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

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for COML 1104 - FWS: Reading Films

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

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for COML 1106 - FWS: Robots

In this course, we will read works of literary, cultural, music, art, and film criticism aimed at a popular audience, from a range of magazines and other publications. We will discuss what makes a successful work of criticism, why we read criticism, and how criticism has changed over time. Readings will include Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion. Writing assignments will include analysis of works of criticism and then criticism in practice, as you apply what we have learned and write and revise critical essays on topics of your choice. 

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for COML 1139 - FWS: The Art of Criticism

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

Full details for COML 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

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: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

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

Throughout Western history, the nature of melancholy (aka "depression," its modern counterpart) has both inspired and baffled philosophers, doctors, artists, and writers. Compared to other ailments, affects, or conditions, this mysterious sadness has provoked a proliferation of concepts, theories, therapies, and artworks. This seminar offers a comparative survey of discourses on melancholy/depression and their related ideological, social, aesthetic, and scientific issues, from the Ancient Greeks onwards. We will focus on the ways in which melancholy/depression has been theorized in medicine, theology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, ethnography, philosophy, and ecology; on how its shifting forms are related to issues of politics, society, culture, race, and gender; and on the many modes through which it has been file and expressed in literature, visual art, music, and today's social media.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

Full details for COML 2552 - From Black Bile to Digital Depression:The History of Melancholy in Medicine, Philosophy, Art, Media

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.

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

Full details for COML 2703 - Thinking Media

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for COML 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

Images of tattooed, inscribed, and marked bodies abound in popular media, from television series to blogs, from performance art to popular literature. When the body becomes a canvas or text, this raises crucial questions about the definition and the reading of individual bodies and their ties to different categories, such as gender, race, culture, and society. This course we will pay particular attention to the shifting meanings of body modification in different cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts. Course material will include texts, films, and artwork by Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Lalla Essaydi, Peter Greenaway, Zhang Huan, Franz Kafka, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mirta Kupferminc, Christopher Nolan, Renata Salecl, Hortense Spillers, Qiu Zhijie, and others, as well as television series, internet forums, and other popular culture formats.

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

Full details for COML 3017 - Written on the Body

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for COML 3021 - Literary Theory on the Edge

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

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

Full details for COML 3261 - Global Cinema and Media

How have income inequality and climate change, two of the most urgent issues of our time, come to shape the contemporary imagination? What might a poetics of economies or ecologies, or an economical or ecological poetics, look like? What metaphors and semantic fields, networks, and webs of discursive and rhetorical choices, inform discourses of economy and ecology? How might economical and ecological tropes help us rethink poetics, and vice-versa? What are their protocols and conventions, constraints and regulations, possibilities and limitations? What tensions, and what "imaginary solutions to real problems," do we find among them? Ranging across a variety of national and international contexts, this course will explore how such concerns figure in contemporary non-fiction, poetry, fiction, film, and electronic and digital media.

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

Full details for COML 3264 - Poetics, Economies, Ecologies

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.

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

Full details for COML 3336 - Border Environments

In this course, we will read some of the most influential examples of a genre at the intersection of literature and history: the memoir of the revolutionary. Along the way, we will consider some of the fictional works (e.g. by Turgenev, Dostoevsky) that have been important in this nonfictional tradition, as well as poetry produced by the revolutionary currents we discuss. As we study the autobiographies of Russian, American, and German leftist political figures like Piotr Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Ernst Toller, and Angela Davis, we will consider the literary methods these writers use to intertwine their own life stories with political history. How is life-writing a form of revolutionary self-fashioning? How have literary movements intersected with revolutionary writings? With special attention to the questions of gender, ethnicity, and race.

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

Full details for COML 3389 - The Revolutionary as Author: Autobiography and Political Myth

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 Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bolaño, Césaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

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

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

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

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

Full details for COML 3811 - Theory and Practice of Translation

This course examines how writers, filmmakers, and content creators from Africa engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, queerness, sex strikes, etc. Our inquiry also surveys theorists' commitment to highlighting forms of self-fashioning and agency/responsibility in addition to troubling problematic tropes of pathologization and excess. 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. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentations) and deep attention to analysis and writing (reaction papers, an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you refine your understanding of body politics.

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov's legacy at Cornell is not limited to the world-famous literary works he produced here. The university's natural and built environments also provided powerful material for his lifelong pursuit of butterflies within their geo- and biodiverse ecosystems. In this project-oriented course on the writer-lepidopterist, we will read his words, look at his drawings, study his collections of insects and plants, and develop our own modes of engaging with place and planet through a lively science-art practice.

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

Full details for COML 4103 - Nabokov, Naturally

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 seminar will explore some of the most important psychoanalytic approaches to politics and collective life. from Sigmund Freud's Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to works by Le Bon, Reich, Althusser, Fanon, Lacan, Safouan, Zizek and Dolar. Questions explored will include the relationship between mass and individual psychology; the role of unconscious identification (ideal ego, superego) in group formation, nationalism, xenophobia and racism; fantasy and politics; and the people considered as a subject and political actor. Events and contexts discussed will range from the French Revolution to the Nazi Reich to colonialization and contemporary authoritarianisms. Works of political theory by Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Arendt, Balibar and Ranciere will be put in dialogue with psychoanalytic readings.

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

Full details for COML 4243 - Psychoanalysis and Politics

This course studies philosophical, literary, and scientific conceptions of "nature" and the ethics and politics of human-nonhuman relations.  We will cover a wide array of texts and global issues-such as animal cruelty, indigenous ecological thought, climate justice, plant ecologies, and ecological sovereignty-while trying to trace a history of French and Francophone ecological thought, from the 16th century to today.  Our readings will address a number of related questions: what is our responsibility to nonhuman beings?  How must our conceptions of nature, humanity, ethics, and politics change to become more ecological?  And are these issues contemporary or have they been with us for centuries, even millennia?  Students will closely study and collectively discuss texts while undertaking assignments ranging from the analytic to the experimental.

Full details for COML 4252 - Ecological Thinking: Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics Beyond the Human

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

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

Full details for COML 4334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

We experience our world (and the histories of our world) increasingly as a conglomerate of spaces of and for containment. These enclosed spaces are multiple, and their strategies of who and how they imprison are profoundly unequal. How does theory, or rather, different theoretical approaches, deal with structures and experiences of captivity? What captive figures are being used, how are they theorized, and what ways of escaping, opening up, or destroying spaces of captivity are envisioned? In this course, we will draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches to scrutinize an array of figures of captivity, such as the camp, the prison, the campus, the closet, the hold, the enclosure, the frame, the panopticon, the trap, the globe, the screen, for a comparative assessment. We will focus on captivity and its avatars in theory but also reflect on what makes theory itself captive, even complicit in imagining and structuring our reality by way of containment.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS)

Full details for COML 4372 - Captive Theory

Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? At a time when reality appears dystopian, many are quick to dismiss utopian visions as naïve or irresponsible. In this seminar, we take on the critical and imaginative task of considering what utopias can tell us about our pasts, presents, and possible futures. We encounter two centuries of utopias in which communes have displaced the family, mutual aid has taken the place of capitalist individualism, and sexuality is no longer linked to property rights. While these speculative times and places seek to overcome capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the climate crisis, they remain haunted by these figures. Our treatment of utopias in theory and literature therefore includes a range of ambivalent affects and genres, from critical and ambiguous utopias to philosophical treatises and manifestos.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for COML 4380 - Imagining Utopia

The driving dialectic in post-colonial studies has been the colonizer/colonized, or the Third World vs. the West. But slowly the field is letting go of this "arrested dialectic" and in its place various triangulations are emerging: e.g. transnationalism, world literature, the global novel, and global south literary studies. Starting with a walk through the emerging theoretical concepts of world/global/transnational literature, we will primarily focus on a global south reading of African literature (itself a contested term), and perennial questions around language and translation. Specifically we will look at how writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, V.S. Naipul, NoViolet Bulawayo, and MG Vassanji challenge the post-colonial discourse and how a global south reading provides an uncomfortable conversation with transnational and world literature theories and concepts.

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

Full details for COML 4511 - The Global South Novel and World Literature

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?

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

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

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by "literature" and the "sciences." Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

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

Full details for COML 4825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology

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 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

Are queer theory and Marxism truly irreconcilable? While queer studies emerged in part as a rejection of Marxism's totalizing approach and Marxists have criticized the queer emphasis on individuals, this seminar explores the potential of bringing the two fields together. We will consider how queer critiques of reproductive futurism, racial capitalism, and homonationalism can transform the legacy of Marxist theory and practice. At the same time, we will examine Marxist notions of totality, reification, and value to reenvision the scope of queer politics. After covering these key Marxist and queer theoretical concepts, the seminar will turn to transnational Marxist debates on gender and sexuality in Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union. We will conclude the seminar with a discussion of new scholarship in the emergent field of queer Marxism and a symposium with presentations by seminar participants.

Full details for COML 6303 - Queer Marxism

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general  horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for COML 6334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

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

We experience our world (and the histories of our world) increasingly as a conglomerate of spaces of and for containment. These enclosed spaces are multiple, and their strategies of who and how they imprison are profoundly unequal. How does theory, or rather, different theoretical approaches, deal with structures and experiences of captivity? What captive figures are being used, how are they theorized, and what ways of escaping, opening up, or destroying spaces of captivity are envisioned? In this course, we will draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches to scrutinize an array of figures of captivity, such as the camp, the prison, the campus, the closet, the hold, the enclosure, the frame, the panopticon, the trap, the globe, the screen, for a comparative assessment. We will focus on captivity and its avatars in theory but also reflect on what makes theory itself captive, even complicit in imagining and structuring our reality by way of containment.

Full details for COML 6372 - Captive Theory

This course is intended to familiarize graduate students with the intellectual history, background, and development of Marxist theory in relation to the contemporary literary and cultural-theoretical landscape. As the broad field through which numerous other directions in theory and research were formed, a knowledge of the Marxist tradition remains an essential backdrop to later developments – the analysis of modes of production, the sociology of labour, the politics of class formation, the developments and trends of postcolonial studies, the modern and contemporary forms of social thought, numerous currents of political thought, and so on. This course therefore fills a need for graduate students to familiarize themselves not only with the work of Marx, but also with central debates in twentieth century and postwar social theory. Rather than examine the work of major figures of the history of socialism as a political tendency, we will focus on the history of theoretical research in the Marxist tradition, with the goal of preparing students to critically apprehend the intellectual history of the principal debates, the major figures, and developments of this tradition in a broad and inclusive sense.

Full details for COML 6490 - Marx and Contemporary Theory

The history of systems theory involves complex stories of technoscientific change and knowledge production on a global scale. In recent years, scholars have increasingly moved away from the field's predominantly North American and European focuses to study instead how systems theory's thinking of dynamic interrelations, and the related area of cybernetics research on self-organization and recursivity have developed in major Asian societies. This course first explores the epistemological foundations of systems theory before studying its major developments and historical case studies in the PRC, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. We will then examine systems theory and cybernetics' impacts on questions of technocratic governance, biopolitics, economy, gender and sexuality, and cultural and aesthetic production.

Full details for COML 6681 - Systems Theory and Asia Critique

How do narratives work? What kinds of social functions do stories perform? And how can the theory and analysis of narrative help us to grasp and shape power relations? The course will introduce the history of classical narrative theory, from Aristotle and Lessing to Todorov and Genette, but it will focus especially on new trends in queer, critical race, and feminist narrative theory, and on the uses of narrative form across disciplines and social spaces. You will be expected to write a few  short responses to the readings, practice giving a formal conference-style oral presentation, and write a final essay based on the conference paper.

Full details for COML 6793 - Theory and Analysis of Narrative

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by "literature" and the "sciences." Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Full details for COML 6825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology

Founded by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, St. Petersburg was built expressly to advertise the triumph of enlightened absolutism at home and to display Russia's status as a major European power abroad. But for all of its neo-classical splendor, the image of imperial St. Petersburg has been consistently invoked as a critical touchstone for the expression of political discontent, social unease and spiritual anxiety. The most modern and "intentional" of Russian cities, Russia's northern capital has come to stand for everything that's wrong with modern life. In this seminar, we will approach St. Petersburg as a cultural text composed by an illustrious trio of Russian writers who saw the complicated history of their country through Peter's "window to the west" -- Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Andrei Bely.

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

Full details for RUSSL 2158 - St. Petersburg and the Making of Modern Russia

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

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

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

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

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

In this course, we will read some of the most influential examples of a genre at the intersection of literature and history: the memoir of the revolutionary. Along the way, we will consider some of the fictional works (e.g. by Turgenev, Dostoevsky) that have been important in this nonfictional tradition, as well as poetry produced by the revolutionary currents we discuss. As we study the autobiographies of Russian, American, and German leftist political figures like Piotr Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Ernst Toller, and Angela Davis, we will consider the literary methods these writers use to intertwine their own life stories with political history. How is life-writing a form of revolutionary self-fashioning? How have literary movements intersected with revolutionary writings? With special attention to the questions of gender, ethnicity, and race.

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

Full details for RUSSL 3389 - The Revolutionary as Author: Autobiography and Political Myth

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

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for RUSSA 3306 - Creative Writing for Heritage Speakers

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for RUSSA 3310 - Advanced Reading

Involves discussion, in Russian, of authentic Russian texts and films (feature or documentary) in a variety of non-literary styles and genres. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for RUSSA 4414 - Modern Russia: Past and Present II

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

Full details for RUSSA 4434 - Russian for Russian Specialists

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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

This course teaches language as a gateway to Ukrainian literature, history, and arts and the means of communication in everyday life, offering thorough grounding in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Full details for UKRAN 1121 - Elementary Ukrainian I

This course teaches language as a gateway to Ukrainian literature, history, and arts and the means of communication in everyday life, offering thorough grounding in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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

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

This content-based modular course aims to develop students' capacity to use the Ukrainian language as a research and communication tool in a variety of specialized functional and stylistic areas that include literary fiction, scholarly prose, printed and broadcast journalism. It is designed for students with interest in the history, politics, literature, culture and other aspects of contemporary Ukraine, as well as those who plan to do their research, business or reporting about Ukraine.

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

Full details for UKRAN 3134 - Advanced Ukrainian II

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

Full details for UKRAN 3300 - Directed Studies

Intended for students who speak more or less standard Ukrainian but have only beginner's understanding of Ukrainian grammar and have not learned to read or write in Ukrainian well (or have not learned written Ukrainian at all). May be taught slightly faster or slower in a given year, depending on the needs and interests of the students. Two classes a week teach writing and grammar and related reading. These classes are required, and the students who take them receive 2 credit hours. The third (optional) class teaches reading and discussion, focusing on contemporary styles.

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