The invention of new communications technologies is often accompanied by a swell of hope. Enthusiasts expect people to become more connected, new ideas to become more accessible, and information to be shared more rapidly and in more fixed forms than ever before. While there are always nay-sayers, who warn against the effects of such inventions, the narrative linking new communications technologies and progress is so strong that these detractors are most commonly painted as luddites, and the narrative itself is used to justify and promote yet newer media as well as new configurations of state and media relations.
In this class, we will examine some of the most significant transformations in the history of communications technology—from orality to writing, from tablet to scroll to codex, manuscript to print, hand-press to steam-press, print to radio, radio to tv, and tv to streaming and other forms of new media. We will ask some basic questions: How were these technologies made? How and by whom were these technologies used? How did contemporaries perceive them and the transformations they did or did not work? We will also ask some bigger questions: why do certain communications technologies emerge and get adopted when and where they do? Conversely, why are some communications technologies resisted at some times and in some places? What impacts do communications technologies have on the societies in which the appear? Do they alter the course of events? Do they change the way in which we think? If so, then how? Is the history of communication substitutive or additive? How is the digital age in which we live similar to or different from those that came before?
History Majors may use this course to fulfill the pre-1800 requirement depending on the topic of their research paper.

This course will survey what has come to be known in literary and cultural studies as "theory" by tracking the genealogies of a select range of contemporary practices of interpretation. We will address the following questions. What are some of the historical and rhetorical conditions of emergence for contemporary critical theories of interpretation? What does it mean to interpret literature and culture in the wake of the grand theoretical enterprises of the modern period? How do conceptions of power and authority in literature and culture change as symbolic accounts of language give way to allegorical and performative accounts? How might we bring frameworks of globality and translation to bear on literary and cultural criticism? Half of the course sessions will involve the instructor and the students reading texts that represent a range of hermeneutic approaches, in classical and contemporary forms. For the other half of the class, we will welcome one visiting instructor per week from the Comparative Literature faculty, who will assign readings and lead discussion on their own area(s) of specialization.
The central, practical goals of the class will be to help first year PhD candidates in Comparative Literature prepare for their MA exam, to introduce students to a range of faculty in the Program, and to forge an intellectual community among the first year cohort.

This course introduces students to the powerful and influential corpus of Old Norse literature and to the cultural and historical landscape of Viking and medieval Scandinavia. Students will explore mythological and heroic verse, court poetry, law codes, runic inscriptions, and the famed Icelandic sagas to develop a deeper understanding of one of the most significant literary traditions in high medieval Europe, and to myth-bust popular misconceptions about who 'the Vikings' were and how they lived.

THE GLOBAL NOVEL: This course has three broad aims: first, it will introduce students to a selection of compelling contemporary narratives; second, it will provide prospective students of literature and film, as well as interested students headed for other majors, with fundamental skills in literary, visual, and cultural analysis; and, third, it will encourage a meditation on the function of literature and culture in our world, where commodities, people, and ideas have been constantly in motion. Questions for discussion will therefore include: the meaning of terms like "globalization," "translation," and "world literature"; the transnational reach and circulation of texts; migration and engagement with "others"; violence, trauma, and memory; terrorism and the state; and the ethic of cosmopolitanism. Our collective endeavor will be to think about narrative forms as modes of mediating and engaging with the vast and complex world we inhabit today. See COML website for current semester's description at https://complit.sas.upenn.edu/course-list/2019A

This course will provide an overview of major European thinkers in literary theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will pay particular attention to the following movements: Structuralism and Deconstruction (Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, Barthes, Derrida), Social Theory (Foucault, Ranciere), Psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Abraham and Torok), Schizoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari), Feminism and Queer Theory (Irigary, Kristeva, Sedgwick), Spatial Theory (Bachelard, DeCerteau, Lefebvre), and the Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer, Kracauer). Readings and discussion will be in English.