What’s new? What’s next? Seminars in Comparative Literature, Spring 2025
Comparative Criticism I: Classical to Neoclassical
Professor Bob Edwards
This course surveys foundational texts in the Western tradition for criticism, poetics, and literary aesthetics from classical Antiquity through the Neoclassical period. It is a companion to CMLIT 503: Comparative Criticism II—Romantic to Contemporary. The texts we read will range from Plato and Aristotle through Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Burke, Lessing, and Schiller. They represent a largely cohesive, if frequently contested, tradition whose critical assumptions and aesthetic values remain largely consistent until Romanticism and its various forms of modernity. It is in these texts that questions about representation and fiction, the tools and categories of analysis, and principles such as unity and literary decorum take shape; here, too, we find key formulations about literary systems, genre, and the roles of readers and authors. At various points we will want to set this tradition against non-Western practices of interpretation. What does a canonical text like the Poetics look like in the philosophical analyses of Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina? How do South Asian aesthetic categories challenge and illuminate Western accounts of aesthetic experience? What similarities and differences can we find in European and
East Asian frames for literary anthologies? The course will require active participation in readings and discussion, several presentations, and a series of short papers.
Sound, Publics, and Technology in Contemporary Culture
Professor Shuang Shen
This course approaches sound as both object and approach: it delves into the philosophical and cultural inquiries about the nature of sound –– is sound an object, a sensory experience, a cultural condition? It also locates sound studies at the conjuncture of several disciplines and discourses, not all of which specifically engage with sound as the exclusive focus. Specifically, this seminar will consider five topics: 1) philosophical discussions of the ontology and epistemology of sound, particularly pertaining to fundamental Western and non-Western paradigms of knowledge production; 2) historical and cultural discussions of sonic and listening practices that intersect with empire and postcolonial studies, Cold War studies, indigenous studies, the discourses of publics, counterpublics; 3) sound media studies on sound dissemination, storage, reproduction as well intermedia approaches to sound, such as the intersection with visual and performance studies; 4) the intersection between sound and literary studies: orality, voice and embodiment, echo and resonance. 5) the sound of language, multi- and pluri-linguistic practices; autochthonous and allochthonous sounds. Case studies are drawn from literary and cultural productions as well as historical archives in a global context, giving more attention to the global South and the Third World as well as to contemporary cultural formations that bear the imprint of the Cold War. Besides the conventional requirement of a final paper, the instructor is open to proposals about projects in other media forms, such as a podcast.
Note: 1) This seminar welcomes students at all stages, including those preparing for the Comprehensive or writing the dissertation although formal registration for auditing the course is much preferred and greatly appreciated. I am willing to adjust the syllabus to feature the specific topics and theories related to a dissertation chapter, and I am open to setting aside some weeks for us to share work-in-progress with each other. I for one would be interested in sharing my current project (or the conceptualization of it) on podcasting in post-Cold War and post-socialist China with the class. 2) The seminar can be considered a trial run for a public humanities seminar that is currently at a proposal stage in two ways: one, we will try to include speakers to this seminar. With the help of GILL, we have scheduled the Taiwanese sound artist Wang Hong-Kai to give a Zoom talk and join your class virtually on Mar. 5, Wednesday. We plan to start at 6PM with a brief intro and have a 30-min listening session together. After a short break, she will give a short talk followed by a Q&A. With prior planning, we can invite one or two more speakers to the class. Two, we can try to work with CLS to explore the possibility of organizing a sound event/project in conjunction with the journal. This means that a final project in an alternative format (different from the conventional seminar paper) will be acceptable following discussions with the instructor.
Critical Studies in Global Korean Literature and Culture
Professor Jooyeon Rhee
This course introduces students key texts and trends in modern Korean literature and culture from a global perspective. It examines the most prominent literary and visual works that articulate the intricacy of modern Korean culture at the intersections of major historical, ideological, and environmental forces and issues in the twentieth century such as colonialism, cultural imperialism, Cold War politics, democratic movement, feminist movement, environmental injustice, etc. Students will also read literary and cultural criticism and theories to improve their analytical ability that will be demonstrated in their writings.
Global Chinese Literature
Professor Nicolai Volland
This seminar provides an overview of the predominant critical approaches to modern Chinese literature, by placing these paradigms in historical perspective and linking them with key texts that illuminate the authors’ arguments and demonstrate exemplary readings that have proven influential in the field, past and present.
The course covers critical interventions and debates from the 1960s to the present day, helping you understand the emergence of the field in its present form; we will also scrutinize the major trends that are currently providing new directions for the study of modern Chinese literature. In addition to the critical literature, we will read a range of key literary texts, from the late Qing to the twenty-first century, and from across the Sinophone world, including texts from the Chinese diaspora. These texts provide insights into the forces (aesthetic and intellectual, as well as social and historical) that have shaped the canon of modern Chinese literature. In particular, this class has three interlocking aims: (1) to familiarize you with the history of the discipline and its current shape; (2) to offer you an overview of the evolving canon of modern Chinese/Sinophone literature; (3) to situate Chinese literature and its study with the broader critical work of world literary studies, in an approach that we will provisionally call “Global Chinese Literature.”
READING EFFLUENCE: PLANETARY HEALTH, HUMAN CONTAGION AND SUSTAINABILITY
Professor Rosemary Jolly
This class will attract students wanting to read knowledges from the margins of colonial capitalism back into a critique of human rights and that regime’s investments in anthropocentrism. What happens to genre when it accords non-human subjects what Western culture since the Enlightenment has called ‘selfhood’? The United Nations Human Rights regime was critiqued at the time of its adoption for its focus on the individual as the unit, as it were, of rights. This course looks at key narratives from the Global South that critique normative human rights regimes by sidelining human rights as at best unsustainable and at worst, anthropocentric. We will explore how writing from Africa, Australasia and the Caribbean refuse the Western notion of the human and instantiate a multiplicity of complex subjects in ‘his’ place. This class is for those looking for a deep dive into how we can think otherwise about human rights (yes, I mean the ones that don’t work most of the time); what happens when decolonial critique and the health humanities meet
‘down South’; what a “welcome to country” can look like when it’s not reduced to settler colonialism; and what the alternatives are to treating ourselves, our emotions and the planet as sites of extractive industry. Exemplary writers include Alexis Wright, Marlene NoubeSe Philip, Masande Ntshanga, Lauren Beukes, Edwidge Danticat, Shelley BurneField.
Note that there will be an alternative of this class for Africanists that will substitute a set of African texts chosen by the Africanists themselves in consultation with me. The Effluent Eye will remain the approach taken: therein lies the coherence of the syllabus. Note that one assignment may be written as an experimental genre of the critical and the creative in conjunction with a consultation with me prior to the undertaking.
Who may be interested in this class?
Those intrigued by decolonial theory, global health, critical health humanities, disease narratives, colonial-capitalist violence, gender based violence and racism; the postcolonial narrative history of pandemics, zoonoses; zooanthroponoses (HIV/AIDS; COVID 19, Ebola; Mpox); addiction/using and harm reduction; what replaces human rights and normative trauma theory; why disposability and grieve-ability become meaningless when the humanas-substitute comes into view; what happens when sustainability is a category for thinking through human emotions; where the hope may lie; innovative journalism/fiction/memoir; ‘marginal’ youth and anger; what recycling means it’s when undertaken with an effluent eye; ways of mourning subjects somewhat beyond the human grasp; why senses of the
absurd, including absurd laughter, are inextricable from resilience — and necessarily
extricable from rationality.