The Person in the Poem:
Through the study of a wide variety of poems from the Renaissance to the present, students in this seminar will expand their familiarity with the sweep of modern English-language poetry and will develop a thorough understanding of fundamental poetic concepts—especially those concepts related to the question of “the person in the poem”: “author,” “voice,” “persona,” “address,” “personification,” “representation,” and “referentiality.” These are all concepts essential to the advanced study of poetry and of literature more comprehensively. We’ll sharpen our understanding of these concepts in our close readings and discussions of major poems by authors including W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Alexander Pope, Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and William Wordsworth. These poetic works will be complemented by our study of some essential works of modern poetic theory. Course requirements will include several short essays and a variety of in-class exercises, including recitation, memorization, and imitation as well as active participation in seminar discussion. (No mid-term or final exams.)

Taught in Hebrew. Texts and discussions in Hebrew.
The art of the short story is fertile ground for non-mainstream genres like horror and mystery, and its economy lends itself to the electronic era. For Hebrew writers, the short story has been a favorite since the renaissance of Hebrew literature and the revival of the language at the end of the 19th century; now it is vibrant in Israel, where Hebrew is the dynamic language of everyday life. At the center of this course are contemporary works by both male and female authors, ranging from traditional to post-modernist. Their diction is simple, sometimes colloquial, but they reflect a rich inner world and a tumultuous outer reality. Authors include: S.Y. Agnon, Orly Castel-Bloom, Alex Epstein, Amir Gutfreund, Esty G. Hayim, and Yoel Hoffman.

This course investigates how people try to understand who they are by writing about their lives. It will cover a broad range of forms, including memoirs, novels, essay films, and even celebrity autobiographies. The course will be international and in focus and will ask how the notion of self may shift, not only according to the demands of different genres, but in different literary, linguistic, and social contexts. Questions probed will include the following: How does a writer's language--or languages--shape how they think of themselves? To what extent is a sense of self and identity shaped by exclusion and othering? Is self-writing a form of translation and performance, especially in multilingual contexts? What can memoir teach us about the ways writers navigate global literary institutions that shape our knowledge of World Literature? How do various forms of life-writing enable people on the margins, whether sexual, gendered, or racial, to craft narratives that encapsulate their experience? Can telling one's own story bring joy, affirmation, and greater transcultural or even global understanding? In sum, this course proposes to illuminate the many ways in which writing becomes meaningful for those who take it up. The format of the seminar will require students to offer oral presentations on the readings and invite them to craft their own experiences and memories in inventive narrative forms.

This course examines intersections of artistic production and radical politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. It addresses art from across a wide array of media: street art, film, theater, poetry, performance art, fiction, graphic arts, digital media, and urban interventions. We will examine artistic movements and artists from across the Americas, including revolutionary Latin American theater, film, and literature; the art of Black Liberation in the U.S.; the Chicano art movement and its queer dissidents; street performance and protest produced in the context of dictatorship; anticolonial performance art and alternative reality gaming; and activist art, political theater, and cinema from the 21st century. Through its focus on the relationship between art and politics, this course also introduces students to foundational concepts related to the relationship between culture and power more broadly. As part of the course, students will have the opportunity to develop and present their own artistic project. Weekly discussion posts, midterm paper, final research paper, creative project and artist statement.

Artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet of things are rapidly changing every aspect of our lives. The methods and questions of the humanities are critical to understanding these shifts. Run like a workshop, this course will explore various sites at Penn and around Philadelphia where humanists and artists are collaborating with scientists and engineers to solve the big problems facing our planet and our species. We’ll visit museums and special collections in search of the future of past. We’ll learn how scholars of race and gender are combating algorithmic bias in our search engines. And we’ll meet librarians who are helping climate scientists save their data from politics. Students will gain hands-on experience with writing grants, collaborating across disciplines, and developing research questions in digital humanities. They will also acquire basic facility and literacy with key digital tools like GitHub, XML/HTML, and online publishing platforms like WordPress and Scalar. Together, we will gain a critical, historical framework for understanding technology’s impact on our lives. Absolutely no prior coding experience is required. Coursework will involve regular in-class exercises, short response papers, and one mid-sized digital project.

Pirates: Real and Imagined

This course will examine the vital presence of pirates in maritime, particularly Atlantic, history and in English literature, including the travelogues some of them produced. We will begin with Elizabethan forms of state-sponsored piracy, “adventuring,” and exploration, and then follow pirates into the eighteenth century. We will think about their shifting profiles as they abetted and disrupted colonial and commercial practices and ask how they could be both national heroes and hostis humanis generis (enemies of all mankind). We will examine the history of impressment and of labor, including indenture and slavery, that played a role in the making of pirate lives and the codes of conduct they developed for their operations. We will learn to see pirates as contributors to political theory and practice, trade and commerce, as well as to natural history and sea-borne discovery. We will read about the occasional women pirates who infiltrated and functioned within this very male world. In general, we will also be tracking the reasons why some pirates became legends, and why they continue to fascinate readers and movie-goers. One short essay, one final research paper, bi-weekly discussion posts

This undergraduate level course explores key tropes and themes of Iranian modernity through a close reading of Persian novel, short story, travelogue, and memoir. Various literary genres from social realism, to surrealism, magic realism, naturalism, and absurd literature will be introduced with specific reference to Iran's literature and in light of literary theory of novel. This course does not require any prior knowledge of Persian language and literature. Throughout the course, we will be particularly concerned with the relationship between Persian fiction and the West. We will investigate this curious relationship through themes of gender, religion, politics, and war.

When was Modernism:
This class will provide a survey of international modernism by historicizing it. Most critics agree that 1922 was the main year of modernism, giving birth to masterpieces associated with the concept, those canonical texts by Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Katherine Mansfield, E.E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot. We will read selections from these « monuments » before wondering when modernism began. This will take us back to the pre-war years, and we will examine earlier texts by Joyce, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Apollinaire. Finally, we will look for a possible closure by reading passages from texts like Cane (1923), As I Lay Dying (1930), Nausea (1938), The Day of the Locust (1939), and pages from Finnegans Wake (1939). A comparison between those « slices » of global cultural history offers a clear view of important trends and movements in the arts and literature. The years that produced modern masterpieces also saw the emergence of a “modern classicism,” a development ushering in the mixture of the new and tradition that has become the hallmark of modernism, thus turning it into a contemporary classicism. We will study passages from In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, The Castle, The Enormous Room, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Duino Elegies, Geography and Plays, Jacob’s Room, The Garden Party, The Waste Land, As I Lay Dying, Nausea, The Day of the Locust and Finnegans Wake. All texts available online. Requirements: one oral presentation and two papers of 8 pages each.

An introduction to the momentous history of German film, from its beginnings before World War One to developments following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990. With an eye to film's place in its historical and political context, the course will explore the "Golden Age" of German cinema in the Weimar Republic, when Berlin vied with Hollywood; the complex relationship between Nazi ideology and entertainment during the Third Reich; the fate of German film-makers in exile during the Hitler years; post-war film production in both West and East Germany; the call for an alternative to "Papa's Kino" and the rise of New German Cinema in the 1960s.

In this seminar, we will explore the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers across the globe have responded to tyrants and tyrannical regimes. Our focus will be a set of outstanding contemporary novels from Latin America, Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. We will begin with the Latin American boom writers of the 1960s and 1970s (represented on the syllabus by Manuel Puig and Gabriel García-Márquez) before moving on to two recent Nobel prize winners, Herta Müller (2009) and Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). In addition to these four writers, we will also consider the works of Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Jessica Hagedorn, Nuruddin Farah, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Mohammed Hanif. Primary texts include both Anglophone and translated novels as well as poems, plays, scripted films, and documentaries that represent or describe totalitarian regimes.
Two central questions will guide our readings: 1) What are the connections between oppressive regimes and literary expression -- between violence and aesthetics? 2) What formal strategies do writers in these situations use to manage the complex and sometimes dangerous political content of their works? Graded requirements include several short response papers, a bibliographic project, and a long-form research paper (3000 words).