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.

From medieval Chinese tales to memoirs about SARS and COVID-19, this cross-cultural literary inquiry explores how conceptions of selfhood and belonging inform ideas about well-being, disease, intervention and healing. How do languages, social norms and economic contexts shape experiences of health and illness? From depression and plague to aging, disability and death, how do sufferers and their caregivers adapt in the face of infirmity or trauma? Our study will also consider how stories and other genres can help develop resilience, compassion and hope. Enrollment limited to 20.

An examination of race, identity, and resistance in African, Caribbean, and African American literatures through the lens of coming-of-age novels. This course will enable students to critically engage the political and aesthetic imperatives of black writing by interrogating the thematics and legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racism. How do writers of Africa and the African diaspora appropriate the Bildungsroman as a literary form in their constructions of identity, freedom, and citizenship? What makes this genre particularly useful for the liberatory project of black imagination?

Offered as WLT 232 and EAL 232. Can literature inspire personal and social transformation? How have modern Chinese writers pursued freedom, fulfillment, memory and social justice? From short stories and novels to drama and film, we explore class, gender and the cultures of China, Taiwan, Tibet and the Chinese diaspora. Readings are in English translation and no background in China or Chinese is required. Open to students at all levels.

Introducing translated works by celebrated Portuguese-language writers, this course will explore
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. Discussing fiction by Machado de Assis and
Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Mia Couto and Paulina Chiziane (Mozambique), Grada Kilomba

Offered as WLT 203 and ENG 203. Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain; Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra; Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Lafayette’s The Princesse of Clèves; Goethe’s Faust; Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Lecture and discussion. WLT 203/ENG 203, like WLT 202/ENG 202, is among the courses from which comparative literature majors choose two as the basis of the major. Students interested in comparative literature and/or the foundations of Western literature and wanting a writing-intensive course should take 202 or 203 or both.

We hear and read translations all the time: 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. We explore translation in a range of contexts by hearing lectures by experts in the history, theory and practice of translation. Knowledge of a foreign language 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.

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. In this class we 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 investigates the counterfactual, speculative, subjunctive impulse in overtly speculative drama and film with a particular focus on race and gender. We examine an international range of plays by such authors as Caryl Churchill, Tess Onwueme, Dael Orlandersmith, Derek Walcott, Bertolt Brecht, Lorraine Hansberry, Craig Lucas and Doug Wright, as well as films such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Pan’s Labyrinth; Children of Men; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; X-Men; Contact and Brother From Another Planet.