(Although this seminar is scheduled to finish at 6.00, we will finish at the latest by 5.30 to allow participants to attend History of Material Text seminars. We will meet in the Kislak Center.) Gloss and commentary are the sinews and nerve system of medieval textuality. But so pervasive are these forms that we often take them for granted, consulting them for the data they can yield up about interpretive trends and future literary production. In this seminar we will look more closely at the formal, rhetorical, and material history of gloss and commentary, from late antiquity to the later Middle Ages, in Latin and vernacular traditions, in sacred and secular domains. We will also look at some non-Western fields of sacred commentary, including Qur’anic exegesis, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Hebrew bible, as well as any fields that the students in the seminar want to investigate. We will approach this subject through manuscripts in the Penn collections and from other collections online. The main topics we will cover can be summarized as follows: terminologies, formal properties, and character of gloss and commentary; the nature of large free-standing commentaries and examples of learned and literary texts that supported this particular form of critical approach; and interactions between text and commentary that gave rise to important theoretical understandings of letter and sense, literal and figurative (or allegorical) interpretation, authorial intention, and the interpretive control of the commentator. More particularly we will look at late antique and medieval definitions of gloss and commentary; ideological appropriations through the power of the gloss; the layout of commentaries (interlinear and marginal commentary vs. free-standing); commentators’ prologues; and the self-marking of commentators. What do expositors call their commentaries and how do they name their own roles? Under what constraints (legal, theological, philological) do commentators labor, and how do they mark those constraints? What conventions emerge for denoting commentative intertextuality? What kinds of texts tend to support free-standing commentaries, and under what conditions does a marginal commentary become a free-standing commentary? And finally, how does a successful commentary transform the reception of a literary or sacred text, or an intellectual tradition, and what role does its formal rhetoric play in reshaping the understanding of a text? We can (and will) cover these topics through glosses and commentaries that have been translated into English (or through English-language studies on them); but students who know various premodern languages can take these questions further into their own fields (and the readings can be adjusted according to individual inclinations). Non-medievalists are welcome. Classicists will find much to think about in studying medieval commentaries on classical texts; and early modernists/modernists will find important insights for their own work on the ages of print by studying the technologies of manuscript annotation and transmission. I hope that students working in non-Western traditions will find this seminar useful for their thinking and that they will present their materials to the group. We will also have ample opportunity to look at the importation of gloss and commentary systems into vernacular literatures.

This course provides the opportunity for students to investigate the relationship between the emergence of African peoples as historical subjects and their location within specific geopolitical and economic circumstances.

Edgar Allan Poe was considered a vulgar hack by many of his fellow Americans, but in 19th-century France, he was touted as an ill-fated poetic genius, the original poete maudit. Through the translations and biographical essays of Charles Baudelaire, who found in Poe a kindred spirit in the "gout de l'infini," French intellectuals came to know the American writer as a model of compositional lucidity and morbid mastery. From his inklings of an urban modernity in "The Man in the Crowd" to the nevrotic perversity of "Berenice," Poe's aesthetics have cast an influential shadow on French culture. Beginning with Baudelaire, we will explore in this course the many literary and artistic movements in France that were directly inspired by Poe's uncanny mix of the macabre and the methodical: Symbolist poetry (Valery, Mallarme), the Scientific Fantastic (Maupassant, Villers de l'Isle-Adam), fin-de-siecle Decadence (Huysmanns,Odilon Redon), Science Fiction, (Verne), the detective novel (Gaboriau), and 20th-century Surrealism (Breton, Max Ernst).

Yuri Slezkine described the twentieth century as a "Jewish Age"-to be modern would essentially mean to be a Jew. In German historical and cultural studies, this linkage has long been made--only in reference to the last years of the German monarchy and the time of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, what has become known as "modern" German culture-reflected in literature, music, and the visual arts and in a multitude of public media-has been more often than not assigned to Jewish authorship or Jewish subjects. But what do authorship and subject mean in this case? Do we locate the German-Jewish experience as the driving force of this new "modernity," or is our understanding of this experience the result of this new "modern" world?

This course will read, together, the literatures of northern India from approximately 1500–1947, as part of an effort to form a literary history of a multilingual space. How do literary cultures interact across time and in space? How can this interaction be tracked and analyzed? And how can a consideration of geographic scale, world-systems theory, and the idea of the “multilingual local” be brought to bear on the study of literature? This course will function as a laboratory for the exploration of these concepts, while allowing new ideas of literary history to emerge through the granular analysis of literature itself. Major subjects of interest will include the genesis of the Urdu language, the role of Bhakti religious movements in literary history, the establishment of Braj as a literary standard, and the development of Hindi and the language debates of the nationalist period. Readings will include primary sources in translation from Urdu, Braj, Avadhi, Hindi, and other relevant languages, as well as secondary literature in translation and in English. Expertise in South Asian languages or literatures is not required. Students will finish the course with a thorough understanding of the literary history of North India, as well as insight into problems of literature and geography.

This course explores the literal and literary landscapes of 19th-century Paris and Philadelphia, paying particular attention to the ways in which the built environment is shaped by and shapes shifting ideologies in the modern age. Although today the luxury and excesses of the "City of Light" may seem worlds apart from the Quaker simplicity of the "City of Brotherly Love," Paris and Philadelphia saw themselves as partners and mutual referents during the 1800s in many areas, from urban planning to politics, prisons to paleontology. This interdisciplinary seminar will include readings from the realms of literature, historical geography, architectural history, and cultural studies as well as site visits to Philadelphia landmarks, with a view to uncovering overlaps and resonances among different ways of reading the City. We will facilitate in-depth research by students on topics relating to both French and American architectural history, literature, and cultural thought.

Most seminars focus on literary texts composed during a single historical period;this course is unusual in inviting students to consider the challenges of approaching texts from a range of different historical eras. Taught by a team of literary specialists representing diverse periods and linguistic traditions and conducted as a hands-on workshop, this seminar is designed to help students of literature gain expertise in analysis and interpretation of literary works across the boundaries of time, geography, and language, from classic to modern. Students will approach literature as a historical discipline and learn about key methodological issues and questions that specialists in each period and field ask about texts that their disciplines study. The diachronic and cross-cultural perspectives inform discussions of language and style, text types and genres, notions of alterity, fictionality, literariness, symbolism, intertextuality, materiality, and interfaces with other disciplines. This is a unique opportunity to learn in one course about diverse literary approaches from specialists in different fields. Master classes are taught by Kevin Brownlee, Linda Chance, Eva del Soldato, Huda Fakhreddine, Scott Francis, Nili Gold, Bridget Murnghan, Deven Patel, Kevin Platt, Michael Solomon, Emily Steiner, Julia Verkholantsev, and Emily Wilson.

The purpose of this course is to examine the various modalities of interaction between anthropology and literature in modern French culture. Our guiding thesis is that the turn toward other cultures has functioned as a revitalizing element in the production of cultural artifacts while providing an alternative vantage point from which to examine the development of French culture and society in the contemporary period. The extraordinary innovations of "ethnosurrealism" in the twenties and thirties by such key figures of the avant-garde as Breton, Artaud, Bataille, Caillois, and Leiris, have become acknowledged models for the postwar critical thought of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, as well as inspiring a renewal of "anthropology as cultural critique in the United States." Besides the authors just indicated, key texts by Durkheim, Mauss and Levi-Strauss will be considered both on their own terms and in relation to their obvious influence. The institutional fate of these intellectual crossovers and their correlative disciplinary conflicts will provide the overarching historical frame for the course, from the turn of the century to the most recent debates.

This seminar will consider the possibilities of feminist theory in the wake of the resurgence of feminist politics in recent years, amidst the #MeToo and Black Live Matter movements and the prominence in the media of such issues as campus sexual assault and transgender rights. For a while in the first decade of the new millennium, academic journals and books were lamenting the demise of feminist criticism; the work published in the past decade has proven this demise illusory. Numerous important studies that engaged explicitly and directly with feminism has continued to appear, many of which brought feminism into dialogue with queer, trans*, affect, critical race, postcolonial, and new materialist theory. In this course, we will examine the interchange between popular and academic feminism, considering how recent feminist work at once engages with contemporary political questions and extends the purview of feminist theory. All students will write a conference-length paper and oral presentation.<br />