What’s new? What’s next? Seminars in Comparative Literature, Fall 2025
Comparative Method in Literary Studies
Professor Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Rosemary Jolly, and Eric Hayot
Bibliography, research methods, and studies in comparative literature.
Theory and Praxis of Teaching Global Literatures
Professor Charlotte Eubanks
This course is a professional development seminar that prepares graduate students to contribute professionally to the advancement of teaching global and world literature courses at the college and university level. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities inherent in teaching works that are written or performed in a variety of languages and we will explore concrete matters such as teaching within different institutional settings and delivery modes, determining learning objectives and assessment instruments, crafting a syllabus, designing lesson plans, and so forth. Throughout, we will focus on student learning, on creating an inclusive instructional environment, and on professional ethics as involved in the ways we teach literature. The course is intended to strengthen graduate students’ abilities and confidence as teachers now, and their readiness for professional scholarship and for the academic job market later (most faculty jobs in literature are at teaching-focused institutions).
Comparative Arabic Literature and Criticism
Professor Linda Istanbulli
This seminar offers a critical introduction to key texts and debates in modern Arab 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 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 Arabic 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.
History of the Book in East Asia
9:00–10:15 a.m.
Professor Kate Baldanza
Pond Lab 302
This course provides a grounding in the state of the field of book history in East Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Tibet and Vietnam. It will provide an overview of the field of book history, traditional methods of book-making, the book as a material object, and East Asian book history’s place within the larger field of book history. Students will use Special Collections in the Penn State Libraries and the Palmer Museum to examine material objects. We will engage in hands-on activities in the course. Students will co-curate an exhibition on “The Art of the Book” to be held at the Palmer Museum. Knowledge of an Asian language is not required.
Between Three Worlds: Postcolonialism, Communism, and the Global Cold War
Professor Nergis Ertürk
This course will examine the discursive conditions and stakes of new scholarship in postcolonial studies, which contends that understanding the history of decolonization necessitates an investigation of the cultural and political determinants of the Cold War. We will approach the so-called Third World as an important literary and political front of the Cold War and examine important aesthetic and political debates that took place during this period. Through our study of representative primary works from the Cold War era and contemporary scholarship in the field, we will ask a series of methodological questions about our modes of study of this period and its literary archives. Questions to be addressed will include: is the Cold War an event or a period, and if so, what are its temporalities? How do we conceptualize eventfulness, and how does one periodize? If history is more than mere “context,” what is the relationship between the literary critic’s master narrative and archival inscriptions and traces? In addition to readings by Siegfried Kracauer, David Scott, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault on historicity, eventfulness, and “the archive of pains,” we will study primary works by Richard Wright, Aimé Césaire, Georg Lukács, Nâzım Hikmet, Tayeb Salih, and Svetlana Alexievich. Topics to be addressed will include Bandung humanisms, Afro-Asian Writers’ conferences and translation projects, modernism and realism debates, the tragedy and romance of revolution, the spirit of anticommunism, the Chernobyl disaster and nuclear criticism, and (post)communist memory and ruinophilia.
Mémoire de la violence et violence de l’oubli: Remembrance and forgetting in Francophone Postcolonial Literatures
Professor Bruno Jean-François
This seminar engages with the major shifts in Memory Studies that relate to the transcultural and decolonial turns, and draws from a selection of literary texts from various geographical regions (Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean) to consider the critical contribution of Francophone fictions and literatures across the Global South to the forging of complex and decentered representations of memory in a variety of instances, situations, and contexts characterized by colonial and postcolonial violence. With a particular attention to expressions such as collective memory, cultural memory, and historical memory, the seminar uses a comparative approach bringing together 20th and 21st-century texts and voices from various political, cultural, and historical contexts, to examine the ways in which postcolonial writers explore, disrupt, or complicate practices of remembering (and forgetting)—whether individual or collective, social or cultural, political or institutional—that ultimately decolonize common understandings of time and history (past, present, and future), space and place, identity and self-affirmation. For our analysis of literary texts by authors such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Maryse Condé, Ananda Devi, Fatou Diome, Assia Djebar, Alain Mabanckou, Véronique Tadjo, Fabienne Kanor, Jean-Luc Raharimanana, Sylvain Savoia, and Khal Toorabully, we shall also consider seminal works in memory studies (Halbwachs, Ricoeur, Nora, Olick, Erll, Rothberg, Hirsch) and discuss the relevance of concepts such as collective memory, lieux de mémoire, devoir de mémoire, multidirectional memory, and postmemory, among others to literary studies. Ultimately, we shall study literary texts as forms or practices of witnessing that push back against Western politics of testimony and silence, as well as Eurocentric and Global North representations of history. Please note that this seminar will be conducted in French.