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.

This course’s objective is two-fold: to understand the rich tradition of Jewish Italian writers since the nineteenth century (including Enrico Castelnuovo, Umberto Saba, Italo Svevo, Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Edith Bruck, and Primo Levi), and to explore the notion of Jewish memory as an integral part of the cultural history of modern Italy. Whether writing about the process of Jewish integration in post-unification Italy, the Jewish communities in Turin and Ferrara, or the consequences of the Racial Laws and the tragic experience of the Shoah, these writers narrated crucial moments in the life of Italy’s modern society as a whole, and problematized the very notion of an Italian identity as seen from the perspective of a minority. Questions related to national identity and minority status will be discussed through readings by Renan, Gramsci, Maalouf, Gellner, among others. Italy has the oldest Jewish Diaspora in the western World: does a Jewish cultural legacy exist in Italian literature? What does the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature written by Jewish writers tell us about Italy’s relations with its oldest minority? Among the founding fathers of the Italian nation, a few wrote and fought for the legal and civic emancipation of Italian Jews (D’Azeglio, Tommaseo, Cattaneo), how did they reconcile the tension between the idea of equality for all citizens and the freedom of minorities to be different? And, finally, how do we understand today’s Italy and its multiethnic society considering the country’s history with its Jewish minority?<br />
This class will be taught in English and is open to undergraduate students with permission of the instructor

The continual exchanges between literature and film throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—from the Silent Shakespeares of the early 1900s to the 2013 Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying--have made it virtually impossible to study one without the other. Since 1895 the relationship between the two practices has evolved and changed dramatically, always as a measure of larger cultural, industrial, and aesthetic concerns. In addition to questions about “textual fidelity,” today the debates about the interactions of film and literature have opened and enriched innumerable textual case studies of adaptation but also pointed to larger concerns and debates which resonate more broadly across both literary studies and film studies. These include debates about the cultural and textual terms of authorship, about the economic and political pressures permeating any adaptation, about the literature’s appropriation of cinematic and other media structures. More broadly, today adaptation studies now move well beyond just literature and film, involving video games, YouTube mash ups, and numerous other textual and cultural activities that invigorate and complicate the importance of theories, practices, and histories of adaptation into the 21st century.<br />
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An introduction to major literary movements and authors from five areas of Francophonie: the Maghreb, West Africa, Central Africa, the Caribbean and Quebec.

How do we recognize materialism? This seminar poses this question by acknowledging &quot;materialism&quot; as a contested category with disparate and contradictory historical meanings: as a synonym for dogmatism, as the arch-enemy of reason and morality, as the scientific philosophy of the revolutionary workers' movement, as an alternative to (idealist) metaphysics, as a poetic practice, or as a central concern for material nature and environment, among others. Less concerned with enumerating philosophical systems, we will search out &quot;family resemblances&quot; and materialist tendencies among a wide range of texts. To this end, we will not only read the major historical texts of the so-called materialists (from Lucretius to Spinoza, from La Mettrie to Lenin), but also engage with materialism's supposed critics and antagonists (from Plato to Kant and Hegel). A special emphasis will be placed on the attempts to recuperate materialism as a positive category in recent critical theory and continental philosophy, for example, in the reinventions of Marxist and Spinozist traditions. We will also survey the attempts that found new traditions, such as aleatory materialism or various new materialisms. By reading exemplary literary texts that engage with the problem of materialism the seminar will also ask: can one speak of materialist poetics?

Topic for Fall 2017: &quot;Object Theory&quot;. This seminar will investigate the rise of and ongoing scholarly concern with &quot;objects&quot; and &quot;things,&quot; which has emerged from fields such as anthropology and art history as a category of renewed interest for literary scholars, too. We will investigate key contributions to theories of the object by thinkers such as: Mauss, Barthes, Heidegger, Latour, Benjamin, Bill Brown, Jane Bennett, among others. Literary readings will accompany these theoretical texts.

This course will provide an intensive introduction to the study of the novel, approaching the genre from a range of theoretical, critical, and historical perspectives. It may examine conflicting versions of the novel's history (including debates about its relationship to the making of the individual, the nation-state, empire, capital, racial and class formations, secularism, the history of sexuality, democracy, print and other media, etc.), or it may focus on theories of the novel, narratology, or a particular problem in novel criticism. It may attend to a specific form or subgenre of fiction, or it may comprise a survey of genres and texts.

This broadly interdisciplinary course is designed for Graduate and Undergraduate Fellows in the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) who hail from departments across Arts and Sciences as well as other schools at the university. The course is also open to others with permission of the instructors. Work in environmental humanities by necessity spans academic disciplines. By design, it can also address and engage publics beyond traditional academic settings. This seminar, with limited enrollment, explores best practices in public environmental humanities. Students receive close mentoring to develop and execute cross-disciplinary, public engagement projects on the environment.

This seminar will examine the mutual pressures and formations of religion, race, and sexuality in early modern poetry. How are spiritual and secular discourses of desire mutually constitutive? Is the experience of religious devotion, with its gender-fluid identifications and erotic raptures, ever anything but queer? To what extent does Christianity depend on, and even construct, racialized hierarchies? How does early modern theology disrupt the stable selfhood, self-satisfied morality, and monogamous attachment often assumed central to modern definitions of faith? Primary texts will include lyric poetry by Donne, Lock, Shakespeare, Lanyer, and Crashaw along with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost. All students will lead one seminar discussion and write one conference-length paper (10-12 pages).<br />
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Is power smart? Conventional models of power-- both in every day, common sense understandings and in academic studies-- tend to be instrumentalist .They understand power as a thoughtful exercise designed to achieve particular ends. But as we consider the political-cultural landscape, does the assumption that power is rational hold up? This seminar will examine and bring together an in-depth exploration of Michel Foucault's theory of power with contemporary affect theory and its relationship with Michel Foucault's theory of power to address this question. We will begin by mapping out Foucault's &quot;analytics of power,&quot; from his early work on power knowledge to his late work on embodiment, desire, and the care of the self. We will then turn to consider a series of interpretations of Foucault within contemporary affect theory, an approach which centralizes the non-rational, emotive force of power. Along the way, we will consider formations of sex, race, religion, material culture, and cinema. No previous knowledge of theory is required. Students will be encouraged to connect the theoretical frames of the class to their own fields and areas of interest.