World Literatures

WLT 100cw Topics: Introduction to World Literatures-Cannibals, Witches, Virgins (4 Credits)

An examination of the rewritings and adaptations of the three iconic figures of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—Caliban the demi-devil savage other, Sycorax the devil-whore, and Miranda the virgin-goddess—by writers from different geographies, time periods and ideological persuasions. Using texts such as Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban, Lemuel Johnson’s Highlife for Caliban, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, the class seeks to understand how postcolonial, feminist and postmodern rewritings of The Tempest transpose its language and characters into critiques of colonialism, nationhood, race, gender and difference. Restrictions: WLT 100 may be repeated once with a different topic. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 100wl Topics: Introduction to World Literatures-What is World Literature? (4 Credits)

This course focuses on the global circulation of texts and ideas. It looks at cross-cultural influences and evolving ideas of “world” and “nation” during the historical transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. The course explores how writers from Africa, Asia, and the Americas have experimented with various literary forms — novels, short stories, poetry, plays, films, periodicals, and digital forms — in order to express marginalized cultures and critique dominant regimes. The class discusses how questions of literary form, central to conceptions of world literature, are also questions of belonging, community, and power. Restrictions: WLT 100 may be repeated once with a different topic. (E) {L}

Fall

WLT 150 The Art of Translation: Poetics, Politics, Practice (2 Credits)

Translations are everywhere: on television news, in radio interviews, in movie subtitles, in international bestsellers. But translations don’t shift texts transparently from one language to another. Rather, they revise, censor and rewrite original works, to challenge the past and to speak to new readers. The course explores translation in a range of contexts by hearing lectures by experts in the history, theory and practice of translation. Knowledge of a foreign language is useful but not required. S/U only. Can be taken concurrently with FRN 295. {L}

Spring

WLT 177dp Colloquium: Topics in World Literatures-Dwelling Poetically (4 Credits)

To introduce the pleasures of poetry, this course travels through poems on themes of journeying and dwelling, voyage and return, travel and home, wandering, war and immigration. Reading ancient Chinese songs and Greek epic to contemporary docupoetry and rap, the course explores key elements of poetic art (voice, metre, tropes, image and suggestion). Students encounter less concrete effects as they confront ambiguity, develop interpretive imagination, and surmise poetry’s powers and stakes. What is a poem? How and when does poetry affect the world? The class also considers the art, ethics and politics of translation, and students compose and translate short poems. Restrictions: WLT 177 may be repeated once with a different topic. Enrollment limited to 20. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 177ew Colloquium: Topics in World Literatures-Epic Worlds (4 Credits)

A comparison of the first literary works to emerge from oral story-telling traditions among several ancient, medieval, and modern peoples to express their highest ideals and sense of collective identity: the Mesopotamian "Gilgamesh," the Indian "Mahabharata," the Old Irish "Táin Bó Cúailnge," the Medieval Welsh "Four Branches of the Mabinogi," the Finnish "Kalevala" and the Nyanja (Congolese) "Mwindo." The course explores these epics as sites of cultural formation and moral contest, and especially seeks to understand their world-views, value systems, and trajectory of human history through time as these are revealed in the life-struggles of vividly imagined heroes and heroines. Restrictions: WLT 177 may be repeated once with a different topic. Enrollment limited to 20. WI {L}

Spring, Variable

WLT 178/ SPN 178 Naughty Fictional Translators (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 178 and SPN 178. This course focuses on fictional portraits of iconoclastic translators and interpreters. The first two months are devoted to a (relatively) "slow reading" of Don Quijote as a pioneer text in terms of attributing a central role to a fictional translator. The third month is devoted to international films and short stories--largely, but not exclusively, from the Spanish-speaking world, which has experienced a remarkable upsurge of "transfictions" (i.e., fictions about translators) since the ‘90s. Taught in English. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

WLT 202/ ENG 202 Western Classics in Translation I: Homer to Dante (4 Credits)

Offered as ENG 202 and WLT 202. Considers works of literature, mostly from the ancient world, that have had a significant influence over time. May include: epics by Homer and Virgil; tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Plato’s Symposium; Dante’s Divine Comedy. Enrollment limited to 20. WI {L}

Fall

WLT 203/ ENG 203 Western Classics in Translation II (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 203 and ENG 203. Considers works of literature from different linguistic and cultural traditions that have had a significant influence over time. Posits that the emergence of a modern literary tradition might be understood as a sustained exploration of the relationship between fiction and reality, as tracked through major artistic movements like realism, romanticism, naturalism, expressionism, and existentialism. Interrogates the category of "the classic," the idea of "the west," and the meaning of reading "in translation." Includes works by major writers from Cervantes to Sartre. Enrollment limited to 20. WI {L}

Spring

WLT 205 African Literature (4 Credits)

A study of the major writers and diverse literary traditions of Africa, with emphasis on the historical, political, social and cultural contexts of the emergence of writing, reception and consumption. The course pays particular attention to several questions: in what contexts did modern African literature emerge? Is the term "African literature" a useful category? How do African writers challenge Western representations of Africa? How do they articulate the crisis of postcoloniality? How do women writers reshape our understanding of gender and the politics of resistance? {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 207 Colloquium: Another World (Literature) is Possible: Internationalism, Postcolonialism, Translation (4 Credits)

Discussions of world literature often highlight canonical books valued in the capitals of the world literary system: Paris, London, and New York. This course charts a different trajectory, travelling through non- Western texts and cities that both engage the traditional locations of world literature as well as attempt to create new literary networks and forms on an international scale. It reads literature alongside primary historical documents from various events and movements that are foundational to the political and cultural projects of anticolonialism. It pays attention to the issue of translation, or in other words, the ways texts and ideas travel across wide geographies and histories, particularly in the postcolonial world. Enrollment limited to 20. {L}

Fall, Variable

WLT 212/ POR 212 Author, Authority, Authoritarianism: Writing and Resistance in the Portuguese-Speaking World (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 212 and POR 212. Introducing translated works by celebrated Portuguese-language writers, this course explores themes of resistance, including resistance to dictatorship, patriarchy, slavery, racism, and colonialism, but also more ambivalent postures of resistance toward authority assumed within particular forms of expertise and knowledge production and deployment. Discussing fiction by Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Mia Couto (Mozambique), Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (Angola/Portugal), and Nobel laureate José Saramago (Portugal), students consider historical contexts; how their work resonates with the contemporary world, literature, and fictionality as sites of resistance; and the sometimes fraught dynamics they reveal between authorship and authority. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 218 Holocaust Literature (4 Credits)

What is a Holocaust story? How does literature written in extremis in ghettos, death camps or in hiding differ from the vast post-war literature about the Holocaust? How to balance competing claims of individual and collective experience, the rights of the imagination and the pressures for historical accuracy? Selections from a variety of genres (diary, reportage, poetry, novel, graphic novel, memoir, film, monuments, museums) and critical theories of representation. All readings in translation. No prerequisites. {H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

WLT 223/ CLS 223 Myth in Epic: Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome (4 Credits)

Offered as CLS 225 and THE 225. This course explores mythological epics from Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome with a focus on creation narratives, conceptions of the divine, and the hero’s journey. Students engage with theories of myth’s origins and social functions and trace mythmaking strategies and motifs across time and space. How do definitions of “god,” “hero,” and “epic” change from one culture to another? What impact do gender and social status have on heroism? How did epic poetry develop, and why do ancient epics still matter today? Readings include the Atrahasis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Apollonius’ Argonautica, and Vergil’s Aeneid. {A}{H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

WLT 232/ EAL 232 Modern Chinese Literature (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 232 and EAL 232. Can literature inspire personal and social transformation? How have modern Chinese writers pursued freedom, fulfillment, memory and social justice? From short stories and novels to drama and film, this course explores class, gender and the cultures of China, Taiwan, Tibet and the Chinese diaspora. Readings are in English translation and no background in China or Chinese is required. Open to students at all levels. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

WLT 237/ ITL 237 Colloquium: The Black Mediterranean (4 Credits)

Offered as ITL 237 and WLT 237. This interdisciplinary course examines the current migration across the Mediterranean to Europe within a larger context, using historical analysis, literature, film studies, postcolonial theory, political science, and anthropology. Together, these different approaches paint an image of the Mediterranean as a dynamic border area in which people of different cultures, languages, religions, and ethnicities have interacted with one another throughout time and space. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{L}

Fall, Spring, Annually

WLT 240 Imagining Black Freedom: African, Caribbean and African American Literature (4 Credits)

An examination of race, identity, and resistance in African, Caribbean, and African American literatures through the lens of coming-of-age novels. This course will enable students to critically engage the political and aesthetic imperatives of black writing by interrogating the thematics and legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racism. How do writers of Africa and the African diaspora appropriate the Bildungsroman as a literary form in their constructions of identity, freedom, and citizenship? What makes this genre particularly useful for the liberatory project of black imagination? Writers include Ngugi, Dangarembga, Wicomb, Cliff, Kincaid, Morrison and Wright. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 241/ ITL 241 Colloquium: Dreaming Venice: Myth, Decay, and Modern Desire (4 Credits)

Offered as ITL 241 and WLT 241. For over a millennium, the Republic of Venice cultivated a powerful political and cultural image — a city rising miraculously from the lagoon, a serene maritime empire, the “Queen of the Adriatic.” From Wordsworth and Byron to Mann, D’Annunzio, Calvino, and Brodsky, the course examines how Venice became a privileged site for reflecting on ruin, spectacle, memory, and the fragility of cultural heritage. Moving beyond literary representation, the course also explores Venice as crime scene, global art capital, tourist spectacle, ecological warning, and endlessly replicated simulacrum. Through literature, film, philosophy, and contemporary cultural criticism, students analyze how Venice exists simultaneously as a living city, a global exhibition space, and one of the most enduring — and contested — myths of Western culture. Enrollment limited to 20. {L}

Fall, Variable

WLT 264/ RES 264 Dostoevsky (4 Credits)

Offered as RES 264 and WLT 264. Focuses on close reading of the major novels, short fiction and journalism of Dostoevsky, one of the greatest writers in modern literature. Combining penetrating psychological insight with the excitement of crime fiction, Dostoevsky’s works explore profound political, philosophical and religious issues, in a Russia populated by students and civil servants, saints and revolutionaries, writers and madmen. In a close reading of his fiction and nonfiction, the class traces the development of Dostoevsky’s style and ideas, considering how these texts engage with issues specific to nineteenth-century Russia, as well as the broader traditions of European literature and intellectual history. In translation. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 266md Colloquium: Topics in South African Literature and Film-Modern (4 Credits)

A study of South African literature and cinema from apartheid era to the present. The course focuses on the ways in which the political, economic and cultural forces of colonialism and apartheid have shaped culture and politics in contemporary South Africa. The course also pays attention to the ways in which literature and film helps us visualize the relationship between power and violence in apartheid and post-struggle South Africa. Enrollment limited to 18. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 270 Colloquium: Health and Illness: Literary Explorations (4 Credits)

From medieval Chinese tales to memoirs about SARS and COVID-19, this cross-cultural literary inquiry explores how conceptions of selfhood and belonging inform ideas about well-being, disease, intervention and healing. How do languages, social norms and economic contexts shape experiences of health and illness? From depression and plague to aging, disability and death, how do sufferers and their caregivers adapt in the face of infirmity or trauma? Our study will also consider how stories and other genres can help develop resilience, compassion and hope. Enrollment limited to 20. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 273/ RES 273 Cosmic Cold War: Russian and Western Science Fiction in Political Context (4 Credits)

Offered as RES 273 and WLT 273. How did the "final frontier" of space become a "front" in the Cold War? As the US and USSR competed in the Space Race, science fiction reflected political discourses in literature, film, visual art and popular culture. This course explores Russian and Western science fiction in the contexts of twentieth-century geopolitics and artistic modernism (and postmodernism), examining works by Bogdanov, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Butler, Haraway, Pelevin and others. The survey considers science fiction’s utopian content and political function, as well as critical and dystopian modes of the genre. No prerequisites or knowledge of Russian required; first-year students are welcome to enroll. Enrollment limited to 40. {A}{H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 275 Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Sources, Tales, Transformations (4 Credits)

This course delves deep into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middleearth, focusing on The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) and its prelude, The Hobbit (1937). The course looks back to Tolkien’s inspiration from medieval literature and traditional lore, and forward to the manifold adaptations of his works in diverse media. At the center of the course are Tolkien’s texts, which the course considers as a nexus of venerable and modern literary traditions, a repository for cultural criticism, a laboratory for linguistic experimentation, an environment for philosophical exploration, and a paradigm for multi-media worldbuilding. Cannot be taken S/U. Restrictions: Not open to students who have taken FYS 139. Enrollment limited to 40. (E) {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

WLT 280/ ENG 280 Historical Memory and the Global Novel (4 Credits)

Offered as ENG 280 and WLT 280. This course explores the relationship between history and memory in a series of post-WW2 “global” novels, texts that somehow straddle or transcend national traditions and marketplaces. This course interrogates how art might ethically engage with—or seek refuge from—historical “events” such as colonial and post-colonial violence, total/nuclear war, authoritarian military coups, global terrorism, trans-Atlantic slavery and the Holocaust. Major course themes include the relationship between the personal and the historical, the national and the global, the generational transfer of trauma, feelings of guilt and complicity, and the idea of historical memory itself. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

WLT 300 Foundations in Contemporary Literature Theory (4 Credits)

This course serves as an introduction to a variety of practices and positions in critical theory. The first half of the course introduces major paradigms like psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. The second half traces the influence of these approaches on fields like gender and queer studies, media studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. Using a combination of literary case studies and examples from contemporary culture, the course treats theory as a crucial tool for understanding the world around us. Recommended for students interested in thinking critically about art, culture, and politics, and for students interested in graduate school in the humanities. Enrollment limited to 25. {L}

Fall

WLT 330/ TSX 330 Capstone Seminar in Translation Studies (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 330 and TSX 330. The capstone seminar brings together a cohort of concentrators to discuss a final translation project that each student undertakes with the guidance of their adviser in the concentration and to situate the project within the framework of larger questions that the work of translation elicits. The readings focus on renowned practitioners’ reflections on the challenges, beauties and discoveries of translating. Students compare how translations transform the original novel and question the concept of original text as it interacts with the culture and the language into which it is translated. Open to students in the Concentration in Translation Studies and World Literatures. Prerequisite: WLT 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {L}

Spring

WLT 340md Seminar: Topics in World Literatures-Media of Dissent (4 Credits)

What is the art of dissent? How have dissident writers, musicians, artists and activists pursued justice and repair? How do social movements use artistic media to voice resistance and make demands? To confront violence, exploitation and existential risks, the class looks at art, fiction, poetry, film, music and social media. Students practice visual analysis, close reading, historicization, scholarly research and debate, public writing and making their own media of dissent. Works from China and France, Russia, the United States and beyond. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 400 Special Studies (1-4 Credits)

Readings in the original language (or in certain cases translations) of literary texts read in or closely related to a course taken with a faculty member appointed in comparative literature. Students are encouraged to contact the instructor during the prior semester. Instructor permission required.

Fall, Spring

WLT 430D Honors Project (4 Credits)

Prerequisites: Requirements for the major. This course is a thesis to be written in both semesters of the senior year. A full draft of the thesis is due the first Friday of March. The final draft is due mid-April, to be followed by an oral presentation and discussion of the thesis. For more detailed requirements, see the WLT website, at the end of the list of courses. Department permission required.

Fall, Spring