Transnational Literatures and Cinemas

The course thus focuses on the transnational dimension of conceptual change and how seemingly universal or unitary notions undergo significant changes according to the specific cultural and historical context or language community in which they are embedded. A transnational approach to key concepts of literary or cultural studies allows students to productively map how concepts travel in the humanities and are adopted to specific contexts, thus producing an international vocabulary. From a cultural-theoretical perspective, the course focuses on transnational poetics, productions and the local embeddedness and reception of global cultural flows. The global themes from which to analyze the selected works can vary each year (e.g. crisis, labor, class, migration, race, ecology, crime) and will be chosen from a comparative approach in which students of each language will act as cultural experts.  

Content in 2025-2026: “Narratives of Crisis and Change” 

Students will flesh out the concepts of crisis and precarity and relate them to the overarching topics of labor and migration, discussing their operationality and malleability. In mixed-language groups they will work collaboratively towards a “living handbook” on the course’s website, which will offer a transnational glossary of key concepts in contemporary critical theory, literary studies and film studies related to crisis and critique, precarity, labor and migration. Students will build on the handbooks that will be used in this course, and will collect sources in their own languages of study. This dynamic lexicon will be continually enhanced and expanded through hyperlinks.  

Weeks 1-3 will be structured around cinema and weeks 4-6 around literature. Both clusters will be structured as follows: firstly, students will compose individually an annotated, selective bibliography based on language-specific resources. Secondly, they will collectively write, in mixed language groups, an entry per key concept (and its adaptations in different cultural areas) and per key work (preferably one with a transnational thematic, context of production or circulation). In the end students will have produced two key concepts and discussed two key works per group. In week 7 students will give an oral group presentation on the key work they have chosen (novel/film) on the basis of their key concept, paying special attention to the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. In week 8 students will individually prepare their paper proposal and close read or watch a work of their choice. Finally, in week 9, students will submit a short paper that integrates close-reading of a relevant film or novel in the language they study and will write a concise blogpost for the website.