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-scene, 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 Marquez 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 this course, we will learn how to write criticism for a popular audience—in other words, how to write the kinds of book/film/music/art/fashion reviews you can read in magazines, newspapers, and digital media. We’ll talk about what makes for a good work of criticism (even if it might be a negative review) and about the pleasures of reading and writing criticism. In assignments, you’ll apply what we’ve learned by writing and revising your own reviews, often on topics of your own choice.

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

In this class, students will learn about animal welfare and conservation through international films. We will discuss wildlife, companion, farm, and lab animals in conjunction with human cultures, politics, and geography. The course will cover various animal species in fiction films, documentaries, and animated movies. In some motion pictures, animals will be central, in other more peripheral. Students will learn how to compose a film review, assess sources, and write a critical essay. The class includes guest speakers and a field trip to Cornell Teaching & Research Barns. All films are digital for students to watch in their free time.

Full details for COML 1141 - FWS: Animals in Global Cinema

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

Could a meter have a meaning? Could there be a reason for a rhyme? And what is lost and gained in translation? We'll consider such questions in this introduction to poetry. We'll see how poems are put together and we'll learn how to figure them out. Poets may include Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Hayden, Frank O'Hara, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Anna Akhmatova. All reading is in English.

Full details for COML 2050 - Introduction to Poetry

Why don’t we tell it straight? Narratives and media today are “out of line.” No longer primarily sequential or episodic, stories branch out, jump back and forth, tie themselves into loops, provide alternative versions. What was once the terrain of the experimental is now true for many popular culture texts. In this course, we will explore a range of texts, films, and TV shows that are “out of line.” While our focus will be on popular culture—from TV shows like Westworld to films like Nolan’s Inception or Kwan and Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once—we will also build a framework of narrative theory and take our inspiration from experimental literary texts such as those by Calvino, Perec, or Borges.

Full details for COML 2272 - Out of Line: Introduction to Narrative and Media

An introduction to media studies from a global, “planetary,” comparatist perspective, at the intersection of languages, cultures, discourses, disciplines, and materials representing a range of contexts and approaches world-wide, this course will explore the historical and theoretical foundations of the current landscape of media economies and ecologies, and the ways that landscape continues to be shaped by contemporary developments in technology, culture, and politics. Among our topics and concerns will be the persistence of questions of genre in cinema, television, video, the film industry, journalism and digital media, the emergence and evolution of social media platforms and streaming services, and the increasing cultural, social, economic, and political impacts and implications of AI.

Full details for COML 2466 - Comparative Media Studies

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. (HC)

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

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, Slavery, and Cinema

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.

Full details for COML 3261 - Global Cinema and Media

An introduction (without prerequisites) to fundamental problems of current political theory, filmmaking, and film analysis, along with their interrelationship. Particular emphasis on comparing and contrasting European and alternative cinema with Hollywood in terms of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodernist, and postcolonial types of interpretation. Filmmakers/theorists might include: David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Kathryn Bigelow, Gilles Deleuze, Rainer Fassbinder, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Marleen Gorris, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen & Albert Hughes, Stanley Kubrick, Fredric Jameson, Chris Marker, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Robert Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, George Romero, Steven Shaviro, Kidlat Tahimik, Maurizio Viano, Slavoj Zizek. Although this is a lecture course, there will be ample time for class discussions. Weekly film screening, TBA. Taught in English.

Full details for COML 3300 - Political Theory and Cinema

This course will survey the influence of jazz across multiple forms, including literature, poetry, and film. This influence was often reciprocal; as writers, playwrights, filmmakers and poets sought to think with and through jazz, so too did jazz musicians engage with and take inspiration from other forms. Through our engagement with these multiple mediums, we will develop a broader understanding of the social and political context for this music and the unique affordances and challenges of cross-media scholarship. No prior knowledge of jazz is required; the course is designed to function as a novel (excuse the pun) way of introducing the genre. In addition to reading and watching various forms of media, we will be listening to music throughout.

Full details for COML 3327 - Jazz Fictions: Film, Literature, Music

How does the state draw political power from nature? What is the relationship between the environment and national and/or imperial identity? How does the environment resist political control, or support human resistance? This course will explore these questions from the perspective of Russian and Soviet culture. Analyzing literature, art, and film in historical context, we will consider the environment as worker and victim, refuge and rebel, commodity and national(ist) emblem, exploring the degrees of agency it is granted in different artistic depictions. With special attention to the history of Russian imperialism and Soviet “internal colonization” and to non-Russian writers and artists of the Russian Empire and USSR, including Indigenous writers. All readings will be in English.

Full details for COML 3435 - Art, Nature, and Empire in Russian and Soviet Culture

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for COML 3485 - Cinematic Cities

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. Taught in English.

Full details for COML 3542 - Fables of Capitalism

“My existence is a scandal,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of “art for art’s sake” and all that was considered exquisite, ironic, or obscene, the Decadent aesthetes of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of language, beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional moral strictures. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, and especially Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, fashion, and design, including music by Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss and artworks by James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Moreau.

Full details for COML 3550 - Decadence

This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship-critiquing them and engaging their ideas-we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.

Full details for COML 3750 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods

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

Full details for COML 3781 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the 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, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

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.

Full details for COML 3811 - Introduction to Translation Studies

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. (LL)

Full details for COML 3985 - Literature of Leaving China

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.

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

An introduction to the arboreal humanities, this course examines the status of trees and forests at the intersection of ecological, aesthetic, artistic, and literary concerns. In addition to scientific texts and scholarly treatises, we will read popular accounts and literary works that examine the being of trees and forests in relation to and as conditions of possibility of human culture. Taught in English.

Full details for COML 4225 - Arboreal Humanities: Ecology, Aesthetics, and Literature

This seminar offers a relatively comprehensive survey of the thought and political theory of Alain Badiou, from his engagement in Althusser’s circle, to his political participation in May ’68 and its aftermath, the experience of the UCFML and its successor, L’organisation politique, and his vast body of philosophical and political writing from the 1990s onwards. In direct readings from the whole of Badiou’s body of work, we will trace key concepts such as the void, ontology as mathematics, the figure of the subject and its retrospective convocation, the event, fidelity, the suture, and more, explore the relationship of Badiou’s work to figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Deleuze, and others, along with examinations of Badiou’s longtime collaborators Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel.

Full details for COML 4283 - Badiou: Politics and Thought

As a philosophical approach to culture and society emerging out of European contexts, critical theory has traditionally excluded questions about the history of racial difference. Yet critical theory’s insights into processes of subject formation, social relations, mass culture, and general emancipatory drive continue to inform and be of value to scholars of race concerned with the everyday production and transmission of ideas about normative humanity. At the same time, in their engagement with theory's blindspots, scholars of race demonstrate the racialized histories, contexts, and assumptions that make up that for which "theory" cannot account, as well as that from which it has unquestioningly emerged. This course explores contemporary critical scholarship on race, as defined by its relationship to anti-positivist epistemologies, theories of the subject, critiques of traditional ontology and aesthetics, and engagement with the Black radical tradition, environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, and more. Some familiarity with key figures and ideas in postcolonial theory and Black studies is desirable though not absolutely necessary. Readings may include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Rizvana Bradley, David Marriott, Rei Terada, Nahum Dmitri Chandler, Fred Moten, and others.

Full details for COML 4353 - Race and Critical Theory

The premodern world played a crucial role in the formation of postmodern theory. ‘Biblical exegesis’, ‘negative theology’, ‘inner experience’, and other premodern concepts and practices were taken up by postmodern authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, and Robert Musil. Each week we will read one modern author in dialogue with one premodern author, such as Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, among many others. The aim of our comparisons will be to interrogate the legacy of what Bruce Holsinger calls the “premodern condition.”

Full details for COML 4471 - Premodern-Postmodern

In this course, we shall be looking at the he said, she said of colonial/anti-colonial literature. In particular we shall look at texts where European and African authors have been in direct conversation, with the hope of developing a deeper understanding of what was at stake in the colonial projects, and how both the colonizer and colonized understood colonization and resistance – and the contradictions in inherent in each. Looking at the works of Mannoni, Fanon, Nawal El Saadawi, Micere Mugo, Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, and others, we shall try to paint a picture that engages the voices and vulnerabilities of both lion and hunter.

Full details for COML 4571 - Africa Writes Back: Colonizer and the Colonized

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Full details for COML 4836 - Transcultural Theory

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 is a theoretical exploration of digital biopolitics, a convergence of how digital technologies mediate, govern, and regulate life, particularly within frameworks of power and control. Extending the concept of biopolitics—the governance of populations through the imbrication of life processes into political calculations to enhance the former—the course foregrounds how computational systems, algorithms, and data practices shape and are shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces. The interdisciplinary course, linking political philosophy, media theory, and race studies, thinks with a wide range of scholars for whom digitality, as it encounters biopolitics, is generative for a deeper understanding of the datafied world. This exploration follows sections, including data as a resource, digital embodiment and corporeality, digital labor and necropolitics, and biopolitical resistance in digital spaces. Foundational to the course are inquiries about posthumanism and ethics, such as: How does the digital reconfigure traditional boundaries between human and non-human, self and other? As technology mediates biopolitical power, who holds systems accountable for harm and injustice?

Full details for COML 4944 - Digital Biopolitics

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 seminar offers a relatively comprehensive survey of the thought and political theory of Alain Badiou, from his engagement in Althusser’s circle, to his political participation in May ’68 and its aftermath, the experience of the UCFML and its successor, L’organisation politique, and his vast body of philosophical and political writing from the 1990s onwards. In direct readings from the whole of Badiou’s body of work, we will trace key concepts such as the void, ontology as mathematics, the figure of the subject and its retrospective convocation, the event, fidelity, the suture, and more, explore the relationship of Badiou’s work to figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Deleuze, and others, along with examinations of Badiou’s longtime collaborators Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel.

Full details for COML 6283 - Badiou: Politics and Thought

As a philosophical approach to culture and society emerging out of European contexts, critical theory has traditionally excluded questions about the history of racial difference. Yet critical theory’s insights into processes of subject formation, social relations, mass culture, and general emancipatory drive continue to inform and be of value to scholars of race concerned with the everyday production and transmission of ideas about normative humanity. At the same time, in their engagement with theory's blindspots, scholars of race demonstrate the racialized histories, contexts, and assumptions that make up that for which "theory" cannot account, as well as that from which it has unquestioningly emerged. This course explores contemporary critical scholarship on race, as defined by its relationship to anti-positivist epistemologies, theories of the subject, critiques of traditional ontology and aesthetics, and engagement with the Black radical tradition, environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, and more. Some familiarity with key figures and ideas in postcolonial theory and Black studies is desirable though not absolutely necessary. Readings may include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Rizvana Bradley, David Marriott, Rei Terada, Nahum Dmitri Chandler, Fred Moten, and others.

Full details for COML 6353 - Race and Critical Theory

This seminar explores the writing of revolutionary moments, when the course of history is interrupted and announces a new path, one that can be realized, betrayed, or compromised. What are the strategies for capturing, condensing, and making legible events that have an often unrecognized pre-history, an explosive moment, and various aftermaths? How do literary and theoretical strategies differ? After a quick look at the Peasants War and its theorizations by Bloch, Engels, and the Wu Ming collective, the course focuses on the long nineteenth century in Europe (including its colonies) and its series of revolutionary convulsions: the French Revolution (Buechner, Weiss, Kant, Hegel, Burke, Tocqueville), the Haitian Revolution (Kleist, CLR James, Hegel, Buck-Morss); the weavers uprising of 1844 (Hauptmann, Heine, Kollwitz); the 1848 revolutions (Marx, Flaubert, Tocqueville), and the Paris Commune of 1871 (Kristin Ross).

Full details for COML 6395 - Writing Revolution: France, Haiti, 1848 Europe, and the Paris Commune

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

As Théophile Gautier said of Decadent aesthetics, “It is an ingenious, complex, learned style, full of shades and refinements of meaning, ever extending the bounds of language, borrowing from every technical vocabulary, taking colors from every palette and notes from every keyboard; a style that endeavors to express the most inexpressible thoughts, the vaguest and most fleeting contours of form, that listens, with a view to rendering them, to the subtle confidences of neurosis, to the confessions of aging lust turning into depravity, and to the odd hallucinations of fixed ideas passing into mania.” "Decadent" is an enduring term of political abuse, but also defines a canonical aesthetic movement ironically fascinated throughout the past two centuries with the style of empires in decline, including ours.

Full details for COML 6551 - Decadence and the Modern Novel

This graduate seminar provides a basic introduction to the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and to the latter’s interpretation and appropriation of the former. A major concern is the articulation of philosophy and politics, particularly in the case of Heidegger. We are also interested in the types of argumentation and styles of writing of both thinkers, including in light of the hypothesis that they were working in the ancient tradition of prudent exotericism, viz. that they never wrote exactly what they thought and that they intended their influence to come slightly beneath the level of conscious apprehension. We also consider their impact on the long list of intellectuals across the ‘Left-Center-Right’ spectrum, including (depending on seminar-participant interest): Adorno, Agamben, Bataille, Badiou, Bourdieu, Butler, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Gadamer, Irigaray, Klossowski, Löwith, Marcuse, Rorty, Leo Strauss, Vattimo, Zupancic. The readings are provided in German (and French or Italian in some cases) and in English translations, when these exist. Discussion and papers in English. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

Full details for COML 6630 - Nietzsche and Heidegger

“Prophetic Realisms” explores the notion that certain literary texts – those that are deeply embedded in the socio-economic totality of the world they build – not only provide insight into the present world, but also anticipate the shape of things to come: the tendencies and trajectories of coming historical formations. The latent is already manifest so that, strangely, one of the proving grounds of literature is history. This idea is very pronounced in Georg Lukacs’ 1930s writing on Realism, but also shared by his antagonists in the ‘Expressionist Debates,’ such as Ernst Bloch: the one point they agree on is literature’s ability to ‘anticipate’ historical developments. This idea is expressed, in a different way, by Erich Auerbach’s 1937 essay “On the Serious Imitation of the Everyday” and 1938 essay “figura”. In this course we will look at these 1930s writings, constellating them with the 1830s texts that harken back to as anticipating the direction of capitalism (Balzac, but also Stendahl), alongside the early 1900s novels anticipating the rise of fascism (Heinrich Mann, but also Fallada), and finally juxtaposing them with science fiction since the 1960s, including theoretical reflections on them with respect to ‘prediction’, such as Philip K Dick, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood. We are interested in moments when historical time seems to become ‘concentrated,’ hence the axes of 1830/1930/2030.

Full details for COML 6730 - Prophetic Realisms: Literature and the Shape of Things to Come, 1830-1930-2030

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Full details for COML 6836 - Transcultural Theory

This seminar focused on early modern texts by (e.g.) Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau. and others. Dealing with early modern anti-and post-humanism, and topics such as: subjectivity, embodiment, alterity, vegetal being, monstrosity, representation, affect, violence, politics, ecology, and nature. With forays into ancient and more modern philosophy, the 20th- and 21st-c. afterlife of early modern issues (Freud; Heidegger; Derrida; Agamben; etc.),and related or homologous problems and modes in the visual arts (e.g., the grotesque; the beautiful and the sublime; sketching; the non-finito; fragments; ruins; e.g.,).

Full details for COML 6943 - Aesthetics, Before and Beyond Kant

This course is a theoretical exploration of digital biopolitics, a convergence of how digital technologies mediate, govern, and regulate life, particularly within frameworks of power and control. Extending the concept of biopolitics—the governance of populations through the imbrication of life processes into political calculations to enhance the former—the course foregrounds how computational systems, algorithms, and data practices shape and are shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces. The interdisciplinary course, linking political philosophy, media theory, and race studies, thinks with a wide range of scholars for whom digitality, as it encounters biopolitics, is generative for a deeper understanding of the datafied world. This exploration follows sections, including data as a resource, digital embodiment and corporeality, digital labor and necropolitics, and biopolitical resistance in digital spaces. Foundational to the course are inquiries about posthumanism and ethics, such as: How does the digital reconfigure traditional boundaries between human and non-human, self and other? As technology mediates biopolitical power, who holds systems accountable for harm and injustice?

Full details for COML 6944 - Digital Biopolitics

How does the state draw political power from nature? What is the relationship between the environment and national and/or imperial identity? How does the environment resist political control, or support human resistance? This course will explore these questions from the perspective of Russian and Soviet culture. Analyzing literature, art, and film in historical context, we will consider the environment as worker and victim, refuge and rebel, commodity and national(ist) emblem, exploring the degrees of agency it is granted in different artistic depictions. With special attention to the history of Russian imperialism and Soviet “internal colonization” and to non-Russian writers and artists of the Russian Empire and USSR, including Indigenous writers. All readings will be in English.

Full details for RUSSL 3435 - Art, Nature, and Empire in Russian and Soviet Culture

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for RUSSL 4492 - Supervised Reading in Russian Literature

Independent study.

Full details for RUSSL 6611 - Supervised Reading and Research

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

Full details for RUSSA 1104 - Conversation Practice

Gives a thorough grounding in all the language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Course materials include clips from original Russian films and television programs. Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computers. Note the RUSSA 1104 option. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1122 - Elementary Russian Through Film

The emphasis is on reading unabridged articles on a variety of topics from current Russian web pages and translating them into English; a certain amount of discussion (in Russian) may also be undertaken. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1126 - Reading Russian Press

RUSSA 1131 and RUSSA 1132 cover the standard Cornell first-year Russian language curriculum at a slower 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 interactive online assignments with fewer 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

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

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

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, you will be able to carry on basic conversations in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian on many topics from your daily life. You should be able to make polite requests, ask for information, respond to requests and descriptions, impart personal information, and have simple discussions on familiar topics. You will also acquire the skills to read and understand simple informational texts, such as newspaper headlines and menus, announcements and advertisements, and to extract the general idea of longer informational texts. You will master the writing systems of the languages, and you should be able to write notes or simple letters and keep a journal.

Full details for BCS 1131 - Elementary Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian I

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 goal of the advanced course in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language is to help students improve their high-immediate or advanced proficiency in BCS. The course focuses on the colloquial, literary (as well as scholarly) idiom, primarily by developing students' ability to read authentic literary and journalistic texts and speak and write about them in BCS.

Full details for BCS 3134 - Advanced Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian II

The Intermediate Finnish II course is designed for students with some prior knowledge of Finnish. Students will have the opportunity to practice listening, reading, writing, and speaking in Finnish. They will learn to express opinions and feelings, and to discuss their families, immediate surroundings, and daily activities. The course is conducted in Finnish.

Full details for FINN 2134 - Intermediate Finnish II

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.On successful completion of Elementary Ukrainian I and II, students will have control of the basic linguistic structure and common core vocabulary of Ukrainian; converse with native speakers with a degree of confidence and grammatical accuracy; communicate in speech and writing on general subjects; read simple accounts of current events; and function successfully at Ukrainian schools, urban communities, stores, restaurants, theaters, etc.The course is centered around an all-skill textbook used at leading universities in the US and integrates an interactive audio-visual component based on Ukrainian songs, developed at Cornell by Krystyna Golovakova.

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, history and culture of Ukraine, tracing its journey toward independence and statehood. Historical mileposts, along with the role of language and culture in defining Ukraine’s place in the world, 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? We will attempt to understand how historical experiences, cultural traditions, and aspirations for independence have combined to create contemporary Ukraine. Detailed description at https://ukrainian.as.cornell.edu.

Full details for UKRAN 2200 - Understanding Ukraine: History, Culture, Language, and the Road to Independence

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

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

This course is for students who can read Ukrainian and wish to practice reading various texts: poetry, folklore, short stories, essays, and larger works. The exact list of texts is discussed and finalized with the class and depends on the interests and proficiency of the students. It varies from semester to semester, and therefore the course can be repeated. The goals of the course are to improve students' reading and speaking fluency, expand their active vocabulary, and deepen their cultural understanding through literature. All discussions are in Ukrainian. While UKRAN 3305 is a natural precursor, it is not required for enrollment. Detailed description at https://ukrainian.as.cornell.edu.

Full details for UKRAN 3306 - Reading in Ukrainian: Language, Literature, and Culture