CPLT 210. Film and Literature: Bodies and Sexualities across Genres, Media and Cultures
Prof. Michelle Bloom
W 5:00 – 7:50

We will explore the relationships between film and literature, including adaptation, translation, intertextuality, cinécriture, and “literary film” as well as “cinematic literature.” We will study world film, considering national and transnational cinemas (including and crossing boundaries between China, England, France, Iran, Japan, Korea and the US). Our focus will lie in the concept of the body and in sexualities, with particular attention to “female” and other non-cis males, non-white bodies. Theoretical and critical works will inform our work on literary and film texts. The course will also consider the teaching of literature and cinema.

CPLT 270. Modern African Literature
Prof. Anthonia Kalu
M 5:00 – 7:50pm

This course examines selected central works from contemporary written African literature. All assigned works are written originally in English or translated from African or other European languages into English. We shall examine how African literature portrays colonialism, post-colonialism, and independence and how those representations inform, enable or disrupt our understandings of questions about space, gender, individual and communal consciousness, development, and national identities in contemporary Africa. We will also explore how writers from different African countries agree with, differ from and/or respond to each other in their uses of literature to examine these and other questions significant to the histories and politics of individual nations and the continent.

CPLT 277. Seminar in Comparative Literature: Postnational Literature
Prof. Paul McQuade
T 5:00 – 7:50pm

We live in an age of global circulation, yet our idea of literature remains entrenched within the domain of a text’s language or the geographic specificity of its production. What, then, to make of literatures created by the effects of diaspora, migration, and exile? How to read literature written beyond the mother tongue or in a state of translation? This course is designed to introduce students to literary texts which bear a strained relation to the nation-state as well as key theoretical texts in the thinking of modern literature and nationality. Students will develop skills in frameworks that expand the traditional area and literary studies through close attention to issues of language and gender, as well as colonial contexts, the history of comparative literature, and the disciplinary status of ‘area’.