Includes courses from: Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, South America and the United States.

Africa

SLL1110F: Sex, Love and Taboo

University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

African Languages and Literatures

Description: This course actively engages students in exploring the vocabularies of African languages with regard to sex, love and taboo. It encourages students to explore the ways in which African languages are used to talk about love and sex. The course also promotes critical and creative thinking on the topic of taboo in African languages. It encourages students to explore the ways in which African languages are used to talk about love and sex, promoting critical and creative thinking on the topic of taboo in African languages.

Asia

01DJ843: Study of Japanese Literature V

University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences; Special Programs in English (Master’s Program in International Area Studies)

Description: This course is designed as a survey of modern Japanese literature and culture, providing an introductionto a variety of Japanese literature written in late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The aims of this course are to improve one’s skills in reading and analyzing Japanese literary texts and in understanding the concerns and perspectives of the authors as well as the major ideas that have helped shape modern Japanese culture and society.

Australia

APG4266: Deleuze and Foucault

Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria

Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies

Description: A reading of selected texts of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The unit has three parts: (1) The common cultural and theoretical background of French philosophy in the twentieth century; (2) The last writings of Foucault (what he describes as his ‘genealogy’ writings), his writings on prisons and disciplinary power, and those on the history of sexuality; (3) Deleuze’s ‘rhizomatic writings,’ concentrating on Nietzsche, Sacher von Masoch and A Thousand Plateaus.

Canada

ANG 724: La Dramaturgie Canadienne Comparée

Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec

Littérature Canadienne Comparée

Description: Déterminer les parallèles, contrastes et différences essentielles entre les deux dramaturgies. Ces différences sont-elles vraiment imputables à une approche dramaturgique idoine à chaque culture, ou au contraire sont-elles plutôt le fruit d'une recherche individualisée des auteurs? Étude comparative du traitement dramatique des thèmes dans un corpus de six pièces canadiennes-anglaises et six pièces canadiennes-françaises.

COL 5067 H,S: RUINS

University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario

Centre for Comparative Literature

Description: This seminar will consider the ruin as a key trope for modernity. Topics include: the theorization of history as catastrophe and decay (Adorno, Benjamin, Sebald); natural and historical disaster (Voltaire, Kleist and the Lisbon earthquake); Pompeii and Rome in the historical imagination (Gibbon, Piranesi, Freud); politics of empire and nation (Volney); iconoclasm, revolutionary vandalism and the tabula rasa (Hubert Robert, Abbé Grégoire); the ruin in relation to literary modes such as fragment and allegory (Schlegel) or to broader aesthetic categories of the picturesque, the sublime or the sentimental (Burke, Diderot, Caspar David Friedrich); and artificial and apotropaic ruins, urban and industrial ruins, ruin in relation to contemporary discourse of the trace, ghost and remnant (Derrida, Agamben, Nancy). A significant focus of the course will be on the ruined landscapes of post-WW II – e.g., Warsaw, Berlin, Hiroshima – and the contemporary survival of memory, which continues to respond to this. Questions of architecture and urbanism will be central in this context as well as in cinema (e.g., Alain Resnais, Alexander Kluge, Helma Sanders-Brahms).

CLMD 6105: Cultural Mediations

Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario

Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC)

Description: The role that technology plays in changing models of literacy, visuality and aurality. The technologies of the cultures of print, vision and sound will be discussed through specific examples of cultural practices in various media.

Europe

LC590: Monsters and the Monstrous in Contemporary Literature

Dublin City University; Dublin, Ireland

School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies; MA in Comparative Literature

Description: The course will investigate and explore contemporary literary representations of monsters and of the monstrous as well as the enduring influence of monsters and the monstrous on contemporary human cultures. Starting from varied literary productions, we will branch out into non-literary fields of expression and analyse the clashes, interactions and transformations nurtured from the encounters between both literary and non-literary worlds. The course will be based on varied literary documents belonging to many genres, from novels to diaries, via medical logbooks, theatre plays, the media, T.V. and film scripts. These texts, representing different aspects of contemporary monsters and contemporary representations of the monstrous, will come from European and non-European literary productions. The very open nature of the course caters to the needs and desires of the different student cohorts, and even though the course will be based on varied literary productions, it will bridge over to non-literary artefacts and/or fields of expression.

Milostný diskurz - jazyk bolesti, vášne a samoty ‘Love Discourse: the language of pain, passion and loneliness’

Univerzity Karlovy v Praze [Charles University in Prague], Prague, Czech Republic

Ústavu ceské literatury a literární vzdy [Institute of Czech and Comparative Literature and Literary Theory]

Description: The course is inspired by A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. “The lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude,” writes Roland Barthes. “This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one.” A spokesman for amorous discourse, talking to himself, is always a kind of “fake” dialogue. It is a discourse of silence – talking but no one answered: “It offers a place to read the speech, instead of someone who speaks from within yourself, love, face to face with each other (love object), which is silent” (Barthes) [quote translated from Czech]. Is modern literature a great love story? Is its “love language” and religion indeed the language of loneliness? The course will focus mainly on World Literature of the twentieth century (Abelard and Heloise, Kafka, Pessoa, Pavic, Nabokov, Sorokin and others).

South America

Disciplina FLC5980-2: A Crise da Autoridade na Literatura Portuguesa do Século XX [The Crisis of Authority in Portuguese Literature of the Twentieth Century]

Universidad de São Paulo [University of Sao Paulo], São Paulo, Brazil

Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas [Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities]

Description: The course aims to examine the literature of the twentieth century in Portugal from the perspective of the crisis of authority. This crisis is triggered in different areas of the literary debate, namely as subject – political revolutions, social and aesthetic of the century make up a dominant thematic axis in modern and contemporary literary production – and as a diegetic process – starting with the Orphic revolution, with the heteronym process, going through new construction techniques in poetry and prose up to the crisis of authorship in contemporary literature when the appropriation of alien discourse finds its legitimacy in the narrative polyphony.

United States

RUSSN-UA 870: The Unquiet Dead: Imagining the Afterlife in Film and Fiction

New York University, New York, New York

Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, cross-listed with Comparative Literature

Description: This course explores the connections between narrative and imagined scenarios for the afterlife. As we examine the literary and cinematic treatments of vampires, ghosts, zombies and, in particular, posthumous narrators, we will look at the political and ideological deployment of afterlife narratives, investigating questions of cultural and sexual purity, collective guilt and socioeconomic anxiety. Particular attention is paid to the folklore and fiction of the Slavic world and to contemporary American reinterpretations. Readings will include texts by Nabokov, Gogol, Ovid, Stoker and Morrison, accompanied by selected films.

CWL 432: From Ghost Stories to Video Games: Japanese Fiction in Comparative Contexts

San Francisco State University, San Francisco State University, California

Comparative and World Literature Department

Description: Examination of formal transformations in Japanese prose fiction through comparison with other literary traditions; focus on questions of tradition, influence, genre and translations.

16:195:610:01: Comp Lit in Dialogue – Cross-Cultural Ecocriticism(s)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Graduate Program in Comparative Literature

Description: How do we talk about nature or, more precisely, about the representation and reflection of human / non-human identities and relationships in literature, film and other media? Do contemporary environmental theories, crises and politics require literary and cultural studies to diversify the assumptions, concepts and interpretations that usually frame their study of nature and society? Originally developed in the early 1990s within the American and English academies, ecocriticism nevertheless has been accused of solipsism and ethnocentrism in its primary focus on American and English national literary traditions and ecologies. This seminar will specifically explore current rethinking of environmental aesthetics in different media; the imagination of the global, the local and the planetary in a diversity of world environmentalisms; the rise of postcolonial ecocriticism; the appearance of new varieties of ecofeminisms and popular environmentalisms; and current debates in critical animal studies and notions of the post-human. Tentative readings by Giorgio Agamben, Lawrence Buell, Una Chaudhuri, Jacques Derrida, Greg Garrard, Donna Haraway, Ursula Heise, Bruno Latour, Glen Love, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Tim Morton, Rob Nixon,  Dana Phillips, Cary Wolfe and Wendy Woodward. The seminar will be grounded on twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts on Latin American and Latina/o ecologies. The course will especially focus on two waves of globalization in Latin America: the 1880s-1930s and the process that started in the early 1970s and intensified since the end of the Cold War.