The extent to which the narrative reflexes of the novel can accommodate and express the nature of human work are explored primarily in a study of two nineteenth-century writers. Eliot and Hardy. Reading for the course also includes novels and short stories of other nineteenth-century writers (Dickens, Zola, tolstoy, Stowe, Melville), and background reading on the social and philosophic theory of work.

A study of the tradition of "serio-comic" literature from ancient times to the present, focusing on works that combine ostensibly incompatible tones, genres, and themes to produce a particular sense of man in history. Readings include: the dialogues of Lucian, Petronius' SATYRICON, extracts from Rabelais and Boccaccio, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, extracts from Sterne, and Gogol's DEAD SOULS. Students will be expected to attend a series of undergraduate lectures on these works; an additional hour will be scheduled in which the history and theory of menippean satire will be discussed. Special attention is given to general problems of genre theory that are raised by works that seem to challenge generic norms.

Within the last ten or fifteen years, there has been a flowering of scholarship revealing the diversity of oral verbal art worldwide. The course surveys a selection of recent book-length studies of specific narrative and other verbal art traditions in their cultural contexts. We will move from North Africa through the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, the western Pacific, and native America, examining particular traditions and texts, the ways they intersect with their societies, and the ways different scholars have found to document and interpret them.

This course will provide an overview of major European thinkers in literary theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will pay particular attention to the following movements: Structuralism and Deconstruction (Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, Barthes, Derrida), Social Theory (Foucault, Ranciere), Psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Abraham and Torok), Schizoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari), Feminism and Queer Theory (Irigary, Kristeva, Sedgwick), Spatial Theory (Bachelard, DeCerteau, Lefebvre), and the Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer, Kracauer). Readings and discussion will be in English.

Does architectural theory define architectural practice? The present seminar will explore this question in a number of ways. It will look at prominent examples of contemporary architecture and their evaluation by prize committees and architectural critics; recent theoretical work and architectural manifestoes and the practice of architectural firms; and the writings and work by architect-critics such as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, and Peter Zumthor. In the course of our seminar, we will also reflect on the question whether architecture, a discipline that deals with an inhabitable environment, may differ in its relationship between theory and practice from other arts, such as painting or literature.

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.

The specific topics of the seminar vary from semester to semester, depending on the instructor and his/her choice. Among the topics previously covered, and likely to be offered again, are the following: The Theatre of Jean Racine, Fiction of Mme de Lafayette, The Moralists (La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld, Perrault ), Realistic Novels (Sorel's Francion, Scarron's Le Roman Comique, Furetiere's Le Roman Bourgeois). Students Give oral and written reports, and write a term paper.

Environmental Humanities: Theory, Methods, Practice is a seminar-style course designed to introduce students to the trans- and interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. Weekly readings and discussions will be complemented by guest spearkers from a range of disciplines including ecology, atmospheric science, computing, history of science, medicine, anthropology, literature, and the visual arts. Participants will develop their own research questions and a final project, with special consideration given to building the multi-disciplinary collaborative teams research in the environmental humanities often requires.

This course introduces three genres of life writing: Autobiography, Memoir and the Diary. While the Memoir and the diary are older forms of first persons writing the Autobiography developed later. We will first study the literary-historical shifts that occurred in Autobiographies from religious confession through the secular Eurocentric Enlightenment men, expanded to women writers and to members of marginal oppressed groups as well as to non-European autobiographies in the twentieth century. Subsequently we shall study the rise of the modern memoir, asking how it is different from this form of writing that existed already in the middle ages. In the memoirs we see a shift from a self and identity centered on a private individualautobiographer to ones that comes from connections to a community, a country or a nation; a self of a memoirist that represents selves of others. Students will attain theoretical background related to the basic issues and concepts in life writing: genre, truth claims and what they mean, the limits of memory, autobiographical subject, agency or self, the autonomous vs. the relational self. The concepts will be discussed as they apply to several texts. Some examples are: parts of Jan Jacques Rousseau's Confessions; the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; selected East European autobiographies between the two world wars; the memoirs of Lady Ann Clifford, Sally Morgan, Mary Jamison and Saul Friedlander. The third genre, the diary, is a person account, organized around the passage of time, and its subject is in the present. We will study diary theories, diary's generic conventions and the canonical text, trauma diaries and the testimonial aspect, the diary's time, decoding emotions, the relation of the diary to an audience and the process of transition from archival manuscript to a published book. The reading will include travel diaries (for relocation and pleasure), personal diaries in different historical periods and countries, diaries in political conflict (as American Civil War women's diaries, Holocaust diaries, Middle East political conflicts diaries). We will conclude with diaries online, and students will have a chance to experience and report about differences between writing a personal diary on paper and diaries and blogs on line. Each new subject in this online course will be preceded by an introduction. Specific reading and written assignments, some via links to texts will be posted weekly ahead of time. We will have weekly videos and discussions of texts and assigned material and students will post responses during these sessions and class presentations in the forums.

Over the last three decades, the fields of literary and cultural studies have been reconfigured by a variety of theoretical and methodological developments. Bracing and often confrontational dialogues between theoretical and political positions as varied as Deconstruction, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Queer Theory, Minority Discourse Theory, Colonial and Post-colonial Studies and Cultural Studies have, in particular, altered disciplinary agendas and intellectual priorities for students embarking on the professonalstudy of literature. In this course, we will study key texts, statements and debates that define these issues, and will work towards a broad knowledge of the complex rewriting of the project of literary studies in process today. The reading list will keep in mind the Examination List in Comparative Literature. We will not work towards complete coverage but will ask how crucial contemporary theorists engage with the longer history and institutional practices of literary criticism.