How does literature contend with the legacies of empire, specifically, modern European colonial rule in the 20th century? How have authors interpreted and responded to decolonization, and relatedly, to emergent forms of neo-colonialism? How have these processes shaped contestations around issues of gender, race, class, caste, and nation? This course will think through these concerns that continue to shape art, culture, and society in the global south today, long after the end of formal empire. We will analyze contemporary novels, short stories, and essays addressing regions and contexts ranging from South Asia and West Africa to the Caribbean and post-war Britain. Texts will serve to introduce students to key authors and theoretical debates within the field of postcolonial literatures, and include Chinua Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The course will also engage with critical perspectives on ‘post’-colonialism, and explore what postcolonial literatures can teach us about ongoing moves to ‘decolonize’ universities in the global north and beyond.

This class will explore complications of representing war in the 20th and 21st centuries. War poses problems of perception, knowledge, and language. The notional "fog of war" describes a disturbing discrepancy between agents and actions of war; the extreme nature of the violence of warfare tests the limits of cognition, emotion, and memory; war's traditional dependence on declaration is often warped by language games--"police action," "military intervention," "nation-building," or palpably unnamed and unacknowledged state violence. Faced with the radical uncertainty that forms of war bring, modern and contemporary authors have experimented in historically, geographically, experientially and artistically particular ways, forcing us to reconsider even seemingly basic definitions of what a war story can be. Where does a war narrative happen? On the battlefield, in the internment camp, in the suburbs, in the ocean, in the ruins of cities, in the bloodstream? Who narrates war? Soldiers, refugees, gossips, economists, witnesses, bureaucrats, survivors, children, journalists, descendants and inheritors of trauma, historians, those who were never there? How does literature respond to the rise of terrorist or ideology war, the philosophical and material consequences of biological and cyber wars, the role of the nuclear state? How does the problem of war and representation disturb the difference between fiction and non-fiction? How do utilitarian practices of representation--propaganda, nationalist messaging, memorialization, xenophobic depiction--affect the approaches we use to study art? Finally, is it possible to read a narrative barely touched or merely contextualized by war and attend to the question of war's shaping influence? The class will concentrate on literary objects--short stories, and graphic novels--as well as film and television. Students of every level and major are welcome in and encouraged to join this class, regardless of literary experience.

Sex is everywhere. It's intimately individual and jarringly universal. It's about ourselves, and it's about being together with others. It comes from within us with great force, and it's forced upon us from the outside by our societies and communities. It is experienced as extremely authentic while also regulated through an intricate network of cultural codes, traditions, and laws that articulate explicit as well as implicit attitudes toward gender and sexuality. In this course, we will explore how, throughout different historical and cultural contexts, writers and thinkers grappled with issues such as normal and deviant sexual practices, masculinity and femininity, and the intersection between gender and cultural categories such as race, class, and nationality. An introductory course in literary studies, this course will focus on a wide range of genres in the tradition of world literature, aiming at providing the students with basic skills to critically analyze and engage with literary texts and cultural artifacts. We will read, watch, and discuss texts in various genres (prose, poetry, essays, drama, film, theory) and from different cultural backgrounds (ancient and modern; from America, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East).

Shakespeare has become a cultural icon with significant capital over the past two centuries not only in the so-called West but also on a global scale. This seminar will examine Shakespeare not as a static literary figure but as a dynamic and contested presence in global culture. It will explore Shakespeare’s plays as well as their global reach in relation to critical issues of the twenty-first century, asking what it means to read, study, perform, and appropriate Shakespeare today. How does Shakespeare speak to our contemporary concerns? What versions of Shakespeare are available to us, and how do different interpretative approaches shape our understanding of his works? By engaging with recent critical perspectives on gender, sexuality, race, religion, class, and the environment in Shakespeare studies, this seminar will examine Shakespeare’s continued relevance in a rapidly changing world.

Course requirements will include close reading of plays, active participation, presentations, short essays and a final critical analysis paper.

Capitalist society is the object of Karl Marx's analysis and critique—a society that is the product of history and may one day vanish. This course will trace Marx's critique by moving between the fields of philosophy, economics, and politics. We will locate key interventions of Marx's thought that transform modern conceptions of history, the relation between economics and politics, and the limits of struggle and emancipation in capitalist society. We will consider the historical conditions of Marx's writing and the development of his thought to discover many sides of Marx and many divergent Marxisms (humanist, post-structuralist, feminist, and others) that follow, often at odds with each other. Further, we will ask about what kind of horizons Marx's and Marxist interventions open up for critique and analysis of capitalist society with respect to gender, race, class, and nation. "Theory becomes a material force when it has seized the masses," argues the young Marx; indeed, his theories have fueled emancipatory movements and propped up tyrannical regimes, substantiated scientific theories and transformed philosophical debates. In examining Marx's legacy, we will focus on the elaborations and historical limitations of his ideas by examining the challenges of fascism, the communist experiment in the Soviet Union and its collapse, as well as the climate and other crises currently taking place. In conclusion, we will turn to the question of whether and to what extent Marx's ideas remain relevant today, and whether it is possible to be a Marxist in the contemporary world dominated by global capital.

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 is a study of modern Arabic literary forms in the context of the major political and social changes which shaped Arab history in the first half of the twentieth century. The aim of the course is to introduce students to key samples of modern Arabic literature which trace major social and political developments in Arab society. Each time the class will be offered with a focus on one of the literary genres which emerged or flourished in the twentieth century: the free verse poem, the prose-poem, drama, the novel, and the short story. We will study each of these emergent genres against the socio-political backdrop which informed it. All readings will be in English translations. The class will also draw attention to the politics of translation as a reading and representational lens.

This seminar explores how writers in the African Diaspora have engaged, challenged, and experimented with English and its literary forms to write about slavery. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Testimony: Life-writing as Dialogue
This hybrid literature/creative writing course centers on the genre of testimony as a form of life-writing and self-making that is fundamentally dialogic; that is, dependent on what Dori Laub calls “a listening other” to be fully realized. We will consider the concept and practice of testimony through three intersecting avenues. First, we will explore the multivalent critical theory of testimony, drawing from a range of disciplines including memory and trauma studies; human rights scholarship and activism; feminist philosophy; queer theory; disability studies; and more. Second, we will read and analyze contemporary testimony in a variety of genres, produced by people of diverse identities and experiences from around the world. Third, we will write and share in community our own series of short testimonies, learning and practicing critical skills for this particular form of dialogic practice that are transferable beyond the course, including: deep listening, self- and other-awareness, and the capacity to embrace the other’s enduring strangeness and incomprehensibility while still recognizing their humanity. Importantly, this is not a traditional writing workshop with peer review and revision cycles. While attention to craft is part of the testimonial process, the focus here is on sharing and receiving personal narratives without critique of craft. The course is open to all majors, and no particular “talent” or identity as a writer is required.
The reading list will include contemporary (post-1945) narratives from Latin America/the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and their U.S.-based diasporas as well as Native and Black U.S. writers. The theory is likewise drawn from diverse and not exclusively Western/white sources.

This course offers a broad survey of banned, censored, suppressed, and silenced literature in Eastern Europe and the USSR during the 20th century. While the totalitarian political regimes of the 20th century sought to control the public sphere and regulate artistic production, their efforts were never entirely successful. Inevitably, works appeared that either sought to directly challenge and confront ideology, “slipped through the cracks” and were banned or censored retroactively, or seemed palatable enough to censors but proved provocative to perceptive readers skilled in reading “between the lines.”
We will read and discuss banned, problematic, and controversial works written during the 20th century in contexts of political unfreedom, as we seek answers to a number of questions about the interconnection between the political and the aesthetic, such as: Do works banned for political reasons also pose aesthetic challenges to tyranny? Does suspect politics entail suspect aesthetics, or vice versa? Can radical aesthetics arise from ostensibly conformist politics? How does Sir Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative liberty help us navigate the murky waters of art under despotism? Readings will include works by Hrabal, Kiš, Kross, Kundera, Shalamov, Voznesenskaia, Yohansen, and others.