12 courses with the subject CPLT, 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 3000002/01002 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm Diana Matar 4.00 8/12
222 Milbank Hall CPLT BC3107 Translating the Animal. 4.00 points. 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 Spring 2026: CPLT BC3107 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CPLT 3107001/00003 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm Hana Worthen 4.00 7/16
308 Diana Center CPLT BC3108 Nazism in Performance. 4.00 points. 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 Fall 2025: CPLT BC3108 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CPLT 3108001/00254 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm Hana Worthen 4.00 3/16
306 Milbank Hall CPLT BC3120 Poetics of the Mouth. 3 points. 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 BC3123 Getting Personal: Strange Companions in Cosmo Prose. 3.00 points. 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 lment
203 Diana Center Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 239 CPLT BC3144 Stories and Storytelling: Attending to Narrative. 3.00 points. 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 Fall 2025: CPLT BC3144 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CPLT 3145001/00724 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm Brian O'Keeffe 3 22/25
409 Barnard Hall CPLT BC3158 Languages of Loss: The Poetry of Mourning. 3 points. 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. CPLT BC3160 TRAGIC BODIES. 3.00 points. 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 CPLT BC3162 NOVELLA CERVANTES TO KAFK. 3.00 points. 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 Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CPLT 3162001/00144 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm Alfred Mac 3.00 6/30
325 Milbank Hall Adam CPLT BC3164 Trees of Knowledge: Ecocriticism and World Literature. 3.00 points. 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 Fall 2025: CPLT BC3164 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
403 Barnard Hall CPLT BC3165 City # Country in the Comparative 19th-century Novel. 4.00 points. 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 lment 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, ###) will provide case studies. Such long novels benefit from nuanced and intensive seminar discussion in which all voices are critical
CPLT 3510001/00300 M 12:10pm - 2:00pm Daniella Gitlin, 4.00 7/12
119 Milstein Center 0. FACULTY CPLT BC3551 The Arabian Nights and Its Influences. 4 points. 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. CPLT BC3552 The Arabic Novel. 4.00 points. 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 llment 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 Spring 2026: CPLT BC3552 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CPLT 3552001/00149 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm Hisham Matar 4.00 12/15
318 Milbank Hall CPLT BC3630 Theatre and Democracy. 4 points. 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. Fall 2025: CPLT BC3630 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CPLT 3630001/00258 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm Hana Worthen 4 2/16
214 Milbank Hall CPLT BC3675 MAD LOVE. 3.00 points. 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 CPLT BC3997 SENIOR SEMINAR IN COMP LI. 4.00 points. 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) Spring 2026: CPLT BC3997 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
