This course, wholly conducted in English translation from the Sanskrit, will identify a history of *masterpieces* from the Sanskrit tradition and carefully read selections or whole works that exemplify the most well-received classical Sanskrit works over the past two millennia. We will focus on the high classics of Sanskrit literature, sutras and commentaries on systematic forms of Indian philosophy, and selections from Sanskrit texts on the social, literary-critical, exact, and medical sciences. Students will be encouraged to engage with these works through the prisms of comparative literary theory, critical translation studies, comparative philosophy, and broader perspectives of social and cultural history.

Lonely bureaucrats and love-struck students, Bollywood stars and wayward revolutionaries: this course introduces students to the worlds of the Indian novel. From the moment of its emergence in the 19th century, the novel in India grappled with issues of class and caste, colonialism and its aftermath, gender, and the family. Although the novel has a historical origin in early modern Europe, it developed as a unique form in colonial and post-colonial India, influenced by local literary and folk genres. How did the novel in India--and in its successor states after 1947--transform and shift in order to depict its world? How are novels shaped by the many languages in which they are written, including English? And how do we, as readers, engage with the Indian novel in its diversity? This course surveys works major and minor from the past 200 years of novel-writing in India--with surveys both into predecessors of the Indian novel and parallel forms such as the short story. Readings will include works in translation from languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Urdu, Telugu, and Malayalam, as well as works written originally in English. Students will leave this course with an understanding of the Indian novel, along with the social conditions underlaying it, especially those relating to caste and gender.

Premodern India produced some of the world's greatest myths and stories: tales of gods, goddesses, heroes, princesses, kings and lovers that continue to capture the imaginations of millions of readers and hearers. In this course, we will look closely at some of these stories especially as found in Purana-s, great compendia composed in Sanskrit, including the chief stories of the central gods of Hinduism: Visnu, Siva, and the Goddess. We will also consider the relationship between these texts and the earlier myths of the Vedas and the Indian Epics, the diversity of the narrative and mythic materials within and across different texts, and the re-imagining of these stories in the modern world.

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

Scholars in queer studies have contributed powerful critiques of the disciplines and of academic business as usual. For this reason, we might see the field as being anti-method rather than producing alternative or counter-methods. This course explores the paradox of producing positive knowledge in the absence of or in opposition to disciplinary dictates about what counts as knowledge. We will consider queer and feminist studies alongside other inter- and anti-disciplinary formations including critical race studies, disability studies, border studies, transgender studies, affect studies, and feminist science studies. Acknowledging the extent to which queer and feminist scholarship incorporate the work of traditional disciplines, we will consider several ethical and methodological cruxes in these fields. We will focus on a range of methodological experiments in these fields including critiques of historicism, the affective turn, queer materialism, surface reading, memoir, low and high theory, queer empiricism, extravagant formalism, and assemblage theory, among others, and will attend to the ways that academic institutionalization has shaped these fields. In addition to many articles across these fields, we will read a set of example texts that mix traditional and experimental methods (Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love). **Note: This course does not presume prior knowledge, but familiarity with queer, feminist, transgender, and critical race studies (as well as cultural studies more broadly) will certainly make things smoother. That said, the course is designed to serve as an introduction—albeit a challenging one—to the interdisciplinary field of queer studies (with a focus on literary studies). <br />

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 transmission; Composition and context; Sources for the ‘Secret History’; Genealogies and paternal and maternal descent; Fratricide and empire; Narrative and chronotope; Secrecy and public history. All readings will be in English.