This course critically examines the way in which "survival" has been/continues to be defined as individual triumph in the 20th and 21st century. The intent here is to dig deeper into current buzzwords like "resilience," "wellness," "grit," and "care" to ask how such concepts have been constructed in different socio-historical moments, by and for whom, and towards what (social, cultural, political, economic) ends. We will pay special attention to the central role that the child plays in these discourses as an icon of both ultimate vulnerability and idealized resilience, and we'll consider the burdens and privileges that such centering might confer upon real-life children. We engage with a generically diverse body of contemporary multiethnic and transnational literature featuring children and young people in crisis, including texts from Black, Latine, Native, Asian and White U.S. writers as well as Dutch, Argentine, Iranian, Malaysian, and Afghan authors. All non-English texts will be read in English translation, with the option for students to read in the original language if they wish and are able. Learning to dialogue across cultures and learning from such interactions with these texts and one other will be an essential part of our approach to exploring these complex questions.

Karl Marx’s masterpiece Capital received little attention at the time of its publication, but gained new life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The afterlives of Capital, however, took disparate forms across different regions and traditions globally: while working on the same text, these traditions gave rise to conflicting and contradictory interpretations, antagonistic dialogues, and cross-disciplinary encounters. This seminar will examine a series of exemplary interpretations of Capital with attention to detail in order to clarify the stakes of different readings and pose the question of relevance of Marx’s masterpiece for the contemporary moment. We will investigate how political conjunctures, regional specificities, and ideological concerns shape disparate modes and cultures of reading. We will also examine how Capital is transfigured through the lens of disciplines such as literary studies and comparative literature, philosophy, political science, postcolonial studies, and economics. We will also pose the question of philosophical genealogies of Capital, tracing how divergent philosophical backgrounds inflect the reconfigurations of Marx’s thought, e.g., in examining “Hegelian,” “Spinozist,” and “Epicurian” readings. The topics may include, but are not limited to, the following regions and traditions: France (Louis Althusser group), Italy (Mario Tronti and autonomia tradition), and Germany (Neue Marx Lektüre); Soviet Union (Isaak Rubin, Evald Ilyenkov); Bolivia (Alvaro Garcia Linera), and Argentina (Ernesto Laclau). Finally, we will engage with the most recent readings of Capital in the twenty-first century in the works of thinkers such as Sylvia Federici, Michael Heinrich, and A. Kiarina Kordela, among others.

In this course we will consider texts that become "national epics," texts that in some sense come to "represent" a nation. How and when might such imaginative texts emerge? Nations change, and old poems may no longer serve. Can the Song of Roland, once compulsory study for all schoolchildren in France, still be required reading today-- especially if I am French Muslim? What about El Cid in Spain? How do some texts-- such as the Mahabharata in India, or Journey to the West in China-- seem more adaptable than others? The course begins in western Europe, but then pivots across Eurasian space to become gradually more global. Most all of us have complex family histories: Chinese-American, French Canadian, Latino/a/x, Jewish American, Pennsylvania Dutch, Lenni Lenape. Some students may choose to investigate, for their final project, family histories (and hence their own, personal connection to "national epics").

Deception and lies are a constant theme and a mechanism of narrative art. For a genre literally synonymous with falsehood, fiction has always been touchy about its relationship to truth: Does the novel neutrally represent reality or does it recreate it? Are characters like living, breathing real people, or are they mere simulations? And if they’re just words on a page (or images on a screen), why are we so moved by their adventures, loves and misfortunes? In this class, we will explore and expand on these questions by focusing on novels and films that deal explicitly and exclusively with fakers, shapeshifters and doppelgangers, lies of necessity and of opportunity, as well as with works that revel in exposing their own manipulative artificiality. We will read psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers, and postcolonial thinkers and ask, What does it mean to be authentic? How malleable are our individual identity, race, gender and sexuality? What forces shape it, and how constant is this shape? Are we the same selves when we have a conversation as when we give a presentation? Do we remain ourselves when we talk to customers at our service jobs, to teachers, to students? When we “pass” as a different race? When we speak in a different accent? How do we reconcile the conflicting demands of “be yourself” and “fake it till you make it”? What is the relation between our presentation of ourselves and our selves?
Novels and shorts stories for discussion might include classics like Nella Larsen’s Passing, Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as movies like Gaslight, The Battle of Algiers, The Yes Men, and American Psycho. While much of the weekly work in this class will be reading-and-discussion based, oral presentations – keenly aware of their own artifice – will count toward half of the final grade. A final oral presentation will be based on a creative project in conversation with class materials.
The course would satisfy those interested in fulfilling the Advanced Film and Literature and Global Literature and Film requirements.
This is a CWiC course, Communication Within the Curriculum.

This course will introduce students to the historical and intellectual forces that led to the emergence of queer theory as a distinct field, as well as to recent and ongoing debates about gender, sexuality, embodiment, race, privacy, global power, and social norms. We will begin by tracing queer theory's conceptual heritage and prehistory in psychoanalysis, deconstruction and poststructuralism, the history of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, woman-of-color feminism, the feminist sex wars, and the AIDS crisis. We will then study the key terms and concepts of the foundational queer work of the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, we will turn to the new questions and issues that queer theory has addressed in roughly the past decade. Students will write several short papers.