Course open to first-year Comparative Literature graduate students in preparation for required M.A. exam taken in spring of first year.

This graduate seminar offers an intensive, critical, and collaborative study of contemporary African film and media production. The past three decades have seen an unprecedented shift in the African media landscape. Not only has the wide availability of satellite media across the continent made international film and television programing part of African popular culture, but moreover the growing film industries within the continent, most notably Nollywood, have altered how Africans are carving an image of themselves on the big and small screens.<br />
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In partnership with local, regional, and international film and media centers, we will study a range of films—features, shorts, documentaries, and television shows—paying close attention to the means and sites of production as well as the formal qualities that distinguish these works. Many of the films we will analyze stand out both for their exceptional aesthetic quality as well as their remarkable ability to confront pressing political and social themes. But we will also think about trash: what counts as trashy media, and for whom? Who watches it, where, and why? Other questions we will ask include: What particular indigenous modes of storytelling do African films employ? What categories begin to emerge under the umbrella category of &quot;African film and media,&quot; and where do diasporan film and media practitioners and critics fit in this landscape? How are these films tackling some of the urgent questions of our times, including migration and globalization; ethnic, political, and economic polarization; gender and sexuality; and massive urbanization and industrialization sweeping Africa and other parts of the Global South? What role do festivals in various countries play in shaping media production and distribution? How important is the concept of authorship in this context? And how do these films challenge the dominant western trope of Africa as a spectacle, instead offering novel ways of picturing everyday African experiences that we rarely glimpse in western media?<br />
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To explore these questions, we will visit multiple sites of film production, distribution, exhibition, and education, including Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, Sankofa Films in Washington, D.C., and the College of Performing and Visual Art at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Location and knowledge production are inextricably connected, and by considering African media production from these multiple sites, and collaborating with multiple stakeholders, this course offers a directly engaged pedagogy of the complex artistic, cultural, social, and political dynamics of African audiovisual creation. The travel component of this course entails a day trip to Washington, D.C. during the semester and a week-long trip to Addis Ababa at the end of the spring term (students applying for this course should be prepared to travel May 30, 2020-June 7, 2020). Ultimately, this course aims to use film and media production to intervene in a larger discourse on how Africa is figured in the global humanities, not as an absent or passive actor but one actively engaged in producing art and humanistic knowledge that has much to teach us and the world.<br />
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Admission to the course will be by permission only and students are required to submit a short statement of interest (max. 200 words) to dagw@english.upenn.edu and redkaren@sas.upenn.edu by November 1, 2019.<br />
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An advanced seminar treating some topics in Victorian British Literature, usually focusing on non-fiction or on poetry.

This is an advanced course treating topics in 16th Century history and culture particular emphasis varying with instructor.

This seminar will study a number of selected Middle English texts in depth. Attention will be paid to the textual transmission, sources, language, genre, and structure of the works. Larger issues, such as the influence of literary conventions (for example, &quot;courtly love&quot;), medieval rhetoric, or medieval allegory will be explored as the chosen texts may require.

This seminar is organized as a laboratory space for graduate students and faculty working in a number of adjacent fields and problems. Seminar discussions will be led not only by the primary instructors, but also by a number of guests drawn from the Penn faculty. For the first weeks of the course, we will focus on seminal works in the interlinked areas of history and memory studies, cultural representations of collective violence, trauma studies, and other related topics. Beginning with the Xth week of the course, we will turn to case studies in a variety of geographic, cultural and historical contexts. Additionally, some later sessions of the course will be devoted to a presentation and discussion of a work in progress of a Penn graduate student, faculty member or a guest lecturer.

From the vast quarries and catacombs under modern Paris to coalminer's tunnels in the North and coastal caves of the South, France's underground spaces have been associated through fiction with themes of political revolt, violent crime, symbolic purification, and scientific inquiry. The nineteenth century in particular saw the institutional and discursive rise of what William Whewell called the &quot;palaetiological sciences&quot;, in which inquiry into the (geological) past reveals the patterns of the present. Combined with France's turbulent Revolutionary history, these fields marked the national consciousness with the recurring notion of cyclical cataclysm. As the century progressed, positivist thought inflected the underground imaginary through scientific fictions of discovery and naturalist fictions of patriotic recovery. But despite surface ideology, each narrative text contains its own stratified layers and schistic rifts, which we will study through close analysis of subterranean spaces in novels by Hugo (Les Misérables), Berthet (Les Catacombes de Paris), Verne (Voyage au centre de la terre), Leroux (La double vie de Théophraste Longuet), Sand (Laura: Voyage dans le cristal) and Zola (Germinal). The seminar will also include secondary readings by figures like Nadar and Dumas and scholars like Williams, Rudwick, Harkness, Prendergast, and Pike.

Ancient India's two epic poems, composed in Sanskrit and received in dozens of languages over the span of two thousand years, continue to shape the psychic, social, and emotional worlds of millions of people around the world. The epic Mahabharata, which roughly translates to The Great Story of the Descendants of the Legendary King Bharata, is the longest single poem in the world (100,000 lines of Sanskrit verse) and tells the mythic history of dynastic power struggles in ancient India. An apocalyptic meditation on time, death, and the utter devastation brought upon the individual and the family unit through social disintegration, the epic also houses one of the great religious works of the world, The Bhagavad Gita (translation: The Song of God), which offers a buoy of hope and possibility in the dark ocean of the epic's violent narrative. The other great epic, The Ramayana (Rama's Journey), though essentially tragic, offers a brighter vision of human life, how it might be possible to live happily in an otherwise hopeless situation. It too is about struggles for power in ancient India but it offers characters--especially Rama-- that serve as ideals for how human beings might successfully negotiate life's great challenges. It also provides a model of human social order that contrasts with dystopic polities governed by animals and demons. Our course will engage in close reading of selections from both of these epic poems (in English translation, of course) and thus learn about the epic genre, its oral and textual forms in South Asia, and the numerous modes for interpreting the epic. We will also look at the reception of these ancient works in modern forms of media, such as the novel, television, theater, cinema and the comic book/anime. In the process, through selected essays and reflections, we will pay special attention to the ways in which the ancient epics remain deeply relevant in the modern world, reflecting on topics such as the aesthetics of war, the psychic life of social ideals, and creative responses to ethical conflicts.

This course will focus on prominent examples of the genres of tales and stories characteristic of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: lays, fabliaux, saints' lives, and novellas, which are among the most influential and widely distributed genres both in France and elsewhere. The success of these tales is a function of their origin in oral culture, their brevity, their wit, and their propensity for titillating, obscene, or even shocking subject matter. At the same time, though, their distinct blend of high and low culture provides modern readers with a window into the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern periods. The topics we will discuss include: The formal characteristics of each genre (narrative techniques, organizational principles), the ways in which seemingly disparate genres such as saints' lives and bawdy fabliaux can inform one another, how tales both follow and call into question the logic of exemplarity, according to which stories are meant to hold up good examples to be imitated and bad examples to be avoided, what representations of love, marriage, and sex can tell us about medieval and early modern conceptions of gender, how tales reflect developments in learned discourses such as theology, law, and medicine, how the same story can be told differently by multiple authors, and what these different versions can tell us about chronological, national, professional, and gender differences. While the primary focus of the course is on literature in French, particular attention is also given to the ways in which French short narrative fiction influences and is influenced by the larger medieval and early modern world, with a particular focus on England, Italy, and Spain. Moreover, English translations of all primary readings will be made available via Canvas, and in-class discussions will be designed to accommodate varying levels of ability in French. This course counts toward the graduate certificate in Global and Medieval Renaissance Studies.