An introduction to the history and concepts of monsters and monstrosity. We will apply readings in literary and cultural theory to case studies drawn from biblical literature and iconography from the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean myths and cosmologies, Victorian-era gothic novels, and contemporary popular culture to study monstrous beings from the earliest examples until the present. We will center questions concerning the human creation (and fear) of monstrous beings, the cultural specificity of terror, the social significance of monsters, and how the history of monsters informs, and has been informed by, the ancient world. No previous knowledge of the Bible, literature, or monsters is required or presumed.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 12

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 112Y

Prerequisites: None. Open to First-Years only.

Instructor: Jarrard

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; REP - Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy

Other Categories: FYS - First Year Seminar

Typical Periods Offered: Every four years

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

From the mid-20th century to 2021, women writers have been major players globally in the upsurge of what is now referred to as speculative fiction--a literary supergenre or umbrella term for a spectrum of “what if” fictions: fairy tale, science fiction, horror, dystopian, magic realism, surrealism, fantasy. We will explore together short stories and novels written in the last four decades. Class discussions will aim at interpretation and appreciation of these peculiar and powerful literary texts as well as reflection on their particular historical and cultural context.

In particular, we will be curious about how these authors play with a spectrum of gender - in their own lives and in their writing. The texts include fiction written in English and fiction translated into English; we will address the issue of reading works in translation. Speakers and students of languages other than English, are encouraged to offer their insights into the necessary friction between an original text and its English translation.

Among the authors to be read: Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, Samanta Schweblin, Ursula Le Guin, Basma Abdel Aziz, Eden Robinson, Vandana Singh. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 40

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 119

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Sides

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

"World Literature” views a literary work as the product of local culture, then of regional or national culture, and finally of global culture. Critics of world literature argue that a text's richness may be lost in translation, that too often a privileged Western literary tradition forces “other” literatures into a relationship of belatedness and inferiority, and that world literature leads to the globalization of culture-and as the global language becomes predominantly English, the world of literature will be known through that single language alone. This course offers an opportunity to not only read rich and exciting literary texts from ancient eras to the contemporary moment but also after reading key critical essays that defend and critique “World Literature” to reflect on the cultural politics that directly or indirectly determines who reads what. Range of texts from contemporary Arabic short fiction, science fiction from China and Africa, global gothic fiction, and poetic forms across time and cultures. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Dougherty

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

The Athenian playwrights of the Classical period, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, produced brilliant tragedies and comedies that continue to engage us today and to define our notion of drama. At the same time, the Athenian people forged the principles that form the basis for our own political institutions. The element of performance, common to both drama and democracy, provides an important key to understanding this interesting confluence of theater and politics, and this class will combine the close reading (in English) of ancient Greek drama with a consideration of the plays in their original context. We will also address the interplay between Greek tragedy and comedy, assessing each genre's capacity for social and political criticism as well as the subversion of Athenian values and norms.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 211

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken CLCV 310.

Instructor: Dougherty

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as CLCV 310.

Every story is a travel story, and this class introduces students to the theme of travel as it appears in a range of literary texts from Homer's Odyssey to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Toni Morrison's novel Home. We will focus on the ways that mobility, transience, and unsettledness function in these works both to confirm and challenge our ideas of home, identity (both personal and cultural), and the possibilities of return.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 212

Prerequisites:

Instructor: Dougherty

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

We tend to place epic and lyric poetry at opposite ends of the spectrum: epic poetry is musty, monumental, and masculine while lyric poems are fresh, exquisite, and feminine. This class will read and discuss the works of those contemporary lyric poets who reach across this divide to embrace Homeric epic -- revising these ancient poems for modern times, for different audiences, in new forms. The class will read the Iliad and Odyssey together with the works of contemporary poets (e.g., Anne Carson, Louise Gluck, Alice Oswald, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott) to explore the nature of this contrapuntal conversation about poetic form across time and genre. All readings will be in English.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 221

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: Dougherty

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course begins with a brief history of European colonization and includes a unit on French expansion as it relates to immigrant communities in Paris. Next, the class will cultivate a broad sense of the period of independences, decolonization, and the formation of new nations as a period in world history, once again contextualizing the different waves of immigration to the city of Paris. Students will use Parisian sites and a variety of materials available locally to study immigration patterns and the recent development of the Parisian cityscape while privileging immigrant perspective. Weekly assignments, which can be done flexibly, will involve visits to museums, monuments, neighborhoods, markets, and cafés. A number of local scholars, artists, and activists will provide guest lectures to guide our study. Each student will devise a project that will involve exploring the city from a viewpoint that falls within their interest, defined through discipline or theme. The latter part of the course will consist of independent work involving exploration of the city through the prism of the student’s project and it will be done in close consultation with the instructor. Interviews and shadowing of individuals (with prior permission) who are living the immigrant experience will inform the final project, which will take the form of a multimedia journal.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: FREN 236

Prerequisites: A special hybrid course offered for Wellesley students studying abroad at American University in Paris.

Instructor:

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

In East Asia, the rise of the girl in literary and popular culture coincides with the appearance of modernity itself. Beginning with the ‘modern girl,' we move chronologically, exploring coming-of-age tropes in East Asian fiction, manga, anime, and film. How does the objectification of the adolescent girl illuminate issues around ethnicity, national identity, sexuality, even globalization? What national anxieties hover around girls' bodies? We read texts in English translation and explore models of female development that might aid us in our exploration of this cultural phenomenon. Secondary readings include works by Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Marianne Hirsch, Carol Gilligan, Elizabeth Grosz, among others.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 236

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Zimmerman

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course introduces students to the Chinese cultural and literary tradition through the lens of modern reception and cinematic representation. Beginning with Confucius and ending with the last emperor of the imperial period (221 BCE–1911 CE), we will explore key historical turning points, influential philosophical works, and major literary genres. By pairing historical writings (in English translation) with iconic blockbusters and arthouse films, students will analyze in what ways and to what ends film adaptations transform their source materials. We will also delve into the complex and often fraught relationships between the past and present in contemporary Sinophone contexts.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 237

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Du

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course discusses the narrative challenges posed by the Anthropocene, the current era in history in which the impact of humans on the environment imperils the very future of our planet. Reading fictional and critical texts that have emerged in different parts of the world over the course of the last three decades, we will identify the fictional tools and aesthetic strategies that writers are exploring to address the climate catastrophe.  We will discuss what the traditions of writing about biocide are to which contemporary authors can turn when creating new narratives adequate to capture the environmental crisis. We will analyze the most prominent genres involved in “green writing” and will pay close attention to the ways authors deal with the tensions between the local and the global in their narratives.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: ES 238

Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken GER 338.

Instructor: Nolden

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course meets with GER 338, which is intended for advanced German students and which has a third class meeting conducted in German.

The legends of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, with their themes of chivalry, magic, friendship, war, adventure, corruption, and nostalgia, as well as romantic love and betrayal, make up one of the most influential and enduring mythologies in our culture. This course will examine literary interpretations of the Arthurian legend, in history, epic, romance, and fiction, from the sixth century through the sixteenth, following the characters and motifs through their evolution. We will also consider some later examples of Arthuriana, in novels, comics, TV and movies, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: MER 247,CPLT 247

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Wall-Randell

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course is conducted in English and will introduce students to the cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world through selected films, music and readings. In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore how filmmakers, musicians and writers respond to social and political changes in Angola, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Mozambique and Portugal. Topics covered include colonialism; postcolonialism; wars of independence in Africa; Brazil’s military dictatorship; Portugal´s New State dictatorship; evolving national identities; and representations of trauma and memory. Readings are in English and films have subtitles.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 14

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 256,AFR 256

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Igrejas

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Typical Periods Offered: Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

A study of translation in theory and in practice, in its literal and many metaphorical senses, and of the vast multilingual world in which translation takes place. Among the possible topics: translation of literary texts, translation of sacred texts, the history and politics of translation, the lives of translators, translation and gender, translation and colonialism, machine translation and Google Translate, endangered languages, the representation of translation in literature and film, invented languages. Students taking the course at the 300 level will do a substantial independent project: a translation, a scholarly inquiry, or a combination of the two.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: One course in literature (in any language) or permission of the instructor. Competence in a language or languages other than English is useful but not necessary.

Instructor: Aadnani, Parussa

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as CPLT 375. This course can count towards the English major/minor in consultation with the instructor.

Christopher Isherwood’s autofictional Berlin Stories (1945)—featuring Sally Bowles, immortalized by Liza Minelli—inspired John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera and, later, the film adaptation (1951, 1952). These, in turn, inspired the musical Cabaret (1966). The legendary Bob Fosse directed and choreographed Cabaret for the screen (1972); the rest is cinematic history. On stage or screen, Cabaret departs from novel and play. The famed musical transforms the ‘original,’ taking the Cabaret as motif and theme, a seedy nightclub run by a sinister Master of Ceremonies. Joel Grey was the original Emcee, while Alan Cumming reinterpreted the role in Sam Mendes’ West End and Broadway productions (1998, 2014). Amid these adaptations and revivals, Isherwood published Christopher and His Kind, shedding further light on his nocturnal Berlin years (1976). This memoir was dramatized for the screen, which at last reveals the ‘real’ Sally Bowles, Jean Ross (2011). An intertextual mesh of media, stories, genres, authors, characters, and agendas, the history of Cabaret is an exciting story in itself. In this course, we will analyze most of the works mentioned, while tracing the intertextuality and history of Cabaret. That history includes the ‘divine decadence’ of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, and the beginnings of the Second World War. But the lives and afterlives of Cabaret also trace a complex queer genealogy, before and after Stonewall, which continues to this day. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 283

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: González

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

This course examines fictions whose basic reality would be familiar if not for the introduction of a magical element that undermines commonplace notions about what constitutes reality in the first place. The magical element can be a demon, talisman, physical transformation, miraculous transition in space or time, appearance of a second plane of existence, revelation of the unreality of the primary plane of existence, etc. Students will read Kafka's Metamorphosis, Queneau's The Blue Flowers, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Sokolov's School for Fools, and short stories by Borges, Cortazar, and Nabokov.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 40

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Weiner

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring

Notes:

Everyone loves ghost stories, but why? Do we believe in their truth? Do we see ghosts as something that people from other cultures or other times believe? How might the presence of ghosts be linked to historical developments, including European colonialism? In this course, we will read stories featuring ghosts from across the world and through modern history. We’ll also explore various kinds of literary criticism to see how they can help us become more aware of what we’re doing when we read ghost stories. Stories and novels will include well-known works such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Leslie Maron Silko’s Ceremony, Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and South Korean novelist Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest. The goal is to become more aware of the assumptions behind how we read and interpret these stories. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 285

Prerequisites:

Instructor: Lee

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

How is literature related to capitalism? How can one help us to understand the power of the other? This course examines their shared forms and overlapping histories. We will read literary works, accounts of capitalism as a social system and historical epoch, and criticism focused on the material basis of literature. Fiction will range from Balzac to Ling Ma. That trajectory shows the development of capitalism from the period of the industrial revolution in England to the complex supply chains of global capitalism in the present. Theorists will include Marx, Adorno, Brecht, Eric Williams, and Althusser. Issues will include the commodity form, the role of slavery and empire in the development of capitalism, class consciousness, structuralism, and neo-liberalism.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 287

Prerequisites: None.

Instructor: Y. Lee

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels have throughout their history in the United States had a complex relationship with members of minority groups, who have often been represented in racist and dehumanizing ways. Meanwhile, though, American Jews played influential roles in the development of the medium, and African-American, Latinx, Asian-American, and LGBTQ artists have more recently found innovative ways to use this medium to tell their stories. In this course, we will survey the history of comics in the U.S., focusing on the problems and opportunities they present for the representation of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference. Comics we may read include Abie the Agent, Krazy Kat, Torchy Brown, Superman, and Love & Rockets, as well as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Mira Jacob’s Good Talk.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Crosslisted Courses: ENG 290,CPLT 290

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Lambert

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

In his Republic Plato described his utopia as a land where people are divided into four classes depending on their intelligence, where a philosopher-king rules over all, and a guardian class spies and protects, where private property is forbidden and where children are taken from their parents to be raised for the state and taught only things that will increase their loyalty to the state. Eugenics is practiced, literature banished. Plato's vision has inspired socialist utopian fantasies and dystopian warnings alike. Students will read Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What's to Be Done?, H.G. Wells' Time Machine and A Modern Utopia, Evgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. We will examine the ideas and plans of Plato, Charles Fourier, Jeremy Bentham, Charles Darwin, Cecil Rhodes and others as they take shape on the pages of the novels we read. And we will consider the extent to which the utopias we read are prophesy or proscription.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 20

Prerequisites: None

Instructor: Weiner

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

The term “speculative fiction” has emerged as an inclusive gesture towards the most exciting fiction being written right now. Under its umbrella thrive fiction categories like Gothic, horror, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, dystopian, and environmental fiction (plus heady blends of all these).

Writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQIA+ writers have figured prominently in the contemporary (post 2000) explosion of speculative fiction—writing about “what if” in the future or in the past has proved liberating as a critique of colonial legacies, an exploration of transcultural and transnational experiences in the lives of immigrants, and a re-imagining of gender.

Entering the world of Anglophone speculative fiction requires, too, reflecting on the particular historical and cultural contexts of these texts and exploring the speculative fiction genre through scholarly essays and online literary magazines. Among the authors: Helen Oyeyemi, Vandana Singh, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Larissa Lai, and Claire Colman.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 319

Prerequisites: A 200-level ENG course, or CPLT 180, or ENG 119, or permission of the instructor.

Instructor: Sides

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes:

The posthuman points to a deep crisis of humanism. Its most powerful critique targets the fundamental malfunction of the existing social order, epistemological paradigm, and modes of governance, production, trade, and culture that have menaced the human conditions and harmed the planetary ecological system. The posthuman thinking in an East Asian context motivates a reevaluation of various modernity projects and reconsiders the position and potentials of humanity in terms of planetary consciousness. In contemporary East Asian culture, posthuman images are particularly applied to reflections concerning the deteriorating ecological system, evolution or devolution enabled by mutations of the political economy, and above all, an awareness of multiplicity that replaces the human-centric singular form of globalization. This seminar guides students to rethink about concepts like gender, sex, class, race, and species in the emerging cultural contexts of the Chthulucene, the Neo-Baroque, virtual reality, digital consciousness, and the metaverse. The course integrates theoretical studies to case analyses of literary works, films, TV dramas, video games, and digital artworks from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and the Asian diaspora across the Pacific.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 328

Prerequisites: One course at the 200 or 300 level on East Asian literature, history, or culture, or CPLT 180 or another CPLT course at the 200 or 300 level.

Instructor: M. Song

Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

This course narrates three thousand years of writing practices, with the Chinese script—the shared writing system in premodern East Asian—as a through line. We will focus on the social implications of writing, investigating questions such as how writing transformed political systems and interacted with ordinary people. Units and topics of this course include: mechanics of writing systems, empire formation and writing standardization, reading and writing practices in East Asia, evolving relationships between writings and (local, vernacular, and national) languages, writing as a technology, cross-cultural interactions and receptions, and finally, writing and gender. For the past two millennia, East Asia has been a source of media innovation. As we migrate with the Chinese script from bamboo slips onto paper, from printed books onto computer screens, we will tackle the theoretical toolkit and historical precedents for examining our current age of media disruption.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 346

Prerequisites: One course at the 200 or 300 level on East Asian literature, history or culture; or in Comparative Literature; or by permission of the instructor.

Instructor: Du

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the director. Open to juniors and seniors.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Prerequisites: Permission of the director.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.

When we talk about food, we think about personal passions, individual diets and eating behaviors, but we might also think about cultural traditions, consumption disparities and food insecurities, about public health and sustainability, animal rights, deforestation, and genome edited crops. Clearly, the topic challenges us to address difficult questions of intersectionality (of the personal and the political, the local and the global, the human and the non-human). In this seminar we will learn to translate academic discourses into public writing formats that might include op-eds, social media posts, (cook) book reviews, Wikipedia entries, restaurant reviews, and portraits of food activists.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 12

Crosslisted Courses: ES 362

Prerequisites: Open to Juniors and Seniors, or by permission of the instructor. Not open to students who have taken GER 362.

Instructor: Nolden

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Other Categories: CSPW - Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: This course meets with GER 362.

Filmmakers in the modern Middle East and North Africa have been at the forefront of intellectual engagement with their societies’ major challenges. By narrating the lives of individuals caught in historical circumstances not of their choosing, they have addressed issues such as incomplete decolonization and economic exploitation, cultural and political dogmatisms, the politicization and policing of religious, gender and sexual identities, foreign intervention and occupation, and dictatorship, civil war, and displacement. We will engage with the form, content, and historical contexts of a range of films and analyze how they leverage aesthetic, affective, and effective image, speech, and sound to persuade their audiences.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: MES 364,CPLT 364

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructors. At least one course in Middle Eastern Studies (apart from Arabic language) will be required and preference will be given to Seniors and Juniors.

Instructor: Aadnani (Middle Eastern Studies), Kapteijns (History)

Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes:

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 25

Prerequisites: CPLT 360 and permission of the department.

Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring

Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.

A study of translation in theory and in practice, in its literal and metaphorical senses alike, and of the multilingual world in which translation takes place. Topics: translation of literary texts, translation of sacred texts, the history and politics of translation, the lives of translators, translation and gender, machine translation, adaptation as translation. Students taking the course at the 300 level will do a substantial independent project: a translation, a scholarly inquiry, or a combination of the two.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 30

Prerequisites: One course in literature (in any language) or permission of the instructor. Competence in a language or languages other than English is useful but not necessary.

Instructor: Aadnani, Parussa

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Fall

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall

Notes: This course is also offered at the 200-level as CPLT 275. This course can count towards the English major/minor in consultation with the instructor.

This seminar guides students to explore the political, cultural, and epistemological changes represented in Chinese science fiction. It contextualizes the genre’s evolution in the intellectual history of modern China, where imagining the future of China is often the focus of contending ideologies and intellectual trends. The course introduces students to three booms of Chinese science fiction, which all happened when China went through drastic changes. The contemporary new wave of science fiction particularly presents a subversive vision of China’s pursuit of power and wealth, a dystopian counterpart to the government-promoted “Chinese dream.” This course examines the cutting-edge literary experiments that characterize the new wave, and studies the transgression of gender, class, and nation in science fiction that evokes sensations ranging from the uncanny to the sublime, from the corporeal to the virtual, and from the apocalyptic to the transcendent.

Units: 1

Max Enrollment: 15

Crosslisted Courses: CPLT 382

Prerequisites: One course at the 200 or 300 level on Chinese literature, history or culture, or by permission of the instructor.

Instructor: O'Krent

Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature

Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Spring

Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered

Notes: