Comparative Literature and Society

CPLS W3454y Blood/Lust: Staging the Early Modern Mediterranean 3 pts. Application Required; GLOBAL CORENot offered in 2013-2014. This course examines, in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain and England (1580-1640), how the two countries staged the conflict between them, and with the Ottoman Empire; that is, how both countries represent national and imperial clashes, and the concepts of being "Spanish," "English," or "Turk," often played out on the high seas of the Mediterranean with Islam and the Ottoman Empire. We will consider how the Ottoman Empire depicted itself artistically through miniatures and court poetry. The course will include travel and captivity narratives from Spain, England, the Ottoman Empire and Barbary States.

CPLS W3722x Narrative and Disability 4 pts. The past ten years have seen an explosion of memoirs, blogs, essays, novels and films about illness and disability. This course will look at the intersection of disability and narrative, investigating the ways that illness and disability give rise to unique forms of representation in a variety of media. We will contextualize our study of narrative by asking what political and social factors have given rise to the current boom in disability narratives, as well as the way we understand disability itself. We will lend historical depth to our investigation by looking to earlier examples of disability in literary and visual culture, seeking to understand how more recent representations are informed both by a longer literary history, as well as such practices as freak shows, institutionalization, and the rise of the medical and/or helping professions. Weekly meetings are organized topically to introduce students to some of the major concepts and debates currently animating the field of disability studies.

CPLS V3900y Introduction To ICLS 3 pts. Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics include: oral, print, and visual culture; epic, novel, and nation; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; sex and gender transformation; the human/inhuman; writing trauma; urban imaginaries; world literature. Open only to students intending to declare a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medicine, Literature, and Society in spring 2013.

CPLS W3910y Unequal Geographies:Key Concepts in Conceiving the Global 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This seminar-based course introduces students to a series of key concepts vital in conceptualizing our globalizing world. Students will engage with cultural, linguistic, and geographic spaces as diverse as East Asia, West Africa, Australia and Canada (with a focus on indigenous peoples in these latter two sites), as well as multiple other sites from across the planet. Coordinated by members of the 2012-13 INTERACT Postdoctoral Collective the course is taught with the participation of a group of 5 lecturers who are experts in specific global regions and issues. Students will engage with the discourse of globalization and its attendant limits and problems through such topics as: enlightenment and orientalism, kinship and migration, liberalism and its limits, and the nation-state in a globalizing world. The interdisciplinary course offers students the opportunity to engage methodologies and approaches from across the humanities and social sciences from cultural anthropology and history of ideas to literary analysis and cultural studies.

CPLS W3944y Literature and Medicine: Imagining Illness 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Between Virginia Woolf's pronouncement that no great literature of illness exists and Henry James' late contention that sickness offers for the writer the "shortest of all cuts to the interesting state," we have a possible range of literary responses to illness. But bodies and disease are not just socially contested discursive formations, they are determined by the constraints of biological reality. The experience of illness, from autism to cancer, comes to life in this intersection of "medical fact" and representational value. Through the reading of literary accounts of illness and illness narratives as conceived by patients, physicians and professional writers, we will develop a language and theoretical framework to explore the relation between culture and medicine in the construction of the sick body and self. To highlight these reciprocal relations, we will examine the scientific and representational meanings of concepts like contagion, vaccination, genetic transmission and transplantation in the works of Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, William Gibson and Kazuo Ishiguro in addition to illness memoirs by Susanne Antonetta, Emmanuelle Laborit and Paul Monette.

CPLS W3945y (Section 1) Transnational Memory Politics and the Culture of Human Rights 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Prerequisites: Instructor permission required. Since the 1980s, societies around the world have developed an obsession with issues of memory and history. A large body of literature, spanning fields in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, has emerged on the role of memory, commemoration, amnesia, and related matters in history and culture. In the years following the fall of the Berlin wall , the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa and of the military dictatorships in Latin America, this memory discourse has increasingly been intertwined with issues of transitional justice, truth commissions, and human rights, arguably one of the most salient public political developments across the globe. Students will have encountered the issues of memory and human rights in other courses related to specific geographic areas they have focused on. This course will introduce them to the transnational, even global dimensions of the topic with a special focus on the cultural contributions to memory and rights discourse. Instructor Permission Required.

Global Core.

CPLS V3947y Transnational Melodrama 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Our common understanding of melodrama refers to a set of subgenres that remain close to the heart and hearth and feature a heightened emotionalism and moral contrast. This melodramatic, or excessive, narrative and imagination has also been a prevalent mode dealing with intercultural clashes and historical conflict. This course explores melodramatic imaginations in literature, film, and drama mainly at three historical and geopolitical moments: the eighteenth century, the interwar period, and the present global era. The goal of this course is to investigate the history and imagination of global interrelations through melodramatic representation and inquiry in Chinese, European, and American literature and culture. In the end, we aim to develop a critical understanding of race, gender, immigration, and border thinking in our globalized world. Course materials range from Chinese Ming drama to Puccini's Madame Butterfly, from Turkish-German film Head On to Chinese American novel American Knees.

CPLS W3955y The West in Global Thought 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This seminar explores the meaning of the "West" through political and cultural critiques articulated - and carried out - across the world from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will examine how a wide range of writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and political activists have construed the "West". This interdisciplinary approach enables us to highlight how the "West" has been criticized for possessing different and contradictory characteristics - for being materialistic and idealist; national and imperial; secular and Christian; universalist and Euro-centric; progressive and polluting. Students will confront these critiques by analyzing how the category of the "West" figured (and figures) into the various agendas of intellectuals from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe itself.

This course satisfies Global Core requirements.

CPLS W3956x Postcolonial Narrative and the Limits of the Human 3 pts. This course connects developments in postcolonial studies to developments in science studies. Specifically, the focus will be the legacy of the idea of modernity as a production of the encounter between European imperialism and the (post)colonial world. Students will practice close reading of literary, ethnographic, and archival texts and will respond to these texts through critical academic writing, wherein they will enact their own close readings. If, as Bruno Latour asserts, the illusion of modernity emerges from its faith in its own purification of differing spheres (the economic and the religious, say), and if so-called "primitive" social worlds are constituted through what Marcel Mauss called the "total social fact," then how might the assertion that "we have never been modern" change for those who have been refused inclusion in the category "human?" The "governance of the prior," as Elizabeth Povinelli calls it, traverses postcolonial and settler colonial space, reinforcing the contours of "modern" and "premodern" on which neocolonial modes of domination rely. The claims of colonized (and particularly indigenous) peoples to social difference are frequently articulated as modes of resistance. Yet, postcolonial nation states often subtly attempt to configure precisely how colonized subjects desire and identify. How indigenous people articulate difference, then, can function as a mode of resistance or autonomy. But it is often also complicated by the legacy of the desires and identifications of colonizers and their descendents. We shall examine this space of desire and identification with all its complications and ask: if "we have never been modern," then how is modernity reconfigured by the (post)colonial experience?

CPLS V3960x Foundations of Narrative Medicine: Giving and Receiving Accounts of Self Not offered in 2013-2014. Narrative competence is a crucial dimension of health-care delivery, the capacity to attend and respond to stories of illness, and the narrative skills to reflect critically on the scene of care. Narrative Medicine explores and builds the clinical applications of literary knowledge. How are illnesses emplotted? Does suffering belong to a genre? Can a medical history be co-narrated in order to redistribute ownership and authority? What does Geoffrey Hartman mean by the term, "story cure?" the objectives of this course include furthering close reading skills, and exploring theories of self-telling and relationality. At the center of this project is the medical encounter. We are interested in situations in which one person gives an account of himself, of herself, and another person is expected to receive it. In examining the complexities of this exchange, to help clinicians to fulfill their "receiving" duties more effectively, we will turn to narrative theory, performance theory, autobiographical theory, psychoanalytic theory, and the nexus of narrative and identity. Readings will include works by, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, Judith Butler, Arthur Frank, Jonathan Shay, Michael White, and an assortment of the readings in narrative theory, trauma scholarship and witnessing literature.

CPLS V3991x Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature and Society 3 pts. Required of all comparative literature and society majors. Intensive research in selected areas of comparative literature and society. Topic for 2013: TBA

CPLS V3995y Senior Thesis on Comparative Literature and Society 3 pts. Students who decide to write a senior thesis should enroll in this tutorial. They should also identify during the fall semester a member of the faculty in a relevant department who will be willing to supervise their work and who is responsible for assigning the final grade. The thesis is a rigorous research work of approximately 40 pages (including a bibliography formatted in MLA style). It may be written in English or in another language relevant to the student's scholarly interests. The thesis should be turned in on the announced due date as hard copy to the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Subtitle: Reading Marx's critique of capitalism in France and Italy in the 60's
Please note: This course requires an application

CPLS G4075x Philosophy, Anthropology, and Politics 3 pts.Please Note: This seminar requires an application. APPLICATION PROCEDURE: Please send an email to Assistant Director Catherine LaSota (clasota@columbia.edu) by April 30, 2013 with the following information: -name -program and year -relevant courses taken -a couple of sentences explaining interest in the course In the 1960's, Marxists in the Western World felt the need to "return" to the original writings of Marx, and attempt a reconstruction of Marxism. It was made inevitable and desirable at the same time by the failure of existing socialist regimes and new revolutionary prospects in the capitalist world, by diverging interpretations of the "philosophy of praxis" itself, as well as unexpected results of its intersection with new paradigms of social and textual criticism. In the categories invented in these circumstances originate models of critical theory which are still among the most influential today. This class will compare two of them, which both focused on the philosophical and political dimensions of the "critique of political economy", as developed in and around Marx's Capital: that proposed in Italy by the "operaista" school (Tronti, Negri and others), and that proposed in France by Althusser and his group (labeled "structuralist" at the time).

CPLS W4080x Magic and Modernity 3 pts. Examines literary treatments of magic produced at five pivotal moments in (mostly) European intellectual history, and inquires: How does the depiction of magic relate to the idea of "modernity" and its attendant anxieties? How do texts produce magical effects? How does magic function as a way of understanding the world? Readings include works by Ovid, Apuleius, Marie de France, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Bulgakov and others, as well as folklore and theoretical texts.

CPLS G4090y Humanism and the Human 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Reconfiguring the modern legacy of humanism in light of new demands of thinking about the human sciences. Response to challenges of both anti-humanist and post-humanist critiques by positing the question "what is human?" in the domains of psyche, pedagogy, politics, as well as through the prisms of feminist epistemology and recent philosophical ruminations on the animal and the machine.

FALL 2013 is Political Corruption in a Globalized World
Mini Seminar: October 9-28, 2013

CPLS G4104x Collective Identities in a Globalized World 1.5 pts. This course begins by defining corruption. It examines the emergence of "modern abominations" and the fundamental separation of polities and markets, the State and society, the public and private spheres. From there, the discussion recognizes the inevitable interlapping of normative codes and the emergence of permanent structural tensions between them, including homo economicus, homo politicus, clientelism, nepotism and political spoils.

CPLS G4125x Critique of Human Rights and the Institution of the Citizen 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. The course aims at rethinking the articulation of "insurrection" and "constitution" in the trajectory of modern citizenship. It begins with a return to the conflicts between vindications and the critiques of the "natural rights" declared by bourgeois revolutionaries, and finishes with a discussion of the perspectives of a "citizenship beyond the institution" openend by the contemporary criss of the national, social and imperial State. A turning point will be provided by the critical discussion of Hanna Arendt's statement of the "right to have rights" as a negative foundation of the political community. This mini-seminar requires an application.APPLICATION PROCEDURE: Please send an email to Assistant Director, Catherine LaSota with the following information: -name -program and year -relevant courses taken -a couple of sentences explaining interest in the course

CPLS G4152y Politics of Performance: Nazism and Communism 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. How is ideology transmitted as performance? This course explores that question by examining a series of performances and performance genres developed and disseminated in mid-twentieth-century Europe, and by contextualizing them within a number of theoretical perspectives. The main focus of the seminar is on the 1930s and 1940s in both the Third Reich and the Eastern Bloc. The seminar will take in a wide range of "performances," including both those marked as aesthetic (theatre, film, art exhibitions), as well as considering the politically motivated aesthetics of trials, political rallies, the performance of race and of progress. We will read widely in the literature of political and performance theory, as well as engaging with a range of primary materials: films, documentaries, plays, newsreels, and mass spectacles. Fulfills one (of two) required courses in dramatic literature for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts major.

CLPS G4200x Freud 4 pts. A close reading of some of Freud's major works focusing on the changing theories of repression and sexuality in his evolving and contradictory understanding of the functioning of the mind, "the apparatus of the soul". The readings include some (most) of the following: Studies on Hysteria (1895), Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), On Narcissism (1914), some of the Papers on Metapsychology (1915), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Requirements: regular attendance, comments (1-2 page max) on each reading (due Sunday before each Wednesday class), a short term paper.

CPLS W4225y Organ(ic) Bodies: Medicine, technology, and the question of the human 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. The rapid proliferation, over the last fifteen years, of technologies that aim at the preservation of life at the edges of illness has created a conceptual, intellectual, and political fissure in the ways in which life and death can be fixed with any degree of certainty. This is true as much in chronic cases, such as the various neurodegenerative diseases, as in acute cases managed in the ICU, where life is being preserved through mechanical intervention. Are these mechanical interventions (ventilators, stomas, monitors) prosthetics that become part of the human body, or do they remain within the space of signification of the extracorporeal? What is the glamour of the "cyborg" when it appears within the context of medico-mechanical intervention? These questions are not academic intellectual abstractions but they become pressing questions when they inform the decision-making process in the context of encounters between physicians and patients, patients and families, or physicians and the State. Cases such as Terry Schiavo's, which captured the global imaginary as it posited the question of "what is a human being" and what is "life" and what is not, belie the deep anxieties that appear when medical interventions are in the process of becoming naturalized and normalized, as if the questions that they posit are exhausted when they are approved by the IRB or the Ethics Board. This course will examine the conceptual spaces that are being created in the crevices of the fixity of life, death, and the human/non-human being by looking at concerns that have been voiced by various thinkers: Donna Haraway, Nicholas Rose, Barbara Maria Stafford, Michel Foucault, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, Georges Canguilhem, David Napier, Roberto Esposito, Alfred Tauber, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Lorraine Daston.

CPLS G4340x Interpretation: Theory and Practice 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Relying on Charles Sander Peirce's theory of interpretation in the context of his semiotic, this course develops a common language powerful enough to underwrite modern interdisciplinary studies in the 21st century. It explores three theme in particular: signs and cognition; the analogy between grammar and nature; historical explanation in the humanities and sciences.

CLPS G4400x Psychoanalysis and Religion 4 pts. For the last several centuries most major thinkers, with a few key exceptions, have subscribed to "the secularization thesis." They believed that, once the process of secularization had been set in motion, it would progressively appropriate all the realms of life while the importance of religion would steadily decline. Then, the sudden irruption of religious movements in the second half of the twentieth century caught almost everyone by surprise and forced secularization theorists to reevaluate their positions. The emergence of anti-secularism was also one aspect of the more general critique of the Enlightenment and added fuel to the rise of postmodernism. It appeared that the secularization theory might have only pertained to one particular place, namely Europe, and that it was not a universal phenomenon. Indeed, as the sociologist of religion Peter Berger has observed, with the "de-secularization of the world," the beliefs of its proponents require more explanation than the resurgence of religion. Freud "the godless jew" was an unequivocal and uncompromising atheist who wanted psychoanalysis to be a vehicle for advancing the secularization of the world. And the vast majority of analysts who came after Freud followed him on this point, making psychoanalysis an almost completely atheist profession. For almost a century, religion was considered an "illusion" at best or a form of pathology at worst. But the same events that assailed other fields also had their impact on psychoanalysis. And just as many philosophers and social scientists have been compelled to radically reexamine their views on religion, so analysts have been forced to critically question theirs. Indeed, one might even say there has been a religious turn in psychoanalysis. In this course we will begin by examining Freud's views on religion, locating them in the Enlightenment tradition. Once we have developed a sound grasp of his ideas, we will begin developing a critique of them which will draw heavily on his debate with the Lutheran Pastor Oskar Pfister. We will the then examine Winnicott's reinterpretation of the ideal of illusion, which many contemporary analysts who are sympathetic to religion draw on to develop an alternative to Freud. The course will end with two questions. Can psychoanalysis help us understand the return of religion in the last half of the twentieth century? And, after the critique of secularism, is it possible to develop a more viable secularist position instead of turning back to religion?