Course Offerings

Examines how experiences of Paris have been committed to the page from the first century to the present. Considers the uses and effects of overviews, street-level accounts, and underground approaches to describing the city and its inhabitants. Includes visits to the sewers and museums, revolutionary sites and archives, with multiple members of the comparative literature faculty speaking on their areas of expertise.
http://www.aup.edu/paris-through-its-books

This course explores the history of French vineyards and winemaking and French literature about wine from the Middle Ages to twentieth century. We will first learn about winemaking methods and the science of wine production, before looking at the history of French winemaking and “terroirs” from Antiquity to the present. This course immerses students in the notions of “taste” and “terroir” as important elements in the production of a distinctive French cultural identity. Students will focus on the history and production of wine in major winemaking regions (which vary from semester to semester), read French texts celebrating wine, and receive formal wine education to develop their sense of taste. The course includes a study trip.

How do words change when we use them on and offline? What happens to writing and reading when we move between physical books and digital environments? What are the relationships between Literature and the Internet?  How do ‘traditional’ or ‘canonical’ literary works dialogue with social media, computer games and Google-generated poetry? What does it ‘mean’ to ‘read’ ‘books’ in the third decade of the twenty-first century? 

Explores the work of Anglo-American modernist writers in Paris, concentrating on the works of Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and other writers. Relates their formal experimentation to the visual arts and to the psychic dynamics of exile: the experience of liberation from the constraints of one culture and an alienated relation to the new environment.