How are understandings of literature shaped by the politics of language? This course explores approaches to the study of “World literature(s),” including important interventions from postcolonial and translation theory, in an increasingly monolingual world. The first half of the course considers such terms as cosmopolitan, global, modern, and universal; alongside counterpart notions of vernacular, local, traditional and particular. The course asks how language relates to ideas of nationalism, nativism, and to the making of canons.

What makes a book too dangerous to read? A film too obscene to watch? Who decides what stories should be silenced—and why? This course explores the history of censorship, artistic rebellion, and the power of “forbidden” narratives. The course starts from Plato’s decision to ban poets from his Republic, and from there surveys a range of banned books across time and space. From Don Quixote to Ulysses, the course examines why certain books and films have been deemed too shocking, subversive, or politically volatile for public consumption.

The regions of Africa, South Asia, and the Arabian peninsula have been interconnected across the Indian Ocean for centuries. This course explores literary representations of this water body as a theatre of world history and contemporary relation, considering perspectives from the diverse but interconnected ecologies, cultures, belief systems, and aesthetic forms of a maritime region marked by colonization, forced migration, trade and cultural exchange.

What is a Holocaust story? How does literature written in extremis in ghettos, death camps or in hiding differ from the vast post-war literature about the Holocaust? How to balance competing claims of individual and collective experience, the rights of the imagination and the pressures for historical accuracy? Selections from a variety of genres (diary, reportage, poetry, novel, graphic novel, memoir, film, monuments, museums) and critical theories of representation. All readings in translation. No prerequisites.

Offered as WLT 212 and POR 212. Introducing translated works by celebrated Portuguese-language writers, this course explores themes of resistance, including resistance to dictatorship, patriarchy, slavery, racism, and colonialism, but also more ambivalent postures of resistance toward authority assumed within particular forms of expertise and knowledge production and deployment.

Translations are everywhere: on television news, in radio interviews, in movie subtitles, in international bestsellers. But translations don’t shift texts transparently from one language to another. Rather, they revise, censor and rewrite original works, to challenge the past and to speak to new readers. The course explores translation in a range of contexts by hearing lectures by experts in the history, theory and practice of translation. Knowledge of a foreign language is useful but not required. S/U only. Can be taken concurrently with FRN 295.

Offered as WLT 330 and TSX 330. The capstone seminar brings together a cohort of concentrators to discuss a final translation project that each student undertakes with the guidance of their adviser in the concentration and to situate the project within the framework of larger questions that the work of translation elicits. The readings focus on renowned practitioners’ reflections on the challenges, beauties and discoveries of translating.

Filmmaking is storytelling. This story can be told by the actors or by its visuals. Every film employs a production designer who, with the director and cinematographer, is in charge of the visual design of the film. Students learn how a production designer breaks down a script to determine which scenes should be shot on location and which should be built as sets. Each student makes design choices for the entire script. Whether picking out locations or creating sets to be shot on a soundstage, this class examines what makes one design choice better than another.

This course explores—through reading, viewing, and making—theatre created using documentary sources, including interviews, found texts, historical documents, and other sources. Students explore the dramatic, social, and political implications of this work, while considering notions of authenticity and authority derived from direct testimony, documentary sources, and community involvement. Students also explore the tension between maintaining truth and creating dramatic shape, theatricality, and audience engagement.