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, such as [X, Y, Z]. 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 plays such as R.U.R. by Karel Capek, 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

Where do we get our images of poetry, and of poets? Along with the images we find in poems themselves, how do poetry and poets figure in fiction and film, in philosophy and popular culture? How do such figures inform the images in poems, poetry's image? In what senses is poetry a "liberal art"? What is its relation to "self," to language, history, and politics, to other disciplines and discourses? This course will explore such issues in a wide range of short texts in both verse and prose, in fiction, film, and other media. The course's focus on "poetry image" will encourage students to make the connection between such self-reflexive practices in the texts they're reading and viewing and the texts they themselves produce in their own writing. Authors that we will study include Plato, Wordsworth, Poe, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Whitman, Rimbaud, Stein, Breton, Stevens, Neruda, Borges, Wittgenstein, Celan, Rich, Brathwaite, Waldrop, Collins, Swenson, and Bolaño.

Full details for COML 1113 - FWS: Poetry's Image

Have you ever been frustrated with only existing inside your own mind? In this course we will read what authors and thinkers have written about differences between groups of people – like race and gender – and about the difference between any two people, which makes it hard to feel like we "really know" someone. We will write about how these differences relate to each other, and what we would want to change about them. We will read stories that allow us to reach across distance and know something, but also how, in the information age, they demonstrate what we cannot know.

Full details for COML 1115 - FWS: On Alienation and Empathy

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

This course introduces the field of Visual Studies.  Visual Studies seeks to define and improve our visual relationship to nature and culture after the modern surge in technology and knowledge.  It contains objects, images, and problems that lie beyond the Art History and experimental science, yet is grown from both cultures.  It teaches the physical and legal limits of human, animal, and machine vision, how knowledge and power get into images, how spectacle drives the economy, and techniques of analysis that can deliver fresh perspectives across disciplines.

Full details for COML 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

Literature has long been understood as a window into the human condition, with nature serving as its mere backdrop. How would our relationship with literature change if we reversed this hierarchy? In an age when human activity has irreversibly transformed all four elements of nature -- air, water, earth, and fire – how do we rediscover the active role that the elements have always played in the constitution of the literary imagination? Through a journey with texts from six continents, this course offers a new model of world literature, one predicated not on social actors and cultural forces alone but on the configurations, flows, and disruptions of the elements. In the process, it addresses the place and work of literature in an increasingly threatened planet.

Full details for COML 2036 - Literature and the Elements of Nature

This course will explore the question: What is world literature?  Is it all the literature ever written everywhere in the world?  All the world's greatest books? All the books a person needs to read to become a true citizen or denizen of the world?   But then, what is a world?  How does the labor of the imagination construct a world or the world? How can we relate the world of literature to other worlds such as that of history and historical experience?  Readings will range widely across time and world space and will include attention to contemporary theories of world literature.

Full details for COML 2041 - World Literature in Question

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

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

This course offers an introduction to the questions, topics, approaches, and theories that characterize the field of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Studies. Using an interdisciplinary approach (literature, history, anthropology, media, law, and science), we will explore categories such as sexual norms, human rights, power, feminism, queerness, gender/sex, censorship/ moral panic, and identity in Euro-American as well as in postcolonial and global terms. Through a variety of films, primary and secondary sources, you will formulate questions and provide answers to the relationship of these categories with organizing structures, including race, ethnicity, religion, family, marriage, reproduction, the economy, and the state. While we investigate how sexual identities in African, South American, and Asian contexts converge with or challenge Euro-American discourses, we will look at the tools LGBT studies offers for understanding power and culture.

Full details for COML 2290 - Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies

Film industries in the Middle East, as in much of the rest of the world, emerged out of efforts at the national level. In the Arab world and Israel, the film industries reflect upon struggles of self-determination. The Iranian film industry underwent significant changes following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By viewing a range of films from the Arab world, including North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as from Turkey, Israel, and Iran, we will consider the significance of these national rubrics and how they have shaped the work of filmmakers throughout the Middle East.   Films also reach beyond the boundaries of the nation, and so, we will consider how these films transcend national borders. On the one hand we will consider limit factors, like censorship, and the role of language and dialect on film viewership and distribution. And, on the other hand, we will consider the influence of external forces, such as the influence of foreign film markets in Europe and North America on filmmakers in the Middle East, as well as the effects of foreign financing—both from Europe and the Gulf States.  All films will be screened with English subtitles.

Full details for COML 2293 - Middle Eastern Cinema

The course provides a survey of the book from ca. 1100 to 1500, with emphasis on the development of the book in Western Europe, especially France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, and Spain.  It focuses on the many roles of the book in medieval societies, with special attention paid to production, dissemination, and reading practices. The collection of manuscripts and incunabula in Kroch Library allows a "hands-on" approach to learning.  Along the way, we will read excerpts from some of the most influential texts of the Middle Ages, such as the Song of the Nibelungs: The Romance of Alexander; the Scvias of St. Hildegard of Bingen: Dante's Divine Comedy; Jacobus de Varagine's Golden Legend; and the travel narratives of Marco Polo or Bernhard von Breydenbach.

Full details for COML 2350 - The Medieval Book: Objects and Texts

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

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, English, German Studies, Information Science, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

Full details for COML 2703 - Thinking Media

"Language is a skin," the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: "I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.

Full details for COML 2760 - Desire

Students develop a specific dramatic text for full-scale production. The course involves selection of an appropriate text, close analysis of the literary aspects of the play, and group evaluation of its representational value and effectiveness. All students in the course are involved in some aspects of production of the play, and write a final paper as a course requirement. Credit is variable depending upon the student's role in play production: a minimum of 50 hours of work is required for 1 credit; a maximum of 3 credits are awarded for 100 hours or more of work.

Full details for COML 3010 - Hispanic Theatre Production

Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, trangender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art.  Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required.

Full details for COML 3021 - Literary Theory on the Edge

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

As human migration around the world reaches a crisis unseen since WWII and as fences and walls once again dominate political rhetoric, how do we reckon with borders – not just as a metaphor but as a way of life? By examining how ideas and practices of borders interact and collide with their physical and embodied realities, this course approaches one of the most urgent questions of our time in a comparative, transnational framework. Starting with the U.S.-Mexico border and human flows across the Indian subcontinent, we will venture into numerous other zones to develop conceptual frameworks and critical vocabularies for borders in the twenty-first century.

Full details for COML 3338 - Border Theory/Border Practice

What role should imaginative arts play in debates about transnational migration, one of the principal factors re-shaping community and communication today?  Focusing on literature and film from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with primary examples drawn from Germany, France and the United States—in relation to Turkey, Hungary, Tunisia, Iran, Nigeria, China, Mexico, and Japan—this course explores how creative arts rework the fabric of social life affected by migration.  Seminar-style discussion of assigned readings and viewings, with occasional lectures on other arts and regions.  Thematic units organized around key concepts such as borders and movement, ethnoscapes and citizenship, reading and viewing, labor and leisure, cityscapes and place-making, mediascapes and personhood, lawfulness and illegality, language and speech, art and perception.   

Full details for COML 3580 - Imagining Migration in Film and Literature

This interdisciplinary undergraduate lecture examines the visual culture of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th century to the present. Lectures present artifacts, prints, paintings, photographs, sculpture, film and installation art that images the history of slavery and its profound contemporary resonance. Lectures and assignments consider the following themes: how does the gaze structure vision and influence the control of historical narratives? Which themes dominate the visual culture of slavery? How does visual culture encode memory, violence or racism? How did the visual culture of slavery produce and circulate new technologies of vison? Where is the history of slavery visible in the built environment or the local landscape? Students study artifacts in the May Anti-Slavery Collection at Kroch Library and artworks at the Johnson Museum. Field trip to nearby anti-slavery sites of memory.

Full details for COML 3681 - Slavery and Visual Culture

This course examines the historic diversity of the modern Middle East, exploring histories of inter-communal contact and conflict. We begin by investigating the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and the impact of its dissolution. We will focus our attention on commercial centers that fostered inter-communal relations, as well as investigating sites of strife and cases of minority repression. We will read histories, memoirs, and fiction, and view films that help us better understand inter-communal relations, tensions, and conflict. We will also interrogate the terms for exploring a range distinctions among majority and minority populations including: religious difference (Muslims, Christians, and Jews); divisions of religious rite (Sunni and Shi'a); entho-linguistic minorities (Armenians and Kurds); national identities (Israelis and Palestinians); cultures of origin (Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi Jews). We will explore how these divisions inform urgent current conflicts: the civil war in Syria and the refugee crisis; the civil war in Iraq and the campaign by ISIS against minorities; as well as tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Full details for COML 3743 - Minorities of the Middle East

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.

Full details for COML 3781 - Freud and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the America? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Césaire, Walcott, Bolaño, Espada, Waldrop, Vicuña, Hong, and Rankine.

Full details for COML 3800 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

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

Full details for COML 3811 - Theory and Practice of Translation

Ever since the creation of the concept of a culturally and geographically stable center in China, people have been intentionally excluded from that center. Disgraced officials are sent to far-flung provinces, loyalists to past regimes hide out across China's borders, and dissidents have their entry visas revoked, making it impossible for them to return home. The experiences of these people, and the poems and stories they write, tell us a great deal about what it means and how it feels to be included and excluded. What is the difference between the way China looks from the inside and the way it looks from the outside? Who has the power to decide who gets to live in China, and how and why do they use it? What is the relationship between our identities and our homes? Texts studied will range from 300 BCE to the present; all will be read and discussed in English. 

Full details for COML 3985 - Literature of Leaving China

Spinoza was excommunicated, wrote under death threats, and has remained a scandal to philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, ethics, literature. "Every philosopher has two philosophies, his own and Spinoza's" (Bergson); and "the savage anomaly" (Negri) exerted profound influence on Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. We will introduce Spinoza and his legacy, from the "atheism controversy" in the eighteenth century to today's "New Spinozists," who have been developing anti-Kantian and anti-Hegelian formulations of burning contemporary questions. With Spinoza, we ask: "What is freedom, and whose power does it serve?" (Leo Strauss)-especially if "The new world system, the ultimate third stage of capitalism is for us the absent totality, Spinoza's God or Nature, the ultimate (indeed perhaps the only) referent, the true ground of Being in our time" (Jameson).

Full details for COML 4090 - Spinoza and the New Spinozism

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 4200 - Independent Study

In recent years literary representations and philosophical discussions of the status of the animal vis-à-vis the human have abounded.  In this course, we will track the literary phenomenology of animality.  In addition we will read philosophical texts that deal with the questions of animal rights and of the metaphysical implications of the "animal."  Readings may include, among others, Agamben, Aristotle, Berger, the Bible, Calvino, Coetzee, Darwin, Derrida, Descartes, Donhauser, Gorey, Haraway, Hegel, Heidegger, Herzog, Kafka, Kant, La Mettrie, de Mandeville, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ozeki, Rilke, Schopenhauer, Singer, Sorabji, Sterchi, Stevens, de Waal, Wittgenstein, Wolfe.  A reading knowledge of German and French would be helpful.

Full details for COML 4240 - The Animal

In contemporary scholarship on race, temporality mediates the relationship between historicity and human difference by way of alignments and affiliations between time and interiority; immediacy and transparency; and complementarily, exteriority and opacity. In contrast to its popular denotations, race scholarship thus recognizes "mediation" as antagonistic, rather than conciliatory. We map the discursive lines shaping contemporary scholarship which grasps for the philosophical grounds of race and racialization at the infrastructural levels of time, space, and ontology. In tandem, we consider media that reflect and engage questions raised by the antagonistic mediation of racial difference. Readings may include works by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, David Marriott, Fred Moten, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, David Llloyd, Michelle Wright, Calvin Warren, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida. 

Full details for COML 4351 - Antagonism

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 4368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

There is an astonishing discrepancy between our perception of the Holocaust as a central event of the twentieth century and its marginal place in postwar culture.  It is during those years, nevertheless, that the destruction of European Jews aroused an intellectual debate whose philosophical, political, and literary contributions constitute landmarks for contemporary culture and criticism.  The course will explore the reasons for such a discrepancy, reconstructing the steps of the integration of the Holocaust into our historical consciousness.  It will analyze some of the most significant attempts to think such a trauma made by German-Jewish exiles (Arendt, Adorno, Anders), the survivors of the Nazi camps (Améry, Levi, Celan, Antelme), as well as the public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (Sartre, Bataille, MacDonald, etc).

Full details for COML 4415 - The Holocaust in Postwar Culture (1945-1961)

A far-reaching distrust and crisis of authority seems to be coextensive with the European Enlightenment and modernity—but what is authority? Amidst the different attempts at definition and classification, at least one thing is certain: our relation to authority is never simple and straightforward, but is the site of intense fantasmatic activity, mixing guilt, defiance, respect, resentment, terror, justice, and love. The word itself is highly evocative, and part of its power lies in the halo of images and meanings it conjures. Our investigation of the problem of authority will be guided by two great writers of the twentieth century, rarely read together, Franz Kafka and Jean Genet.

Full details for COML 4622 - Authority and Anti-Authority: Kafka and Genet

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relations of politics to art in general and the cultural politic of "autonomia" more specifically.  This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe.  During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers, and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union.  How does their "refusal to work" shape culture and vice versa?  What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power?  We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rule) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture.  We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others; with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of the situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on.  We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say post autonomist-thought for the present and future.

Full details for COML 4798 - Labor and the Arts

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

The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will follow adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world though to the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, pornography, culture, movie viewing, gender and queerness. We will rethink and theorize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (weekly reaction papers, and a final paper), the students will refine their theoretical, conceptual, and artistic accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

Full details for COML 4948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

This seminar offers a systematic introduction to methods of literary interpretation from Romanticism to the present, with a particular emphasis on the German roots of hermeneutics and critical thought. At stake is the formation and development of literary criticism around 1800 with Schleiermacher's "universal hermeneutics" and Friedrich Schlegel's notions of the fragment and irony. The two main trajectories the seminar follows are: the hermeneutic-interpretative tradition beginning with Schleiermacher, proceeding through Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Freud, and ending with Gadamer's epochal work Truth and Method. The second trajectory addresses the Critical Theory in the guise of Marx, Lukacs, Kracauer, Adorno, and Benjamin. Finally, we will look at critical thought today in Germany and its two most influential representatives: Kittler and Luhmann.

Full details for COML 4995 - Critical Thinking and Literary Methods

The seminar will examine how space is represented in literary texts and pursue the question whether literary language can be connected to spatial features that are unique to prose, poetry and other poetic discourses. We shall review the tradition of literary representations of space by discussing topics such as "the aesthetics of space," "landscape-and garden architecture," "the sublime," "the relationship between corporeality and external worlds," "space and memory/commemoration," "distinctions between space, place, locale, psychic and physical spaces." Ranging from antiquity to contemporary literary and theoretical texts the seminar will approach "space" as a phenomenon that changes its shape with changing analytical or poetic approaches while simultaneously changing the shape of the inquiring or representing discourse. Other guiding questions will be: does literature take on spatial forms? Is poetic language dependent on spatial orientation? Does literature create space? Literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis will be the disciplinary spaces under discussion. Readings include Aristotle, Plato, Longinus, Kant, Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Stifter, Nietzsche, Benn, Heidegger, Freud, Rilke, Bernhard, Bachelard, Blanchot.

Full details for COML 6130 - Spaces of Literature

Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, trangender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art.  Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required.

Full details for COML 6159 - Literary Theory on the Edge

Graduate Students: please bring your faculty signed proposal to 240 Goldwin Smith Hall.

Full details for COML 6200 - Independent Study

This interdisciplinary seminar would like to offer new hypotheses on the ways poetry is understood and experienced by a reader's mind. Our methodology, while non-reductionist, will take into account the current state of cognitive science, and also build on literary theory and philosophy (both "analytic" and "Continental"). Poetry makes use of cognitive structures and paths, of formal repetitions and algorithms-but it also alters and challenges the usual boundaries of thought. Thus, we need to consider both the ordinary and the extraordinary, if we ever want to explain the mental performance of the poetic. A comparative corpus of poems (written in European languages, from Antiquity to the 20th century) will be used throughout the semester. Students from very diverse backgrounds but with an interest in mind and/or language and poetry are welcome.

Full details for COML 6226 - Poetry and Mind

As human migration around the world reaches a crisis unseen since WWII and as fences and walls once again dominate political rhetoric, how do we reckon with borders – not just as a metaphor but as a way of life? By examining how ideas and practices of borders interact and collide with their physical and embodied realities, this course approaches one of the most urgent questions of our time in a comparative, transnational framework. Starting with the U.S.-Mexico border and human flows across the Indian subcontinent, we will venture into numerous other zones to develop conceptual frameworks and critical vocabularies for borders in the twenty-first century.

Full details for COML 6338 - Border Theory/Border Practice

In contemporary scholarship on race, temporality mediates the relationship between historicity and human difference by way of alignments and affiliations between time and interiority; immediacy and transparency; and complementarily, exteriority and opacity. In contrast to its popular denotations, race scholarship thus recognizes "mediation" as antagonistic, rather than conciliatory. We map the discursive lines shaping contemporary scholarship which grasps for the philosophical grounds of race and racialization at the infrastructural levels of time, space, and ontology. In tandem, we consider media that reflect and engage questions raised by the antagonistic mediation of racial difference. Readings may include works by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, David Marriott, Fred Moten, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, David Llloyd, Michelle Wright, Calvin Warren, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida. 

Full details for COML 6351 - Antagonism

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

There is an astonishing discrepancy between our perception of the Holocaust as a central event of the twentieth century and its marginal place in postwar culture.  It is during those years, nevertheless, that the destruction of European Jews aroused an intellectual debate whose philosophical, political, and literary contributions constitute landmarks for contemporary culture and criticism.  The course will explore the reasons for such a discrepancy, reconstructing the steps of the integration of the Holocaust into our historical consciousness.  It will analyze some of the most significant attempts to think such a trauma made by German-Jewish exiles (Arendt, Adorno, Anders), the survivors of the Nazi camps (Améry, Levi, Celan, Antelme), as well as the public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (Sartre, Bataille, MacDonald, etc).

Full details for COML 6415 - The Holocaust in Postwar Culture (1945-1961)

This course examines black feminist theories as they are articulated in the cross-cultural experiences of women across the African Diaspora. We will explore a variety of theories, texts and creative encounters within their socio-political and geographical frames and locations, analyzing these against, or in relation to, a range of feminist activisms and movements. Some key categories of discussion will include Black Left Feminism, Feminist Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean and African feminisms. Texts like the Combahee River Collective statement and a variety of US Black feminist positions and the related literature as well as earlier black feminist articulations such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice will also be engaged. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own research projects from a range of possibilities.

Full details for COML 6465 - Black Feminist Theories: Sexuality, Creativity, and Power

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

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relation of politics to art in general and the cultural politics of "autonomia" more specifically.  This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe.  During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union.  How does their "refusal to work" shape cultural and vice versa?  What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power?  We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rude) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture.  We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others: with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on.  We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say postautonomist-thought for the present and future.

Full details for COML 6798 - Labor and the Arts

A paranoid husband believes that his wife is a witch. A man rejects vehemently the very idea of the Devil's existence, unwittingly doing so right in his face. From outright horrifying to eerily funny, always dangerous, but at times benevolent, demons, witches, and other mysterious and elusive creatures of Russian lore inhabit people's imagination and figure prominently in a number of Russian books and films. In this course, we will read and discuss fairy tales, pieces of poetry, short stories, and one of the greatest novels in Russian twentieth century literature. We will also watch several feature and animated films.  

Full details for RUSSL 2500 - Demons and Witches in Russian Literature and Film

The nineteenth century Russian novel had its beginnings in a period of short fiction; it ended in another one.  When Tolstoy was preparing to write Anna Karenina, he reread Pushkin's tales.  Dostoevsky's characters have roots in Lermontov's fiction.  The Russian novelists also wrote short works.  This course focuses on the stories and tales of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others.  It covers the nineteenth century and extends a decade or two in either direction, to the early years of modern Russian fiction in the late eighteenth century and to the final pre-revolutionary years in the early twentieth century.

Full details for RUSSL 3341 - Short Russian Fiction (The Nineteenth Century)

Independent study.

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 1122.

Full details for RUSSA 1104 - 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 television programs. Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computers. Note the RUSSA 1104 option. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1122 - 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 1126 - 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 1132 - Self-Paced Elementary Russian II

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 2204 - 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 3304 - Advanced Composition and Conversation

Creative writing for heritage speakers of Russian. Writing short (one page for each class) texts in Russian in a variety of genres: personal letters, blog entries, news articles, technical descriptions, official documents, short stories, and the like. Two meetings per week if taken for 2 credits hours. An optional third weekly meeting when taken for 3 credit hours has short reading assignments from contemporary literary and non-literary texts. The course is a continuation of RUSSA 3305 but may also be taken by qualified students who have not completed RUSSA 3305. Issues of style and grammar are discussed in every class. The course is primarily for students who learned to speak Russian at home, but students with other backgrounds may be eligible as well. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 3306 - Creative Writing for Heritage Speakers

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. This course may be taken as a continuation of RUSSA 3309, but it may also be taken by itself. Discussion of the reading is conducted entirely in Russian and centered on the content and analysis of the assigned selection. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 3310 - 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 4414 - Advanced Conversation and Stylistics

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. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 6634 - Russian for Russian Specialists