This interdisciplinary film & literature course will approach a 300-year history of documenting abolition through the lens of history, art, and activism. The class will be divided roughly in half: pre-20th century, and post-20th century. We will put into dialogue the legacy of the 18th and 19th-centuries’ movements to document and abolish racial slavery in the North Atlantic world, with the history of journalistic art-making and media activism. The diverse activist art forms include but are not limited to: woodcut engravings, ceramics, petitions, boycotts, manifestos, graphic novels, poetry, and documentary films. The course will also include a number of abolitionist and activist speakers working today. Authors will include earlier transatlantic writers like Thomas Clarkson and Sojourner Truth, as well as contemporary abolitionists and critics of the prison industrial complex, for example: Angela Davis and Jackie Wang. Films and media will span early agitational documentaries, especially by Dziga Vertov and Joris Ivens, and will continue through the 1960s with documentaries by Alain Resnais, Santiago Alvarez, Madeline Anderson, and others. The course will conclude with viewings of contemporary films and media centering around Black Lives Matter and other liberatory movements. Alongside works from the US we will also discuss abolition and activism from a global perspective, thus analyzing films and media from the former USSR, East Asia, South America, and beyond. Along with academic research papers and analyses, as well as discussion board posts, the course will integrate a substantial number of creative projects, and the course will culminate in a final creative-critical project, to be completed collaboratively between students, and possibly in conjunction with an activist organization. Readings will be primarily in electronic format although some (especially the graphic novels/comics, which aren’t available in electronic format) will need to be purchased in print form. The approximate cost of all print materials should not exceed $60. There will be no timed quizzes or exams.

This is a course on the history of literary theory, a survey of major debates about literature, poetics, and ideas about what literary texts should do, from ancient Greece to examples of modern thought. The first half of the course will focus on early periods: Greek and Roman antiquity, especially Plato and Aristotle; the medieval period (including St. Augustine, Al-Farabi, and Boccaccio); and the early modern period (including Giambattista Vico). In the second half of the course we will turn to modern concerns by looking at the literary (or “art”) theories of some major philosophers and theorists: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Fanon. We end the course in the later twentieth century with readings from cultural theorists such as Edward Said and Paul Gilroy. The purpose driving this course is to consider closely how this tradition generated questions that are still with us, such as: What is the act of interpretation? Whose interpretation matters? What is the “aesthetic”? What is representation or mimesis? When does an author’s intention matter, and how are we to know it?

Nationalism, even in our globally-connected world, is making a comeback. And each one of us, and our families before us, have been affected by the particular traditions of nations, and rivalries between them. This course considers how texts become “national epics,” how they “represent” a nation. Times change, nations change, and old poems may no longer serve. Can the Song of Roland, once compulsory study for all French schoolchildren, and children in French colonies, 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, then pivots across Eurasia (Russia, Mongolia) to end with China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Philippines. All of us have complex family histories-- Chinese-American, French Canadian, Latino/a/x, Jewish American, Pennsylvania Dutch—and all are rewarding to investigate. Some students choose to research, for their final project, the “epic” of their own family histories; talking with grandparents is a good way to start.

This course is designed to introduce students to the rich art of Modern Hebrew and Israeli literature and film. Poetry, short stories, and novel excerpts are taught in translation. The course studies Israeli cinema alongside literature, examining the various facets of this culture that is made of national aspirations and individual passions. The class is meant for all: no previous knowledge of history or the language is required. The topic changes each time the course is offered. Topics include: giants of Israeli literature; the image of the city; childhood; the marginalized voices of Israel; the Holocaust from an Israeli perspective; and fantasy, dreams & madness.

In 1989-1991, a whole world, perhaps many worlds, vanished: worlds of socialism. In this course we will investigate key works of literature and film spanning the socialist world(s), focused around the USSR, which was for many the (not uncontested) center of the socialist cosmos for much of the twentieth century. Further, we will study the cultural and political interrelationships between the socialist world(s) and anticolonial and left movements in the developing and the capitalist developed nations alike. Finally, we will investigate the aftermaths left behind as these world(s) crumbled or were transformed beyond recognition at the end of the twentieth century. Our work will be ramified by consideration of a number of critical and methodological tools for the study of these many histories and geographies. The purview of the course is dauntingly large—global in scale—and therefore “coverage” will of necessity be incomplete. Readings and viewings may include works by: Tengiz Abuladze, Bertolt Brecht, Slavenka Drakulić, Sergei Eisenstein, Howard Fast, Ritwik Ghatak, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pablo Neruda, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Sembène Ousmane, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Rabindranath Tagore, Christa Wolf, Zhang Meng, and others.

Tales of voyages to strange lands with strange inhabitants and even stranger customs have been a part of the Western literary tradition from its inception. What connects these tales is that their voyages are not only voyages of discovery, but voyages of self-discovery. By describing the effects these voyages have on the characters who undertake them, and by hinting at comparisons between the lands described in the story and their own society, authors use fantastic voyages as vehicles for incisive commentary on literary, social, political, and scientific issues.
In this course, we will see how voyage narratives as seemingly distant as Homer’s Odyssey and Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes fit into a bigger tradition of speculative fiction. We will determine what the common stylistic elements of speculative fiction are, such as the frame narrative, or story-within-a-story, and what purpose they serve in conveying the tale’s messages. We will see how voyagers attempt to understand and interact with the lands and peoples they encounter, and what these attempts tell us about both the voyagers and their newly discovered counterparts. Finally, we will ask ourselves what real-world issues are commented upon by these narratives, what lessons the narratives can teach about them, and how they impart these lessons to the reader.
Readings for this course, all of which are in English or English translation, range from classics like the Odyssey and Gulliver’s Travels to predecessors of modern science fiction like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to seminal works of modern science fiction like Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. We will also look at how films like Planet of the Apes (1968) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) or television shows like Star Trek and Futurama draw upon literary or cinematic models for their own purposes. Students will also have the opportunity to examine and present on pieces from the Mark B. Adams Science Fiction Collection at Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, which comprises over 2,000 volumes of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy.
This course is meant not only for SF fans who would like to become better acquainted with the precursors and classics of the genre, but for all those who wish to learn how great works of fiction, far from being intended solely for entertainment and escapism, attempt to improve upon the real world through the effect they have on the reader.

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 will provide a wide-ranging introduction to the literatures of South Asia from roughly 1500 to the present, as well as an exploration of their histories and impact on South Asian society today. How are literary movements and individual works - along with the attitudes towards religion, society, and culture associated with them - still influential in literature, film, and popular culture? How have writers across time and language engaged with questions of caste, gender, and identity? We will read from the rich archive of South Asian writing in translation - from languages that include Braj, Urdu, Bangla, and Tamil - to consider how these literatures depict their own society while continuing to resonate across time and space. Topics of dicussion will include the Bhakti poetries of personal devotion, the literature of Dalits - formerly referred to as the Untouchables - and the ways in which literature addresses contemporary political and social problems. Students will leave this course with a sense of the contours of the literatures of South Asia as well as ways of exploring the role of these literatures in the larger world. No prior knowledge of South Asia is required; this course fulfills the cross-cultural analysis requirement, and the Arts and Letters sector requirement.

Premodern India produced some of the world's greatest myths and stories: tales of gods, goddesses, heroes, princesses, kings and lovers that continue to capture the imaginations of millions of readers and hearers. In this course, we will look closely at some of these stories especially as found in Purana-s, great compendia composed in Sanskrit, including the chief stories of the central gods of Hinduism: Visnu, Siva, and the Goddess. We will also consider the relationship between these texts and the earlier myths of the Vedas and the Indian Epics, the diversity of the narrative and mythic materials within and across different texts, and the re-imagining of these stories in the modern world.