Courses

We live in an image-saturated world. How do we make sense of the moving image and its powerful roles in shaping culture and mediating our relationship with the world? This course will equip students with the tools to understand and decipher film language. It introduces and interrogates the basic notions, technologies, terminologies, and theories of film analysis. We will study visual and compositional elements, like mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. Films we discuss will include different geographies, genres, major directors, schools, and film movements. Through writing, students will learn to analyze films with accurate, medium-specific vocabulary, develop informed and nuanced arguments, and critically reflect on the position of the viewer.

Full details for COML 1104 - FWS: Reading Films

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

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

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

Full details for COML 1106 - FWS: Robots

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

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

In this course, we will work with poems of varied styles and traditions. You will learn to understand poetry through analytical writing and through the composition of your own poems. 

Full details for COML 1134 - FWS: Reading Poetry

On the eve of his discovery of the treasures of Pharaoh Tutankhamen in the Egyptian desert, archaeologist Howard Carter famously described his findings as 'wonderful things'. This idea of wonder, amazement – and fantasy – defines moments of encounter between travelers from Europe and America, on the one hand, and the cultures of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, on the other. In this course, we will study examples of 'wonderful' artistic production emerging from such moments of cross-cultural contact, across literature, art, architecture, fashion, and opera. Through the practice of composing conceptually and structurally compelling essays, this course invites us to explore case studies of cross-cultural artistic production, while gaining a background in global history, postcolonial theory, and politics.

Full details for COML 1137 - FWS: Wonderful Things: Orientalism in Art, Literature and Culture

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.

Full details for COML 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In addition to the more than two million people imprisoned under the criminal justice system, the U.S. government captures even more people into carceral spaces within and beyond its borders. Looking into a range of texts from Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian American, and Arab American writers, this course examines the U.S. penal system, not only as prisons and physical places, but also in state practices that decide social value, disadvantage people based on race, and criminalize them accordingly. Ultimately, this course asks and answers the following questions: what is the relationship between race and punishment? What are the socially constructed roles of incarceration? And what are some of the narratives and abolitionist, decolonial perspectives that push against them?

Full details for COML 2009 - Prison Literature: Race, Carcerality, and Abolition

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. We will experiment with what it means to engage with astrophysics concepts both inside and outside of the disciplinary framework of astronomy—for example, in genres like film, afrofuturist science fiction, and critical theory. Do astronomy concepts lose coherence outside of their scientific contexts, or do they acquire a different kind of sense? Why are humanities scholars everlastingly drawn toward the stars? In particular, what do artists and theoreticians of color gain from turning toward cosmological reflection? Texts will include works by authors like Octavia Butler and Dionne Brand, theorists like Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, and others. Astronomy concepts will include the electromagnetic spectrum, stellar evolution, and general relativity.

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

The primary work of the course is researching and writing articles about poetry on Wikipedia.  The course follows two related tracks: studying poetry and learning how to make it accessible to others.  Verse analysis and research and writing skills will be emphasized.  The semester project is one substantially edited Wikipedia article.  As a background to our work, we will consider Wikipedia in the context of both the history of encyclopedias and the digital humanities.  A particular focus of our reading and writing will be under-represented poets and poems. The goals of the course are to write about poetry with a broad audience in mind and to contribute to the world's body of knowledge about poetry.

Full details for COML 2051 - Writing about Poetry on Wikipedia

Islamophobia and Judeophobia are ideas and like all ideas they have a history of their own. Although today many might think of Islamophobia or Judeophobia as unchangeable---fear of and hatred for Islam and Muslims or Judaism and Jews---these ideas and the social and political practices informed by them have varied greatly over time and place. They even intersected during the Middle Age and in Ottoman times when "the Jew" was frequently represented as allied with "The Muslim". The first part of this course traces the history, trajectory, and political agency of Judeophobia and Islamophobia in texts and other forms of culture from late antiquity through the present. The second part of the course is devoted to modernity and the present especially in Europe and the United States focusing on representational practices---how Muslims/Islam and Jews/Judaism are portrayed in various discourses including the media, film and on the internet. We will investigate how these figures (the Muslim, the Jew) serve as a prism through which we can understand various social, political and cultural processes and the interests of those who produce and consume them.

Full details for COML 2523 - Judeophobia, Islamophobia, Racism

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, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, 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

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 3006 - Race and Slavery, Old and Modern

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

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. 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.

Full details for COML 3021 - Literary Theory on the Edge

We live in an age of algorithms wherein seemingly every aspect of life can be broken down, measured, and even sold as data. But how did we get here? And where are we going? This course privileges literature as a unique lens for exploring our digital past, present, and potential futures. In it, we will leverage an array of literary forms—from experimental prose and poetry to science fiction—to renew our understanding not only of the relationships between writing and so-called information technologies, but of such pressing issues as algorithmic bias, automation, neocolonialism, and digital labor. Literary and theoretical readings include texts by Hari Kunzru, Georges Perec, Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, Antoinette Rouvroy, Bernard Stiegler, and Donna Haraway, among others.

Full details for COML 3026 - Digital Texts: Literature, Data, 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

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

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

Full details for COML 3378 - Korean American Literature

Tragedy and its audiences from ancient Greece to modern theater and film. Topics: origins of theatrical conventions; Shakespeare and Seneca; tragedy in modern theater and film. Works studied will include: Aeschylus' Agamemnon; Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, Philoctetes; Euripides' Alcestis, Helen, Iphigeneia in Aulis, Orestes; Seneca's Thyestes, Trojan Women; Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Othello; Strindberg's The Father; Durrenmatt's The Visit; Bergman's Seventh Seal; Cacoyannis' Iphigeneia.

Full details for COML 3440 - The Tragic Theatre

This course examines the stories, literary examples, and metaphors at work in elaborating capitalist society and its "hero," the modern economic subject: the so-called "homo oeconomicus." We will examine the classic liberal tradition (e.g., Locke, Smith, Mill) alongside its later critiques (e.g., Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Brecht) as well as more recent feminist, Black, and indigenous interventions (e.g., Federici, Davis, "land-grab university" research). Throughout we will create a dialogue between texts, both across centuries (e.g., Locke on Property with Indigenous Dispossession; Balzac's Pere Goriot with Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century) as well as across genres (e.g., Nomadland with Geissler's Seasonal Associate). At stake are the narrative and figurative moments in theoretical texts as well as crucial literary sources (novels, novellas, and plays) as they collectively develop the modern economic paradigms of industry, exchange, credit-debt, and interest – as well as the people they often leave out: women, people of color, the working class. The seminar will include working with an archive, collection, or museum at Cornell.

Full details for COML 3542 - Fables of Capitalism

"The pleasure of the text," Roland Barthes writes, "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do." What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies? Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas?  In the context of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st-century, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on erotic desire and cinema? We will focus especially on relatively recent metacinematic work, moviemaking about moviemaking, by such directors as Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell.

Full details for COML 3702 - Desire and Cinema

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

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

Greece and Rome, refracted in nineteenth-century writers, composers, and painters, including: Plautus, re-made by Oscar Wilde; Aristophanic Comedy, Bowdlerized by Bowdler, de-Bowdlerized by Gilbert, Irished by Sullivan, represented by D'Oyly Carte as a caricature of what it caricatured; scientific poetry, abandoned for prose: Lucretius to the Darwins; myth, gothicized by pre-Raphaelites, rivalled musically by Germans; Virgil's Aeneid, construed as justifying usurped monarchy that was masked as a restored republic, to parallel Britain's powerless monarchy masking imperial oligarchy; Byron's "real" Greece yielding to idealized Hellas as Greeks were taught that freedom required "Hellenic" not "Romaic" identity and a German king.

Full details for COML 3820 - Victorian Greeks and Romans

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

Full details for COML 3891 - Occupied France Through Film

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

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

Full details for COML 4015 - Passions and Literary Enlightenment

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

This course examines the works of major poets and artists from the Spanish and French- speaking Caribbean from roughly 1925-1945. During this period, two movements—Negrismo and Négritude—emerged, on the one hand, as anticolonial efforts at Black self-expression in the Caribbean and, on the other, as engagements with European avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Surrealism. We will examine canonical works by Luis Palés Matos, Nicolás Guillén, Wifredo Lam, Lydia Cabrera, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas, and Hector Hyppolite. Theoretical readings include Franz Fanon and Antonio Benítez Rojo. Reading knowledge of Spanish or French or both is recommended but not required. Students may write their papers in Spanish, French, or English.

Full details for COML 4364 - Negrismo, Negritude and Surrealism in the Caribbean

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

This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology.

Full details for COML 4423 - The City: Asia

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death  is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

Full details for COML 4429 - Walter Benjamin

What is the role of the psyche in revolutionary politics? Can there be social revolution without psychic liberation? This class brings together political theory, intellectual history, and psychoanalysis to survey some of the ways Freud's concepts were taken up by radicals, artists, and writers critiquing the global colonial order. Although many twentieth century analysts used psychoanalytic language to justify a hierarchy of races and civilizations, just as many did the opposite. Analyzing these anticolonial appropriations of Freudian psychoanalysis brings into focus unexpected connections in twentieth century radical politics. Students can expect to discuss figures like Sigmund Freud, André Breton, Wifredo Lam, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Michel Leiris, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Albert Memmi, and Frantz Fanon. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for COML 4627 - Freud in the Tropics: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism, and Colonialism

This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice? For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for COML 4628 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa

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 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

Though Indigenous literature or, more accurately, literatures are growing both in their production and criticism, we have yet to address the question of settler discourse and writings. Can we conceptualize a literary settler colonialism? What is a settler text? And what are the literary aspects and politics that bind this genre? This course approaches this question comparatively, looking into the United States and Israel as active settler colonialisms, and analyzes American nationalism, Zionism (as a European nationalist movement), and their overlap in American Zionist writings. The course begins with critical scholarship in the fields of American Indian and Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and Palestine studies, then moves into literary texts, canonical and lesser known, that we will read and hypothesize as settler texts.

Full details for COML 6009 - What Is a Settler Text?

While the old concept of the "mind" has been revamped over the last few decades and is routinely accepted as a "scientific object" (through cognitive studies, especially), the equally ancient idea of the soul has now largely been relegated to an article of faith or a metaphor for the psyche.  But our minds need a soul more than we'd like to think.  Our aim in this seminar is to reconstruct a theory of the soul as a mental potentiality that would not necessarily be religious nor conditioned by a belief in the afterlife. To make this slightly paradoxical case, we'll revisit a canonical corpus made of literary and philosophical texts and tie it to recent cognitive science, psychoanalysis or phenomenology.

Full details for COML 6020 - Theories of the Soul

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. 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.

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

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

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

What is illness? What is health? The human body seems to vacillate between these dichotomous versions of its existence. This seminar traces the cultural/historical developments/traditions that define illness, disease, well-being, treatment, cure and approaches to death. We will approach the topic at the intersections of medicine, philosophy, psychology and literature. Authors will include: Herodot, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Galen, von Bingen, Burton, Paracelsus, Kant, Novalis, Herder, Hegel, Stifter, Dostojevskij, Tolstoj, Nietzsche, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Freud, Foucault, Susan Sontag et al.

Full details for COML 6511 - Illness as Metaphor

Some of the most powerful approaches to visual practices have come from outside or from the peripheries of the institution of art history and criticism. This seminar will analyze the interactions between academically sanctioned disciplines (such as iconography and connoisseurship) and innovations coming from philosophy, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, literary theory, mass media criticism, feminism, and Marxism. We will try especially to develop: (1) a general theory of "visual ideology" (the gender, social, racial, and class determinations on the production, consumption, and appropriation of visual artifacts under modern and postmodern conditions); and (2) contemporary theoretical practices that articulate these determinations. Examples will be drawn from the history of oil painting, architecture, city planning, photography, film, and other mass media.

Full details for COML 6600 - Visual Ideology

"You didn't see anything," a woman in a movie says to her dubious lover. "No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don't understand."  What is desire in a movie, and how do we know it when we see it or feel it? How do the images, sounds, and narratives of a cinematic event engage us erotically? How might we want to revise classic psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories of desire and cinema in light of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st century? We will focus especially on metacinematic work by Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others.

Full details for COML 6601 - Erotics of Visuality

To hone our skills in the analysis of topics in Asian studies, we will review critically a number of switchpoints that have produced conceptual difference in recent scholarly work. Asia scholars have laid claim to the historical, to modernity, coloniality, postcoloniality, religion, affect, temporality, race, capital, (mass) media, embodiment, the translocal, and the posthuman as the bases for producing conceptual difference. Each of these switchpoints has allowed for valuable interventions from Asian Studies into the humanities and social sciences. We will develop questions, criteria, and critiques to thoroughly test our tools of analysis and work toward yet other methods. Contemporary academia valorizes the production of conceptual difference. Thus, evaluation criteria routinely include originality and innovation. This is a valuable point of departure that allows us to ask, What kind of conceptual difference do we want to produce in our work? What kind of conceptual difference is intellectually rigorous? Asia as Question does not merely provide intellectual history but rather tests out—and creates—contemporary, critical approaches. As such, it interrogates especially notions of region and area; work on temporality; new ontologies; and current approaches to media ecologies. 

Full details for COML 6622 - Asia as Question

This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology.

Full details for COML 6623 - The City: Asia

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 6685 - Literature of Leaving China

Contemporary theory has turned surface phenomena into the grounds and foundations for conceptual work: from moebius-strips to simulacra, from skin to screens, from folds to planes. But theory's "superficial" turn has led to radically different critical uses. What accounts for the pervasive fascination with surface imaginaries in theoretical thought? This course will engage us in a series of critical reflections on the deployment, as well as the folding and warping, of figures of superficiality, flatness, smoothness, transparence, and nakedness in contemporary theory, from deconstruction to biopolitics, from media studies to queer and transgender theory, from animal and environmental studies to phenomenology, from systems theory to aesthetics. Readings will include texts by Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Han, Didi-Huberman, Foucault, Lyotard, Nancy, Serres, Sloterdijk and others.

Full details for COML 6707 - Surface Theories

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

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

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

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

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

Designed to teach advanced reading and discussion skills. Weekly reading assignments include 20-40 pages of unabridged Russian, fiction or non-fiction. 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 Language 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 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 2134 - 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 course offers a general overview of the geography, history, literature, cinema, fine arts, music, and language of this Eastern European country of some 40 million people. At various historical periods since the 18th century, Ukraine had been controlled by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, gained independence in 1991, and become the target of a military invasion by Russian Federation in 2022. Through assigned readings, videos, and other materials, students will gain a degree of understanding of the historical and social forces that shape Ukrainian everyday life, natural environments, and popular culture, and its current place in Europe and the world.

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

The 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.

Full details for UKRAN 2134 - 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.

Full details for UKRAN 3134 - Advanced Ukrainian II