Comparative Literature Courses
                        Spring 2008

Any literature course in any language, including English, at the 300 level or above counts towards the Comparative Literature major or minor.

COURSES OF SPECIAL INTEREST TO COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDENTS:

ARTR 329/529 (3) Modern Arabic Literature in Translation

Mr. Al-Samman, Instructor
1100-1215 TR

Introduction to the development and themes of modern Arabic literature (poetry, short stories, novels and plays). Taught in English.

CPLT 202 (3) History of European Literature II cross-listed with CPLT 202 -- You must sign up both for the lecture (section 0001) and for a discussion section.
Mr. Braden, Instructor
1230-1345 TR

A survey of Western literature from 17th-century Europe to the present day, with readings of some of the major works of narrative, drama, and poetry in various European languages; authors read will include Molière, Madame de Lafayette, Voltaire, Goethe, Pushkin, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Kafka, Pirandello, T. S. Eliot, Achebe, and Walcott. All works will be read in English, though for those read in translation the original language will be constantly cited. There will be several short papers and a final exam.

Format: Two lectures a week, plus required attendance at an assigned discussion section. Discussion sections will remain closed to registration until after the first class meeting; you must come to the first class meeting in order to receive a discussion section assignment.

This course is required for Comparative Literature majors, but all interested students are welcome. It is a continuation of CPLT 201, but that course is not a prerequisite for this one. This course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement, and may be counted toward the English major as three hours of “Literature in Translation.”

CPLT 305 (3) Fiction of the Americas
Mr. Pellon, Instructor
1530-1800 T

In this second-year seminar, we will study the centuries long “conversations” between North American and Spanish American writers.  Principally through short stories and some novels, we will examine their mutual fascination.  Our reading list will include works by Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Horacio Quiroga, John Reed, Mariano Azuela, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Raymond Chandler, Mempo Giardinelli, Charles Darwin, Silvia Iparraguirre and Cormac McCarthy.  Short papers (300 words) on each author, and take-home essay exam.  The short papers will be due Friday of every week.  The class will be conducted in English, and students may read Spanish American works in English translation or Spanish according to their ability or desire. Restricted to second-year students.

CPLT 345 (3) History of Drama II
Ms. Löfgren, Instructor
0930-1045 TR

This is the second of a two-semester course on the history of Western drama; the first semester is not a prerequisite. The first semester brought us from the emergence of drama in 5th century B.C. Athens through the eighteenth century. This semester, we will trace the development of drama from the nineteeth century to the present. We will begin our journey with the emergence of realism, then move to reactions against realism throughout the first half of the twentieth century: expressionism, surrealism, Epic theater, Absurdism. We will then read plays by previously silenced voices that begin to be heard in the 1960s: of African Americans, women, Asian Americans, gay playwrights, to name a few. We will read plays Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Tomson Highway, Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, and others. Writing requirements: two short papers and one longer paper or a project (one option is to write your own play); a final exam.

ENCR 482 (3) Violence and Representation
Ms. Chakravorty, Instructor
1700-1815 TR

This course will interrogate Fanon's assertions that the colonized find their freedom only through violence, and that decolonization is always a violent process, by considering the structuring dialectics between violence, the body, and postcolonial narratives of insurgency. If, for Fanon, decolonization is both literally and linguistically an adopted violence so that militancy against colonialism is an answer back in the imported language of destruction that the colonizer best understands, our goal will be to investigate the complex and shifting relations to violence/violation that postcolonial texts elaborate when they represent insurgent anticolonial practices. By looking closely at how postcolonial narratives represent insurgencies against power and their attendant violences, we will arrive at an analytic for addressing the technologies of pain, trauma, brutality, torture, and repression that conditioned regimes of colonial discipline and control. We will also consider the extent to which postcolonial texts appropriate an apparatus of violence in representing bodies in rebellion, while also articulating alternative visions of resistance and social change that specifically refuse the ethics of extremism. Our inquiry will draw from a critical discourse on corporeality (Foucault, Scarry), the nation (Fanon, Anderson) and gender (Butler, Spivak) to illuminate the peculiar charge in narratives of insurgency between the embodied politics of militancy and the body politic. Finally, the texts which we will be reading deal in some way with the problematic of form (how to represent the urgency of politicized violence as a condition of modernity), and in so doing reach beyond realist conventions to reflect aspects of the surreal, the grotesque, the spectacular, and the magically real. We will assess the efficacy of these forms, and their overwrought symbolism, in managing the economy between the public and the private, victims and perpetrators, masculinity and femininity, and whites and blacks, which structured the play of colonial violence itself. Over the course of the term, we will be reading writers as diverse as Roy, Coetzee, Al-Shaykh, Djebar, Salih and viewing films such as The Terrorist, Bandit Queen, and The Battle of Algiers.

ENCR 562 (3) History of Criticism
Mr. Jost, Instructor
1530-1645 TR

Even bus tours have their uses and pleasures; one can learn the lay of the land and enjoy sights and sites not likely to be revisited in the immediate future. This course careens under control from the ancients to the moderns and postmodersn, with many scenic S-curves through the neighborhoods of Longinus, Sidney, Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Mallarme, and others. We will likely use the recent Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism as our guide books, and will pay special attention to the leading lights illuminating our way to the last century. Depending on class size, we will do our best to blend close reading, class disucssion, guided lectures, and occasional rest stops for individual and group exploration. Several papers, likely a mid-term and/or final, and frequent postcards home.

ENMC 482B (3) Modern Painters and Writers
Ms. Feldman, Instructor
1230-1345 TR

When the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire created a poetic manifesto of Modernism entitled "The Painter of Modern Life," he imagined a kind of art, a mode of  criticism, and an ideal artist which to this day illuminate efforts to make and appreciate art. Taking this document and the questions it raises as our inspiration, we'll consider a wealth of beautiful, fascinating, and disturbing works, exploring the genesis of Modernism through the interactions among painters and writers in Paris of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We'll look at relations of many sorts across paintings and literary texts by  Manet, Kandinsky, Rilke, Cézanne,  Flaubert, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Stein, and Picasso –as well as others more briefly as we deem them helpful.  This course does not require prior knowledge of either French literature or art history, although both will be welcomed and cultivated. This course may be taken for NC or MC credit.

Required: class participation, a few brief papers and one substantial project.

GERM 584 (3) Einführung in die Literaturtheorie
Mr. Kaiser, Instructor
1530-1800 M

Dieser Kurs ist als Einführung in elementare Aspekte der Analyse literarischer Texte konzipiert. Da er in der Vergangenheit mit grossem Erfolg von Frau Voris unterrichtet wurde, werden wir uns an dieses Modell, das seinerseits auch an deutschen Universitäten angeboten wird, anlehnen. Im Zentrum unserer Űberlegungen stehen Fragen nach dem Text, dem Autor, der Funktionsweise rhetorischer Figuren, der Gattungsdifferenzen (Unterschiede zwischen Textsorten) und die verschiedenen Entwürfe von Textkritik (Semiologie der Literatur, Strukturalismus, Formalismus, literarische und philosophische Hermeneutik, Rezptionsästhetik, Literatursoziologie, Sozialgeschichtliche vs. immanente Werkinterpretation, Marxistische Literturtheorie, Diskursanalyse, New Historicism, Poststrukturalismus, Gender Studies und psychoanalytische Literaturdeutungen).  Das Seminar ist primär an diejenigen Studenten und Studentinnen gerichtet, die sich entweder im ersten oder zweiten Jahr in unserem Seminar.

GETR 347 (3) Literary Responses to the Holocaust
Mr. Grossman, Instructor
1400-1515 MW

This course examines how writers working in various genres, modes and media seek to respond to the event commonly referred to as the Holocaust. How does that event impinge on memory in the post-1945 period; how do writers
confront such problems of memory -- in the generation of survivors and the generations that follow. How successful have been the various attempts at public commemoration? Readings to be drawn from: Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi,
Charlotte Delbo, Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Rose Auslaender, Aharon Appelfeld, Jurek Becker, Anne Michaels, Esther Dischereit. Maxim Biller, David Grossman, James Young and others. Films may include: Night
and Fog, Shoah, Europa Europa and My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner. Requirements: one short paper (5-7 pages); one long paper (10-12 pp).

ITTR 341/HIEU 341 (3) Dante's Florence
Ms. Parker, Instructor
1300-1350 MWF

This course investigates Italian history and culture through the prism of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, one of the most important works in European literature. The three books of the comedy offer a meditation on the social and political life of the Italian city-states, a critique of contemporary Christianity, and a commentary on art and literature at the end of the Middle Ages. The format of the course will be lectures on historical and cultural issues critical to the Comedy and discussions of selected cantos of the great poem. We will also take advantage of the information available through "The World of Dante" website being constructed by Deborah Parker at the university's Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities. There will be a midterm, a final and a paper based on a study of issues raised by the poem itself.

JPTR 382/582 Modern Japanese Women Writers
Ms. Wilson, Instructor
1400-1630 W

Introduction to the resurgence of the female literary tradition from the early 1900s to the present. The course focuses on women writers as cultural and social critics, how each individual artist challenges and is shaped by Japanese culture and society. Some stories by American women writers will also be examined as a point of comparison. Prerequisite: one ENWR course. Course meets Non-Western Perspectives Requirement.

RUTR 273/373 Dostoevsky
Mr. Connolly, Instructor
1100-1200 TR

This course examines the remakable legacy of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, beginning with his first experiments in prose ficiton and culminating with his timeless masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. Along the way we shall meet Dostoevsky's famous rebel, the man from underground," the soulful murderer in Crime and Punishment, and a series of alienated heroes, would-be supermen, and relentless seekers after God. The course will also consider Dostoevsky's relationship to other masters of West European and Russian literature. All readings in English, no knowledge of Russian required. Satisfies the Humanities Requirement.

RUTR 336 20th Century Russian Literature
Ms. Bird, Instructor
0930-1045 TR

This course explores the rich literary culture of Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. Because modern Russian literature is inexorably linked to the historical and political context in which it was written and read, literary works examined in this course are considered in that context. All works are read in English translation. The list of readings includes works by Bely, Mayakovsky, Gorky, Bunin, Babel, Zamiatin, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, and others.