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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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 18th 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.  

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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

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: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

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

Take your love for literature, film and media into uncharted waters. This course explores cutting-edge debates in the humanities today through the prism of in the transnational, multilingual discipline of Comparative Literature. Attending closely to selected philosophical and literary works as well as film and visual culture we will survey new questions arising from, translation studies, literary and political theory, world literature, gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and media studies. Authors, artists, texts and directors may include, Gilgamesh, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Judith Butler, Mahasweta Devi, Raymond Williams, Teju Cole, Ai WeiWei, Abderrahmane Sissako, and others.   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.

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

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

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: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for COML 2235 - New Visions in African Cinema

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

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

Full details for COML 2251 - Poetry's Image

This course explores Asian speculative literary fiction and cinema including early mythological influences, science fiction, and contemporary discourses of technoscientific progress. Students will examine the historical development of the broad genres in their specific contexts; the conceptual relations between realism, science, fantasy, and speculation; and ultimately, question past and future understandings of "Asia" as speculative.

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

Full details for COML 2282 - Speculative Asias

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

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

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

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 Kafkaesque parable of Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegelman's Maus books as well as W.G, Sebald's Austerlitz. We shall conclude with several episodes of the acclaimed 2009-2017 French TV series A French Village.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for COML 2580 - Imagining the Holocaust

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

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

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. 

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

Full details for COML 3001 - Methods of Comparison

In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.

Full details for COML 3010 - Latinx Theatre Production

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

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

This course examines how philosophical, architectural, filmic, and literary practices shape our understanding of place and space, engaging with theories of mapping, spatiality, and the built environment. Does dwelling on this earth imply building? Is thinking itself an architectural act? What would it mean to undo this 'will to architecture'? What is the relation of the act to the environment? What does the situation of 'things and locations' mean for the possibilities of politics and thought? We will examine poetic and philosophical dimensions of place and site; modernity, nihilism, and its critique; belonging, the uncanny, and the stranger; utopia, dystopia, and the global built environment through readings, films, and artistic practices from figures and groups including Archigram, Bachelard, Badiou, Massimo Cacciari, Derrida, Heidegger, Isozaki Arata, Jameson, Karatani, Kiarostami, Henri Lefebvre, WG Sebald, Wallace Stevens, Superstudio, Manfredo Tafuri, Tarkovsky, Raymond Williams, and more.

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

Full details for COML 3111 - Literature, Art, and the Environment

The course will offer an overview of video art, alternative documentary video, and digital installation and networked art. It will analyze four phases of video and new media: (1) the development of video from its earliest turn away from television; (2) video's relation to art and installation; (3) video's migration into digital art; (4) the relation of video and new media to visual theory and social movements. Screenings will include early political and feminist video (Ant Farm, Rosler, Paper Tiger TV, Jones), conceptual video of the '80s and '90s (Vasulka, Lucier, Viola, Hill), gay and multicultural video of the '90s (Muntadas, Riggs, Piper, Fung, Parmar), networked and activist new media of the 21st century (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, SubRosa, Preemptive Media). Secondary theoretical readings on postmodernism, video theory, multicultural theory, and digital culture will provide students with a cultural and political context for the discussion of video and new media style, dissemination, and reception.

Full details for COML 3115 - Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics

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.

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

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

Global Cinema and Media offers a survey of international film and media 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 and media's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films and video will be accompanied by readings in film and media theory and history.

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

Full details for COML 3261 - Global Cinema and Media

This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through 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: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval "Spain." Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.

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

Full details for COML 3340 - Islamic Spain: Culture and Society

The rapidly growing literature of the Korean diaspora is one of the most significant developments in Korean literature since the 20th century. As Korean literature has circulated as world literature, it has become more widely recognized in the Anglophone world through translation and through narratives written by Korean American authors. This course will explore Korean American literature and creative transpacific exchanges between Korea and the US, addressing issues of identity, language, place, migration, race discrimination, citizenship, and the ways in which storytelling shapes community. We will examine the vibrant dialogue between works of fiction and poetry across the Pacific, reading the work of Korean American authors alongside the writing of Korean authors working in the Korean language. Increasingly, Korean American writers are creating narratives that remember and reconfigure Korean history and Korea's relationship to the US, and we will explore narratives and poetry that offer new perspectives on the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, and American imperialism such as Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered, and Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korea is required.

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

Full details for COML 3378 - Korean American Literature

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

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

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

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors.  Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives.  As "unbound" energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life.  Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology.  Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, SSC-AS) (KCM-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for COML 3781 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

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?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

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

Stories of transformation have been central to literary traditions for thousands of years, but these tales of shape-shifting took on a special life in the English Renaissance, when Ovid's Metamorphoses surged in popularity. This course will explore the fundamental connection between literary creativity and unstable identities – whether these narratives of metamorphosis show humans turning to beasts, trees, or stones, men changing into women, or inanimate objects coming to life and taking human form. Class readings draw on examples from Ovid, Shakespeare, and other Renaissance poets, as well as the re-imagining of these fantasies in modern science fiction and make-over shows. What do these stories of metamorphosis tell us about what it means to be human – or not?

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

Full details for COML 4242 - Metamorphoses in Renaissance Literature and Culture

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

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

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

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011).  We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS) (CA-AG, KCM-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for COML 4368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. "The Rhetoric of Temporality, "Semiology and Rhetoric," "The Resistance to Theory," "Autobiography as De-Facement," "Shelley Disfigured," "Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist," "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate.

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

Full details for COML 4382 - Paul de Man

The work of Louis Althusser remains a central and canonical reference for contemporary theory, but also a historical reference of major importance for its intellectual history. Althusser not only taught or mentored an extraordinary range of intellectual figures in France (Badiou, Balibar, Derrida, Foucault, Macherey, Ranciere, etc), his basic concepts circulated through crucial social debates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (humanism and anti-humanism, the articulation of modes of production, societies structured in domination). In his later years, Althusser's thought acknowledged surprisingly divergent filiations (Heidegger, Derrida) from the expected Marxian and psychoanalytic references, and his legacy became central to the foundations of Cultural Studies. This seminar will examine a wide range of developments and destinies for the theoretical legacies of Althusser and his close collaborators.

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

Full details for COML 4485 - The Althusserian Legacy

Thoreau, in 1841: "Nature is always silent and unpretending as at the break of day." He had just contrasted the robin's song with "the bustle and impatience of man." Why could silence contain birdsong but not human noise? This course explores the idea and representation of nature's silence—as a positive ideal; as soundlessness; as wordlessness; and as extinction. Heeding the environmental criticism that interrogates the contrast between silent "Nature" and noisy humanity, we will remain curious about what compels us in accounts of nature's multivalent silence. Concurrently, we will examine writings that attend to natural sound. Investigating silence, we will also strive to better understand what we mean, and what could be meant, by nature.

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

Full details for COML 4697 - Is Nature Silent?

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the age of digital media and A.I.? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? Moving among a range of genres and sub-genres, poetry, fiction, film, and multimedia, websites and streaming services, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media, and the increasingly pervasive role of A.I., in contemporary culture and politics.

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

Full details for COML 4861 - Genres, Platforms, Media

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

In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.

Full details for COML 6021 - Latinx Theatre Production

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 workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.

Full details for COML 6224 - Writing for the Public: Adapting Academic Work for a General Audience

Structured around guest and public lectures by field members and beyond, the proseminar provides a common experience for students and facilitates the exchange of approaches to theoretical problems and methodological orientations. Thus, the course introduces students to the work and methods that animate their faculty's original contributions to their respective fields while offering them a forum to ask said faculty how to navigate the various stages of research and publication processes.

Full details for COML 6290 - Comparative Literature Proseminar

This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through 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

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011).  We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought. 

Full details for COML 6368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. "The Rhetoric of Temporality, "Semiology and Rhetoric," "The Resistance to Theory," "Autobiography as De-Facement," "Shelley Disfigured," "Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist," "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate.

Full details for COML 6382 - Paul de Man

This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Hervé Guibert, Pepe Espáliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.

Full details for COML 6424 - Beauty, Grief

The work of Louis Althusser remains a central and canonical reference for contemporary theory, but also a historical reference of major importance for its intellectual history. Althusser not only taught or mentored an extraordinary range of intellectual figures in France (Badiou, Balibar, Derrida, Foucault, Macherey, Ranciere, etc), his basic concepts circulated through crucial social debates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (humanism and anti-humanism, the articulation of modes of production, societies structured in domination). In his later years, Althusser's thought acknowledged surprisingly divergent filiations (Heidegger, Derrida) from the expected Marxian and psychoanalytic references, and his legacy became central to the foundations of Cultural Studies. This seminar will examine a wide range of developments and destinies for the theoretical legacies of Althusser and his close collaborators.

Full details for COML 6485 - The Althusserian Legacy

This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval "Spain." Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.

Full details for COML 6539 - Islamic Spain: Culture and Society

Thoreau, in 1841: "Nature is always silent and unpretending as at the break of day." He had just contrasted the robin's song with "the bustle and impatience of man." Why could silence contain birdsong but not human noise? This course explores the idea and representation of nature's silence—as a positive ideal; as soundlessness; as wordlessness; and as extinction. Heeding the environmental criticism that interrogates the contrast between silent "Nature" and noisy humanity, we will remain curious about what compels us in accounts of nature's multivalent silence. Concurrently, we will examine writings that attend to natural sound. Investigating silence, we will also strive to better understand what we mean, and what could be meant, by nature.

Full details for COML 6697 - Is Nature Silent?

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

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the age of digital media and A.I.? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? Moving among a range of genres and sub-genres, poetry, fiction, film, and multimedia, websites and streaming services, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media, and the increasingly pervasive role of A.I., in contemporary culture and politics.

Full details for COML 6861 - Genres, Platforms, Media

Explore the ways of 19th to 21st century Russian Jewry through survey of literature and film. Learn about life in Russia from the perspective of Jewish and Russian-Jewish writers as well as through portrayal of Russian Jews in works of prominent Russian authors in the context of period. Selected works of Pushkin and Chekhov, Gogol and Sholom Aleichem, Pasternak and Yevtushenko will help create a multidimensional picture of the political and socio-cultural environment in which processes of integration and assimilation, both imposed and impeded by the state, shaped the identity of the modern-day Russian Jews in their deep, inherent connection to the Russian culture and often complicated relationship with their roots, which characteristically distinguishes them from their American contemporaries.

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

Full details for RUSSL 2001 - Russian Jews and Jewish Russians in Literature and Film

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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 pace than RUSSA 1103 -RUSSA 1104 and RUSSA 1121 -RUSSA 1122, the pace to be chosen by each individual student in consultation with the instructor. Somewhat larger homework reading, writing, and online assignments with fewer and shorter meetings with the instructors in very small groups. Detailed description at Russian.cornell.edu.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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

The course is designed for advanced students of Russian who are interested in Russian studies requiring fine active control of the language. Students will have an opportunity to speak formally and informally on topics in their field of interest. Fine points of syntax, usage, and style will be discussed. The subject matter differs from year to year. Detailed description at Russian.cornell.edu.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for RUSSA 4433 - 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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for BCS 2133 - 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 course offers a general overview of the geography, history, literature, cinema, fine arts, music, and language of this Eastern European country of some 40 million people. At various historical periods since the 18th century, Ukraine had been controlled by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, gained independence in 1991, and become the target of a military invasion by Russian Federation in 2022. Through assigned readings, videos, and other materials, students will gain a degree of understanding of the historical and social forces that shape Ukrainian everyday life, natural environments, and popular culture, and its current place in Europe and the world.

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

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 course offers a close look at the language and culture in independent Ukraine: Western vs. Slavic linguistic heritage, Internet styles, Russian vis-a-vis Ukrainian influence, and more. Mileposts of the 20th and the 21st centuries are discussed in depth. This is not a course in history or government; the recent complex (often cataclysmic) events in Ukraine are investigated in the context of the everyday life of our contemporaries. How have Ukrainians pursued self-determination through culture and language after decades of oppression and control? The course is taught by a recent refugee from the Ukrainian war who is especially interested in Ukraine's new role on the world stage. Why the yellow-and-blue flags and bumper stickers in our streets and parking lots?

Full details for UKRAN 2200 - Ukraine's Culture and Language within the Legacy of the USSR, Russian Invasion, and Other Crises

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

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

Full details for UKRAN 3300 - Directed Studies

Intended for students who speak more or less standard Ukrainian but have only beginner's understanding of Ukrainian grammar and have not learned to read or write in Ukrainian well (or have not learned written Ukrainian 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 related reading. These classes are required, and the students who take them receive 2 credit hours. The third (optional) class teaches reading and discussion, focusing on contemporary styles.

Full details for UKRAN 3305 - Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers of Ukrainian