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, students will learn about animal welfare, behavior, and conservation through international films. We will discuss wildlife, companion, and farm 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, and in others, peripheral. Students will learn how to compose film reviews and a film production analysis. All movies are streamed for students to watch in their free time. The course is listed as “sustainability inclusive” by the Cornell Campus Sustainability Office.

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

Is Dostoevsky’s Devils (1872) the first novel about modern terrorism? Some readers think so. It is also a novel about parents and children, about generational misunderstandings and their consequences. To prepare for reading this complicated book, the class will begin with works by Dostoevsky’s predecessors: Pushkin’s tales (1830s) and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). You will do a lot of writing, guided by research in Cornell’s libraries. Assignments will range from explorations of puzzling passages to narratives about your reading and investigative progress. What are your questions about Dostoevsky and his sometimes terrifying vision? You’ll learn how to look for answers and how to explain your findings to others. The skills and resources you discover will be useful through your years at Cornell and beyond.

Full details for COML 1143 - FWS: Looking into Dostoevsky's "Devils"

What does it mean to approach a text critically? In this course, students will explore a range of primary texts (novels, stories, films) alongside critical texts that offer both interpretive frameworks and models of interpretation. Through a process of discussion, guided drafting, and revision, students will learn how to articulate an informed and nuanced position on a text. Readings will vary depending on the instructor's thematic focus; please consult the Knight Institute website and course syllabi for specific sections. Theoretical readings may include such writers as Lauren Berlant, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Donna Haraway, and Audre Lorde; fiction and film may include works by writers and filmmakers such as Octavia Butler, Han Kang, Franz Kafka, and Bong-Joon Ho.

Full details for COML 1144 - FWS: Ways of Reading, Ways of Seeing

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

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

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

This course will explore how in the body of world literature, film and music humans have construed, narrated, imagined the end of time and of the world and sometimes its new beginning. Spanning from ancient epic through colonial narratives to twentieth century works and 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 and include authors such as St John of Patmos, Messiaen, Columbus, Beckett, Gibson, Marquez, Murakami, Alexievich, Liu.

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

Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for COML 2400 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature

Contemporary World Cinema offers an introduction to some of the most acclaimed international films of the 21st century. We will consider narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental films from multiple national and transnational contexts. We will examine both dominant and alternative forms of storytelling, how funding institutions, festivals, and awards shape the global circulation of films, how genres get transformed internationally, and how films intervene in how we think about specific social issues and political contexts. Specific films and case studies may vary from year to year. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for COML 2512 - Contemporary World Cinema

What is cinema? Does film represent the world, or does it create new ones? Does film help us understand how we see and think, or has it changed our very forms of perception? In this course, students contemplate cinema as a technology, an art form, a mass medium, and a mode of perception. We will explore a range of key debates in film theory, from the early twentieth century to the present. We will consider a variety of topics lying at the intersection of formal-aesthetic and socio-ideological approaches to film, including medium specificity, spectatorship, apparatus, realism, and questions relating to film ontology more generally. We will also consider how feminist, postcolonial, and black film criticism have restructured discourses about the image. The course will train students in the vocabulary of film analysis while introducing them to cinema as a central site for thinking about modernity, politics, aesthetics, and global visual culture.

Full details for COML 2591 - Introduction to Film Theory

This lecture course principally examines the writings and visual art of the Russian intelligentsia in relation to the idea of revolution (approximately from the 1820s to the 1920s). How did the intelligentsia constitute itself as the revolutionary force through its writings? What were the ways it imagined revolution, a revolutionary party, and a revolutionary people? What role did the intelligentsia play in Russian revolutionary history? And finally, how did modernization, revolution, war, and the construction of the world’s first socialist society affect the intelligentsia’s composition, political thought, literature, and art? We will examine the era’s major politico-cultural trends (Nihilism, Anarchism, Populism, Terrorism, Bolshevism, Pacifism, etc.) and readings will include works of literature (e.g. Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bely, Mayakovsky) as well as classic pieces of political writing (e.g. Herzen, Bakunin, Lenin). (HIST-HEU)

Full details for COML 2691 - Russian Revolutionary History

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. (MUSIC-HC)

Full details for COML 2703 - Thinking Media

This course introduces the prehistory of “artificial intelligence” (AI), from ancient automata through medieval combinatorics to early modern calculating machines. Putting contemporary debates into historical perspective, readings and discussions will engage with literary, cultural, philosophical, artistic, and technical sources, as well as contemporary scholarship in critical AI studies. Discussions and writing assignments will explore the sociocultural imagination of techniques and technologies and the history of concepts related to creativity, intelligence, and artificiality. Taught in English.

Full details for COML 2727 - AI Before AI: From Automata to Thinking Machines

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. (ARKEO-COS)

Full details for COML 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the The Story of Sinuhe and The Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the Travels of Ibn Battuta, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, and The Arabian Nights. We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

Full details for COML 2754 - Wondrous Literatures of the Near East

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

Full details for COML 3021 - Literary Theory on the Edge

In his work "Black Reconstruction in America," Du Bois glosses over a key moment in American revolutionary thinking. Senator Wade of Ohio, among three Whig politicians impatient with Abraham Lincoln's acccommodationism in relation to the defeated South, proposes a certain radical policy. That is, the newly liberated slaves must be willing to act their former oppressors. Du Bois, in cursory parliamentary fashion, makes mention of Wade's radicalism but never engages it. However, in his biography of John Brown, we find Du Bois' thinking of a piece with Wade's. This course will chart the unfolding of Du Bois's critique: from his non-engagement to what we might take to be an almost full embrace of Wade's proposal through the radical actions of John Brown.

Full details for COML 3029 - Revolutionary John Brown: As Figured by W.E.B. Du Bois

What symbolic forms might be adequate to phenomena of such inhuman scale as the sixth extinction or the catastrophic climate change of the Anthropocene? Revisiting important literary theoretical discourses on the epic and the realist novel through the lens of Amitav Ghosh’s argument that the realist novel actively occludes the realities of its time and that its form forecloses the non-human, this course will investigate the affordances of epic form, myth and fable for modes of apprehending and representating the inhuman. Materials will range from ancient and medieval epic to contemporary novels, films and anime with special attention to the challenging work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris. Authors may include Homer, Dante, Han Kang, Flaubert, Miyazaki, Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Benh Zeitlin and Wilson Harris.

Full details for COML 3075 - Epic Form and the Inhuman

This course will consider efforts to reinvent romantic love, marriage, and parenthood in the French, Russian/Soviet, and American traditions. We will study theoretical writing from influential utopian and feminist thinkers alongside works of literature and film that have imagined new modes of love and family relations, with special attention to the position of women and attitudes to love and marriage in revolutionary movements. Primary sources will be supplemented with scholarship on the history of revolutionary movements, utopian communities, and their aftermaths. (HIST-HTR)

Full details for COML 3165 - Reinventing Love

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 examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval Spain. Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.

Full details for COML 3340 - Islamic Spain: Culture and Society

What does it mean to be Jewish and Arab? In this course we will read and analyze representations of this contested identity in memoirs, essays, fiction, and film by and about Arab Jews. We will study the history of Arab Jewish communities as well as the causes and consequences of their displacement in the mid 20th Century. We will explore the identity politics of Arab Jews in diaspora communities in North America, Europe and Israel. Not all Jews from Arab contexts spoke Arabic or identified with Arab culture. We will examine the political, cultural, and philosophical differences among the terms Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Levantine. We will pay particular attention to the wide-ranging political philosophies of Arab Jews in Israel / Palestine, from the Israeli Black Panthers to the religious party Shas. We will conclude by examining the politics of memory in representations of Arab Jews produced in Arab countries.

Full details for COML 3414 - Arab Jews

?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. (ENGL-PST)

Full details for COML 3550 - Decadence

The generative age of AI has arrived—and with it a profound question: what happens when machines begin to write the humanities? This seminar takes the most extreme case of modern violence, the Holocaust, to test the limits of memory, language, and empathy in the digital age. Each student works closely with one survivor testimony while engaging hands-on with digital tools, including text analysis, AI models, and media platforms. Through history, psychology, memory studies, and media theory, we will examine what AI can and cannot capture about human suffering, narrative, and truth. Drawing on history, psychology, memory studies, and media theory, the course confronts a core question of existence for the humanities: how to preserve the fractured, human voice that no machine can replicate. (HIST-HEU)

Full details for COML 3709 - Testimony and Technology: The Holocaust in the Age of AI

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

Is Homo sapiens the only species capable of producing visual art? Nonhuman great apes, especially, seem to be able to draw, paint, and enjoy such works. Our prehistoric ancestors are responsible for the adornment of the Lascaux, Altamira, or Chauvet caves. Our next of kin in the distant past (including Neanderthals) also displayed symbolic activity involving visual (re)presentation. Avant-garde or Aboriginal practices, “outsider art” concurrently challenge how we define the visual realm. Thus, the purpose of this interdisciplinary class is to revisit the contemporary debate on the dawn of art by bringing together research in paleoanthropology and primatology at the interface of aesthetics, cognitive science, and speculative theory. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

Full details for COML 3837 - Dawn of Art: Apes, Prehistory, Theory

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. (ASIAN-LL)

Full details for COML 3985 - Literature of Leaving China

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.

Full details for COML 4243 - Psychoanalysis and Politics

The most intense public encounter between Existentialism and Marxism occurred in immediate post-WWII Europe, its structure remaining alive internationally. Existentialist questions have been traced from pre-Socratic thinkers through Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes onward; just as roots of modern materialism extend to Epicurus and Lucretius, or Leopardi. This course will focus on differing theories and concomitant practices concerned with “alienation,” “anxiety,” “crisis,” “death of God,” “nihilism,” “rebellion or revolution.” Crucial are possible relations between fiction and non-fiction; also among philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Other authors may include: Althusser, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Büchner, Camus, Che, Dostoevsky, Fanon, Genet, Gide, Gramsci, O. Gross, Hamsun, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, C.L.R. James, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Lagerkvist, Lacan, Lenin, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Mishima, G. Novack, Nietzsche, Ortega, Pirandello, W. Reich, Sartre, Shestov, Tillich, Unamuno. There is also cinema. Taught in English.

Full details for COML 4251 - Existentialism

Violence is on the rise across the political spectrum. While the left has a long tradition of pacifism, the prevalence of political violence today suggests that we can no longer equate leftism and nonviolence. This course expands understandings of violence beyond the state or military force to consider left-wing theories of political violence from assassinations and sabotage to guerilla warfare and revolutionary upheaval. We will cover major transnational movements including anarchism, anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, feminism, and Marxism, as well as key concepts such as expropriation, counter-violence, propaganda of the deed, and revolutionary defeatism. Taught in English.

Full details for COML 4295 - Violence and the Left

This course explores an unsettling phenomenon: white South African Afrikaners, the architects and for more than 40 years the political exponents of apartheid, now cast themselves as victims of discrimination. Consequently, they now, in relation to the US, enjoy a privileged status as refugees. This course seeks to provide an account of how we have arrived at this strange historical conjuncture. Those who, for decades, and with impunity, where the perpetrators of racism now claim that they are victims. How did we arrive at this most inexplicable moment? What forces are at play to allow for not only the dissemination of this discourse, but now enable these historical perpetrators to enjoy preferential refugee status?

Full details for COML 4420 - Victimizers, Victims: White South Africans as Refugees

What does it mean to make and read theory that is truly global? After decades of heightened global circulation, thinking theory and the global together still poses challenges. While we are rightly suspicious of theories that claim universality, theoretical work has to find new positionalities: ways of being attentive to cultural and contextual specificities while also offering insights on a more global scale. In this course we will approach the problem of global theory from different vantage points: We will scrutinize some key theoretical texts (of so-called Western theory) for their cultural and contextual politics and will put these in dialogue with theories of the global and globalization on the one hand and theories that position themselves (at least partly) outside of Western theoretical traditions. In a final movement, we will read relevant recent theoretical texts to sketch what the future of global theory might look like.

Full details for COML 4810 - Global Theory?

What is the “meaning of meaning,” exactly? Are signification, significance, sense, and meaning one and the same? Is “semantics” a sub-branch of linguistics, or what GPT “does,” or a path to poetry? This transdisciplinary research seminar will put to the test vastly different theories—and practices—of meaning, ranging from the display of signification in the verbal arts to the task of philosophical definition, from the technology of the dictionary to that of computerized word embedding, from the interplay between cognition and communication to the scholarly art of reading. Our scope will be broad and comparative, across disciplines, languages, historical periods, and genres. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

Full details for COML 4842 - Theories & Practices of Meaning: Literature, Semantics, AI

Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester. A letter grade is awarded on completion of the second semester, COML 4940.

Full details for COML 4930 - Senior Essay

Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester.

Full details for COML 4940 - Senior Essay

In his work "Black Reconstruction in AMerica," Du Bois glosses over a key moment in American revolutionary thinking. Senator Wade of Ohio, among three Whig politicians impatient with Abraham Lincoln's acccommodationism in relation to the defeated South, proposes a certain radical policy. That is, the newly liberated slaves must be willing to act their former oppressors. Du Bois, in cursory parliamentary fashion, makes mention of Wade's radicalism but never engages it. However, in his biography of John Brown, we find Du Bois' thinking of a piece with Wade's. This course will chart the unfolding of Du Bois's critique: from his non-engagement to what we might take to be an almost full embrace of Wade's proposal through the radical actions of John Brown.

Full details for COML 6029 - Revolutionary John Brown: As Figured by W.E.B. Du Bois

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

What does it mean to be Jewish and Arab? In this course we will read and analyze representations of this contested identity in memoirs, essays, fiction, and film by and about Arab Jews. We will study the history of Arab Jewish communities as well as the causes and consequences of their displacement in the mid 20th Century. We will explore the identity politics of Arab Jews in diaspora communities in North America, Europe and Israel. Not all Jews from Arab contexts spoke Arabic or identified with Arab culture. We will examine the political, cultural, and philosophical differences among the terms Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Levantine. We will pay particular attention to the wide-ranging political philosophies of Arab Jews in Israel / Palestine, from the Israeli Black Panthers to the religious party Shas. We will conclude by examining the politics of memory in representations of Arab Jews produced in Arab countries.

Full details for COML 6414 - Arab Jews

This course explores an unsettling phenomenon: white South African Afrikaners, the architects and for more than 40 years the political exponents of apartheid, now cast themselves as victims of discrimination. Consequently, they now, in relation to the US, enjoy a privileged status as refugees. This course seeks to provide an account of how we have arrived at this strange historical conjuncture. Those who, for decades, and with impunity, where the perpetrators of racism now claim that they are victims. How did we arrive at this most inexplicable moment? What forces are at play to allow for not only the dissemination of this discourse, but now enable these historical perpetrators to enjoy preferential refugee status?

Full details for COML 6420 - Victimizers, Victims: White South Africans as Refugees

This course will offer a survey of critical and interpretive approaches to literature. Based on works by Goethe, Kleist, Hoffmann, Tieck, Keller, Stifter, Rilke, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Joyce, Woolf and others this course will discuss models of interpretation linked to various schools of thought like psychological, gender-specific, socio-economic, structuralist, philosophical or philological modes of analysis.

Full details for COML 6522 - Methods of Interpretation: Critical Approaches to Literature

This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval Spain. Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.

Full details for COML 6539 - Islamic Spain: Culture and Society

What does it mean to think through stories, especially when one’s métier is theory? This seminar considers modes of non-conceptual thought as an essential practice of twentieth-century theory. Here the story takes precedence as evidence and argument – a mode of thinking in its own right – by mobilizing images, rhetoric, plot, and other literary devices to present and examine an idea. The seminar begins with classical precursors such as Plato, biblical parables, and Montaigne and then focuses on twentieth-century thinkers who aim to reinvigorate thought via storytelling. Authors include Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt, Hans Blumenberg, and others. Taught in English.

Full details for COML 6775 - Thinking Through Stories: Benjamin, Adorno, Freud, and Others

What does it mean to make and read theory that is truly global? After decades of heightened global circulation, thinking theory and the global together still poses challenges. While we are rightly suspicious of theories that claim universality, theoretical work has to find new positionalities: ways of being attentive to cultural and contextual specificities while also offering insights on a more global scale. In this course we will approach the problem of global theory from different vantage points: We will scrutinize some key theoretical texts (of so-called Western theory) for their cultural and contextual politics and will put these in dialogue with theories of the global and globalization on the one hand and theories that position themselves (at least partly) outside of Western theoretical traditions. In a final movement, we will read relevant recent theoretical texts to sketch what the future of global theory might look like.

Full details for COML 6811 - Global Theory?

What is the “meaning of meaning,” exactly? Are signification, significance, sense, and meaning one and the same? Is “semantics” a sub-branch of linguistics, or what GPT “does,” or a path to poetry? This transdisciplinary research seminar will put to the test vastly different theories—and practices—of meaning, ranging from the display of signification in the verbal arts to the task of philosophical definition, from the technology of the dictionary to that of computerized word embedding, from the interplay between cognition and communication to the scholarly art of reading. Our scope will be broad and comparative, across disciplines, languages, historical periods, and genres. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

Full details for COML 6842 - Theories & Practices of Meaning: Literature, Semantics, AI

This course will consider efforts to reinvent romantic love, marriage, and parenthood in the French, Russian/Soviet, and American traditions. We will study theoretical writing from influential utopian and feminist thinkers alongside works of literature and film that have imagined new modes of love and family relations, with special attention to the position of women and attitudes to love and marriage in revolutionary movements. Primary sources will be supplemented with scholarship on the history of revolutionary movements, utopian communities, and their aftermaths. (HIST-HTR)

Full details for RUSSL 3165 - Reinventing Love

The nineteenth century was the first great age of Russian poetry - beginning with Pushkin's predecessors, continuing through Lermontov, and ending with Tiutchev and Fet and anticipations of modernism. In this course you'll learn how to read short poems carefully, you'll expand and deepen your understanding of the Russian language, and you'll gain insight into one of the world's major literary traditions.

Full details for RUSSL 3331 - Introduction to Russian Poetry

Tolstoy is impossible. An aristocrat who renounced the privileges of wealth and rank. A man of titanic appetites who repudiated meat, alcohol and sex. A Christian who did not believe in God and tried to rewrite the Gospels. An anarchist who ruled his estate like an ancient patriarch. A writer of genius who thought literature was evil and a waste of time and referred to his greatest novel as garbage. A pacifist who described the frontline experience of soldiers in the most careful, loving detail. In Tolstoy's imaginative universe, we may find the origin of contemporary conflicts and anxieties about money, about love and about power. But Tolstoy's modern consciousness was not made in Paris or New York - Tolstoy was made in late imperial Russia, notoriously the least modern country in nineteenth century Europe. How, then, did Tolstoy happen? How can we account historically for the contradictions that informed his epic project of self-fashioning? In this seminar, we will see Tolstoy at work in his single-handed creation of a counter-culture at war with the social and political currents of his time - and of ours. (HIST-HEU)

Full details for RUSSL 4172 - Tolstoy: History and Counter-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 group of students 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 at Russian.cornell.edu.

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

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

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

Full details for BCS 2134 - Intermediate Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian II

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

Full details for FINN 1122 - Elementary Finnish II

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

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