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

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

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

Full details for COML 1106 - FWS: Robots

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

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

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

Full details for COML 1134 - FWS: Reading Poetry

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies—photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

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

Full details for COML 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers.  We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chávez, and Carmen Maria Machado.

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

Full details for COML 2032 - Contemporary Narratives by Latina Writers

Conventional wisdom would have it that the "black" in black holes has nothing to do with race. Surely there can be no connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness. Can there? Contemporary Black Studies theorists, artists, fiction writers implicitly and explicitly posit just such a connection. Theorists use astronomy concepts like "black holes" and "event horizons" to interpret the history of race in creative ways, while artists and musicians conjure blackness through cosmological themes and images. Co-taught by professors in Comparative Literature and Astronomy, this course will introduce students to the fundamentals of astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies. Texts may include works by theorists like Michelle Wright and Denise Ferreira da Silva, authors like Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, music by Sun Ra, Outkast and Janelle Monáe. Astronomy concepts will include the electromagnetic spectrum, stellar evolution, and general relativity.

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

Full details for COML 2034 - Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos

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.

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

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

Could a meter have a meaning?  Could there be a reason for a rhyme?  And what is lost and gained in translation?  We'll think about these and other questions in this introduction to poetry.  We'll see how poems are put together and we'll learn how to figure them out.  Poets may include Herbert, Hardy, Hopkins, Housman, Dickinson, Frost, W. C. Williams, Gw. Brooks, Heine, Pushkin, Lermontov, Akhmatova.  All reading is in English; we'll make use of non-English originals when possible.

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

Full details for COML 2050 - Introduction to Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Full details for COML 2760 - Desire

Full details for COML 2762 - Desire and Modern Drama

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, transgender 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.

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

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

Full details for COML 3262 - Global Cinema II

From the 1720 South Sea Bubble to the 2008 global financial crisis, from Handel's operas to Spotify's algorithms, music has chronicled the booms and busts of markets. This course investigates how music and money are entwined in discourse and practice by tracing an origin story of capitalism that began in eighteenth-century Europe. We will ask how music has captured the spirit of capitalism since its inception, stoking its fantasies and attuning to its effects. In turn, we will contemplate how systems of economic thought reckon with shifting ways of creating and consuming music. In allowing music ranging from broadside ballads to commercial jingles to illuminate mutually the writings of such thinkers as Smith, Marx, Adorno, and Graeber, our discussions will unravel varied musical lives through themes including credit and debt, labor and property, media and interest, trade and slavery, nature and environment. 

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

Full details for COML 3315 - Music and Money

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for COML 3336 - Border Environments

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Talking chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos or gorillas are certainly widespread in myths, novels or movies (from Franz Kafka to The Planet of the Apes, from Tristan Garcia to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). But centuries of philosophical speculation and of scientific research have also endowed some great apes with the ability to communicate verbally with humans, either through sign language or with arbitrary symbols on computer keyboards. This class will explore the scientific, theoretical, imaginary, and legal underpinnings and consequences of such endeavors and narratives, thereby also serving as an introduction to the "post-humanistic" field of "animal studies." Our course will take advantage of unique video resources, the Cornell archive documenting the life of Kanzi and other bonobos as well as the "Ape Testimony Project."

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

Full details for COML 3921 - Apes and Language

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

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

Full details for COML 3977 - Body Politics in African Literature, Cinema, and New Media

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

What does it mean to live in the aftermath of slavery? How has the human history of slavery contributed to the production of "natural" values that we take for granted—such as community, property, citizenship, gender, individuality, and freedom? This course explores the history of enslavement throughout the human past, from the ancient world to the modern era. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between slavery and the construction of racial blackness. We will explore various institutionalized forms of servitude throughout time and space, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic worlds, from eunuchism to concubinage, from slavery in the Roman Empire to "modern slavery" and sex trafficking. Readings will be in English and will engage a variety of dynamic sources: theoretical, historiographical, anthropological, religious, legal, literary and multimedia.

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

Full details for COML 4352 - Race and Slavery, Old and Modern

Recent years have seen a boom in ways to use technology in order to learn about and improve the self. This course examines contemporary cultural orientations toward technology by exploring how medieval thinkers turned to language, images, books, and other tools and means of making in order to develop a sense of themselves in ethical relationship to others and to the world around them. We will place medieval work (such as Chaucer and Kempe) in conversation with resonant modern and contemporary writing (including Haraway, hooks, and Foucault). Advertisements and marketing for apps like "Co-Star", and "Calm" will supplement our discussions. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

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

Full details for COML 4626 - Medieval Technologies of the Self

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

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the digital age? 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? What are the implications of such questions for what Jacques Ranciere has called the "distribution of the sensible," for democratic consensus and dissensus? Moving among websites, social media, and streaming services, from Poetry Foundation and PennSound to podcasts and serial TV, from FaceBook and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, from Netflix and Amazon to Roku and Hulu, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media and their impact in contemporary culture and politics.

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

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

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

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

Full details for COML 4948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

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

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 6200 - Independent Study

"All decolonization," wrote Frantz Fanon, "is successful at the level of description."  With a focus on the difference between description and critique and on the uneven relation between the academic project underlying the subfield of postcolonial studies and histories of colonialism and aspirations to decolonization across the twentieth century,  this seminar will offer a retrospective survey on the assemblage of texts that has come under the name "Postcolonial Theory" and inquire into its purchase on this present with particular emphasis on questions of indigeneity and environmental crisis.  Authors may include: Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Wynter, David Scott, Leela Gandhi, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Jason Moore, Glenn Coulthard, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rob Nixon.

Full details for COML 6221 - Postcolonial Theory: Then and Now

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for COML 6336 - Border Environments

What does it mean to live in the aftermath of slavery? How has the human history of slavery contributed to the production of "natural" values that we take for granted—such as community, property, citizenship, gender, individuality, and freedom? This course explores the history of enslavement throughout the human past, from the ancient world to the modern era. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between slavery and the construction of racial blackness. We will explore various institutionalized forms of servitude throughout time and space, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic worlds, from eunuchism to concubinage, from slavery in the Roman Empire to "modern slavery" and sex trafficking. Readings will be in English and will engage a variety of dynamic sources: theoretical, historiographical, anthropological, religious, legal, literary and multimedia.

Full details for COML 6352 - Race and Slavery, Old and Modern

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

Full details for COML 6783 - Freud and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

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

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the digital age? 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? What are the implications of such questions for what Jacques Ranciere has called the "distribution of the sensible," for democratic consensus and dissensus? Moving among websites, social media, and streaming services, from Poetry Foundation and PennSound to podcasts and serial TV, from FaceBook and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, from Netflix and Amazon to Roku and Hulu, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media and their impact in contemporary culture and politics.

Full details for COML 6861 - Genres, Platforms, Media

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

Full details for COML 6948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

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.  

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

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

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is considered the greatest of Russian writers and a central figure in Russian culture. In a short life – he was killed in a duel at 37 – he wrote in a wide variety of forms. He is best known as a poet, but his fiction – prose and verse – marks the beginning of the great tradition of the Russian novel; to understand Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, we need to read Pushkin. Among the fictions we will read are stories, including the Tales of Belkin and "The Queen of Spades," the novella The Captain's Daughter, the novel in verse Eugene Onegin, and Pushkin's history of his African ancestor, The Moor of Peter the Great. We will also read selected short poems.

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

Full details for RUSSL 3351 - Pushkin's Fictions

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 1122.  Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computer. Class meeting times will be chosen at the organizational meeting (usually the second or third day of the semester) so as to accommodate as many students as possible. The time and place of the organizational meeting will be announced at russian.cornell.edu

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 on the Russian Langage Program website.

Full details for RUSSA 3310 - Advanced Reading

Read and discuss texts for GOVT 3837. The course may also support student research for the GOVT 3837 final paper. This 1-credit course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their understanding of certain aspects of the Cold war. Course materials may include archival documents, newspaper articles, songs and poetry, urban folklore, etc. The course is taught entirely in Russian. Native speakers of Russian as well as advanced non-native speakers with moderate to advanced reading skills are eligible.

Full details for RUSSA 3312 - Reading about the Cold War

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 - Modern Russia: Past and Present II

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. Maybe taken more than once. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 6634 - Russian for Russian Specialists

By the end of this course, students will be able to carry on basic conversations in Bosnian/ Croatian/Serbian on many topics from daily life. They 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. They 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. They will master the writing systems of the languages, and should be able to write notes or simple letters and keep a journal.

Full details for BCS 1132 - Elementary Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian II

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

Full details for BCS 1134 - Intermediate Bosnian Croatian Serbian II

The Elementary Finnish II course is designed for students with some prior knowledge of Finnish. Students have an opportunity to practice listening, reading, writing and speaking in Finnish. Students learn to provide information about their opinions and feelings, their families, their immediate environment and their daily activities.

Full details for FINN 1122 - Elementary Finnish II

The purpose of this course is for the students to develop elementary proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, and writing in Ukrainian, while acquiring some basic knowledge of Ukrainian culture, history, geography, and way of life. Upon completion of the course, students who have attended classes on a regular basis, successfully completed all assignments and all tests and exams with a minimum grade of B- should be able to: - master Ukrainian pronunciation and grammatical accuracy well enough to be understood by a native speaker of Ukrainian. - provide basic information in Ukrainian, both orally and in writing, about themselves, their family, likes and dislikes, everyday activities, studying, as well as some immediate needs, such as ordering food and making simple purchases; - understand and participate in simple exchanges on everyday topics (e.g., meeting people, school, shopping, etc.) in most common informal settings; - use and understand a range of essential vocabulary related to everyday life (e.g., days of the week, numbers, months, seasons, numbers, telling the time and date, family, food, transportation, common objects, colors, etc.).

Full details for UKRAN 1122 - Elementary Ukrainian II

The course starts with a review and subsequent reinforcement of grammar fundamentals and core vocabulary pertaining to the most common aspects of daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of students' communicative skills (oral and written) on such topics as the self, family, studies and leisure, travel, meals and others. A number of Ukrainian language idiosyncrasies like numeral + noun phrases, verbal aspect, impersonal verbal forms, verbs of motion and others receive special attention. Course materials are selected with the aim of introducing students to some functional and stylistic differences in modern Ukrainian as well as distinctions between the Kyiv and Lviv literary variant.

Full details for UKRAN 1134 - Intermediate Ukrainian II

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. The course is taught in Ukrainian.

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

Full details for UKRAN 3134 - Advanced Ukrainian II