Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies Requirements

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 writing-intensive course counts towards the Academic Writing requirements).

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

In this course, queer solo performance and theater are playfully considered "forbidden acts" because they commonly enact a special kind of transgression. These acts give voice to and, at once, subvert a wide range of political identities conventionally defined by race, ethnicity, HIV status, class, gender, and sexual practice. Often autobiographical at their point of departure, queer performance and theater seem intent on troubling the comfort of community even as they invest in it. This rich, albeit problematic, ambivalence stems from the fact that the term queer, itself, connotes primarily a locus of refusal, an unbinding and destabilizing term of defiance, of provocation via polysemy. As such, queer performance and theater seek to open up new vistas of multiple, shifting, polymorphous identities. What political implications might these queer texts dramatize? What may be the ramifications of instilling the notion of personal identity with collective utopian aspirations? How would the students enrolled in this class spin the term queer to encompass their own sense of individual difference and empower their own vision of creative defiance? In attempting to respond to these questions, students taking this course will be invited to share their own forbidden acts: to approach theoretical refection through performative exercises, to merge the analytical realm with the autobiographical monologue, to test the limits (if there are any) between theatrical play and ideological engagement.

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.

This course looks at sports as a cultural, social and political phenomenon and explores some of the major concepts pertinent to the cultural studies discipline through the lens of sports such as nationalism, social class, race/ethnicity, gender, celebrity culture and its fans, ethics, and concepts of power. Students will also consider the very ideas of 'sportsmanship,' 'playing the game' and the global 'mega-events' that many professional sports competitions have become. This course will involve reading theoretical essays related to sports, class discussion of the readings, regular reading responses, and presentations. Students will be encouraged to pursue their own research interests based on a particular sport, major sports event (Olympics, European Soccer Championship, World Series) or sports infrastructure (Little-League, college sports, sports clubs) and to reflect culturally on an activity that cuts across many disciplines (e.g. business, communications, ethics, health) as well as one that they themselves may be passionately involved in, either as actors and/or as spectators.

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 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.

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.

"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.