During the last century, spectacle became a key notion within the practice, criticism, theory and history of art. It posed a question that remains relevant: How could artists compete with the intensely visual entertainments that were flourishing on the stage, street and screen and attracting increasingly large audiences? This course explores how major artists approached this practical and intellectual challenge, as well as the ways that the theory was generalized and applied in important studies of fascist, capitalist and communist politics, the society at large and the history of 18th- and 19th-century French painting.

This seminar explores the history of early modern European printing and its materials, with a focus on Albrecht Dürer. An underlying assumption of the course is that art-making materials and practices are linked to contemporary conceptions and theories of nature. From 1450 to 1850, the natural resources most commonly deployed for printing were wood, metal, and stone. Their use was shaped by environmental conditions, and had an impact on the ecology of their places of origin. While the course will focus on European print culture, and Albrecht Dürer when possible, it also will refer to early modern print materials and practices from East Asia.

Fairy tales are among the first stories we encounter, often before we can read. They present themselves as timeless--"Once upon a time..." - yet are essentially modern. They are often presented as children's literature, yet are filled with sex and violence. They have been interpreted as archetypal patterns of the subconscious mind or of deep cultural origins, yet perform the work of shaping contemporary culture. They circulate in myriad oral variations, and are written down in new ones by the most sophisticated literary authors. In this course we will explore the fantasy, enchantment, labor, and violence wrought by fairy tales.

An overview of three of the most influential writers in the twentieth century, focusing on selected masterpieces. All three were fascinated by similar topics: dreams and memory; sexuality; Judaism. All three lived during traumatic historical periods. Proust during WWI; Freud during WWII; and Borges during Peronismo. Seminar will explore the relationship between literature modernism, politics, and religion.

Since its advent in the 19th century, photography has been a privileged figure in literature's efforts to reflect upon its own modes of representation. This seminar will trace the history of the rapport between literature and photography by looking closely at a number of literary and theoretical texts that differently address questions central to both literature and photography: questions about the nature of representation, reproduction, memory and forgetting, history, images, perception, and knowledge.

What's the point of education? What should anyone truly learn, why, and how? Who gets to attend school? Is it a right, a privilege, a duty, an investment, or a form of discipline? Do schools level the playing field or entrench inequalities? Should they fashion workers, citizens, or individuals? Moving from France to the US, and from the Enlightenment to the present, we look at the vexed but crucial relationship between education and democracy in novels, films, essays, and philosophy, examining both the emancipatory and repressive potential of modern schooling. Topics include: Brown, class, meritocracy, testing, and alternative pedagogies.

As fascism was rising in Europe in the 1930s, French writers, artists, and intellectuals expressed their opposition to this threat both in action, coalescing around militant groups with overt political positions, and in their work. This antifascist cultural mobilization was siphoned into the resistance during WWII. This highly interdisciplinary course explores works of literature, art, cinema, and photography that fought fascism before and during the war in France. Works will be situated within their historical context and framed by theory. The course will be complemented with a trip to France during spring break.

In 1835, when Franz Liszt checked into a hotel in Geneva, he registered Europe as his lieu de residence. But the country to which the Hungarian composer referred doesn't exist. We Europeans have the European Union, but we haven't been able to define a common European culture. A transnational vista from a cultural perspective is missing. Hotel Europa will try to delineate the common features of the European conflictual heritage, the very idea of a European cosmopolitan civilization, through a cross-cutting approach, using various fields, including history, literature and art history.

What is German-Jewish thought? Why are so many of the most influential thinkers of modernity German(-speaking) Jews? Think of Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, and Arendt, not to mention writers like Kafka and Celan. In what sense can their writing and thinking meaningfully be described as 'Jewish'? How was the position of minoritization conducive to such extraordinary critical insight and literary creativity? Topics to include: secularization, tolerance, and 'the Jewish question'; messianism and eschatology; (anti-)Zionism; psychoanalysis and the Jewish joke. Readings from the Enlightenment to the present, with a focus on the 20th century.

The magical personal relations associated with the term "charisma" originally referred not to a political category but a dynamic in interwar Germany's literary cults. How did a poetic phenomenon become a political one? What are the figures, metaphors, or narratives through which the mystery of charisma has been described? We will explore how early 20th c. German culture represented charisma as an occult phenomenon, erotic seduction, drug-like intoxication, a result of financial crisis, or a media effect. We will also study the role of charisma in debates about whether today's world resembles that of the Weimar years.

This team-taught interdisciplinary seminar has the double aim of exploring the themes of music, sound, and the voice in Ovid's epic poem and how later composers in turn gave voice to Metamorphoses through the musical, especially operatic works that it inspired. We will engage in the close study of Ovid's treatment of myths like Marsyas, Orpheus and Eurydice and Echo and Narcissus in relation to earlier versions and then consider the continuities and differences between the poem's soundworld and its musical realizations in works such as Monteverdi's Orfeo, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, and Strauss' Daphne.

This course explores the colonial experience discussed by Italian writers who were in contact with Northern Africa between the 19th and the 20th centuries. This association between Italy and Africa has not been extensively developed neither within Italy or abroad, and it will be the primary focus of this course. The newly unified Italy (1861) looked at Africa as a colonial opportunity to expand its might and wealth. Writers soon embarked to places such as Alexandria and shared a unique perspective on Africa: they understood the continent not as a space to conquer and colonize, but rather as a surprisingly tolerant society in which to live.

We start with Tolstoy's artistic stimuli and narrative strategies, exploring the author's provocative visions of war, gender, sex, art, social institutions, death, and religion. The emphasis is placed here on the role of the written word in Tolstoy's search for truth and power. The main part is a close reading of his masterwork "The War and Peace" (1863-68) - a quintessence of both his artistic method and philosophical insights. Each student will be assigned to keep a "hero's diary" and speak on behalf of one or two major heroes of the epic (including the Spirit of History).The roles will be distributed in accordance with the will of fate.