In this course, we will examine a representative sample of premodern women’s writing in French, beginning in the Middle Ages and concluding in the Revolutionary Era. The authors studied come from differing walks of life, social classes, and religious and political identifications, and they express themselves in a wide variety of genres, including short stories, fairy tales, lyric poetry, letters, plays, and novels. Despite their many differences, these authors are united by a common tendency to question a centuries-old tradition of misogynistic discourse, patriarchal social order, and gender normativity.
Authors to be studied include:
- Marie de France (ca. 1160), a brilliant storyteller and poet attached to the court of Henry II of England whose fabulous tales, arguably an early form of speculative fiction, imagine alternatives to the rigidity of arranged marriages and the heterosexual couple.
- Christine de Pizan (1364–ca. 1430), a court writer for Charles VI of France and several other powerful patrons who is often considered France’s first professional female writer. Her Livre de la Cité des Dames (Book of the City of Ladies) systematically refutes the misogynistic pronouncements of learned male authors and holds up devotion and religious life as alternatives to accepting the assigned role of wife and mother.
- Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), the sister of Francis I of France and a prolific author of devotional poetry, plays, and the Heptaméron, a collection of tales modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron and known for its often shocking subject matter. Throughout her oeuvre, she calls into question the social perception of women rooted in misogynistic discourse, as well as the tendency to blame sexual violence on women, while at the same time revealing the potential danger of masculinity for men and women alike and envisioning Pauline Christianity as a means of radical equality.
- Pernette du Guillet (1520–1545), Louise Labé (c. 1524–1566), and Anne de Marquets (1533–1588), three poets who respond to and write against the male-centered tradition of Petrarchan love poetry. Guillet and Labé stand out for their frank and often sensual depictions of female desire and sexuality in spite of taboos against their public expression, while Marquets, a Dominican nun at the convent of Poissy, combines Petrarchan, devotional, and mystic tropes to envision religious life as an alternative to the heteronormativity of lay French society and the Protestant Reformation.
- Madame de Lafayette (1634–1693) and Madame de Sévigné (1626–1696), whose writings are of monumental importance in the history of literature in French as well as invaluable testimonies to the role played by women in the intellectual developments of the early modern period, including salons, Jansenism, and free-thinking (libertinism).
- Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (1685–1755), author of the first known version of La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast), who, along with other female authors of fairy tales, used the conventions of the genre to challenge social conventions and criticize the treatment of women.
- Claire de Duras (1777–1828), whose novel Ourika, much like Villeneuve’s La belle et la bête, shows how feminist concerns might intersect with colonialism and race; a bestseller in its day, it is one of the first works in French to feature a complex and articulate black narrator and what many scholars consider to be a modern outlook on race and identity.
To provide historical and theoretical context, these readings will be supplemented with relevant primary and secondary sources, as well as with modern and contemporary adaptations, such as illustrations and films. The course is open to graduate students and to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor. Discussions will be in English. Readings will be made available both in the original French and in English translation, and final papers may be writte

This is a comparative course on medieval stylistic practices, formal innovations, and especially theories of form. Our common ground will be the theories that were generated in learned and pedagogical traditions of medieval literary cultures of Europe and pre-modern India (with their roots in ancient thought about poetic form). We will also collaborate on the particulars of the vernacular cultures that stamped their interests on the interplay of language, genre, and form. Questions common to all the literary traditions may be the social, ethical, and epistemological roles of poetry. Other common questions include the distinctively medieval terms of interpretive theory and practice; technologies of interpretation; theories of fiction; the histories of the language arts; transformations of the terminology of figurative language; grammatical orthopraxis and permitted “deviation”; and material texts. As we turn from interpretive to generative categories, we will consider how arts of poetry find their linguistic and stylistic focus in the vocabularies of individual vernacular traditions.

In this seminar, we will study a number of films (mainly feature films, but also a few documentaries) that deal with the complicated nexus of issues that have come to be discussed under the rubric of “globalization.” See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

In this course we will consider the writing, publication, and reading of texts created on both sides of the Atlantic in early modern times, from the era of Gutenberg to that of Franklin, and in many languages. The seminar will be held in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in Van Pelt Library and make substantial use of its exceptional, multilingual collections, including early manuscripts, illustrated books, plays marked for performance, and censored books. Any written or printed object can be said to have a double nature: both textual and material. We will introduce this approach and related methodologies: the history of the book; the history of reading; connected history; bibliography; and textual criticism. We will focus on particular case studies and also think broadly about the global history of written culture, and about relations between scribal and print culture, between writing and reading, between national traditions, and between what is and what is not “literature.” We encourage students with diverse linguistic backgrounds to enroll. As part of the seminar, students will engage in a research project which can be based in the primary source collections of the Kislak Center. History Majors or Minors may use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, or Latin America geographic requirement if that region is the focus of their research paper.

Contemporary newspapers are packed with articles about the devastating effects of climate change and industrial pollution. This course explores what short stories and novels written in twentieth century Korea have to say about the changing ecology of the peninsula. More specifically, how do laboring bodies contribute to, and also, resist the creation of unsustainable local ecologies? The fiction we read is primarily concerned with how gendered bodies labor with the land in response to the contemporaneous socio-political climate including colonialcapitalism, national division, industrialization, authoritarianism, democracy, and neoliberalism.
We will read works that capture the everyday experience of laborers, gendered violence, and the ecological repercussions of nation-building projects through the lens of modern Korean literature. Throughout the course, students will develop their critical thinking skills in speaking and writing about the ecological, ethical, and political implications of literature. This course is interdisciplinary and encourages students to incorporate methodologies from their own fields of expertise and apply them to the class assignments. Materials are all in English and no prerequisite is necessary to enroll.

Since several years, the societal and cultural reality of multilingualism has become an important research field in linguistics and literary studies, as in cultural studies more generally. This graduate course will investigate how multilingual poetics challenge and resist paradigms and ideologies of innate monolingualism, linguistic mastery, absolute translatability and monocultural nationalism.
To begin with, the course will introduce central aspects of scholarship on literature and multilingualism, covering concepts such as heteroglossia, code switching, translingualism and macaronic language, and debates such as those on world literature, global English, foreignization, (un)translatability and non-translation, including their political and ethical importance.
After a brief historical overview, glancing at western literary multilingualism in the Middle Ages, Romanticism and the avantgarde, the course will mainly focus on literature of the late 20th and 21st centuries taken from Germanic and Romance linguistic contexts. Using an exemplary selection, the course will cover prose, poetry and drama, and include excerpts of texts by authors such as Andrea Camilleri, Gino Chiellino, Fikry El Azzouzi, Ernst Jandl, Jackie Kay, Çağlar Köseoğlu, Monique Mojica, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Olivier Rolin, Yoko Tawada, Nicoline van Harskamp, and others. Reading these texts, we will try to determine how multilingualism manifests itself (linguistically, discursively, rhetorically, thematically, contextually etc.) and how the texts engage with linguistic, cultural and social pluralities. The course will conclude with a focus on the translator as a central character in fictional prose and movies.
Classes will take place in an interactive format that stimulates discussion and exchange. Students will get the respective excerpts – both in the original version and in English translation – one week at a time so that they can prepare themselves each week for the discussion. Theoretical and contextual information will be provided via Power Point presentations.

What do Hamilton, RuPaul’s Drag Race, political protest, TikTok Ratatouille, and Queen Elizabeth’s funeral have in common? They all compose repertoires of performance. From artistic performances in theatres, galleries, and concert halls to an individual’s comportment in everyday life, to sporting events, celebrations, courtroom proceedings, performance studies explores what happens when embodied activities are repeatable and given to be seen. In this course we ask: what is performance? How do we describe, analyze, and interpret it? What do theatre and everyday life have in common? How does performance legitimize or challenge the exercise of power? How has social media shifted our understanding of the relationship of our daily lives to performance? How does culture shape what is considered to be performance and how it functions? What isn’t performance?
Throughout the semester students will apply key readings in performance theory to case studies drawn from global repertoires of contemporary and historical performance. In addition to analyzing artistic performances, we will also consider sporting events, celebrations, political events, and the performance of everyday life. We will attend to the challenges provoked by performance’s embodied, ephemeral, affective, effective, relational, and contingent aspects. Coursework will include discussion posts, class facilitation, and the opportunity to choose between a research paper or creative project for the final assessment.

This course is an introduction to and exploration of modern East Asian literatures and cultures through close readings and discussion of selected literary works from the early 20th century to the start of the 21st century. Focusing on China, Japan, and Korea, we will explore the shared and interconnected experiences of modernity in East Asia as well as broaden our perspective by considering the location of East Asian cultural production within a global modernity. Major issues we will encounter include: nation-building and the modern novel; cultural translation; media and technology; representations of gender, race, and class; history and memory; colonialism; war; body and sexuality; globalization. No knowledge of the original language is required.

This seminar provides an overview and introduction to the cinema of Luis Buñuel with a particular focus on the Spanish filmmaker’s engagement with Surrealism. Drawing on the expertise of Professors Ignacio Javier López and Michael Solomon, each seminar session will unfold in two parts: first, Solomon will offer a general introductory lecture and discussion covering various aspects of Buñuel’s filmography including technical and formal analyses that touch on cinematic form, montage, and adaptation, and a contextualization of Buñuel’s cinema within the Spanish, Mexican, Latin American, and European (inter) national cinemas and cinematic movements; second, López will offer a close examination of individual films focusing on Buñuel’s longstanding ties with (the ideas of) Surrealism from the movement’s initial moment of scandal and provocation—understood by its participants as a new philosophy, a new way of seeing in an endless process of discovery—to a second moment in which Surrealism admits its failure to enact its revolutionary goals. Films covered in the seminar include Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), L’Age d’or (1930) Menjant garotes, Las Hurdes/Terre sans pain (1933/36) Los Olvidados (1950) Susana (1951) Ensayo de un crimen (1955), Death in the Garden (1956), Nazarín (1959), Viridiana (1961) The Exterminating Angel (1962), Belle de jour (1967), Tristana (1970), and Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Students will start working early on a final project (seminar paper), reworking the draft several times during the semester.

This course introduces students to critical animal studies via medieval literature and culture. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.