COMPLIT 164: Solidarity - Histories, Literatures, Rationales (COMPLIT 364, CSRE 164)
This course studies moments in history where ordinary forms of immediate political interest give way to a more capacious sense of obligation and commitment. With close readings of literary texts we will critique and analyze these moments to understand better their complexities and contradictions. Cases include Spanish Civil War; South African apartheid, Ukraine, Palestine.
Last offered: Spring 2024
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 167B: Emotions and Literature: Histories, Cultures, and Societies
What is the role of the emotions in our lives? How have people across cultures represented and expressed their feelings? Why and how do films, TV shows, and works of literature make us - spectators and readers - experience emotions? Exploring these questions, this course introduces undergraduate students to the history of emotions as a field of critical inquiry. The main objective of the course is to provide a series of interpretative tools and creative skills for comparative critique through cross-cultural and transhistorical lenses. To achieve this goal, we will study emotions as both themes and processes central to cultural production. Primary materials will range across geographical areas, historical periods, artistic movements, and genres, including literature, music, and cinema. Literary texts will encompass poetry, prose, and drama. We will examine cultural responses to emotionality, sensibility, and affectivity from classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enl
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What is the role of the emotions in our lives? How have people across cultures represented and expressed their feelings? Why and how do films, TV shows, and works of literature make us - spectators and readers - experience emotions? Exploring these questions, this course introduces undergraduate students to the history of emotions as a field of critical inquiry. The main objective of the course is to provide a series of interpretative tools and creative skills for comparative critique through cross-cultural and transhistorical lenses. To achieve this goal, we will study emotions as both themes and processes central to cultural production. Primary materials will range across geographical areas, historical periods, artistic movements, and genres, including literature, music, and cinema. Literary texts will encompass poetry, prose, and drama. We will examine cultural responses to emotionality, sensibility, and affectivity from classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernism, and present-day popular culture and entertainment. Because we will study the development of human sensations, this course is about our own experiences as well as about analyzing different kinds of experiences. We will see how what we read, hear, and watch has been shaped by emotions, and how these cultural products can, in turn, shape who we are and how we relate to one another.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Martinez Periset, F. (PI)
COMPLIT 213: Culture and Revolution in Africa (AFRICAAM 213, FRENCH 213E, GLOBAL 213, HISTORY 243E)
This course investigates the relationship between culture, revolutionary decolonization, and post-colonial trajectories. It probes the multilayered development of 20th and 21st-century African literature amid decolonization and Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives and the debates they generated about African literary aesthetics, African languages, the production of history, and the role of the intellectual. We will journey through national cultural movements, international congresses, and pan-African festivals to explore the following questions: What role did writers and artists play in shaping the discourse of revolutionary decolonization throughout the continent and in the diaspora? How have literary texts, films, and works of African cultural thought shaped and engaged with concepts such as "African unity" and "African cultural renaissance"? How have these notions influenced the imaginaries of post-independence nations, engendered new subjectivities, and impacted gender and generational dynamics? How did the ways of knowing and modes of writing promoted and developed in these contexts shape African futures?
Last offered: Winter 2025
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
COMPLIT 233A: Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean (AFRICAAM 133, COMPLIT 133, CSRE 133E, FRENCH 133, JEWISHST 143)
This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connections between the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This course will help students improve their ability to speak and write in French by introducing students to linguistic and conceptual tools to conduct literary and visual analysis. While analyzing novels and films, students will be exposed to a diverse number of topics such as national and cultural identity, race and class, gender and sexuality, orality and textuality, transnationalism and migration, colonialism and decolonization, history and memory, and the politics of language. Readings include the works of writers and filmmakers such as Aim Csaire, Albert Memmi, Ousmane Sembne, Lela Sebbar, Mariama B, Maryse Cond, Dany Laferrire, Mati Diop, and special guest 'onora Miano. Taught in French. Students are encouraged to complete
FRENLANG 124 or successfully test above this level through the Language Center. This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 234: Classics of Persian Literature (COMPLIT 134A)
Why do poems that were written hundreds of years ago still capture the imagination? How is love configured in the texts of a distant culture? Who sings the tales and who are the heroes? This course offers an introduction to the central works of Persian literature, from the 10th century to the present, across the genres of epic, romance, lyric, and novel. As we become acquainted with texts from a millennium of literary history, we will touch upon questions of performance (music and dance), storytelling, profane and divine love, the nature of spiritual quests, the development of narrative and poetic form, the formal and ethical aspects of translation, and, finally, the meaning of modernity in a non-Western context. Readings include: the Book of Kings by Ferdowsi (d.1020); Layla and Majnun by Nezami (d.1209); The Conference of the Birds by Attar (d.1221); selections from the Masnavi and Divan of Rumi (d.1273); the Rose Garden by Sa`di (d.1292), selections from the Divan of Hafez (d.1390); The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (d.1951); and selected modern poems. Taught in English.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
COMPLIT 242C: Close Reading: History, Theory, Practice (COMPLIT 342C, ENGLISH 242C, GERMAN 242C, GERMAN 342C)
What is "close reading"? This course is a survey and discussion of close reading and its formative role in twentieth century literary criticism and studies. Technique, explication, interpretation, method, practice, judgement: we will discuss various understandings of close reading's tasks, its history, and its implications for how and why we read literature. Readings include foundational texts (I. A. Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks; Jane Gallop, Jonathan Culler, Eve Sedgwick, etc.) and contemporary debates (John Guillory, Jonathan Kramnick, N. Katherine Hayles, etc.).
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Pao, L. (PI)
COMPLIT 261: Comparative Methodologies in Black Gender Studies (AFRICAAM 361, COMPLIT 361, FEMGEN 362)
This course takes a comparative methodological approach to Black Gender Studies, introducing students to the important terms and debates that animate this field, such as Spillers' "ungendering" and Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation". We will read academic articles, book chapters, and exhibition materials in the fields of literary criticism, history, anthropology, gender studies, and fine art that trace Black Women's and gender expansive people's experiences across the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of this course is to aid graduate students in growing as theorists in their own fields by engaging with the methodologies and terms present in contemporary Black queer and gender studies. We will also learn to conduct historical scholarship via archival sources. Particular attention will be paid to scholarship published in the past decade, especially as it relates to performance, literary criticism, and expansive gender throughout the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.This course is by application only. Please send a statement of interest and your CV to mlrosa@stanford.edu.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 311: Ottoman and Modern Turkish Translation Workshop
This workshop offers intensive practice in translating literary texts between Ottoman and modern Turkish and English. The focus is on the actual process of translation - what the translator does, and why. Through close reading, discussion, and peer critique, we will pursue independent projects, gaining insight into the craft and producing a substantial body of work. We will explore the structural differences between Ottoman/modern Turkish and English, recognize shifts in style and syntax across periods, and attend to questions of tone, register, and voice. We will also survey the history, theories, and practices of terceme and çeviri - translation - in Ottoman and Turkish contexts, while developing an individual translation practice enriched by insights from translation studies and by conversations with classmates. We will gain experience as supportive readers and editors of each other's work in progress - experience we will also apply to our own drafts. Suitable for students with advanced proficiency in Turkish.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Karahan, B. (PI)
COMPLIT 342C: Close Reading: History, Theory, Practice (COMPLIT 242C, ENGLISH 242C, GERMAN 242C, GERMAN 342C)
What is "close reading"? This course is a survey and discussion of close reading and its formative role in twentieth century literary criticism and studies. Technique, explication, interpretation, method, practice, judgement: we will discuss various understandings of close reading's tasks, its history, and its implications for how and why we read literature. Readings include foundational texts (I. A. Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks; Jane Gallop, Jonathan Culler, Eve Sedgwick, etc.) and contemporary debates (John Guillory, Jonathan Kramnick, N. Katherine Hayles, etc.).
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Pao, L. (PI)
COMPLIT 348: US-Mexico Border Fictions: Writing La Frontera, Tearing Down the Wall (ILAC 348)
A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome, crossed, and cursed; motivates bodies to climb over walls; and threatens physical harm. This graduate seminar places into comparative dialogue a variety of perspectives from Chicana/o and Mexican/Latin American literary studies. Our seminar will examine fiction and cultural productions that range widely, from celebrated Mexican and Chicano authors such as Carlos Fuentes (La frontera de cristal), Yuri Herrera (Señales que precederan al fin del mundo), Willivaldo Delgaldillo (La Virgen del Barrio Árabe), Américo Paredes (George Washington Gómez: A Mexico-Texan Novel), Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza), and Sandra Cisneros (Carmelo: Puro Cuento), among others, to musicians whose contributions to border thinking and culture have not yet been fully appreciated such as Herb Albert, Ely Guerra, Los Tigres del Norte, and Café Tacvba. Last but not least, we will screen and analyze Orson Welles' i
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A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome, crossed, and cursed; motivates bodies to climb over walls; and threatens physical harm. This graduate seminar places into comparative dialogue a variety of perspectives from Chicana/o and Mexican/Latin American literary studies. Our seminar will examine fiction and cultural productions that range widely, from celebrated Mexican and Chicano authors such as Carlos Fuentes (La frontera de cristal), Yuri Herrera (Señales que precederan al fin del mundo), Willivaldo Delgaldillo (La Virgen del Barrio Árabe), Américo Paredes (George Washington Gómez: A Mexico-Texan Novel), Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza), and Sandra Cisneros (Carmelo: Puro Cuento), among others, to musicians whose contributions to border thinking and culture have not yet been fully appreciated such as Herb Albert, Ely Guerra, Los Tigres del Norte, and Café Tacvba. Last but not least, we will screen and analyze Orson Welles' iconic border films Touch of Evil and Rodrigo Dorfman's Los Sueños de Angélica. Proposing a diverse and geographically expansive view of the US-Mexico border literary and cultural studies, this seminar links the work of these authors and musicians to struggles for land and border-crossing rights, anti-imperialist forms of trans-nationalism, and to the decolonial turn in border thinking or pensamineto fronterizo. It forces us to take into account the ways in which shifts in the nature of global relations affect literary production and negative aesthetics especially in our age of (late) post-industrial capitalism. Taught in English.
Last offered: Winter 2025
| Units: 3-5