FALL 2026 Program in Literature Course Offerings
LIT109CN Imperialism, Anticolonialism, Decolonization
Crosslists: ICS 109CN
Professors Michael Hardt and Jessica Namakkal
M/W 3:05pm – 4:20pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
This course will investigate foundational texts that analyze colonial and imperialist political formations, as well the movements that resist and combat them. The texts will consider coloniality in a wide range of geographical contest and spanning time periods from early modernity until the present. Topics will include racial forms of domination, economic exploitation, resource extraction, and political control. Evaluation will be based on class participation, short papers, and exams.
LIT110S Intro to Digital Cultures
Crosslists: CMAC 110S; VMS 110S
Professor Luciana Parisi
M/W 10:05am -11:20am
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
What is digital culture today? In the 90s digital culture studied how the internet transformed our interactions. In the 00s digital culture is driven by social media platforms (from youtube to tiktok), data profiling and recommendation algorithms. We visit iconic places through our constantly updating city apps. Our identity profiles are fashioned by social media influencers. We match with new friends and become followers. We know that biases of race, class, gender and sexuality are internal to search algorithms. Everyday decisions, behaviours, and desires are linked to our smart media. This course explores how digital media affect our subjectivity, our body, social and collective actions, political power and control.
LIT120CC Hollywood, In Theory
Professor Markos Hadjioannou
Tu/Th 11:45am – 1:00pm
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
Introductory-level course with no prerequisites. Examines Hollywood cinema and its sociocultural contexts of the past 100+ years. Introduces students to theoretical research approaches that explore the “Hollywood phenomenon”: its connection to modernity and postmodernity as historical-cultural periods; its activation and circulation of shaped beliefs about American national identity and international influence; its narrativization and formation of ideals related to personal individuality and social identities within American society; as well as its promotion of aesthetic models for the art of cinema.
LIT201 What is Cultural Studies?
Crosslists: ENG 201S; ICS 202
Professor Robyn Wiegman
Tu 4:40pm – 5:55pm
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
“Culture,” writes Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” He says this because the word can refer to so many different things: art and literature, national identity, language, community, food, even the habits and routines that comprise our everyday lives. How then should we study it? This course explores multiple answers to this question by tracing the history of Cultural Studies in its interdisciplinary disposition across the humanities and interpretative social sciences. Course materials will engage literature, film, contemporary media, and ethnographic writing to explore what Cultural Studies has come to know about the complexity of its primary object of study. There are no prerequisites.
LIT215 Italian Cinema
Crosslists: CINE 254; ITALIAN 380; VMS 308
Professor Roberto Dainotto
M/W 3:05pm – 4:20pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
The course is an introduction to major movements, genres and styles of Italian cinema from Neorealism to the present. Classes are taught in English. Films are subtitled.
LIT283S Mind/Body in Philosophy and Literature
Crosslists: PHIL 284S
Professor Maya Kronfeld
W/F 10:05am – 11:45am
Location TBD
No prerequisites
A critical introduction to the classic mind-body problem in philosophy and its literary afterlife in Romanticism and Modernism. We will also engage the basic methodological question of how to do philosophy and literature together without reducing one to the other.
LIT314 What is Critical Theory?
Crosslists: AMES 316; CULANTH 314; ROMST 314
Professor Nima Bassiri
Tu/Th 11:45am – 1:00pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
The term “critical theory” has recently become a hot button issue in the United States. Over the past few years, critical theory along with related fields of study like critical race theory have become flashpoints of moral panic. But what exactly is critical theory? Why is it so dangerous, and why are some so aggrieved by the ideas that it offers? This class will offer an introduction to fundamental texts and concepts in the history of critical theory broadly conceived. All our readings will be primary literature from what might be dubbed a ‘critical theory canon’ and are intended to introduce students in the humanities and qualitative social sciences to essential and foundational materials. We will not only come to understand what critical theory is but also how it allows us to interrogate and reimagine core social, political, and ethical concepts such as freedom, capitalism, subjectivity, colonialism, race, violence, and secularism.
LIT344S Black Feminist Experimentation
Crosslists: VMS404S; ENG 352S; CINE 344S; GSF 344S; ICS 301; CMAC 344S; AAAS357S; DOCST345S
Professor Zakiyyah Jackson
M/W 4:40pm – 5:55pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
This course examines black feminist experimentation in fiction, poetry, film, video, historiography, and theory. It explores what becomes possible when literary and visual works defy the rules of genre, medium, and tradition, and when creativity refuses respectability and fixed representations of black womanhood and femininity. What new forms emerge from the collapse of convention? What remains of gender and sexual identity when black feminist artists break the rules? By rejecting standard narrative protocols and demands for “authentic” or “positive” representation, this course treats art as a laboratory for thought—testing the limits of form and imagining what lies beyond racialized norms of type and aesthetic value.
LIT350 Brains, Everywhere
Crosslists: GSF 350; LSGS 350; NEUROSCI 250; ROMST 350
Professor Antonio Viego
W/F 10:05am – 11:20am
Location TBD
No prerequisites
Over the course of the last 3 decades, we have the witnessed the spectacularly speedy rise of the “neurosciences,” an historical event characterized by some critics as a “neuro-revolution” that has, in turn, given rise to a “neuro-society” and “neuro-cultures” and “neuro-subjects.” In this seminar we will track this history and ask ourselves precisely what kind of change in meaning might “neuro” effect in the disciplines that were previously “neuro”-free? If there is a neuro-turn in the humanities and social sciences, what is it exactly that’s “turning”? The “brain” plays a special role in all of this. The “brain” now possesses star power, celebrity status. Its endless imaging makes it the 21st century “centerfold.” We will look at recent scholarship on brain imaging techniques such as the work of anthropologist Joseph Dumit and the work of historians of science like Francisco Vidal to understand the role the brain has played in the rise of the neurosciences. Relatedly, we will consider how the brain has also become the point of discussion creating opportunities for different fields of study to potentially engage each other’s research to ask broad questions about “personhood/subjectivity,” knowledge, “mind/body,” “self/ego,” “emotion/affect.” We will read the work by philosophers like Catherine Malabou and Nicolas Rose, feminist and science studies theorist Elizabeth Wilson, sociologist Victoria Pitts-Taylor, anthropologist Joseph Dumit, affective neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, Disability and Trauma Studies scholar, m. remi yergeau, and neuro-psychoanalytic theorist Mark Solms.
LIT354S Into to Psychoanalytic Theory
Crosslists: GSF 354S; LSGS 354S; PSY 254S
Professor Antonio Viego
W/F 11:45am – 1:00pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
In this seminar we will read key works in psychoanalytic theory by its inventor, Sigmund Freud such as Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality, Interpretation of Dreams, "Mourning and Melancholia," an early case study "Anna O.," The Ego and the Id, and Civilization and Its Discontents. We'll also read the work of important psychoanalytic theorists, commentators, and historians that include Adam Phillips, Jamieson Webster, Darian Leader, Judith Butler, Jonathan Lear, and Eli Zaretsky. We will explore psychoanalytic theory by focusing on specific topics such as hysteria, perversion, sexuality, repression, narcissism, the unconscious, and the id/ego/superego. Throughout the semester, we will examine the relationship in psychoanalysis between theory and practice as well as entertain the possibility that the theories based on clinical practice might have some applicability for grappling with questions concerning power, politics, conceived in a global context, and what philosopher Michel Foucault referred to in his later work as the “care of the self.” Is psychoanalysis dead? What is the point of psychoanalysis? Is psychoanalysis feasible in today’s world? How is psychoanalysis different from psychology? How is psychoanalysis taken up in the neurosciences? What are the differences between psychoanalysis and the relatively new field, neuro-psychoanalysis?
LIT366S Art and Activism
Crosslists: German 375S; AMES 375S; VMS 377S
Professor Negar Mottahedeh
Tu/Th 11:45am – 1:00pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
History of modern revolutionary movements and social movements and impact on intellectual and artistic production; contemporary developments in manifesto writing in a global context.
LIT383S Breakdown: Madness, Self, Fiction
Crosslists: GSF 383S; PSY 283S
Professor Cate Reilly
W/F 1:25pm – 2:40pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
This course is a study of madness, mental illness, and psychological distress as experienced and accounted for from literary and philosophical perspectives. How should an individual’s declaration of spiritual health or illness by understood? What critical tools can literature bring to the study of the soul’s suffering as professed in the first person? How might the humanities offer a different perspective on mental life than psychiatric and neuroscientific accounts? To consider these questions, we focus on testimonies of mental strife in a transnational/historical frame, attending particular to the role of factors like gender and race in determining who is labeled mad and who declared sane. Literary selections span different movements ranging from Romanticism and Realism to Modernism and contemporary neurofiction. The course considers these texts in dialogue with ancient treatises on afflictions of the soul, continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and research in the history of psychiatry. Authors include, but are not limited to Descartes, Dostoevsky, Freud, Foucault, Gogol, James, Malabou, Tolstoy, Rhys, Spivak.
LIT460S Weil, Beauvoir, Murdoch
Crosslists: ENGLISH 460S; GSF 460S; PHIL 460S
Professor Toril Moi
M/W 1:25pm – 2:40pm
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
Simone Weil (1909-44), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86), and Iris Murdoch (1919-99) are towering figures in the history of European philosophy. Yet they have all, in different ways, become somewhat marginal to the philosophical mainstream. All three wrote on ethics. Weil wrote on labor, society, affliction and grace. Beauvoir wrote novels, memoirs, and The Second Sex, a groundbreaking feminist analysis of women’s situation. Inspired by Weil, Murdoch wrote about attention and the good, and went on to become one of the UKs leading novelists. The course will introduce students to their writing across genres, and situate their work in relation to their respective national traditions.
LIT524S AI Ethics and Aesthetics
Crosslist: CMAC 524S; VMS 524S; JAM 524S
Professor Luciana Parisi
Th 1:25pm – 3:55pm
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
This course engages with theories of aesthetics and ethics to examine how artificial intelligence models in contemporary planetary culture mediate and entangle the sensible and the ethical. From the generation of text, sound, and images to the production of literary genres, musical forms, and visual styles, the rapid diffusion of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has exceeded the revolutionary transformation brought about by the Internet in the 1990s. As Large Language Models and other generative systems increasingly function as culture machines, they transform digital processes into structural articulations of meaning, value, and relation. In this context, it becomes urgent to ask what has happened to the relation between sensibility and ethical life today.
LIT576S Antonio Gramsci
Crosslist: ITALIAN 588S
Professor Roberto Dainotto
M/W 11:45am – 1:00pm
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
“If one wants to study the conception of a world-view that has not been exposed systematically by its author (and whose essential coherence is to be found not in a single essay or in a series of essays, but in the entire development of all his intellectual work, in which the elements of such view of the world are implicit), we need to do careful, preliminarily philological work, carried out with the greatest scruples of exactness, of scientific honesty, of intellectual loyalty, and without preconceptions or prejudice.” Taking as a starting point Gramsci’s note from notebook 16 § 2, this course proposes a philological reading of the fragmentary Prison Notebooks to reconstruct both the “world-view” and the possible political uses implicit in such Gramscian concepts as hegemony, praxis, Renaissance, Reformation, popular literature, Americanism, subalternity…
LIT614S Power of the Story
Crosslists: VMS 619S; ROMST 614S; RELIGION 614S
Professor Markos Hadjiannou and Rey Chow
Tu/Th 10:05am – 11:20am
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
When elaborating on the age-old figure of the storyteller, the cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote that the story is essentially different from information. Whereas information has to do with instantaneous verifiability (and thus, one might say, disposability), the story’s lifespan is much longer, as its meanings resonate through different storytellers, communities, artistic and narrative traditions.
With this comparison as a point of departure, we will examine three exemplary cases from the West, from which we outline certain grand narratives that have had a large impact on thought, belief systems, aesthetic production and theoretical interpretation: the stories of Oedipus, Narcissus and Jesus.
LIT626S Theory Technology Difference
Crosslists: GSF 626S; ICS 561S; ISS 626S; CMAC 626S; ROMST 626S; AAAS 626S; JAM 626S
Professor Zakiyyah Jackson
W 11:45am – 2:15pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
The goal of this course is to think critically about the nature of technology and its role in social life, as well as its effects on the earth. We examine how technologies emerge within complex causal networks that distribute difference through imperial racialization and contemporary forms of colonialism. Central questions include: What is technology? How do social values become embedded in technical systems? Has technology become autonomous, shaping how we think, live, and act? Under what conditions might existing technologies be redirected toward liberatory ends? By engaging these questions, the course develops critical perspectives on the metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political dimensions of technological life.
LIT650S History of Mental Illness
Crosslists: HISTORY 650S; NEUROSCI 650S; PSY 650S
Professor Nima Bassiri
W 3:05pm – 5:35pm
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
What is madness? Historical analysis offers a variety of answers to this question. This course will provide students with a broad introduction to the modern history of mental illness, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will cover a diverse set of issues, including the disciplinary formation of psychiatry and neurology, new medical understandings of pathology, and the political assumptions and ramifications of defining and redefining madness in the North Atlantic and abroad. The course will end with an examination of some contemporary issues framed in historical context — namely, the rise of pharmacological treatments, transcultural views of madness, and the growing prevalence of brain-based theories of mental disorders.
LIT681S Wittgenstein
Crosslists: ENGLISH 582S; PHIL 681S
Professor Toril Moi
M 3:05pm – 5:35pm
102 Friedl
No prerequisites
Key questions in literary theory reconsidered from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Cavell). Topics will vary, but may include: meaning, language, interpretation, intentions, fiction, realism and representation, voice, writing, the subject, the body, the other, difference and identity, the politics of theory. New perspectives on canonical texts on these subjects.
LIT684 Global Revolution
Professor Cate Reilly
W/F 3:05pm – 4:20pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
This course is an exploration of the concept of revolution as a key engine of social, political, and cultural modernity. We cover literary works and the political philosophy of calls for revolution, from the English Civil War to more current revolutionary movements, such as Occupy and the Zapatistas. The course places particular emphasis on the French and Russian Revolutions as key critical nodes and touchstones for other major revolutionary struggles (Haiti, 1848, 1968 in worldwide context). It is guided by an approach attendant to the philosophy of history. What role does aesthetic and philosophical writing play in revolutionary struggle? How do such works construct a revolutionary subject? Figure temporality? Propose internationalism? Readings from Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Platonov, C.L.R. James, Mao, and others.
LIT690S-01 Gilles Deleuze
Crosslists: ROMST 690S
Professor Michael Hardt
M 10:05am – 12:35pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
This seminar will focus on Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with the history of European philosophy, primarily in the 1960s. Texts may include his books on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant, and Spinoza, as well as his independent volumes, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. We will read extracts from these philosophers in order to situate Deleuze’s analysis of them. Previous knowledge of the European philosophers will be helpful but not expected. Similarly, reading knowledge of French will be helpful but not expected.
LIT690S-02 Dreamworlds and Ruins
Crosslists: GERMAN 690S; VMS 690S; ROMST 690S
Professor Negar Mottahedeh
Tu 3:05pm – 5:35pm
Location TBD
No prerequisites
An exploration of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk). The seminar will trace Benjamin’s engagement with 19th-century Parisian arcades as allegorical sites where the phantasmagoria of capitalism, commodification, and modernity are both constructed and unraveled. We will read the Arcades Project alongside key thinkers (Marx, Baudelaire, Proust, Nietzsche, Aragon) and concepts (aura, allegory, dialectical image, shock, ruins, dreamworlds). Students will grapple with m text’s methodology—its citation-heavy structure, unfinished nature, and its radical challenge to linear historiography.
LIT810S Jazz + Literature
Crosslists: AAAS 810S; MUSIC 810S
Professor Maya Kronfeld
Thu 10:05am – 12:35pm
Location TBD
An advanced seminar for graduate students interested in working at the intersection of Black music studies and verbal art (fiction and poetry). We will combine hands-on musical analysis with literary and theoretical exploration, with an emphasis on critical writings by jazz practitioners past and present.
LIT899 Interdisciplinary Debates
Crosslists: GSF 960S
Professor Robyn Wiegman
Tu 10:05am – 12:35pm
Location TBD
Prerequisites: GSF 701 or its equivalent
This seminar focuses on the work of Hortense Spillers, whose 1987 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most important essays in feminist theory in the last half century. Reading across Spillers’s archive, we will explore the thinkers who influenced her and those who provoked her interventions, while devoting the final weeks to tracing her work’s impact on recent conversations in Black feminist theory, Trans Studies, and Afro-pessimism. The course is part of the 2026-27 annual theme in GSF on the Feminist 1980s. It is oriented toward doctoral candidates who have successfully completed GSF 701: Foundations in Feminist Theory or its equivalent, but will consider MA students with the relevant training in feminist studies. Admission is by permission only.