Topics vary each semester. Fall 2018: Since it was not translated into English until the mid 1960s, Walter Benjamin s Work of Art essay was slow to arrive in the English-speaking world, and when it did, it seemed part of the same zeitgeist as Guy Debord s The Society of the Spectacle, Roland Barthes The Rhetoric of the Image, and Louis Althusser s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. This zeitgeist was deeply suspicious of popular images, and this suspicion was soon fortified from a feminist direction by Laura Mulvey s Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and a postcolonial one by Frantz Fanon s Black Skin, White Masks. Benjamin s essay extended it to the kinds of images we generally find in museums, i.e., to what I will be calling pictures. This made the museum the primary target of institutional critique, and gave rise to what Hal Foster called the anti-aesthetic. It was against this backdrop that the so-called Pictures Generation emerged. This category was helpful at first, since it allowed us to look at things that would otherwise have been forbidden. It was based, however, on a misapprehension: the misapprehension that a picture means the same thing for Jeff Wall as it does for Cindy Sherman.

Topics vary from year to year.

Seminar on selected topics in music theory and analysis.

Specific topic varies. The seminar will bring together the study of early modern English literature and culture with histories and theories of gender, sexuality and race. Contact with 'the East' (Turkey, the Moluccas, North Africa and India) and the West (the Americas and the Caribbean) reshaped attitudes to identity and desire. How does this history allow us to understand, and often interrogate, modern theories of desire and difference? Conversely, how do postcolonial and other contemporary perspectives allow us to re-read this past?

Topics vary. Previous topics include The Grail and the Rose, Literary Genres and Transformations, and Readings in Old French Texts. Please see the department's website for current course description:

This course will explore the multiple literary modernisms of South Asia, interpreted broadly to include the wide range of literary movements in South Asia during the mid-twentieth century. We will begin with the question of definitions before exploring key moments and problems in the complex histories of these literatures. What is literary modernism in South Asian literature? How can it be contextualized within a larger framework of literary modernity? What are the key conceptual problems brought up within these literatures and the critical discourses associated with them, and how can they be seen in a common framework? How can South Asian modernisms be viewed in relation to modernist periods elsewhere in the world? Key points of methodological inquiry will include the literary history of modern South Asian literatures, the role of translation, and the interaction between artistic movements and global politics. Readings will be in English or in translation, and will include both primary documents as well as other literatures when relevant, and will include works by Rabindranath tagore, Gajana Madhav Muktibodh, Satyajit Ray, Bal Sitaram Mardhekar, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Bertold Brecht, O.V. Vijayan, Cesar vellejo, Dilip Chitre, and Arun Kolatkar.

An advanced seminar on postmodernist culture. Recently offered as a study of relationship between poetry and theory in contemporary culture, with readings in poststructuralist, feminist, marxist, and postcolonial theory and in poets of the Black Mountain and Language groups.

This course varies in its emphases, but in recent years has explored the theory of narrative both from the point of view of eighteenth-century novelists and thinkers as well as from the perspective of contemporary theory. Specific attention is paid to issues of class, gender, and ideology.

Theories and models of historical investigation. Analysis of historiographic writings and musicological works exemplifying particular approaches, such as transnational, environmental/landscape, gender/sexuality, critical race studies, performance studies, archives, and the digital humanities.