What does it mean to imagine environmental justice?

Our course explores a range of narrative forms from distinct global contexts, to ask what environmental justice looks like in a world where the effects of colonialism and climate change are unevenly distributed across populations. Sustained engagement with Indigenous North American, African American, Palestinian, and South African imaginary traditions will highlight diverse ways of relating to land, water and nonhuman animals challenge that challenge capitalist and colonial logics of extraction.

This course asks students to comparatively and critically reflect on literary, filmic, and nonfictional narratives that engage in different ways with the question of justice. Course materials highlight not only instances of spectacular environmental catastrophe but also more subtle effects on bodies and landscapes, attending to the complex ways that environmental crisis intersects with race, gender and sexuality. The class will enable participants to translate these ideas into practice by producing public-facing content through creative modes of enquiry. Ultimately, we will strive to understand how various forms of artistic and creative expression might enable us to imagine more equitable futures.
INSTRUCTOR: REBECCA MACKLIN

This course is offered online with synchronous and asynchronous components.

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates, and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. Fulfills Cross Cultural Analysis.
INSTRUCTORS: META MAZAJ, KAREN REDROBE

Karl Marx gave his well-known work Capital the subtitle “A Critique of Political Economy”—not “how to be a communist,” or “why the Soviet Union is the best,” or “what is wrong with religion, freedom, and democracy.” Those non-existent subtitles describe some of the preconceptions many in the U.S. have about Marx and Marxisms, while the actual subtitle reminds us that Marx and Marxisms at their root simply try to examine the problems with both capitalism and the political and economic discourses that justify or ignore those problems. Today, many around the globe are also reflecting on capitalism’s problems, in the hope of imagining and realizing a better future. This course will trace some of the origins of that renewed inquiry, and allow us to discuss its limits and possibilities in today’s world. It will offer an introduction to the works of Marx and some of the varied traditions that have spun out of them; no prior familiarity with that work or those traditions is required. By reading Marx’s own writings as well as social theory influenced by them, and by reading literature and watching film, art, and popular culture from around the globe, we will consider a diverse array of answers to questions like: How are activism and theory connected? How do racial, gender, economic, and political inequalities emerge and increase around the globe? Why does shopping make us feel so much pleasure, pain, or numbness? What was the relationship between Atlantic world slavery and capitalism? What are ideology and alienation? How might culture help us imagine our way out of the violence and inequality of social relations?
INSTRUCTOR: DAVID KAZANJIAN

This course is offered online in synchronous format.

Like James Joyce’s Dublin, Carl Sandburg’s Chicago, or even Woody Allen’s Paris, cities have long been the object of yearning and the subject of art. In the time of a pandemic, the idea of the city is associated with new challenges and emotions. This course examines how cities are forged in cinema, literature and scholarship as well as the role of their architecture. While we focus on Israeli cities like Jerusalem, Tiberias, or Tel Aviv, we’ll compare their artistic portrayals to those of American, German, and Iraqi cities, among others. The psychological and physical bond between writers or directors and their respective places is metabolized in their poetry, prose, and films, and so artistic representations of cities often reflect the inner world, personal relations, or social and national conflicts. Fulfills Arts and Letters.
INSTRUCTOR: NILI GOLD

In modern American popular culture Jewish humor is considered by Jews and non-Jews as a recognizable and distinct form of humor. Focusing upon folk-humor, in this course we will examine the history of this perception, and study different manifestation of Jewish humor as a particular case study of ethnic in general. Specific topics for analysis will be: humor in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish humor in Europe and in America, JAP and JAM jokes, Jewish tricksters and pranksters, Jewish humor in the Holocaust and Jewish humor in Israel. The term paper will be collecting project of Jewish jokes.
INSTRUCTOR: DAN BEN-AMOS

This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from 1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan's war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with Japanese classics, confrontation with the state, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality. We will explore these and other questions by analyzing texts of various genres, including film and film scripts, novels, short stories, manga, and academic essays. Class sessions will combine lectures, discussion, audio-visual materials, and creative as well as analytical writing exercises. The course is taught in English, although Japanese materials will be made available upon request. No prior coursework in Japanese literature, culture, or film is required or expected; additional secondary materials will be available for students taking the course at the 600 level. Writers and film directors examined may include: Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, Imamura Shohei, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Beat Takeshi.
INSTRUCTOR: AYAKO KANO

How do we look at objects? And which stories can objects tell? These are questions that have been asked quite regularly by Art Historians or Museum Curators, but they take a central place within the context of psychoanalytic studies as well. The seminar “Freud’s Objects” will offer an introduction to Sigmund Freud’s life and times, as well as to psychoanalytic studies. We will focus on objects owned by Freud that he imbued with special significance, and on of Freud’s writings that focus on specific objects. Finally, we will deal with a re-interpretation of the “object” in psychoanalytic theory, via a discussion of texts by British psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott.

The course will meet twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday, for lectures and discussion. In a third weekly session on Fridays, we will take the seminar on the road, and connect via zoom with curators and directors at the Freud Museums in Vienna (Monika Pessler, Daniela Finzi) and London (Carol Seigel), with the Director of the Freud Archives in Washington, D.C. (Louis Rose), with art historians and classicists both in the United States and Europe, and with psychoanalysts from the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. This way, the course hopes to take advantage of the on-line format that we will probably have to adopt in the Spring still (should in-person teaching be possible in the Spring already, we can connect with international scholars in the lecture room).

The course requirements will consist of two short papers, due midterm and at the end of the semester, participation in on-line discussion forum, and participation in synchronic sessions. The lectures and Friday discussions will be recorded, and the recordings placed on Canvas.

The Canvas site will also offer readings for the course, images, and brief films. The material will relate to the objects under discussion and their history, to the conservation of objects, and (if appropriate) placement in museums. A choice of Freud’s writings will be put on line as well. In addition, readings for the entire course will include:
Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells (Eds.), Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989.
Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table. Sigmund Freud's Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis. London: Walker Books, 2006.
Daniela Finzi and Monika Pessler (Eds.), Freud: The Origin of Psychoanalysis: IX. Vienna, Berggasse 19. Berlin: Hatje Cranz, 2020.

In German:
Lydia Marinelli (Ed.), Meine ... alten und dreckigen Götter: Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Freud-Museum Wien. Frankfurt/M: Stroemfeld /Roter Stern, 1998.
Lydia Marinelli, Die Couch. Vom Denken im Liegen. München: Prestel, 2006.
Lothar Müller, Freuds Dinge: Der Diwan, die Apollokerzen & die Seele im technischen Zeitalter. Berlin. Die andere Bibliothek, 2019.

Additional essays will be added on canvas for each session.
INSTRUCTOR LILIANE WEISSBERG

"A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism": This, the famous opening line of The Communist Manifesto, will guide this course's exploration of the history, legacy, and potential future of Karl Marx's most important texts and ideas, even long after Communism has been pronounced dead. Contextualizing Marx within a tradition of radical thought regarding politics, religion, and sexuality, we will focus on the philosophical, political, and cultural origins and implications of his ideas. Our work will center on the question of how his writings seek to counter or exploit various tendencies of the time; how they align with the work of Nietzsche, Freud, and other radical thinkers to follow; and how they might continue to haunt us today. We will begin by discussing key works by Marx himself, examining ways in which he is both influenced by and appeals to many of the same fantasies, desires, and anxieties encoded in the literature, arts and intellectual currents of the time. In examining his legacy, we will focus on elaborations or challenges to his ideas, particularly within cultural criticism, postwar protest movements, and the cultural politics of the Cold War. In conclusion, we will turn to the question of Marxism or Post-Marxism today, asking what promise Marx's ideas might still hold in a world vastly different from his own. All readings and lectures in English.

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.
INSTRUCTOR: HUDA FAKHREDDINE

This basic course in literature provides an overview of French literature and acquaints students with major literary trends through the study of representative works from each period. Special emphasis is placed on close reading of texts in order to familiarize students with major authors and their characteristics and with methods of interpretation. Students are expected to take an active part in class discussion in French. French 232 has as its theme the Individual and Society. Prerequisite: Two 200-level courses taken at Penn or equivalent.
INSTRUCTOR: GERALD PRINCE