Arts and Letters (A&L)

Survey of 20th- and 21st- century graphic novels in the context of cultural theory. Sophomore standing required.

In this course we read a wide selection of short stories and/or a novel by authors from Spain and Latin America. Our discussions will concentrate on formal critical analysis, but the texts are always connected to their historical contexts. Throughout the course, we will introduce and incorporate into our discussions the terminology and key concepts of literary criticism and narrative analysis. We will work towards being able to write a clearly focused original critical essay in Spanish analyzing an aspect of a text or a group of texts, and using three or more bibliographical sources.

This course explores the development of Peninsular Spanish Poetry from the Middle Ages to the present, and of Latin American Poetry from pre-Columbian times until our day. After an initial period that covers poetic terminology, genres, versification, and methods of analysis, the course dedicates precisely the same number of days to Peninsular Poetry as it does to Latin American poetry. The poems are selected to represent specific literary periods, movements, and highlights of both regions, but also to represent the historical moment.

You will explore the literature and the cultural debates of "the long 19th century" in Scandinavia.  In this class we will read literary and philosophical texts written between the French Revolution and World War I. During this period Scandinavians experienced profound political and social changes.  They saw the increasing proliferation of secular and scientific explanations of the world, the rise of the Industrial state, and the increasing call for expanded political rights. 

This course is an introduction to Latin American philosophy. As such its aims are to give a firm ground in the history of Latin American philosophy; to introduce some of the crucial ideas, issues, problems and forms of thinking that occur in some of the most important periods, movements and figures in Latin American thought; to cultivate the ability to read this tradition in its own right, and to recognize its distinct and meaningful contributions to world philosophies. The course will involve close reading and analysis of texts, background lectures and class discussions.

Representative literary works from the 19th and 20th centuries with attention to literary analysis and literary history. Conducted in Italian.

The fascination with automata is as old as Plato, but it picks up considerable steam (so to speak) with the emergence of a mechanistic world-view during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Starting here, we will investigate theoretical/philosophical texts, literary texts, and films that explore the implications of the idea of artificial life for philosophical, scientific, political, and religious questions.

This course features discussions of representative modernist texts/films (from Romanticism to the Expressionist Crises) which critically investigate the social bourgeois realities of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries.

Major topics include:

This course will examine a sample of Jewish literature (novels and a memoir) by distinguished Jewish writers around the world since the early twentieth century. Some themes will seem familiar:

Introduction to the world of Greek and Roman mythology with an emphasis on the issues of personal and social identity