This course surveys the scholarly and real-world life of Edward Said's 1978 monograph, Orientalism. Topics may include Said's primary source material, theories of Orientalism applied to eighteenth-century literature, earlier and later forms of Orientalism, and the impact of Said's work on postcolonial studies.

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.

This seminar will cover all aspects of the "Secret History of the Mongols" (1264), the classic source on medieval Mongolian history and our most important source on Genghis Khan. The class will be taught through close reading of the text in translation, with full consideration of the parallel passages in the 'Authentic Chronicles,' Rashid al-Din's Compendium of Chronicles, and the Yuan shi. Themes we will cover include:Textual transmissionComposition and contextSources for the 'Secret History'Genealogies and paternal and maternal descentFratricide and empireNarrative and chronotopeSecrecy and public historyAll readings will be in English.

This seminar will explore the medieval and early modern reception of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, through literary imitations and translations, commentaries, and literary responses. To study the fortunes of the Consolation is to come to terms with one of the greatest informing influences on medieval and early modern European poetic thought. We will spend the first few weeks reading and digesting the Consolation itself, working between the Latin text and an English translation (probably using the Loeb edition). Knowledge of Latin is not required for the course, but the readings will provide ample opportunities for you to work on and with Latin as you wish. When we have read the Consolation we will explore its reception history. This will include medieval vernacular receptions (moving from early texts such as the Old English Boethius to its many appearances in Old French and Middle French, in Middle English especially in the form of Chaucer's Boece, and in any other language traditions that students want to cover); some of the remarkable commentaries on the text, and the later medieval literary apotheosis of the Consolation in Chaucer's Troilus and the "Boethian lyrics," in Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, in Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes, and in early modern texts, including--spectacularly--the translation of the Consolation by Queen Elizabeth 1. I encourage you to bring your own interests in the Consolation to the course and suggest some reception directions for the group to take.

This seminar will be a broad survey of Marx and Freud, with attention to each thinker as well as to how their theories supplement one another. Different instructors may emphasize different aspects of marxism and psychoanalysis, as well as the historical contexts of the two theorists. See English.upenn.edu for full course offerings.

While the focus of this seminar will shift from year to year, the aim is to enable students to gain 1) a basic understanding of various theoretical approaches to literature, 2) familiarity with the histories and conventions of criticism, literary and otherwise, in Japan; 3) a few theoretical tools to think in complex ways about some of the most interesting and controversial issues of today, such as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, postmodernism, and feminism, with particular focus on Japan's position in the world. The course is primarily intended for graduate students but is also open to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor. The course is taught in English, and all of the readings will be available in English translation. An optional discussion section may be arranged for those students who are able and willing to read and discuss materials in Japanese.

Topics vary. See the Spanish Department's website for the current offerings. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/pc

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.

This seminar is an exploration in European intellectual history. It traces the historical trajectory, from antiquity to the present day, of the idea that there once was, and again could be, a universal and perfect language among humanity. The tantalizing question of the possibility of such a language has been a vital and thought-provoking inquiry throughout human history. If recovered or invented, such a language has the potential to explain the origins, physical reality, and meaning of human experience, fostering universal understanding and world peace. Greek philosophers grappled with the capacity of names to correctly denote things. In Judaic and Christian traditions, the notion that the language spoken by Adam and Eve perfectly expressed the nature of the physical and metaphysical world captivated the minds of intellectuals for nearly two millennia. In defiance of the biblical myth of the confusion of languages and peoples at the Tower of Babel, they persistently endeavored to overcome divine punishment and rediscover the path to harmonious life. In the 19th century, Indo-Europeanist philologists perceived an avenue to explore the early stages of human development by reconstructing a proto-language. In the 20th century, romantic idealists like the inventor of Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhof, constructed languages to further understanding among estranged nations. For writers and poets of all times, from Cyrano de Bergerac to Velimir Khlebnikov, the concept of a universal and perfect language has served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Today, this idea reverberates in theories of universal and generative grammars, in the approach to English as a global language, and in various attempts to devise artificial languages, including those intended for cosmic communication.
Each week, we examine a particular period and a set of theories to explore universal language projects. But above all, at the core of the course lies an examination of what language is and how it is used in human society.

The seminar will focus on Arendt's major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (and its three parts, Anti-Semitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism). We will also discuss the reception of this work and consider its relevance today.