Comparative Literature

This course focuses on the emergence of the literary tale, both the scholarly and popular aspects, and the way in which its great models, particularly Giovanni Boccaccio’s THE DECAMERON and Giambattista Basile’s STRAPAROLA, depict the oral origins of the genre. As they relate to a corpus of classic literary tales (Perrault, Grimm), the course studies contemporary cinematic adaptations to examine the plasticity of the genre, including the emphasis of fairy tale in popular culture. It examines how these stories are appropriated and adapted to fit the current social and political discourse and discusses whether these adaptations are part of scholarly or popular culture. Films studied include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s LE DECAMERON (1971), Jacques Demy’s PEAU D’ANE (1970), and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES (2012).

Every war story, according to Leo Tolstoy, begins with the disclaimer that war cannot be understood by those who have not witnessed it for themselves – yet the story is always told anyway. Since the earliest works of art and literature, war has been a persistent topic and a prevailing theme, but it has also presented a challenge for artists and writers: while culture cannot resist representing war, war often seems to resist being represented. This course asks why war has seemed to hold such a challenge for representation in art and writing, and how artists and writers have attempted to overcome this resistance to image-making and storytelling. Our primary focus is on literary works that offer rich and evocative writings of modern warfare, but students begin by paying brief attention to earlier works of literature, as well as some visual pieces, that set the scene for our cultural understanding of warfare today.

This course contextualizes Supreme Court decisions by revisiting major societal shifts through the prism of American fiction, from the 19th Century to the present. The course begins with a brief introduction on mimesis and literature’s potential to relate and reflect historical events and, more simply, facts. It then focuses on numerous works of fiction contextualizing and referring to the following topics chronologically following the Supreme Court’s decisions: slavery (Dredd Scott v. Sandford), segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), the New Deal, interracial marriage and race relations in the United States (Loving V. Virginia), the Pentagon Papers and the freedom of the press (New York Times v. United States), the limits of free speech (Texas v. Johnson), culture and political wars in the contemporary United States (Bush v. Gore/Citizens United v. FEC), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and Covid-19 and mask mandates (Lucas Wall, et al. v. Transportation Security Administration). 

This course looks at how the experience of migration is represented in 20th-century Irish writing. While the central focus is on literary representations of the Irish diaspora, contemporary representations of the immigrant experience within Ireland is also examined. English language and Irish language texts (in translation) are considered.

The course considers the literature of nuclear disaster from 1986 to the present, comparing Chernobyl to selected literary responses to the Fukushima accident of 2011, and attempt to show some major tendencies in these works. Some questions the course may ask as the texts are read: How do writers capture the invisible threat of radiation? What is the larger political context they operate in? What forms can literature take in the face of disasters that are both local and global, and whose consequences exceed normal human temporality?

The course is an introduction to the COMMEDIA: INFERNO, PURGATORIO, AND PARADISO with particular attention to key cantos. Students read texts and apply methodological tools for the analysis of literary texts. Required reading includes COMMEDIA by Dante Alighieri. Students are also required to read essays in Italian from a list provided by the course instructor.

This course introduces African oral and written literature in the indigenous languages. Students discuss literary aspects of both oral and written literature and the various functions and purposes they serve in society. The course includes a description and analysis of various genres of African oral and written literature.