COLT 410 - Surrealism and Psychoanalysis    
Instructor: Jeffrey S. Librett

Surrealism was an avant-garde movement in literature, the visual arts, and film that arose in the France of the 1920s, in the wake of the manifold horrors and disillusionments of World War I. One main source of inspiration for the movement was Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, a theory of the human that posited the unconscious mind as the center of the psyche, and the dream as the “royal road” to the unconscious. Accordingly, we will study Freud’s theory of dreams and the unconscious, and then its application and displacements in surrealism. Students will have room to focus on their chosen surrealist artefacts and theory outside the list for some writing assignments.

COLT – 360 Gender and Identity in Literature: “Constructing Otherness: Literature of Nonconformity”    
Instructor: Matthias Kramer

How do we come to know something to be different? What makes one identity “normal” and another nonconforming, and how is this decided? How do identities become represented in literature, and how does representation condition identity and vice-versa? How does otherness come to be gendered, racial, classed, and/or based on (dis)ability, and how do these categories overlap and compound one another?  In this mid-level Comparative Literature course, we will begin to answer these and other questions by reading and comparing literary and filmic texts from around the world that illustrate, dramatize, or symptomize the conditions of otherness and nonconformity.