In a series of seven lectures, writers-creative nonfiction authors, playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, documentarians and short story writers-provide an overview of the practice of creating narratives from specific disciplinary perspectives. Editors, publishers, agents and producers reflect on the publication and production process. Speakers discuss researching, revising, publishing and producing texts and read from their work to provide examples. They also explore questions of style, voice and genre. S/U only. Only meets during the first half of the semester.

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.

A study of South African literature and cinema from apartheid era to the present. The course focuses on the ways in which the political, economic and cultural forces of colonialism and apartheid have shaped culture and politics in contemporary South Africa. The course also pays attention to the ways in which literature and film helps us visualize the relationship between power and violence in apartheid and post-struggle South Africa. Enrollment limited to 18.

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.

A comparison of the first literary works to emerge from oral story-telling traditions among several ancient, medieval, and modern peoples to express their highest ideals and sense of collective identity: the Mesopotamian "Gilgamesh," the Indian "Mahabharata," the Old Irish "Táin Bó Cúailnge," the Medieval Welsh "Four Branches of the Mabinogi," the Finnish "Kalevala" and the Nyanja (Congolese) "Mwindo." The course explores these epics as sites of cultural formation and moral contest, and especially seeks to understand their world-views, value systems, and trajectory of human history through tim

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. Can be taken concurrently with FRN 295. S/U only.

An examination of the rewritings and adaptations of the three iconic figures of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—Caliban the demi-devil savage other, Sycorax the devil-whore, and Miranda the virgin-goddess—by writers from different geographies, time periods and ideological persuasions. Using texts such as Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs.