This course offers an overview of the ancient, medieval, and early modern rhetorical traditions, and aims to work very broadly across cultural and textual histories. It should be useful for any students working in early and later periods (including post-Renaissance) who want a grounding in the intellectual and institutional history of rhetoric, the "discourse about discourse" that was central to curricular formation, aesthetics, politics, ideas of history, and ideas of cannons. We will read materials from sophistic rhetoric, from Plato and Aristotle, from Cicero, Quintilian, and rhetorical theoriests from late antiquity (including Augustine); we will work through medieval materials from monastic and cathedral schools to the universities, considering how Ciceronian rhetoric carries an overwhelming influence into Middle Ages; we will consider the professional stratification of various kinds of rhetorical production and theory in the late Middle Ages and look at some crucial literary embodiments of rhetoric as disciplinary force.

This course is for graduate students and undergraduates with permission of the instructor. All students enrolled must have knowledge of at least one language other than English. We will study the history, theory and practice of literary translation, and participate in it. Readings will include theoretical works in translation studies, using selections from Lawrence Venuti's Translation Studies Reader and Schulte/Biguenet's Translation Theory Reader, with some supplemental readings; we will also look at comparative cases of multiple translations of the same original, and analyze how different translators make different interpretative/formal/aesthetic choices. Course assignments will include both a research paper, on the history and/or theory of translation, and an extended practical translation exercise, to be workshopped over the course of the semester, consisting of a literary translation of a text of the student's choice.

What is being a man, being a woman, being masculine, being feminine, being neither, being both? Is sex about pleasure, domination, identity, reproduction, or something else? Are sexual orientation and gender identity innate? How can words, myths and stories inform cultural assumptions about sex and gender? Did people in ancient times have a concept of sexuality? How do gendered English terms (like "girly", "effeminate", or "feisty") compare to gendered ancient Greek and Latin terms, like virtus, which connotes both "virtue" and "masculinity"? Why did the Roman and English speaking worlds have to borrow the word "clitoris" from the ancient Greeks? How did people in antiquity understand consent? Can we ever get access to the perspectives of ancient women? In this introductory undergraduate course, we will learn about sex and gender in ancient Greece and Rome. We will discuss similarities and differences between ancient and modern attitudes, and we will consider how ancient texts, ancient art, ancient ideas and ancient history have informed modern western discussions, assumptions and legislation. Our main readings will be of ancient texts, all in English translation; authors studied will include Ovid, Aristophanes, Plato, Euripides, and Sappho. Class requirements will include participation in discussion as well as quizzes, reading responses, and a final exam.

This course offers a broad introduction to the study of Latina/o/x culture. We will examine literature, theater, visual art, and popular cultural forms, including murals, poster art, graffiti, guerrilla urban interventions, novels, poetry, short stories, and film. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality as they shape Latino/a/xs' experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course will include immigration and border policy, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, Latinx feminisms, queer latinidades, ideology, identity formation, and social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English.

You cannot build a wall to stop the free flow of literary and creative ideas. But in constructing narratives of national identity, states have long adopted particular texts as &quot;foundational.&quot; Very often these texts have been epics or romances designated &quot;medieval,&quot; that is, associated with the period in which specific vernaculars or &quot;mother tongues&quot; first emerged. France and Germany, for example, have long fought over who &quot;owns&quot; the Strasbourg oaths, or the Chanson de Roland; new editions of this epic poem, written in French but telling of Frankish (Germanic) warriors, have been produced (on both sides) every time these two countries go to war. In this course we will thus study both a range of &quot;medieval&quot; texts and the ways in which they have been claimed, edited, and disseminated to serve particular nationalist agendas. Particular attention will be paid to the early nineteenth century, and to the 1930s. Delicate issues arise as nations determine what their national epic needs to be. Russia, for example, needs the text known as The Song of Igor to be genuine, since it is the only Russian epic to predate the Mongol invasion. The text was discovered in 1797 and then promptly lost in Moscow's great fire of 1812; suggestions that it might have been a fake have to be handled with care in Putin's Russia. Similarly, discussing putative Mughal (Islamic) elements in so-called &quot;Hindu epics&quot; can also be a delicate matter. Some &quot;uses of the medieval&quot; have been exercised for reactionary and revisionist causes in the USA, but such use is much more extravagant east of Prague. And what, exactly, is the national epic of the USA? What, for that matter, of England? Beowulf has long been celebrated as an English Ur-text, but is set in Denmark, is full of Danes (and has been claimed for Ulster by Seamus Heaney). Malory's Morte Darthur was chosen to provide scenes for the queen's new robing room (following the fire that largely destroyed the Palace of Westminster in 1834), but Queen Victoria found the designs unacceptable: too much popery and adultery. Foundations of literary history still in force today are rooted in nineteenth-century historiography: thus we have The Cambridge History of Italian Literature and The Cambridge History of German Literature, each covering a millennium, even though political entities by the name of Italy and Germany did not exist until the later nineteenth century. What alternative ways of narrating literary history might be found? Itinerary models, which do not observe national boundaries, might be explored, and also the cultural history of watercourses, such as the Rhine, Danube, or Nile. The exact choice of texts to be The exact choice of texts to be studied will depend in part on the interests of those who choose to enroll. Faculty with particular regional expertise will be invited to visit specific classes.<br />
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Candidate texts:<br />
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Ireland, The Cattle Raid of Cooley, medieval legends of the Red Hand of Ulster, the &quot;great books&quot; written in Irish houses that were later taken to England (but returned).<br />
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Iceland, Egil's Saga (key to independence movements in the 1930s); the unique &quot;repatriation&quot; of Icelandic texts by Denmark in the 1970s.<br />
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Wales, Mabinogion; Eisteddfod culture.<br />
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Italy, the tre corone (Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, a medieval group formalised by Bembo in the sixteenth century to represent a &quot;stable&quot; model for Italy. Also: the Aeneid as national Italian epic; the cult of Catherine of Siena as a national saint in the 1930s.<br />
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England: Beowulf, Malory, Spenser, Milton?<br />
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France/ Germany/ Anglo-Norman England: La Chanson de Roland<br />
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USA: Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, The Birth of a Nation (with its wacky and vile &quot;medievalism&quot;), The Big Sea (crossing from Europe to discover the Renaissance in Harlem)? <br />
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Uzbekistan, Dede Korkut<br />
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Turkey, Iskandersname (epic of Alexander, a figure claimed by many national literatures)<br />
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Hungary, myths and legends of St Stephen (including the &quot;Crown of Hungary&quot; in the parliament building: it is now illegal, in Hungary, to research this object).<br />
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Spain: El Cid, or the Libro de buen amor?<br />
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Israel: the Bible (its history is its religion, its religion is its history; Ruth, Esther, Tobit, and Judith as historical novels)?<br />
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Iran/ Persia: Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds<br />
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territory unbounded: The Shahnameh (&quot;Persian Epic as World Literature,&quot; Hamid Dabashi)<br />
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Japan, The Tale of Genji (the paradox of a female-authored national text)<br />
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China, novelle of the Tang dynasty (featuring the misadventures of students studying for exams)