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).

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 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 seminar explores how the humanities can contribute to discussions of sustainability. We begin by investigating the contested term itself, paying close attention to critics and activists who deplore the very idea that we should try to sustain our, in their eyes, dystopian present, one marked by environmental catastrophe as well as by an assault on the educational ideals long embodied in the humanities. We then turn to classic humanist texts on utopia, beginning with More's fictive island of 1517. The "origins of environmentalism" lie in such depictions of island edens (Richard Grove), and our course proceeds to analyze classic utopian tests from American, English, and German literatures. Readings extend to utopian visions from Europe and America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as literary and visual texts that deal with contemporary nuclear and flood catastrophes. Authors include: Bill McKibben, Jill Kerr Conway, Christopher Newfield, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Owens, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ayn Rand, Christa Wolf, and others.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature:
In this lecture-discussion class we will study a series of thematically connected novels by some of the twentieth-century’s most important writers from Britain and the global south. This version of the course will also include some novels and films by Caribbean and Native American writers. Class discussions will critically examine the following oppositions: “Englishness” (or “Frenchness”) and otherness, civilization and barbarism, power and knowledge, the metropolis and the periphery, and writing and orality. The course will appeal to students with an interest in questions of race and gender and the relationship between literature and politics, as well as students who simply want to read a set of compelling books and expand their literary horizons. Books are likely to include: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; E.M. Forster, Passage to India; Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Graham Greene, The Quiet American; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God; Sembene Ousmane, God’s Bits of Wood; Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, Louise Erdrich, Tracks, and J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians. Films may include: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Black and White in Color, Sugar Cane Alley, The Battle of Algiers, Even the Rain, The Constant Gardener, and/or the film version of Waiting for the Barbarians. Students will also be encouraged to see the film versions of the novels included in the course. Writing requirements: a mid-term and final paper of around 8-10 pages in length.

Topics vary. Please see the department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc