Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for Fall 2023

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
COML1100 FWS: Humanities Core Course
Theme for 2023-24: Inheritance. Where Do We Come From? What and Where Are We? Where Are We Going? Posing these and other fundamental questions, all the more urgent in these uncertain times, the Humanities Core course engages first year students in the pleasure and challenge of humanistic inquiry across a range of disciplines. Through the study of literature, film, history, philosophy, popular culture, and visual art, students will probe how meaning is made and learn various forms of analysis to gain a greater understanding of human creativity and social relations. The course is not a survey, but a series of careful readings of keystone works around a different theme each year and an exploration of methods for analyzing the creation and contestation of meaning. The Humanities core course is a gateway to the humanities and a foundation for future learning.

Full details for COML 1100 - FWS: Humanities Core Course

Fall, Spring.
COML1104 FWS: Reading Films
We live in an image-saturated world. How do we make sense of the moving image and its powerful roles in shaping culture and mediating our relationship with the world? This course will equip students with the tools to understand and decipher film language. It introduces and interrogates the basic notions, technologies, terminologies, and theories of film analysis. We will study visual and compositional elements, like mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. Films we discuss will include different geographies, genres, major directors, schools, and film movements. Through writing, students will learn to analyze films with accurate, medium-specific vocabulary, develop informed and nuanced arguments, and critically reflect on the position of the viewer.

Full details for COML 1104 - FWS: Reading Films

Fall, Spring.
COML1105 FWS: Books with Big Ideas
What do Frankenstein and Things Fall Apart have in common? What lies behind the fantastical stories of Aladdin? Do we have to like Garcia Márquez and Shakespeare? These texts and authors re-imagine the human experience at its most intriguing level. In this course, we will discuss human rights, intimacy, joy, isolation, and other controversies at the heart of these books. Throughout the semester, students will learn how to articulate an informed and nuanced position on these issues via formal practices in analytical readings, drafting, peer review, and self-editing. Actual selection of readings may vary depending on the instructor's focus.

Full details for COML 1105 - FWS: Books with Big Ideas

Fall, Spring.
COML1106 FWS: Robots
In 2015, Japan's SoftBank Robotics Corporation announced the world's first robot with feelings. Many people were excited, many more disturbed. If robots are simply, as the dictionary suggests, machines "designed to function in the place of a living agent," then what is so disturbing about them? Since robots are designed to replace human labor (first economic, and now also emotional), do they represent a threat as much as they do an aid? What happens when robots exceed their purpose, and become more humanlike? How do robots read, write, and feel? How do the activities of coding and writing, or decoding and reading differ? Students will be equipped with the vocabulary and writing strategies to rigorously analyze, compare, and debate the meaning of robots in the human imagination from different epochs, countries, languages, and media. In doing so, they will write in a variety of registers about works such as the play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, who invented the term "robot". Other materials may include philosophical texts, fiction, videogames, films, graphic novels, and hip-hop concept albums.

Full details for COML 1106 - FWS: Robots

Fall, Spring.
COML1109 FWS: The Rhetoric of Post-Racial America
Race is a ubiquitous yet under-discussed subject in America. Typically debates on "race" and skin color flare up around incidents such as the latest police killings of black folks or the profiling of South Asian, Arab, or Latino-looking people at security checkpoints. This course offers opportunities to write about race and skin color outside of intimidating accusations of racism. Writing is not just a classroom subject but a tool to create realities and worlds. While improving your writing skills and participating in civic debates, you will have the opportunity to scrutinize your own assumptions on physicality. We will read fiction, blogs, journal and newspaper articles and watch feature films and documentaries. Writing assignments will include reading reflections, responses, summaries, critiques, and analytical and argumentative essays.

Full details for COML 1109 - FWS: The Rhetoric of Post-Racial America

Fall.
COML2035 Science Fiction
Science fiction is not merely a literary genre but a whole way of being, thinking, and acting in the modern world. This course explores classic and contemporary science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hunger Games alongside a rich array of fiction and films from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Our discussions will position these works vis-à-vis seminal thinkers, ranging from Plato to Descartes and Donna Haraway to Paul Crutzen, who ask the same questions as science fiction does about our selves, our world, and our future.

Full details for COML 2035 - Science Fiction

Fall.
COML2241 Game of Thrones: Multi-Media Fantasies
In this course we will use the Game of Thrones series as a way of familiarizing ourselves with different tools of cultural analysis and approaches in literary theory (such as narratology, psychoanalysis, media studies, queer theory, disability studies, animal studies etc.). A strong emphasis will be placed on the different media "avatars" of the series: novels, TV series, graphic novels, spin-offs, fan fiction, blogs, fan art, etc.

Full details for COML 2241 - Game of Thrones: Multi-Media Fantasies

Fall.
COML2251 Poetry's Image
Where do we get our images of poets, and of poetry? Along with the images we find in poems themselves, how do poetry and poets figure in fiction and film, in music and popular culture? How do such figures inform both the images we find in poems and poetry's own image? What is poetry's relation to other genres and discourses, to self and language, history and politics? Exploring such issues in verse and prose, in fiction, film, and other media, including among others Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Parra, and Bolaño, the course will arc toward impactful recent interventions by such contemporaries as Cathy Park Hong, Claudia Rankine, Layla Long Soldier, Kendrick Lamar, and Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries. 

Full details for COML 2251 - Poetry's Image

Fall.
COML2400 Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature
Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them.

Full details for COML 2400 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature

Fall.
COML2580 Imagining the Holocaust
How is the memory of the Holocaust kept alive by means of the literary and visual imagination? Within the historical context of the Holocaust and how and why it occurred, we shall examine major and widely read Holocaust narratives that have shaped the way we understand and respond to the Holocaust. We also study ethical and psychological issues about how and why people behave in dire circumstances. We shall begin with first-person reminiscences—Wiesel's Night, Levi's Survival at Auschwitz, and The Diary of Anne Frank—before turning to realistic fictions such as Kineally's Schindler's List (and Spielberg's film), Kertesz's Fateless, Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Ozick's "The Shawl." We shall also read the mythopoeic vision of Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just, the illuminating distortions of Epstein's King of the Jews, the Kafkaesque parable of Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegelman's Maus books.

Full details for COML 2580 - Imagining the Holocaust

Fall.
COML2754 Wondrous Literatures of the Near East
This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the "The Story of Sinuhe" and "The Epic of Gilgamesh," as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the "Travels" of Ibn Battuta, the "Shahnameh" of Ferdowsi, and "The Arabian Nights." We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

Full details for COML 2754 - Wondrous Literatures of the Near East

Fall.
COML3001 Methods of Comparison
What do comparatists do when we approach our objects of study? What enables or justifies comparison across different languages, different genres, different media, and different disciplines? Does all comparison assume a common ground of some kind (whether historical, formal, conceptual, or ideological), or is comparison inherently ungrounded, provocative, or political? We will explore these questions through examination of a wide range of comparative projects, from those often cited as foundational to the discipline and their most important critics to contemporary comparative projects that are reshaping the discipline and expanding it in new directions. 

Full details for COML 3001 - Methods of Comparison

Fall.
COML3012 Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film After the End of History
More than thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the distance needed to view the twentieth-century state socialist project from a historical perspective--even as Cold War tropes are revived amid another major confrontation with Russia. In this course, we will analyze memoirs, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period of history. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Albania, the UK, and the United States.

Full details for COML 3012 - Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film After the End of History

Fall.
COML3240 Blood Politics: Comparative Renaissance Drama
Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood? In the course of trying to answer this and other questions of blood, we will read plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for COML 3240 - Blood Politics: Comparative Renaissance Drama

Fall or Spring.
COML3261 Global Cinema I
Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history.

Full details for COML 3261 - Global Cinema I

Fall.
COML3300 Political Theory and Cinema
An introduction (without prerequisites) to fundamental problems of current political theory, filmmaking, and film analysis, along with their interrelationship.  Particular emphasis on comparing and contrasting European and alternative cinema with Hollywood in terms of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodernist, and postcolonial types of interpretation.  Filmmakers/theorists might include: David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Kathryn Bigelow, Gilles Deleuze, Rainer Fassbinder, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Marleen Gorris, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen & Albert Hughes, Stanley Kubrick, Fredric Jameson, Chris Marker, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Robert Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, George Romero, Steven Shaviro, Kidlat Tahimik, Maurizio Viano, Slavoj Zizek.  Although this is a lecture course, there will be ample time for class discussions.

Full details for COML 3300 - Political Theory and Cinema

Fall.
COML3535 Science, Fiction, Media
From videophones to walkie-talkies, transatlantic tunnels to interstellar travel, or perpetual motion to wireless energy, science fiction frequently presents visions of the future based on radical media change. At the same time, classic works of media theory often read like science fiction: film is a "time machine"; audio recordings "bring the dead to life"; computer networks exist in "cyberspace;" electronic media spell the end of the "Gutenberg galaxy." Working with a variety of visual, acoustic, and print media, primarily from the German-speaking world, we will discuss the relationship between fantasy and ideology; problems of planning, staging, and coordinating world projects; changing evaluations of high and low culture; the discourse of "Americanization;" and critical studies of futurity.

Full details for COML 3535 - Science, Fiction, Media

Fall.
COML3685 Feminism and Islam in North Africa
The course is a survey of Feminist Islamic thinkers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, and their diaspora, featuring both French and Arabic texts in English translation. The purpose of the course is to critically explore the competing treatment of major gendered tropes in a Muslim context (the veil, the harem, polygamy, etc.) by North African thinkers, through their examination of qur'anic surats/hadiths, the evolution of tafsirs (tradion of qur'anic exegesis) as well as their conflicting approaches to secular western feminism. Readings might include: Fatema Mernissi, Asmaa Lamrabet, Qasim Amin, Naguib Mahfoud, Assia Djebar, Mona Eltahawy, and Nawal El-Saadawi.

Full details for COML 3685 - Feminism and Islam in North Africa

Fall.
COML3811 Theory and Practice of Translation
The modern field of translation studies overlaps most closely with literary studies, but it intersects also with fields such as linguistics and politics.  The intense work in translation studies in the last few decades follows a long history of thinking about translation.  The activity of translation has been viewed over many centuries as betrayal, as an inferior form of literary production, as extending the life of the literary work, as a creative process equal to the original.  In this course we will examine various approaches to the translation of literary texts, both prose and verse.  We will read texts by theorists and by translators, possibly including Cicero, Schleiermacher, Nabokov, Jakobson, Nida, Toury, Appiah, Derrida, Venuti, Bassnett, and others.  We will also read and analyze translations of literary works, with a focus on classics of Russian literature.  Practical translation work will illuminate theoretical readings.  

Full details for COML 3811 - Theory and Practice of Translation

Fall.
COML4007 The Art of Love
"Is love an art? Then it rquires knowledge and effort," writes Erich Fromm in the first chapter of The Art of Loving. His question (from 1956) is not a new one. This course engages with the long tradition of thinking about love as an art, not merely something one falls into or out of, but something one does or fails to do.  We'll start with Plato's Phaedrus Ovid's ironic Art of Love before proceeding to three great medieval depictions of love: Andreas Capellanus' On Love, Bernard of Clairvaux's On Loving God, and Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot. We'll also look at some of the more provocative modern arts of love, from Fromm to Foucault, Barthes to Gillian Rose.

Full details for COML 4007 - The Art of Love

Fall.
COML4060 Modern Poetry in and out of World Systems
How can we think modern lyric on a world scale?   This seminar will attempt to articulate two world systems and one world republic:  the idea of the modern capitalist world system as a dynamic political- economic entity consisting of centers and peripheries in Immanuel Wallerstein's sense, the modern imperial discursive world system that codified a hierarchy of human difference and finally the modern world republic of letters centered in 19th century Paris and for the purposes of this seminar, on Baudelaire's creation of modern lyric. We will ask: how have poets  crafted their lyric modernity partly through a poetic engagement with those dimensions of European modernism and aestheticism that touch upon the civilizational and racial difference that fix them in their imperial peripheries?  Poets may include Cavafy, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Miraji, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes.

Full details for COML 4060 - Modern Poetry in and out of World Systems

Fall.
COML4103 Nabokov, Naturally
Vladimir Nabokov's legacy at Cornell is not limited to the world-famous literary works he produced here. The university's natural and built environments also provided powerful material for his lifelong pursuit of butterflies within their geo- and biodiverse ecosystems. In this project-oriented course on the writer-lepidopterist, we will read his words, look at his drawings, study his collections of insects and plants, and develop our own modes of engaging with place and planet through a lively science-art practice.

Full details for COML 4103 - Nabokov, Naturally

Fall.
COML4190 Independent Study
COML 4190 and COML 4200 may be taken independently of each other. Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Full details for COML 4190 - Independent Study

Fall.
COML4229 Culture, Cognition, Humanities
Seminar on the essential features and qualities of culture and how it impacts human endeavors. Because understanding culture necessarily requires interaction across multiple areas of study, this interdisciplinary seminar will be based on discussions of recent research at the interface of cognitive science and the humanities. Topics may include: animal cultures, the evolution of language, the symbolic revolution, knowledge acquisitions, play, rituals and the arts. 

Full details for COML 4229 - Culture, Cognition, Humanities

Fall.
COML4281 Human-Centered Design and Engaged Media
This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, NGOs, and nonprofits working on human rights, public health, and environmental and land rights in the US and abroad. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, critical design thinking, and strategic storytelling, students collaborate on projects with the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Health Access Connect (Uganda), NYS 4-H, and SOOFA Ranch (GA). Consulting on partners' ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO's Human-Centered Design Thinking and Stanford's Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as UX, tactical media, and activist organizing developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

Full details for COML 4281 - Human-Centered Design and Engaged Media

Fall.
COML4435 Art, Nature, and Empire: The Environment in Russian and Soviet Culture
How does the state draw political power from nature? What is the relationship between the environment and national and/or imperial identity? How does the environment resist political control, or support human resistance? This course will explore these questions from the perspective of Russian and Soviet culture. Analyzing literature, art, and film in historical context, we will consider the environment as worker and victim, refuge and rebel, commodity and national(ist) emblem, exploring the degrees of agency it is granted in different artistic depictions. With special attention to the history of Russian imperialism and Soviet "internal colonization" and to non-Russian writers and artists of the Russian Empire and USSR, including Indigenous writers.

Full details for COML 4435 - Art, Nature, and Empire: The Environment in Russian and Soviet Culture

Fall.
COML4451 Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writings in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Full details for COML 4451 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema

Fall.
COML4511 The Global South Novel and World Literature
The driving dialectic in post-colonial studies has been the colonizer/colonized, or the Third World vs. the West. But slowly the field is letting go of this "arrested dialectic" and in its place various triangulations are emerging: e.g. transnationalism, world literature, the global novel, and global south literary studies. Starting with a walk through the emerging theoretical concepts of world/global/transnational literature, we will primarily focus on a global south reading of African literature (itself a contested term), and perennial questions around language and translation. Specifically we will look at how writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, V.S. Naipul, NoViolet Bulawayo, and MG Vassanji challenge the post-colonial discourse and how a global south reading provides an uncomfortable conversation with transnational and world literature theories and concepts. This class counts toward the Literatures of the Global South and post-1800 requirements for English majors.

Full details for COML 4511 - The Global South Novel and World Literature

Fall or Spring.
COML4684 The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures
This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for COML 4684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures

Fall.
COML4687 Trans Theory and Politics Across the Americas
This richly interdisciplinary course examines trans issues in the transnational context of North and South America. Focusing on the tensions and cross-pollinations of (especially US and Canadian) trans studies and (especially Argentinian) travesti theory, the course equips students to engage in critical epistemologies, to practice philosophical and cross-cultural analyses, and to attend to the nuances of language, law, and lived experience.

Full details for COML 4687 - Trans Theory and Politics Across the Americas

Fall.
COML4692 Trance and Media
Media is a notoriously unwieldly concept, at once self-evident and generalizable beyond the bounds of conceptual utility. Yet one feature that tends to inhere in both the narrowest and broadest of definitions is media's capacity to transcend time and space. Similarly, to be a medium, in the context of ritualistic mediumship requires, at minimum, the capacity to transcend the here and now in order to mediate between disparate realms of being. Both media studies and the anthropology of "altered states of consciousness" have complicated traditional approaches to the philosophy of the subject from various disciplinary perspectives. Through film, video, and theory, this course explores trance and media in conjunction and across the globe.

Full details for COML 4692 - Trance and Media

Fall.
COML4930 Senior Essay
Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester. A letter grade is awarded on completion of the second semester, COML 4940.

Full details for COML 4930 - Senior Essay

Multi-semester course: Fall, Spring.
COML4940 Senior Essay
Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester.

Full details for COML 4940 - Senior Essay

Multi-semester course: Fall, Spring.
COML4948 Pleasure and Neoliberalism
The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

Full details for COML 4948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

Fall.
COML6000 Landscape and Technology
The myth of landscape as a natural, external space for human contemplation, gradually ruined by technology, stubbornly refuses to die. How should we read works from a preindustrial past? Is there a precise moment in history when technology comes into what soil scientist Peter Haff calls the postcard picture of landscape? Reading in the original languages where possible, we will begin with foundational pastoral and bucolic texts from the classical, early modern, and Romantic periods before moving to contemporary science/speculative fictions. we will also read recent critical works on the "botanic turn," terraforming, posthuman ruins, and infrastructure.

Full details for COML 6000 - Landscape and Technology

Fall.
COML6007 The Art of Love
"Is love an art? Then it rquires knowledge and effort," writes Erich Fromm in the first chapter of The Art of Loving. His question (from 1956) is not a new one. This course engages with the long tradition of thinking about love as an art, not merely something one falls into or out of, but something one does or fails to do. We'll start with Plato's Phaedrus Ovid's ironic Art of Love before proceeding to three great medieval depictions of love: Andreas Capellanus' On Love, Bernard of Clairvaux's On Loving God, and Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot.  We'll also look at some of the more provocative modern arts of love, from Fromm to Foucault, Barthes to Gillian Rose.

Full details for COML 6007 - The Art of Love

Fall.
COML6060 Modern Poetry in and out of World Systems
How can we think modern lyric on a world scale?   This seminar will attempt to articulate two world systems and one world republic:  the idea of the modern capitalist world system as a dynamic political- economic entity consisting of centers and peripheries in Immanuel Wallerstein's sense, the modern imperial discursive world system that codified a hierarchy of human difference and finally the modern world republic of letters centered in 19th century Paris and for the purposes of this seminar, on Baudelaire's creation of modern lyric. We will ask: how have poets  crafted their lyric modernity partly through a poetic engagement with those dimensions of European modernism and aestheticism that touch upon the civilizational and racial difference that fix them in their imperial peripheries?  Poets may include Cavafy, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Miraji, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes.

Full details for COML 6060 - Modern Poetry in and out of World Systems

Fall.
COML6190 Independent Study
This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should enroll online in the instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for COML 6190 - Independent Study

Fall.
COML6651 Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writings in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Full details for COML 6651 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema

Fall.
COML6661 Persecution and the Art of Writing
The title alludes to an essay by Leo Strauss, now modified and expanded beyond political philosophy to include literary and audio-visual media (past and present) and psychoanalysis. Persecution (via censorship or heterodoxy) is both externally imposed and internalized. Texts include selections from: Plato (Epistles and Republic); Dante (Inferno, Canto X, as read by Gramsci); Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed); Boethius (Consolation of Philosophy); Machiavelli (as read by Strauss, by Gramsci, and by Althusser); Spinoza (Theological-Political Treatise); Hegel (as read by Marx); Lessing (Ernst and Falk on Freemasonry); also short selections from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Emily Dickinson. Titles indicate related topics: Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (A.M. Melzer); Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (R. Girard); The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (M. Detienne); The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (F. Kermode); The Marrano of Reason (Y. Yovel); Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands Motet (E.E. Lowinsky); Gulliver's Travels (J. Swift); Paranoiac-Critical Method (S. Dali); The Third Policeman (F. O'Brien); Subliminal Psycho—  (A. Hitchcock); Awaiting Oblivion (M. Blanchot); and Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (G. Marcus).

Full details for COML 6661 - Persecution and the Art of Writing

Fall.
COML6684 The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures
This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for COML 6684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures

Fall.
COML6687 Trans Theory and Politics Across the Americas
This richly interdisciplinary course examines trans issues in the transnational context of North and South America. Focusing on the tensions and cross-pollinations of (especially US and Canadian) trans studies and (especially Argentinian) travesti theory, the course equips students to engage in critical epistemologies, to practice philosophical and cross-cultural analyses, and to attend to the nuances of language, law, and lived experience.

Full details for COML 6687 - Trans Theory and Politics Across the Americas

Fall.
COML6692 Trance and Media
Media is a notoriously unwieldly concept, at once self-evident and generalizable beyond the bounds of conceptual utility. Yet one feature that tends to inhere in both the narrowest and broadest of definitions is media's capacity to transcend time and space. Similarly, to be a medium, in the context of ritualistic mediumship requires, at minimum, the capacity to transcend the here and now in order to mediate between disparate realms of being. Both media studies and the anthropology of "altered states of consciousness" have complicated traditional approaches to the philosophy of the subject from various disciplinary perspectives. Through film, video, and theory, this course explores trance and media in conjunction and across the globe.

Full details for COML 6692 - Trance and Media

Fall.
COML6740 German Critical Theory and American Radical Thought
This seminar explores the nexus of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and American Black and queer thought. While the legacy of the Frankfurt school (Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) is often traced forward to the work of Juergen Habermas and other contemporary Germans, there is another on-going and more radical legacy taking place in American Black and queer thought. This seminar will look at central texts of Critical Theory and their resonances (as both expansion and critique) in contemporary Black and queer thinking. We will create dialogues around themes such as: Adorno, Fumi Okiji, and Fred Moten on jazz & music; Bloch and José Estaban Muñoz on hope and utopia; Marcuse and Angela Davis on liberation; Adorno and Oshrat Silberbusch on the non-identical as resistance, etc.

Full details for COML 6740 - German Critical Theory and American Radical Thought

Fall.
COML6948 Pleasure and Neoliberalism
The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

Full details for COML 6948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

Fall.
RUSSL3333 Twentieth Century Russian Poetry
The early twentieth century – the three decades preceding and following the Russian Revolution – was a great period of Russian poetry.  The focus of this course is short lyrics by early twentieth century Russian poets: Blok, Annenskii, Akhmatova, Mandel'shtam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and others.  In this course you'll learn how to read short poems carefully, you'll expand and deepen your understanding of the Russian language, and you'll gain insight into one of the world's major literary traditions.  Reading is in Russian (poems) and English (essays and critical works), discussion in English.  The course work will be adjusted to the language proficiency of the class.  Satisfies the Russian minor requirement for Russian literature with reading in the original.

Full details for RUSSL 3333 - Twentieth Century Russian Poetry

Fall.
RUSSL4435 Art, Nature, and Empire: The Environment in Russian and Soviet Culture
How does the state draw political power from nature? What is the relationship between the environment and national and/or imperial identity? How does the environment resist political control, or support human resistance? This course will explore these questions from the perspective of Russian and Soviet culture. Analyzing literature, art, and film in historical context, we will consider the environment as worker and victim, refuge and rebel, commodity and national(ist) emblem, exploring the degrees of agency it is granted in different artistic depictions. With special attention to the history of Russian imperialism and Soviet "internal colonization" and to non-Russian writers and artists of the Russian Empire and USSR, including Indigenous writers.

Full details for RUSSL 4435 - Art, Nature, and Empire: The Environment in Russian and Soviet Culture

Fall.
RUSSL4492 Supervised Reading in Russian Literature
Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for RUSSL 4492 - Supervised Reading in Russian Literature

Fall or Spring.
RUSSL6611 Supervised Reading and Research Fall or Spring.
RUSSA1103 Conversation Practice
Reinforces the speaking skills learned in RUSSA 1121. Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computer. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1103 - Conversation Practice

Fall.
RUSSA1121 Elementary Russian through Film
Gives a thorough grounding in all the language skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Course materials include clips from original Russian films and televisions programs. Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computers. Note the RUSSA 1103 option. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1121 - Elementary Russian through Film

Fall.
RUSSA1125 Reading Russian Press
The emphasis is on reading unabridged articles on a variety of topics from current Russian web pages and translating them into English; a certain amount of discussion (in Russian) may also be undertaken. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1125 - Reading Russian Press

Fall.
RUSSA1131 Self-Paced Elementary Russian I
RUSSA 1131 and RUSSA 1132 cover the standard Cornell first-year Russian language curriculum at a slower pace than RUSSA 1103 -RUSSA 1104 and RUSSA 1121 -RUSSA 1122, the pace to be chosen by each individual student in consultation with the instructor. Somewhat larger homework reading, writing, and online assignments with fewer and shorter meetings with the instructors in very small groups. Detailed description on the Russian Language Program website.

Full details for RUSSA 1131 - Self-Paced Elementary Russian I

Fall.
RUSSA2203 Intermediate Composition and Conversation
Guided conversation, translation, reading, pronunciation, and grammar review, emphasizing the development of accurate and idiomatic expression in the language. Course materials include video clips from an original Russian feature film and work with Russian web sites, in addition to the textbook. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 2203 - Intermediate Composition and Conversation

Fall.
RUSSA3300 Directed Studies
Taught on a specialized basis for students with special projects (e.g., to supplement a non-language course or thesis work).

Full details for RUSSA 3300 - Directed Studies

Fall, Spring.
RUSSA3303 Advanced Composition and Conversation
Reading, writing, and conversation: current Russian films (feature and documentary), newspapers, television programs, Russian web sites, and other materials are used. If taken for 1 or 2 credit hours, students attend 1 or 2 classes per week, respectively. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 3303 - Advanced Composition and Conversation

Fall.
RUSSA3305 Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers of Russian
Intended for students who speak grammatically correct Russian but do not know Russian grammar and have not learned to read or write Russian well (or have not learned written Russian at all). May be taught slightly faster or slower in a given year, depending on the needs and interests of the students. Two classes a week teach writing and grammar and include related reading. These classes are required, and the students who take them receive 2 credit hours. The third (optional) class teaches reading and discussion, and grants an additional credit hour. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 3305 - Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers of Russian

Fall.
BCS1131 Elementary Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian I
By the end of this course, you will be able to carry on basic conversations in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian on many topics from your daily life. You should be able to make polite requests, ask for information, respond to requests and descriptions, impart personal information, and have simple discussions on familiar topics. You will also acquire the skills to read and understand simple informational texts, such as newspaper headlines and menus, announcements and advertisements, and to extract the general idea of longer informational texts. You will master the writing systems of the languages, and you should be able to write notes or simple letters and keep a journal.

Full details for BCS 1131 - Elementary Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian I

Fall.
BCS2133 Intermediate Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian I
The intermediate course in BCS is a continuation of the elementary course and is intended to enhance overall communicative competence in the language. This course moves forward from the study of the fundamental systems and vocabulary of the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian to rich exposure to the spoken and written language with the wide range of speakers and situations. The goal of the course is to give students practice in comprehension, speaking, and composition, while broadening their vocabulary and deepening their understanding of grammar and syntax. The course will focus on the following skills: conversation, writing, role-playing, interviewing, and summarizing. To develop these skills the students will be assigned dialogues, language exercises, translations, descriptions, summaries, and a final independent project.

Full details for BCS 2133 - Intermediate Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian I

Fall.
BCS3302 Advanced Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian Through Literature and Film
FINN2133 Intermediate Finnish I
The Intermediate Finnish I course is designed for students with some prior knowledge of Finnish. Students have an opportunity to practice listening, reading, writing and speaking in Finnish. Students learn to provide information about their opinions and feelings, their families, their immediate environment and their daily activities. The course is taught in Finnish.

Full details for FINN 2133 - Intermediate Finnish I

Fall.
UKRAN1100 Introduction to the Geography, History, Culture, and Language of Ukraine
The course offers a general overview of the geography, history, literature, cinema, fine arts, music, and language of this Eastern European country of some 40 million people. At various historical periods since the 18th century, Ukraine had been controlled by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, gained independence in 1991, and become the target of a military invasion by Russian Federation in 2022. Through assigned readings, videos, and other materials, students will gain a degree of understanding of the historical and social forces that shape Ukrainian everyday life, natural environments, and popular culture, and its current place in Europe and the world.

Full details for UKRAN 1100 - Introduction to the Geography, History, Culture, and Language of Ukraine

Spring.
UKRAN1121 Elementary Ukrainian I
This course teaches language as a gateway to Ukrainian literature, history, and arts and the means of communication in everyday life, offering thorough grounding in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Full details for UKRAN 1121 - Elementary Ukrainian I

Fall.
UKRAN2133 Intermediate Ukrainian I
The course starts with a review and subsequent reinforcement of grammar fundamentals and core vocabulary pertaining to the most common aspects of daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of students' communicative skills (oral and written) on such topics as the self, family, studies and leisure, travel, meals and others.

Full details for UKRAN 2133 - Intermediate Ukrainian I

Fall.
UKRAN3133 Advanced Ukrainian I
This content-based modular course aims to develop students' capacity to use the Ukrainian language as a research and communication tool in a variety of specialized functional and stylistic areas that include literary fiction, scholarly prose, printed and broadcast journalism. It is designed for students with interest in the history, politics, literature, culture and other aspects of contemporary Ukraine, as well as those who plan to do their research, business or reporting about Ukraine.

Full details for UKRAN 3133 - Advanced Ukrainian I

Fall.
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