COL101F Truth and Lies in Crime Writing (FYS)

This course will explore a range of crime fiction and nonfiction, from literary classics to genre-based texts. Readings will include classic writers of the genre such as Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, and Dennis Lehane, and nonfiction works such as "In Cold Blood," David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon." and Charles Barber's "Citizen Outlaw." A theme of the class will be the duplicitous and elusive nature of truth and objectivity in both the journalistic and fictional accounts. Students will have the opportunity to write a short piece of crime fiction or narrative nonfiction, in addition to analytical papers.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL101Z Truth and Lies in Crime Writing

This course will explore a range of crime fiction and nonfiction, from literary classics to genre-based texts. Readings will include Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," Nabokov's "Lolita," Raymond Chandler, and P.D. James, and nonfiction works such as "In Cold Blood," Robert Kolker's "Lost Girls," and Charles Barber's "Citizen Outlaw." A theme of the class will be the duplicitous and elusive nature of truth and objectivity in both the journalistic and fictional accounts. Students will have the opportunity to write a short piece of crime fiction or narrative nonfiction, in addition to analytical papers.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL108F Language (FYS)

This course, beyond providing an introduction to the science of linguistics, is designed to give students in their first year an awareness of the importance of language in everyday life and of the range of its uses and abuses as a cultural and class marker, vehicle of knowledge, and instrument of power. It is an objective of this course that students who complete it should be better prepared than they were before for the sensitive and exacting study not only of literature but of whatever specialized studies they subsequently undertake. Topics to be considered include whether language is a cultural artifact that is learned or is instinctual; the varieties of languages; language as expression of culture; linguistic imperialism; problems of translation; the distinction between speech and writing; stenolanguage, metalanguage, and poetic language; metaphor and symbol; and semiotics.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL112F The European Novel from Cervantes to Calvino (FYS)

This course provides an introductory survey that tracks the development of the European novel through its major periods--from its origins in DON QUIXOTE through the rise of the novel in 18th-century Britain to romanticism, realism, and modernism.



We will focus on texts that had tremendous impact (and long afterlives) throughout Europe, that inspired responses and imitations in many different languages, and that provided European intellectual culture with archetypal characters and plots through which problems of history, politics, and philosophy were articulated--Voltaire's naïf and Dostoevsky's nihilist; Defoe's heroic bourgeois individualist and Kafka's victim of modern bureaucratic rationality. The readings will also introduce students to some of the European novel's important subgenres (e.g., romance, gothic, grotesque, the philosophical novel) and important narrative forms (e.g., epistolary novel, unreliable narration, free indirect discourse).
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL114F Freud and Psychoanalysis (FYS)

This course offers a close, critical study of Freud's psychoanalytic writings through the major phases of his career. We will be attending to individual texts, ongoing issues, the cogency of his theoretical formulations, and the range of his relevance and reception in deconstruction (Jacques Derrida), feminism (Elizabeth A. Wilson), and Black Studies (Franz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: FGSS112F
Prereq: None

COL115F Reading in Slow Motion (FYS)

In "The Return to Philology," Paul de Man wrote: "Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures of language which it is the more or less secret aim of literary teaching to keep hidden."



This course will introduce students to the theory and practice of reading literary texts closely, in slow motion. Engaging with short works of poetry and prose--including texts translated from languages other than English--students will learn to work with (and perhaps through) their uncertainties, bafflement, and non-understanding of the text and its structures of language. Secondary readings will include theoretical and critical essays drawn chiefly from the New Critics and American versions of deconstruction. While we will gain a basic understanding of key critical concepts such as author, reader, text, closure, and ambiguity, our focus will be on learning from the literary texts themselves rather than from the theoretical readings.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL119F Narrating Pandemics (FYS)

With COVID-19 bringing a combination of stressful social isolation and unusual amounts of free time, people have been turning to representations of pandemics in fiction and film both as a kind of ironic escapism and as a potential source of comfort and insight into present conditions.



This course will look closely at some of these fictional representations, especially from the genre of speculative fiction, to get a sense of how pandemics are narrated and of what aspects of our social world are illuminated by this narrating. While we will look briefly at the history of pandemics from the Black Death through the 20th-century developments in virology, immunology, and epidemiology, our primary focus will be on more recent texts--ones responding to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, along with ones inspired by more recent outbreaks of Ebola, avian flu, H1N1, etc. The selection of texts will not attempt to give a representative overview of the genre, but rather a set of starting points for thinking about narrative form and representational strategies in relation to the depiction of pandemics.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL121F Writing About Social Issues (FYS)

This FYS course will involve close reading of classic journalistic books on complex social issues and opportunities for students to write their own articles on social and political concerns of interest to them. Texts will include William Finnegan's COLD NEW WORLD, Charles Barber's CITIZEN OUTLAW, Bryan Stevenson's JUST MERCY, Rebecca Skloot's THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, Barbara Ehrenreich's NICKEL AND DIMED, and Jennifer Gonnerman's reporting in "The New Yorker." The distinction and tensions between advocacy and "objective" reporting will be an ongoing point of discussion in the course.



Students will produce three feature-style pieces based on their own original research and reporting.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL123 Love, Sex, and Marriage in Renaissance Europe

This writing-intensive seminar will compare literary and artistic depictions of love, sex, and marriage during the Renaissance by authors and artists from England, Spain, France, Flanders, Germany, and Italy. We will read both male and female writers in genres ranging from poetry, the short story, and theater to the essay, the travel narrative, and the sermon. We will also examine other arts such as painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts (e.g., wedding chests). Questions we will explore include, but are not limited to, How were love and marriage related during the Renaissance? What role did sex, gender, and violence play in relationships between couples and within society? How do gender and genre affect the ways in which love, sex, and marriage are depicted? How did cultural differences influence writers' and artists' interpretations of love, sex, and marriage? And what about same-sex unions? Other topics will include virginity and celibacy, erotic literature, family and class structures, and divorce.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L123, FGSS123, MDST125
Prereq: None

COL123F Love, Sex, and Marriage in Renaissance Europe (FYS)

This seminar compares literary depictions of love, sex, and marriage from the 14th to the 17th centuries by writers from England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and Sweden. (Students will be able to study writings from other parts of Europe over the course of the semester should they so choose.) We will read texts composed by women and men in genres including poetry, theater, the short story, the essay, the maxim, the travel narrative, and the sermon. Though the seminar is focused on literature, we will also consider painting, engravings, sculpture, and the decorative arts (e.g., wedding chests). We will explore questions such as: How were love and marriage related during the Renaissance? What roles did sex, gender, race, class, and violence play in relationships between couples and within society, and how were they represented in literature and art? How do gender and genre affect the ways in which love, sex, and marriage are depicted? How did cultural differences influence writers' and artists' interpretations of love, sex, and marriage? And what about homosexual love, same-sex unions, and depictions of dissident sexualities and genders? Finally, how do contemporary (21st-century) writers reimagine Renaissance representations of love, sex, and marriage, and why do Renaissance texts and images matter today? Other topics will include virginity and celibacy, friendship, erotic literature and pornography, religion, family and class structures, and divorce. This seminar engages students with university-level research by navigating search engines and databases (beyond a Google search!), honing their analytical skills, and polishing their academic prose. Students will also have the opportunity to write creatively should they so choose.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L123F, FGSS123F, MDST125F, WLIT249F
Prereq: None

COL123Z Love, Sex, and Marriage in Renaissance Europe

This seminar compares literary depictions of love, sex, and marriage from the 14th to the 17th centuries by writers from England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and Sweden. (N.B. Students will be able to study writings from other parts of Europe over the course of the semester should they so choose.) We will read texts composed by women and men in genres including poetry, theater, the short story, the essay, the maxim, the travel narrative, and the sermon. Though the seminar is focused on literature, we will also consider painting, engravings, sculpture, and the decorative arts (e.g., wedding chests). We will explore questions such as: How were love and marriage related during the Renaissance? What roles did sex, gender, race, class, and violence play in relationships between couples and within society, and how were they represented in literature and art? How do gender and genre affect the ways in which love, sex, and marriage are depicted? How did cultural differences influence writers' and artists' interpretations of love, sex, and marriage? And what about "homosexual" love, same-sex unions, and depictions of dissident sexualities and genders? Finally, how do contemporary (21st-century) writers reimagine Renaissance representations of love, sex, and marriage, and why do Renaissance texts and images matter today? Other topics will include virginity and celibacy, friendship, erotic literature and pornography, religion, family and class structures, and divorce. This seminar engages students with university-level research by navigating search engines and databases (beyond a Google search!), honing their analytical skills, and polishing their academic prose. Students will also have the opportunity to write creatively should they so choose.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L123Z, ENGL123Z, FGSS123Z, MDST125Z, WLIT249Z
Prereq: None

COL125F Staging America: Modern American Drama (FYS)

Can modern American drama--as cultural analysis--teach us to reread how America ticks? Together we will explore this question as we read and discuss some of the most provocative classic and uncanonized plays written between the 1910s and the present. Plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Mike Gold, workers theater troupes, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka, Arthur Kopit, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Ayad Akhtar, and others will help us think about what's at stake in staging America and equip us as cultural analysts, critical thinkers, close readers of literature, and imaginative historians of culture and theater. This seminar will introduce first-year students to the kind of critical thinking developed in majors such as English; American Studies; African American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; College of Letters; Theater Studies; and the Social and Cultural Theory Certificate.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL175F, AMST125F, AFAM152F, FGSS175F, THEA172F
Prereq: None

COL129 Writing the French Revolution

"Liberty, equality, and fraternity" was the slogan of the French Revolution and features three concepts of enduring interest. In this seminar we will explore the French Revolution and its antecedents--and what these can mean for us today. In the process we will delve into a number of ways of thinking and modes of representation: historical thinking, of course, but we will also get a sense of the origins of sociology and political science, the power of scientific thinking, and differences between literary and visual representation (especially films). This course will also serve as a writing workshop emphasizing the nuts and bolts of good writing and experimenting with such rhetorical modes as argument, personal narrative, persuasion, and fiction-writing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L129
Prereq: None

COL130F Thinking Animals: An Introduction to Animal Studies (FYS)

In 1789, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote: "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but, 'Can they suffer?'" This question, which challenged the social and legal norms of the 18th century that denied sentience to non-human animals, has influenced disciplines across the social sciences and humanities to focus on what has more recently become known as, "the question of the animal." Bentham's question has sparked centuries of debate about the sentience of non-human animals and our relationship to them. In this course, we will examine a range of theories and representations of "the animal" to understand the desire to tame or objectify animals (through zoos, factory farming, and taxidermy), as well as why they are often conceived of as guardians of inaccessible experience and knowledge, and how the human and its various gendered, classed, and racial manifestations have been conceived of through and against notions of animality. Readings may include Poe, Kafka, Derrida, Bataille, Haraway, and Coetzee (among others).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: FGSS130F, ENVS130F
Prereq: None

COL138 Wesleyan University Collegium Musicum

The Collegium Musicum (literally "company of musicians") is a vocal performance ensemble dedicated to exploring and performing the diverse European repertories of medieval, renaissance, and baroque music. Emphasis is given to the study of musical styles, performance practices, vocal independence, healthy singing, and musicianship. Students investigate various cultural aspects of the production of music, including primary sources, acoustics, and cultural heritage. Outreach projects include singing with and for seniors.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC438, MDST212
Prereq: None

COL138F Masculinities (FYS)

This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of masculinities, focusing on the difficulty of disentangling the (social-) scientific questions of what men are (and how they come to be that way) from the interpretive question of what masculinity means. We will survey a range of perspectives from evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, social psychology, anthropology, feminist studies, and queer theory that describe and attempt to account for masculinities. In order to understand how these scholarly accounts might fit together to form a more comprehensive interpretive framework, we will also be engaging in critical analysis of examples from contemporary television and film that will help us to understand the role that representation plays in our cultural constructions of masculinity.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: PSYC138F
Prereq: None

COL150F Great Books Unbound: Self and Other (FYS)

Where, how, and why do we draw the boundaries of self and other? In this course, we will discover, analyze, and debate how texts from antiquity to the present have generated and questioned ideas of me and you, us and them: from Shakespeare's tale of love's language ("Romeo and Juliet"), to Descartes's philosophical account of the self as a thinking substance ("Meditations") to Natalie Zemon-Davis's account of self-fashioning, identity theft, and love ("The Return of Martin Guerre"), to Shelley's story of monstrosity and belonging ("Frankenstein").



This course equips students to unbind influential texts from their traditional readings using the collaborative and interdisciplinary approach of the College of Letters. This course combines small FYS discussion sections with weekly mini-lectures by three professors from different disciplines (philosophy, literature, history), along with occasional writing workshops. Designed as a gateway course to any of the core humanities disciplines, Great Books Unbound is not a prerequisite for a College of Letters major, but students considering the major are strongly encouraged to enroll.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL189 Introduction to History: History of the Present

In this course we explore history as a critical endeavor. The aim is twofold: to reflect on the role history plays in making categories of contemporary debate appear inevitable, natural, or culturally necessary; to question underlying assumptions about the relationship between past and present that are so often taken for granted. We will examine both history's influence on politics and the politics of history as a discipline.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST189
Prereq: None

COL194 Civic Responsibility and Places of Remembrance: Historical Consciousness in Germany and Beyond

The Holocaust, Germany's STASI terror, resistance to dictatorships, debates about Germany's war memorials, and colonial history come to mind when we think of 20th-century Germany. In this seminar we will pursue the questions: What do we remember? How do we remember? What are places of remembrance, how are they created, and what functions do they have in our society and for us personally? The term "places of remembrance" comes from the French (lieux de mémoire, literally, places of memory). This term was coined by the French historian Pierre Nora. For him, places of remembrance are not only material places, but also so-called "immaterial" places such as people, data, and concepts that are anchored in people's collective memory and have an identity-forming function. In relation to Germany, places of remembrance can be specific places (Weimar) or memorial sites (the Auschwitz concentration camp), but also buildings (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin), monuments (Bismarck Monument in Hamburg), people (e.g., names of people on street signs), events (Fall of the Wall), customs (Christmas) or symbols. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who was murdered in Buchenwald, described memories as a connective structure. They connect people socially and temporally. But not only individuals, also societies, nations, and cultures remember (= collective memory). According to Halbwachs, crystallization points or places of memory are needed for this process. Like pieces in a mosaic, these form the identity of a culture, a nation, or a society. Their meaning and their perception can change over time. Some things can also be forgotten, but places of remembrance would help us avoid forgetting. With this caveat in mind, we want--among other things--to explore, discuss, and present "places of remembrance" and the role of memory culture in Germany and beyond.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST294
Prereq: None

COL200 The Narratives of Illness and Recovery

This course provides a detailed examination of primarily first-person accounts of illness and recovery. The focus will be on narratives that deal with mental illnesses and trauma or the psychological aspects of physical illnesses. We will explore the relationship of story and narrative to the healing process. Students will analyze across texts the common psychological traits that lead to recovery and generativity, as well as the response to loss and the experience of suffering. Particular emphasis will also be placed on the role of "the wounded healer," those persons who have suffered and then choose to assist others who face similar predicaments.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL200
Prereq: None

COL201 Writing Nonfiction

In this creative course, students will address the elements of creative nonfiction, such as narrative, character, voice, tone, conflict, dialogue, process, and argument. The work of nonfiction writers such as James Agee, George Orwell, Joseph Mitchell, Walker Percy, Anne Lamott, Caroline Knapp, and Dave Eggers will serve as models and inspiration. The course will be taught in workshop fashion, with selected students presenting their writing in class each week.



Charles Barber is the author of two works of nonfiction and a novel in progress. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Medical School and a visiting writer at the College of Letters.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL214
Prereq: None

COL202 Bodies and Sexualities in Medieval Islam

Islamic societies have long traditions of commentary about the body and sexuality. Medieval Islamic texts are replete with references to homosexual and erotic love that challenge the assumption, common today, that Islamic society is restrictive by its very nature. In this course, we will explore how the body was conceptualized by medieval Muslims. Instead of essentializing the Islamic "viewpoint" on the body, we will survey the variety of opinions and ideas about the body in the medieval Islamic world. We will draw on the Quran, early Abbasid erotic poetry and literature, Islamic medical manuals, philosophical works, and belles-lettres, in order to trace how different understandings of the body and sexuality unfolded over time. In particular, we will focus on the notion of complementarity between the sexes, the role of marriage and procreation, the effects of medical theories on understandings of bodily health and illness, the ethical and legal frameworks governing sexual conduct, and the references to homoeroticism, pederasty, and female same-sex desire found in medieval Arabic and Persian love poetry and literature.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: FGSS203, RELI208
Prereq: None

COL202F Bodies and Sexualities in Medieval Islam (FYS)

Islamic societies have long traditions of commentary about the body and sexuality. Medieval Islamic texts are replete with references to homosexual and erotic love that challenge the assumption, common today, that Islamic society is restrictive by its very nature. In this course, we will explore how the body was conceptualized by medieval Muslims. Instead of essentializing the Islamic "viewpoint" on the body, we will survey the variety of opinions and ideas about the body in the medieval Islamic world. We will draw on the Quran, early Abbasid erotic poetry and literature, Islamic medical manuals, philosophical works, and belles-lettres, in order to trace how different understandings of the body and sexuality unfolded over time. In particular, we will focus on the notion of complementarity between the sexes, the role of marriage and procreation, the effects of medical theories on understandings of bodily health and illness, the ethical and legal frameworks governing sexual conduct, and the references to homoeroticism, pederasty, and female same-sex desire found in medieval Arabic and Persian love poetry and literature.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: RELI208F
Prereq: None

COL203 World History

Using material culture, visual sources, primary texts, and articles, this course will give students a solid understanding of World History from the River Valley Civilizations, the Classical Period, and the Post-Classical Period, to the Early-Modern Period, the Long 19th Century, and the Contemporary Period. Emphasis will be placed on the development of major cultures around the world -- and there will also be discussion of how the major cultures fail to explain much of World History.



In practical terms, students will learn how to assess a broad range of historical sources from varied places and times; how to debate these works in class discussion; how to produce concise and precise reading notes based on an argument/counter-argument format; and how to work collaboratively on the group project.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST242
Prereq: None

COL204 British Literature in the Enlightenment: Individualism, Consumer Culture, and the Public Sphere

England was changing rapidly in the 17th and 18th centuries. Indeed, it is often said that this period was crucial for the emergence of individualism, consumer culture, and the public sphere--for the modern world itself. The period is sometimes described as the Age of Reason, but it was also an age of bawdy laughter, intense emotion, brazen self-promotion, serious faith, and gossip in coffeehouses and magazines. It was an age, too, of flourishing marketplaces, imperial expansion, slavery and abolition. This course will track how literary writers celebrated, condemned, participated in, or simply tried to make sense of their changing moment (and the changing understandings of literature available in it).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL206
Prereq: None

COL205 Deconstructing Democracy

What role does democracy play in the narratives that political philosophers tell themselves about the moment human beings pass from the state of nature into civil society? Why is it that almost all political philosophies have almost nothing good to say about democracy? And how did it happen that democracy has come to be one of the most debated concepts straddling the borderline of the literary and the political, the real and the ideal? Seeking to answer these and other questions, this course will follow the concept of democracy through some canonical and non-canonical texts in or relating to political philosophy. We shall attempt to understand why democracy gives rise to the complications and paradoxes that are definitive of the conceptual space of political society.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM202
Prereq: None

COL207 The Political Animal

In this seminar we will read a series of texts that depict the human being in its capacity as political animal. We will consider what kind of beast is created when a mass of people get together. How do you distinguish between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community? What happens when these needs conflict? We will also ask what qualities are demanded of the individual by the community - bravado? Wisdom? Unscrupulousness? Particular attention will be given to moments when the individual attempts to win the community's respect or sway its opinions. How do you influence the public? Does the best person always make the best leader? The course will cover a long chronological range of works, from classical tragedy to the 20th-century novel. It will also address a variety of political situations, communities, and actors: battles and elections; utopias and dystopias; heroes, demagogues, and outcasts.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL208 The Art and Science of Social Engagement

This course will focus on methods and approaches to engaging traditionally underrepresented groups in the social and political process. The instructor will draw on his work conducting federally funded studies on social and political engagement with historically marginalized populations--individuals living in poverty, those diagnosed with mental illness, and those with histories of incarceration--which have shown increased well-being and enhanced civic participation. A particular focus will be on the transformation of the narrative identities of individuals from "outsiders" to participants, in the genres of memoir, biography, and poetry, as well as sociological studies. The course will contrast formal "evidence-based" approaches of social engagement with stories of individual inspiration and transformation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: AMST268
Prereq: None

COL209 Appearing Acts: Visual Histories and Identity Construction Through Photography in Spain

In her reading of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," Susan Sontag finds a close bond between photography and the world, our cave. Photography, she says, shows us a new visual code that constructs narratives that "alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at," and in doing so can influence, guide, and condition our knowledge of the world. Keeping this in mind, when it comes to Spain, what kind of world does photography construct? How does the visual field influence and guide our knowledge of modern Spain? In this seminar, we will reflect on how photography has conceptualized social and national identities in Spain from the 19th century to the present, asking how images create, shape, and question the cultural and social archive. Through the examination of photographs, theories, and methods, we will draw a contextualized history of photography that will help us to consider its role in the interdisciplinary construction of Spanish identity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN269
Prereq: None

COL210 Living a Good Life

For many philosophers, Eastern and Western, philosophy has been more than an effort to answer fundamental theoretical questions. It has been an activity aimed at changing one's orientation to the world and, thus, how one lives one's life. We will explore Chinese, Greco-Roman, and contemporary versions of the idea that philosophy should be seen as a way of living a good life. How does philosophical reasoning interact with lived practice? How do views about metaphysics or psychology lead to ethical commitments? Despite their differences, Confucians, Daoists, Aristotelians, and Stoics all agreed that philosophy should aim at making us better people. Can such an idea still get traction in today's world?



This course will typically have a large-group lecture each Monday, smaller breakout sections with the instructors on Wednesdays in which the texts and ideas will be discussed, supplemented by smaller weekly student-led dialogue sessions on Fridays. For details about the structure of the course and a syllabus of class meetings, along with the locations of plenary lecture sessions, breakout sessions, and dialogue sessions, please see this year's course website and past versions of the course at the following link: https://livingagoodlife.com.



Students who would like to explore the ancient Chinese and Greek texts on which the course draws are encouraged to enroll in either of two, optional 0.50-credit classes that are associated with our course: PHIL151 Living a Good Life: Chinese Lab; and PHIL152 Living a Good Life: Greek Lab. These courses will expose students with no prior background to the Classical Chinese and Greek languages. See their separate entries in WesMaps for more information.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL210, CEAS253
Prereq: None

COL211 What is Sicily?

Language is frequently thought of as the accompaniment of empire. How, then, does one study a poetry without an imperium? This course examines Sicilian culture as a phenomenon which developed under the rule of many empires (Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, French, Spanish) whilst never itself an empire. Birthplace of the sonnet and crossroads of a plurality of cultures, the Sicilian language remains a literary language to this day. What does it mean to write in Sicilian? At the margins of history, empire, and continent, this course examines the growth and transformation of a colonized island from antiquity to the present through its literatures.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: MDST216, RL&L211
Prereq: None

COL212 Finance, the Stock Market, and the History of Economic Thought

This class has two main purposes: first, to introduce students to the subject of finance--especially the stock market--and, second, to explore the connections between finance and the humanities, especially literature, as a means of understanding the crucial role of finance in society. Readings, class discussions set up as structured debates, news articles, video clips, guest speakers, and a group project will together reinforce the students' growing knowledge of this subject.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST227
Prereq: None

COL213 Enlightenment and Science

This course will examine the positive and negative ways that 21st-century science and technology have been impacted by the Enlightenment. In this earlier time, without government or private sources of funding for science, the emphasis on immediate outcomes became common. Practitioners of science often had to be showmen to attract attention in order to get funding. Through the study of contemporary news articles, this class will also consider such ethical choices, many of them to do with resource allocation, that we are facing in science, medicine, and technology today. It has been assumed that the modern age was drawn from the scientific method and the scientific advances of the Enlightenment. It was Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire, both strong supporters of Isaac Newton, who, in the mid-18th century, chose the rational, scientific method as the marker of their intellectual age, the Enlightenment. This choice was adopted by their intellectual cohort, and in turn it was slowly accepted as the standard by European society overall. Thus Enlightenment science did not only lead to modern, 21st-century science, it also directly shaped modern attitudes toward the proper running of society and this continues until today. Yet, little work has been done on what it means to organize a society along scientific principles, especially given that this represented a sharp shift away from traditional decision-making on the state level, and a move towards secularization. How did this new, rational approach shift the priorities of European societies, particularly in terms of the distribution of resources? In the 18th century, there was also a desire by educated readers who were not themselves practicing science to learn more about both the history of science and contemporary scientific discoveries. In this century, emerging modern science was relatively open to new types of people, not just new ideas. During the Enlightenment, science and technology were being advanced by artisans as well as privileged practitioners of science. Talented young men from less privileged backgrounds were, for the first time, slowly able to gain access to the major scientific circles during the Enlightenment. A surprising number of women (in a time when women had virtually no legal rights apart from their male relatives) were also active in scientific circles, perhaps most notably Margaret Cavendish, Émilie du Châtelet, and Caroline Herschel. Women were also the organizers of the intellectual salons in Paris and the political salons in London. In both cases, science was discussed as a normal topic of discussion, not just a subject for specialists. However, the professionalization and specialization of the sciences in the 19th century led to mixed results--it certainly allowed for a substantial increase in the scale of modern scientific work. Nevertheless, it also led to a less open attitude toward those not trained as scientists in the newly established manner. It also resulted in the end of educated people outside of the sciences considering science to be an area that they should know in order to be proper citizens, not just intellectuals. For centuries it was assumed that the modern age was drawn from the scientific advances of the European Enlightenment in the 18th century. Then, in the last few decades, many scholars started to attack what has been called the Enlightenment Project with its wholesale emphasis on science and rationality. Others have found that there were also valuable nonscientific achievements in Europe during the Enlightenment. However, there is a need to bring the scientific method and the technological advances of the 18th century back into the conversation about the science of that time and then of our own time. Given that we now live in an age both bettered and dominated by science and technology, it is of paramount importance to understand the origins of modern science and technology.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST261
Prereq: None

COL214 The Modern and the Postmodern

In this course we will examine how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last 200 years. Our readings will be drawn from a variety of areas--philosophy, novels, music, painting, and photography--and we will be concerned with the relations between culture and historical change. Finally, we shall try to determine what it means to be modern today and whether it makes sense to go beyond the modern to the postmodern.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-HIST
Identical With: HIST214, CHUM214
Prereq: None

COL216 European Intellectual History to the Renaissance

This class will examine some of the major texts in Western thought from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. Emphasis will be placed on close reading and analysis of the texts.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST215, MDST225
Prereq: None

COL217 Love and Loss in Medieval and Early Modern French Literature and Culture

The interconnected themes of love and loss encompass others such as desire, passion, friendship, death, separation, and grief. This course introduces students to the uses of these themes in French literature of the medieval and early modern periods by reading a range of texts, from the courtly romance and lyric poetry, to the essay, the novella, and theater. We will examine how men and women treat these themes, and we will be especially sensitive to the ways in which women write in genres traditionally dominated by men. Topics of study will include the body, virtues and vices, marriage, sexuality, seduction, chastity, and violence. We will also place emphasis on improving French pronunciation and on developing oral presentation and written skills. Readings, papers, and discussions will be in French.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN222, MDST220
Prereq: None

COL218 The Family Memoir: A Contemporary Study of the Genre

The course will focus on a series of contemporary family memoirs. Readings will include Mikal Gilmore' SHOT IN THE HEART, Edwidge Danticat's BROTHER I'M DYING, Sarah Broom's THE YELLOW HOUSE, Helen Macdonald's H IS FOR HAWK, and Mary Karr's THE LIAR'S CLUB. We will analyze different approaches to the genre, the diversity of ways and formats of telling stories about families, and what makes a particular memoir compelling and insightful. We will also discuss the elusive nature of truth versus fact in stories about families. Students will have the opportunity to write both analytical papers and short family memoirs of their own.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL219 Modern Spain: Literature, Painting, and the Arts in Their Historical Context

In this course, we study the so-called "masterpieces" of modern and contemporary Spanish literature, painting, and film (18th century to the present). The works chosen represent the major literary and cultural movements of the past three centuries: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, realism, and naturalism, the generations of 98 and 27, the avant-garde, neorealism, and postmodernism. As masterpieces, they have achieved canonical status through either the influence they have come to exercise over successive generations or their popular reception at the time of their production. In our close analysis of these works, we will interrogate the processes and conditions of canonicity. We will emphasize the relationship between cultural production and historical context, seeking to draw analogies at all times between the short stories, novels, poems, plays, paintings, and movies under consideration and the social, political, and economic milieu from which they emerged.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN250
Prereq: None

COL220 Modern Christian Thought

This course will provide an introduction to the field of Christian thought by exploring the relationship between conceptions of God and conceptions of selfhood, from St. Augustine through liberation, feminist, evangelical, process, and eco-theologies. How do the ways people think about God reflect, support, or interrupt the ways they think about the human subject? And what sorts of ethics, communities, and political decisions do these models underwrite?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RELI
Identical With: RELI220
Prereq: None

COL221 Revolutionary Lives: How a Life Becomes Political Power, Middle Ages to Modernity

Death is not enough to turn a life into a political movement. That translation requires a story. This course asks why, since Gandhi, few leaders have successfully drawn upon the power of adopting a revolutionary approach to living as a means of effecting political, social, and cultural change. A student-centered collaborative pedagogy equips students with the tools and concepts to collectively workshop principles drawn from a wide range of examples of revolutionary living from the period known as the middle ages; from well-known and widely imitated examples such as the Buddha, the Prophet, and the Christ, to lesser-known examples including cross-dressing nuns, hermits on pillars, desert mothers, begging collectives, and much more. Students will then apply the ways these past lives were remembered and transmitted to contemporary movements such as Occupy Wall Street or the Black Lives Matter CHOP in Seattle. Course assignments consist of short essays, presentations, and a self-designed final project that can be analytical, creative, or demonstrative.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: MDST241, HIST232
Prereq: None

COL222 Ruin and Redemption: Narrating Twentieth-Century Italy

When fugitive far-left terrorist Cesare Battisti was extradited to Italy in January 2019 to serve out a life sentence for crimes committed in the late 1970s, he provided fresh evidence for the way that 20th-century events still cast long shadows into contemporary Italy. The events, their narration and re-narration over time tell the story of unresolved conflicts and overturned verdicts in a context characterized by repression, revisionism, and rehabilitation. In this course we study three historical events of the past century that continue to haunt contemporary Italian society, culture, and politics: fascism; civil war and resistance; and the political violence of terrorism in the 1970s and 80s. We approach these events by examining the ever-changing narratives about them. For each narrative we focus on specific issues (e.g., for fascism: the rise of fascism, racism and anti-Semitism, colonialism, Mussolini's cult of personality, the exaltation of war, fascist intellectuals, the art of the regime, etc.), but we use these as an entry point to articulate contradictions and complexity. We explore these narratives through various media and forms of expression: from films to novels, from landmarks to newspaper articles, from poems to billboards. By exploring how the polarizations of these narratives flow into the 21st century, we unveil the fractures and conflicting agents at the core of contemporary Italy.



The course is conducted in Italian. Authors include: Gianni Amelio, Marco Bellocchio, Italo Calvino, Liliana Cavani, Umberto Eco, Beppe Fenoglio, Dario Fo, Natalia Ginzburg, Helena Janaczek, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luisa Passerini, Cesare Pavese, Rossana Rossanda, Roberto Rossellini.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL222
Prereq: None

COL223 Home Movies: Italian "Families" on Film

What is "the family" in an Italian social and cultural context? How has it changed over time? How has it responded to the transformations of Italian society since the time of the postwar economic miracle until today? Have its contours changed to adapt to new values? Has it fossilized existing values? Are families limited to flesh-and-blood kinship or are they constructed along lines of shared values and loyalty? This course seeks some answers to these questions through a sustained exploration of a variety of types of families as they are presented in Italian cinema from roughly 1950 until today. We will take stock of representations of the "traditional" family and the related social values, seeking to understand how Italian filmmakers, through their focus on the family, enter into the debate concerning tradition and change within Italian society, culture, and history. To that end, we will examine family dynamics along a broad spectrum of relative and intersecting aspects including affiliation, love, and rivalry; elective families (organized around crime syndicates, families constituted according to affinity); "failed" and "challenged" families and what that means; and examples of single-parent and same-sex families that seek to challenge conventional heteronormative paradigms. Along the way, we will recur to some critical readings (in sociology, history, and anthropology) that will help us frame our inquiry. This course is conducted in Italian. ITAL 223 is an appropriate course for anyone seeking an advanced class after ITAL112.



We will screen one primary film each week, which will anchor our discussions and serve as the basis for that week's activities. Students will also make 10-15 minute presentations on a secondary film that will serve as a "companion" to the primary text and will thicken our understanding of that week's themes.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL223
Prereq: ITAL221 OR ITAL222

COL224 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Rethinking the Italian Renaissance

In this course we explore the intellectual achievements of the Italian Renaissance. We study the development of new secular values and the quest for the fulfillment of body and soul, glory, and exuberant pleasures. We question notions of beauty, symmetry, proportion, and order. We also unveil often-neglected aspects of Renaissance counter-cultures, such as the aesthetics of ugliness and obscenity and practices of marginalization (e.g., misogyny, homophobia). We inquire into the rediscovery of classical civilizations. We consider how the study of antiquity fundamentally changed the politics, literatures, arts, and philosophies of Italy at the dawn of the modern era. Through a close reading of texts by authors such as Francesco Petrarca, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Michelangelo, we investigate continuities and ruptures between their quest for human identity and ours. This course is conducted in English, and all primary and secondary sources are in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L224, ITAL224, MDST223
Prereq: None

COL225 20th-Century Franco-Caribbean Literature and the Search for Identity

This course investigates how 20th-century Francophone literature from the Caribbean defines Caribbean identity. Through a study of literary texts, films, and paintings from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Guyana, and Louisiana, we will explore the evolution of Caribbean self-definition, focusing on the major concepts of Negritude, Antillanite, Creolite, and Louisianitude.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: AFAM223, AMST226, LAST220
Prereq: None

COL226 Dialogue of Poets: Classical and 20th-Century Poetry in Spain and Latin America

This course samples the rich tradition of Spanish-language verse from its beginnings to the present. It is organized around four primary dialogues: (1) the creative reception by leading 20th-century poets from Spain and Latin America (e.g., Neruda, Lorca, Machado, Borges, Paz, Rossetti) of classical poets (Saint John of the Cross, Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz); (2) the interplay of poetry and essays by those same poets; (3) the round-trip fertilization of popular and elite, oral and written forms of poetry; and (4) the crossing of linguistic, ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries that has shaped Spanish-language verse from its beginnings as love lyrics embedded in Hebrew and Arabic poems (jarchas) to the creative stimulus of other Romance languages (especially Galician and Catalan) in Spain, through Latin American poets open to Amerindian and African influences, and Hispanic-American poets exploring bilingualism in the U.S. We will read lyric, epic, and burlesque verse on a wide variety of themes (mysticism, sex, history, reason, travel, love, politics, sensory perception, death, and poetry itself); reflect on how poetry can best be enjoyed and understood; and consider how poetry has been produced, heard, read, and used (ritual and spontaneous song; minstrel performance of epic and ballads; courtly patronage, literary academies, and manuscript circulation; private reading of printed texts and commodification; and 20th-century singer-songwriter musical settings and politics). Although no prior expertise in poetry is expected, a willingness to engage it closely (textually and historically) is essential.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN232, LAST232
Prereq: None

COL227 Life Writing: Writing About the Self and from Experience

This course will examine both the power and the complexities of writing that derives from personal experience. Topics to be addressed, in turn, are memory (and its reliability); experience (authoritative/reportorial vs. interpretative/symbolic); identity and voice of the narrator; and agency (the degree to which the narrator is in control, or not in control, of the narrative). Types of life writing that will be explored are coming-of-age narratives, illness and trauma narratives, confessional narratives, autobiographical poetry and song lyrics, and interviews/oral histories. Readings and materials include Shadd Maruna, William Styron, Mary Karr, Donna Tartt, James Joyce, and many others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: WRCT227, ENGL228
Prereq: None

COL227Z Life Writing: Writing about the Self and from Experience

This course will examine both the power and the complexities of writing that derives from personal experience. Topics to be addressed, in turn, are memory (and its reliability); experience (authoritative/reportorial vs. interpretative/symbolic); identity and voice of the narrator; and agency (the degree to which the narrator is in control, or not in control, of the narrative). Types of life writing that will be explored are coming-of-age narratives, illness and trauma narratives, confessional narratives, autobiographical poetry and song lyrics, and interviews/oral histories. Readings and materials include William Styron, Mary Karr, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Malcolm X, Donna Tartt, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL228Z, WRCT227Z
Prereq: None

COL228 Virtue and Vice in History, Literature, and Philosophy

Examines the long, complex and sometimes contradictory associations of virtue with piety, salvation, righteousness, intensity, strength, and, more recently with vulnerability and suffering. Beginning with Confucius and Aristotle, and winding our way through Christianity, humanism, postmodernism until the present, we will explore the ethics, power, and politics of the ideas of virtue and vice.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: CHUM228, PHIL112, HIST140
Prereq: None

COL229 Heroes, Lovers, and Swindlers: Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature and History

This course is designed to develop students' ability to make informed and creative sense of four fascinating, complex, and influential medieval and Renaissance Spanish texts in their multiple (literary, historical) contexts: the "national" epic EL CID (12th-13th century); the bawdy and highly theatrical prose dialogue known as LA CELESTINA (1499); the anonymous LAZARILLO (1554), the first picaresque novel; and María de Zayas's proto-feminist novella THE WAGES OF VICE (1647). Through these and selected historical readings, the course is also intended to provide students with a basic knowledge of Spanish culture (in its plurality) from the 11th through the 17th centuries, the texture of everyday life, and the larger movements of long-term historical change. We will draw on literature and history to imagine the world of chivalry and crusade in the medieval Spain of "the three religions of the book" (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam); of mercantile values, courtly love, and prostitution in the Renaissance city; of social injustice and religious hypocrisy in imperial Spain; and of the exacerbated gender and caste tensions that followed from the political crises of the 1640s. We will reflect on the interplay of literature and history in our efforts to come to grips with a past both familiar and strange; address the crossing of linguistic, artistic, ethnic, religious, caste, and gender boundaries that has long been a conspicuous feature of Spanish society; and consider what texts and lives of the past might still have to say to us today. No prior historical or literary preparation is required, only a willingness to engage the readings closely (textually and historically).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN230, MDST228
Prereq: None

COL230 Longform Narrative

This course will explore techniques and theories that sustain multifaceted and long narratives in fiction and nonfiction. Students will read texts that transpire over many pages, over long periods of time, and which involve deep explorations of character, setting, and theme. Readings will draw on various genres: classics ("Crime and Punishment" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"), crime fiction (Donna Tartt's "The Secret History"), and narrative nonfiction (Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" and Gay Talese's "Honor Thy Father"). We will examine and explore the elements that sustain long and complex stories. Students will write one very long (50-page) essay or piece of fiction over the course of the semester.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL242
Prereq: None

COL231 Orientalism: Spain and Africa

Over the past several decades, North African and Middle Eastern cultures have become conspicuously important within the Spanish cultural arena. Translations of writers from Lebanon to Morocco abound in Spanish bookstores. Spanish writers have begun addressing North African and Middle Eastern issues with greater frequency, especially in their novels. The dramatic rise in the African immigrant population in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s, meanwhile, has been matched by a rise in press coverage of issues pertaining to Africa and the Middle East. These factors constitute the point of departure for our historical overview of the treatment of Islamic cultures in modern Spain, from early 19th century to the present. Guided by Edward Said's seminal essay, ORIENTALISM, we will assess the extent to which (and the process by which) Spain passes from the Orientalized subject of European Romanticism (painting, literature, music) to an Orientalizing European power in the late 20th century. In doing so, we will seek to relate the representation of Islamic cultures in Spanish literature and painting to social, political, and economic factors, most important of which was Spain's military invasion into Morocco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will also survey changing attitudes among Spanish intellectuals with regard to the Islamic world and toward Spain's Islamic heritage, the result, perhaps, of 20th-century modernization and, most recently, of Spain's full integration, after Franco's death, into Europe's military and political structures. The tools for this study include works of literature primarily, but we will also focus on painting, historical essays, newspaper articles, and film.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN264
Prereq: None

COL232 Cuneiform to Kindle: Fragments of a Material History of Literature

This course provides a theoretical and historical investigation of diverse media of literary expressions from clay tablets to digital texts. We will inquire into the history of writing through different technologies and modes of composition, circulation, and reception from antiquity to the present day. By engaging in such topics as the transition from scroll to codex, from manuscript to print, and from book to Kindle, we will consider the history of literacy in relation to other forms of expression (oral, visual, networked) and analyze different practices of organizing textual materials (punctuation, paragraphing, annotation). We will scrutinize paratextual elements (title, front matter, opening information, foreword) and various forms of verbal accretions (glosses, commentaries, editorial interventions). We will examine shifting notions of authorship and originality and explore different systems of storage (libraries, archives, museums). And by questioning the multifaceted, nondeterministic interplay between literary artifacts and the media by which they are formalized and materially formed, we will provide a critical and historical reflection on the nature of textuality, writing, and media.



Readings will set essays in the history of the book and media studies alongside key literary case studies from various periods and geographical areas. Projects will engage with textual materiality (including through the creation of book-objects of our own). The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L234, MDST231, WLIT261
Prereq: None

COL233 Visual Sounds: Exploring the Landscape and Architecture of Musical Notation

This course examines a diverse range of musical works seeing their notation as a process of translation, transformation, provocation, and imagination. Tracing a thread from medieval notations through to contemporary scores, we investigate the shifting tensions between the sonic and the visual over the long arc of music history. Why were sounds inscribed in the 9th century? How do 1960s scores reflect the radicalism of their era? Connections across centuries help shed light on musicians for whom the creative potential of notation surpasses its descriptive and prescriptive functions. Featured composers will include Hildegard of Bingen, Guillaume de Machaut, La Monte Young, George Brecht, Earle Brown, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Cathy Berberian, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Mark Applebaum, and Claudia Molitor. Complementary materials comprise visual art, concrete poetry, and live theater.

One of the reason composers started to experiment with open scores in the 1950s and '60s was to develop a kind of musical notation that could be read, and therefore performed, even by those who did not identify as musically literate. This course is, accordingly, open to all students. No prior knowledge of musical notation or instrumental expertise is required. Meetings will involve discussion of a wide range of readings with the goal of expanding understanding of multiple relationships between music and visual materials.



Learning Objectives:

¿ To gain familiarity with the diversity of forms of musical notation.

¿ To recognize the variable relationships between inspiration, transcription, performance, and recordings.

¿ To consider musical notation as a form of design, a language code, and a form of translation.

¿ To develop creative processes and understand the creative processes of others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC240, MUSC240
Prereq: None

COL234 The Cosmos of Dante's "Comedy"

In 1321, Dante Alighieri completes the final cantos of the "Comedy" and breathes his last. After 700 years, the "Comedy" has not finished saying what it has to say. This course provides an in-depth introduction to Dante's masterwork as a point of entry to the history of Western literature, philosophy, and science. The core of the course consists of an intensive study of Dante's encyclopedic poem in relation to the culture and history of Medieval Europe. We examine the poem as both a product and an interpretation of the world it describes. We also observe how the "Comedy" casts its long shadow on modern culture: in Primo Levi's description of the horror of Nazi concentration camps, or in Amiri Baraka's fragmentary representation of America's infernal racist system. We investigate the challenges that Dante's text elicits when it migrates to visual and cinematic arts (from medieval illuminations to Robert Rauschenberg to David Fincher), continuously camouflaging and adapting to different media. Major topics of this course include: representations of the otherworld; the soul's relation to the divine; Dante's concepts of governance and universal peace; mythology and theology in Dante's Christian poetics; the role of the classics in the Middle Ages; intertextuality and imitation; genres and genders in medieval literature; notions of authorship and authority during the 13th and 14th centuries; the culture and materiality of manuscripts in the Middle Ages; and the reception of Dante's work from the 14th century to the present. The course combines a close analysis of Dante's inventiveness and literary strategies with exercises in analytical writing and in multimedia translation and adaptation, aimed at prompting critical reflection on the ways in which present cultural practices are built upon the practices of the past. This course is conducted in English; no previous knowledge of Italian is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L226, ITAL226, RELI218, MDST226, WLIT250
Prereq: None

COL236 Don Quixote: How to Read the Ultimate Novel

No novel is more celebrated than "Don Quixote," albeit in often contrary ways: touchstone at once of the modern and the post-modern; of prosaic and magical realism; of Romantic idealism and skepticism, relativism, or materialism; of a truth-telling folly; and of the competing claims of books and "life" or history and fiction. Sample superlatives: the one text that can challenge Shakespeare in the Western canon (Harold Bloom), all prose fiction is a variation on its theme (Lionel Trilling), one of the four great myths of modern individualism (Ian Watt). Each generation recognizes itself differently in it and every major literary tradition has made it its own. One secret of its lasting appeal is that, brilliantly improvisatory and encyclopedic, it resists being pinned down. Nothing quite prepares us for the hallucinatory thing itself. There is something for every taste: self-invention; the biology of personality; humor, pathos, and tragicomedy; high and low culture; prose, poetry, and theatrics; episodic variety in a long narrative arc; probing examination of the ambiguities of heroism with a parade of spirited and resourceful heroines who rival and often upstage the heroes; and the disruptive transformations of a new world order (the print, educational, and military revolutions; early modern globalization; incipient capitalism; the explosive growth of profit-driven entertainments). A celebration of the transformative power of imagination even as it casts a gimlet eye on how fantasies can go awry, what passes for "the real world" is often as nutty as the hero himself. We will read, discuss, and write about "Don Quixote" in English, together with key examples of the critical, philosophical, literary, and artistic responses it has inspired. The course assumes no familiarity with literature, history, or Spanish; it does call for an interest in grappling with this wonderful text closely, imaginatively, and historically.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L236, MDST236, WLIT247
Prereq: None

COL237 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)

The Hebrew Bible is one of the most influential texts in the world. From antiquity to the present, it has served as a source of philosophical, literary, and artistic reflection. It is a fascinating document, combining narrative, poetry, law, prophetic proclamations, and puzzling parables. What kind of book is the Hebrew Bible? Who wrote it and why? How do we approach such a text across the distance of time? Through a systematic reading from the very beginning, we will place the Bible in its historical context while giving special attention to the philosophical and literary questions it raises: Is obedience to authority always justified? Why do good people suffer unjustly? What is God's gender? In answering these and other questions, you will gain an understanding of the ways contesting interpretations make authoritative claims.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RELI
Identical With: RELI201, MDST203, CJST244, WLIT281
Prereq: None

COL238 Animal Theories/Human Fictions

The question of "the animal" has become a recent focus of theory, although depictions of nonhuman animals can be traced to the very origins of representation. This course will move among literature, philosophy, art, and theory in an effort to trace the changing conceptions of human-animal difference and human-animal relations from 18th-century fictions of savage men and wild children to current theories of the posthuman. We will consider the ways that the representation of "the animal" intersects with theories of gender and race as it also contests the grounds of representation itself. Authors may include Rousseau, Poe, Sewell, Mann, Colette, Coetzee, Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida, and Harway.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: FGSS239, ENGL252
Prereq: None

COL239 Rebels and Rebellions in Early Modern Spain

What does it mean to be a rebel? This course examines literary, visual, and historiographical representations of rebels and rebellions in early modern Spain. Students will examine the uprisings of aggrieved comuneros (proto-bourgeois revolutionaries) in Castile and of outraged moriscos (Muslims converts to Christianity) in Granada and Aragon, the covert spiritual rebellions of crypto-Jewish conversas (Jewish converts to Christianity) and crypto-Muslim moriscas, as well as texts composed by women writers who rebelled against gender norms and Spain's most famous playwright's classic rebellion play. We will analyze the scathing testimonies of expelled moriscos and paintings that reimagine the pre-expulsion revolts of Valencian moriscos alongside gripping examples of local resistance to the moriscos' banishment, an astonishing and unprecedented tragedy in Spanish history. The seminar will introduce students to a critical framework for analyzing visual and multilingual texts. Close readings of "rebellious" texts will acquaint students with both known and nameless rebels of Spain, as well as with the unresolved legacies they left behind.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN239
Prereq: None

COL240 Revolutionary France and the Birth of Modern Art, 1789-1900

This course examines the birth of modern art in the wake of the French Revolution and traces the evolution of modern art throughout what would prove to be an extraordinary century of social transformation and formal experimentation, ending in the Dreyfus Affair and Post-Impressionism. Themes this class explores include the advent of a public sphere for art-making and the relationship between artistic advance and appeals to an ever-widening public; painting and revolution in France and its colonies; the redefinition of history painting in light of the abolition of slavery and the Declaration of the Rights of Man; the expansion of France's colonial empire and the representation of racial difference; the rise of feminism and attempts on the part of women artists to find their own voice in a masculine practice; the destabilization of classicism in light of scientific discoveries and ideas of "primitivism"; and the conflict between the unabashed pursuit of artistic individualism and the need to define collective values and experience. Although these developments took place two centuries ago, they continue to define the field of modern art today.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA240, RL&L240
Prereq: None

COL241 Sophomore Colloquium 1: Antiquity

This is the first of the five multidisciplinary colloquia required of all COL majors. It must be taken during the first semester of the major's sophomore year. The topic is antiquity, and the course covers major texts of the Greek and Roman/Latin traditions, along with selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-COL
Prereq: None

COL242 Sophomore Colloquium 2: The Middle Ages

This is the second of the five multidisciplinary colloquia required of all COL majors and must be taken in the second semester of the major's sophomore year. The topic is the medieval period, and the course covers the literature, philosophy, and history of roughly a millennium, from 500 CE to 1500 CE.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: COL241

COL243 Junior Colloquium: The Early Modern Period

This is the third of the five multidisciplinary colloquia required of all COL majors and must be taken in the first semester of the major's junior year. Its topics are drawn from the literature, history, and philosophy of Europe in the period 1475 to 1800.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-COL
Prereq: None

COL244 Junior Colloquium 2: The Early Modern Period

For the COL class of 2022, this is the third of the five multidisciplinary colloquia required and must be taken in the second semester of their junior year. Its topics are drawn from the literature, history, and philosophy of Europe in the period 1475-1800.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL245 Senior Colloquium 1: The 18th and 19th Century

This is the fourth of the five multidisciplinary colloquia required of all COL majors and must be taken in the first semester of the major's senior year. The subject matters covered include literature, history, and philosophy in the 19th century, which in this context, can extend from 1789 to 1900.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-COL
Prereq: None

COL246 Senior Colloquium 2: The 20th and 21st Century

This is the fifth and final of the five multidisciplinary colloquia required of all COL majors and must be taken in the second semester of the major's senior year. It includes texts from the literature, history, and philosophy of the 20th and 21st century, extending from 1900 to 2020.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL247 The Fall of Rome and Other Stories

The fifth-century fall of Rome to barbarian invaders is an idea that slowly crystallized over time. This course will examine the birth and development of this "fall"--one of the most persistent stories in history--using the very texts in which it was first articulated. We will work with selections from a range of authors--Suetonius, Eusebius of Caesarea, Ammianus Marcellinus, Augustine of Hippo, Jordanes, Procopius of Caesarea and many others--to connect the fall of Rome with other attempts to explain catastrophe and change. The course will conclude by surveying the persistence of the fall of Rome as an idea, through the medieval, early modern, and modern periods, right into contemporary discourse.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: CLST118, HIST247
Prereq: None

COL248 Foundations of Critical Theory: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud

This course serves as an introduction to the main ideas of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and their distinct yet similar techniques of interpretation. Michel Foucault once claimed that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud "have changed the nature of the sign and modified the fashion in which the sign can in general be interpreted" -- which means that they changed the way in which we interpret and make sense of the world and of ourselves. Marx did so by leading his readers, in Capital, to "the hidden abode of production" where "the secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare;" Nietzsche did so by inviting his readers, in his Genealogy of Morality, to "go down and take a little look into the secret of how they fabricate ideals on earth;" Freud did so by teaching that we cannot know ourselves and are hence "not the master in our own house."

This course is designed to make critical theory and contemporary discourses in the humanities and social sciences more accessible by providing the modern historical and philosophical foundations for key critical concepts such as interpretation, subject/agency, history, origin, society and social power, value, modernity, capitalism, socialism, and religion/morality. We will explore some of the most influential writings of the respective authors in a comparative manner and, thus, come to a better understanding of the genesis of critical modern thinking.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST268
Prereq: None

COL249 Narrative and Ideology

When ballads were popular songs that told stories, Andrew Fletcher (1655--1716) emphasized the importance of controlling dominant narratives: "If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation." Nowadays, stories take various forms, among them cinematic, and they circulate and are consumed in vast quantities. People make stories, and the consumption of those stories, in turn, "makes" people, helping to construct individual subjectivity and collective discourse. How do narratives function as the vehicles for both overt and covert ideologies? How do stories change as they become such vehicles, and how do ideologies change when they are embedded in stories? This course pursues these questions through the analysis of the narrative structure of post-1980 American films, supplemental by reading some film theory. It combines short lectures (mainly in the first few weeks) with much discussion.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL247
Prereq: None

COL250 The Renaissance Woman

This course takes seriously the socioeconomic, cultural, religious, and physical restrictions placed on women writing in the 16th and 17th centuries. Through a selection of literary works, we will examine the ways in which early modern women exercised considerable authorial agency in the poetic-fashioning of the literary tropes, genres, and forms of thought that they inherited. Often re-forming, reinventing, revising, and re-imagining poetic spaces, these women developed their own styles of critique and creation from within their historically specific concerns. This course recovers works that were frequently written out of the study of the early modern during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to grapple with the imaginative voices of women writing under the constraints of their time.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: FGSS250
Prereq: None

COL251 Kafka: Literature, Law, and Power

Elias Canetti claimed that among all writers, Kafka was "the greatest expert on power." In this course we will focus on Kafka's narratives of power relations. We will read and discuss Kafka's sometimes painfully precise descriptions of how power is exerted in the family and in personal relationships and how scrutiny and discipline are exercised over the body. We will also consider Kafka's depictions of physical violence and of apparatuses and institutions of power and the ethical and political implications of these depictions. The working hypothesis of this course is that Kafka not only tells stories about power, but that his stories also contain an implicit theory of how power works in modern society.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST251
Prereq: None

COL252 Writing Love: Articulations of Passion, Genres of Intimacy

What is love? How do we understand the amorous? How do we write the erotic? Is the passionate necessarily opposed to the intimate? Can the prosaic be poetic? This course investigates literary works that depict, problematize, immortalize, and give expression to the varied and nuanced forms of erotic love in human relationships. We will examine and employ the art of verbal language in articulations of passion and genres of intimacy found in philosophical discourse, lyric verse, epistolary exchanges, prose fiction, and dramaturgical and cinematic representations. By working through a liminal space between the sensible and the intelligible, desire and devotion, ineffability and fidelity, absence and presence, mortality and immortality, we will posit and discuss the perennial question: What is love?



Students will be given the opportunity to write analytically and creatively in response to the assigned readings.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL254 Folly & Enlightenment: Madness Before and After the Mind/Body Split

This course examines a variety of ways in which madness has been conceptualized in literary and philosophical texts. Through close readings of classical, early modern, and modern works we will consider forms of human disquiet which have been framed as amorous rapture, poetic furor, the wisdom of folly, visionary experience, satiric subversion, apotheosis, and enlightenment. We will reconsider Foucault's observation that madness is contingent on society by exploring the ways in which perceivably mad characters interact with the limits of their social restrictions and the boundaries of consciousness in order to reveal truths and manifest new outcomes. Special attention will be paid to relationship between insanity and intellect. What is madness? What does it reveal to us about ourselves and our worlds? How does the history of madness inform our understanding of contemporary discourse on mental health and psychic well-being?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL255 The Invention of Fiction: Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron

In this course we read and discuss Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (ca. 1353), a collection of 100 short stories traded by an "honest brigade" of 10 Florentine men and women. They tell each other these stories while sheltered in a secluded villa as the plague of 1348 rages in Florence. We study the Decameron as both a product and an interpretation of the world Boccaccio inhabited. We examine the Decameron's tales and narrative frame as a point of entry into the cultural and social environment of medieval Italy. We look at its scurrilous, amusing, and provocative innuendos as traces of erotic, religious, ethnic, and cultural questions. We investigate the sexual exuberance of many of Boccaccio's tales and the tension between "high" and "low" culture. We consider the development of mercantilism and literacy in early-modern Europe and its emerging virtues of wit and self-reliance. We review the dynamics of composition and reception in manuscript culture and the book's adaptation into different media, from illuminations to film. And by impersonating the 10 Florentines, we will reenact their pastime of telling stories and appreciate Boccaccio's remarkably modern sensibility and unsurpassed art of writing fiction. This course is conducted in Italian.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL235, MDST245
Prereq: None

COL257 Remembering Selves: Forces and Forms of Autobiography

The Delphic Oracle commands "know thyself," and perhaps in response, authors have felt compelled to confess, condemn, forget, and remember past selves in an effort to narrate and so envision who they are in the present. This course will look at a range of autobiographical works from The Confessions of Saint Augustine to contemporary graphic memoirs. We will ask how memory works to conserve, construct, or distance past selves; how bodies delimit selves; and how selves are conceived in and through our relations with others and with our worlds (material, social, and historical).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL258 The Word for World is Information: Ideologies of Language in Science Fiction & Film

By the middle of the 20th century, it had begun to seem possible to produce a grand theory of communication that would use language as a basis for understanding all of human thought, behavior, and culture. As competing versions of such a theory circulated through academic disciplines as disparate as anthropology, neurophysiology, and the emerging field of computer science, they also filtered out--sometimes in strangely warped or oversimplified forms--into popular culture.



This course will examine the most interesting and influential of these theories, both in their scholarly origins and in their most puzzling and promising elaborations in works of literary and filmic science fiction. We will be particularly attentive to the ways that the narrative logic of science fiction texts can gloss over certain logical and philosophical inconsistencies in these theories while revealing others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL260
Prereq: None

COL259 The Human Condition: Arendt, Nietzsche, Marx

"God is dead," the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote at the close of the 19th century, "and we have killed him!" Nietzsche presents these words as being proclaimed by "a madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly." Both the content of this famous quotation and its setting express a concern with the internal and external conditions under which modern humans live and make sense of their lives: without the certainty of divine guidance and order (internally), encountering one another only as impersonal buyers and sellers on the marketplace (externally). In this seminar, we will study three strikingly unique yet nonetheless intersecting ways of addressing the human condition after the death of god. We will start with Hannah Arendt's magisterial "The Human Condition" (1958), in which she presents the history of how in the Western philosophical tradition the active life (the vita activa, as distinguished from the vita contemplativa, the life of the mind) has been conceptualized. Drawing on Nietzsche's genealogical method, Arendt traces the genesis of concepts from their Greek, Latin, and Biblical origins to modernity. In doing so, she focuses on the activities of labor, work, and action: Labor is the "metabolism between humans and nature" (Marx), the process through which we appropriate the earth for our survival as a species; work is the transformation of the earth into a durable world; and plurality is the sharing of this world with others.



From Arendt's comprehensive conceptual history of the human condition, we will proceed in reverse chronological order to contextualize and challenge her claims. Arendt singles out Nietzsche and Marx as the paradigmatic modern "life and labor philosophers" and foremost representatives of philosophical "naturalism," and we will first examine Nietzsche's account of the devolution of European morality to nihilism and his critique of Western metaphysics as a "life-denying" death-cult, and will then, in the final third of the semester, investigate Marx's attempts to historicize and rethink the interdependence of humans and their natural environment in terms of an alienation of practice and the transformation (necessitated by the capitalist "law of value") of human labor into an abstract power of domination over humans and, eventually, the whole planet.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: GRST288
Prereq: None

COL260 Detective Fiction: Procedure and Paranoia in Spanish Narrative

The detective genre is the point of departure for an investigation that will lead us to solve a mystery: How do fictions about the detective--a person who is generally outside the law and sometimes crazy or paranoid--help us to understand the social construction of Spain? We will follow this figure through time (from the 19th century to the present) and space (visiting many Spanish cities) to build a theory of the genre in Spain and a panorama of Spanish society and culture. Following the trail left by novellas, novels, and short stories, together with critical texts, our investigation will allow us to unravel the mysteries of a multidimensional society.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN259
Prereq: None

COL261 Castles of Cards: Italian Romance Epic Storytelling Lab

Celebrated authors of 20th-century Italian literature such as Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati have included in their works several features of Renaissance romance epic, from the importance of orality and the idea of sharing stories with a community of listeners to multi-threaded narratives and a playful attitude to the world of storytelling. The current popularity of fantasy literature and TV series puts us in an ideal position for the study of the chivalric romance and for an exploration of the continuities and the differences between past and present literary forms. In this course we focus on canonical and less canonical texts of the Italian Renaissance epic and their modern rewritings. After a multimedia investigation of Andrea da Barberino's "Guerrin Meschino," Luigi Pulci's "Morgante," Boiardo's "Inamoramento de Orlando," Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and Tasso's "Gerusalemme liberata" along with their rewritings by authors such as Bufalino, Nori, Celati, Calvino, and Giuliani, we will take inspiration from Calvino's "Il castello dei destini incrociati" to transform the classroom into a storytelling lab. The same deck of tarot cards that Calvino used for his book will help us to take part in a role-playing game and create a collaborative story that will gradually unfold throughout the semester. The class aims both at studying the Italian romance epic in order to reenact it creatively and also at using this collaborative rewriting as an interpretive tool to explore Renaissance literature from within.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL260
Prereq: ITAL112

COL262 Tolstoy

During the 19th century when Tolstoy wrote his novels and stories, literature was viewed in Russia as the intelligentsia's primary medium for debating its big questions (such as how to resolve the inequalities that had been institutionalized under serfdom, or how to choose between new and old values as Russia experienced modernization). Writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky willingly assumed the responsibility to address a broad range of political, historical, and philosophical-religious questions in their fiction, and they wrote novels with radical formulations as well as solutions to these questions. However, they also viewed literature, particularly the novel, as a medium with rich potential for innovative formal experimentation, and so they resisted the call for conventional ideological novels. Each of Tolstoy's best works is an innovative formal experiment that creates an unprecedented, new type of novel. This course will study how Tolstoy's writings both responded to and transcended their times by creating new novelistic forms and new truths within those forms.



For native speakers and learners who have studied Russian for at least four semesters, a half-credit course is available in which we will read excerpts from Tolstoy's works (CGST 330).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS252, REES252, RULE252, WLIT252
Prereq: None

COL263 Greeks-Romans-Christians

Western civilization emerged, in part, out of the achievements of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians. Art, architecture, philosophy, and literature were all forged in a crucible of clashing cultures. This course will introduce students to the religious worlds of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity. Attention will be given to the mythologies of the gods and cultic practices of the people, including religious sanctuaries, festivals, and sacrifices; divination, magic, and the mysteries; philosophy, ethics, and theology. We will conclude with an assessment of the rise and eventual triumph of Christians, their appropriation and critique of Greco-Roman culture, and their obsession with martyrdom and the cult of the dead.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI231, CLST235
Prereq: None

COL264 Law, Politics, and Order in the Ancient World

Legal texts--law codes, decrees, and edicts, juristic discussions, law court cases--help us understand the history of legal thinking and strategy, and the construction of constitutional frameworks. Yet Greek and Roman legal sources offer something more than a history: Although these texts in many ways served as the foundation for European legal systems, they nonetheless offer radically different ways of thinking about concepts such as private and public, rights versus responsibilities, and the possibility of freedom and happiness--some more progressive than our own. In an era when many of our institutions and conventions appear open to challenge, the classical sources offer alternate legal and social ways of thinking, and new tools for understanding our own time. This course will provide an introduction to legal thinking in classical antiquity and, drawing from a range of sources, will speak to the intersection of constitutional frameworks with political theory. Through narratives and case studies, we will examine Greek and Roman approaches to thorny legal issues that are still contested today: women's rights, wartime codes, the right to trial, torture, capital punishment, and immigration and citizenship, among others. The ancient sources will be brought into dialogue with current cases and debates. We will also explore the construction of constitutional frameworks and see how these are deployed alongside religious beliefs and collective mores to cultivate "civic thinking." For CLST Major requirements and for Classics/CCIV Major requirements, this course falls under the History, Politics, and Social Justice track.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CLAS
Identical With: CLST221
Prereq: None

COL265 Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Then and Now

This course serves as an introduction to Critical Theory as first envisioned and practiced in the 1930s and 1940s by a group of European refugee scholars in New York and Los Angeles associated with the "Institute for Social Research," which later became known as the "Frankfurt School" (the city of Frankfurt being the location of its European origin and post-WW2 abode). Drawing on the German philosophical (Kant and Hegel), sociological (Weber and Simmel), psychological (Nietzsche and Freud), and Marxist (Engels, Marx, and Lukacs in particular) intellectual traditions, "Critical Theory" was intended to shed light on the genesis of capitalist class societies' inherently antagonistic and irrational makeup. Uncompromisingly interdisciplinary, the critical theorists explored phenomena such as authoritarian movements, mass media, propaganda, and the culture industry, and in doing so championed the significance of art and radical thought for the prospects of liberation from authoritarianism and alienated social relations. For the first generation of Critical Theorists (who must be distinguished from their less radical heirs, such as Habermas and Honneth), critique was not a purely academic exercise, but was pursued for the sake of radical social transformation and thus was sparked by a utopian impulse.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: GRST284
Prereq: None

COL266 History and Limits of Aesthetic Theory

This class will engage significant contributions to Aesthetic Theory in the West from antiquity to the modern period along three dimensions: theoretical, critical, and historical. From a theoretical standpoint, we will address perennial questions in aesthetics, such as what makes something a work of art in the first place, what it means for art to be "beautiful" or otherwise "successful," how differences in media condition and contribute to artistic meaning, what genera are and how they evolve, whether and how art can be ethically or politically significant, why we care about fiction, why and how we "enjoy" tragic plays or horror films, and how artistic tradition can (and should) inform individual works. From a critical standpoint, we will consider how works of art contemporaneous with each theoretical account either reinforce or challenge its specific proposals. And from a historical standpoint, we will seek to understand how aesthetic theories both respond to the specificities of their own epoch and situate themselves relative to the artistic and aesthetic traditions of their predecessors. Readings will include texts by Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Lessing, and Hegel.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: PHIL267
Prereq: None

COL267 Practical Criticism

In the early twentieth century, I.A. Richards, an instructor in English Literature at Cambridge, ran an experimental class he called "practical criticism." Each week, he distributed a single poem to his students without revealing the poem's title, author, and date of publication. He asked students to take the poem home, read it as many times as they felt necessary, and write a brief essay that simultaneously judged and interpreted the poem. This course revives Richards's experiment for the twenty-first century. We will follow Richards's protocols for a different set of twelve poems, which students must read, judge, and interpret. (Students must vow not to use Google to identify the authors.) The first half of seminar will be spent discussing the poems and the students' judgments of them; the second half will be spent reflecting on the discussions in the first half, with the help of theoretical writings by Immanual Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Theodor Adorno, Frank Sibley, John Guillory, and Sianne Ngai.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: WRCT262
Prereq: None

COL268 Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov--brilliant writer, outrageous literary gamesman, and cosmopolitan exile--is a towering figure of 20th-century literature. His most famous novel, "Lolita," propelled him to international stardom and changed the transnational literary landscape. Child of a turbulent century, Nabokov wrote exquisite and at times disturbing prose in Russian and English, balancing between imaginary worlds and harsh realities. This seminar offers a sustained exploration of Nabokov's major Russian and American writings as well as film adaptations of his "Despair" (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and "Lolita" (Stanley Kubrick). We will consider memory, exile, trauma, nostalgia, and identity as we read Nabokov, who saw existence as a "series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES268
Prereq: None

COL269 Modern Aesthetic Theory

As a philosophical discipline, aesthetic theory initially coalesced around a cluster of related issues concerning the nature of beauty and the norms governing its production, appreciation, and authoritative assessment. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, both art and aesthetics undergo a conspicuous yet enigmatic shift, signaled by (among other things) Hegel's declaration that "art, in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past." Rather suddenly, classical accounts of beauty, genius, aesthetic experience, and critical taste are beset by anxieties about the autonomy and significance of aesthetic praxis in human life and, subsequently, by a series of challenges to the tenebility of traditional aesthetic categories--author, text, tradition, meaning and interpretation, disinterested pleasure, originality, etc. Our aim in this course is to track these conceptual shifts and to interrogate the rationale behind them. (This course complements, but does not presuppose COL 266: History and Limits of Aesthetic Theory.)
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: PHIL269, GRST269
Prereq: None

COL270 Modernist City-Texts

Since the 19th century, the city has been both a privileged and a problematic object of representation for narrative realism: privileged because urban spaces have increasingly been seen as shaping or producing the very social relations and individual experiences that realism wants to describe; problematic because the city itself, as a coherent totality that might explain those relations and experiences, is too vast, heterogeneous, and complex to be represented through the traditional techniques of realism.



This course will approach the problems and possibilities of the city for realism through a close reading of two large, ambitious texts that attempt to represent the city as a totality: James Joyce's novel ULYSSES (1922) and David Simon's television series THE WIRE (2002-2008). We will be particularly concerned with two techniques, pioneered by Joyce, for representing the city: stream of consciousness, which creates a tour of the city from the perspective of a single, mobile flâneur; and montage, which creates a map of the city by juxtaposing various cross-sections of social life or various institutions central to the city's functioning.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL272
Prereq: None

COL271 Performing Ethnicity: Gypsies and the Culture of Flamenco in Spain

In this course, we will analyze how Gypsies and flamenco are associated, in fact and in fiction, and how and why they have emerged into the limelight of Spanish national cultural discourses. Although they represent discrete realities--not all Gypsies identify with flamenco and not all flamenco artists are Gypsies--correlations between the two have nonetheless been exploited by the media and by artists as an often unwanted emblem of Spanishness. The tensions surrounding this practice seem related to an undisputed fact of Spanish cultural history: Flamenco is unique within European culture; with a population of nearly one million, Gypsies are Spain's dominant minority; yet recognition of the artistic value of the former and acceptance and assimilation of the latter have been slow to congeal within Spanish society. Our practical aim will be to analyze these important aspects of Spanish culture in their historical context. We will study how the connection between Gypsies and flamenco has emerged; we will evaluate the extent to which it is valid; and we will attempt to assess what seems to be at stake in the struggles between those who promote and those who resist this connection as distinctive of Spanish national culture. In doing so, we seek to foster a deeper understanding of the importance of the Roma community within the framework of European and Spanish culture and a deeper appreciation for flamenco as a unique form of cultural expression. On the theoretical plane, we seek to understand how music, dance, literature, cinema, performance, and art can give expression to ethnicity; how cultural hegemonies emerge; and what role artists play in supporting or contesting those hegemonies. In general, this course is designed to help students develop critical skills of cultural analysis while increasing their proficiency in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN257
Prereq: None

COL272 Exoticism: Imaginary Geographies in 18th- and 19th-Century French Literature

This course will consider the fascination with the exotic--with foreign landscapes, customs, and culture--in 18th- and 19th-century French fiction and, to a lesser extent, poetry. Discussions will focus on the representation of foreignness and the construction of the exotic woman, as well as on the status of the European gaze. Major authors may include Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Mérimée, Loti, Flaubert, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Gautier.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN372
Prereq: None

COL274 Outsiders in European Literature

Modern literature is replete with protagonists who represent a position or identity that is outside an accepted mainstream; they are different, peculiar and/or attractive, and potentially dangerous. This course will focus on the experience of being or being made into such an outsider, or other, and on the moral, cultural, racial, gendered, sexual, or national norms or boundaries such an outsider establishes for the inside. Reading both fiction and theory, we will ask how the terms of inside and outside are culturally and historically constructed as we also look for proposals for dealing with outsiders and their otherness. Authors may include Kafka, Mann, Camus, Colette, Fanon, Sartre, Beauvoir, Duras.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL264
Prereq: None

COL275 Moral Complexity in Islam: Origins to the Present

Ethics seem straightforward, until you need to explain your choices. How do you judge actions of truth and deception, love and hate, wealth and poverty, pain and punishment, freedom and slavery? Over the long history of Islamic cultures, how did people describe a good, full life? Is there a unique Islamic ethos of action? Do Islamic thinkers tie values and decisions to divine revelation, or to reason? How do we determine the nature of good and evil? Can God do evil, and what would that even mean? In confronting these questions along with Islamic philosophers and thinkers we will find a surprising range and diversity, and some of history's most compelling answers. Diverse and creative, these answers from the Islamic past compel us to rethink some of our basic presuppositions. Blending theory with case studies from the Islamic past and present, we will approach some of the hard ethical questions that Muslims across the world have had to deal with historically and continue to address today.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL276 Tolstoy Part One: War and Peace and Other Works

Lev Tolstoy (1828 -1910) lived longer than any of the other major nineteenth-century Russian writers. His career began in the 1850s, as Russian literature was moving out of the age of Romanticism, and extended into the twentieth century, as modernism was becoming the dominant mode of Russian literature. This course will deal with the first half of Tolstoy's career, beginning with his experiments in the narration of consciousness ("A History of Yesterday" and Childhood) and in the narration of the experience of war (Sevastopol Stories). The main part of the course will be devoted to his epic War and Peace, in which the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 serves as the vehicle for considering the nature of Russian nationhood, the place of the individual in large historical events, and the very essence of how history should be narrated. Each of Tolstoy's best works is an innovative formal experiment that creates an unprecedented, new type of novel. This course will study how Tolstoy's writings both responded to and transcended their times by creating new novelistic forms and new truths within those forms. The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES290, RULE290, RUSS290, WLIT263
Prereq: None

COL277 Tolstoy Part Two: Anna Karenina and Later Works

Lev Tolstoy (1828 -1910) lived longer than any of the other major nineteenth-century Russian writers. His career began in the 1850s, as Russian literature was moving out of the age of Romanticism, and extended into the twentieth century, as modernism was becoming the dominant mode of Russian literature. His influence in Russia went far beyond literature. By the end of his life, he was the leader of a moral movement known as Tolstoyanism, the major tenets of which were pacifism, vegetarianism, and a resistance to state power verging on anarchism. This course begins with Tolstoy's mid-career masterpiece Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy explores the problematic nature of the Russian family through the experiences of two main characters: an adulterous wife, for whom the novel is named, and an autobiographical stand-in, Konstantin Lyovin, who is a mouthpiece for many of Tolstoy's own concerns about the post-emancipation Russian economy and the pernicious influence of the West. We will also read Tolstoy's final major novel, Resurrection, which calls into question all the bases of modern society, with the prison system as the primary embodiment of societal evil. The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES291, RULE291, RUSS291, WLIT264
Prereq: None

COL278 Medicine: An Artful Science or Scientific Art? Physician Writers Since 1900

In this seminar we will read physician authors since 1900 who have bridged the divide between the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. We will trace the evolution of research and practice over this period and contextualize these developments against broader social currents, appreciating that medical practice is a reflection of the best and worst of ourselves.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: SISP278
Prereq: None

COL279 Good, Evil, Human: German Fairy Tales and Their Cultural Impact

The collected folk tales of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm have had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Germany and beyond. Despite our sense that we already know these texts, it is worth taking a closer look at their messages. Deceptively simple, these little tales communicate and negotiate extraordinarily important and complicated messages about what it means to be human, to behave in acceptable ways, to have and control unwelcome desires, and to (be able to) imagine a better world. We will read selected fairy tales from the Grimm collection and other texts, investigate the historical context in which the Grimms undertook their ambitious project, learn about ways in which scholarship has framed fairy tales, and discuss adaptations of the fairy-tale tradition in films and texts of the 20th century.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST279, GELT279, WLIT251
Prereq: None

COL279F Good, Evil, Human: German Fairy Tales and Their Cultural Impact (FYS)

The collected folk tales of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm have had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Germany and beyond. Despite our sense that we already know these texts, it is worth taking a closer look at their messages. Deceptively simple, these little tales communicate and negotiate extraordinarily important and complicated messages about what it means to be human, to behave in acceptable ways, to have and control unwelcome desires, and to (be able to) imagine a better world. We will read selected fairy tales from the Grimm collection and other texts, investigate the historical context in which the Grimms undertook their ambitious project, learn about ways in which scholarship has framed fairy tales, and discuss adaptations of the fairy-tale tradition in films and texts of the 20th century.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST279F, GELT279F
Prereq: None

COL280 Image/Word: Narrative and Photography in Contemporary Spain

The objective of this course is to analyze the relationship between literature and photography, questioning the idea of representation that usually unites them. This relationship goes further than the simple representation of the environment that surrounds us: literature and photography modify not only the perception of, for example, urban space, but also its organization; that is, they have a direct effect on the built environment. This effect creates a productive linkage that challenges the limits of these disciplines and the worlds in which they are created, proving how their work aims not exclusively to describe or represent but also to build. This idea of creating is the base for this seminar, where students will develop a photographic and a narrative/analytic project in which they will test firsthand the relationships and skills seen in the class. Thus, they will be able to see the connections between disciplines and cultures that guide our everyday life.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN267
Prereq: None

COL281 Histories of Race: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment

The concept of race was first "invented" during the 18th century by anatomists, natural historians, and, ultimately, the century's classifiers. This class will come to grips with the birth of this concept in two ways. First, we will read excerpts from travelogues to Africa and the Caribbean (as well as short excerpts from natural history) in order to chart the slow and halting creation of the concept of race as it crystallized in European thought during the 18th century. Having studied this "proto-raciology," the class will then examine 16 unpublished manuscripts that were submitted to a contest on the source of "blackness" organized by the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences in 1739. These include essays submitted by priests, anatomists, and partisans of climate theory. Students in this class will actively engage with these materials by producing glossary definitions that will be published along with the entire collection of essays. The ultimate goal of this course is to provide students with an understanding of the concept of race that will inform their reactions to this question as both a historical concept . . . and an ongoing problem that affects all of us in the present.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RLAN
Identical With: FREN275
Prereq: None

COL282 Death and the Limits of Representation

The disciplines of history, philosophy, and literature all hinge on the issue of representation. The ability to communicate ideas, visions, or arguments all depend on the ability to represent these abstract notions in a concrete and recognizable form. In this course we will problematize the basis of all three disciplines by exploring Death as the limit of representation: as that which is ultimately unknowable (or knowable only second-hand) and thus beyond representation. Indeed, what is the concept of the "ghost" but an attempt to represent someone who is dead in the recognizable form of the body that once lived. Yet, the ghost appears and disappears, is not bound by the laws of time or space, and is largely present in its absence. By exploring texts by such authors as Plato, Shakespeare, Poe, Derrida, Levinas, Mbembe, and Hartman, and studying historical events such as the "black death," the Middle Passage, and the Shoah, we will attempt to understand the project of representation and its limits.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: HIST284
Prereq: None

COL283 The Rationalist Tradition in Early Modern European Philosophy

This course offers an intermediate-level survey of the Rationalist tradition in Early Modern European Philosophy. Broadly speaking, Rationalism (with a capital 'R') is the view that human reason can deliver insight into significant philosophical truths, without relying on sense experience. We will explore varieties of this methodological commitment in connection with several core topics - including the existence of God, the nature of the human mind (or soul), its relation to the body, and the possibility of empirical knowledge. We will read texts by René Descartes, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Baruch Spinoza, G.W. Leibniz, and Emilie Du Châtelet.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: PHIL254
Prereq: None

COL285 The Essay from Page to Web Page

We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with canonical examples (ranging from the 18th century to the first two decades of the 21st century) of the two largest categories of the heterogeneous essay genre: the personal, meditative, expressive essay on the one hand and the public, satirical, argumentative-critical, journalistic essay forms on the other. We will then investigate - by both reading and writing - how essayistic prose has been reshaped, even transformed, in the digital era. Both the enduring aspects of the essay and those that change from print to pixel will be our objects of investigation. One month into the semester, students will begin research on the web, identifying and sharing both shorter online posts and long-form descriptive, analytical and polemical writings they will argue for as significant. Concurrently, they will begin to compose original work in the emergent genres and forms of digital prose, in both short postings and longer pieces ranging from the descriptive to the intellectual and polemical, such as reviews and political and cultural critiques. The course will explore how form and content alter together, as cultures think about, criticize, theorize, and reshape themselves in new media. We will analyze the new norms and conventions of reading and writing that emerge in this process to develop an understanding of how we skim, read, absorb and experience the digital writing that now constitutes much of the public sphere.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL286 French Cinema: An Introduction

This course introduces students to the history of French cinema (the evolution of its aesthetics as well as of its main themes), from the films of the Lumière brothers in 1895 until now with French filmmakers of Maghrebi origins. One leading question of the course will be, What makes French cinema "French"?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

COL287 Nietzsche als Versucher (CLAC.50)

The term "Versucher" combines three meanings: (i) a writer of essays, (ii) a maker of experiments and hypotheses, and (iii) a tempter who seductively tests convictions and provokes latent desires. Friedrich Nietzsche draws on all these senses when he proposes "Versucher" as "the not-undangerous name [he] dares to bestow" on the "philosophers of the future"--a coming generation of free spirits who will (finally) be capable of appreciating and continuing his intellectual legacy (Beyond Good and Evil, §42).



This course will interrogate Nietzsche's conception of a philosophical Versucher and examine how this concept might apply to Nietzsche himself: as an experimenter with literary style and genre (including the essay form) and as a polarizing cult figure who has attracted the fascination of generations of teenagers and the most diverse (often diametrically opposed) ideological movements. How is it that Nietzsche inspires such passionate attachment in such radically different readers? What is it about his philosophical style and literary form that cultivates a feeling of intimacy and fierce allegiance while also admitting such aggressively divergent interpretations? To explore these questions, we will read and discuss excerpts from Nietzsche's writings and correspondence alongside texts by his friends and interlocutors--such as Richard Wagner, Paul Rée, and Nietzsche's unrequited paramour, Lou Andreas-Salomé. We will also look at prominent cases of his cultural reception--notably by the Nazi party (due to the influence of Nietzsche's sister, who was a party member) and simultaneously by opponents of totalitarianism such as Robert Musil, Karl Löwith, and Walter Kaufmann.



This course is part of the Fries Center for Global Studies' Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) initiative. It is taught in German and associated with COL290/PHIL252 "Nietzsche - Science, Psychology, Genealogy," though students can take either course independent of the other. No background in philosophy or literature is required for this course, but advanced-intermediate (B2+) reading and spoken German is a must.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: CGST290, GRST330, PHIL253
Prereq: None

COL288Z Solitude, Society and Loneliness in Romanticism and Modern Culture

We are now living in an age of constant connection to anybody, anywhere, at any time. An indirect result of this is that individual privacy and solitude are being sacrificed (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) for the pleasures as well as the risks of interconnection. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has, however, highlighted the risks of extended solitude, which has made reconnection a newly relevant theme in our lives. We thus find ourselves at a moment in history when we think of both solitude and connection with deep feelings of ambivalence. How can literature, sociology, art, and film about solitude and connection help us to think clearly and deeply about their roles in our lives?



We will read and discuss authors who consider the risks and pleasures both of solitude and interconnection, from early Romantic writers such as Mary Shelley, to American Romantics such as Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, to modern European writers such as Franz Kafka and Dino Buzzati. We will also examine non-fiction works such as Sherry Turkle's Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. We will use these works ultimately to consider our own culture of interconnectivity. What place and meaning do the solitude and privacy so prominent in Romantic literature have in a modern culture that makes them virtually obsolete? What can films such as Kieslowki's A Short Film about Love and Hitchcock's Rear Window show us about the relationship of solitude and privacy? More generally, what can these books and films tell us about solitude and interconnection in and since the nineteenth century?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL268Z
Prereq: None

COL289 Italian Filmmaking by the Book: Adaptations, Texts, and Contexts

This course explores the adaptations and transformations of Italian literary texts into their cinematic and televisual counterparts. We will principally study Italian narratives from the 20th and 21st centuries and their screen adaptations as a way of uncovering the modes and means by which Italian screen culture borrows from literary antecedents. Is the relation between literary texts and their screen adaptations a love story or bad romance? Is it characterized by a "faithfulness" to the text or a "betrayal"? Throughout the semester, students will acquire an enriched understanding of the assorted texts and their contexts by studying varied genres (short fiction, novels, nonfiction, detective stories), a variety of themes (crimes both real and imagined, petty and powerful; historical revisionism; personal and political dilemmas), and diverse geographical settings focusing principally on Southern Italy (including cities and islands reaching from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic).



All students in the course will study a common core of five author/director pairs. The core consists of "Il Gattopardo" (di Lampedusa/Visconti); "Io non ho paura" (Ammaniti/Salvatores); "L'amica geniale" (Ferrante/Costanzo); "Gomorra" (Saviano/Garrone/Sollima); and "Novelle per un anno/Caos" (Pirandello/Taviani). Additionally, students will, in consultation with the instructor, choose a sixth pairing from the list of the following titles, which will serve as the basis of their end-semester presentation as well as an element of the oral final exam: "Il giorno della civetta" (Sciascia/Damiani); "Il contesto/Cadaveri eccellenti" (Sciascia/ Rosi); "I Malavoglia/La terra trema" (Verga/Visconti); "Padre Padrone" (Ledda/Taviani); "Quo vadis, baby?" (Verasani/Salvatores); "Acciaio" (Avallone/Mordini); "Il conformista" (Moravia/Bertolucci); "Todo modo" (Sciascia/Petri); "Minchia di re/Viola di mare" (Pilati/Maiorca); "Benzina" (Stancanelli/Stambrini); "Il padrino" (Puzo/Coppola); "La tregua" (Levi/Rosi); and "Le forme dell'acqua" (Camilleri/Sironi). Students may also care to consider literary texts from earlier historical periods: Basile's 16th-century "Il cunto de li cunti/Il racconto dei racconti" (Garrone) and Collodi's 19th-century "Pinnochio" (with adaptations by Disney, Benigni, and Garrone). This course will be conducted in Italian. This course is appropriate for all students who have completed ITAL 112 or whose placement exam indicated a course numbered ITAL 221 or higher.



Students are encouraged to put the lengthened winter break to good purpose. All students are expected to read the first book of Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, "L'amica geniale," during the winter break. It is a long novel, but students will find that the Italian is not challenging. Any edition in Italian will be fine (e.g., electronic, print, used, etc.). Reading in advance of the semester will facilitate students' workload as well as keep Italian flowing during the lengthy pause. It is further greatly recommended that students read di Lampedusa's "Il Gattopardo" in advance of the semester. If students have already taken an Italian course numbered 221 or higher, or have already studied in Italian, it is recommended that they read "Il Gattopardo" in Italian. Any edition will serve.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL249
Prereq: None

COL290 Nietzsche - Science, Psychology, Genealogy

This course offers an intermediate survey of Friedrich Nietzsche's mature philosophical writings. Nietzsche's thought is centrally concerned, throughout his career, with a cluster of classical philosophical questions--does human life have meaning? What makes an action right or wrong? Can we comprehend the true nature of reality? What undergirds our normative judgments (of beauty or justice)? We will be especially concerned with tracking Nietzsche's reflections on the impact of modern science (especially the advent of Newton's mechanical physics and Darwin's evolutionary biology) on our conceptions of value and meaning in human life.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: PHIL252, GRST290
Prereq: None

COL291 Forward, Without Forgetting: The GDR in Literature and Film

In 1949, postwar Germany officially split into two separate countries with the formation of the German Democratic Republic. Also known as East Germany, the GDR was isolated from the Western world for four decades, and it developed its own, equally rich, literary and cinematic cultures. By looking at a range of textual and visual sources, students will engage critically with ways of understanding this "other" Germany and its distinctive cultural expressions, ideology, and history, including the role of the government and the Stasi. The course also explores phenomena like the "Ostalgie" and retro-chic that manifested themselves after the Fall of the Wall in 1989. The readings include short stories, songs, and excerpts by and among others: Wolf Biermann, Johannes Becher, Günther de Bryn, Stefan Heim, Rainer Kunze, Brigitte Reimann, Claudia Rusch, Susanne Schädlich, Maxi Wander, Christa Wolf. Participants will view and discuss films and TV series produced before and after unification.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST302
Prereq: GRST213

COL292 Reason and Its Limits

This course offers a close study of Immanuel Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, supplemented by related writings by Kant and some secondary literature. Kant observes that the history of philosophy is rife with disagreements, even though philosophers purport to traffic in necessary truths disclosed by reason alone. This scandalous fractiousness calls into question reason's ability to offer substantive insights into necessary truths. Kant's "critique" aims to vindicate reason by distinguishing, in a principled manner, the sorts of things we can know with certainty from those that lie beyond the limits of human understanding. His central thesis, "transcendental idealism," holds that "reason has insight only into what it produces after its own plan" (Bxiii). In other words, we can indeed be certain of key structural features of reality such as its spatiotemporality and causal interconnectedness--but only because those features are, in some crucial sense, mind-dependent. This class will explore in detail the arguments for these claims as well as prominent interpretations of their philosophical upshot.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL291, GRST292
Prereq: None

COL293 Words and Sex: Storytelling, Censorship, and Boccaccio's Decameron

We will explore literary genres and representations of sex and gender in Boccaccio's Decameron. Through close readings of selected tales and cultural analyses of their trans-historical and transnational reception, we take the Decameron's words as point of departure for the study of storytelling and the politics of readership. As modern readers of Boccaccio's renowned and classic Medieval collection of short tales, we investigate the text's notions of love, gender, and sexuality by comparing and contrasting the Decameron with various other texts across varying media, from the works of Petrarch and Chaucer to the modern readings of D. H. Lawrence and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and from visual arts to digital humanities. Students are invited to creatively engage with these and other texts of their choice (and with approval of the instructor) in order to produce, by the end of the course, either a) an analytic blog post that may be published on the H-Net of the Transnational Italian Studies working group; or b) an individual or collective project inspired by Boccaccio's Decameron.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL216
Prereq: None

COL294 Soundscapes of Islam

From the melodious recitation of the Qur'an and Sufi-inspired sung poetry to popular soundtracks of religious revival and resistance, the world of Islam has generated myriad sonic expressions across its diverse historical and geocultural milieus. While recognized for its affective and transformative powers, music has also been the subject of a longstanding polemic in Islamic societies, its moral and ethical status being debated and contested. This course will survey the soundscapes and ideoscapes of Islam, exploring the manifold roles and meanings assigned to music among Muslim communities. It will examine a range of sound practices and related discourses to discover the ways in which locally distinct religious and social customs have shaped concepts of music and sonic articulations of Muslim identity. We will locate the varied and shifting attitudes toward music and musicians within the context of political censorship, colonialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitan modernity, and consider the impact of current conflicts and migratory processes on the local-global circulation of religious ideologies and sounds. Drawing from selected case studies of sacred and secular performance, we will explore the musical construction of gender, place, and architecture; the role of media in the formation of Muslim 'counterpublics'; and the mediation of aesthetic sensibilities through style. Topics covered will include: views on music within the Islamic tradition (the Qur'an and Sunna, shari'a law, theology, and Sufism); philosophies and cosmologies of music in Islam; music at the courts of Islamic rulers; religious chant and art singing in the Middle East; sound, healing, and exorcism in North Africa; ritual, devotional, and mystical practices in Central Asia; Islamic performing arts in Indonesia; Sufi world music and Muslim pop and hip-hop across Asia and Africa, and among immigrants and refugees in Europe and North America. Throughout the course, Islam will be encountered as a widely diverse spiritual and sociocultural system that has been a source and stimulus for creativity among Muslim peoples worldwide.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC296, REES296
Prereq: None

COL295 Rome After Rome: Culture and Empire of Constantinople

Rome did not fall. Rome was swallowed by a new idea of what it means to be Roman when, in the fourth century, the empire left its own founding city behind and moved the capitol to the newly-minted city of Constantine, Constantinople. This course gives students a hands-on introduction to one of the most astounding sociopolitical transformations in human history, tracing out the cultural, political, and economic trajectories of the Roman empire of the Middle Ages.



In exploring the textual and material relics of this medieval metropolis on their own terms, students apply and publish their research interests on the collaborative place-based interactive teaching encyclopedia Constantinople as Palimpsest (https://arcg.is/0e4Lb4). For their final project students will design a unit for a high school history course, using Constantinople as Palimpsest to introduce the diversities and paradoxes of life in the city of New Rome.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: HIST230, MDST128
Prereq: None

COL296 Devotion and Deception: Erotic Discourse from Dante to Petrarca

In this course, we will investigate the ideology, content, and material forms of love literature from Dante Alighieri to Francesco Petrarca. Through a close reading of such texts as Dante's Vita nova (ca. 1295), Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (ca. 1353), and Petrarca's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (often referred to as the poetry book par excellence: il canzoniere, ca. 1374), we will unveil the literary and fictitious nature of medieval erotic literature. We will explore the origins of love poetry in medieval France and its subsequent interpretation and rewriting in Italian courts and comuni. We will inquire into the cultural constructions of the medieval notion of the lyrical self and how it still has an impact on our own notion of consciousness. We will study the forms, themes, and characters that populate 'love stories' in the Middle Ages. We will analyze the dynamics of composition, circulation, and reception in manuscript culture. Our close analysis of the texts as they have been preserved in manuscript form will help us gauge the differences between medieval and contemporary ways of writing, reading, and loving. This course is conducted in Italian.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL227, MDST247
Prereq: None

COL297 Reading Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, trained philologist and self-proclaimed "free spirit," remains one of the most controversial figures in modern thought, a source of fascination and outrage alike. Best known as the philosopher of the "Dionysian," the "will to power," the "eternal return of the same," the "transvaluation of all values," and the "over-man," Nietzsche also proudly considered himself the most accomplished prose stylist in the German language. In this course, we will examine two closely interrelated issues: (1) the genesis of Nietzsche's major philosophical thoughts in the areas of epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and the critique of religion, from his earliest to his latest writings; (2) the cultivation of a philosophical style that, in its mobilization of highly artistic modes of aphoristic reduction, metaphorization, personification, and storytelling, aspires to turn critical thinking into a life-affirming art form.



The course will combine philosophical interpretation with textual analysis. No prior knowledge of Nietzsche's works is expected; however, a willingness to set aside significant chunks of time to dwell in Nietzsche's texts is required. Students with reading knowledge in German are encouraged to read at least some of the assignments in the original. Guidance in doing so will be provided based on individual need.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST261
Prereq: None

COL298 Music of Central Asia: From Throat-singing to Heavy Metal

The music of the Hu was chosen as the soundtrack to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order because it sounded otherworldly to Western audiences. In fact, the Hu draw on ancient musical traditions from Central Asia, one of the most culturally and musically diverse areas of the world. This course introduces students to a wide range of music practices, genres, and styles in historically nomadic and sedentary regions of Central Asia: throat-singing, sounds of shamanic and Sufi Islamic rituals, epic performance, narrative instrumental playing, oral poetry competitions, folk and art singing, Western-influenced classical and popular music genres, including Central Asian repertoires of opera and symphony, Azerbaijani jazz, Uzbek estrada, Kazakh Q-pop and crossover music, Mongolian heavy metal and hip hop. The roles and meanings of music are discussed in relation to wider aspects of culture and social life, the impact of Soviet culture policies, post-Soviet national revival, and globalization.



The course includes a performance component. Students learn to play a variety of Kazakh and Kyrgyz musical instruments, including plucked and bowed lutes, a plucked zither, clay ocarinas, jaw harps, and percussion instruments. Previous musical training is not necessary. The course draws on extensive audiovisual materials and is open to students of all levels.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC297, REES297, RUSS297
Prereq: None

COL299 Freud

This course offers a close, critical study of Freud's psychoanalytic writings through the major phases of his career. We will beattending to individual texts, ongoing issues, the cogency of his theoretical formulations, the reasons for his revisions and the rangeof his relevance.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST222
Prereq: None

COL300 Infinity and the Mathematization of Nature: Early Modern Perspectives

The "mathematization of nature" is a hallmark of the so-called "scientific revolution" in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. By privileging quantitative methods for measuring and explaining natural phenomena, thinkers broke with the largely "qualitative" forms of explanation typical of the Aristotelian tradition. Especially with the development of new mathematical methods--notably, advances in algebra, analytical geometry, and the development of infinitesimal calculus--the scope and explanatory power of natural philosophy was considerably extended. At the same time, however, new puzzles arose about how the pristine models of abstract mathematics could apply to the messy reality of concrete nature. This question was especially pressing in connection with new mathematics' exploitation the notion of infinity: infinite series, infinite extensions, infinitesimally small quantities, and even infinities greater than other infinities. Should we take the successful application of such infinitary mathematics to natural phenomena to imply that nature itself harbors an infinity of infinities? And how must we reconceive the cognitive powers of the human mind to make room for the fact that infinity has ceased to signify the unknowable as such and has instead become a primary tool for producing scientific knowledge?



In this seminar, we will examine some of the most prominent Early Modern applications of infinitary mathematical methods in the study of natural phenomena as well as central debates about what sense, if any, can be made of these procedures and their apparent success.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: SISP304, PHIL304
Prereq: None

COL301 Researching and Writing Historical Narrative Nonfiction: A Workshop

Historical Nonfiction will be a workshop-based course co-taught by a Charles Barber, a writer, and Jesse Torgerson, a historian. Students will have the opportunity to work on a project led by Charles Barber, a book-in-progress of historical narrative nonfiction based in Palm Beach, Florida in the 1920s. The project involves a decade-longs conflict between a gang and two father and son sheriffs, set against the explosive (and often corrupt) growth of Palm Beach as resort in the early 19th century. Students will work with court and governmental records, as well as archival materials of all sorts. Students will receive professional credit for their contributions. A focus of the first part of the course will be historical methodology and evaluation of records (led by Torgerson); the second half of the course will address the question of transforming historical materials into compelling narratives. Readings will include models of historically based nonfiction, such as David Grann's Killer of the Flower Moon and Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL302 Cultural Criticism and Aesthetic Theory: Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno

This seminar introduces and explores the cultural criticisms and aesthetic theories of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, two of the 20th century's most notable Marxist thinkers and critics. Our aim will be to illuminate the intimate interconnections between cultural criticism and aesthetic theory taking place concurrently with the rise of the artistic avant-gardes (with which both thinkers felt deep affinities). We will study the intellectual origins, cultural contexts, methods, and critical aims of Benjamin's and Adorno's uniquely individual yet also closely related practices of cultural criticism. Further, we will examine the assumptions underlying their aesthetic writings and seek to reconstruct their respective contributions to aesthetics.



Over the course of the semester, we will study the works of our protagonists both on their own terms and in comparison to each other. Major thematic units will include (but are not limited to) their writings on literary aesthetics, narrative, and translation; architecture and the city (Naples, Moscow, Paris, Berlin); landscape and nature; mass culture and aesthetic autonomy. Our starting point will be Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel, a work to which both Benjamin and Adorno were much indebted. On occasion, we will supplement our explorations with asides from the 1920s and 1930s (by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, Asja Lachs, Ernst Bloch) as well as scholarship for optional reading (by Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Fredric Jameson, Susan Buck-Morss, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Susan Ingram, Judith Butler, Esther Leslie).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST250
Prereq: None

COL303 Radical Self-Care

This is a higher-level seminar on philosophy as a way of life that will explore how the notion of self-care has been developed and deployed throughout history by several political theorists and activists, including Mohandas Gandhi, MLK Jr., Nelson Mandela, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Sara Ahmed.



When conducted in the present day, reflection on how one should live naturally requires attending to matters of sociopolitical concern, such as healthcare inequities, environmental degradation, wealth disparities, and prison reform. An investigation into the links between personal and social well-being has so far been something of a lacuna in the field of philosophy as a way of life, though in a variety of formulations and across several traditions, practices of self-care and self-formation have typically been seen as continuous with (and even a prerequisite for) a robust engagement with others and the pursuit of social justice causes. We will explore the connection between these two domains in this course. As a project during the semester, students will be asked to engage in a cause that matters to them by implementing selected ideas from the thinkers and activists that we'll be studying.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL350
Prereq: None

COL304 The Enlightenment You Don't Know (And What It Can Tell You about the Digital World)

Who am I? How and what can I know? Is what I perceive of and present to the world the truth? What can and should I do? Who knows what about me? Such questions are asked with increased urgency as the sheer mass of information makes reliable orientation impossible, as social relations become unstable, as uncontrollable actors gather ever more information about us, and as the (neo)liberal sense of self starts to dissolve under the pressures of new media and accelerating social and political processes.



This course proposes that, to look for ways to navigate this situation, we ought to turn to the 18th century, a time when old certainties and assumptions collapsed under the emergence of modernity and new, "enlightened" views of humans and their world were developed. During that time, thinkers and artists set out to redefine the self, obsessively observing the individual, its cognition, and its role in the world. In doing so, they invented the modern self, one with rich inner lives, a keen interest in the observable reality, proud of its abilities, and aware of its role as a social being and its observation by others. They created elaborate modes of paying attention, of reading the human being in its complexity. Acquiring insight into their ideas can help us see what is being lost and gained today. We will focus largely on the German 18th century since it produced some of the final instantiations of Enlightenment thought in a variety of disciplines.



In the first part of this course, we will read from a variety of disciplines that either were invented in the 18th century or underwent significant changes during that time, ranging from legal theory and natural sciences to philosophy and literature. In the second part, we will jump forward to the dissolution of this modern self in our current moment. We will engage with theory and digital art of the 21st century, exploring what it means to constantly be distracted, to be the focus of attention of algorithms, and to be confronted with a world which is both always at the disposal of our attention and always out of reach.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: GRST289
Prereq: None

COL305 The Critic and Her Publics

The critic and her public are difficult concepts to define or fix. The critic is not a creative writer, an academic, a journalist, or a reporter, yet criticism borrows from the protocols of all four professions. The critic's publics are not made up exclusively of scholars, specialists, artists, or lay readers, but span these divisions. The aim of this course is to trace the evolution of the critic, her function, her style, and her publics from the seventeenth century to the present. Readings will include essays by Jane Anger, Margaret Cavendish, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Jorge Luis Borges, Clement Greenberg, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Renata Adler, Michael Warner, Anne Carson, Margo Jefferson, and Elif Batuman. The class will be linked with the Shapiro Center talk series, "The Critic and Her Publics," and the Shapiro Center Master Classes.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: WRCT305
Prereq: None

COL306 Spectacles of Violence in Early Modern French Tragedy

The French Kingdom endured decades of socio-political unrest and religious wars during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The tragedies that emerged from these bloody conflicts--many of which staged physical violence--not only reflected but also actively participated in the debates surrounding the 'troubles civils.' In this advanced seminar, we will study such tragedies in order to examine the uses, functions, and ethics of spectacular violence, in plays that adapt mythological stories (e.g., Medea), religious narratives (e.g. David and Goliath, Saint Cecilia), and current events (e.g., executions, assassinations, and regicides) for the stage. We will read the plays alongside and against the competing theoretical frameworks of violence found in various poetic treatises of the time period, yet we will also keep in mind the practical constraints and conditions of performance in early modern France. Finally, we will reflect on why we should read these plays today and how they inform our contemporary moment. Readings, written assignments, and discussion will be in French.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN306, THEA292
Prereq: None

COL307 Negotiating French Identity: Migration and Identity in Contemporary France

With the largest minority in France being of Maghrebi origin, Islam has become the second largest religion in France today. What are the repercussions of this phenomenon for French identity? How did French society understand its identity and regard foreigners in the past? What do members of the growing Franco-Maghrebi community add to the ongoing dialogue surrounding France's republican and secular identity? This course will analyze the recent attempts at redefining French identity through a study of literary texts, films, and media coverage of important societal debates (e.g., the Scarf Affair, French immigration laws, the Algerian war). Readings, discussions, and papers will be in French.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN305
Prereq: None

COL308 Translation in Theory and Practice

This seminar is a workshop devoted to helping students from a range of disciplines and departments hone their practices of translation. Translation is part of a wide range of academic, publishing, and creative activities: humanities and social science scholars read texts in translation, translate while doing field work and archival research, and include translations in their articles and books; translation is an engine of creativity for many writers, bilingual or not. This course will begin by looking at various alternate translations of the same texts, to expand our sense of options and possibilities. The next five weeks of reading will introduce students to some of the main debates, theories, and practices of translation into English.



The second half of the course will focus on students' own translation projects. While you are welcome to pursue a project you already have in mind, most students will be choosing and starting a new project, guided by the discussions and topics in the first half of the course. The scope can be small (a single short story, a chapter of a novel or biography, a few poems or song lyrics), or you can have an eye to a bigger project you want to pursue after the end of the semester (a senior thesis, a short-story submission for publication, a book pitch). Week by week, all students will respond in class and in writing to translations-in-progress. In the last week, we will get to see and respond to everyone's revisions.



Facility in a language other than English is required; perfect fluency is not required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT210, ENGL273
Prereq: None

COL308Z Contemporary Short Stories in Translation

This course will introduce students to a wide range of contemporary short stories from around the world, translated into English. We will read fiction from four geographical clusters--Nordic Europe, Latin America, East Asia, Western Europe--as well as from outside these relatively well-defined categories. Along with exploring the fiction itself, we will consider how the English-language publishing industry treats these different zones, as we acknowledge the risk of ending up with national or regional stereotypes. We will also keep in mind the translator's role as an active creator of the works we are reading. In week two, we will pay special attention to the crucial professional role of the translator in getting these authors published and recognized, and there will be in-class visits from one translator in each cluster. The objective of the course is to get a basic overview of different contemporary trends and traditions, and their various paths to publication in English, as well as hopefully finding one or two new favorite writers.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT210Z, ENGL202Z
Prereq: None

COL309 Truth & the Poet: Lyric Subjectivity and Phenomenology

Who is the poet? What is subjectivity? How is the "Lyric I" located and articulated? How do lyrics reify their own claims to truth? Is there a role for the poet in society? What is the relationship between critique and creation? This course examines the poet in relation to various formulations of subjectivity in the history of phenomenology. We will explore how lyric subjectivity may speak truth without deferring to or differing from empirical and objective truth claims. We will consider whether the history of the lyric can be read as a series of observations that contribute to understandings of subjectivity, agency, and intersubjectivity before and after the theological turn in French phenomenology. Readings in lyric poetry will be paired with readings in phenomenology as a way of putting poetry and philosophy into conversation. Assignments will be both analytic and creative.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL310 More-Than-Human-Worlds: Theories and Fictions

How do we imagine the worlds of other life forms: what they know, what is meaningful to them, their ways of communicating? Which senses must we use and what forms of translation are necessary (if impossible) to turn their languages, their thoughts, their desires into our fictions or poetry or theory? What stories have been told and what stories could or should we tell in order to inspire more responsive and responsible relations between the diverse yet enmeshed worlds of human and non-human lives? These are some of the questions we will be asking as we move through a diverse range of writings about relations to other animals and to other worlds that are both within and beyond our own.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENVS320
Prereq: None

COL311 Translation Workshop in Early Modern Spain: Topographies of Love, Arcadia, and History

This course takes a practical approach to the translation of early modern Spanish literature. We will begin by consulting various comments on the art and craft of translation made by 16th-century Spanish translators in their own works before we encounter the curious case of the "pastoral prosimetrum," a type of narrative fiction that reimagined the author and their contemporaries under literary pseudonyms in an updated version of an idyllic Arcadian landscape. From Spanish to English, from experience to poiesis, we'll recontextualize these topographies of love in their own literary and historical moment in order to translate those imaginaries into contemporary English. Readings will be in English and Spanish. Discussions and translations will be in English. There are no prerequisites, but reading knowledge of Spanish is required. Please consult the instructor if you have questions about your language ability.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: RL&L311
Prereq: None

COL312 Love and Other Useless Pursuits

What is love? Is it an emotion? A judgment? A way of coming to know ourselves or others? What is the point of love? Does it have a defined object, a purpose, or an end? Does it have a logic or does it defy logic? What good or evil can it do in the world? "Love and Other Useless Pursuits" is an upper level seminar that approaches these questions through a comparative history of literature, literary theory, and philosophical aesthetics. The authors we read will likely include Plato, Andreas Capellanus, Tullia d'Aragona, Margaret Cavendish, Immanuel Kant, Stendhal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcel Proust, Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, and Lauren Berlant.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT304
Prereq: None

COL313 Classic Spanish Plays: Love, Violence, and (Poetic) Justice on the Early Modern Stage

From 1580 to 1690, Spanish and Latin American playwrights created one of the great dramatic repertoires of world literature, as inventive, varied, and influential as the classical Greek and Elizabethan-Jacobean English traditions. A distinguishing feature of this theatrical tradition is the unusual prominence it lent to actresses (and roles written for them), as well as to women in the paying audiences. This profit-driven popular entertainment of its day appealed to the learned and illiterate, to women and men, and to rich and poor alike. And the plays correspondingly mixed high and low characters, language, genres, and sources, with results regularly attacked by moralists. Vital, surprising, and ingenious, they exposed the creative tension between art and profit on a new scale, a tension that remains alive for us. We will examine five of the greatest of these plays by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (in Mexico or "New Spain") in a variety of genres and modes (history, epic, romantic comedy, tragedy, Islamic borderland, metatheater, parody, siege play, philosophical and theological drama), with their deft character portraits (the original Don Juan by Tirso; Calderón's "Spanish Hamlet" Segismundo; Lope's spitfire diva Diana, the Countess of Belflor; and Sor Juana's cross-dressing comic virtuosi) and their spirited dialogue, inventive plots, and dazzling metrical variety. We will look at the social conditions that enabled the Spanish stage to serve as a kind of civic forum, where conflicts between freedom and authority or desire and conformism could be acted out and the fears, hopes, dangers, and pleasures generated by conquest, urbanization, trade, shifting gender roles, social mobility, religious reform, regulation of matrimony and violence, and clashing intellectual and political ideals could be aired. We pay particular attention to the shaping influence of women on the professional stage (in contrast to England) and to performance spaces and traditions. Organized around the careful reading of five key play-texts in Spanish, together with historical, critical, and theoretical readings, this course assumes no familiarity with the texts, with Spanish history, or with literary analysis. However, an interest in engaging these wonderful plays closely, imaginatively, and historically is essential. There will be opportunities to pursue performance, adaptation, and translation.



This counts as a Theater Method course for the Theater Major.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN231, THEA231
Prereq: None

COL314 Cuban Literature and Film: Imagination, Revolt, and Melancholia (CLAC 1.0)

This course surveys the major aesthetic and socio-historical movements in modern and contemporary Cuba. Since the late nineteenth century, the island of Cuba has been at the center of a number of key epochal disputes: between colonialism and independence, racism and racial justice, neocolonialism and revolution, liberalism and socialism, isolationism and globalization. In the arts, the turn of the century launched a period of great imaginative invention. Considering the singular place of Cuba in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the globe, this course addresses some of the most representative works of Cuban literature and film since independence until the present time. Imagination, revolt, and melancholia are the three concepts that will orient our discussion. Imagination refers both to artistic creation and to the collective capacity of projecting new worlds, utopias, or impossible realities. Revolt, as opposed to revolution, is not restrained to politics as usual but relates rather to a deep experience of discontent and a return (from the Latin revolvere) to ancient psycho-social strata. Finally, melancholia serves as a point of view to understand what happens when history does not live up to emancipatory expectations. Special attention will be given to Afrocubanismo, ethnographic literature, the avant-garde aesthetics of the group Orígenes, Marvelous Realism, testimony, revolution, socialist experimental film, diaspora, the Special Period, and post-Soviet life. Reading materials and in-class discussions will be in Spanish. Hence, knowledge of advanced Spanish is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM315, CGST324, LAST315, SPAN296
Prereq: None

COL315 German Romanticism: Disenchantment and Re-enchantment

Famously, the sociologist Max Weber described the rational, enlightened age as "disenchanted": Unlike "the savage," he claimed, who uses "magical means" for manipulating "mysterious incalculable powers," the denizens of capitalist modernity use "technical means and calculation" to master "all things." At the same time, Weber indicated that the "process of disenchantment, which has been under way for millennia in Western culture," birthed abstract new enchantments: "Having lost their magic, the multiple gods of the past rise up from their graves in the form of impersonal forces, fighting for power over our lives and thus beginning anew their eternal struggle against one another." Against the backdrop of Weber's dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment, this course offers a representative overview of some of the key ideas, works, and authors of German Romanticism, a term that designates both a period that extends from about 1795 to 1848 and a style of creative and intellectual production that encompasses a remarkable diversity of phenomena, including the proto-avant-garde experiments with communal "sympoetry" and "symphilosophy" in the Early Romantic circles and the rise of "Dark Romanticism" that fuses a fascination with science and new technologies with a turn to the occult and demonic. In tracing the tensions between disenchantment and re-enchantment, we will consider works of literature, criticism, art, and music, including works by some of the key figures in the German intellectual and artistic tradition, such as Heinrich Heine, the Brothers Schlegel and the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Caspar David Friedrich, Robert and Clara Schumann, Franz Schubert, Karoline von Günderrode, Bettina von Arnim, Novalis, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and the young Karl Marx.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST386
Prereq: GRST213

COL316 Newest German Literature and Film

This seminar is designed to introduce students to films and literary texts produced in the German language in the past few years. Because the materials we will read and watch are of recent vintage, they are not yet part of an established canon: What their significance is and how and why we should engage with them is far from settled. For this reason, this seminar will fulfill a twofold task: (1) It will critically engage with some of the most cutting-edge literary and filmic creative work currently being done in the German language; and (2) it will offer extensive opportunities to explore and critique how these texts deal with contemporary social issues such as the revival of nationalist, Islamophobic, and authoritarian politics, the European Union's crisis of legitimacy in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, or the new "social question" arising from the dismantling of the welfare state and the growing "precarization" of work.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST310
Prereq: GRST213

COL318 Secrets, Lies, and Fictions in the Americas

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter underlined the spread of a "paranoid style" in American politics. Although Hofstadter's description seems more appropriate today than ever, in an increasingly interconnected global order the role of misinformation, uncertainty, manipulation and conspiratorial imaginaries in shaping and limiting democracies and public spheres cannot be exclusively assigned to any particular locale. From a continental standpoint, this course offers analytical tools to explore the political complexity of lies, secrets and fictions in both the United States and Latin America since the mid-twentieth century to this day. By studying a series of cases-including the Guatemalan civil war, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. intervention in the Middle East, the "dirty war" in Latin America, censorship in socialist Cuba, the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London, Wikileaks, hacker practices in the early days of internet, or Cambridge Analytica-we will address the relations between surveillance, spectacle, and conspiracies (both factual and imagined) in the contemporary techno-political landscape. Moreover, the course emphasizes the speculative and theoretical potentials of art and literature when it comes to understanding socio-political phenomena. Beyond distinctions between truth and falsehood, fictional constructions are key to our collective capacity to imagine alternative worlds. By mapping out the ways in which fictions circulate as such or rather as truthful versions of reality, we will problematize the limits and uses of truth, lies, official and alternative narratives, as well as the power of states, corporations, individuals, and collectives to direct attention and frame information.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM321, AMST222, LAST321
Prereq: None

COL320 Places of Remembrance: Historical Consciousness in Germany

Memorial days and monuments: every nation recalls its history. Antisemitism, the Holocaust, East Germany's STASI terror and the resistance to dictatorships, and the more recent debates about Germany's colonial history come to mind when we think of 20th century Germany. In this seminar, we will explore the culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) and visit places of remembrance (Erinnerungsorte) virtually. We will discuss how and what we do--and do not--remember, based on selected readings, documentaries, and memorial sites. Speakers from Germany will be invited via Zoom to talk about specific places and activities of remembrance. We will develop online projects, for example, one's own family history or that of others, or geo-mapping memorial sites.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST320
Prereq: GRST213

COL321 Dialogues of Love: A Close Reading

Towards the end of the fifteenth century amidst the burgeoning cultures of the Italian Renaissance in Naples, Genova, and Venice, the exiled Ibero-Sephardic philosopher and physician Judah Abravanel (Leone Ebreo) composed a philosophical work on erotic ethics as a dialogue between love (Philone) and wisdom (Sophia). "The Dialogues of Love" (1535) presented early modern readers with an erotic cosmology which drew upon Ancient and Medieval texts including Plato, Neo-Platonism, Neo-Aristotelianism, Kabbalah, and scriptural commentary. Widely translated, read, and reprinted throughout the sixteenth century, this text animated literary and cultural life throughout sixteenth-century Europe, finding its way into the work of poets and fiction writers such as Miguel de Cervantes. This course engages this unique and breathtaking work of early modern philosophy through a close reading of a Renaissance cosmos staged as a lovers' courtship.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: RL&L321, MDST321, CJST321
Prereq: None

COL322 Documentary Fictions

How stable is the binary distinction between the documentary and the fictional? Is fiction's claim to representing reality any less valid than that of non-fiction? How does creative non-fiction conjure the sense of the Real? Can an archival document convey the depth of spiritual, emotional, and aesthetically infused intimacy on its own? What happens when the documentary and the fictional overlap to produce competing versions of the Real? What is at stake in such an overlap when the competing versions of the Real vie for a definitive, true account of events past and present?



This class investigates various genres of storytelling that appeal to the documentary and the factual in pursuit of authenticity: propaganda, counter-propaganda, conspiracy theories, political and artistic manifestos, historical fiction and cinema, diary writing, autobiography and memoir, and documentary photography and film. Focusing geographically on East-Central Europe and Russia and chronologically on the last 100 years, the class will take up such thematic units as civil war, socialist realism, capitalist realism, the deaths of dictators, revolutionary hagiography, homefront narratives, and survivor testimony.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM323, REES226, RUSS226
Prereq: None

COL323 Gender and History: Global Feminist Theories and Narratives of the Past (FGSS Gateway)

What is a female husband? In the 1980s an increasing number of feminist scholars posed questions about the relationship between biological sex and gender roles. The African scholar Ifi Amadiume, who studied the history of female husbands in West Africa, asserted that such relationships between sex and gender needed to be studied in a global context. More than two decades after Amadiume's influential book "Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society" (1987) was published, the scholarship on global gender and sexuality is vibrant and dynamic. These works have shown gender to be central to understanding society at different periods and geographical locations, but it is far from a universally understood category.



This seminar will introduce first- and second-year students to the history of gender, sex, labor, and feminist activism from a global and comparative perspective with readings from the history of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. We will also cover the development of influential theories in the field and how they apply to the writing of history. This course is especially appropriate for prospective history and feminist, gender and sexuality majors, though all students interested in using gender as category of historical analysis for their scholarly work in other fields are welcome.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST291, FGSS269
Prereq: None

COL324 Interpreting the "New World": France and the Early Modern Americas

The impact and long-lasting effects of the "discovery" of the "New World" on Europeans cannot be overestimated. This advanced seminar will compare and contrast styles of expedition and conquest among the European nations, though the course will focus on the French context and the various events and encounters that occurred in the early modern Americas, particularly between 1492 and 1610, a period that laid the groundwork for the subsequent colonial project. Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to the Amerindians' points of view. In turn, students will examine the insights and blind spots in 16th-century French navigators', cosmographers', cartographers', and intellectuals' interpretations, representations, and negotiations of difference by critically engaging with concepts such as nature, culture, alterity, gender, sexuality, marriage, religion, exchange, possession, conquest, and war. Reading, writing, and class discussions will be in French.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN324, FGSS324
Prereq: None

COL326 Literary Movements: Conceptual and Experimental Fiction

The course seeks to examine the modern novel by focusing on fiction structured around a concept ("conceptual fiction") and fiction which deviates from the traditional modes of storytelling in a coherent enough way ("experimental fiction"). Together, we will examine novels and short stories in which an idea, an image, or metaphor directly informs the structure, plot, characterization, or all of the above of the work. We will also look at works of formal invention and/or subtle experimentation as far as they are constructed around a discernible and coherent pattern. There have been countless such works in the modern/contemporary period and some of the notable practitioners include Virginia Woolf, Moshin Hamid, George Saunders, Cormac McCarthy, Carlos Fuentes, Toni Morrison, and John McGregor, amongst others have work in this "movement." We will also look at critical essays around these books including from David Lodge, James Baldwin, and Victor Schlovsky, amongst others.



We will study texts from some of these writers (Woolf, Hamid, Saunders, McCarthy) closely and try to determine what it means to create fiction around a "concept." Implicit in this inquiry would be the broader question of form, formal invention, and the vagaries of experimentation. What makes a novel unique? What new grounds does this novel or story break? Does the experimental mode help or hinder meaning? What makes a novel unique? How does structure distinguish a novel rather than plot or characterization, or, for that matter, ideas? What are the ways by which a novel can subvert the traditional form of the novel? What are the strictures of genre and how do they constrain or help expand the art of storytelling?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT310
Prereq: None

COL327 Cervantes

Cervantes is known chiefly for DON QUIXOTE, often described as the first modern novel and fountainhead of one of the great modern myths of individualism. DON QUIXOTE also reimagines virtually every fashionable, popular, and disreputable literary genre of its time: chivalric, pastoral, picaresque, sentimental, adventure, and Moorish novels; the novella; verse forms; drama; and even the ways these kinds of literary entertainment were circulated and consumed, debated, celebrated, and reviled. It is a book about the life-enhancing (and endangering) power of books and reading and the interplay of fiction and history and truths and lies. Cervantes' art remains fresh and unsettling, sparing no one and nothing, including the author and his work. Distinguished by its commitment to the serious business of humor, make-believe, and play, the novel is at once a literary tour de force and a fascinating lens through which to examine the political, social, religious, and intellectual debates of its moment. Characteristic themes include social reality as artifact or fiction, the paradoxical character of truths, the irreducible diversity of taste and perception, the call for consent in politics and love, and personal identity (including gender) as a heroic quest. In this course, we will read, discuss, and write about DON QUIXOTE, along with a sampling of critical, philosophical, literary, and artistic responses it has inspired.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN236, MDST254
Prereq: None

COL328 History and Theory

This seminar will explore the contemporary theory and philosophy of history, giving special attention to the publications of "History and Theory," the academic journal owned and edited by Wesleyan University faculty for the past 60 years. We might discuss such topics as the nature of historical truth; history as a science, with laws, and as an art, with style; the nature of historical time; gender history; agency and causation; history of the emotions; of animals, and history's moral imperatives; as well as the ramifications of the postmodern turn. We will give special attention to recent arguments about the theory of history and the nature of the past.

Key figures are likely to include Walter Benjamin, R. G. Collingwood, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Nancy Partner, Joan Scott, Reinhart Koselleck and Gabrielle Spiegel.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST338
Prereq: None

COL329 Madness and Its Others: The Ethics of Intelligibility

What does it mean to make madness speak? In his 1961 "History of Madness," Foucault took a critical view of the history of censure and confinement which relegated madness to the periphery of the social whole. Within this view, Foucault historicized four phases (or epistemes) of madness: Antiquity, Renaissance, Classical, and Modern. But, as Derrida asked in his rejoinder essay, "Cogito and the History of Madness," is the historicization of madness not itself a kind of censure and confinement? This course takes up the question of madness and otherness at the intersection of ethics and intelligibility. In addition to the Foucault/Derrida debate on madness and reason in Descartes's "Meditations," we will consider the ethics of dialectic, understanding, and the sovereignty of reason in Shakespeare's King Lear, Truffaut's L'enfant sauvage, selections from Plato's Phaedrus, and Levinas's "Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity." Where intelligibility marks the boundary between reason and unreason--where what can be spoken, what can be thought, and the possibility of articulation and of being understood are contingent on the relation to the other--we will explore the ethics of reason and unreason, self and other, and the spaces in between.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL332 European Intellectual History since the Renaissance

This class will examine some of the major texts in Western thought since the Renaissance. Emphasis will be placed on close reading and analysis of the texts.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST216
Prereq: None

COL332L European Intellectual History since the Renaissance- Service Learning

This class will examine some of the major texts in Western thought since the Renaissance. Emphasis will be placed on close reading and analysis of the texts.



This course is designed for Service Learning. Students in this course will read short selections about Aging, meet with a specific senior citizen to talk about the books we are reading for class (5 times in the semester), and write 2-page papers responding to those meetings. Otherwise, both History 216L and History 216 will have the same class requirements.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST216L
Prereq: None

COL334 History of Spanish Cinema

This course explores the development of Spanish cinema from the early 20th century to the present. We will evaluate how social, political, and economic circumstances condition Spanish cinematography at key junctures of Spanish cultural history in terms of the production and distribution of films, cinematographic style, and thematics. The course will also highlight key facets of the Spanish star system as well as the auteurism of those directors who have achieved international acclaim by reworking a national film idiom within international frames of reference.



For a detailed description of the objectives, materials, viewing requirements and modes of assessments, please visit the course web site at: https://span301.site.wesleyan.edu/
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L301, FILM301
Prereq: None

COL335 Sophist, Statesman, Philosopher: Plato's Later Metaphysics and Politics

How is it possible to speak falsely? Plato connects this question with a puzzle he inherits from the great pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides: to speak falsely is to speak about what is not; but in speaking about what is not, we ascribe being somehow to not-being, which sounds like a contradiction. This seminar will focus on the metaphysical, epistemological, and political issues generated by Parmenides's puzzle and explore Plato's solution to them in two of his later-period works: the Sophist and the Statesman. In the process, we will see how Plato rethinks his theory of forms in these dialogues, how he learns to let go of Socrates, how a sophist should be distinguished from a philosopher, and how all of this is relevant to politics and the art of ruling.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM331, PHIL306
Prereq: None

COL336 Theories of Translation

This course will examine a range of predominately 20th-century theoretical approaches to literary translation in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism, and translation studies. In an effort to derive a definition of literary translation, we will focus on two questions. First: What is literal (or word-for-word) translation? How does it differ from other kinds of translation; how does it conceptualize meaning; what are its purposes; and what oppositions (e.g., literal vs. figurative) can we use to make sense of it? Second: What is the relationship between language and culture? Can translation give us access to an unfamiliar culture; can literary translation affect the culture in which it is produced; or does translation simply colonize foreign texts by transforming them into something legible to a domestic culture?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL356
Prereq: None

COL337 What is (a) Language?

Scholarly inquiries into language have always faced the distinctive (though not unique) problem of how to define their object of study. What is language? Language in general, human language, a particular language, language as opposed to dialect or idiolect, etc.



This course will not answer these questions. It will, however, examine the most important and influential ways that they have been formulated and answered throughout the Western tradition of linguistic inquiry. Our survey will be organized around two main tendencies that are sometimes distinct but often complementary. First, the question of origins: Where does (a) language come from, and what does this tell us about its nature? We'll look at etymology and theories of language change alongside thought experiments and evolutionary theories that try to narrate the emergence of language from nonhuman forms of animal communication. Second, the questions of structure and function: How does (a) language work; what do we use it to do? We'll look at the medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, alongside the (approximate!) modern analogues of morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Our goal will be to get a sense of the major theoretical issues that have run through scholarly inquiries into language(s) across disciplines ranging from linguistics and philosophy through anthropology, sociology, and literary theory, to cognitive studies and evolutionary biology.



While our scope is large, our method will be narrow, focusing on close readings of important primary texts in the history of Western linguistic thought. Since our emphasis will be on the coherence of theoretical positions rather the coherence of historical narratives, we'll focus especially on works that have exerted the strongest influence on contemporary understandings of language, particularly those from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: CGST215
Prereq: None

COL338 Utter Nonsense: Modernist Experiments with Meaning

In "The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism" (1933) T.S. Eliot wrote," The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be [...] to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog."



To extend this analogy: this course will look at texts by meatless burglars, writers who set out not to sedate but to conscript the sense-sniffing house-dog as they pillage the house for things of value.



This course will survey some of literary modernism's most defamiliarizing texts, ones that challenge interpreters by withholding or avoiding that digestible (and perhaps soporific) "meaning" Eliot referred to. We will look at modernist formal experiments from Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire through Dada, surrealism, the French New Novel, and the theater of the absurd, alongside the less prominent but equally influential exploration of aleatory, procedural, and machine-generated poetry by writers such as Jackson Mac Low and the Oulipo. Working with authors' manifestos and critics' interpretations alongside the primary texts, we'll pay special attention to the varied relationships to meaning that can be found at work in texts that a casual reader might lump together as simply meaningless or nonsensical.



As the semester progresses and we get a clearer sense of what these texts require from their readers, we'll begin to ask (with the help of some basic readings in semiotic and psychoanalytic literary theory) how our interpretive behavior when confronted with seeming nonsense might relate to the various things we do when we read normal or typical texts--ones that strike us as already or obviously meaningful. Is making sense something that a text can ever do on its own or something that we must always do to (or for) the text?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: ENGL346
Prereq: None

COL339 Reading Theories

In this survey of theories that have shaped the reading of literature and the analysis of culture, emphasis is on key concepts--language, identity, subjectivity, gender, power, and knowledge--and on key figures and schools such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure, Barthes, Gramsci, Benjamin, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Jameson, Berlant, Moten, postmodernism, and U.S. feminism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL295, CLST393, CEAS340, RL&L290, GRST231, RUSS340, RULE340, REES340
Prereq: None

COL340 Daemons, Enigmas, and the Cosmic Image: Classical and Modern Allegory

Allegories are everywhere--from novels, art, and philosophy to news, political rhetoric and the law. They confront us as something strange, as overly baroque or disappointingly simplistic, as a symbolic mystery that becomes blandly prosaic once the proper interpretive key has been found. Allegories can be abstract and ethereal (e.g. Dante traveling through the heavenly spheres), but they can also make abstract ideas concrete: the idea of justice becomes the Roman goddess Iustitia, blindfolded, holding a sword and a set of scales, a statue in front of a courthouse. They try to explain life's complexities, but the stories they tell are much stranger than the lives that we live: the insatiable longing for our significant other is really the search for our other true half, since once we were round creatures rolling happily around but were cut in half by Zeus for our transgressions. What are these allegorical texts doing for us, and why are they doing it in such bewildering ways?



This course looks at the persistence of allegory. We will inquire into its origins in the Classical world, and we will try to understand how it has been found (or made) useful by writers and literary theorists in the 20th and 21st centuries.



The texts that interest us will make simple things mysterious and mysterious things simple, transforming the imaginable into the visible and the visible into the imaginary. And we will try to find our way through this mode of writing and of reading that insistently brings opposites together, connecting different realms of experience, knowledge, and language in ways that both produce and defy sense.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: CLST340
Prereq: None

COL341 Plato's REPUBLIC

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." This declaration, famously made by Alfred North Whitehead in the early 20th century, seems especially true of Plato's Republic. No other work in the Western tradition can lay claim to setting the tone so influentially for the development of philosophy as a discipline. Almost every branch of philosophical thought we are familiar with today--on matters of ethics, politics, moral psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetics--receives a major formulation in this text. This seminar will be devoted to a close reading of each of the 10 books of The Republic alongside various perspectives that have been taken on this magisterial work in contemporary philosophy, journalism, and literature. We will focus on The Republic primarily as a work of moral psychology by investigating the topical question of the dialogue: Why is it better to live justly rather than unjustly? For Plato, a just life is one governed by the pursuit of wisdom or learning, and this he believes will also be a psychologically healthy one. By contrast, a life governed by the indiscriminate pursuit of power--the life of a tyrant--is psychologically corrupted. These are bold claims. What is Plato's argument for them? In raising this question, we will consider the political project Plato embarks upon in the Republic in constructing a just society, as well as connected issues he raises in the dialogue concerning the nature of human motivation, the distinction between belief and knowledge, the distinction between appearance and reality, the importance of a proper education to the human good, and the role of art and beauty in furthering the common good. Alongside Plato, we will read various works of secondary literature, journalistic pieces, and works of fiction this semester, all inspired by The Republic.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL303, CLST257
Prereq: None

COL342 The Word for World is Information: Ideologies of Language in Science Fiction & Film

By the middle of the 20th century, it had begun to seem possible to produce a grand theory of communication that would use language as a basis for understanding all of human thought, behavior, and culture. As competing versions of such a theory circulated through academic disciplines as disparate as anthropology, neurophysiology, and the emerging field of computer science, they also filtered out--sometimes in strangely warped or oversimplified forms--into popular culture.



This course will examine the most interesting and influential of these theories, both in their scholarly origins and in their most puzzling and promising elaborations in works of literary and filmic science fiction. We will be particularly attentive to the ways that the narrative logics of science fiction texts can gloss over certain logical and philosophical inconsistencies in these theories while revealing others.



Readings will likely include scholarly works by Norbert Wiener, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Roman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky, Warren Weaver, and others alongside science fiction texts by George Orwell, Damon Knight, Samuel Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzette Haden Elgin, Neal Stephenson, Koji Suzuki, and Ted Chiang (with special attention to television and film adaptations).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL348 Cybernetics and Ghosts: Narrative Machines and Posthumanist Fiction

Within certain texts that have been canonized under the various rubrics of postmodernist, posthumanist, and cyber fiction, there is a yearning to either discover or banish what in the mid-20th century was quaintly referred to as the "ghost in the machine." On the one hand, these texts offer a model of literature and of narrative as machine: produced algorithmically (e.g. via combinatorial recursion) or through the application of some experimental constraint, conceit, or gimmick, they seem to be functioning according to a program or plan rather than relating the events of a human life. Against or within this formal framing, these novels find themselves having to account for their human characters (and readers) in one of two ways: either by mechanizing them (in their motivations, their behaviors, and even their narrative desires) or by appealing ultimately to some sort of spirit, inspiration, or even ghost.



This course will examine the ways that several of these texts attempt to make sense--simultaneously--of mechanist models of the human (particularly derived from cybernetics) and of their own seemingly inorganic--and even alienating--narrative forms.



Primary texts will include novels and stories by Georges Perec, Jorge Luis Borges, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Mark Danielewski.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL349 Modernism and the Total Work of Art

The term "total work of art" refers to the German concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which took on new urgency in the 19th century amid social upheaval and revolution. Understood as the intention to reunite the arts into one integrated work, the total work of art was tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. While there exist many approaches to totality in the modern era, this course focuses on modernist theories and practices that simultaneously critiqued existing society and posited a utopian alternative. We will begin by studying formulations of totality in response to a cultural crisis initiated by the 1789 French Revolution. From there, we turn to German idealism and to an analysis of composer Richard Wagner's ideas and compositions that made the idea of the synthesis of the arts a central focus for European modernism. Yet if Wagner's works and writings provided the dominant reference for subsequent developments from the 1880s onward, these most often consisted of a search for alternatives to his own theory and practice, particularly in the visual arts. We will examine attempts to envision totality after Wagner in Impressionist painting and German Expressionism. Ideas of totality and utopia continued to carry positive associations for modern artists until the 1930s, when they became co-opted by totalitarian governments. The course concludes by examining the perversion of modernist dreams in Nazi festivals and art exhibitions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA339, GRST239, GELT239, RL&L339
Prereq: None

COL350 History as Tragedy: Genre, Gender, and Power in the Alexiad of Anna Komnena

Why did it take until the 11th century for a woman to write a work in the genre of history? What did it take for Anna Komnena--a renowned student of ancient literature, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, and a princess of the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire--to finally break into this most gendered of genres? And, how has Anna Komnena's accomplishment been received? This course will spend an entire semester delving into this deeply literary history, and its influence from the Middle Ages to the present. Students will engage with "The Alexiad" through close intertextual readings, critical scholarship in history, relevant work in theory, and digital research methods.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: MDST350, HIST328
Prereq: None

COL351 Catching Glimpses: Perceiving Infinitesimals in the Scientific Revolution

The rise of mathematical natural science in the early modern period marked the dissolution of objective reality as it had previously been known. Since Aristotle, perceptible objects had been understood to be enduring substances whose identities were inscribed in their very being and which retained these identities through change. The mechanistic worldview of the 17th and 18th centuries exploded this stable order into a telescoping multiplicity of material systems, from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large. Rather than encountering a world of enduring and identifiable substances--animals, vegetables, and minerals; people and artifacts--the perceiver was instead confronted with fleeting constellations of homogeneous matter in a perpetual flux, no sooner glimpsed than gone. This metaphysical picture of infinitary flux was complemented by a new branch of mathematics, the infinitesimal calculus, which proved immensely successful both in uncovering new theorems and in modeling empirical phenomena.



Both the metaphysics and the mathematics of the new science were, however, rife with paradox. If material objects not only harbor a microscopic substructure but are, in fact, divisible without end, then we are faced with pluralities of pluralities without any underlying unities--parts of parts of parts...and not a whole among them. Conceptual instability afflicted the infinitesimals used in calculus, as well. In some contexts they were treated as very small but non-zero quantities, in others as strictly zero--provoking one critic to call them "ghosts of departed quantities."



In conjunction with the CHUM theme "Ephemera," this class will study the philosophical turbulence induced by the new science--in particular, by the mechanical philosophy and infinitesimal calculus. We will pay special attention to its consequences for the philosophy of perception. Aristotle compared perceptible objects to signet rings impressing their distinctive forms on the receptive wax of the human sensorium. But if there are no enduring substances or determinate forms, how are we to understand our perceptual relation to the world? How must perceptual experience be reconceived so as to accommodate the fleetingness and flux of material phenomena? And how is it that, though we are awash in ephemera, we nevertheless enjoy an (illusory?) impression of endurance and stability?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM339, GRST249, PHIL302, SISP339
Prereq: None

COL352 Coming Out/Coming of Age: Narratives of Becoming in Italian Culture

By examining narratives of "becoming" in Italian literary and screen texts, we will work to read against a dominant "master" narrative of Italian culture that is cis-male, patriarchal, and "white." The literary and screen texts we will explore in depth include some "classic" narratives of coming of age in the Italian cultural tradition which we will lay alongside Italian cultural "coming out" narratives, some "classic," others less so. What can we learn from such adjacencies? What does one "come out" of with regard to either strand of inquiry? Is adolescence a "closet" out of which one emerges with a sexual identity? Does one come of age as an artist or "come out" as a practitioner of a particular artistic genre (filmmaker, poet, novelist)? How do artistic choices of practice subtend and inform sexual identity? What gets left behind in this "progress" of "becoming"? These are some of the questions we will address in this course, conducted in Italian.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: ITAL247
Prereq: None

COL353 Writing between Cultures: German Literature and Film by Authors of Foreign Descent

This seminar will introduce students to both literary texts and films by immigrants or descendants of immigrants, all of whom write in German, whether as their first or second language. Among the topics we will explore are homesickness, interactions with bureaucracy, use of and perspectives on language, questions of citizenship and identity, assimilation and integration, cultural misunderstandings, and encounters with bigotry and xenophobia. We will discuss works by Yoko Tawada, Aras Ören, Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Wladimir Kaminer, Vladimir Vertlieb, Saša Stanišic, and others as we consider what properties make their works part of the canon of German literature, or not. Films by Fatih Akin and Yasemin Samdereli are also included in this course.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST335
Prereq: GRST213

COL354Z Self and Text in Roman North Africa: Augustine's Confessions

The native North African Augustine of Hippo wrote the most influential autobiographical text in (so-called) Western literature. It remains the most brilliant text I have ever read: a mind-bendingly complex and yet fully coherent literary self. Let's read it together. Set between Carthage and Rome in 400, Augustine wrote just 10 years before the Eternal City would be sacked by the disaffected former legions of the empire (the Goths). Split between conqueror and conquered, civilization and apocalypse, Augustine wove humanity's existential and epistemological questions into a literary tapestry for the ages: Who am I? How do you speak? Who are you? How do I listen? Who are we? How do we know? At once memoir, critique of empire, philosophy, psychology, theology, personal history, criticism, and a letter, these CONFESSIONS require close, careful, focused, attentive readings from a diverse group of interpreters. Join our learning community and spend two snowbound weeks at Wesleyan with a book you will never forget.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: HIST354Z, MDST354Z
Prereq: None

COL355 The Treason of the Intellectuals: Power, Ethics, and Cultural Production

In his 1928 essay Julien Benda railed against the "treason" of the European intellectual establishment who abandoned disinterested intellectual activity in favor of political and nationalist engagement. In this course we will explore the relation of intellectuals to politics and the ethical ramifications thereof. Beginning with the Dreyfus Affair, the course will emphasize political involvement in France to focus on the vexed relationship between political action and intellectual production. We will examine figures such as Zola, Benda, Breton, Celine, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Aron, Fanon, Foucault, Mbembe, Derrida, Kristeva, and Cixous.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST391
Prereq: None

COL359 Philosophical Classics I: Ancient Western Philosophy

This course provides an overview of the development of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, from its inception in the 6th century BCE through to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics. In exploring this material, we will touch on all or nearly all of the central concerns of the Western philosophical tradition: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, religion, and logic. Our focus in class will be on the close analysis of primary texts. Students must be willing to engage with readings that are fascinating but at the same time dense, difficult, and perplexing. The course requires no prior experience in philosophy and should be of equal interest to students who are pursuing or intend to pursue other majors.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL201, CLST217
Prereq: None

COL360 Philosophical Classics II: Early Modern Philosophy from Descartes Through Kant

Can we ever hope to attain certain knowledge of the external world? Can we know ourselves? How is our mind related to our body? Are our senses more reliable than our intellect? Or is it the other way round? Can we have science without a belief in God? These are some of the questions that excited the philosophical imagination of the major intellectual figures of the early modern period, an era of unparalleled collaboration between science and philosophy. In this course we will examine how the Scientific Revolution encouraged philosophers toward radical innovation in epistemology and philosophy of mind, laying the foundations for our own modern conceptions of natural law, scientific explanation, consciousness and self-consciousness, knowledge and belief. We will be reading, analyzing, and arguing with some of the most influential works in the history of Western philosophy, including Descartes' MEDITATIONS, Locke's ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, Hume's ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, and Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL202
Prereq: None

COL363 (Un)Popular Performances/Performances (Im)Populaires

In 1607, a young Scotsman named William Drummond was studying law in Bourges, France, a popular "study abroad destination" for Scottish students as well as an important stopover city on the routes of itinerant professional and amateur actors. While in Bourges, these actors performed a variety of different kinds of plays, including tragedies, comedies, tragicomedies, pastorals, and farces. Although these performances were often met with hostility from the city's religious authorities, Drummond attended several plays during his stay and, lucky for us, took rather detailed notes about them. His observations from the 1607 "season" are preserved in his personal papers in the National Library of Scotland.



This course will use Drummond's notes as a guide to discover and examine other forms of evidence--both traditional and nontraditional--that help us understand what was at stake in theater, performance, and (un)popular culture in late 16th- and early 17th-century France. We will study the ways the past has been organized and cataloged, how traditional sources and research have shaped our view of the past, and how unconventional methodologies can help us locate new sites of knowledge and culture. Written assignments, class discussions, and (most) readings will be in French.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM363, FREN363, MDST363, THEA363
Prereq: None

COL370 Writing Fiction

Chinua Achebe was famous for his quote "If you don't like another person's story, write your own." Although disliking another's story could inspire creative writing, there are various reasons why people write, ranging from the basic human desire to understand the world through storytelling down to the desire to respond to the issues of the day--be it moral, political, religious--through fiction. The course is designed to help students gain skills in writing fiction; recognizing the literary conventions of fiction; reading and critiquing published work from a writer's perspective; making deliberate creative choices; engaging the work of others in a workshop setting; and revising their work using feedback from their peers and other writing strategies. As such, our reading list will be diverse in scope, cutting across various continents, races, and creeds. We will hope to use the work on the reading list as stepping points for creating our own stories whether in response to various prompts or as original stories to be discussed in workshops. At the end of the semester, you will not only have read a good chunk of fiction and have a good sense of how fiction works, you will also have produced--and substantially revised--some of that writing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT270, AFAM281, ENGL277
Prereq: None

COL373 "Real" Love: Subjects of Unreason

Is love a special kind of madness? Do love and madness lead to kindred encounters with the limits of experience? What are the subjects of unreason that inform our conceptions of the world and the "real"? How might the novel (as a literary genre) help us to reason philosophically about irrational experience?



This course explores love and madness through depictions of reason and unreason in two major prose works by the author of "the first modern novel," Miguel de Cervantes through a close reading of Don Quixote and The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda. From the adventures of a country gentleman turned knight-errant to the trials and tribulations of two sojourning lovers repeatedly separated and reunited on the road, we will explore the lived and the ideal, the rational and the irrational, the presence and the absence, the mortal and the immortal in the erotic encounter at the outset of the modern literary imagination.



Both texts will be read in contemporary English translation. No foreign language knowledge is required. Recommendations for appropriate critical editions in Spanish will be provided for any student who wishes to read in the original language.



This is a discussion-based close reading seminar.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM373
Prereq: None

COL375 Advanced Research in the Traveler's Lab

The Traveler's Lab uses a combination of digital humanities techniques and rigorous historical methodologies to equip students in advanced directed research in the open-ended topic of movement of people, animals, and objects, and the spaces in and through which they lived and moved.



T-Lab advanced research students will (depending on the specific project): work individually or in small groups to turn specific historical material into data; utilize and/or learn skills in GIS, translation, database creation, database management, and digital visualizations; engage with the methodological and theoretical implications of their work; and be provided with conference presentation and publication opportunities.



As a part of the international Traveler's Lab network, students will also be connected to, receive feedback from, and be provided the opportunity to collaborate with professors at higher education institutions in the United States and around the world.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Prereq: None

COL389 The Mediterranean Archipelago: Literary and Cultural Representations

"Islands which have / never existed / have made their ways / onto maps nonetheless" (Nicholas Hasluck). In this course, we study Mediterranean islands as geographical, textual, and metaphorical spaces. We focus on specific islands--both fictional and real--as case studies for the aesthetic, political, and metaphysical implications of insularity, while also aiming to present the Mediterranean as a spatial, historical, and cultural network of relationality and conflict. Elaborating upon Predrag Matvejevitc's statement that "the Mediterranean is not only geography," we approach Mediterranean insularity not only in cartographical representations (from Greek geographers to Arab cartographers), but also as poetic topos (from Ariosto's Island of Alcina to Goethe's Capri), narrative stratagem (from Homer's Phaeacia to Boccaccio's Rhodes), literary protagonist (from Deledda's Sardinia to Murgia's Sardinia), political concept (from Plato's Atlantis to Campanella's Taprobane), and existential condition (from Cervantes's Cyprus to Cavafy's Ithaca). We engage in a diachronic and synchronic exploration of Mediterranean islands' inherent dialectic between resistance and occupation, identity and assimilation, marginality and integration, zoological extinction and speciation, inbreeding and metissage, autochthony and allogeny, linguistic conservatism and creoleness, territorial boundedness and internal division. Our approach will also be archipelagic and include methods and concepts from historical linguistics and dialectology to diplomatic history and postcolonial poetics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM389, MDST360, WLIT340, ITAL289
Prereq: ITAL112

COL390 Romanticism-Realism-Modernism

In the study of German literature (and art), the terms romanticism, realism, and modernism designate a span of time extending from the "Age of Goethe" to the mid-20th century literary cultures of West Germany, East Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In this seminar, we want to take a closer look at representative examples for each of the three categories: What kind of subject matters are prevalent in each respective period, what narrative, dramatic, and poetic devices and forms are typically employed? What distinguishes these periods from one another, how useful are these distinctions? What, finally, is the purpose of such periodizing of literature?

The purpose of this seminar is twofold: 1. It is intended to provide a historical overview of German literature by engaging with representative romanticist, realist, and modernist works of prose, drama, and lyric; 2. It is designed to critically probe the concepts of romanticism, realism, and modernism: How useful are these categories in making us understand the evolution of fiction, authorship and readership, literary subjectivity, or narrative form? What are some pitfalls of using these categories?

All readings, papers, and discussions will be in German.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST390
Prereq: GRST213

COL391 Diderot: An Encyclopedic Mind

In this class we will come to know the most progressive and often radical thinker of the French Enlightenment, Denis Diderot (1713-1784). We will begin this seminar with an examination of how this country abbot grew into the most well known atheist of his generation. We will then move onto his famous 74,000 article Encyclopédie, a book that not only dragged sacrilege and freethinking out into the open, but triggered a decades-long scandal that involved the Sorbonne, the Paris Parliament, the King, and the Pope. (During this portion of the class, students will undertake translations of select entries [from French to English] of the "dictionnaire" for possible publication.) In the second half of the semester, we will also study the writer's freewheeling art criticism. Finally, we will read two groundbreaking novels. The first of these, "La Religieuse", is a gripping pseudo-memoir of a nun who suffers unspeakably cruel abuse after she announces that she wants to leave her convent. The second, "Jacques le Fataliste", is a freewheeling anti-novel where Diderot used fiction to take up the problem of free will. In the final portion of the class, we will also read selections from his anticolonial and antislavery writings.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FREN391
Prereq: None

COL392 Empire, Memory, Translation: A Seminar on the Rings of Saturn

In this seminar, we will explore three themes: The lasting effects of European imperialism and colonialism in (mostly but not exclusively) Europe and their literary representations; the relationship between historical memory and fiction in these representations; and the role of translation in shaping the relationship between historical memory and fiction.



At the center of this course is W. G. Sebald's travelogue "The Rings of Saturn" ("Die Ringe des Saturn"), a work we will read in both its German original and its congenial English translation. Sebald's genre-defying narrative recounts the historical traces of empire, war, and colonialism in the observations and reminiscences of the protagonist's wandering through the de-industrializing landscape of England's Suffolk County during the early 1990s. Obsessively associating phenomena near and far in an almost paranoid fashion, Sebald's first-person narrator leads the reader to the devastations wrought in China during the Opium Wars and in the Congo during Belgian rule; the local and global effects of cycles of capital accumulation, resource exploitation, and climate change; and the challenges and pitfalls of memory's attempts to find an adequate narrative form for how the globally disparate effects of capitalist modernity are interlinked.



All discussions and papers will be in German, and readings will be in German and English, with a consistent focus on theoretical and practical questions of translating from German to English. We will proceed at a slow pace, with plenty of time to grant our superb primary text the time and attention it deserves. This course is designed for students who have taken GRST 213 or have spent a semester studying abroad in a German-speaking country. We will focus on developing critical writing, reading, interpretation, and translation skills in German. Since the quantity of reading is fairly modest, we will put much emphasis on regular writing and rewriting.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST342
Prereq: None

COL393 Directed Research in European Studies

This course is intended for students who wish to undertake a significant research project or get a head start on a senior essay or thesis devoted to any aspect of European civilization from 500 to 2021. The course will begin with three weeks of regular meetings devoted to the purpose of academic research in the humanities and social sciences, developing and refining a research topic, organizing one's research, bibliographies and sources, the construction of an argument, and the organization of a research paper. Students will work on their research projects individually during the rest of the semester, although the class will meet as a group from time to time so students can present and discuss the state of their work. Students will also have weekly tutorials with the instructor to discuss their progress and plan their next steps. Students who are able to do so are encouraged to engage with research materials in languages other than English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L390, GRST291, MDST390, FREN390
Prereq: None

COL401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

COL402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

COL403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

COL404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

COL407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

COL408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

COL409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

COL410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

COL411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

COL412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

COL419 Student Forum

Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

COL420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

COL423 Advanced Research Seminar, Undergraduate

Advanced research tutorial; project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

COL424 Advanced Research Seminar, Undergraduate

Advanced research tutorial; project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

COL465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

COL466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

COL491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

COL492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT