29 courses with the subject CPLT BC, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
CPLT BC2000Introduction to Comparative Literature3.00
This course introduces students to the study of comparative literature. For any student interested in what it means to live in a multi-lingual world with rich and diverse forms and traditions of literary, artistic, and philosophical expression, this course serves to cultivate lifelong skills and habits of attentivenes that will prepare you to navigate the world as engaged, critical-thinking cosmopolitan citizens. For students who would like to major in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard, this course serves as the gateway course for the program. For students who wish to minor in Translation Studies, this course serves as an elective. The course is designed to introduce you to methods and topics in the study of literature across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, across historical periods, and in relation to other arts and disciplines. Readings are selected and juxtaposed in units designed to give you cumulative practice in doing comparative criticism and to foster thereby deepening reflection on underlying historical, philosophical, historiographical, and methodological issues. We will study works of narrative and lyric poetry, novels, short stories, and film and also works of philosophy, political theory, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. We will read texts of literary criticism, literary theory, and translation theory. Topics include: the role of language and literature in different cultures and historical periods, the relationship between genres, the circulation of literary forms, literature and translation, postcoloniality, gender and sexual difference, and the relationship of literature to other arts. By engaging with the particular combinations of texts in the course, students will learn how to read closely and deeply and make well-substantiated critical connections between textual and cultural phenomena that may yield new, original, and surprising insights. Students in this course typically bring with them a range of languages, but not everyone has proficiency in the same languages. Common readings will be in English translation, but students capable of reading the texts in the original languages should feel free to do so. You will be given the opportunity to work with the texts in the original languages in assignments of interpretive and translation criticism
CPLT BC2110Introduction to Translation Studies3.00
This course will introduce students to the principal ways in which translation has been practiced and theorized in the Western tradition. We will consider, cultural, literary and philosophical theories of translation, as well as the role of translation and translators in today's globalized world. Topics covered will include: translation in the context of postcolonialism, globalization and immigration; the translation of children’s literature; subbing and dubbing in film and television, including fansubbing; translation and ecology; translation and justice; machine translation; linguistic rights; debates about mono- versus plurilingualism. We will also consider, less extensively, the place of interpreting (i.e. oral translation primarily in legal and medical settings). Specialists from the New York area will come to speak about current needs and challenges in the field of community interpreting. On the literary level, we will examine the role played by foreign languages (and translation) in the creative process of contemporary writers. We will read a number of “language memoirs,” narratives that recount the authors’ complex and sometimes agonized relation to acquiring a second language (Eva Hoffman, Xiaolu Guo, Alice Kaplan et al). For one of the assignments you will write the beginning of your own language history. We will also read and study in depth Brian Friel’s play Translations. This play is about the replacement of Irish (Gaelic) place names with English names as a result of an ordnance survey in the early 18th century. The course aims to help students improve their translation skills by translating (mostly literature) from your second language (your L2, as the linguists call it) into English, by critically assessing published translations, and by evaluating each other’s' translations-in-progress (including one of the professor's). There will be a number of guest lecturers (translators, editors, writers, interpreters, etc). Prerequisite for the course: Intermediate or advanced level proficiency in any language other than English. This course is a foundational and required course for students wishing to complete a Translation Studies Minor
CPLT BC3000GLOBAL LONG-FORM PHOTOGRAPHY: HISTORY AND MEMORY4.00
This course explores the photographic essay as a distinct visual language. We will examine how photographic artists and photojournalists use sequences of images to construct narratives that communicate complex ideas about the past. In an age when nearly everyone carries a camera to capture the present, many photographers have turned their lenses toward the past to illuminate personal histories and collective memories. Through weekly seminars, we will explore how contemporary photographers around the world challenge national narratives and reimagine history. We will consider how photography—often seen as the medium most bound to the present—can evoke what is absent or lost. Focusing on artists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East, we will explore how their work engages collective memory in relation to dictatorship, state violence, and contested histories. Finally, we will investigate how artists have used re-enactment, commemoration, re-imaging, and inclusive archiving to engage with history and memory through visual practice
Through readings in language philosophy, translation studies, and critical animal studies, Translating the Animal explores how translation, language, and reason have historically worked together to maintain speciesism, preventing human animals from perceiving their commonalities with, and attunement to, sentient nonhuman beings
Explores the cultivation of national and transnational performances as a significant force of National Socialism, at the same time as challenging the notion of "Nazi Theatre" as monolithic formation. The core of the course inquires into the dialectical analysis of artistic creations in diverse art genres, while working towards an understanding of the social dramaturgy of such events as staging the Führer and the racialized body of the priveleged people. Nazism did not harbor ideologies without benefits for the allied nations. Thus, the dynamic performance of transnationalism among the "brothers in arms" will be included as well, in order to elucidate how works of art crossing into the Third Reich were reimagined, sometimes in ways challenging to the presumed values of the state stage. Permission of instructor given at first class meeting
Explores the imagery of eating, drinking, spitting, choking, sucking (and other unmentionables) in relation to insults and excessive behaviors. Readings from Greek poetry (e.g., Homer, Aristophanes) to modern theory (e.g., Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World), including modern novels and films.
CPLT BC3123Getting Personal: Strange Companions in Cosmo Prose3.00
With an emphasis on equality and social justice, this course examines and compares significant 19th c./20th c. literary approaches to friendship as intermediary between individualism and communal life. Discussion of culturally formed concepts and attitudes in modern or postcolonial settings. Reading of Dickens, Hesse, Woolf, Ocampo, Puig, Fugard, Emerson, Derrida, Rawls
Oscar Wilde wrote that "a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at." Ernst Bloch argued that in order to see our own world clearly "we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness." For Wislawa Szymborska, Utopia was an island whose highlights included "The Tree of Understanding" and "the spring called Now I Get It." Latin American thinkers grappled with the concept, too, and Venezuelan novelist Arturo Uslar Pietri suggested that it was Columbus's voyages to the Americas that produced plausible space on the map for Utopia's appearance. At once political, aesthetic, and educational, Utopia began its lexical and political life in literature and has remained a feature in Transatlantic Western discourse from the age of colonial empires to our present-day debates on human rights and economic inequality. In this course we will read and analyze the concept of Utopia from Columbus and Thomas More to the advent of modem socialism with special attention to the themes of economic inequality, gender emancipation, and the limits of cosmopolitan sensibility. We will also take care to look at essays and manifestoes as well as utopian novels, and to include Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. Readings by Tommaso Campanella, Margaret Cavendish, Madame de Stael, Friedrich Engels, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Magda Portal
CPLT BC3140Europe Imagined: Images of the New Europe in 20th-Century Literature3
Compares the diverse images of Europe in 20th-century literature, with an emphasis on the forces of integration and division that shape cultural identity in the areas of travel writings and transculturation/cosmopolitanism; mnemonic narratives and constructions of the past; borderland stories and the cultural politics of translation. Readings include M. Kundera, S. Rushdie, H. Boell, C. Toibin and others.
The objective of this class is to examine a given topic and relate it to a number of literary texts. Students will examine a variety of literary genres and to an equally wide variety of cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts
CPLT BC3144Stories and Storytelling: Attending to Narrative3.00
What is it to attend to narrative? Attending has its etymological roots in Latin, attendere, to stretch (one’s mind) towards, to get closer, which implies a gap between one’s mind and whatever it is one is attending to. Attendre in French means to wait, to expect, another gesture towards space between one’s mind and whatever one is waiting for or expecting. What happens in that space? What is it to attend? Is it to slow down and mind the gap? Or is it to pay or lend attention, as the phrase appears in multiple languages, as though the space is a debt that we or our minds owe? What does it look like to pay attention to narrative and stories? This course offers an introduction to forms and functions of narrative with focus on three modes: perception, reflection, and memory. What distinguishes the texts we will study is how they themselves foreground and reflect on how stories are told and so perform the task of teaching us how to analyze them. Topics include the writing of the self; the nature of memory; the experience of time; the relationship between fact, fantasy, and fiction; and the search for truth. While we will cover a range of scripture, poetry, novels, essays, plays, comics, and hybrid literary forms, the demand of you as readers will be the same: lend your close attention to these works and give yourself time to reflect on them
Jacques Derrida was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and his impact on literary studies was enormously significant. The objective of this course is to take stock of Derrida’s contribution to literature, and to do so by assessing the intricate relations he establishes between literature, philosophy, economic and political theory, gender studies, translation studies, postcolonial theory, and theology. The course is divided into six parts. Part 1 introduces Derrida’s approach to ‘deconstruction,’ particularly as regards his engagement with the fundamental concepts of Western thought and the importance he confers upon the notion of ‘writing’ itself. Part 2 examines Derrida’s autobiographical texts wherein he positions himself as a subject for deconstruction, interrogating his own gender, his sense of being an organic, creaturely life-form, the relationship he has to his own language, and the matter of his identity as French, but also as Algerian, and Jewish. While the majority of the Derrida texts we will be reading are excerpts from larger works or short essays and interviews, in this section we will read a full-length text – Monolingualism of the Other – so that we can trace Derrida’s train of thought from beginning to end. In Part 3 we will use an interview conducted by Derek Attridge, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” as a template for thinking about Derrida’s relation to literature, and in Part 4 we will read our second full-length text by Derrida, namely Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, an in-depth analysis of a prose poem by the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Part 5 considers an aspect of Derrida’s work that reveals the extent of his embrace of provisional, in-between positions for thought in general, and for literary texts in particular, namely translation. For deconstruction is keenly invested in words beginning with ‘trans’: transposition, transplant, trans-valuation, and indeed trans-gender. Translation provides Derrida with a scenario whereby crossings and transits can be imagined – for literary texts, and for identities that wish to remain un-determined by fixed poles or normative values. The course finishes with an assessment of Derrida’s reflections on death, mourning, and the matter of leaving a legacy. In Part 6, we therefore read more of the essay “Living On,” and also Derrida’s final interview, “Learning to Live, Finally.” Not even Derrida could deconstruct away the finality of death, but he did hope to live on. My corresponding hope is that you will feel sufficiently attuned to Derrida’s thought that you consider it important to continue his legacy – to be one of the agents of his living on, survival or survie, a translator and transporter of his thought towards contexts that he could not have foreseen, but which he would doubtless have welcomed as a precious chance for his own work to be considered differently. Taking intellectual risks, thinking otherwise, and inventing new ways of knowing are, after all, the hallmarks of Derridean deconstruction. Spring 2026: CPLT BC3145 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment CPLT 3145 001/00724 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm 409 Barnard Hall Brian O'Keeffe 3 22/25
CPLT BC3158Languages of Loss: The Poetry of Mourning3
A study of the genre of elegy across time and cultures. Emphasis on how poets express grief and relate to literary traditions. Comparisons of European, Chinese, and American elegies (by Theocritus, Milton, Qu Yuan, Holderlin, Wordsworth, Whitman, Bishop, and others) and discussions of the relationship between singular and collective life.
This course will focus on embodiment in ancient and modern drama as well as in film, television, and performance art, including plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Beckett; films such as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Limits of Control”; and performances by artists such as Karen Finley and Marina Abromovic. We will explore the provocations, theatricality, and shock aesthetics of such concepts as Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” and Kristevas powers of horror, as well as Adornos ideas about terror and the sublime
The novella, older than the novel, painstakingly crafted, links the worlds of ideas and fiction. The readings present the novella as a genre, tracing its progress from the 17th century to the 20th. Each text read in the comparative milieu, grants the reader access to the intellectual concerns of an era. Spring 2026: CPLT BC3162 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment CPLT 3162 001/00144 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm 325 Milbank Hall Alfred Mac Adam 3.00 6/30
CPLT BC3164Trees of Knowledge: Ecocriticism and World Literature3.00
This survey of modern and contemporary world literature deals explicitly with environmental issues as a main theme. The course is supposed to serve as an introduction to the new field of “ecocriticism” in the Humanities and to a wide range of literary responses to current ecological concerns and transformations of natural habitat. All texts are available in English, though students will have the opportunity to read them in the original if they desire to do so
CPLT BC3165City ＆ Country in the Comparative 19th-century Novel4.00
This seminar explores the relationship of the nineteenth-century realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, “knowable communities,” how do fictions of the city and imaginings of the country represent individual identity as it is shaped by physical, built environments? In this light, we will consider questions of youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism, local custom and globalism. In class, we will juxtapose close readings of novels with analyses of other cultural forms (translations, paintings, operas, popular entertainment, maps) so that we come away with a broader sense of nineteenth-century pan-media culture and its international afterlives as well as a working knowledge of one of its most meaningful manifestations: the novel. French novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, English novelists Charles Dickens and George Eliot, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and the Chinese novelist Lao She (Shu Qingchun, 舒慶春) will provide case studies. Such long novels benefit from nuanced and intensive seminar discussion in which all voices are critical
This course examines the aesthetic phenomenon of the grotesque in its development from the late Renaissance to Postmodernism by comparing major texts in a systematic fashion. The emphasis of our discussions is on the awkwardness and strangeness of a certain kind of prose or drama; we will therefore examine the typical modes of transgression and the forms of excess in literary representations of the body in various between the 15th century and the present. The transgression may involve the human body, but writers are also interested in the beauty or ugliness of “the beast.” While we will discuss questions of style and linguistic performance, our main concern is the human imagination: how do characters, narrators and writers relate to the strangeness of the body and the world? How is the literary text shaped by distinct aesthetic patterns? What kind of taboo subjects or problematic and ambiguous aspects of power dynamics in modern societies can be addressed by presenting humans and animals as grotesque figures? Our critical discussions of outstanding examples of are based on readings of major scholarly contributions to the field, in particular the studies of internationally recognized intellectuals such as M.Bakhtin, T.Todorov, J.Kristeva, and W.Kayser. You will be introduced to various historical types of the grotesque, ranging from the ornate and bombastic representations in Renaissance literature to the fantastic deformations and hybrid creatures in contemporary literature. The reading material is representative of different cultures, languages and literatures so that we can conceptualize the grotesque from a critical and comparative perspective. Ultimately, the grotesque is seen as a complicated product of social, political, and cultural conditions rather than merely a formal element of a literary discourse. The representation of “grotesque” settings as well as the formation of “grotesque” identities will be examined by considering aspects such as gender, class, race and ethnicity.
Analysis and discussion of the relation of literature to painting, photography, and film. Emphasis on artistic and literary concepts concerning the visual dimension of narrative and poetic texts from Homer to Burroughs. Explores the role of description, illustration, and montage in realist and modern literature
CPLT BC3203Fictions of Judgment: Austen and Kleist3.00
This course investigates how works of fiction reflect on what it means to make moral, aesthetic, and political judgments. It focuses on works by two Romantic-era authors, Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who were contemporaries of one another but have rarely been read together as they inhabited and wrote about vastly different milieux. Strikingly, both have been hailed for their precise mastery of language and form, their keen sense of irony, and their singularly philosophical dispositions. They wrote at a crucial time in both Western and global modernity when European philosophers were re-defining the very activity of judgment itself in relation to new understandings of reason, truth, and the conditions of knowledge. We will read three of Austen’s six completed novels and a play, short stories, a novella, and prose writings by Kleist, paying attention to philosophical problems of self-knowledge, judgment, freedom, and autonomy in relation to historical instantiations of gender, class, and race. Besides studying how these early nineteenth-century works staged processes and crises of judgment, we will ask ourselves what lessons in judgment these works may continue to offer us today
CPLT BC3204Literary Worldmaking: Two Case Studies4.00
This seminar engages students in the immersive and intensive reading of two masterworks of modern prose fiction: Middlemarch, published by George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) in 1871-2 in England, and The Story of the Stone, or the Dream of the Red Chamber, composed by Cao Xueqin (and continued by Gao E) in the late 18th-century moment of Qing-dynasty China. While using devices and conventions from different narrative traditions, these novels operate in the mode of realism and do so at a monumental and panoramic scale, creating literary worlds that reflect the realia of historical lifeworlds. Beyond representing aspects of empirically recognizable worlds, these novels also incorporate philosophical reflection on their own means of representation, on their very status as fiction, on the power and limits of imaginative worldmaking. By studying these novels as cases of literary worldmaking, we will take the opportunity also to reflect critically in this class on the world that emerges–and the process of worldmaking that gets activated–in our very experience of studying these texts together. We will consider how cosmopolitanism, as a guiding ideal of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment university, may be renewed by literary study to help us inhabit a world of common humanity that is richer and more complex than is evident in particularist localisms or a satellite-view, techno-economic globalism. Middlemarch we will read in its entirety. For the sake of time, we will read, in David Hawkes’ translation, the 80-chapter version of The Story of the Stone, or the Dream of the Red Chamber, attributed to Cao Xueqin, instead of the 120-chapter version, with the last 40 chapters attributed to Gao E. If you can and wish to read the text in Chinese, please speak to Professor Sun about the option of scheduling extra discussion sessions
CPLT BC3350IN OTHER WORDS: WORLD POETRY & COSMOPOLITANISM3
What is “world poetry”? This course will try to give an answer to this vexing question. You are being introduced to a number of influential poets who have entered a dialogue about what it means to write, read, translate and appreciate poetry in a global context. The impact of globalization is most visible in a number of anthologies which made considerable efforts to move beyond the existing range of national representatives and to make an English-speaking audience familiar with the names and works of poets who are bilingual or who write in their native language. Throughout the semester, we will read English translations of these poems (but feel free to read the original if you know the language). Secondly, the global context is of great importance for understanding each poet’s vision of the world since poets are involved in processes of “world-making” as well as reacting to the world’s past and present. s the semester progresses you will see that the poets are part of a larger conversation; some themes, forms and issues we discovered at the beginning will return in the middle or toward the end of the term. The selection of poets is based on considerations of gender, race, age and religious affiliation; many of the poets whose works we are going to discuss are iconic figures; in studying other cases, you will be exposed to new voices (for example, young South African poets) whose significance will emerge in a critical discussion of the anthologists’ rationale and criteria for selecting poets and marginalizing others. Fall 2026: CPLT BC3350 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment CPLT 3350 001/00254 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am 237 Milbank Hall Erk Grimm 3 4/20
Maurice Blanchot once described translators as the “hidden masters of culture.” Indeed, though our labor and craft often go unrecognized in the age of Google Translate, translators play an essential role as tastemakers, bridge-builders, advocates, and diplomats, not to mention the most intimate readers and re-writers of literature. In this workshop, we will explore translation as a praxis of writing, reading, and revision. Together, we will also interrogate translation's complex and often fraught role in cultural production. What ethical questions does translation raise? Who gets to translate, and what gets translated? What is the place of the translator in the text? What can translation teach us about language, literature, and ourselves? Readings will include selections from translation theory, method texts, and literary translations across genres, from poetry and prose to essay and memoir. Students will workshop original translations into English and complete brief writing and translation exercises throughout
This course examines the enduring power of The Arabian Nights and some of the wide range of literary authors, genres and variations that it has influenced. The focus is, therefore, on this marvelous work—one of the earliest examples of the short story and the novel—but also on a selection of classical and contemporary works of fiction from around the world that have been informed by it. In this regard, this is a class interested in literary influence, reciprocity and exchange across time and languages.
The novel in Arabic literature has often been the place where every attempt to look within ends up involving the need to contend with or measure the self against the European, the dominant culture. This took various forms. From early moments of easy-going and confident cosmopolitan travellers, such as Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, to later author, such as Tayeb Salih, mapping the existential fault lines between west and east. For this reason, and as well as being a modern phenomenon, the Arabic novel has also been a tool for translation, for bridging gaps and exposing what al-Shidyaq—the man credited with being the father of the modern Arabic novel, and himself a great translator—called ‘disjunction’. We will begin with his satirical, deeply inventive and erudite novel, published in 1855, Leg Over Leg. It is a book with an insatiable appetite for definitions and comparisons, with Words that had been lost or fell out of use (the author had an abiding interest in dictionaries that anticipates Jorge Louis Borges) and with locating and often subverting moments of connection and disconnection. We will then follow along a trajectory to the present, where we will read, in English translation, novels written in Arabic, from Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Morocco and Palestine. We will read them chronologically, starting with Leg Over Leg (1855) and finishing with Minor Detail, a novel that was only published last year. Obviously, this does not claim to be a comprehensive survey; for that we would need several years and even then, we would fall short. Instead, the hope is that it will be a thrilling journey through some of the most facinating fiction ever written. Obviously, this does not claim to be a comprehensive survey; for that we would need several years and even then, we would fall short. Instead, the hope is that it will be a thrilling journey through some of the most fascinating fiction ever written
How does theatre promote democracy, and vice versa: how do concepts and modes of theatre prevent the spectators from assuming civic positions both within and outside a theatrical performance? This class explores both the promotion and the denial of democratic discourse in the practices of dramatic writing and theatrical performance.
The history of irrational love as embodied in literary and non-literary texts throughout the Western tradition. Readings include the Bible, Greek, Roman, Medieval, and modern texts
Designed for students writing a senior thesis and doing advanced research on two central literary fields in the students major. The course of study and reading material will be determined by the instructor(s) in consultation with students(s)
Independent research, primarily for the senior essay, directed by a chosen faculty adviser and with the chair's permission. The senior seminar for majors writing senior essays will be taught in the Spring term
