Comparative Literature and Society

CPLS UN3991 SENIOR SEM-COMP LIT ＆ SOCIETY. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: CPLS UN3900
Prerequisites: CPLS UN3900 The senior seminar is a capstone course required of all CLS/MLA majors. The seminar provides students the opportunity to discuss selected topics in comparative literature and society and medical humanities in a cross-disciplinary, multilingual, and global perspective. Students undertake individual research projects while participating in directed readings and critical dialogues about theory and research methodologies, which may culminate in the senior thesis. Students review work in progress and share results through weekly oral reports and written reports

CPLS UN3995 SENIOR THESIS IN COMP LIT/SOC. 1.50 point.

This year-long, three-credit course is mandatory for students who will be writing their Senior Thesis in Comparative Literature and Society or in Medical Humanities. Students who wish to be considered for Departmental honors are required to submit a Senior Thesis. The thesis is a rigorous research work of approximately 40 pages, and it will include citations and a bibliographical apparatus. It may be written in English or, with the permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies, in another language relevant to the students scholarly interests. Although modeled after an independent study, in which core elements of the structure, direction, and pace of the work are decided together by the student and their faculty thesis supervisor, students are nonetheless expected to complete certain major steps in the research and writing process according to the timeline outlined by the ICLS DUS

CPLT BC3110 INTRO TO TRANSLATION STUDIES. 3.00 points.

Introduction to the major theories and methods of translation in the Western tradition, along with practical work in translating. Topics include translation in the context of postcolonialism, globalization and immigration, the role of translators in war and zones of conflict, gender and translation, the importance of translation to contemporary writers. Completion of Intermediate II or equivalent in any foreign language

CPLT BC3204 Literary Worldmaking: Two Case Studies. 4.00 points.

This seminar engages students in the immersive and intensive reading of two masterworks of modern prose fiction: Middlemarch, published by George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) in 1871-2 in England, and The Story of the Stone, or the Dream of the Red Chamber, composed by Cao Xueqin (and continued by Gao E) in the late 18th-century moment of Qing-dynasty China. While using devices and conventions from different narrative traditions, these novels operate in the mode of realism and do so at a monumental and panoramic scale, creating literary worlds that reflect the realia of historical lifeworlds. Beyond representing aspects of empirically recognizable worlds, these novels also incorporate philosophical reflection on their own means of representation, on their very status as fiction, on the power and limits of imaginative worldmaking. By studying these novels as cases of literary worldmaking, we will take the opportunity also to reflect critically in this class on the world that emerges–and the process of worldmaking that gets activated–in our very experience of studying these texts together. We will consider how cosmopolitanism, as a guiding ideal of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment university, may be renewed by literary study to help us inhabit a world of common humanity that is richer and more complex than is evident in particularist localisms or a satellite-view, techno-economic globalism. Middlemarch we will read in its entirety. For the sake of time, we will read, in David Hawkes’ translation, the 80-chapter version of The Story of the Stone, or the Dream of the Red Chamber, attributed to Cao Xueqin, instead of the 120-chapter version, with the last 40 chapters attributed to Gao E. If you can and wish to read the text in Chinese, please speak to Professor Sun about the option of scheduling extra discussion sessions

HIST BC3825 RACE, CASTE, AND THE UNIVERSITY: B. R. AMBEDKAR AT COLUMBIA. 4.00 points.

B. R. Ambedkar is arguably one of Columbia University’s most illustrious alumni, and a democratic thinker and constitutional lawyer who had enormous impact in shaping India, the world’s largest democracy. As is well known, Ambedkar came to Columbia University in July 1913 to start a doctoral program in Political Science. He graduated in 1915 with a Masters degree, and got his doctorate from Columbia in 1927 after having studied with some of the great figures of interwar American thought including Edwin Seligman, James Shotwell, Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey. This course follows the model of the Columbia University and Slavery course and draws extensively on the relevant holdings and resources of Columbia’s RBML, [Rare Books and Manuscript Library] Burke Library (Union Theological Seminar), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture among others to explore a set of relatively understudied links between Ambedkar, Columbia University, and the intellectual history of the interwar period. Themes include: the development of the disciplines at Columbia University and their relationship to new paradigms of social scientific study; the role of historical comparison between caste and race in producing new models of scholarship and political solidarity; links between figures such as Ambedkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, W. E. B. Du Bois and others who were shaped by the distinctive public and political culture of New York City, and more. This is a hybrid course which aims to create a finding aid for B. R. Ambedkar that traverses RBML private papers. Students will engage in a number of activities towards that purpose. They will attend multiple instructional sessions at the RBML to train students in using archives; they will make public presentations on their topics, which will be archived in video form; and stuents will produce digital essays on a variety of themes and topics related to the course. Students will work collaboratively in small groups and undertake focused archival research. This seminar inaugurates an on-going, multiyear effort to grapple with globalizing the reach and relevance of B. R. Ambedkar and to share our findings with the Columbia community and beyond. Working independently, students will define and pursue individual research projects. Working together, the class will create digital visualizations of these projects

CPLS GU4111 World Philology. 4 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

Philology, broadly defined as the practice of making sense of texts, is a fundamental human activity that has been repeatedly institutionalized in widely separated places and times. In the wake of the formation of the modern academic disciplines in the nineteenth century and their global spread, it became difficult to understand the power and glory of older western philology, and its striking parallels with other pre- and early modern forms of scholarship around the globe. This class seeks to create a new comparative framework for understanding how earlier generations made sense of the texts that they valued, and how their practices provide still-vital models for us at a time of upheaval in the format and media of texts and in our scholarly approaches to them. Students will encounter key fields of philology—textual criticism, lexicography, grammar, and, above all, commentary—not in the abstract but as instantiated in relation to four foundational works—the Confucian Analects, the Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the Aeneid, and the Tale of Genji—and the scholarly traditions that grew up around them. We are never alone when we grapple with the basic question of how to read texts whose meaning is unclear to us. Over the course of the semester, this class will foster a global understanding of the deep roots and strange parallels linking contemporary reading and interpretation to the practices of the past.

CPLS GU4152 POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE. 4.00 points.

How is performance conceived and instrumentalized to fulfill an ideological design? How is ideology transmitted as performance? Centering on National Socialism and Communism, this course explores that and similar questions by examining the political, social, and cultural performances (of Hitler and Stalin, of race and progress, of postwar trials) in the Third Reich and the Soviet Union by engaging a broad range of primary materials (films, documentaries, plays, newsreels, mass spectacles, artifacts of fine art) and by reading widely in the literature of political philosophy and performance studies

CLPS GU4224 QUEER THEORY ＆ PSYCHOANALYSIS. 3.00 points.

It is practically impossible to imagine queer theory without psychoanalysis. Not only does Queer Theory depend on psychoanalysis for conceptualizing sex and sexuality, but even related terms such as desire, relationality, and the body, require rich and substantial psychological elaboration. And yet, in spite of its centrality, there is an abiding resistance to psychoanalysis on the grounds that it focuses too much on the individual, and on the individual mind, and in so doing, fails to grasp the structural dimension of sex, sexuality and identity. If Freud epitomizes the psychological view, and Foucault represents the constructed view, then we could think of Queer Theory as perennially torn between these competing and irreconcilable positions. With all of the theoretical baggage the concept of the individual entails, would it be better for Queer Theory to leave psychoanalysis behind, or are there ways to rethink individuality along more radical lines? Is the individual subject really an obstacle to radical theory or its prerequisite? How do we think about the relationship between Queer Theory and psychoanalysis? While there are extreme positions on either side of this debate, how can we craft a third way that acknowledges the importance of subjectivity while also recognizing the limitations of traditional psychoanalysis? This course introduces the complicated relationship between Queer Theory and psychoanalysis by familiarizing students with the clinical concepts at the core of contemporary critical theory. We will focus specifically on the topics of: sexuality, perversion, trauma, identity, relationality, narcissism, gender and attachment in order to explore how these concepts work today. Delving into theoretical writing by Foucault, Bersani, Edelman, Berlant, Butler, Dean and Preciado, as well as clinical writing by contemporary psychoanalysts, Benvenuto, Gonzalez, Corbett, Laplanche and Gherovici, we will redefine queer formulations by transforming their clinical meaning. In addition to offering a comprehensive outline of how psychoanalysis and Queer Theory relate, this course will expose students to a wide range of contemporary clinical thinking in order to facilitate a deeper engagement with the practical, lived dimension of psychoanalysis

ARCH GU4250 COLONIAL PRACTICES. 4 points.

In this seminar, we will consider colonial practices through architectures, institutions, infrastructures, and territories. Material architectures of extraction, settlement, occupation, and development have been used to occupy territories—and thus take on a special character in deserts, oceans, and jungles, which resist colonial mapping—just as conceptual architectures have produced forms of “coloniality,” following Maldonado-Torres, occupying the mind and spirit as well as the physical world. The seminar asks students to explore colonial practices in institutional structures, cultural production, built architecture, settlement, and ecologies—as sites with which to feel and think.

Students will lead discussion of shared readings, making presentations on concrete studies of the construction, destruction, maintenance, and use of architecture, infrastructure, and territories: for example, examining the figuration of Chiapas by the Zapatista movement, the colonization of space via launch sites in the Algerian desert, or the settlement of Indian coasts by abolitionist missionaries. Students are invited to bring their own historical objects of interest into the course, and should expect to follow deep inquiry into an independent research question. The thematic arrangement of empirical studies is intended to frame open questions, structuring a debate on colonial practices as a theoretical framework that takes seriously the im/possibility of decolonizing architectural history. Our discussions will be propelled by the work of artists and architects, scholarly histories of architecture, space, and territory, and critical as well as radical indigenous, black and brown consciousness, feminist, and anticolonial and decolonial theory. Using actual places as intellectual problems—around which colonial maps have been constructed, across which nomads and migrants have moved, and within which insurgents have configured—this course attempts to offer strategic positions from which to sense, write, and think with architecture.

CLPS GU4260 Digital Psychoanalysis. 3.00 points.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown, psychoanalysts suddenly were displaced from the sanctuary of their clinical consulting rooms. Those who wished to continue seeing patients --including many who previously had condemned virtual analysis--were compelled to adopt remote modes of treatment. Some analysts opted to continue treating patients through phone sessions. Others shifted to tele-psychoanalysis, and without warning, precedent, or training, relocated their practices to cyberspace. This course examines the rapid proliferation of digitized therapeutics in the wake of the pandemic, and the challenges this radical shift poses to the hallowed tradition of in-person analytic practice. It explores the performativity, relationality, and pathologies of the ‘digital self’ that emerges through lived experience in social media environments. Since these forms of self, relationship, and pathology shape analysts as well as patients, this course looks at their impact on digital therapeutic interaction and intersubjectivity. This course also looks at transference, countertransference, resistance and the unconscious, and at cross-racial and cross-cultural dynamics, in online treatments. Finally, the course considers whether tele-psychoanalysis, with its disembodiment, physical absence, and sensory constriction, is a mere simulacrum of in-person clinical encounters, or whether it broadens and enriches the analytic field. This course draws on pre- and post-COVID literatures on digital psychoanalysis, and on my current research on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis during the pandemic

CLGM GU4600 Multilingual America: Translation, Migration, Gender. 4.00 points.

This course introduces students to the rich tradition of literature about and by Greeks in America over the past two centuries exploring questions of multilingualism, translation, migration and gender with particular attention to the look and sound of different alphabets and foreign accents – “It’s all Greek to me!” To what extent can migration be understood as translation and vice versa? How might debates in Diaspora and Translation Studies inform each other and how might both, in turn, elucidate the writing of and about Greeks and other ethnic minorities, especially women? Authors include Olga Broumas, Elia Kazan, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Irini Spanidou, Ellery Queen, Eleni Sikelianos and Thanasis Valtinos as well as performance artists such as Diamanda Galas. Theoretical and comparative texts include works by Walter Benjamin, Rey Chow, Jacques Derrida, Xiaolu Guo, Eva Hoffman, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, Vicente Rafael, and Lawrence Venuti, as well as films such as The Immigrant and The Wizard of Oz. No knowledge of Greek is necessary, although an extra-credit directed reading is open to those wishing to read texts in Greek

CPLS GU4700 Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory: Statelessness, Citizenship, Dissent. 4.00 points.

This seminar uses an open rubric of “topics in contemporary critical theory” to engage a wide range of current concepts, approaches, strands, and debates residing at the crux of social and cultural critique in the intersections of social and political theory, anthropology, literary and cultural studies. Located on these crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences, contemporary critical theory—in the broad sense used here—draws on several traditions of intellectual thought, including (post-)Marxism, ideology critique, critical ethnography, psychoanalytic theory, critical race theory, feminist and postcolonial/decolonial critique. The seminar traces such lines of inquiry in order to explore the links between knowledge, power, subjectivity, and the political. Special attention is given to the relationship between thought and praxis in various contemporary sociopolitical contexts. Specific focus this time is the broader problem of democracy in contemporary societies, both in their national and their global dimensions. This is especially trenchant with the migration/refugee crisis in Europe, the problem of open/closed borders worldwide, and the security crisis in the aftermath of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The volume and intensity of human mobility from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe remains dramatically steady, despite the overall restrictions in mobility following the pandemic conditions worldwide and the resurgence of extreme nationalism. During the last decade refugee statelessness has evolved into a quasi-permanent liminal condition of being within the political body of ‘Western’ societies, especially in so called border countries of the European periphery. The continuous expansion and multiplication of internment camps in countries such as Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. has created different states of existence within national territories, raising a wide range of issues that concern statehood, political rights, the right to equal treatment and access to public goods (i.e., health, education, safety, representation etc.). This cascade of interior frontiers has precipitated a huge debate on questions of citizenship and democratic institutions in the broadest sense. Moreover, dissent has grown across societies, regardless of identity parameters (class, race, gender, ethnicity, religion) and across the ideological spectrum. What now seems to be a permanent crisis of democracy is paradoxically what reveals democracy’s strength, in the midst of its vulnerability, and its necessity despite its many constitutive problems. The course will address these matters theoretically, but with extensive reference to real social and historical problems on the ground as they’re unfolding. This is indeed the key pedagogical purpose: to explore self-reflection and even conceptual abstraction, while never losing sight of the concrete and the mutable—the real life of humans in all its adversity