Courses

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

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

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

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

The theme of urban loneliness has elicited some of the best work in cinema history. This course asks: why are loneliness and the city so well suited for cinematic representation? Tackling the work of American mainstream directors, European arthouse masters as well as "global cinema" auteurs, we reflect on issues of belonging, longing, (digital) connectivity, and the pursuit of happiness in the modern city. Possible selection of films by Sean Baker, Coppola, Jonze, Kaurismäki, Kieslowski, Kim Ki-Duk, Loach, Gaspar Noe, Ulrich Seidl, Scorsese, Truffaut, and Wong Kar-Wai, among others. Course puts emphasis on close-reading and revision of writing.

Full details for COML 1135 - FWS: Loneliness and the City

This course analyses autobiographical writings by authors who experienced settler colonialism, forced removals, and historical erasure. The course is intended to help answer questions around voice, indigeneity, and literary resistance in response to settler colonial violence. In its larger scheme, it asks: What are the shared aesthetics and themes of these writings? How do their authors relay generational and personal trauma? What are some of their literary and political interventions? Students will primarily read verse and prose memoirs by American Indian and Palestinian authors. The course takes a comparative turn as it engages with possible intersections between Palestinian and Native stories, especially those that are written within or about turbulent historical moments. Class discussions and assignments will have critical and creative components, and students are expected to write analytical pieces about the readings and fulfill a creative project that requires a more intimate engagement with the class's themes.

Full details for COML 2008 - The Aesthetics of Displacement

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 will explore how different media represent and stage encounters with the other.  Authors, artists, and directors whose work we will study include people like: Rodrigo Bellot, Carmen Maria Machado, Amanda Gorman, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Hao Jingfang, Franz Kafka, and Yoko Tawada.   Topics may include: postcolonial theory, translation, BIPOC studies, gender and sexuality studies, environmental studies, and media studies. Writing assignments will include a range of forms, genres, and media that help us hone our analytical, critical, and creative understanding, reflection, and expression.

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

The primary work of this course is researching, editing, and writing articles about poetry on Wikipedia.  The course follows two related tracks: studying poetry and learning how to make it accessible to others.  Verse analysis and research and writing skills will be emphasized.  Students will be responsible for expanding or creating three Wikipedia articles about poetry.  At least one new article should be submitted for publication on Wikipedia.  As a background to our work, we will consider Wikipedia in the context of both the history of encyclopedias and the digital humanities.  A particular focus of our reading and writing will be under-represented poets and poems. The goals of the course are to write about poetry with a broad audience in mind and to contribute to the world's body of knowledge about poetry.

Full details for COML 2051 - Writing about Poetry on Wikipedia

This course will explore how in the body of world literature humans have construed, narrated, imagined the end of time and of the world and sometimes its new beginning.  Spanning from ancient epic and origin myths through nineteenth century novels and colonial narratives to contemporary science fiction, we will inquire, through our reading: what is a world?  How does the labor of the imagination construct a world or the world and deconstruct or undo worlds?  Readings will range widely across time and world space (with authors such as Hesiod, Balzac, Marquez, Murakami, Alexievich, Bacigalupi) and will include attention to contemporary theories of world literature.

Full details for COML 2271 - Reading for the End of Time

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Full details for COML 3001 - Methods of Comparison

This course will examine tragedy in the context of colonialism in the Caribbean and Africa, both as an important genre of anticolonial and decolonial writing and as a frame for inquiring into the consequences of historical rupture and the remediability or irremediability of the colonial past.  Authors may include (in chronological order) Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, CLR James, Aimé Césaire, Wole Soyinka, Ousmane Sembene, Derek Walcott, David Scott, Raoul Peck, Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison.

Full details for COML 3042 - Tragedy and Colonial Rupture: On the Question of Irremediable Pasts

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.

Full details for COML 3261 - Global Cinema I

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

Shortly after the 2016 election, The New Yorker published an article entitled "The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming." This course examines what the Frankfurt School knew by introducing students to Critical Theory, juxtaposing its roots in the 19th century (i.e., Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud) with its most prominent manifestation in the 20th century, the Frankfurt School (e.g., Kracauer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) alongside disparate voices (Arendt) and radical continuations (Davis, Zuboff, Weeks) as they engage with politics, society, culture, and literature (e.g. Brecht and Kafka).   Established in 1920s and continued in exile in the US during WWII, the interdisciplinary circle of scholars comprising the Frankfurt School played a pivotal role in the intellectual developments of post-war American and European social, political, and aesthetic theory: from analyses of authoritarianism and democracy to critiques of capitalism, the entertainment industry, commodity fetishism, and mass society. This introduction to Critical Theory explores both the prescience of these diverse thinkers for today's world ("what they knew") as well as what they perhaps could not anticipate in the 21st century (e.g., developments in technology, economy, political orders), and thus how to critically address these changes today.

Full details for COML 3541 - Introduction to Critical Theory

For dozens of millennia before COVID 19, humans lived with epidemics and contagious diseases.  Plagues occurred throughout history, and, as we all know too well, viruses do exist.  But, until very recently, literary descriptions (often tied to religious considerations and philosophical determinations) also played a central role in the way population faced and envisioned epidemics.  Moreover, the notion of contagion is not limited to the medical sphere: fear, ideas, and cultural forms are apt to become contagious, in this class, we will focus on the representation of epidemics in modern French and ancient Greek literary texts, ranging from Homer and Sophocies to Maupassant, Camus, Guibert, or Cixous.  In a comparative way, we'll also interrogate other key texts, from authors such as Boccaccio or Mary  Shelley.

Full details for COML 3655 - Epidemics, Plagues, Contagions

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.

Full details for COML 3707 - Hidden Identities Onscreen

The Second World War and the Occupation of France by German forces had a traumatic impact on the nation's identity. We will examine the way France has tried to deal with this conflicted period through a series of films that each deal, directly or indirectly with the major questions posed by history to French "memory" of the Occupation. What was the role of collaboration, resistance, anti-Semitism, of writers and intellectuals during this traumtic period? How has film helped to define and re-shape the ways in which France has come to terms with its conflicted past?

Full details for COML 3891 - Occupied France Through Film

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

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

This course draws on feminist, queer, and crip theories; animal studies; disability studies; indigenous studies; and environmental studies to examine anthropocentrism and various forms of violence that target groups of people and the environment. How has the definition of the human variously aided or challenged oppressions and violence? How does the otherness of certain humans relate to nonhuman existence and its conditions of being "neither alive nor dead"? Through the representations of death, violence, animals, plants, ghosts, objects, and environments in animated and documentary films, novels, art, nonfiction, as well as history and material culture, the course will rethink the functions of the parameters—ethical, legal, aesthetic, emotional, and political—of the human and of human rights. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for COML 4260 - Rethinking Boundaries of the Human: Crip Ecology, Disability, and Otherness

What does it mean to consider something a failure? What happens when a movement or campaign never quite gets off the ground, never got the traction they wanted, when a dream never comes to fruition? This class will consider the question of failure through analyzing thwarted sociopolitical, artistic, religious movements across disparate global sites and historical moments, with a particular focus on what comes after, and how failure is determined, and by whom.  Case studies will include diverted leftist campaigns, millenarian movements past and present (what happens when the end of the world never comes), artistic initiatives that came and went, and filmic and literary interpretations of failures.  For longer description and instructor bio visit The Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for COML 4261 - Utopia Lost? Failure and its Aftermaths

This course asks how Renaissance lyric poetry (including Petrarch, Labé, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Wroth) negotiates questions of gender through poetic innovation and, just as often, through the use of poetic commonplaces. We will read this poetry in conversation with modern and contemporary theory (including Cixous, Sedgwick, Ngai, Berlant) to help us understand Renaissance lyric's particular fascination with women's bodies. We will ask how male poets' cliché-ridden poems about women offer us ways to think about the persistence and flexibility of misogynist tropes. We will also ask how feminist and queer theory—as well as female poets' responses to their male predecessors and contemporaries—variously diagnose, subvert, and internalize those tropes. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for COML 4262 - Female Complaints: Gender in Early Modern Lyric and Modern Theory

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.

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

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

From the Bible to the Babylonian Talmud to a graphic novel edition of the Book of Esther, texts--their composition, transmission, study and debate—have been at the core of Jewish culture for millennia, whether in diaspora or in the Land. They remain a central technology for the continuation and transformation of an identity that is rich, multiform, unique, and yet open to new influences and interactions. Approaching the varieties of textuality is one way to contemplate the broad sweep of Jewish cultural history. In this course we will consider questions of canonicity, differential access to textual authority by class and gender, the relation between alphabetical and graphic representation, and by no means least, the perenniality of Jewish humor.

Full details for COML 4463 - Modes of Jewish Textuality

What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry's textual environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How does contemporary poetry resist, engage, respond to, sound out that noise? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal cultural, economic, historical, philosophical, political developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a wide range of works that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions of personal and collective identity and language in contexts at once local and global. Poets include Armantrout, Bernstein, Collins, Espada, Gander, Fitterman, Goldsmith, Hong, Osman, Place, Rich, Smith, and Waldrop.

Full details for COML 4860 - Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

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

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 will explore the ways in which Michel Foucault's oeuvre transitions from a concern with sovereignty to a preoccupation with biopolitics. Foucault's early work (one understands that there is no absolute Foucaultian division into "sovereignty" and "biopolitics"), such as "Madness and Civilization," attends to the structure, the construction and the force of the institution – the birth of asylum, the prison, while his later career takes up the question of, for want of a better term, "political efficiency." That is, Foucault offers a critique of sovereignty insofar as sovereignty is inefficient (neither the sovereign nor sovereign power can be everywhere; certainly not everywhere it needs or wants to be; ubiquity is impossible, even/especially for a project such as sovereignty) while biopower is not. Biopower marks this recognition; in place of sovereignty biopower "devolves" to the individual subject the right, always an intensely political phenomenon, to make decisions about everyday decisions – decisions about health, sexuality, "lifestyle." In tracing the foucaultian trajectory from sovereignty to biopower we will read the major foucaultian texts – "Madness and Civilization," "Birth of the Prison," "History of Sexuality" as well as the various seminars where Foucault works out important issues.

Full details for COML 6212 - Michel Foucault: Sovereignty to BioPolitics

This course draws on feminist, queer, and crip theories; animal studies; disability studies; indigenous studies; and environmental studies to examine anthropocentrism and various forms of violence that target groups of people and the environment. How has the definition of the human variously aided or challenged oppressions and violence? How does the otherness of certain humans relate to nonhuman existence and its conditions of being "neither alive nor dead"? Through the representations of death, violence, animals, plants, ghosts, objects, and environments in animated and documentary films, novels, art, nonfiction, as well as history and material culture, the course will rethink the functions of the parameters—ethical, legal, aesthetic, emotional, and political—of the human and of human rights. For longer description and instructor bio visit The Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for COML 6260 - Rethinking Boundaries of the Human: Crip Ecology, Disability, and Otherness

What does it mean to consider something a failure? What happens when a movement or campaign never quite gets off the ground, never got the traction they wanted, when a dream never comes to fruition? This class will consider the question of failure through analyzing thwarted sociopolitical, artistic, religious movements across disparate global sites and historical moments, with a particular focus on what comes after, and how failure is determined, and by whom.  Case studies will include diverted leftist campaigns, millenarian movements past and present (what happens when the end of the world never comes), artistic initiatives that came and went, and filmic and literary interpretations of failures.  For longer description and instructor bio visit The Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for COML 6261 - Utopia Lost? Failure and its Aftermaths

This course asks how Renaissance lyric poetry (including Petrarch, Labé, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Wroth) negotiates questions of gender through poetic innovation and, just as often, through the use of poetic commonplaces. We will read this poetry in conversation with modern and contemporary theory (including Cixous, Sedgwick, Ngai, Berlant) to help us understand Renaissance lyric's particular fascination with women's bodies. We will ask how male poets' cliché-ridden poems about women offer us ways to think about the persistence and flexibility of misogynist tropes. We will also ask how feminist and queer theory—as well as female poets' responses to their male predecessors and contemporaries—variously diagnose, subvert, and internalize those tropes. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for COML 6262 - Female Complaints: Gender in Early Modern Lyric and Modern Theory

From the Bible to the Babylonian Talmud to a graphic novel edition of the Book of Esther, texts--their composition, transmission, study and debate—have been at the core of Jewish culture for millennia, whether in diaspora or in the Land. They remain a central technology for the continuation and transformation of an identity that is rich, multiform, unique, and yet open to new influences and interactions. Approaching the varieties of textuality is one way to contemplate the broad sweep of Jewish cultural history. In this course we will consider questions of canonicity, differential access to textual authority by class and gender, the relation between alphabetical and graphic representation, and by no means least, the perenniality of Jewish humor.

Full details for COML 6463 - Modes of Jewish Textuality

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

This seminar will study the problem of transmission in psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on its stakes for political history and theory. Freud's Moses and Monotheism addresses the unconscious and intersubjective dimensions of the act that founds a people, which "imprints" itself on the people in ways that exceed the framework of allegiance. "How", he asks of Moses, "did one single man come to stamp his people with its definite character and determine its fate for millennia to come?" This transmission is further remarkable in being non-linear, discontinuous, distorted by repression, skipping many generations and crossing continents, but imposing itself nonetheless. My hypothesis is that Freud's argument might shed light on one of the central problems of political theory: the status of what Rousseau calls "the act by which a people is a people. "The act as psychoanalysis understands it is not something we can know, interpret, or anticipate, but something by which we are "struck" both psychically and in the body, where it leaves its traces or impressions. What then is involved in being "struck" by the act of another, and how might it help us to understand the stakes of the act for those who receive it? What role do the unconscious and the body play in the subjectivation of the people and the transmission of its legacy? We will read psychoanalytic texts alongside works of political theory by Rousseau, Marx, CLR James, Du Bois, Arendt, Derrida, Rancière, Zizek, and Badiou.

Full details for COML 6778 - Psychoanalysis and Historical Transmission

What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry's environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a range of works from the past two decades that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions especially of language, aesthetics, and politics. 

Full details for COML 6865 - Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

New forms of German literature emerged in the wake of transnational labor migration, especially after 1989. Taking leave of a sociological model that interprets this literature only in terms of intercultural dialogue, this course juxtaposes prose fiction about cultural contact and critical theories of difference with two primary goals in mind. Students will be introduced to representative examples of contemporary German literatures of migration, and critical modes of conceptualizing cultural contact in Germany will be compared in relation to each other and in tension with the literary field. Focus on German literature of Turkish migration complemented by readings reflecting other transnational phenomena such as postsocialism, postcolonialism, globalization, refugees, world literature.

Full details for COML 6960 - Rites of Contact: Emergent German Literatures and Critical Method

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. The course work will be adjusted to the language proficiency of the class. 

Full details for RUSSL 3333 - Twentieth Century Russian Poetry

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

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 2133 - Intermediate Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian 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

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.

Full details for UKRAN 2133 - Intermediate 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