Serrano, Richard

Education

M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (Comparative Literature)

B.A., Stanford University (English)

Research Interests

Modern French and Francophone poetry; Maghrebi Literature in French and Arabic; Classical, Andalusian and Modern Arabic poetry; Classical Chinese poetry; Korean poetry.

Biographical Notes

Professor Serrano's current research projects in Arabic Literature include a compilation and translation of the seventh-century poet Jamil's diwan and a study of the relationship between poetry in Egyptian and Tunisian protest movements and Classical Arabic tropes of complaint.  In East Asian Literatures he is conducting research on women and eighteenth-century poetry in China and Korea (which also involves a great deal of translation). Projected research projects include a study of the intersection of Chinese and Arab cultures with music, art and literature in Hapsburg Vienna; resituating contemporary poetry of the Maghreb in a Mediterranean (rather than a "postcolonial") context, which entails the work of poets from Spain, France, Italy, Egypt, Lebanon and eventually Greece, Turkey, Israel (and perhaps even Albania and Croatia).  A study that somehow combines a teasing-out of literary relations between Argentina and France in the nineteenth century along with an exploration of regional music and dance of Argentina is also forming.

Selected Publications

Books: (click on images for details)

Other Publications:

• "Reading the Alhambra." Visible Writings. Cultures, Forms, Readings. Ed. Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw. New Brunswick: Rutgers University PRess, 2011, 293-303.
• “Beyond the Length of an Average Penis: Reading across Traditions in the Poetry of Timothy Liu.”  Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005,190-208.
• "Makhali-Phal: Cambodian Dancing Girl at the Francophone Epicenter." Special issue, Literature and Society in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, (Journal of Commonwealth and Post-colonial Studies 7:2, Fall 2001, pp. 7-32).
• "Calixthe Beyala: Griotte Postmoderne ou Plagiaire?" Nouvelles écritures francophones: Vers un nouveau baroque? (Montréal: Presses Universitaires de Montréal, 2001, 338-346).
• "Translation and the Interlingual Text in the Novels of Rachid Boudjedra." Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition. (Ed. Mildred Mortimer. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000, 27-40).
• "Nedjma." Entry in African Literature and Its Times. (Ed. Joyce Moss. Santa Monica: Moss Publishing, 2000, 289-296).
• "Translation and the Interlingual Text in the Novels of Rachid Boudjedra". In Critical Perspectives on Maghrebian Literature. (Ed. Mildred Mortimer. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Spring 2000).
• "Fans, Silks, and Ptyx: Mallarmé and Classical Chinese Poetry." Comparative Literature 50.3. (Summer 1998, 220-241).
• "Lacan's Oriental Language of the Unconscious." SubStance #84. (Vol. 26.3, 1997, 90-106).
• "Al-Buhturi's Poetics of Persian Abodes." Journal of Arabic Literature. (Vol. XXVIII, 1997, 68-87).
• "Al-Sharif Al-Taliq, Jacques Lacan, and the Poetics of Abbreviation." Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Writing. (Ed. J.W. Wright, Jr. & Everett Crowson. Columbia University Press, 1997, 140-157).
• Translation of Abu Nuwas' "Drunkenness After Drunkenness." Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America. From Antiquity to the Present. (Ed. Willis Barnstone & Tony Barnstone. Prentice Hall, 1995, 1010-1011).

Courses Offered

Graduate Courses:

• Islam and the Text in Franchophone Literature of the Magreb
• Poetry
• Césaire, Damas and Senghor
• French and Francophone Poetry
• Genre and the Algerian War
• Francophone Literature and the Imperative of History
• Postcolonial Writer/Postmodern Condition

Undergraduate Courses:

• Past Today: Why Conflicts Endure (An SAS Signature Course)
• Rilke
• Poetry
• North African Literature in French
• Modern Poetry
• Introduction to Francophone Poetry
• Multiple Cultures of the Maghreb
• Introduction to World Literature
• Fin-de-siècle France and the Far East
• Introduction à la poésie francophone
• Remembering and Queer Literature
• Lyric Poetry in Comparative Context
• Aspects of French Literature
• Advanced Grammar and Composition
• Représentations de la famille dans la littérature maghrébine d'expression française