In the last few decades, Haiti has been known on the global stage for its repeated calamities: earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts followed by floods and vice versa, dictatorships, cholera, civil unrest, etc. These media representations, which foreground trauma and failure, tend to overshadow a momentous revolutionary past as well as a long tradition of thriving avant-garde literary and artistic movements. These negative representations are part and parcel of a centuries-long practice of epistemic violence against Haiti that began well before it declared its independence from France in 1804, at the end of a bloody revolution. In this course, we will seek a more nuanced understanding of Haiti by exploring the concepts of life, death, and revolution in a selection of literary texts, essays, articles, documents, and films. Our interdisciplinary approach will allow us to discuss voodoo, the figure of the zombi, gender, the environment, modernity, and the relationship between politics and poetics. This course is taught in French and is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

This course on English-language children’s literature, from the nineteenth century to the present, will range all the way from the simplest picture-books, folk stories, and nursery rhymes to “grown-up” books commonly read by children and teens. We will explore both the form and content of these works in tandem with our study of the complexities of child-development from birth to early adulthood. Psychoanalysis and neuropsychoanalysis will provide our chief frames of reference for understanding early dependency, attachment, and object-relations; parenting and family life; creativity and play; curiosity and encountering the world; psycho-sexual development from infancy to post-adolescence; and childhood experiences of socialization, education, loss, abuse, transgenerational trauma, individuation, separation, and identity-formation. We will read works of children’s literature by authors such as Ludwig Bemelmans, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens, Madeleine L’Engle, John Green, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Ezra Jack Keates, Harper Lee, Astrid Lindgren, Mary McLane, A. A. Milne, George Orwell, J. K. Rowling, J. D. Salinger, Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, Kay Thompson, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and E. B. White. In tandem with these authors’ works, we will read psychoanalytic and neuropsychoanalytic writings by authors such as Sigmund and Anna Freud, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Melanie Klein, René Spitz, Joan Rivière, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, Jean Laplanche, Daniel Stern, Avgi Saketopoulou, Jan Panksepp, and Mark Solms. Course requirements will include several short writing assignments and a variety of in-class exercises, including an in-class presentation and active participation in seminar discussion. (No mid-term or final exams.)

This course will introduce you to Karl Marx in the context of his century, and it will consider the nineteenth century in turn through the lens of his revolutionary social analysis. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This course is a critical exploration of recent literary and cultural theory, usually focusing on one particular movement or school, such as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, or deconstruction. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

This course will provide an overview of critical theory related to the study of gender and/or sexuality. Different instructors will emphasize different topics within these fields. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

This seminar surveys the multiple components of literary culture in South Asia. Students will engage critically with selected studies of literary history and aeshetics from the past two millennia. In order to introduce students to specific literary cultures (classical, regional, contemporary) and to the scholarly practices that situate literature in broader contexts of culture and society, the course will focus both on the literary theories - especially from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - that position South Asia's literary cultures within broader disciplinary frameworks that use literary documents to inform social, historical and cultural research projects. The aim is to open up contexts whereby students can develop their own research projects using literary sources.

Please see department website for current description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/graduate/courses

Please see the department's website for current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

Topic title for Spring 2018: Walter Benjamin. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is a philosopher whose writings on art, literature, and politics have had tremendous influence on many disciplines in the Humanities and Social Studies. He has been variously described as one of the leading German-Jewish thinkers, and a secular Marxist theorist. With the publication of a four-volume collection of this works in English, many more of his writings have been made accessible to a wider public. Our seminar will undertake a survey of his work that begins with his studies on language and allegory, and continues with his autobiographical work, his writings on art and literature, and on the imaginary urban spaces of the nineteenth-century.

The present course will discuss German literature and thought from the period of the French Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century, and put it into a European context.
In regard to German literature, this is the period that leads from the Storm and Stress and Romanticism to the political period of the Vormärz, Realism, and finally Expressionism; in philosophy, it moves from German Idealism to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and neo-Kantian thought. It is also the period that saw the rise of the novel, and new forms of dramatic works. Painting moved out of the studio into plein air; the invention of photography made an imprint on all arts, and the rise of the newspaper led to new literary genres such as the feuilleton. Economically, Germany experienced the industrial revolution; politically, it was striving for a unification that was finally achieved in 1871. The nineteenth century saw the establishment of the bourgeoisie, the emergence of the German working class, and the idea of the nation state; it also saw Jewish emancipation, and the call for women’s rights.
Readings will focus on a variety of literary, political, and philosophical texts; and consider a selection of art works.