Course open to first-year Comparative Literature graduate students in preparation for required M.A. exam taken in spring of first year.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a growing body of scholarship on psychoanalysis and race in cultural studies and the clinical arena. However, there has been little research considering psychoanalysis in relation to critical race theory, a movement that grew out of the 1980s U.S. legal academy examining the ways in which law and liberalism produce racial subjectivity and subordination. This seminar analyzes the psychic and the legal in tandem. We will put classic writings from these two fields in conversation with one another by focusing on some overlapping themes: subject-object relations in histories of slavery and property law; psychic and legal prohibitions on incest and miscegenation; legalized exclusion and state-sponsored segregation in regard to racial grief and grievance; the politics of colorblindness and mechanisms of repression and dissociation; transitional space and its connections to transitional justice and transitional democracy; reparations as a key concept in both political theory and object relations. Throughout the semester we will consider how the unconscious provides a critical framework for analyzing the intergenerational transmission of both trauma and structural racism.

1922 is widely regarded as the annus mirabilis or “wonder year” of international modernism, the year in which landmark works including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Uysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod, Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories, Marcel Proust’s Sodom et Gomorrhe, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room were published. In this seminar we’ll mark the centenary of 1922 by studying some of these works in whole or in part. But we’ll also use the occasion to examine the construction and ramifications of this particular wonder year, to shine a critical sidelight on the politics and temporality of punctual commemoration, and to explore pedagogical and methodological alternatives. Some questions we’ll pursue: what forgotten or under-consecrated works published in the same year, including works by non-white, non-Western, and non-settler authors, might complicate and perhaps decolonize narratives about it as an apogee of modernism? What are the limitations and affordances of constraining oneself to the archive of a year? What longer energies and period arcs ran through this particular year? In what ways could we say that 1922—that any year—refuses to correspond to itself or hold still under scrutiny?

This seminar focuses on premodern conceptions of the 'soul', the force felt to animate and energize a human body for as long as it was considered alive, and to activate virtually all aspects of its behavior through time. Premodern concepts of the soul attempted to account for a person's emotions and desires, perceptions, thoughts, memory, intellect, moral behavior, and sometimes physical condition. The course will trace the various ancient theories of the soul from the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Stoic thought in Greek and Latin, medical writers (Hippocratics, Hellenistic doctors, Galen), and Neoplatonists, to the medieval receptions and transformations of ancient thought, including Augustine and Boethius, Avicenna's interpretation of Aristotle and its medieval influence, and Aquinas and other later medieval ethicists. These premodern conceptions of the soul have a surprisingly long afterlife, reaching into the literary cultures and psychological movements of early modernity and beyond. Knowledge of Greek or Latin not required, but see the following: The seminar will meet for one two-hour session per week, and a separate one-hour 'breakout' session during which students who have registered for GREK 608 will meet to study a selection texts in Greek, and students who have registered for COML/ENGL will meet to discuss medieval or early modern texts relevant to their fields of study.

This course will introduce students to key texts in the history of sexuality, with an emphasis on science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the disciplines. Topics to be addressing include sexology and the circulation of sexual knowledge; the emergence of psychoanalysis and the uses of psychology; transgender lives in and out of the clinic; the built environment and sexual practice; whiteness and the making of normativity. We will read a combination of historical, theoretical, and literary texts, moving from the 19th century through the 21st. The first half of the course, led by Pearl, will trace the tensions between human and nonhuman, will and drive, that arise as the human sciences transform in response to the sexual theories of Charles Darwin, Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and others. The second half of the course, led by Heather, will address the rise and circulation of sexual knowledge in the 20th century, with a focus on sexual practice and conflicts over expertise, narrative, and power.

Readings may include: Darwin's The Descent of Man, Freud's Three Essays, Willa Cather's "Paul's Case," Sylvia Wynter's, "Towards the Sociogenic Principle," Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, Frantz Fanon's clinical writings, The Moynihan Report and responses, Harold Garfinkel, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person” [“Agnes”], Esther Newton’s Mother Camp, Laud Humphrey’s Tearoom Trade, Samuel Delany’ Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, and selected writings by Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, David Marriott, Durba Mitra, Steven Epstein, Kadji Amin, Beans Velocci, and others.

What is an archive, and what is its history? What makes an archival collection special, and how can we work with it? In this course, we will discuss work essays that focus on the idea and concept of the archive by Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau, Benjamin Buchloh, Cornelia Vismann, and others. We will consider the difference between public and private archives, archives dedicated to specific disciplines, persons, or events, and consider the relationship to museums and memorials. Further questions will involve questions of property and ownership as well as the access to material, and finally the archive's upkeep, expansion, or reduction. While the first part of the course will focus on readings about archives, we will invite curators, and visit archives (either in person or per zoom) in the second part of the course. At Penn, we will consider four archives: (1) the Louis Kahn archive of architecture at Furness, (2) the Lorraine Beitler Collection of material relating to the Dreyfus affair, (3) the Schoenberg collection of medieval manuscripts and its digitalization, and (4) the University archives. Outside Penn, we will study the following archives and their history: (1) Leo Baeck Institute for the study of German Jewry in New York, (2) the Sigmund Freud archive at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., (3) the German Literary Archive and the Literturmuseum der Moderne in Marbach, Germany, and (4) the archives of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

This broadly interdisciplinary course is designed for Graduate and Undergraduate Fellows in the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) who hail from departments across Arts and Sciences as well as other schools at the university. The course is also open to others with permission of the instructors. Work in environmental humanities by necessity spans academic disciplines. By design, it can also address and engage publics beyond traditional academic settings. This seminar, with limited enrollment, explores best practices in public environmental humanities. Students receive close mentoring to develop and execute cross-disciplinary, public engagement projects on the environment.