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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Please see the department's website for current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

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

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.

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.