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.

An exploration of the poetics of narrative, with particular emphasis on classical and postclassical narratology. To be analyzed are texts by Maupassant, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Taught in English.

This course will focus on Marxist thought as it has developed around the world from the 19th century to the present. Different instructors may emphasize difference aspects of Marxism and its legacy. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

The default setting of much critical work has been global: the global premodern, global modernism, and so on. But we are currently experiencing deglobalisation, a return to national boundaries, with restrictions on physical movement, prompted by anxieties about fuel self-sufficiency, vaccination supply, migration patterns, economic dependency. It thus seems timely to examine the cultural and historical mechanisms of nationalism. This course draws from some of the conceptual and material challenges of a research project of global scope, nationalepics.com, which has invited over 100 scholars to consider which cultural texts, most often literature but sometimes film, have been adopted to represent a territory as its national epic. When was this choice made? How did the chosen text emerge? Is it still fit for purpose, or do new texts threaten to take its place? The Song of Roland, for example, was made compulsory reading in all French schools, and French colonial schools, in the late 19th-century. Can it still, with its anti-Muslim polemics, be taught in Paris? When did The Song of Hiawatha, assuredly an American national epic a century ago, become a national embarrassment in the USA? Is El Cid, a favourite of General Franco, making a comeback with the return of the Spanish right? Is Mahabharata, always already India’s national epic, able to outlast the co-optative efforts of the current Indian regime? Many “national epics” first emerged c. 1800, especially in western Europe, often through the intensive collecting, editing, and repurposing of premodern texts. Our course begins out west, with Spain, France, Ireland, England, and Iceland, before pivoting across Eurasian space to Iran, Russia and Mongolia, and then China, Korea, and Vietnam. The latter part of the course can consider locales as chosen by class members; past locales include the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, Scotland, Italy. This is not a class in “world literature,” but it does enter into debates between those who champion and market such a concept, and those (Emily Apter, Gayatri Spivak) who would critique it. Valuing philology highly, it draws upon the local linguistic expertise of students and Faculty. Courses such as this are proving increasingly attractive to undergraduates, given Penn’s globalising demographic, and we will also consider the challenges of formulating and teaching courses where most every student can be “expert for a week,” tracing long strands of family history. Examination by several short meditations, plus the workshopping and writing of one long (but not too long) research essay.

Advanced undergraduate students interested in this course should request permission from the instructor and submit a permit request via Path@Penn

This course analyzes acclaimed autobiographical graphic narratives-- also called nonfiction comics or graphic memoirs-- from a transnational and global perspective, focusing on works from East Asia, Latin America, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The course will include academic research essays, a short presentation, and guest artists and lectures. The class will conclude with a hands-on creative project which allows students to use the skills they learned and apply it towards the creation of short non-fiction graphic essays. There will also be events connected to the April 2024 CIMS Wolf Colloquium, Art and Revolution Today, which will feature a roundtable and events with local cartoonists and visual artists. Advanced undergraduate students interested in taking this course should request permission from the instructor and submit a permit request via Path@Penn

What is Italian philosophy? Does Italian philosophy have a peculiar character? Can we speak of "Italian philosophy" if Italy became a unified country only recently, and its history is complex and fragmented? Yet “Italian Thought” and its genealogy are central to today’s theoretical debates on concepts such as biopolitics, reproductive labor and “empire” among others. This course will offer a diachronic review of the most important Italian thinkers, highlighting the political vocation of Italian philosophy, and its engagement with history and science, while discussing the modern supporters and opponents of the “Italian Thought” category. Readings might include Dante, Machiavelli, Bruno, Vico, Beccaria, Gramsci, Cavarero and Agamben among others.

What do theorists and historians of narrative have to contribute to the study of environments and of human/nonhuman relations? How might recent developments in environmental studies unsettle or reshape our models of plot, narratorial modes, narrative genres, suspense, protagonism, character, and character-space? And what are the limits of narrative in getting to grips with pressing environmental questions? This seminar explores the estuary where narrative and environment mix. Through primary and secondary readings we’ll consider environment as, variously, object and subject of narration, event, condition, and actant in plot. We’ll take up narrative’s provisions and limitations as a channel for environmental thinking and environmental justice. And we’ll pay special attention to the narrative elements of scholarship in the environmental humanities, tracing how the writers of article- and book-length studies in the field stage, pace, protagonize, and emplot their arguments. Advanced undergraduate students interested in this course should contact the instructor to request permission to enroll and submit a permit request via Path@Penn. Submatriculated M.A. students may enroll without special permission.

This course will explore fantasy and the fantastic in short tales of 19th- and 20th-century French literature. A variety of approaches -- thematic, psychoanalytic, cultural, narratological -- will be used in an attempt to test their viability and define the subversive force of a literary mode that contributes to shedding light on the dark side of the human psyche by interrogating the "real," making visible the unseen and articulating the unsaid. Such broad categories as distortions of space and time, reason and madness, order and disorder, sexual transgressions, self and other will be considered. Readings will include "recits fantastiques" by Merimee, Gautier, Nerval, Maupassant, Breton, Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jean Ray and others.

This seminar will examine contemporary affect theory and its relationship with Michel Foucault's theory of power. We will begin by mapping out Foucault's "analytics of power," 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 affect theory, an approach which centralizes the non-rational, emotive force of power. No previous knowledge of theory is required.

The language that we know today as Old Church Slavonic was invented, along with the Slavic alphabet(s), in the 9th century by two Greek scholars, Sts. Cyril and Methodius. They had been tasked by the Byzantine Emperor with bringing the Christian faith to the Slavic-speaking people of Great Moravia, a powerful medieval state in central Europe. From there, literacy, along with the Christian faith, spread to other Slavs, and even non-Slavic speakers, such as Lithuanians and Romanians. Church Slavonic and its regional variants were used to compose the oldest texts of the Slavic-speaking world, which today is comprised of Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russia, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Knowledge of this language and tradition aids in understanding the cultural, literary, and linguistic history of any modern Slavic language. For learners of Russian and other Slavic languages, Church Slavonic provides a layer of elevated stylistic vocabulary and conceptual terminology, similar to, and even greater than, the role of Latin and Greek roots in the English language. For historical linguists, Church Slavonic provides unique material for comparison with other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. For medievalists and cultural historians, it opens the door into the Slavic Orthodox tradition that developed in the orbit of the Byzantine Commonwealth.