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

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

The state of the planet is one of the most urgent issues of our time, yet communicating environmental concerns and engaging the public on environmental issues is never easy. By studying and emulating how scientists, activists, philosophers, anthropologists, religious leaders, journalists, and last but not least creative writers connect us with our increasingly threatened world, this course aims to provide tools to students from all disciplines on writing the environment. Assignments will include analyzing and mapping the templates of different kinds of environmental writing; comparing writing from different periods and parts of the world aimed toward diverse audiences; and trying out writing voices and styles within and across the students' divergent knowledge, interests, and skills.

Full details for COML 1107 - FWS: Writing the Environment

Explore the culinary tradition and culture of Russia in broad historical, geopolitical and socioeconomic context through the lens of Russian folklore, short stories of Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov, works of contemporary Russian-American writers, visual art, and international film. The literary journey will take you from the lavish tables of the XVIII century aristocracy, to the hardship and austerity of GULAG prison, to the colorful and savory regional fare of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, to the fridge and pantry staples in the everyday life of Russian family. Your writing assignments will help you develop critical thinking and argumentative skills, precision and clarity of expression, ability to write with discipline, creativity, and sense of style.

Full details for COML 1119 - FWS: A Taste of Russian Literature

For several years now, Ukraine and Russia have been in the headlines as their conflict has captivated the world. Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) is uniquely positioned to provide some answers to many questions surrounding this conflict. A native of Ukraine, Gogol moved to St. Petersburg at the age of twenty. His works set in Ukraine and Russia, his juxtaposition of the two ethnicities, are relevant in gaining an understanding of this tragic strife between the two neighboring countries. Gogol's picturesque style is abundant with rhetorical devices. Studying Gogol's works chronologically, from "The Fair at Sorochintsy" to "The Overcoat," will enable students to familiarize themselves with his oeuvre's wide range. This, in turn, will equip students with numerous tools designed to enrich and improve their writing skills. Most important, writing assignments will help students to learn how to write in a lucid and coherent manner.

Full details for COML 1121 - FWS: Ukraine and Russia through the Eyes of Nikolai Gogol

Anti-Chinese racism resurfaced during the COVID-19 scare, but linking Chinese migrants to disease and "uncivilized" habits is not new. How has the West defined and exercised power over the Chinese "other"? What tools of resistance did Chinese intellectuals and activists wielded in response? Do these tools generate unexpected side-effects, and if so in what ways? This course looks for adventurous and critical minds ready to embark on a tumultuous journey of historical and literary inquiries. We will study translated literature, fiction film and documentary, activist writing, and academic debates on "Chinese" experiences and the experience of "China" in the global world. Student writers will learn to evaluate concepts, analyze creative texts, and put forward informed and nuanced arguments about their subjects of interest.

Full details for COML 1128 - FWS: China and Race

Poems are puzzles, or are they plants? In this class, you'll learn to read with poetry as a fellow writer. You'll respond to key questions like "How does this poem work?" or "Why do I like it?" Poems are often thought of as infinite in the possibilities of perception and wonder they produce. Together we will grapple with the paradox of writing about poetry in a closed, concise form without domesticating it, by investigating how reading poetry can teach us how to write anew. How are lines and stanzas related to sentences and paragraphs? Can ideas "rhyme?" Are notions such as deixis, voice, metaphor, apostrophe, prosody, and the "lyric I" essential to producing a cogent and truthful argument in any discipline? In addition to poems and essays by poets, this course may include relevant literary theory, scientific texts, musical works, and extracts from novels or films.

Full details for COML 1134 - FWS: Reading Poetry

Punk Culture–comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts–represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 2006 - Punk Culture: The Aesthetics and Politics of Refusal

What is a classic? What is contemporary? Where are we heading now? Extending from the Enlightenment and Age of Revolutions to the present, this course will focus on texts that have played a pivotal role in shaping our increasingly global understanding of World Literature. Exploring seminal works from the past and literature's enduring value in the 21st century, we will pay special attention to great short works that have had an outsized impact on the ways literature, culture, history, philosophy, language, economics, politics, and technology continue to intersect and evolve. Authors include Molière, Pope, Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Büchner, Poe, Dickinson, Whitman, Baudelaire, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Borges, Bolaño, Walcott, and Miranda.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 2020 - Great Books: The Great Short Works

Take your love for literature, film and media into uncharted waters. This course journeys beyond national, linguistic and disciplinary borders to explore implications of our globalized and technologized world.  Engage in cutting-edge debates in the fields of comparative literature and film and media studies. Exploring texts from across the globe, we'll read authors like Sappho, Ovid,  Kafka, Césaire, Coetzee, Head, Butler, Borges, Lu Xun, Tawada; watch films by Alain Resnais, Michael Snow, Wong Kar-Wai, Ousmène Sembène, Abbas Kiarostami. Topics will include: postcolonial theory, translation, black studies, gender and sexuality studies, ecocriticism, and media studies. Writing assignments will include the analytical college essay and other forms of critical reflection, such as translation and transmedial analysis.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 2030 - Comparative Literature, Film, and Media

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.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 2035 - Science Fiction

This undergraduate course introduces the formal and topical innovations that African cinema has experienced since its inception in the 1960s. Sections will explore, among others, Nollywood, sci-fi, and ideological cinema. Films include: Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako, Mohamed Camara's Dakan, Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki-Bouki, Cheikh Oumar Sissoko's Finzan, Anne-Laure Folly's Women with Open Eyes, Ousmane Sembène's Camp de Thiaroye, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for COML 2235 - New Visions in African Cinema

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.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

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

Jewish cultures in the New World are far more diverse than most Americans realize. Some know the history of Ashkenazi (German and Eastern European) Jews, most of whom immigrated to the U.S. between 1880-1920. In addition to Ashkenazi cultures, our course introduces the Sephardi (Spanish/Portuguese), Mizrahi (Arab), Persian, and Ethiopian Jews who have immigrated to the Americas since the 16th century. Students will learn how Jews of all origins have built communities across the Americas, from Jamaica, Bolivia, and Brazil to Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. We will focus on the resources that diverse Jewish communities drew on to face challenges in creating new Jewish American cultures, such as how to navigate assimilation, religious observance, legal discrimination, and gender and sexual reform.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 2630 - Brazil to Brooklyn: Jewish Cultures of the Americas

What does the representation of sexual encounter in the Arabian Nights ('Alf layla-wa layla) have to do with a politics of race and gender? This course explores the millenia-long history of mediations and translations of this ancient Perso-Arabic text across literature, film, and popular culture, in the Middle East and in Europe. We will pay attention to the transmission of phobic tropes about female sexuality and miscegenation, or "interracial" sex as they manifest in various versions of 1001 Nights across time and space.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for COML 2700 - Race and Sex: Arabian Nights

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 trace three major threads: myths of creation and destruction; travel narratives; and poetry of love and devotion. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the 'Epic of Gilgamesh' and 'The Song of Songs,' as well as selections from medieval works such as the 'Travels' of Ibn Battuta, the 'Shahnameh' of Ferdowsi, poetry of Yehuda HaLevi, and The Thousand and One Nights. The modern unit will include work by Egyptian Nobel Laureate, Naguib Mahfouz. 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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

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

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. Readings will be complemented by discussions with Cornell faculty and graduate students working in the field.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 3001 - Methods of Comparison

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 course counts as a pre-1800 course for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

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

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. Global Cinema I covers the period from 1895 to 1960. Precise topics will vary from year to year, but may include: early silent cinema; the emergence of Hollywood as industry and a "classical" narrative form; Soviet, German, French and Chinese film cultures; the coming of sound; interwar documentary and avant-garde movements; American cinema in the age of the studio system; Italian Neorealism; the post-war avant-garde.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 3261 - Global Cinema I

How have income inequality and climate change, two of the most urgent issues of our time, come to shape the contemporary imagination? What might a poetics of economies or ecologies, or an economical or ecological poetics, look like? What metaphors and semantic "fields," "networks" and "webs" of discursive and rhetorical choices, inform discourses of economy and ecology? How might economical and ecological tropes help us rethink poetics, and vice-versa? What are their protocols and conventions, constraints and regulations, possibilities and limitations? What tensions, and what "imaginary solutions to real problems," do we find among them? Ranging across a variety of national and international contexts, this course will explore how such concerns figure in contemporary poetry, fiction, and film, electronic and digital media.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for COML 3264 - Poetics, Economies, Ecologies

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.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS, ETM-AS)

Full details for COML 3300 - Political Theory and Cinema

This course explores cultural representations of Afro-Asian intimacies and coalition in novels, songs, films, paintings, and poems. What affinities, loves and thefts, and tensions are present in cultural forms such as anime, jazz, kung fu, and K-pop? Students will consider the intersections and overlap between African and Asian diasporic cultures in global cities such as New York, Chicago, Havana, Lahore, Kingston, and Hong Kong to ask the question: when did Africa and Asia first encounter each other? This will be contextualized through a political and historical lens of the formation of a proto-Global South in the early twentieth, Afro-futurism, women of color feminisms, and Third World solidarity and internationalism. Tackling issues of race, gender, sexuality, and resistance, this seminar also reckons with the intertwined legacies of the institutions of African enslavement and Asian indenture by reading the novels of Patricia Powell and the paintings of Kehinde Wiley, for instance. Students will work in groups to produce Afro-Asia DJ visual soundtracks as part of the final project.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, GLC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for COML 3310 - Afro-Asia: Futurism and Feminism

This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through hands-on performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film. We will examine how Korean literature and performance traditions have transformed over time, with attention given to how these traditions speak to local and global audiences following the Korean Wave. The course concludes with recent developments in Korean popular music, including K-pop bands and K-hip-hop. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is necessary.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 3314 - Korean Literature and Performance: From P'ansori to K-Pop

"My existence is a scandal," Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram the effect of his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of "art for art's sake" and all that was considered artificial, unnatural, or obscene, the Decadent writers of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional ethical moorings. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, A. C. Swinburne, and especially Oscar Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, and design.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 3550 - Decadence

From White Chicks to Blackkklansman, American film has often depicted characters who conceal their race or gender, like black male cops "passing" as wealthy white women. This class will examine how Hollywood has depicted race and gender "passing" from the early 20th century to the present. While tracing common themes across films, we will also study the ideological role of passing films: how they thrill audiences by challenging social boundaries and hierarchies, only to reestablish familiar boundaries by the end. We will not treat these films as accurate depictions of real-world passing, but rather as cultural tools that help audiences to manage ideological contradictions about race, gender, sexuality, and class. Students will finish the course by creating their own short films about passing.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 3707 - Hidden Identities Onscreen

This course offers an exciting trip to the intricate world of Nabokov's fiction. After establishing himself in Europe as a distinguished Russian writer, Nabokov, at the outbreak of World War II, came to the United States where he reestablished himself, this time as an American writer of world renown. In our analysis of Nabokov's fictional universe, we shall focus on his Russian corpus of works, from Mary (1926) to The Enchanter (writ. 1939), all in English translation, and then shall examine the two widely read novels which he wrote in English in Ithaca while teaching literature at Cornell: Lolita (1955) and Pnin (1957).

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 3815 - Reading Nabokov

For a long time area studies have overlooked the over-determined links of gender, race/ethnicity, and social class in fields related to East Asia and the trans-Pacific regions. Little attention has been paid to how to conceptualize gender and race/ethnicity; how to analyze the mutual implication of sexism, racism, and class essentialism (some call it "class racism"), and how to understand the relationships of these topics to the broader contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. This course is designed to offer a series of discussions about the following problems: (1) the historically specific modes of sexism and racism in social spaces related to Japan and other places in the trans-Pacific; (2) the mutual implication of sexism, racism, and social class in various contexts including those of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism; (3) the roles of gender, race, and social class in the United States' knowledge production about East Asia in general; and (4) the conceptions of gender and race in the social formations particular to East Asia. The assigned readings include both English and Japanese materials. However, those who register in ASIAN 3388 are exempt from reading the materials in Japanese.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, GLC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for COML 3980 - Theorizing Gender and Race in Asian Histories and Literatures

Taking its inspiration from David Hume's famous remark that "reason ought only to be the slave of the passions," this course will consider the Enlightenment's "science of human nature" not as the triumph of rationality but as a drama of competing psychologies of the passions. We will consider how the priority accorded the passion of self-preservation or life, the body, and the sexual and acquisitive drives subverted traditional ethics and was countervailed by compassion, sympathy, and other sentiments. We will read a short story and novels as well as some moral and political philosophy (Margaret Cavendish, Hobbes, Defoe, Cleland, Rousseau, Sterne, Laclos, Wollstonecraft, and Nietzsche) to address such topics as the "marriage contract" and the gender politics and economics of the family; love and benevolence in relation to law and obligation; medical discourse in relation to sexual "criminality"; pornography as materialist science and sentimental-sexual education; suffering and the ethics and politics of pity. We will also read theoretical work by Althusser, Foucault and Butler to focus on narrative form and mechanisms of identity formation. This course may be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 4015 - Passions and Literary Enlightenment

Fictions of dictatorship, as termed by scholar Lucy Burns, denote both the narratives and spectacles produced by authoritarian governments and the performances, events, and cultural objects that work against these states of exception. This course will critically examine histories of dictatorships, through both documentary & creative forms (i.e. novels, memoirs, and performance) and with a geographic focus on Asia and Latin America, in order to understand authoritarian returns in our present historical moment.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for COML 4040 - Fictions of Dictatorship

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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

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

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

What happens when Greta Thunberg tears into the EU? Or Banksy interrupts Disney World? Or Black Lives Matters confronts the justice system? How can we help local communities use media to address their concerns? This course mixes seminar, studio, and field activities to explore community-engaged media through hands-on study of media activism, human centered design, and project-based learning. Students combine cultural analysis and media production to study how artists and activists engage audiences in direct action and civic engagement. We'll draw on fields of performance studies, human-computer interaction, and media theory to study how artists and activists use media to create social engagement. Working as critical design teams, we will work with local schools and community organizations on an on-going civic storytelling project.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

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

We will read together a wide range of modern European texts-mostly but not exclusively by at least nominally Jewish authors, many of them working in the German intellectual tradition--accompanied by a range of works by Jacques Derrida that engage those thinkers and their texts. Authors will likely include Theodor w. Adorno, Saint Augustine, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Helene Cixous, Hermann Cohen, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabes, Emannuel Levinas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx, and Gershom Scholem. We will thus be better able to participate in the current re-evaluation of Derrida's legacy, including his Jewishness, and we will read him, among other things, as a proponent of dialogue, sometimes loving and sometimes fiercely agonistic.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 4428 - Reading Derrida and Others

What does it mean to make a poem? How might the act of poetic making—poïesis—unfold on the canvas, on the letterpress bed, or within a graphics layout program like Adobe Illustrator? What choices, what innovations in form, become possible when the fabrication of poetry is an equally textual and material process? An interdisciplinary seminar and collaborative workshop, "Poetry in the Expanded Field" combines critical inquiry with sustained creative practice and experimentation. We will examine emergent practices at the intersections of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, poetry, song, dance, performance, film, and digital technologies, while also engaging in archival research and practicing poetic composition and 2- and 3-D design in programs like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. For additional information visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 4625 - Poetry in the Expanded Field

Problems concerning translation are explored. Although there are many different models of translation, we tend to be confined to the unilateral regime of translation, that is, the very narrow and historically specific mode of translation as a transnational transfer of significance between two national or ethnic languages. This course will survey theories of translation with special emphasis on relationships between trans-national translation and transnational transference. Translation establishes a division of two spheres and thereby marks the limit of what can be expressed in one medium. Broadly understood, translation can take place not only between two national languages but also at a variety of boundaries within a single society. We will investigate different economies of translation by which different social and cultural identities are constructed, emphasizing the disappearance of multi-lingualism in the modern nation-state and the mutation of translation tropics which has given rise to new ways of imagining the organicist unity of the society. Historical transformation of translation accompanying the genesis of linguistic and cultural identity will be examined in reference to historical materials. Furthermore, the course will explore the broader conception of translation in terms of which to critically understand communication as the ideology of Capital.

Catalog Distribution: (KCM-AS, ETM-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for COML 4700 - Translation and Cultural Difference

This course examines how Homer's epic poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad, have been read in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Homer has long been understood as important for defining and contesting European modernity (as a 'classic' or as 'universal'). We will be investigating what happens to Homer when writers and translators, such as Tariq Ali, CLR James, and Derek Walcott write back to Eurocentric ideas of modernity. Therefore we will trace the receptions in various media (popular film, critical theory, the novels of Toni Morrison) to understand how Homer articulates the concepts and crises of contemporary global culture.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 4801 - Homer and Global Modernity

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

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

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

This course will examine the similarities and differences between literary and psychoanalytic approaches to works of fiction or criticism. Do these fields borrow techniques and methodologies from each other? Are they in competition? Do they suggest different practices of reading and writing? Do they both pursue therapeutic goals? Where and how do literature and psychoanalysis position the subject, the self, the individual? Does literature analyze? Authors will include: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Moritz, Goethe, Buechner, Kleist, Poe, Kafka, Goethe, Jung, Lipps, Freud, Lacan, Butler, Benjamin, Derrida, Felman, et al.

Full details for COML 6138 - Literature and Psychoanalysis: Kindred Spirits

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

This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through hands-on performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film. We will examine how Korean literature and performance traditions have transformed over time, with attention given to how these traditions speak to local and global audiences following the Korean Wave. The course concludes with recent developments in Korean popular music, including K-pop bands and K-hip-hop. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is necessary.

Full details for COML 6314 - Korean Literature and Performance: From P'ansori to K-Pop

We will read together a wide range of modern European texts-mostly but not exclusively by at least nominally Jewish authors, many of them working in the German intellectual tradition--accompanied by a range of works by Jacques Derrida that engage those thinkers and their texts. Authors will likely include Theodor w. Adorno, Saint Augustine, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Helene Cixous, Hermann Cohen, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabes, Emannuel Levinas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx, and Gershom Scholem. We will thus be better able to participate in the current re-evaluation of Derrida's legacy, including his Jewishness, and we will read him, among other things, as a proponent of dialogue, sometimes loving and sometimes fiercely agonistic.

Full details for COML 6428 - Reading Derrida and Others

As Théophile Gautier said of Decadent writing, "It is an ingenious, complex, learned style, full of shades and refinements of meaning, ever extending the bounds of language, borrowing from every technical vocabulary, taking colors from every palette and notes from every keyboard; a style that endeavors to express the most inexpressible thoughts, the vaguest and most fleeting contours of form, that listens, with a view to rendering them, to the subtle confidences of neurosis, to the confessions of aging lust turning into depravity, and to the odd hallucinations of fixed ideas passing into mania."  We associate this aesthetic with Oscar Wilde in English, but we will explore it as a modernist innovation also for more recent canonical novelists, from Henry James to Thomas Pynchon.

Full details for COML 6551 - Decadence and the Modern Novel

For a long time area studies have overlooked the over-determined links of gender, race/ethnicity, and social class in fields related to East Asia and the trans-Pacific regions. Little attention has been paid to how to conceptualize gender and race/ethnicity; how to analyze the mutual implication of sexism, racism, and class essentialism (some call it "class racism"), and how to understand the relationships of these topics to the broader contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. This course is designed to offer a series of discussions about the following problems: (1) the historically specific modes of sexism and racism in social spaces related to Japan and other places in the trans-Pacific; (2) the mutual implication of sexism, racism, and social class in various contexts including those of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism; (3) the roles of gender, race, and social class in the United States' knowledge production about East Asia in general; and (4) the conceptions of gender and race in the social formations particular to East Asia. The assigned readings include both English and Japanese materials. However, those who register in ASIAN 3388 are exempt from reading the materials in Japanese.

Full details for COML 6680 - Theorizing Gender and Race in Asian Histories and Literatures

What does it mean to practice theory in the midst of a pandemic? And then what does it mean to return to biopolitics — a mode of theoretical reflection on the enmeshment of life and politics — in the time of Covid-19? These questions lie at the heart of a seminar dedicated to re-examining some of the central theoretical set pieces of biopolitics. Alongside seminal texts from Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, we will take up biopolitics in a number of philosophical works from Italy from the likes of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Toni Negri, and Simona Forti in order to think again some of the key words and concepts of biopolitics (states of exception, community, immunity, event) in the time of virus.

Full details for COML 6703 - Biopolitics and COVID

The course will explore the philosophy, psychoanalysis, and politics of sound along the artistic interface of cinema, video, performance, and new media art.  From analysis of synchronization of sound and image in the talking movie to its discruption in experimental music, video, new media and sound art, we will consider the prominence of sound and noise as carriers of gender, ethnic and cultural difference.  We also will explore the theory of sound, from tracts on futurism, feminism, new music, and sampling, to more recent acoustic applications of eco-theory in which sound merges with discourses of water and environment.  In addition to studying a wide range of artistic production in audio, sound, new media, and screen arts, we will discuss the dialogical impact of theoretical discussions of sound in psychoanalysis and aesthetics, as well as the phenomenal growth of digital acoustic horizons in the Pacific Rim.

Full details for COML 6791 - Acoustic Horizons

This course examines how Homer's epic poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad, have been read in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Homer has long been understood as important for defining and contesting European modernity (as a 'classic' or as 'universal'). We will be investigating what happens to Homer when writers and translators, such as Tariq Ali, CLR James, and Derek Walcott write back to Eurocentric ideas of modernity. Therefore we will trace the receptions in various media (popular film, critical theory, the novels of Toni Morrison) to understand how Homer articulates the concepts and crises of contemporary global culture.

Full details for COML 6801 - Homer and Global Modernity

Full details for COML 7000 - Comparative Literature Proseminar

Founded by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, St. Petersburg was built expressly to advertise the triumph of enlightened absolutism at home and to display Russia's status as a major European power abroad. But for all of its neo-classical splendor, the image of imperial St. Petersburg has been consistently invoked as a critical touchstone for the expression of political discontent, social unease and spiritual anxiety. The most modern and "intentional" of Russian cities, Russia's northern capital has come to stand for everything that's wrong with modern life. In this seminar, we will approach St. Petersburg as a cultural text composed by an illustrious trio of Russian writers who saw the complicated history of their country through Peter's "window to the west" -- Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Andrei Bely.

Catalog Distribution: (HA-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for RUSSL 2158 - St. Petersburg and the Making of Modern Russia

The nineteenth century was the first great age of Russian poetry – beginning with Pushkin's predecessors, continuing through Lermontov, and ending with Tiutchev and Fet and anticipations of modernism.  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 in Russian, discussion in English.  Satisfies the Russian Minor requirement for Russian literature with reading in the original.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for RUSSL 3331 - Introduction to Russian Poetry

This course offers an exciting trip to the intricate world of Nabokov's fiction. After establishing himself in Europe as a distinguished Russian writer, Nabokov, at the outbreak of World War II, came to the United States where he reestablished himself, this time as an American writer of world renown. In our analysis of Nabokov's fictional universe, we shall focus on his Russian corpus of works, from Mary (1926) to The Enchanter (writ. 1939), all in English translation, and then shall examine the two widely read novels which he wrote in English in Ithaca while teaching literature at Cornell: Lolita (1955) and Pnin (1957).

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for RUSSL 3385 - Reading Nabokov

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

Independent study.

Full details for RUSSL 6611 - Supervised Reading and Research

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

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

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

RUSSA 1131 and RUSSA 1132 cover the standard Cornell first-year Russian language curriculum at a slower (or faster) 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, one-on-one or in very small groups.

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

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

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

Reading, writing, and conversation: current Russian films (feature and documentary), newspapers, television programs, Russian web sites, and other materials are used. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 3303 - Advanced Composition and Conversation

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

Designed to teach advanced reading and discussion skills. In seminar 101, weekly reading assignments include 20-40 pages of unabridged Russian, fiction or non-fiction. In seminar 102, the weekly assignments are 80-100 pages. Discussion of the reading is conducted entirely in Russian and centered on the content and analysis of the assigned selection.

Full details for RUSSA 3309 - Advanced Reading

Involves discussion, in Russian, of authentic Russian texts and films (feature or documentary) in a variety of non-literary styles and genres. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 4413 - Modern Russia: Past and Present I

To be taken in conjunction with any Russian literature course at the advanced level. Students receive 1 credit for reading and discussing works in Russian in addition to their normal course work. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 4491 - Reading Course: Russian Literature in the Original Language

Designed for students whose areas of study require advanced active control of the language. Fine points of translation, usage, and style are discussed and practiced. Syllabus varies from year to year. May be taken more than once. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 6633 - Russian for Russian Specialists

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

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 1133 - Intermediate Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian I

The Elementary Finnish I course is designed for students without prior knowledge of Finnish. Students have an opportunity to practice listening, speaking, reading and writing 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 1121 - Elementary Finnish I

The Intermediate Finnish I course provides students a thorough and consistently structured revision of intermediate linguistic competence in Finnish including listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Students learn to talk fluently about a wide range of topics from everyday life, speak about recent past, read and understand newspaper articles, and use appropriate grammatical structures. The course is taught in Finnish.

Full details for FINN 1133 - Intermediate Finnish I

The purpose of this course is for the students to develop elementary proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, and writing in Ukrainian, while acquiring some basic knowledge of Ukrainian culture, history, geography, and way of life.

Full details for UKRAN 1121 - Elementary 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. A number of Ukrainian language idiosyncrasies like numeral + noun phrases, verbal aspect, impersonal verbal forms, verbs of motion and others receive special attention. Course materials are selected with the aim of introducing students to some functional and stylistic differences in modern Ukrainian as well as distinctions between the Kyiv and Lviv literary variant.

Full details for UKRAN 1133 - Intermediate Ukrainian I

Full details for UKRAN 3133 - Advanced Ukrainian I