Comparative Literature Courses
Fall 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

CPLT 201 (3) History of European Literature I
Mr. Cantor, Instructor
1230-1345 TR
CAB 138

IMPORTANT: Students in this course must register both for the lecture & for a discussion section, which will meet once a week. Discussion sections will be closed for registration until the first scheduled meeting of the course; at that meeting students will fill out section request forms, and on that basis will then be assigned to a discussion section.

This course surveys European literature from its origins in Ancient Greece through the Renaissance. As a course in literary history, it seeks to develop an understanding of period concepts, such as Medieval and Renaissance, as well as concepts of genre, such as epic, tragedy, and comedy. Readings include (sometimes in the form of selections) the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia, Oedipus, Antigone, the Aeneid, the Inferno, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Hamlet, and Don Quixote. All foreign language works will be read in English translation. Requirements: three papers and a final examination. Two lectures and one section meeting per week. Sectioning will not be available on ISIS, but will be done at the first class meeting; be sure to attend the first class if you plan on taking the course. This course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement and can be counted toward the English major for 3 hours of "Literature in Translation."

This course is required of all Comparative Literature majors, but all interested students are welcome. It also may be counted toward the English major as three hours of “Literature in Translation.” This course will satisfy the Second Writing Requirement.

CPLT 348 (3) Kafka and His Doubles
Ms. Martens, Instructor
1100-1215 TR
PV8 103

The course will introduce the enigmatic work of Franz Kafka: stories including "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," "A Country Doctor," "A Report to an Academy," "A Hunger Artist," "The Burrow," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"; one of his three unpublished novels (The Trial); the Letter to His Father; and some short parables. But we will also look at Kafka's "doubles": the literary tradition he works with and the way in which he, in turn, forms literary tradition. Thus: Kafka: Cervantes, Kafka: Bible, Kafka: Aesop, Kafka: Dostoevsky, Kafka: Melville; Kafka: O'Connor, Kafka: Singer; Kafka: Calvino, Kafka: Borges. Readings will center on four principal themes: conflicts with others and
the self (and Kafka's psychological vision); the double; the play with paradox and infinity; and artists and animals. A seminar limited to 20 participants. Requirements include a short midterm paper (5-7 pages) and a longer final paper (10-12 pages).

CPLT 351 (3) Introduction to Literary Theory
Ms. Voris, Instructor
1100-1215 TR
CAB 224

An introductory seminar for all students in Comparative Literature. We will examine concepts and assumptions present in contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning and interpretation (hermeneutics); questions of genre (with discussion of representative examples); critical analyses of formalist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, poststructuralist (or rhetorical), Marxist, as well as "ethnic," "postcolonial," and "gendered" approaches to literature. The central ambition of the seminar will be to familiarize ourselves with a body of knowledge important in its own right and, moreover,
indispensable for theoretically self-conscious work in what we call "the humanities." There are no prerequisites except the love of reading.

CPLT 355 (3) The Faust Legend in Literature
Mr. Grossman, Instructor
1530-1645 TR
CAB 245

Goethe's Faust has been called an "atlas of European modernity" and "one of the most recent columns for that bridge of spirit spanning the swamping of world history." The literary theorist Harold Bloom writes: "As a sexual nightmare of erotic fantasy, [Faust] ... has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem. It is certainly a work about what, if anything, will suffice, and Goethe finds myriad ways of showing us that sexuality by itself will not. Even more obsessively, Faust teaches that, without an active sexuality, absolutely nothing will suffice."

Taking Goethe's Faust as its point of departure, this course will trace the emergence and various transformations of the Faust legend over the last 400 hundred years. Retrospectively, we will explore precursors of Goethe's Faust in the form of the English Faust Book, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and possibly one of the various other popular re-workings of the text. We will then read Goethe's Faust in its entirety. Although now viewed as central to the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform the central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics and society. Beyond Goethe, we will study Byron's melancholy attempt in Manfred to create a theater of the emotions that explores problems of power, sexuality and guilt. And we will venture into the twentieth-century, reading texts that re-worked the Faust legend in response to authoritarian politics: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, which wrestles with Nazism in the land of Goethe's Faust, and Mikhail Bulgakow's magical realist response to Stalinism in The Master and Margharita. We will also consider F.W. Murnau's film version of Faust, and may consider Faust works in other media (e.g. music, painting).

Our aims will be to ask why writers repeatedly returned to the Faust legend and how, in re-working Faust, they sought to confront the political, social and cultural problems of their own times. Requirements: one short paper (5 pages), one long paper (10-12 pages), active class participation.

CPLT 373 (3) Literature and the Uncanny
Mr. Kaiser, Instructor
1400-1515 TR
PV8 108

CPLT 493 (3) Comparative Literature Seminar: Realism
Mr. Pope, Instructor
1530-1645 TR
CAB B021

(All students in the Comparative Literature Distinguished Majors program are automatically admitted. Other students welcome up to a maximum of 15 places.)

Why is defining the Real difficult? The first part of this course will study the experience of the Real and the diverse definitions offered from Plato to Lacan, with special consideration given to the ideas of Marx and Freud. We will also consider two transcendental approaches, Christianity and Zen Buddhism. We will follow with the reading and commentary of some of the classic works of European Realism: Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856); George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-1872); Guy de Maupassant, “The Diamond Necklace” (1884); Leopoldo Alas (Clarin), La Regenta (1884-1885); and Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest (1894). Since this is a seminar especially designed for seniors in Comparative Literature and other students who like literature, writing, and different cultures, participants will be required to write brief weekly comments of their reading and a concluding 20-page paper. Students who know the languages in which these works were written, when other than English, can read them in those languages (French, Spanish, and German).

CPLT 802 (3) Comparative and Transnational Studies
Ms. Felski, Instructor
1530-1800 T
BRN 330

CPLT 802 is a required course for all students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Comparative Literature; other students are also welcome.  The course offers an overview of key arguments and debates within the field of comparative literature, transnational studies, and recent theories of world literature. Topics to be discussed include the benefits and dangers of thinking comparatively; critiques of nationalist and nativist theories of culture; the relations between comparative literature and postcolonial theory; questions of canonicity and aesthetic value; multiple modernities; theories of translation; the pedagogy of teaching courses in world literature. We will also read various examples of comparative criticism.

COURSES IN OTHER DEPARTMENTS OF SPECIAL INTEREST

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

Restricted to Instructor Permission

Even bus tours have their pleasures and rewards: one may learn the lay of a new land and enjoy sites one may be unable to revisit in the immediate future. More importantly, we intellectual inhabitants of our highly-theorized world might benefit from being helped to discover our roots in Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Horace and Virgil, the Medieval “arts of discourse” and the empirical method of Hume, up through Romantic neo-Platonism, Nietzschean rhetoric, and 20c “neo-Aristotelianism.” This course uses a clear heuristic of four philosophical approaches to locate and explain the intellectual traditions standing behind contemporary literary theory and criticism. Formerly a lecture course, it is now half-lecture, half-discussion as we move through primary and secondary readings. Our texts are Habib, A History of Literary Criticism; and The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Three papers.

ENMC 380 (3) Concepts of the Modern
Ms. Feldman, Instructor
1230-1345 TR
CAB 216

Modernist writers have often thought of themselves as living in a time of endless crisis. Since "crisis" literally means a turning point, their conceptual and aesthetic worlds favored movement, uncertainty, even vertigo. Artistic responses to modernity pulsed between two poles: the work of art as an escape to dream, gesturing toward the mysterious and the sacred; and the work of art as a reflection of social needs, embedded in history and meant to show us how to live together. What is the self and its relation to (in W.H. Auden's terms) crowds, societies, and communities? What is the significance of ordinary life to affairs of the spirit? For answers to questions such as these, we'll consider Rousseau, Poe, Valéry, Proust, Kafka, Babel, Beckett, Nabokov, Bishop, and Murikami , along with a few selected works of visual art and a film.

FREN 404 (3) The Enlightenment/Les Lumières
Ms. Tsien, Instructor
1700-1815 TR
CAB 225

One of the most important movements in Western intellectual history, the Enlightenment, laid the foundations for our current conceptions of democratic government, religious toleration, freedom of speech, and the scientific method, among other things. Its proponents defied the king and the church in order to bring their countries into a new era and, inadvertently, to spark the French and American Revolutions. The readings for this course will focus largely on works by French authors, but they will also feature texts from the British and American Enlightenment. The authors in question will include Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. We will particularly focus on strategies, such as humor and fiction, used by the authors in order to hide their provocative ideas from government censors.

Requirements for the course will include a midterm exam and a final research paper.

FREN 520 (3) 16th Century French Literature: The Heptameron and the European Novella
Ms. McKinley, Instructor
1400-1515 TR
CAB 241

Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron explicitly showcases its relation to Boccaccio’s Decameron, but it grows just as clearly from a variety of other works and literary genres.   We will explore the Heptaméron in conjunction with brief selections from those earlier works, including in addition to the Decameron:  Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (more commonly known as The Golden Ass); late-medieval French and Italian nouvelles; histoires tragiques ; and Rabelais’s tales of Pantagruel and Gargantua.  This focus will allow us to consider literature of the court and of the people and to appreciate the evolution of narrative structures, techniques and conventions in the early modern period.  Requirements include frequent response writing, a mid-term writing assignment and a final paper.  Taught in French; Comp Lit students are welcome to contribute to discussion and write papers in English.

GETR 340 (3) Intellectual History I
Mr. Wellmon, Instructor
1530-1800 M
CAB B026

In this seminar we will consider the history of aesthetics from Leibniz to Hegel as a history of two related and complex terms: perception and the senses. Our task, then, will be to read what is often referred to as aesthetic theory as a history of the senses and a history of perception. Another main goal will be to trace how a concept initially concerned with sense perception becomes, by the early 19th century, bound up with the work of art. Readings will include texts from: Leibniz, Spinoza, Diderot, Baumgarten, Winkelmann, Shaftesbury, Hume, Lessing, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel.

Requirements include active participation, brief presentations and a final seminar paper.

GETR 355 (3) Faust
Mr. Grossman, Instructor
1530-1645 TR
CAB 245

Goethe's Faust has been called an "atlas of European modernity" and "one of the most recent columns for that bridge of spirit spanning the swamping of world history." The literary theorist Harold Bloom writes: "As a sexual nightmare of erotic fantasy, [Faust] ... has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem. It is certainly a work about what, if anything, will suffice, and Goethe finds myriad ways of showing us that sexuality by itself will not. Even more obsessively, Faust teaches that, without an active sexuality, absolutely nothing will suffice."

Taking Goethe's Faust as its point of departure, this course will trace the emergence and various transformations of the Faust legend over the last 400 hundred years. Retrospectively, we will explore precursors of Goethe's Faust in the form of the English Faust Book, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and possibly one of the various other popular re-workings of the text. We will then read Goethe's Faust in its entirety. Although now viewed as central to the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform the central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics and society. Beyond Goethe, we will study Byron's melancholy attempt in Manfred to create a theater of the emotions that explores problems of power, sexuality and guilt. And we will venture into the twentieth-century, reading texts that re-worked the Faust legend in response to authoritarian politics: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, which wrestles with Nazism in the land of Goethe's Faust, and Mikhail Bulgakow's magical realist response to Stalinism in The Master and Margharita. We will also consider F.W. Murnau's film version of Faust, and may consider Faust works in other media (e.g. music, painting).

Our aims will be to ask why writers repeatedly returned to the Faust legend and how, in re-working Faust, they sought to confront the political, social and cultural problems of their own times. Requirements: one short paper (5 pages), one long paper (10-12 pages), active class participation.

ITTR 226 (3) Dante in Translation
Ms. Parker, Instructor
1300-1350 MWF
CAB 430

RELC 578 (3) Wallace Stevens and the Absolute
Mr. Hart, Instructor
1530-1800 W
CAB 139

RUTR 391/RUSS 592 (3) Russian and Soviet Film
Ms. Nafpaktitis, Instructor
1400-1515 MW
CAB B031

An exploration of Soviet and Russian cinema as artistic medium, industrial product, ideological and political tool, and means of entertainment. This course devotes equal consideration to popular classics as well as the critically acclaimed masterpieces of Russian film in order to engage questions of history, theory and aesthetics within broader cultural
currents. Students will learn about major trends, figures and films in the development of Russian and Soviet cinema and exercise their analytical skills in close readings of films and selected critical essays. Writing assignments will encourage students to acquire and apply conceptual frameworks that are essential to thinking about films as texts and to evaluating the role of cinema as a Russian national art form. No knowledge of Russian required. All films will be shown with English subtitles. Satisfies Humanities requirement

SOC 842 (3) Culture and Stratification
Mr. Millner, Instructor
1330-1530 W
BRN 310

The literature on social stratification tends to focus on inequality between individuals and groups, but has relatively little to say about how the many cultural “objects” that surround humans become ranked—and how their rank in turn affects individuals and groups.  The literature in cultural sociology devotes a lot of attention to the production and reception of cultural objects, but pays inadequate attention to the literature from social stratification.  This course will focus on trying to better integrate these two perspectives.

We will attempt to do this by focusing on a number of seemingly unrelated phenomena that involve assigning status or rank to cultural objects.  For example, we will consider

• how some things become fine art and others are defined as kitsch, how some texts are classified as being part of a literary or sacred canon and others are not,
• how some locations come to be sacred pilgrimage sites, favorite tourist destinations, or National Parks (and other kinds of protected areas) and others places are “the middle of nowhere” or seen in strictly utilitarian terms
• how some events become part of the collective memory and others are soon forgotten,
• how some things are considered garbage and filth and others are pure
• how some movies become classics and others are panned
• how some types of clothes and accessories are fashionable and others are dowdy or passé
• how some ethical and moral standards or norms are taken very seriously in one historical period and thought unimportant in another

Requirements:  Each student will be expected to give one or two brief oral presentations and to write one or two short papers on assigned readings.  The major assignment will be to write a journal-length research paper analyzing in detail the stratification of a particular type of cultural object.

While the detail syllabus is still being constructed readings will include selections from many of the following:

Murray Milner, Jr.
             Status and Sacredness
Stanley Lieberson
             A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change
David Halle
             Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home
Pierre Bourdieu
            Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
            Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine
Arjun Appadurai (Editor)
            The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood
            The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption
James English
            The Economy of Prestige
Lee Martin McDonald
            The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority
Paul DiMaggio
           “The Classification of Art”
Bethany Bryson
            “Anything But Heavy Metal: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes”
Daniel Miller
            Material Culture and Mass Consumption