What’s new? What’s next? Seminars in Comparative Literature, Spring 2026
Comparative Criticism II
Professor Shuang Shen
Principles and theories of literary criticism from eighteenth- and nineteenth- century beginnings to twentieth-century expansion and application.
Translation
Professor Adrian Wanner
This seminar will explore literary translation both from a theoretical and practical angle. We will study seminal texts of translation theory from the 17th century to the present and analyze concrete examples of translations taken from a variety of languages and time periods. We will critically investigate ideologies that promote theories of translatability or untranslatability. Special attention will be paid to poetry as a type of discourse that is generally deemed difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce in a different linguistic medium. In addition to critiquing existing translations, we will also experiment with creating translations of our own. We will focus on such issues as the rendering of form, foreignization vs. domestication, literalism, imitation, homophonic translation, collaborative translation, and self-translation. In addition, we will debate the increasingly crucial significance of AI-generated machine translation. The course will also include encounters with guests who are active translators of literary and philosophical texts.
Comparative Seminar in African Literatures
Professor Mandisa Haarhoff
This seminar offers a comparative examination of literary works of Africa.
Comparative Arabic Literature and Criticism
Professor Linda Istanbulli
This seminar offers a critical introduction to key texts and debates in modern Arab(ic) literary and intellectual history, with a focus on how literature has served as a site for negotiating cultural, political, and epistemological transformation from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will engage works from across the Maghreb and the Mashreq that theorize and reflect on major regional and global developments—including colonialism and anticolonial struggle, postcolonial state formation, authoritarianism, exile, and revolution—while foregrounding the aesthetic and conceptual problems they raise within and beyond their historical moment. Emphasizing the theoretical stakes of Arab(ic) literature’s global entanglements, the course considers such questions as aesthetics and form, language politics, gender and minority discourse, modernity and postmodernism, trauma and cultural memory, and the role of the intellectual. Rather than reproducing familiar binaries, we will explore approaches to Arabic literature that attend to both its regional specificities and its capacity to reshape key debates in comparative literary and cultural criticism. Readings will be in English, with optional Arabic texts available for students with relevant proficiency.
Global Asias as Tactic & Theory: An Introduction
Professors Tina Chen & Charlotte Eubanks
Global Asias is an emerging scholarly field that reimagines approaches to the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas. It responds to the realization that scholars working in, and knowledge generated out of, Asian Studies (as an area-based, Cold War institutional formation), Asian American studies (as an ethnic studies formation), and Asian diaspora studies (as a developing post-national formation) are often segregated. Such segregation makes it harder than it should be to think about Asia and the world on a more global, transhistorical scale, and to think about Asia in relation to its multiple and proliferating diasporas. This graduate seminar introduces students to the evolving field of Global Asias by focusing attention on how institutional forms of knowledge production operate historically and contextually to influence the scholarly understanding of the politics, cultures, societies, aesthetic practices, and peoples of Asia. The course’s dual focus on tactics and theories will enable us to collectively imagine a more expansive scholarly praxis around Global Asias, exploring how the genres of academic labor (research, teaching, and service) are often more generically complex that institutions imagine. We will read a diverse set of literary and critical texts, features and articles from the journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and selections from the book Global Asias: Tactics & Theories.