This class will be an exploration of numerous issues at the core of the “turn to the world” in global film culture and film studies, and the rising popularity and growth of the discipline of World Cinema. As film has become a part of an enormous transnational media system since the 1980s, the concept of “world cinema” has become both a necessary and controversial way to account for cross-border and cross-cultural relations. Is it a useful term, or a slippery signifier, signifying at once too much and too little? Is it productive in realizing its aspiration of unsettling Eurocentric foundations of film studies, or does it merely rebrand existing institutionalized methods under the politically accurate banner of “the world”? Is it the most effective way of describing transnational modes of production, circulation, as well as reading/viewing practices? By tracing both dominant and peripheral cinematic flows and cinemas (from the Korean blockbusters, European art cinema, Bollywood, to small national cinemas such Palestinian cinema) as well as its interpretive frameworks (transnational, national, diasporic, women’s cinema, etc.), we will examine what it means to place a film on the map, not as a gesture of inclusion but as a method of accounting for structural (in)equality to reveal gendered, racial, ethnic, economic and political nature of transnational processes in world cinema.

Aggression is a fact of life—but where does it come from? Why are human lives so mired in violent thoughts and behaviors, including those we direct at ourselves? Why is human history a chronicle of death-dealing? Is aggression inevitable? Is it desirable? What sorts of relations obtain between creativity and destructiveness? This seminar addresses these questions by tracing the concept of the “death-drive” in psychoanalytic and critical theory, from its earliest incarnations in works by Sabina Spielrein, Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, and Melanie Klein to its subsequent “lives” in works by Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Jean Laplanche, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Esther Sánchez-Pardo, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Achille Mbembe, Benjamin Fong, and Ranjana Khanna. We’ll reflect on the place of aggression in our own experience, as well as in the records of others’ experiences—specifically, in autobiographical, autothanatographical, and autotheoretical writings by some of these same theorists, and also by other writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Margery Kempe, Michel Leiris, Clarice Lispector, Michel de Montaigne, Maggie Nelson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Greta Thunberg, Harriet Wilson, and David Wojnarowicz.

Seminar members will each write an autotheoretical essay (approx. 30-40 pages), developed and workshopped in stages, as the semester proceeds, to be submitted in its final form after classes end, in December.

This course is not open to undergraduates unless they are juniors or seniors already working toward completion of the Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, in which case they may contact the instructor for permission to enroll.

Students who would like to get a head-start, in advance of the first class-meeting, could begin by reading (or re-reading) Freud’s short book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Was bleibt? What remains of me when I am dead and gone? This haunting question was especially acute for premodern women unable to control their own textual production, hence afterlife. How then does a lived, biological and historical life become a life, a written artefact; how does that first written text mediate down to us via manuscripts, printed editions, popular translations, strategic revivals, chance discoveries, etc. And how did a premodern woman come or qualify to be remembered by others? So often the answer here appears to be: through egregious misbehaviour. What, not unrelatedly, prompted attempted enclosure of women in convents, houses, and religious houses? What distinctive cultures did such all-female spaces generate? Did conditions of enclosure vary between one country and the next-- say between England and Italy? How were such all-female spaces mourned, once convents were abolished in Protestant countries, and how does desire for all-female society live on today?

Things were difficult for educated women c. 1150, but they got much worse. The rise of universities, celebrated as a distinctive sign of progress in western societies, saw increased opportunities for men coupled with, calibrated against, diminished chances for women. Francis of Assisi founded a dynamic new apostolate of the streets for men, but his associate Clare of Assisi (1194-1253) was obliged to embrace a hidden life of enclosure. No woman after 1150 approached the multi-faceted achievements of Hildegard of Bingen (musician, natural scientist, cosmographer, dramatist, fashion designer, preacher, and author); still in the 1920s Virginia Woolf finds herself being yelled at on the college lawns of Oxbridge before retreating to London, a more sympathetic venue.

These and other issues will be approached through a Smorgasbord of texts, open to the full range of critical approaches and offering a long view of women and writing, c. 1100-1673. We will begin with a brilliant quartet predating the secure establishment of universities: Hildegard of Bingen (briefly), Christina of Markyate (and associated artwork, made for and depicting her), Marie de France, sublime romancer, fabulist, amd werewolf-author, and Heloise, epistolarienne.

We will also consider Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), who had several children before turning religious at around age 40, and who refused to live in seclusion (but lived communally, with other women). Rita of Cascia (c. 1381-1457) was forced into an arranged marriage and endured eighteen years of abuse; she attempted to reform her violent husband, and also the vendetta culture that eventually killed him. There are shrines to St Rita of Cascia across the world, including the one in Kerala, India. Her national shrine in the US is at 1166 South Broad Street, Philadelphia; we might make a site visit.

The two most powerful and influential women of fourteenth-century Europe, and the only two to be declared saints, lived in Rome, one after the other. The most famous poets of the Italian Trecento are Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, known as the tre corone (three crowns). But in terms of European influence, and as religious teachers and speakers of truth to power, Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden demand recognition alongside their male peers; Italy has cinque corone.

The East Anglian women Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich actually met, but their written texts differ greatly. Julian meditates questions of love and death, memory, and the body with an intellectual brilliance second to none in English tradition; only anti-theological prejudice keeps her off the Comp Lit theory list. Margery, au contraire, could not write her own text, but hired a male amanuensis/ scribe/ co-author to compose the first autobiography (some say auto-hagiography) in English. Margery travelled widely and spent time in Rome, learning basic Italian and seeking out the living spaces of Bridget of Sweden. Hope Emily Allen, of Bryn Mawr (where her archive resides), brought Margery into an astonished world in the 1930s; more recent earthquakes include the gay agon of Margery Kempe (1994) by Robert Glück, co-founder of the New Narrative Movement in San Francisco in the early 1980s.

Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) and Veronica Franco (1546-1591) were two of the most brilliant members of a tradition of Venetian courtesans, educated and accomplished women who maintained liaisons with aristocratic men. Stampa's Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa, published shortly after her death, contains some 311 poems in which she establishes herself, in effect, as a female Petrarch, triumphing over difficulties (and her last male lover). Franco, also a cortigiana onesta ("intellectual sex worker"), lived longer and rose higher, commanding a place in important Venetian literary circles.

Isabella Witney (active 1566-1573) published her own works, keen to showcase her talents as a housekeeper and lady's lady (and to avoid falling through the floor into prostitution or jail: see her rueful Will and Testament, addressed to the cruel city of London). Whitney, a woman of slender means and humble background, uses print to try and advance her own career, whereas Mary Sidney (1561-1621), an aristocrat at the far upper end of the social scale, restricts her writings to an élite few, in manuscript. She lives secludedly at Wilton, in a great house that was once a great convent, reading psalms, like nuns long before her; her psalmic verse marries brilliant poetic experimentalism with Calvinist terror. Elizabeth Carey publishes the first closet drama in English by drawing Miriam, Queen of Jewry, from newly-translated Josephus; she then disgraces herself by becoming Catholic and mothering four brilliant daughters (who copy and conserve the text of Julian of Norwich). This they must do abroad, as Catholic nuns; Mary Ward, a Catholic from Yorkshire, joins them in exile, but founds an international order for women who will not be enclosed. Her vast archive, closed to the public for centuries, is now open, and includes her writings in Italian as Maria della Guardia. Aemilia Bassano, daughter of an Italian court musician, publishes a remarkable collection of verse as Aemilia Lanyer that includes the first English country-house poem. This explores the reverse of enclosure: women happily gathered in female society must soon be scattered, following the iron logic of the marriage market.

Sarra Copia Sallam (1592-1641) grew up Jewish in Venice and learned ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. In 1618 she read a play called Esther by Ansaldo Ceba, a diplomat who had become a monk. This led to a long letter exchange; Sarra admits to sleeping with Esther. Accused of heresy, she wrote a book to defend herself, resisting all attempts to convert her from Judaism. Lady Hester Pulter (1595/6-1678), born in Dublin, had fifteen children and outlived all but two of them. A manuscript of her works, called Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassas and discovered quite recently, contains about 120 poems and a prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda. In reweaving legends about the Muslim conquest of Spain, Pulter channels contemporary anxieties about "turning Turk," and addresses issues of rape. Van Pelt owns a copy of the vast, lavishly-funded tome of plays by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673; and also a meagre-sized play text by Aphra Behn). Cavendish eagerly keeps up with contemporary science, authors a feminist sci-fi utopia in Blazing World, and strategically exploits the resource of her own beauty. Like Galileo, she makes good use of telescopes, but to quite different ends. Cavendish ponders the possibilities of all-female society, in both her Convent of Pleasure and, more seriously, her Female Academy. Such longing for female places of learning endures, in various forms, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

These premodern texts may be studied in and of their own time, or as they emerge into print and public consciousness in later centuries, including our own.

One long (but not too long) essay, one essay brainstorm, opportunities for class reports.

Environmental Humanities: Theory, Methods, Practice is a seminar-style course designed to introduce students to the trans- and interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. Weekly readings and discussions will be complemented by guest spearkers from a range of disciplines including ecology, atmospheric science, computing, history of science, medicine, anthropology, literature, and the visual arts. Participants will develop their own research questions and a final project, with special consideration given to building the multi-disciplinary collaborative teams research in the environmental humanities often requires.

Topic for Fall 2021: Making and Marking Time. What is time? In the late 19th century, the questions of how to define time, how to slow down time, and, above all, how to accelerate movement have become a focus of the work by many European philosophers who have tried to come to terms with what is now termed as the Industrial Revolution, and the idea of "progress." And can time be understood as something continuous, or is it fragmented, proceeding in fits and burst? Such contemplations on time have deeply influenced writers and visual artists alike. Marcel Proust was a reader of Henri Bergson and translated his theories of time into a concept of memory. Impressionist painters insisted on picturing fleeting moments, and composers experimented with temporal sequences. Thomas Mann has tried to navigate timelessness in a novel set on a "Magic Mountain." Virginia Woolf and James Joyce have pictured an entire universe in a single day (Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses). Early 20th century Italian Futurists made the contemplation of time part of their manifestoes, and expressionist writers and artists, as well as the supporters of the DADA movement in Germany or elsewhere in Europe were theorizing about time as well. This would influence their choice of genre and form, their writerly practice and technique. Pictures were set into motion in scholarly studies by photographer Eadweard Muybridge and finally in the new medium film. We may be able to understand a reconsideration of time as driving force for the modern movement, or simply "modernity." In this seminar, we will study a selection of literary texts of the late 19th century and the modernist movement, consider the philosophical background and changes in historiography, and consider the development in the visual arts at this time, in particular painting and the new media of photography and film.

This course focuses on the key themes of protest and resistance in contemporary South Asian literarure. Most South Asian countries have been witnessing an endless wave of protests and resistance from various sections of public life for the last three decades. In India, for example, protest literature emerges not only from traditionally marginalized groups (the poor, religious and ethnic minorities, depressed castes and tribal communities), but also from upper-caste groups, whose protest literature expresses concerns over economic oppression, violence and the denial of fundamental rights. Literature is becoming an immediate tool to articualte acts of resistance and anger, as many writers and poets are also taking on new roles as poitical activists. In this class, we will read various contemporary works of short fiction, poetry and memoirs to comprehend shifts in public life toward political and social activism in South Asia. We will also watch two or three documentaries that focus on public protests and resistance. No pre-requisites or South Asian language requirements. All literary works will be read in English translations.

This course aims to improve reading skills and vocabulary by introducing students to extensive passages taken from a variety of Arabic literary genres from all periods. Taught in MSA with writing assignments in MSA.

This course concentrates on French intellectual history after 1945, with some excursions into Germany. We will explore changing conceptions of the intellectual, from Satre's concept of the 'engagement' to Foucault's idea of the 'specific intellectual'; the rise and fall of existentialism; structuralism and poststructuralism; and the debate over 'postmodernity.'

Both psychoanalysis and autobiography are ways of re-telling a life. Psychoanalysis is often called “the talking cure” because, as patients tell the analyst more about their lives (their thoughts, dreams, memories, hopes, fears, relationships, jobs, hopes, fears and fantasies), they start to discover new possibilities within themselves for overcoming conflicts, impasses, emotional pain, and even psychiatric illnesses that have kept them from flourishing. Autobiographers do something similar as they remember, re-examine, and re-tell their lives—though two very important differences are 1) that they do so in writing, rather than in speech, and 2) that they do so, not privately in a psychoanalyst’s office, but publicly in books that anyone may read. This seminar is a comparative exploration of these different ways of re-telling a life. We’ll ask: What are the potential risks and benefits of re-telling one’s life, in either form? What are the differences between having a face-to-face audience of one (the analyst) and an imagined audience of readers? What are the possibilities and limits of self-analysis? What sorts of narratives do patients, analysts, and autobiographers construct? What is the role of the analyst/reader in the construction of such narratives? How complete and “truthful” can they be? And, in our own era of social media and mass surveillance, how have the meanings of audience, self-awareness, privacy, and publicity changed—for better and for worse?

Course goals: Students will come away from the course with a general understanding of 1) psychoanalytic theory and practice from Freud to the present, 2) the literary genre of autobiography, and 3) the meaning and importance of narrative in our lives. Seminar readings will include 1) famous psychoanalytic case-histories and other major works of clinical theory and metapsychology by such authors as Christopher Bollas, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Kay Redfield Jamison, Theodor Reik, and Roy Schafer, and 2) major autobiographical works by such authors as St. Augustine, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Frederick Douglass, Lauren Slater, Greta Thunberg, and Malcolm X.

Assignments: In addition to the required reading and regular participation in seminar discussion, students will write several very short essays, prepare and deliver a brief presentation to the class, and write/produce a hybrid creative-scholarly autobiographical project that will be due at the end of the semester. There will also be a number of brief, straightforward quizzes—but no mid-term or final exam.

Instructors: Like most courses affiliated with the Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, this seminar will be team-taught by a humanities scholar (Prof. Cavitch) and a practicing psychoanalyst (Dr. Moore), who designed the course together. Feel free to contact them if you have any questions about this seminar: cavitch@english.upenn.edu / markmoorephd@icloud.com.

This seminar has a bold aim: it seeks to understand better what has happened in our world since the era of decolonization, by considering the term “politics” in its very broadest and most dramatic connotation—as the dream of social change (and its failures). Another way of describing its subject matter is to say that the course is about revolution and counterrevolution since the Bandung Conference. Together we will investigate the way in which major historical events, including the struggle for Algerian independence, the military coup in Indonesia, the Cuban Revolution, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, the Vietnam War, the fall of the Soviet Block, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iraq War and its aftermath, and contemporary concerns with immigration, corporate malfeasance, structural adjustment and privatization, and environmental catastrophe have been represented in some of the most innovative and moving films of our time. Attention will therefore be paid to a variety of genres, including cinema verité, documentary, the thriller, the biopic, animation, the global conspiracy film, hyperlink cinema, science fiction and dystopia. Films will include: The Battle of Algiers, The Year of Living Dangerously, Memories of Underdevelopment, Lumumba and Lumumba: La Mort du Prophète, The Fog of War, The Lives of Others, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Even the Rain, The Constant Gardener, Syriana, Waltz with Bashir, Caché, Children of Men, and The Possibility of Hope. An archive of secondary readings will be provided on Canvas. Writing requirements: a mid-term and a final paper of around 8-10 pages.