic Poetry Introduction to the canon of Arabic poetry from the sixth to the twenty-first century. Imru' al-Qays, al-Mutanabbi, Mahmud Darwish, and more. Readings in Arabic. Two years of Arabic at Stanford or equivalent required. Counts for the Arabic Track in t...
COMPLIT252B Great Arabic Prose Introduction to the best Arabic Literature from the 790s to 2016. Al-Jahiz, Naguib Mahfouz, and much more. Readings in Arabic. Two years of Arabic at Stanford or equivalent required. Counts for the Arabic Track in the MELLAC Minor. Note: This course...
COMPLIT254 The Middle East through Graphic Novel How do young Middle Easterners grow up and get by? How do states, families, wars, religions, displacement and patriarchy shape their lives? In this course, we will examine the coming of age as children grow up to become adults, learn and negotiate la...
COMPLIT255 Black Feminism and Anti-Carceral Resistance Black feminists throughout the Western Hemisphere have long resisted carcerality, a system that emerged as a response to antebellum Black fugitivity. In this course, we will review Black feminist theory and abolitionist activism, focusing on how the...
COMPLIT257 Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Adriana Cavarero What does it mean to say the personal is the political, or, in the case of Arendt, that the personal is not political, especially if you are a woman? This course explores how Weil, De Beauvoir, Arendt, and Caverero contend with the question of perso...
COMPLIT258A Existentialism, from Moral Quest to Novelistic Form This seminar intends to follow the development of Existentialism from its genesis to its literary expressions in the European postwar. The notions of defining commitment, of moral ambiguity, the project of the self, and the critique of humanism will...
COMPLIT259A Levinas and Literature Focus is on major works by French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and their import for literary studies. Aim is to discuss and evaluate Levinas's (often latent) aesthetics through a close reading of his work in phenomenology, ethics, and...
COMPLIT261 Comparative Methodologies in Black Gender Studies This course takes a comparative methodological approach to Black Gender Studies, introducing students to the important terms and debates that animate this field, such as Spillers' "ungendering" and Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation". We will rea...
COMPLIT263 A History of Silence in Literature An analysis of theological and mystical texts as well as secular works of poetry and prose, from the Middle Ages to the present, exploring both the specific nature and the philosophical implications of silence in literature. Following a historical tr...
COMPLIT263B Paul Celan: The Poetic Event Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the greatest poets of our time. Touching on philosophy, history, our relation to nature, and love, his poetry is a profound meditation on the modern human condition. This course will present some of Celan's best work...
COMPLIT264 Crossing the Atlantic: Race and Identity in the "Old" and "New" African Diasporas In this course, we will think critically about what we have come to call the African diaspora. We will travel the world virtually while exploring a selection of classic and understudied texts, in order to interrogate the relationship between culture,...
COMPLIT264T Race, Gender, Justice The question of justice animates some of the most influential classics and contemporary plays in the dramatic canon. We will examine the relationship between state laws and kinship obligations in Sophocles's Antigone. We will trace the transnational...
COMPLIT266 Martin Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential and contested philosophers of the modern era. This seminar will offer close readings of Heidegger's first book following the Second World War: Martin Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege). We will...
COMPLIT267 Transcultural Perspectives of South-East Asian Music and Arts This course will explore the links between aspects of South-East Asian cultures and their influence on modern and contemporary Western art and literature, particularly in France; examples of this influence include Claude Debussy (Gamelan music), Jacq...
COMPLIT268 Socialism: Theory, Literature, Practice The prospect of socialism has circulated in the cultural and political programs of many countries, and socialist programs have informed the real governance structures in some. This course examines some of the theoretical texts that have described soc...
COMPLIT270 Poetess (Obsolete): Women Poets Take Back Time Is there a tradition of women poets creating forms against the grain of their time? Close reading of women poets in conjunction with short readings in philosophy of time (Kant, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Heidegger). Syllabus includes Sappho, Dickinson,...
COMPLIT273B Concepts of Modernity I: Nihilism In the 1885 Preface to his unfinished work The Will to Power, Nietzsche declared: "For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that...
COMPLIT281E Pirandello, Sartre, and Beckett In this course we will read the main novels and plays of Pirandello, Sartre, and Beckett, with special emphasis on the existentialist themes of their work. Readings include The Late Mattia Pascal, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV; Naus...
COMPLIT284A Poetry and Mysticism This course explores the interfaces of poetic and mystical speech across times and cultures. Topics include performance; subjectivity; spiritual/erotic love; linguistic fragmentation; the limits of language; and, finally, the question of apophasis a...
COMPLIT285 Texts and Contexts: French-English Translation This course introduces students to the ways in which translation has shaped the image of France and the Francophone world. What texts and concepts were translated, how, where, and to what effect? Students will work on a translation project throughout...
COMPLIT286 Forming the world: Pragmatism and Aesthetics This course will explore key pragmatist philosophical and theoretical approaches to literature, the visual arts, and music. How are human lives mediated by and through aesthetic experience, in the realm of the private as well as the public. Rather th...
COMPLIT287 Hope in the Modern Age Immanuel Kant famously considered "What may I hope?" to be the third and final question of philosophy. This course considers the thinkers, from Immanuel Kant to Judith Butler, who have attempted to answer this question from within the context of mode...
COMPLIT288 Women, Wheat, and Weather? Lessons from Italy and the Global South for the 21st Century The Global South - a symbolic Mediterranean stretching from the Caribbean to India - lures the civilized man with the promise of excellent weather, voluptuous women, and good food. Already in antiquity, Sicily, the southernmost province of what is to...
COMPLIT290A Magic, Science, and Religion With the rise of the human sciences in the later nineteenth century, "magic," "science," and "religion" came to be understood as entirely separate domains, with different versions of truth and divergent methods of inquiry. But how has this division b...
COMPLIT293 Literary Translation: Theory and Practice An overview of translation theories and practices over time. The aesthetic, ethical, and political questions raised by the act and art of translation and how these pertain to the translator's tasks. Discussion of particular translation challenges and...
COMPLIT302 Film Series: Understanding Turkey Through Film Join us in our quest to understand the great transformation in Turkey and its impact on its people through cinema. Set against the backdrop of the expansion of capitalism and the fundamental cultural, political and social change in the last decade, t...
COMPLIT304 Voice, Dissent, Resistance: Antiracist and Antifascist Discourse and Action The rise of right-wing movements in the United States and in Europe signal a resurgence of nativist and ethno-nationalist politics that rely heavily on racism to advance fascist politics. This course will explore these phenomena both in terms of the...
COMPLIT307 Proust and His World This course is a chance to read together Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. This seven-volume novel is a stylistic tour de force, a brilliant meditation on defining elements of modernity, and an eccentric meander through art, history and the se...
COMPLIT309A Murder, Mystery and Memory: Istanbul in Historical Fiction This course serves as an introduction to the genre of historical fiction with a focus on Istanbul as its setting. After a brief overview of the origins of the genre in the early nineteenth century to its worldwide popularity in the twenty-first centu...
COMPLIT31 Texts that Changed the World from the Ancient Middle East This course traces the story of the cradle of human civilization. We will begin with the earliest human stories, the Gilgamesh Epic and biblical literature, and follow the path of the development of law, religion, philosophy and literature in the anc...
COMPLIT312A Desiring Machines: Buildings, Maps, and Clouds Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire f...
COMPLIT313 The Power of Myth Is myth a form of thought or is it that which opposes thinking? How does myth create worldviews and engage the emotions? Is myth a universal language or is it a set of cultural dialects? In this seminar myth will be approached from several directions...
COMPLIT314A Shipwrecks and Backlands: Getting Lost in Literature This course takes students on a journey through tales of getting lost in the Portuguese and Spanish empires. We will read harrowing stories of being caught adrift at sea and mystical interpretations of island desertion. The course begins with sea-dom...
COMPLIT315 Vladimir Nabokov: Displacement and the Liberated Eye How did the triumphant author of "the great American novel" "Lolita" evolve from the young author writing at white heat for the tiny sad Russian emigration in Berlin? We will read his short stories and the novels "The Luzhin Defense, Invitation to a...
COMPLIT316 Scholarship and Activism for Justice A collective-based course where participants determine readings on scholarship and activism, invite guest speakers, plan activities to put into action our ideas, values, philosophies.
COMPLIT319 The Turkish Novel Designed as a survey, this course will examine the modern Turkish novel from the early days of the Republic to the present day. We will examine the aesthetic, political, and social aspects of the Turkish novel by reading major samples of national, hi...
COMPLIT320A Epic and Empire Focus is on Virgil's Aeneid and its influence, tracing the European epic tradition (Ariosto, Tasso, Camoes, Spenser, and Milton) to New World discovery and mercantile expansion in the early modern period.
COMPLIT324 Before the Global South: The Avant-Garde and the Quest for New Knowledges in the Premodern Contemporary Brazilian, Caribbean, European, and American writers and artists who engage with media, forms, and temporalities of premodern cultures as they develop new epistemologies of the Global South. Readings include Augusto de Campos, Roberto Da...
COMPLIT325 Realism and the Impossible Nation After thinking about literary realism from the very particular angle of national identity, we will read four big novels - two by the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago (Blindness, and Seeing), Namwali Serpell's brilliant novel of Zambia, The Old Drift,...
COMPLIT32Q Humanities Core: Middle East II -- Classic How should we live? This course explores two ethical pathways: mysticism and rationality. They seem to be opposites, but as we'll see, some important historical figures managed to follow both at once. We will read works by successful judges, bureau...
COMPLIT332 The Transoceanic Renaissance The emergence of a transatlantic and transpacific culture in the early modern period. How is the Renaissance of Europe and England fashioned in a conversation with the cultural forms and material realities of the colonial Americas? And how do colonia...
COMPLIT333 The Interruption of the Machine: Introduction to Sound Studies through Literature This course will introduce students to the field of Sound Studies (methodology, vocabulary, main claims) with a focus on the various sonic articulations of human-machine interactions in literature. The world of fiction as a sonic machine that articul...
COMPLIT334A Concepts of Modernity I: Nihilism In the 1885 Preface to his unfinished work The Will to Power, Nietzsche declared: "For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that...
COMPLIT334B Concepts of Modernity II: Culture, Aesthetics, and Society in the Age of Globalization Emphasis on world-system theory, theories of coloniality and power, and aesthetic modernity/postmodernity in their relation to culture broadly understood.
COMPLIT335 Literatures of the War of 1898: Spain, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and the United States 1898 marked a major shift in the imperial control of the Atlantic and Pacific. This course will address texts from primarily Spain, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, the United States, and other regions. Focus on literature and theory regarding...
COMPLIT336 Yasar Kemal: Dissidence, Rebellion, and Storytelling in Turkey This class will address the major works of Yasar Kemal, a prolific novelist and a masterful storyteller of Kurdish descent from Turkey, who throughout his life endured political persecution and imprisonment for his outspoken stance on minority rights...
COMPLIT338 The Gothic in Literature and Culture This course examines the Gothic as a both a narrative subgenre and an aesthetic mode, since its 18th century invention. Starting with different narrative genres of Gothic expression such as the Gothic novel, the ghost tale, and the fantastic tale by...
COMPLIT346 Comparative Literature Pro-seminar Required of all entering comparative literature graduate students. For Winter 2023, second-year Comparative Literature graduate students (those who entered Autumn 2021) may also enroll. Designed as an introduction to the study and practice of Compara...
COMPLIT348 US-Mexico Border Fictions: Writing La Frontera, Tearing Down the Wall A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome, crossed, and cursed; motivates bodies to climb over walls; and threatens physical harm. This graduate seminar places into comparative dialogue a variety of perspectives from C...
COMPLIT350B The Oceanic Novel: Woolf, Conrad, Duras, Tournier, Condé, Ortese This course will examine novels situated by, on, or in the sea. Its guiding questions: how do the immense breadth and depth of the sea relate to human interiority, self-discovery, and the shadow world of dreams? Does the sea mark a boundary, or a d...
COMPLIT351A Iberian Expansion Through the Looking Glass: One World or Many? The conquerors, missionaries, and historians who reflected on Iberian overseas expansion during the early modern period often asked themselves a crucial question: was there only one world or many? Were the Americas a 'New World,' unknown to the ancie...
COMPLIT353B Hannah Arendt: Facing Totalitarianism Like hardly any other thinker of the modern age, Hannah Arendt's thought offers us timeless insights into the fabric of the modern age, especially regarding the perennial danger of totalitarianism. This course offers an in-depth introduction to Arend...
COMPLIT355 The French-Speaking World: Literature, Culture, and Translation A survey of literatures and cultures of the French-speaking world. We will examine a variety of literary genres as we explore works from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Indian Ocean. Topics include: the politics of language, the making o...
COMPLIT357A Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Adriana Cavarero What does it mean to say the personal is the political, or, in the case of Arendt, that the personal is not political, especially if you are a woman? This course explores how Weil, De Beauvoir, Arendt, and Caverero contend with the question of perso...
COMPLIT359A Philosophical Reading Group Discussion of one contemporary or historical text from the Western philosophical tradition per quarter in a group of faculty and graduate students. For admission of new participants, a conversation with Professor Robert Harrison is required. May be r...
COMPLIT360B History and Theory of the Novel: Foundations Can the novel, as genre, be conceptualized or critically synthesized? This course will approach such a daunting question from its two necessary starting-points: fiction and theory. On the one hand, we'll take up several of those major novels that hav...
COMPLIT361 Comparative Methodologies in Black Gender Studies This course takes a comparative methodological approach to Black Gender Studies, introducing students to the important terms and debates that animate this field, such as Spillers' "ungendering" and Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation". We will rea...
COMPLIT363 Martin Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential and contested philosophers of the modern era. This seminar will offer close readings of Heidegger's first book following the Second World War: Martin Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege). We will...
COMPLIT367 Introduction to Apocalyptic Thinking At the time of the European Enlightenment, the talk about the end of the world was taken to be a remnant of religious beliefs or the domain of insane people. The rational mind knew how to eliminate those obstacles to continuous scientific and technol...
COMPLIT367E Contemporary Theory Lab This new graduate seminar examines the question of whether a new canon of theoretical monographs-as opposed to influential standalone essays or papers-has coalesced in recent years. We focus on a post-Foucaultian, post-1989 moment, understanding theo...
COMPLIT368A Imagining the Oceans How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Primary authors read might...
COMPLIT369 Introduction to the Profession of Literary Studies A survey of how literary theory and other methods have been made institutional since the nineteenth century. The readings and conversation are designed for entering Ph.D. students in the national literature departments and comparative literature.
COMPLIT36A Dangerous Ideas Ideas matter. Concepts such as equality, tradition, and Hell have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like race and urban renewal, play an important role in contemporary d...
COMPLIT371 Politics, Aesthetics, Critical Ecology: Artworks and the Environment Climate change and environmental crises have given rise to critique and reflection. This class will bring together issues of aesthetics, politics, and artworks around environmental issues. The introductory phase will involve students with key issues...
COMPLIT374 Wonder: The Event of Art and Literature What falls below, or beyond, rational inquiry? How do we write about the awe we feel in front of certain works of art, in reading lines of poetry or philosophy, or watching a scene in a film without ruining the feeling that drove us to write in the f...
COMPLIT376 Introduction to Apocalyptic Thinking At the time of the European Enlightenment, the talk about the end of the world was taken to be a remnant of religious beliefs or the domain of insane people. The rational mind knew how to eliminate those obstacles to continuous scientific and technol...
COMPLIT377 Medieval Lyric: How Lyric Moves Through the study of various vernacular premodern traditions, this graduate level course examines the qualities that make texts "lyric" and place them into conversation with contemporary theories of lyric. The course will situate medieval lyric withi...
COMPLIT37Q Zionism and the Novel At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged as a political movement to establish a national homeland for the Jews, eventually leading to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. This seminar uses novels to explore the changes in Zi...
COMPLIT381E Pirandello, Sartre, and Beckett In this course we will read the main novels and plays of Pirandello, Sartre, and Beckett, with special emphasis on the existentialist themes of their work. Readings include The Late Mattia Pascal, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV; Naus...
COMPLIT388 In Search of the Holy Grail: Percival's Quest in Medieval Literature This course focuses on one of the most famous inventions of the Middle Ages: the Holy Grail. The grail - a mysterious vessel with supernatural properties - is first mentioned in Chrétien de Troyes' "Perceval," but the story is soon rewritten by autho...
COMPLIT390A Magic, Science, and Religion With the rise of the human sciences in the later nineteenth century, "magic," "science," and "religion" came to be understood as entirely separate domains, with different versions of truth and divergent methods of inquiry. But how has this division b...
COMPLIT397 Graduate Studies Colloquium Colloquium for graduate students in Comparative Literature. Taught in English. May be repeated for credit.
COMPLIT398L Literary Lab Gathering and analyzing data, constructing hypotheses and designing experiments to test them, writing programs [if needed], preparing visuals and texts for articles or conferences. Requires a year-long participation in the activities of the Lab.
COMPLIT399 Individual Work No Description Set
COMPLIT43 Modernity and Novels in the Middle East This course will investigate cultural and literary responses to modernity in the Middle East. The intense modernization process that started in mid 19th century and lingers to this day in the region caused Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary cultur...
COMPLIT44 Humanities Core: How to be Modern in East Asia Modern East Asia was almost continuously convulsed by war and revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. But the everyday experience of modernity was structured more profoundly by the widening gulf between the country and the city, economically, poli...
COMPLIT46 Atlantic Folds: Indigeneity and Modernity The Atlantic as an infinite doubling of ancient and modern. The Atlantic as an endless, watery cloth of African, American, and European folds, unfolding and refolding through bodies and ideas: blackness, whiteness, nature, nurture, water, blood, cann...
COMPLIT51Q Comparative Fictions of Ethnicity Explorations of how literature can represent in complex and compelling ways issues of difference--how they appear, are debated, or silenced. Specific attention on learning how to read critically in ways that lead one to appreciate the power of litera...
COMPLIT55N Black Panther, Hamilton, Díaz, and Other Wondrous Lives This seminar concerns the design and analysis of imaginary (or constructed) worlds for narratives and media such as films, comics, and literary texts. The seminar's primary goal is to help participants understand the creation of better imaginary worl...
COMPLIT57 Human Rights and World Literature Human rights may be universal, but each appeal comes from a specific location with its own historical, social, and cultural context. This summer we will turn to literary narratives and films from a wide number of global locations to help us understan...
COMPLIT680 Curricular Practical Training CPT course required for international students completing degree. Prerequisite: Comparative Literature Ph.D. candidate.
COMPLIT70N Animal Planet and the Romance of the Species Preference to freshmen.This course considers a variety of animal characters in Chinese and Western literatures as potent symbols of cultural values and dynamic sites of ethical reasoning. What does pervasive animal imagery tell us about how we rela...
COMPLIT802 TGR Dissertation No Description Set
COMPLIT89 Investigating Identity Through Filipinx Fiction This course is both a reading seminar featuring canonical and contemporary Filipinx authors (including Mia Alvar, Carlos Bulosan, Elaine Castillo, Bienvenido Santos, Lysley Tenorio and José Rizal) and a writing workshop where students generate short...