Undergraduate courses in Comparative Literature invite you to think about how stories shape the world. You will read literature, philosophy and theory alongside film, testimony and legal or historical texts. In small, discussion based classes you will explore questions about justice, power, memory, human rights and what it means to live a good life. These courses pair well with many majors and help you build skills in critical reading, writing and analysis.
Comparative Literature courses change each semester, but many explore themes such as:
You might study novels, short stories, philosophical texts, court decisions, human rights declarations, films and archival materials. Courses encourage you to connect what you read to contemporary debates and to your own experience.
COL 115: “Genocide, Testimony and Truth”
David Johnson, Shaun Irlam, and Noam Pines
Tues/Thurs 12:30pm-1:50pm
NSC 220
Class #23892
The term genocide emerged in the aftermath of World War II to designate criminal acts carried out with the intent to destroy national, ethnic, racial or religious groups. In this context, genocide has often been considered the paradigmatic crime against humanity and the crime of crimes. The term continues to be relevant for international law today. Focusing on the legacy of the concept, the course addresses the historical parameters of genocide by examining the Nazi genocide of the European Jewish population and the Rwandan genocide of 1994. At the heart of the course, however, is the tension between historical truth and testimony, on the one hand, that the relation of both to fictional accounts. Fulfills SUNY GE in Humanities and World History and Global Awareness. This course is the same as JDS 115 and course repeat rules will apply. Students should consult with their major department regarding any restrictions on their degree requirement.
COL 199: "Ethics of Refusal"
Devonya Havis
Tues/Thurs
9:30am-10:50am
Park 143
Class #20673
How we move through the world is shaped by our contexts – the technologies we use, social media platforms we follow, learned community perspectives, what we navigate based on where we live, and the ways others perceive us. While our varied contexts contribute to our uniqueness, they often encourage us to follow a particular status quo or to lean into social trends without questioning or examining whether conforming is the best way to live. At what point does living a certain kind of life make us responsible for challenging the given status quo? When is it an ethical responsibility to question authority? What role do critical thinking and knowledge play in helping us determine how best to live? Is there an ethics associated with resisting or refusing? This seminar will use philosophical texts and contemporary readings as a starting point for exploring these questions.
COL 199: “Telling Stories”
Ewa Ziarek
Mon/Weds 4:15pm-5:35pm
Park 250
Class # 15928
Although it plays different roles in different cultures and different historical moments, storytelling seems to be a universal human activity. Children want the same stories to be told over and over again in exactly the same manner. As adults, we enjoy stories in literature, film, videos, or computer games. We listen to the stories of friends and family members. Historians, anthropologists and sociologists both research and construct their own stories in order to make sense of human cultures, traditions, laws and religions. Different kind of stories, such as testimonies and eyewitness accounts, are at work in legal trials. Patient stories are important for social workers, psychologists and doctors. Storytelling has invaded even neuroscience and medicine, for example in Kleinman, The Illness Narratives. Some philosophers argue that foundational stories of a given culture teach us about love, moral values, and good life. In this interdisciplinary seminar we will examine stories in literature, folklore, film, anthropology and history, as well as significant stories in your own lives, in order to ask fundamental questions: why do people tell stories? What kind of knowledge and wisdom is conveyed through stories? How are stories related to power and politics? What can story teach you that science cannot? And what counts as a story? How is it constructed? What is the difference between fictional stories and real stories, such as documentaries or history? Our readings will include stories from the Bible-- for example, the story of Isaac and Abraham and their subsequently pictorial and philosophical retellings; selected fairytales such as Beauty and the Beast and their film versions, short stories by diverse literary writers, such as Melville, Larsen, Kafka and Dinesen; films, for example the BBC film production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; legal accounts, selected stories told by anthropologists, for example Carol Stack, All Our Kin, as well as some of the most interesting reflections by historians and literary critics on the role of storytelling in human culture. Students will also be asked to share the most important stories they learned during their first year colloquium and to reflect on the role of sharing stories through social media.
COL 199: “Art & Madness”
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Tues/Thurs 11:00am-12:20pm
Baldy 111
Class # 22774
When we think of artists, we often imagine people who are eccentric, at odds with the everyday world, and indulging in impulsive emotions: easily irascible, self-absorbed, volatile, passionate, melancholic, and self-destructive are some of the adjectives that come to mind. Two of the most celebrated modern artists have been known for their madness and social isolation: Van Gogh and Beethoven. Their iconic status in popular culture as prototypical Romantic artists is not accidental, since it was Romanticism that established the modern image of the artistic genius as a mad and self-destructive character. At the same time, the artist’s volatile psychology is often explained as the effect of inspiration: the artist seems to have a special, even sacred, relation to a higher reality to which average people lack access. However, this relationship of art to madness and the sacred is not so new. Already in antiquity, Plato wrote of the destructive effects art can have on the human psyche and the city at large. For this reason he proposed in his Republic to ban the poets from the city. Furthermore, he too recognized in artistic inspiration a link to divine madness. After him, Aristotle noted the artist’s melancholy inclination. At the end of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche identified the dark and violent aspects of artistic inspiration with the “Dionysian principle,” since Dionysus was the Greek god of divine madness and intoxication. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we start with Plato’s description of the poet in his Ion. We move on to the Romantic period with Mary Shelley’s famous tale, Frankenstein, which shows the poetic genius in its connection to scientific invention and creativity. We then pass to Thomas Mann and conclude with Nietzsche. Mann’s Death in Venice was in fact written as a conscious illustration of Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas in The Birth of Tragedy, where he interprets art to be the result of an eternal strife between two opposing principles: rational form (Apollo) versus the truth revealed in madness (Dionysus). Along the way, we will have the chance to discuss relevant examples from painting and film.
COL 199: "Quarrel between Philosophy and Literature"
Krzysztof Ziarek
Mon/Wed
4:15-5:35pm
Norton 216
Class #17790
Why do philosophers read poets, and why do poets read philosophy? The course will trace the history of this question, beginning with the ¿quarrel¿ between philosophy and poetry in antiquity and leading up to the contemporary conversations and polemics between the two disciplines. This quarrel between philosophy and poetry is mentioned in Plato, and already at that time it was perceived as ¿ancient.¿ The course will begin by exploring the provenance and the stakes of this quarrel as seen by Plato and proceed on this basis to inquire into its formulations in later texts, from ancient Greece to 20th literature, philosophy, and film.
This seminar is open to all students interested in exploring the fascinating and challenging intersections between the two main areas of the humanities: literature and philosophy. Reading literary and philosophical texts, we will discuss such questions as the nature of human existence, the problem of time, death, and finitude, the role of gender, as well as the differences and similarities between imagination and reason, passion and logic, literary language and philosophical argumentation. What is the difference between how poetry and philosophy address and express those issues? How is poetic/literary saying different from philosophical ways of telling? How do we think between poetic images and philosophical reasoning/argumentation?
In the first part of the course, we will examine convergences and differences between literary and philosophical texts in antiquity (Plato, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Sophocles' tragedies), the Middle Ages (Boethius), and the Enlightenment (Voltaire). Rethinking the heritage of Greek culture and tragedy for the moderns, Nietzsche's influential study The Birth of Tragedy will serve as the transition to the questions that characterize contemporary debates between philosophy and literature. After The Birth of Tragedy, we will read essays by Heidegger and Irigaray, and a number of literary texts: short stories by Dinesen, Borges, and Faulkner, poetry by Wislawa Szymborska, Reggio¿s film, Koyaanisqatsi.
COL 199: "Ethics of Refusal"
Devonya Havis
Tues/Thurs
11:00-12:20pm
Clemens 123
Class #21696
How we move through the world is shaped by our contexts – the technologies we use, social media platforms we follow, learned community perspectives, what we navigate based on where we live, and the ways others perceive us. While our varied contexts contribute to our uniqueness, they often encourage us to follow a particular status quo or to lean into social trends without questioning or examining whether conforming is the best way to live. At what point does living a certain kind of life make us responsible for challenging the given status quo? When is it an ethical responsibility to question authority? What role do critical thinking and knowledge play in helping us determine how best to live? Is there an ethics associated with resisting or refusing? This seminar will use philosophical texts and contemporary readings as a starting point for exploring these questions.
COL 199: “On Dignity and Death”
David Johnson
Tues/Thurs
2:00-2:50pm
Class #24527
What is “dignity”? What is the relationship of dignity to what Victor Hugo calls the “inviolability of life,” but also and no less trenchantly to both the death penalty and the right to die? How does the concept of “dignity” work both to defend and to challenge both the death penalty and the right to die? “On Dignity and Death” explores these questions through readings of philosophy (Cicero, Kant, Foucault), criminology (Beccaria), cultural critical (Dworkin), literature (Hugo, Camus, Capote, Mailer), and abolitionists (Reynolds, Prejean). We will also read the Universal Declaration of Universal Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (proposed 1966, ratified 1976) in order to examine the paradox of a universal human right to life that coexists with the death penalty. In addition, we will read several United States Supreme Court decisions concerning both the State’s right to put to death and its right to make live. The largest goal of the seminar is to teach students how to track the complexity of—and thus to think critically about—a concept that is all too often deployed as if everyone already knew what it meant. How is it that the concept of dignity can be invoked on both sides of both arguments, both for and against the death penalty, both for and against abortion? How can a man, a woman condemned to death for having violated the dignity of others invoke his, her right (and his, her desire) to die with dignity? What does “dignity” mean in this case? Moreover, is the death penalty a just punishment for one who desires to die? Where does one draw the line between execution and State assisted suicide? In order to develop the concept of “dignity,” we will have to consider such foundational notions as autonomy, sovereignty, freedom, rights and obligations, life. We will ask about the role of “grace” and “pardon” in the death penalty. How is the law constituted in and through exceptionality? We will consider the role of time in the debates on both the death penalty and the possibility of a death with dignity. We will be concerned with the time of death and the time of life. What does it mean to “do time” and to “kill time”? What is the time of dignity?
COL 199: "Literature of/and Human Rights"
Shaun Irlam
Mon/Wed/Fri
10:00-10:50am
Baldty 119
Class #23178
This course will explore the intersections between literature and human rights through a number of contemporary post-modern, diasporic and post-colonial works.Summary: a). Narratives of witness; b). poetics of sentiment, creating an audience; c) politics of representation / aestheticization d.) suffering of others, e.) articulation of rights. How does literature bear witness to human suffering and crimes against humanity? A prominent dimension of the novel since its inception has been the drama of human suffering and championship of the persecuted. In the 18th century, an iconic instance of this was Richardsons heroine, Clarissa; in the 19th century, the social protest novels of Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell and others charted the horrors of industrialization in Victorian Britain while Zola¿s Rougon-Macquart cycle did the same for the French underclasses. Across the Atlantic, a large corpus of slave narratives and novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave momentum to the abolitionist movement which became to precursor to the contemporary discourse around human rights.
COL 199: "Literature of/and Human Rights"
Shaun Irlam
Mon/Wed/Fri
12:00-12:50pm
Baldty 120
Class #16287
This course will explore the intersections between literature and human rights through a number of contemporary post-modern, diasporic and post-colonial works.Summary: a). Narratives of witness; b). poetics of sentiment, creating an audience; c) politics of representation / aestheticization d.) suffering of others, e.) articulation of rights. How does literature bear witness to human suffering and crimes against humanity? A prominent dimension of the novel since its inception has been the drama of human suffering and championship of the persecuted. In the 18th century, an iconic instance of this was Richardsons heroine, Clarissa; in the 19th century, the social protest novels of Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell and others charted the horrors of industrialization in Victorian Britain while Zola¿s Rougon-Macquart cycle did the same for the French underclasses. Across the Atlantic, a large corpus of slave narratives and novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave momentum to the abolitionist movement which became to precursor to the contemporary discourse around human rights.
COL 199: "Quarrel between Philosophy and Literature"
Krzysztof Ziarek
Mon/Wed
4:15-5:35pm
Clemens 123
Class #18357
Why do philosophers read poets, and why do poets read philosophy? The course will trace the history of this question, beginning with the ¿quarrel¿ between philosophy and poetry in antiquity and leading up to the contemporary conversations and polemics between the two disciplines. This quarrel between philosophy and poetry is mentioned in Plato, and already at that time it was perceived as ¿ancient.¿ The course will begin by exploring the provenance and the stakes of this quarrel as seen by Plato and proceed on this basis to inquire into its formulations in later texts, from ancient Greece to 20th literature, philosophy, and film.
This seminar is open to all students interested in exploring the fascinating and challenging intersections between the two main areas of the humanities: literature and philosophy. Reading literary and philosophical texts, we will discuss such questions as the nature of human existence, the problem of time, death, and finitude, the role of gender, as well as the differences and similarities between imagination and reason, passion and logic, literary language and philosophical argumentation. What is the difference between how poetry and philosophy address and express those issues? How is poetic/literary saying different from philosophical ways of telling? How do we think between poetic images and philosophical reasoning/argumentation?
In the first part of the course, we will examine convergences and differences between literary and philosophical texts in antiquity (Plato, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Sophocles' tragedies), the Middle Ages (Boethius), and the Enlightenment (Voltaire). Rethinking the heritage of Greek culture and tragedy for the moderns, Nietzsche's influential study The Birth of Tragedy will serve as the transition to the questions that characterize contemporary debates between philosophy and literature. After The Birth of Tragedy, we will read essays by Heidegger and Irigaray, and a number of literary texts: short stories by Dinesen, Borges, and Faulkner, poetry by Wislawa Szymborska, Reggio¿s film, Koyaanisqatsi.