Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies Major

This course presents an interdisciplinary introduction to key concepts in gender studies. Focusing on the way in which gender operates in different cultural domains, this class investigates the manner in which race, culture, ethnicity, and class intersect with gender.

This storytelling course deepens students’ engagement with creative writing across multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms. By examining a range of literary models alongside their own original work, students will explore the dynamic relationship between reading and writing, voice and context, and form and content.
Recommended prerequisite CLCS 100 and CLCS 110.
(Course previously taught as CLCS 120)

This creative writing course fosters and critical and creative encounter with the city of Paris, approached as a mythical urban landscape; one that lives and breathes as a protagonist through French literature and film. Students will critically examine how Paris has been imagined, constructed, and contested across time, considering the ways in which artistic and theoretical discourses shape and are shaped by the city’s evolving cultural identity.
The travel component serves as the culmination of this encounter, moving students from analysis to creative praxis through daily site-specific writing prompts and workshop-style discussions. Core questions driving this exploration include: In what forms does the city persist as a protagonist across literary and cinematic history? What voices emerge from its ruins and reinventions? How do translation and transfiguration mediate our understanding of place, memory, and loss? And how might deepened cultural awareness complicate the allure of Paris as an aestheticized and mythologized space?
Three thematic modules structure this inquiry:
The poetry of Charles Baudelaire, foregrounding the spatial poetics of the city;
Surrealism’s paradoxical approach to time—both defining and destabilizing Parisian temporality;
The French New Wave (contrasted with foreign cinematic representations of Paris), with a focus on translation, transfiguration, and the allegorical play of light and otherness.
(Course previously taught as CLCS 105T)

This course engages students in the critical study of cinema through close analysis and key theoretical frameworks. Examining film theory, narrative and documentary structures, cinematography, lighting, sound, casting, and location, students will develop a sophisticated understanding of film language and its cultural implications.
Coursework emphasizes both scholarly analysis and practical application, requiring students to critically engage with canonical and contemporary films while producing two applied film projects. Through sustained inquiry, students will interrogate philosophical and culture-specific assumptions embedded in visual storytelling, moving beyond passive reception toward an active, adaptable approach to film interpretation.
Structured into concentrated modules, the course covers advanced film analysis, contemporary criticism, audience reception, and practical applications, fostering a deeper engagement with the aesthetic, theoretical, and cultural dimensions of cinema.
(Course previously taught as CLCS 150)

This course offers an in-depth study of film language through critical analysis and practical engagement with cinema. Students examine key theoretical and technical aspects of filmmaking—including narrative and documentary structures, cinematography, lighting, sound, casting, and location—while interrogating the philosophical and cultural frameworks that shape visual storytelling.
In preparation for an international film festival experience, students engage with concentrated modules on film analysis, contemporary criticism, audience reception, and practical applications. These studies provide the critical foundation for on-site participation in the festival, where students will engage with screenings, discussions, and industry panels. Additionally, video-making workshops on location offer hands-on opportunities to apply their knowledge, bridging theory and practice in a dynamic, immersive setting.
(Course previously taught as CLCS 150T)

The unique alchemy of word and sound, of music, literature and theater led to the creation of a complex art form - Opera. The objective of this course is to familiarize students with all the elements that contributed to its popularity throughout the centuries. It is meant to enlarge the cultural horizon through a historic prospective from its origins to present day, overcoming the largely diffused pre-concept that opera is only for connoisseurs. Based on extensive listenings, readings and discussions, the course emphasizes the musical and literary aspects of opera history, as well as its theatrical, architectural and political context. It presents students with the essential elements needed to attend a performance, the variety of singing voices and the complexity of preparation and staging of an opera. It encourages students to comparative listening of different versions and reading of the original literary sources.

The construction of memory is one of the fundamental processes by which the workings of culture can be studied. Every country, every culture and every community has a specific memory culture that finds expression in a congruence of texts: of literature and film, of law and politics, of memorial rituals, and historiography. The aim of this course is to enable students to recognize different forms of the construction, representation and archiving of memory; to analyze processes of individual and collective identity formation through memory; and to understand the power differentials operant in the negotiations and performance of a national memory.

This course covers popular music genres, generally defined as music produced for commercial purposes and transmitted through mass media to a wide audience, and their relationship with popular culture. Drawing on sociology, media studies and cultural studies, it will examine the cultural significance of popular music genres such as rock’n’roll, punk, heavy metal, hip hop, rap, techno, industrial etc., with reference to issues such as space, ethnicity, class and gender. It will further explore how and to what end the creation, circulation and consumption of popular music tend to be shaped by record companies and corporate business styles. Finally, reflecting upon how popular music is, in many ways, a direct reflection of its times, it will show how it is mediated by historical, geographical, political, economical and technological factors.

Science fiction narratives may be defined as speculative fictions, ideal allegorical vehicles eliciting theoretical reflection on the state of contemporary culture and society and motivating social reform. As such, the main objective of this course is to consider several major contemporary socio-cultural issues through the unique lens provided by writers and filmmakers of the science-fiction tradition. The issues, allowing for variances from year to year, will include questions regarding gender and Otherness, the hypothesized deterioration of a human-world bond, modern apocalyptic anxieties, genetic engineering, intersections of ideology and communication technologies. Authors and filmmakers may include: Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guinn, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, William Gibson; Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, Andrew Niccol, Jean-Luc Godard, Lana and Andy Wachowski

The literature of Prague lies in the city's complex web of identities, a web created by social upheaval through the ages. Beginning with sixteenth-century tales of the Golem, the clay figure animated by Rabbi Loew to protect the city's Jewish community, students will investigate how Prague's writers have responded to the politics of their times by embracing the surreal and the ambiguous. In particular, this class will look at how these authors have found inspiration in the city itself. Reading includes Franz Kafka's evocation of the early twentieth-century city and a selection of works by more recent writers such as Weil, Kundera, and Hakl. Studying the way these writers repeatedly draw on each other through the idea of the city as a text, students will visit their haunts in Prague and its surroundings, and map their works onto the city's landscape and onto its history, with the surreal Kafka museum as a starting point.

Colonialism has left its traces not only very obviously on the former colonies themselves but also on the face of the cities of the colonisers. Host of the ''Congo Conference'' that carved up the continent in 1885, Germany was late into the ''scramble for Africa.'' However, it has long been implicated in colonialism through trade, scientific exploration, and Hamburg’s position as a ''hinterland'' of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Seeking to explore colonial echoes in less obvious places, namely in contemporary Berlin and Hamburg, the course asks how we can remember colonialism in the modern world, become conscious of its traces, and encourage critical thinking about the connections between colonialism, migration and globalization. As an Academic Travel, this course will include an on-site component where the class will team up with postcolonial focus groups in Berlin and Hamburg, going onto the street and into the museum to retrace the cities’ colonial connections, and to experience and engage with the colonial past through performance-based activities.

This course explores queer solo performance and theater as playful acts of transgression that challenge and reimagine political identities shaped by race, ethnicity, HIV status, class, gender, and sexuality. These performances, often rooted in autobiography, simultaneously unsettle and engage community norms. The term ''queer'' is examined as a dynamic, destabilizing force that provokes through its refusal to be easily defined, embracing multiplicity and fluidity in identity. Students will investigate the political implications of these queer performances and their potential to infuse personal identity with collective utopian aspirations. Through performative exercises, theoretical reflections, and autobiographical monologues, students are encouraged to explore and articulate their own “forbidden acts”, blurring the lines between theatrical expression and ideological engagement. This course invites participants to expand their understanding of queer identity and creative defiance, crafting new narratives that reflect their unique experiences.

This course looks at poverty as it is portrayed in contemporary literature, film, television, painting, music and street magazines. Students will explore how these representations compare to economic and social indices such as income, Living Standards Measurement surveys, welfare statistics, poverty indexes and poverty determinants. For these latter determinants the class will take Switzerland, a country in which the extremes of poverty and riches are quite subtle, as our case study. The overall goals of this course are 1) to compare different forms of representation and to recognize and be able to distinguish among the many faces and facets of poverty in a wealthy nation and 2) to critically explore the ideologies underlying mainstream representations of ''the poor'' or ''the marginalized'' and to ask how effective such representations are in triggering social change.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French authors and artists were instrumental in shaping the imaginary of the ''Orient'', with a myriad of paintings and texts housed for public consumption in national cultural institutions. Students will use the French case to explore the politics of representation: the creation and objectification of an Oriental ''Other''. On-the-ground field study in museums, archives and galleries of Paris (the former colonial capital) and Marseille (the ''Gateway to North Africa'') will help students to investigate the ties that bind the visual arts and literature with the exercising of knowledge and power, and to read literary and artistic works as shaped by their cultural and historical circumstances. The strong Arab and Berber presence in both cities today, in particular from France's former colonies in North Africa, will provide the impetus to question how contemporary writers and artists explicitly and implicitly engage with and renegotiate these ''cultural artifacts'', and what broader significance this might have for questions of representation and identity, Self and Other, in the (not only French) present. Students will read contemporary texts by authors such as Leïla Sebbar and Assia Djébar and explore work by visual artists including Zineb Sedira and Zoulikha Bouabdellah, using their, and our own, ''encounters'' in the Louvre, the Pompidou Center, the Arab World Institute, MuCEM and smaller galleries to consider the significance of reappropriating the gaze and of the relationship between visual pleasure and politics, while questioning who art is ''for'' and where the ''representation business'' takes us. (The course may count toward the French Studies major in consultation with the coordinator of the French Studies program.)

In this course, students will explore the cultures that produce and are reproduced by our current food systems in Europe, touching upon the local, national and global dimensions. This course will examine the cultural, ecological, political, and geographic forces at work influencing the chain of production from farm to table. In particular, students will consider the contemporary food systems in Italy and Switzerland as well as their cultural and historical roots. Students will learn more about what it takes to become an active food citizen as the class considers where food comes from here in Europe and how the food we eat shapes who we are, both literally and figuratively. This course includes a travel component to Italy and Switzerland where students will study first hand some of the concepts discussed, including terroir, slow food, and local farm to table movements.

This course approaches film from an ecocritical perspective to explore how the medium of film articulates relations between the environment and human rights. In recent decades, scholars have increasingly examined how film represents ecological issues and humans' involvement with those issues, particularly with regards to environmental disaster and climate change. The course aims to make students familiar with those debates by examining a variety of film genres -- blockbuster, documentary, animation, among others -- to offer a survey in reading film ecocritically, from a human rights’ perspective. Students will gain experience in analyzing films as texts and in applying ecocritical theory to those films and the ethical issues surrounding them, from production to narrative, and distribution to reception. Screenings, theoretical readings, class discussion, video-making and writing assignments will help students develop a critical awareness of how film tells the story of our complex relation with the environment against the backdrop of contemporary human rights regimes.

This course examines gender, ethnic, class, family, age, religious relationships within contemporary Morocco. It first provides students with a historical overview of Morocco since its independence in 1956, focusing on the monarchies of Hassan II and Mohammed VI the current king. It explores the power dynamics that exist in a society that is predominantly patrilinear and where gender roles are mostly divided along a binary system; it studies the place of the individual in a society where the collective ego prevails; it considers the place of Berber identity within Moroccan society and finally it explores Sufism as a counter-power to any form of Islamic rigorism. All the themes studied are substantiated with presentations by Moroccan scholars working in the fields of sociology, gender, ethnic, religious, and music studies. (Knowledge of French recommended.)

This travel course will focus on forced migration and refugees, with a travel component that takes the class to Greece, one of the major European nodes of the current refugees crisis. The course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the political, social and cultural contexts of forced migration and is coupled with the study of a number of imaginative responses that help to shape attitudes and positions towards refugees. Throughout this course, students will study ideas of human rights as they relate to refugees, political and theoretical concepts that help to think through notions of belonging, sovereignty, welcome, and a range of cultural narratives, including films, public art, theater and literature, that bring their own critical interventions to bear on the emergent discourses surrounding refugees.

This course is designed as an introduction to the field of postcolonial studies. Readings will familiarise students with a diversity of ''world literature'' and grant an understanding of key debates in postcolonial studies. As postcolonialism is not a unified field of study, the course engages with different theoretical understandings of the term and queries what it even means to be ''postcolonial.'' When exactly does the postcolonial begin? What are the implications of using such a broad umbrella term to designate writings from around the world? Students will explore depictions of the colonial encounter and decolonisation, question the links between colonialism and globalisation, and examine constructions of East and West, Global North and Global South. Central to the course will be the themes of: power and violence; economics and class; land and nation; authenticity and development; gender and sexuality; history and memory; the politics of literature; and the politics of print culture. Students will read a diverse and broad historical selection of texts from a variety of geographical locations including, India, Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Jamaica. Literary texts will be paired with theoretical readings from such critics as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ann McLintock, Benita Parry, Franz Fanon, and Edward Said. Although the main focus of study is literature, the course will adopt an interdisciplinary approach, understanding literary works as products of cultural, historical, social, and political circumstances. Throughout the course, students will explore how colonial power has shaped—and continues to shape—the world in which we live.

It seems almost a cliché to say that the literature of New Zealand feeds off its often wild and varied landscape. And yet - from the Māori creation narrative to Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Man Booker Prize-winning novel ''The Luminaries'' the ideas that define New Zealand's literary history are built around and shaped by the land. Against the backdrop of the narrated landscapes themselves, this course will draw on short and longer texts by authors such as Katherine Mansfield, Keri Hulme, Janet Frame, Owen Marshall, Hone Tuwhare, Catton and Kapka Kassabova, as well as on related visual culture (e.g. work by filmmaker Jane Campion), to explore the relationship between humans and the environment in New Zealand literature, focusing particularly on the central South Island and its East and West Coasts. How does this relationship negotiate notions of belonging and a ''place to stand'' in a postcolonial country where land is symbolic not only of internal, but also of external conflict? How do more recent migrants make critical use of these ideas (Kassabova)? How do the sharp edges and isolated spaces of the landscape convey the ''small violences'' of rural New Zealand (Mansfield, Frame, Marshall)? And how does literature raise the bigger questions about the destructive power of humankind (Tuwhare)?

This course offers an overview of different masculinities as they have been represented in literature and film for the past couple decades. Students will first explore the recent developments in masculinity studies, particularly focusing on masculinity along intersectional lines. They will reflect upon the intricate ways of defining, theorizing and conceptualizing masculinity in an age that Zygmunt Bauman has defined as liquid. They will read novels such as Tomboy by French writer Nina Bouraoui, Salvation Army by Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa and watch films such as Death Proof by American film director Quentin Tarentino, Facing Mirrors by Iranian film director Negar Azarbayjani, Boys Don't Cry by American film director Kimberly Peirce.

Over 50% of the world’s population today is estimated to live in cities and this number is continuously rising. This puts tremendous pressure on city planners, developers, and governments to provide for their citizenry without putting undue stress on the environment, and without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs in turn. Culture of Cities: Sustainability will focus on four key components of what makes a city sustainable: its cultural heritage (the heritage city), the ethical values undergirding its governance (the just city), the integration of nature into the urban habitat (the green city), and patterns of food production and consumption (the food city). Students will study urban sustainability and urban systems from these perspectives in our classroom in Lugano before travelling to Zurich to see how a relatively small but prosperous city develops strategies toward a sustainable future.

Classical literary texts have been challenged, censored, banned and burned over the last two centuries with disconcerting regularity. The tradition is old, the reasons varied, and the list long containing, for instance, works by Boccaccioi, Goethe, Lewis Carroll,  Flaubert, Balzac, Hemingway, Helen Keller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rushdie, Tony Morrison, and, most recently, Maus by Art Spiegelman. This course investigates different kinds of censorship such as  pre-publication censorship, censorship by schools, libraries, and disciplinary canons, as well as the legal, social and political pressures brought to bear on authors, and publishers by entities from school boards to entire regimes. 

The class will read a range of texts that have been censored, banned or burned in order to understand the reasons and the contexts in which they were deemed unfit to be read and how the ban influenced not only the respective formation, reception and production of ''dangerous'' literature and authors, but also the notion of the reader as an endangered and vulnerable figure.

In 1619 the first slaves reached the new colonies in what is now the United States of America, founding a history of pervasive, discriminatory, racialist ideology that reaches all the way into our present. In a first part, this course will trace the history and culture of slavery from the slave trade to the civil war and emancipation and into the era of Jim Crow, the civil rights movement and beyond. Students will read a range of historical texts, policies and legal text that shaped slavery as well as responses to slavery in the form of slave narratives. In a second part, the course investigates through films and documentaries, music, memorials, literature and economic texts how the legacy of slavery continues to shape the culture of the United States in all areas of cultural and political life. In this part, students will grapple with questions of memory and memorializations, cultural appropriations, systemic economic inequalities, cross-cultural conceptions of enslavement and the question of reparations.

Food carries social, symbolic, and political-economic meaning that differs across cultures, and hence cuisine represents a focal point for studying divergent cultural practices. In that sense, this class examines the sociological, anthropological, literary, and cultural dimensions of food. The class will explore people's relationship to food with regard to the environment, gender roles, and social hierarchy, from French haute cuisine to the fast food phenomenon.

A writing workshop that allows students to explore different forms of prose writing including the traditional novel, the epistolary novel, and the graphic novel. This course will emphasize central techniques such as character, setting, beginnings and endings. Each week students will present sketches for critique in the writing workshop, and will compose a short piece of fiction for publication in the final class journal.

Beginning with the post-colonial theory of Edward Said, this class will examine the ideas of exile and immigration in a colonial and post-colonial context. This course will explore exile vs. expatriatism, language and power, movement across cultures, narrative agency and authority, and voices in the new immigrant narrative. By approaching the topic from a comparative perspective, students will be exposed to a polyphony of voices and the variety of experiences associated with exile and the construction of identity. Students will examine, in particular, contemporary fiction as a window to the context of this experience.

This creative writing/cultural theory course focuses on the concept of haunting and related phenomena such as possession or exorcism. The course draws from recent scholarly work in hauntology, a term coined by Jacques Derrida in his SpectresdeMarx (1993). What emerges from this area of research is an unusual theoretical space in which to consider literature and culture, both philosophically (as critical thinkers) and creatively (as authors and performance artists). The class explores and creatively experiments with texts that function primarily as a medium for giving voice to those realms of human experience that are generally considered unreasonable and extrasensory; otherworldly perceptions of parallel dimensions that transcend the laws and rational orderings of the knowable physical world. Students will reflect on ghostly metaphors and manifestations as they are summoned, in various forms and to different ends, by fiction writers, performers, and filmmakers who tend to link stories of haunting to social-psychic-emotional disturbances: expressions of diasporic sensibilities and hyphenated ethnicities, stigmas of invisibility related to shadows of class and gender, spectral polyvalence and the paranormal activity emerging from recent theoretical discourse around taboo conceptual couplings such as the queer child and/or the ''unruly/child''.

''Human Rights'' has become a key selling point for organizations, political parties and social movements. And yet what is actually meant by the term often remains vague, and it is difficult to take the critical stance necessary to judge its significance. In this class we interrogate the term with a series of questions: what counts as ''human'' in the discourses surrounding Human Rights? What sorts of rights do individuals in fact have simply by virtue of being human? Do all humans have the same rights? Who gets to decide this? How has the definition changed over the last 200 years? To what extent is the term gendered, determined by class and racialized? And finally: how do different national settings change how we think about and act on ideas of Human Rights? This course will examine these questions by tracing ideas surrounding Human Rights in treatises, literary texts, films, debates and case studies from the Enlightenment to the present. Against the backdrop of foundational texts such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, declarations by the European Court of Human Rights, the African Court on Human and People's Rights, the Geneva convention and the United Nations Human Rights Commission students will consider literary and filmic works that grapple critically with the terms they lay out. Students will also consider how NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch translate the political rhetoric to apply their own interpretations of Human Rights to their field work.

In this course, the class will work to create a more critical understanding of what race is, what race does, and how contemporary racial meanings are constructed and disseminated. In order to do so, students will explore Critical Race Theory (CRT) and critical theories of race in several contexts. CRT refers to a theory that emerged among legal educators in the US in the 1980s and 1990s. In the last twenty years, a growing number of scholars in fields such as cultural studies, gender studies, history, media studies, politics, postcolonial studies and sociology have integrated and developed the work done by critical race theorists. This course will focus in particular on this interdisciplinary approach to critical race studies. The practice of race will be examined as well as the policies and institutions that shape race in a global context in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Finally, students will consider the intersection of race and other social hierarchies, including gender, sexuality and social class.

This course aims to investigate law's place in culture and culture's place in law. This focus proceeds from the realization that law does not function in a vacuum but exerts a powerful influence on all manner of cultural practice and production, even as its own operation is influenced in turn by various forms of culture. Given this increasing porosity and interpermeability of Law and different forms of culture, the focus of this course is on the mutual influence between law and other discursive practices, such as literature, TV sit-coms and film. In studying a number of prominent legal cases such as Brown v the Board of Education, we will explore the following questions: What are the mechanisms by which popular representations and cultural practices find their way into legal processes and decisions? How does law in turn bleed into and influence cultural processes? Does law act as a buffer against societal assumptions about, and constructions of, gender, age, ability, sexuality and ethnicity, or does it re-enforce and re-inscribe existing social norms?

The cultural debris that results from political and natural catastrophes is made up of narratives that contain both implosion and creation, wreckage and renewal. In that sense disasters mark pivotal turning points in the way we conceptualize and understand human phenomena and cultural processes in a number of disciplinary perspectives from psychoanalysis to literature, from environmental science to religion and from ethics to aesthetics. Students will read the narrative fallout in fiction, science, and film that emanate from distinct disaster zones ranging from the petrified texture of Pompeii to the generative force field of ground zero.

This is the first of two capstone courses for CLCS majors pursuing a thesis. In this course, students develop and refine their thesis proposals, construct an annotated bibliography, and produce the first chapter of their thesis project. Emphasis is placed on independent research, the development of a strong theoretical framework, and the articulation of a clear scholarly argument.
While fostering self-directed inquiry, the course also integrates collaborative elements, including peer workshops and group discussions, to support the research and writing process. By engaging with faculty mentorship and feedback from peers, students will sharpen their critical thinking, research methodologies, and academic writing skills in preparation for the second thesis-driven capstone course (CLCS 499).

CLCS 499 is one of two available alternatives (the other being an internship) for the second of two capstone courses for CLCS majors. CLCS 499 represents the culmination of the interdisciplinary, intercultural experience at Franklin. Students will complete a thesis that represents the capstone to their major experience. A thesis is recommended in particular for students interested in pursuing graduate studies.

CLCS 498 is one of two available alternatives (the other being a thesis) for the second of two capstone courses for CLCS majors. CLCS 498 represents the culmination of the interdisciplinary, intercultural experience at Franklin. Students will complete an internship that represents the capstone to their major experience. An internship is recommended for students entering a professional field.