The 1917 Russian Revolution was to inaugurate a new epoch in human history. Working with and within this time of political and cultural upheaval, Sergei Eisenstein inaugurated a revolution in montage technique that would usher a new age of cinema, a new practice of art, and a new way of thinking in images. Eisenstein’s cinematic techniques aimed at producing concepts in the language of film. It also sought modes of expression inaccessible to discursive thought. Navigating a tenuous line between art and politics, Eisenstein's works explore the social and political power of affectivity and expressivity, and the cinematic potential for both representing and eliciting emotion in individual viewers and masses alike. In conversation with the tumultuous political and cultural shifts of the Soviet society from the revolutionary 1920s to the age of Stalinism and the World War II, this course will follow Eisenstein’s filmography, from his monumental reconstruction of the revolutionary Petersburg in October to the engagement with representations of history during the Stalinist era in Ivan the Terrible. We will engage with Eisenstein’s theoretical writings, his cartoons and sketches, public speeches, and his lost and unrealized projects, such as his collaboration with Hollywood and a plan to film Marx’s Capital. In this process, we will learn basic tenets of film and aesthetic theory, while practicing the analysis of film with attention to form and content.
Following the lead of Eisenstein's artistic and theoretical production, we will engage with questions his work raises: How can cinematography elicit and manipulate the emotions of its viewer? What is expressivity? Can film represent philosophical concepts? What is cinema's relation to propaganda and politics? What is revolutionary about the medium of film, and what is film’s role in the revolution?
No prior knowledge of Russian history, culture or society is required, nor is specialized knowledge of film history or film analysis. All readings will be in English, and all films will be subtitled in English.

The course is designed to introduce to the clinical, theoretical, and cultural history of psychoanalysis through readings of texts by the most important psychoanalytic writers from the late nineteenth century to the present day. They include Sigmund Freud, Sabina Spielrein, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, John Bowlby, Juliet Mitchell, Stephen Mitchell, and others. These readings suggest that psychoanalysis offers powerful ways of understanding how all of us think, feel, and behave, both as individuals and in relation to other people and larger communities. The theory and the practice of psychoanalysis are based on the importance of unconscious processes. We will study the complex ways in which those processes affect our lived experience in childhood development and family relationships, in our wishes, dreams, and fantasies, in our experiences of work, play, love, sex, trauma, and loss, and in our creative, spiritual, and political strivings. Because the course aims to link the academic and the clinical, it is team-taught by a professor of English and a psychoanalyst to introduce to the breadth, variety, and dynamism of psychoanalytic ideas and techniques. In order to stress the interdisciplinary nature of psychoanalysis, we will read literary, historical, philosophical, and anthropological works that have relevance to the psychoanalytic exploration of the human condition. We will show how effective psychoanalytic ideas are in bridging a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, including recent developments in neuropsychoanalysis. Students from all disciplines will find in the class illuminating links between psychoanalysis and their primary fields of study.

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.

This course introduces students to the extraordinary quality of literary production during the past four millennia of South Asian civilization. We will read texts in translation from all parts of South Asia up to the sixteenth century. We will read selections from hymns, lyric poems, epics, wisdom literature, plays, political works, and religious texts.

This course explores an aspect of cultural studies intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

What do the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes, the Roman satirist Juvenal, have in common with rappers Snoop Dogg and Eminem? Many things, in fact, but perhaps most fundamental is their delight in shocking audiences and upending social norms. This course will examine the various arts (including literary, visual and musical media) that transgress the boundaries of taste and convention in ancient Greco-Roman culture and our own era. We will consider, among other topics, why communities feel compelled to repudiate some forms of scandalous art, while turning others - especially those that have come down to us from remote historical periods - into so-called classics.

This course will introduce students to some of the greatest works of dramatic literature in the western canon. We will consider the social, political, religious and artistic functions of drama in ancient Greece and Rome, and discuss both differences and similarities between ancient drama and modern art forms. The course will also pursue some broader goals: to improve students skills as readers and scholarly critics of literature, both ancient and modern; to observe the implications of form for meaning, in considering, especially, the differences between dramatic and non-dramatic kinds of cultural production: to help students understand the relationship of ancient Greek and Roman culture to the modern world; and to encourage thought about some big issues, in life as well as in literature: death, heroism, society, action and meaning.

How do we think 'the world' as such? Globalizing economic paradigms encourage one model that, while it connects distant regions with the ease of a finger-tap, also homogenizes the world, manufacturing patterns of sameness behind simulations of diversity. Our current world-political situation encourages another model, in which fundamental differences are held to warrant the consolidation of borders between Us and Them, "our world" and "theirs." This course begins with the proposal that there are other ways to encounter the world, that are politically compelling, ethically important, and personally enriching--and that the study of literature can help tease out these new paths. Through the idea of World Literature, this course introduces students to the appreciation and critical analysis of literary texts, with the aim of navigating calls for universality or particularity (and perhaps both) in fiction and film. "World literature" here refers not merely to the usual definition of "books written in places other than the US and Europe, "but any form of cultural production that explores and pushes at the limits of a particular world, that steps between and beyond worlds, or that heralds the coming of new worlds still within us, waiting to be born. And though, as we read and discuss our texts, we will glide about in space and time from the inner landscape of a private mind to the reaches of the farthest galaxies, knowledge of languages other than English will not be required, and neither will any prior familiary with the literary humanities. In the company of drunken kings, botanical witches, ambisexual alien lifeforms, and storytellers who've lost their voice, we will reflect on, and collectively navigate, our encounters with the faraway and the familiar--and thus train to think through the challenges of concepts such as translation, narrative, and ideology. Texts include Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. LeGuin, Salman Rushdie, Werner Herzog, Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Hoban, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Arundhathi Roy, and Abbas Kiarostami.

The purpose of this course is to present a variety of narrative genres and to discuss and illustrate the modes whereby they can be analyzed. We will be looking at shorter types of narrative: short stories, novellas, and fables, and also some extracts from longer works such as autobiographies. While some works will come from the Anglo-American tradition, a larger number will be selected from European and non-Western cultural traditions and from earlier time-periods. The course will thus offer ample opportunity for the exploration of the translation of cultural values in a comparative perspective.