Courses for Fall 2025
| Title | Instructors | Location | Time | Description | Cross listings | Fulfills | Registration notes | Syllabus | Syllabus URL | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| COML 0004-401 | India's Literature: Love, War, Wisdom and Humor | Gregory Goulding | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This course introduces students to the extraordinary quality of literary production during the past four millennia of South Asian civilization. We will read texts in translation from all parts of South Asia up to the sixteenth century. We will read selections from hymns, lyric poems, epics, wisdom literature, plays, political works, and religious texts. | SAST0004401 | Arts & Letters Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
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| COML 0030-401 | Introduction to Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory | Angelina E Eimannsberger | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course will introduce students to the historical and intellectual forces that led to the emergence of queer theory as a distinct field, as well as to recent and ongoing debates about gender, sexuality, embodiment, race, privacy, global power, and social norms. We will begin by tracing queer theory's conceptual heritage and prehistory in psychoanalysis, deconstruction and poststructuralism, the history of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, woman-of-color feminism, the feminist sex wars, and the AIDS crisis. We will then study the key terms and concepts of the foundational queer work of the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, we will turn to the new questions and issues that queer theory has addressed in roughly the past decade. Students will write several short papers. | ENGL0160401, GSWS0003401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202530&c=COML0030401 | ||||
| COML 0052-401 | Literature and Society: Introduction to Psychoanalysis | David L Lopez Jean-Michel Rabate |
MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | The course is designed to introduce to the clinical, theoretical, and cultural history of psychoanalysis through readings of texts by the most important psychoanalytic writers from the late nineteenth century to the present day. They include Sigmund Freud, Sabina Spielrein, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, John Bowlby, Juliet Mitchell, Stephen Mitchell, and others. These readings suggest that psychoanalysis offers powerful ways of understanding how all of us think, feel, and behave, both as individuals and in relation to other people and larger communities. The theory and the practice of psychoanalysis are based on the importance of unconscious processes. We will study the complex ways in which those processes affect our lived experience in childhood development and family relationships, in our wishes, dreams, and fantasies, in our experiences of work, play, love, sex, trauma, and loss, and in our creative, spiritual, and political strivings. Because the course aims to link the academic and the clinical, it is team-taught by a professor of English and a psychoanalyst to introduce to the breadth, variety, and dynamism of psychoanalytic ideas and techniques. In order to stress the interdisciplinary nature of psychoanalysis, we will read literary, historical, philosophical, and anthropological works that have relevance to the psychoanalytic exploration of the human condition. We will show how effective psychoanalytic ideas are in bridging a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, including recent developments in neuropsychoanalysis. Students from all disciplines will find in the class illuminating links between psychoanalysis and their primary fields of study. |
ENGL0052401 | Arts & Letters Sector | |||||
| COML 0275-401 | Montage and Revolution: Conceptual Cinema of Sergei Eisenstein | Siarhei Biareishyk | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | The 1917 Russian Revolution was to inaugurate a new epoch in human history. Working with and within this time of political and cultural upheaval, Sergei Eisenstein inaugurated a revolution in montage technique that would usher a new age of cinema, a new practice of art, and a new way of thinking in images. Eisenstein’s cinematic techniques aimed at producing concepts in the language of film. It also sought modes of expression inaccessible to discursive thought. Navigating a tenuous line between art and politics, Eisenstein's works explore the social and political power of affectivity and expressivity, and the cinematic potential for both representing and eliciting emotion in individual viewers and masses alike. In conversation with the tumultuous political and cultural shifts of the Soviet society from the revolutionary 1920s to the age of Stalinism and the World War II, this course will follow Eisenstein’s filmography, from his monumental reconstruction of the revolutionary Petersburg in October to the engagement with representations of history during the Stalinist era in Ivan the Terrible. We will engage with Eisenstein’s theoretical writings, his cartoons and sketches, public speeches, and his lost and unrealized projects, such as his collaboration with Hollywood and a plan to film Marx’s Capital. In this process, we will learn basic tenets of film and aesthetic theory, while practicing the analysis of film with attention to form and content. Following the lead of Eisenstein's artistic and theoretical production, we will engage with questions his work raises: How can cinematography elicit and manipulate the emotions of its viewer? What is expressivity? Can film represent philosophical concepts? What is cinema's relation to propaganda and politics? What is revolutionary about the medium of film, and what is film’s role in the revolution? No prior knowledge of Russian history, culture or society is required, nor is specialized knowledge of film history or film analysis. All readings will be in English, and all films will be subtitled in English. |
CIMS0275401, REES0275401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | |||||
| COML 0320-401 | Modern Hebrew Literature and Film in Translation | Nili R Gold | T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | This course is designed to introduce students to the rich art of Modern Hebrew and Israeli literature and film. Poetry, short stories, and novel excerpts are taught in translation. The course studies Israeli cinema alongside literature, examining the various facets of this culture that is made of national aspirations and individual passions. The class is meant for all: no previous knowledge of history or the language is required. The topic changes each time the course is offered. Topics include: giants of Israeli literature; the image of the city; childhood; the marginalized voices of Israel; the Holocaust from an Israeli perspective; and fantasy, dreams & madness. | CIMS0320401, JWST0320401, MELC0320401 | Cross Cultural Analysis Arts & Letters Sector |
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| COML 0478-401 | Banned Books: Writing Against Censorship | Aleksey Berg | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This course offers a broad survey of banned, censored, suppressed, and silenced literature in Eastern Europe and the USSR during the 20th century. While the totalitarian political regimes of the 20th century sought to control the public sphere and regulate artistic production, their efforts were never entirely successful. Inevitably, works appeared that either sought to directly challenge and confront ideology, “slipped through the cracks” and were banned or censored retroactively, or seemed palatable enough to censors but proved provocative to perceptive readers skilled in reading “between the lines.” We will read and discuss banned, problematic, and controversial works written during the 20th century in contexts of political unfreedom, as we seek answers to a number of questions about the interconnection between the political and the aesthetic, such as: Do works banned for political reasons also pose aesthetic challenges to tyranny? Does suspect politics entail suspect aesthetics, or vice versa? Can radical aesthetics arise from ostensibly conformist politics? How does Sir Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative liberty help us navigate the murky waters of art under despotism? Readings will include works by Hrabal, Kiš, Kross, Kundera, Shalamov, Voznesenskaia, Yohansen, and others. |
REES0478401 | ||||||
| COML 0522-301 | Testimony: Life-writing as Dialogue (SNF Paideia Program Course) | Sarah Ropp | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Testimony: Life-writing as Dialogue This hybrid literature/creative writing course centers on the genre of testimony as a form of life-writing and self-making that is fundamentally dialogic; that is, dependent on what Dori Laub calls “a listening other” to be fully realized. We will consider the concept and practice of testimony through three intersecting avenues. First, we will explore the multivalent critical theory of testimony, drawing from a range of disciplines including memory and trauma studies; human rights scholarship and activism; feminist philosophy; queer theory; disability studies; and more. Second, we will read and analyze contemporary testimony in a variety of genres, produced by people of diverse identities and experiences from around the world. Third, we will write and share in community our own series of short testimonies, learning and practicing critical skills for this particular form of dialogic practice that are transferable beyond the course, including: deep listening, self- and other-awareness, and the capacity to embrace the other’s enduring strangeness and incomprehensibility while still recognizing their humanity. Importantly, this is not a traditional writing workshop with peer review and revision cycles. While attention to craft is part of the testimonial process, the focus here is on sharing and receiving personal narratives without critique of craft. The course is open to all majors, and no particular “talent” or identity as a writer is required. The reading list will include contemporary (post-1945) narratives from Latin America/the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and their U.S.-based diasporas as well as Native and Black U.S. writers. The theory is likewise drawn from diverse and not exclusively Western/white sources. |
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| COML 0527-401 | The Aftermath of Slavery: Language, Storytelling, Experimentation | Zita C Nunes | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This seminar explores how writers in the African Diaspora have engaged, challenged, and experimented with English and its literary forms to write about slavery. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | AFRC0527401, ENGL0527401, GSWS0527401, LALS0527401 | ||||||
| COML 0615-401 | Modern Arabic Literature | Huda Fakhreddine | CANCELED | This course is a study of modern Arabic literary forms in the context of the major political and social changes which shaped Arab history in the first half of the twentieth century. The aim of the course is to introduce students to key samples of modern Arabic literature which trace major social and political developments in Arab society. Each time the class will be offered with a focus on one of the literary genres which emerged or flourished in the twentieth century: the free verse poem, the prose-poem, drama, the novel, and the short story. We will study each of these emergent genres against the socio-political backdrop which informed it. All readings will be in English translations. The class will also draw attention to the politics of translation as a reading and representational lens. | MELC0615401, MELC6505401 | Cross Cultural Analysis Arts & Letters Sector |
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| COML 1000-401 | Introduction to Literary Study: Close Reading Global Fiction and Film | Jack Weizhe Cao | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This course has three broad aims: first, it will introduce students to a selection of compelling contemporary narratives; second, it will provide prospective students of literature and film, as well as interested students headed for other majors, with fundamental skills in literary, visual, and cultural analysis; and, third, it will encourage a meditation on the function of literature and culture in our world, where commodities, people, and ideas have been constantly in motion. Questions for discussion will therefore include: the meaning of terms like "globalization," "translation," and "world literature"; the transnational reach and circulation of texts; migration and engagement with "others"; violence, trauma, and memory; terrorism and the state; and the ethic of cosmopolitanism. Our collective endeavor will be to think about narrative forms as modes of mediating and engaging with the vast and complex world we inhabit today. See COML website for current semester's description at https://complit.sas.upenn.edu/course-list/2019A | ENGL1409401 | Arts & Letters Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
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| COML 1020-401 | Marx, Marxism, and the Culture of Revolution | Siarhei Biareishyk | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Capitalist society is the object of Karl Marx's analysis and critique—a society that is the product of history and may one day vanish. This course will trace Marx's critique by moving between the fields of philosophy, economics, and politics. We will locate key interventions of Marx's thought that transform modern conceptions of history, the relation between economics and politics, and the limits of struggle and emancipation in capitalist society. We will consider the historical conditions of Marx's writing and the development of his thought to discover many sides of Marx and many divergent Marxisms (humanist, post-structuralist, feminist, and others) that follow, often at odds with each other. Further, we will ask about what kind of horizons Marx's and Marxist interventions open up for critique and analysis of capitalist society with respect to gender, race, class, and nation. "Theory becomes a material force when it has seized the masses," argues the young Marx; indeed, his theories have fueled emancipatory movements and propped up tyrannical regimes, substantiated scientific theories and transformed philosophical debates. In examining Marx's legacy, we will focus on the elaborations and historical limitations of his ideas by examining the challenges of fascism, the communist experiment in the Soviet Union and its collapse, as well as the climate and other crises currently taking place. In conclusion, we will turn to the question of whether and to what extent Marx's ideas remain relevant today, and whether it is possible to be a Marxist in the contemporary world dominated by global capital. | GRMN1020401, PHIL1439401, REES1172401 | Humanties & Social Science Sector | |||||
| COML 1026-401 | Shakespeare Now | Abdulhamit Arvas | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | Shakespeare has become a cultural icon with significant capital over the past two centuries not only in the so-called West but also on a global scale. This seminar will examine Shakespeare not as a static literary figure but as a dynamic and contested presence in global culture. It will explore Shakespeare’s plays as well as their global reach in relation to critical issues of the twenty-first century, asking what it means to read, study, perform, and appropriate Shakespeare today. How does Shakespeare speak to our contemporary concerns? What versions of Shakespeare are available to us, and how do different interpretative approaches shape our understanding of his works? By engaging with recent critical perspectives on gender, sexuality, race, religion, class, and the environment in Shakespeare studies, this seminar will examine Shakespeare’s continued relevance in a rapidly changing world. Course requirements will include close reading of plays, active participation, presentations, short essays and a final critical analysis paper. |
ENGL1025401, GSWS1025401, THAR1225401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | |||||
| COML 1027-401 | Sex and Representation | Asaf Yossef Roth | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | Sex is everywhere. It's intimately individual and jarringly universal. It's about ourselves, and it's about being together with others. It comes from within us with great force, and it's forced upon us from the outside by our societies and communities. It is experienced as extremely authentic while also regulated through an intricate network of cultural codes, traditions, and laws that articulate explicit as well as implicit attitudes toward gender and sexuality. In this course, we will explore how, throughout different historical and cultural contexts, writers and thinkers grappled with issues such as normal and deviant sexual practices, masculinity and femininity, and the intersection between gender and cultural categories such as race, class, and nationality. An introductory course in literary studies, this course will focus on a wide range of genres in the tradition of world literature, aiming at providing the students with basic skills to critically analyze and engage with literary texts and cultural artifacts. We will read, watch, and discuss texts in various genres (prose, poetry, essays, drama, film, theory) and from different cultural backgrounds (ancient and modern; from America, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East). |
CIMS1027401, GSWS1027401 | Arts & Letters Sector | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202530&c=COML1027401 | ||||
| COML 1050-402 | War and Representation | Chaya Sara Oppenheim | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This class will explore complications of representing war in the 20th and 21st centuries. War poses problems of perception, knowledge, and language. The notional "fog of war" describes a disturbing discrepancy between agents and actions of war; the extreme nature of the violence of warfare tests the limits of cognition, emotion, and memory; war's traditional dependence on declaration is often warped by language games--"police action," "military intervention," "nation-building," or palpably unnamed and unacknowledged state violence. Faced with the radical uncertainty that forms of war bring, modern and contemporary authors have experimented in historically, geographically, experientially and artistically particular ways, forcing us to reconsider even seemingly basic definitions of what a war story can be. Where does a war narrative happen? On the battlefield, in the internment camp, in the suburbs, in the ocean, in the ruins of cities, in the bloodstream? Who narrates war? Soldiers, refugees, gossips, economists, witnesses, bureaucrats, survivors, children, journalists, descendants and inheritors of trauma, historians, those who were never there? How does literature respond to the rise of terrorist or ideology war, the philosophical and material consequences of biological and cyber wars, the role of the nuclear state? How does the problem of war and representation disturb the difference between fiction and non-fiction? How do utilitarian practices of representation--propaganda, nationalist messaging, memorialization, xenophobic depiction--affect the approaches we use to study art? Finally, is it possible to read a narrative barely touched or merely contextualized by war and attend to the question of war's shaping influence? The class will concentrate on literary objects--short stories, and graphic novels--as well as film and television. Students of every level and major are welcome in and encouraged to join this class, regardless of literary experience. | ENGL1449402 | Humanties & Social Science Sector | |||||
| COML 1190-401 | Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures | Sara Kazmi | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | How does literature contend with the legacies of empire, specifically, modern European colonial rule in the 20th century? How have authors interpreted and responded to decolonization, and relatedly, to emergent forms of neo-colonialism? How have these processes shaped contestations around issues of gender, race, class, caste, and nation? This course will think through these concerns that continue to shape art, culture, and society in the global south today, long after the end of formal empire. We will analyze contemporary novels, short stories, and essays addressing regions and contexts ranging from South Asia and West Africa to the Caribbean and post-war Britain. Texts will serve to introduce students to key authors and theoretical debates within the field of postcolonial literatures, and include Chinua Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The course will also engage with critical perspectives on ‘post’-colonialism, and explore what postcolonial literatures can teach us about ongoing moves to ‘decolonize’ universities in the global north and beyond. | CIMS1190401, ENGL1190401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | |||||
| COML 1191-401 | World Literature | Ezra Hayim Lebovitz | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | What is it that we do, asks David Damrosch, “when we circulate works through the shifting spheres of world literature?” What happens to a text as it moves beyond its culture of origin? What transformations take shape? This course considers works that move beyond national and linguistic borders, taking on new lives in distinct cultural contexts. We’ll explore key nodes of connection and exchange in world literature in the increasingly interconnected and transnational literary world of the 20th century. In this course, we’ll examine a variety of unique cases in the study of world literature, attending, among others, to global adaptations of Shakespeare; to the exportation of haiku to a variety of linguistic cultures; to debates about the status of African languages in a decolonizing world. This course will cover a wide array of authors and texts from around the world, including Aimé Césaire, Rabindranath Tagore, Chinua Achebe, Roberto Bolaño, and Yoko Towada, as well as theorists like Edward Said, Pascale Casanova, and Franco Moretti. No previous experience in the study of literature or language is expected. All readings will be offered in English translation. |
CLST1602401, ENGL1179401 | ||||||
| COML 1201-401 | Foundations of European Thought: from Rome to the Renaissance | Ann Elizabeth Moyer | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course offers an introduction to the world of thought and learning at the heart of European culture, from the Romans through the Renaissance. We begin with the ancient Mediterranean and the formation of Christianity and trace its transformation into European society. Along the way we will examine the rise of universities and institutions for learning, and follow the humanist movement in rediscovering and redefining the ancients in the modern world. | HIST1200401, ITAL1201401 | Cross Cultural Analysis History & Tradition Sector |
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| COML 1220-401 | The German-Jewish Experience: Philosophy, Literature, Religion in the early Twentieth Century | Liliane Weissberg | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Yuri Slezkine described the twentieth century as a "Jewish Age"-to be modern would essentially mean to be a Jew. In German historical and cultural studies, this linkage has long been made--only in reference to the last years of the German monarchy and the time of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, what has become known as "modern" German culture-reflected in literature, music, and the visual arts and in a multitude of public media-has been more often than not assigned to Jewish authorship or Jewish subjects. But what do authorship and subject mean in this case? Do we locate the German-Jewish experience as the driving force of this new "modernity," or is our understanding of this experience the result of this new "modern" world? | GRMN1220401, JWST1220401, PHIL1582401 | ||||||
| COML 1231-401 | Perspectives in French Literature: Love and Passion | Jacqueline Dougherty | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This basic course in literature provides an overview of French literature and acquaints students with major literary trends through the study of representative works from each period. Students are expected to take an active part in class discussion in French. French 1231 has as its theme the presentation of love and passion in French literature. | FREN1231401 | Cross Cultural Analysis Arts & Letters Sector |
https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202530&c=COML1231401 | ||||
| COML 1231-402 | Perspectives in French Literature: Love and Passion | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This basic course in literature provides an overview of French literature and acquaints students with major literary trends through the study of representative works from each period. Students are expected to take an active part in class discussion in French. French 1231 has as its theme the presentation of love and passion in French literature. | FREN1231402 | Arts & Letters Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
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| COML 1311-401 | Introduction to Modern Hebrew Literature | Nili R Gold | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | The objective of this course is to develop an artistic appreciation for literature through in-depth class discussions and text analysis. Readings are comprised of Israeli poetry and short stories. Students examine how literary language expresses psychological and cultural realms. The course covers topics such as: the short story reinvented, literature and identity, and others. This course is conducted in Hebrew and all readings are in Hebrew. Grading is based primarily on participation and students' literary understanding. | JWST1310401, MELC1310401, MELC5400401 | Arts & Letters Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
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| COML 1345-401 | Global Sephardi Culture | Marina Mayorski | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | The course surveys major trends in global Sephardi cultures. We will begin by exploring the origins of Sephardi culture, and especially the significance of exile within it, through medieval Hebrew poetry from the “Golden Age” of Jewish culture in Spain (8th-15th centuries) and subsequent responses to the expulsion of Jews in 1492. We will follow those exiles to new homes in the Ottoman Empire, from the period of early settlement in the 16th century to 19th- and 20th-century Ladino literature, which thrived in locations far afield from its Spanish roots, printed and disseminated in Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Austria, and the United States. We conclude with narratives of migration in the second half of the 20th century and contemporary Sephardi cinema, literature, and music from America, Turkey, and Israel, focusing on the impact of the Holocaust and the mass emigration of Jews from former Ottoman lands. Students will become acquainted with Sephardi history through literary texts translated from Ladino, Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. These primary sources will be complemented by relevant scholarship in Jewish studies and European, Middle Eastern, and American history. We will study prominent writers such as Elias Canetti and Emma Lazarus alongside lesser-known writers such as Moses Almosnino, Grace Aguilar, Elia Carmona, Vitalis Danon, and Clarisse Nicoïdski. |
JWST1345401, MELC1340401 | ||||||
| COML 1427-401 | Wild Things: Children’s Literature and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child | Max C Cavitch | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | When it comes to literature, this course takes “childish” things seriously. From the simplest picture-books (like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are) all the way to “grownup” books frequently read by children (like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird), we’ll explore a wide range of modern children’s literature as a resource for people of all ages: for children themselves; for their parents and other family members and caregivers; for the adults those children become; and for the communities and societies in which they live. The books we read (or have read to us) as children contribute to almost every aspect of our journey toward adulthood, including language acquisition; cognitive development; the assimilation of social norms and expectations: the ability to relate to others; the acquisition of knowledge; the management of difficult feelings; our capacities for play, imagination, and work; our appreciation of human diversity and the ability to empathize with others; and the formation of our own preferences, interests, and identities. Childhood itself is studied in virtually every humanistic discipline, from anthropology to economics to history to philosophy; but nowhere is the study of childhood more vitally important than in the branch of psychology known as psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud launched the field of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century in large part by asking his adult patients to tell him about their memories of childhood. As they did so, Freud quickly realized that almost every aspect of adult experience (including many psychiatric illnesses) was connected, in some way, to the formative experiences of our earliest years. Psychoanalysis is a way of listening to the child inside all of us—the child whose memories, thoughts, and feelings we all carry with us (mostly unconsciously, but nonetheless consequentially) throughout our lives. This is why studying children’s literature is also an excellent way to study psychoanalysis. Stories for and about children can teach us a great deal—and help us to remember a great deal more—about what childhood is like, and psychoanalysis gives us an unrivaled set of concepts and terms for understanding much more fully what we were like so long ago and why that still matters so much to our adult selves. |
ENGL1427401, GSWS1427401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | |||||
| COML 1601-401 | Ancient Drama | Emily Wilson | T 12:00 PM-1:29 PM R 12:00 PM-1:29 PM |
This course will introduce students to some of the greatest works of dramatic literature in the western canon. We will consider the social, political, religious and artistic functions of drama in ancient Greece and Rome, and discuss both differences and similarities between ancient drama and modern art forms. The course will also pursue some broader goals: to improve students skills as readers and scholarly critics of literature, both ancient and modern; to observe the implications of form for meaning, in considering, especially, the differences between dramatic and non-dramatic kinds of cultural production: to help students understand the relationship of ancient Greek and Roman culture to the modern world; and to encourage thought about some big issues, in life as well as in literature: death, heroism, society, action and meaning. | CLST1601401 | Arts & Letters Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
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| COML 1650-401 | Introduction to Digital Humanities | Whitney A Trettien | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Artificial intelligence, big data, and social media are changing every aspect of our lives. The methods and questions of the humanities are critical to understanding these shifts. Run like a workshop, this course will explore various sites at Penn and around Philadelphia where humanists and artists are collaborating with scientists and engineers to solve the big problems facing our planet and our species. We’ll visit museums and special collections in search of the future of past. We’ll learn how scholars of race and gender are combating algorithmic bias in our search engines. And we’ll gain hands-on experience developing research questions in digital humanities. Students will acquire basic facility and literacy with key digital tools and platforms while gaining a critical, historical framework for understanding technology’s impact on our lives. | ENGL1650401, HIST0870401 | Humanties & Social Science Sector | |||||
| COML 2310-401 | Women's Work | Emily D. Steinlight | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | What counts as work, and in what ways is work divided and organized by gender? How, in turn, is gender shaped by experiences of work, occupational categories, and relationships of labor? And how do race, ethnicity, class, and nationality variously define, subdivide, and reinforce the shifting category of "women's work”? In this course we will explore the gendered dimensions of labor as they intersect with other forms of social identity—and as they construct familial relations, gender norms, and economic and emotional obligations—via a range of texts. Readings may include fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Alice Childress, and Tsitsi Dangarembga; poetry by Mary Collier and Anna Barbauld; lifewriting by Hannah Crafts and Mary Seacole; and selections of social analysis and theory by Silvia Federici, Barbara Ehrenreich, Angela Davis, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Tithi Bhattacharya, Hortense Spillers, Nancy Fraser, and Evelyn Nakano Glenn. | AFRC2310401, ENGL2310401, GSWS2310401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | |||||
| COML 2420-401 | British Cinema: Film, Television, and Transatlantic Screen Culture | James English | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This is a wide-ranging introduction to the “other” major cinema in English: the films of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The British film industry has been thriving in the 21st century, but it remains the underdog in a global media environment dominated by Hollywood. We will consider some of the ways British filmmakers have positioned themselves in the space of world cinema and television as close rivals or radical alternatives to the American model. Our approach will be to study two films a week, mixing films from the 21st century with films from earlier moments in British cinema history from the 1930s through the 1990s. Our aim will be to discern some of the enduring cinematic modes and transatlantic strategies that contribute to the national “signature” of British film. Our screenings will run the gamut from the big-budget James Bond and Harry Potter franchises, to mid-sized transnational productions such as Pride & Prejudice and Slumdog Millionaire, to more independent or artisanal work by such directors as Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Sally Potter, Michael Winterbottom, Lynne Ramsay, Steve McQueen, and Andrea Arnold. A number of films we will study were made for British and/or American television, and we will devote some attention to the important and changing relationship between TV and cinema in contemporary screen culture. |
ARTH2930401, CIMS2420401, ENGL2420401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | |||||
| COML 2840-401 | Groundbreaking Poets and Traditional Forms | Taije Jalaya Silverman | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Learn about sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and other standards of the established canon as they are revitalized by the most celebrated poets working today. As we read and write in various meters and forms, we will also explore United States history. Phillis Wheatley Peters' address to George Washington will teach us iambic pentameter, as Terrance Hayes' broken villanelle will describe the pre-Civil War raid on Harper's Ferry, and Emma Lazarus's sonnet in the voice of the Statue of Liberty will reveal American immigration policy. Split between discussions and workshops so we can practice the prosody we study, the course will move between early and contemporary events that shape American identity: Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan's terzanelle about Japanese internment camps, Yusef Komenyakaa's ghazal about the Ferguson protests, Patricia Smith's sestinas about Hurricane Katrina, and Reginald Dwayne Betts's sonnets about mass incarceration. We will research sources of these older forms, and look at how they influence newer ones like the bop, the Golden Shovel, and the duplex. Poets we will read in depth include: Gwendolyn Brooks, Natasha Trethewey, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Agha Shahid Ali, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Marilyn Nelson, and June Jordan. Assignments will include occasional short essays and more playful exercises on how to follow--and break--the shifting rules of meter and form. | ENGL2840401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | |||||
| COML 3040-401 | Religious Conflict in France from Past to Present | Scott M Francis | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | French history, culture, and politics have all been shaped by centuries of religious conflict, theological controversy, and civil strife. In many ways, Frenchness has always been defined against some kind of religious and/or ethnic Other: heretics, protestants, Jews, or Muslims. At the same time, however, France’s unique religious environment has given rise to some of the most important thought on tolerance. What gave rise to these conflicting tendencies, and how can understanding the history of French religious conflict give us perspective on issues in contemporary France? In this course, we will attempt to answer these questions by studying a series of key historical events and episodes from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century and the present day: the Seventh and Eighth Crusades under Louis IX in the thirteenth century, the travels of Jean de Mandeville in the mid-fourteenth century, the Wars of Religion and French encounters with indigenous peoples in the Americas during the sixteenth century, Molière’s Tartuffe and conflict between free-thinking and religious orthodoxy enforced by Catholic confraternities and their prominent role in politics and society under Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, Voltaire’s conception of religious tolerance in the wake of the “Affaire Calas” in the 1760’s, the “Affaire Dreyfus” (1894-1906) and antisemitism in modern France, and contemporary controversies over religion (particularly Islam) and the public sphere. In addition to discussion-based class meetings, the course will feature visits from specialists working on the materials to be studied as well as visits to the Kislak Center for Rare Books, Special Collections, and Manuscripts to examine original materials, including the Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair. This course is conducted entirely in French. |
COML6040401, FREN3040401, FREN6040401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202530&c=COML3040401 | |||||
| COML 3211-401 | Modern Chinese Poetry in a Global Context | Chloe Estep | M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | The tumultuous political and economic history of modern China has been mirrored in and shaped by equally fundamental revolutions in language and poetic expression. In this course, we will take Chinese poetry as a crucible in which we can observe the interacting forces of literary history and social change. From diplomats who saw poetry as a medium for cultural translation between China and the world, to revolutionaries who enlisted poetry in the project of social transformation, we will examine the lives and works of some of China’s most prominent poets and ask, what can we learn about modern China from reading their poetry? In asking this question, we will also reckon with the strengths and limitations of using poetry as an historical source. In addition to poems, the course will include fiction, essays, photographs, and films by both Chinese and non-Chinese artists that place our poets in a broader context. We will pay close attention to how these poets represent China’s place in the world, as well as the role of language in social change. Topics of discussion include: national identity, revolution, translation, gender, the body, ethnicity, and technology. Familiarity with Chinese or related cultural context is beneficial, but not required. This course introduces students to Chinese poetry in English translation. Students will leave the course with an in-depth understanding of the main figures, themes, and techniques of Chinese poetry, and will be introduced to some of the major developments in the history of China. Through a focus on primary texts, students will develop the vocabulary and analytical skills to appreciate and analyze poetry in translation and will gain confidence as writers thinking about literary texts. |
ASAM3211401, COML7211401, EALC3211401, EALC7211401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | |||||
| COML 5010-301 | Comparative Literature Proseminar | Sarah P. Brilmyer | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course will survey what has come to be known in literary and cultural studies as "theory" by tracking the genealogies of a select range of contemporary practices of interpretation. We will address the following questions. What are some of the historical and rhetorical conditions of emergence for contemporary critical theories of interpretation? What does it mean to interpret literature and culture in the wake of the grand theoretical enterprises of the modern period? How do conceptions of power and authority in literature and culture change as symbolic accounts of language give way to allegorical and performative accounts? How might we bring frameworks of globality and translation to bear on literary and cultural criticism? Half of the course sessions will involve the instructor and the students reading texts that represent a range of hermeneutic approaches, in classical and contemporary forms. For the other half of the class, we will welcome one visiting instructor per week from the Comparative Literature faculty, who will assign readings and lead discussion on their own area(s) of specialization. The central, practical goals of the class will be to help first year PhD candidates in Comparative Literature prepare for their MA exam, to introduce students to a range of faculty in the Program, and to forge an intellectual community among the first year cohort. |
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| COML 5450-401 | Topics: Renaissance Culture | F 1:45 PM-3:44 PM | Please see department website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/graduate/courses | CLST7704401, ITAL5400401, PHIL5150401 | |||||||
| COML 5660-401 | The Long Nineteenth Century: Literature, Philosophy, Culture | Vance Byrd | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | The present course will discuss German literature and thought from the period of the French Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century, and put it into a European context. In regard to German literature, this is the period that leads from the Storm and Stress and Romanticism to the political period of the Vormärz, Realism, and finally Expressionism; in philosophy, it moves from German Idealism to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and neo-Kantian thought. It is also the period that saw the rise of the novel, and new forms of dramatic works. Painting moved out of the studio into plein air; the invention of photography made an imprint on all arts, and the rise of the newspaper led to new literary genres such as the feuilleton. Economically, Germany experienced the industrial revolution; politically, it was striving for a unification that was finally achieved in 1871. The nineteenth century saw the establishment of the bourgeoisie, the emergence of the German working class, and the idea of the nation state; it also saw Jewish emancipation, and the call for women’s rights. This course is taught in German. Readings will focus on a variety of literary, political, and philosophical texts and consider a selection of art works. |
ARTH7770401, GRMN5580401 | ||||||
| COML 5902-401 | The Lessons of Horror | Jean-Michel Rabate | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | The pedagogy of horror is ancient, as Michel Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish. Exhibiting mangled bodies served as a warning for others, the Law being reinforced by the spectacle of torture and painful death. There is a Spanish saying: "the letter can only enter with blood." Goya painted it ("La letra con sangre entra," in the Museum of Zaragoza). Jack London presented a similar pedagogy with his Nietzschean captain in The Sea Wolf. We will start from what Julia Kristeva called "the powers of horror" by looking at philosophical texts, literary texts, and films. We will first need to distinguish between Horror and Terror, and see how Hegel discusses the "Terror" moment in the French Revolution. We will explore parallels between Marquis de Sade and Immanuel Kant with Adorno, Horkheimer and Lacan. What are Sade's Libertines trying to teach in "The philosophy in the bedroom" and in revolutionary political pamphlets? We will follow Derrida when he meditates on cruelty and its links with the death sentence. We will ask about hte rationale of terrifying acts of violence in Prometheus Bound, The Spanish Tragedy, and Titus Andronicus. Is there something to be learned from "torture porn" in films like Hostel, Green Inferno and Martyrs, from strategies of suicide bombing presented either in films (The Terrorist) or in historical analyses (Terror in the name of God)? What is the point of the pedagogy of horror deployed by Kafka ("The Penitentiary Colony") and Samuel Beckett (How It Is)? Is an ethics of care possible after one has perused Maggy Nelson's On Cruelty, and meditated on Conrad's denunciation of colonialism in Heart of Darkness? For more information, please visit: https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/graduate. | CIMS5901401, ENGL5901401 | ||||||
| COML 5903-401 | Freud and After | Max C Cavitch | T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | Psychoanalysis remains the most powerful, relentlessly tested and continuously revised and refined account of human selfhood, motivation, behavior, and intersubjectivity. Despite various attempts to dismiss or domesticate its most radical insights, its conceptions of the person and the interpersonal have continued to be woven into the very fabric of critical theory, from the Frankfurt School to postmodern and contemporary critical schools and their derivatives (e.g., affect studies, critical race theory, disability studies, animal studies, etc.). Yet within the humanities and social sciences, psychoanalysis is commonly taught and applied as little more than a fixed canon of works from the early-to-mid-twentieth century—chiefly, works by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan. Essential though their ideas remain, they can hardly be understood, much less applied in the present without an understanding of the ways in which they’ve been profoundly changed: worked through and beyond by subsequent generations of psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners. This course offers graduate students (and, by permission, advanced undergraduates in the Psychoanalytic Studies Minor) an opportunity to “rebegin” (in Laura Riding Jackson’s sense) their study of psychoanalytic history, theory, and practice, from Freud to the present—and, from the vantage of the present, to rediscover psychoanalysis as a dynamic contemporary discipline and model for critical thinking. In addition to regular participation in class discussion, requirements will include some response papers, an in-class presentation, and an argument-driven essay. For more information, please visit: https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/graduate. | ENGL5905401, GSWS5905401 | ||||||
| COML 5925-401 | The Language of Comics | Jean-Christophe Cloutier | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This graduate seminar introduces students to the marvelously complex and versatile language of comics. In this course, students will be exposed to some of the most innovative and wide-ranging contemporary graphic novels from around the globe. In today's attention economy, comics have risen as one of the biggest success stories of the digital age—and the graphic novel's increasing popularity has further come hand-in-hand with its growing legitimacy in academia as cutting-edge literature. As we explore the secret resources of comics via an array of genres—speculative fiction, journalism, memoir, horror, Shönen manga, self-help, realism, experimental fiction, etc—we will also read comics theory and test the limits of our visual literacy. We will take advantage of Penn Libraries' special collections of comics, and you will be asked to select one of our hidden comics treasures to share with the group. Other possible assignments may include incorporating comics language into your criticism and writing a research paper on a comic of your choosing. Come for the visual literacy, stay for the funny pictures. For more information, please visit: https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/graduate. | CIMS5925401, ENGL5925401 | ||||||
| COML 5934-401 | The Politics of Truth in the Global Documentary | Julia Alekseyeva | R 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course is a study of documentary film practices internationally, beginning from the invention of cinema and ending in the contemporary landscape. It analyzes how documentary worldwide serves a paradoxical function: both a testament to the power of the "real," and a critique of its representation. The class thus challenges preconceived notions of a medium often connected to "cinema-truth." This class will also pay special attention to the intersection of documentary and politics to think through how the art of documentary has been historically instrumental for revolutionary politics, while also deeply complicit in fascist regimes. The course will include short writing assignments as well as a critical-creative project. The course is suitable for both graduate students and advanced undergraduate students, and advanced undergraduate students are more than welcome to apply. For more information, please visit: https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/graduate | CIMS5934401, ENGL5934401, REES6286401 | ||||||
| COML 6030-401 | Poetics of Narrative | Gerald J Prince | M 1:45 PM-3:44 PM | Please see the department's website for current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc | FREN6030401 | ||||||
| COML 6040-401 | Religious Conflict in France from Past to Present | Scott M Francis | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | French history, culture, and politics have all been shaped by centuries of religious conflict, theological controversy, and civil strife. In many ways, Frenchness has always been defined against some kind of religious and/or ethnic Other: heretics, protestants, Jews, or Muslims. At the same time, however, France’s unique religious environment has given rise to some of the most important thought on tolerance. What gave rise to these conflicting tendencies, and how can understanding the history of French religious conflict give us perspective on issues in contemporary France? In this course, we will attempt to answer these questions by studying a series of key historical events and episodes from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century and the present day: the Seventh and Eighth Crusades under Louis IX in the thirteenth century, the travels of Jean de Mandeville in the mid-fourteenth century, the Wars of Religion and French encounters with indigenous peoples in the Americas during the sixteenth century, Molière’s Tartuffe and conflict between free-thinking and religious orthodoxy enforced by Catholic confraternities and their prominent role in politics and society under Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, Voltaire’s conception of religious tolerance in the wake of the “Affaire Calas” in the 1760’s, the “Affaire Dreyfus” (1894-1906) and antisemitism in modern France, and contemporary controversies over religion (particularly Islam) and the public sphere. In addition to discussion-based class meetings, the course will feature visits from specialists working on the materials to be studied as well as visits to the Kislak Center for Rare Books, Special Collections, and Manuscripts to examine original materials, including the Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair. This course is conducted entirely in French. |
COML3040401, FREN3040401, FREN6040401 | ||||||
| COML 6175-401 | History and Memory in/of Socialism | Kevin M.F. Platt | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | State socialist societies shaped the history of the twentieth century. They also intently reshaped the history of past eras. Now, decades after the collapse of the USSR and the capitalist remake of the People’s Republic of China, those histories are often little more than memories, sometimes haunting the present, and sometimes weaponized for present purposes. This course will begin with consideration of state socialist societies’ representations of their own pasts and of global histories, from the historicization of the October Revolution, to the mid-century retellings of deeper histories of empire and nation, to non-conformist histories of state socialist mass violence. In the latter portion of the course, we will turn to investigate the history and memory of state socialism, covering post-socialist melancholy and nostalgia, the deployment of socialist history in memory wars and real wars in formerly state socialist lands, and recent revisions of socialist history in terms of empire, nation, and post- and de-coloniality. Primary materials will range from literature and film to public discourse, monumental art, and historiography (from Maxim Gorky’s “History of Factories and Plants” project [1930s] to Jasmina Wojcik’s _Symphony of the Ursus Factory_ [2018]). Our work will be ramified by readings in theory and method, covering social memory, invented traditions, lieux de mémoire, trauma studies, entangled and multidirectional memory, and other topics. All course materials will be available in English translation. Undergraduates may enroll with instructor’s permission. | ENGL5912401, REES6175401 | ||||||
| COML 6623-401 | Literary History and Aesthetics in South Asia | Deven Patel | T 3:00 PM-6:00 PM | This seminar surveys the multiple components of literary culture in South Asia. Students will engage critically with selected studies of literary history and aeshetics from the past two millennia. In order to introduce students to specific literary cultures (classical, regional, contemporary) and to the scholarly practices that situate literature in broader contexts of culture and society, the course will focus both on the literary theories - especially from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - that position South Asia's literary cultures within broader disciplinary frameworks that use literary documents to inform social, historical and cultural research projects. The aim is to open up contexts whereby students can develop their own research projects using literary sources. | SAST6623401 | ||||||
| COML 6636-401 | The Problem of Vernacularity in Literary Modernity | Gregory Goulding | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | The vernacular, despite its origins in European empire and later colonialism, and its role in creating inherently oppositional relationships between different languages and literary cultures, persists as a foundational way of thinking categorizing literary cultures throughout the post-imperial and post-colonial world. How does literary history appear from the perspective of vernacularity? What might we see when we privilege literary cultures seen as vernacular rather than metropolitan languages such as English or French? How, in turn, might such a perspective inform our understanding of the larger field, across language, of world literary history during the twentieth century? This course begins with a term that indexes relations of power, hierarchy, and empire as a starting point to rethink crucial debates in twentieth century literary history. The category of the vernacular, in its move from the European post-Latinate to a range of imperial, colonial, and post-colonial configurations, introduces problems of comparison that continue to trouble contemporary disciplinary understandings of literary study. Some of the implications of the vernacular, such as those highlighted by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o refusal to write in English, are obvious in their shift towards literary cultures marginalized in colonial and post-colonial contexts. But the concept of the vernacular also intervenes in ideas of reading publics, orality, and indigeneity such that it can be the basis for a wider range of inquiry into the social conditions of multilingual literary histories. This course uses the inherent tension caused by this difficult word to engage in a number of case studies in contexts including interwar Central Europe, Cold War literatures of the Third World, and Korean literature during the period of Japanese occupation; authors discussed will include Fredric Jameson, Abdelfattah Kilito, Aamir Mufti, and Shu-mei Shih. This course is open to all MA and Ph.D. students regardless of prior knowledge. Advanced undergraduates should contact the instructor to request permission to enroll and should submit a permit request via Path@Penn. |
ENGL5636401, SAST6636401 | ||||||
| COML 6820-401 | Seminar on Literary Theory | Ericka Beckman | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Topics vary. See the Spanish Department's website for the current offerings. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/pc | SPAN6820401 | ||||||
| COML 7211-401 | Modern Chinese Poetry in a Global Context | Chloe Estep | M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | The tumultuous political and economic history of modern China has been mirrored in and shaped by equally fundamental revolutions in language and poetic expression. In this course, we will take Chinese poetry as a crucible in which we can observe the interacting forces of literary history and social change. From diplomats who saw poetry as a medium for cultural translation between China and the world, to revolutionaries who enlisted poetry in the project of social transformation, we will examine the lives and works of some of China’s most prominent poets and ask, what can we learn about modern China from reading their poetry? In asking this question, we will also reckon with the strengths and limitations of using poetry as an historical source. In addition to poems, the course will include fiction, essays, photographs, and films by both Chinese and non-Chinese artists that place our poets in a broader context. We will pay close attention to how these poets represent China’s place in the world, as well as the role of language in social change. Topics of discussion include: national identity, revolution, translation, gender, the body, ethnicity, and technology. Familiarity with Chinese or related cultural context is beneficial, but not required. This course introduces students to Chinese poetry in English translation. Students will leave the course with an in-depth understanding of the main figures, themes, and techniques of Chinese poetry, and will be introduced to some of the major developments in the history of China. Through a focus on primary texts, students will develop the vocabulary and analytical skills to appreciate and analyze poetry in translation and will gain confidence as writers thinking about literary texts. |
ASAM3211401, COML3211401, EALC3211401, EALC7211401 | ||||||
| COML 7705-401 | The Harlem Renaisssance: Then and Now | Zita C Nunes | M 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | In 1925, Alain Locke published The New Negro: an Interpretation, an anthology of literary and artistic works by leading figures associated with a movement in Black culture that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. This year’s 100-year anniversary of the event has prompted new scholarship and numerous commemorations. This seminar will focus on the Harlem Renaissance and its resonances across time and space by engaging material from the end of the US Reconstruction (1880s) to the present to explore what, when, where, whose, and why the Harlem Renaissance. The syllabus will include poetry, essays, long and short fiction and criticism. Students will work with archival materials, newspapers and periodicals, as well as film, music,artwork, and photography in exhibition catalogues and local collections. Required coursework will include the presentation of a chapter from a scholarly monograph or article associated with the theme of the course for discussion and a seminar paper, along with weekly assignments. For more information, please visit: https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/graduate. | AFRC7705401, ENGL7705401, FIGS7705401 |