Course Descriptions
Fall 2005 Course Offerings
1A-1B
Archive
of Past Course Descriptions
Fall 2005 Course Offerings: 1A and
1B
CL H1A:1, #17203, DEANGELIS, TT 9:30-11, 123 DWINELLE
"Language, Code, and Meaning"
We take for granted that the primary purpose of language is to communicate
meaning. But what happens when language as we know it becomes insufficient?
What happens when language loses its conventional meaning? How does one
give language a new significance or break the “code” that upholds conventional
linguistic and related political, religious, and social structures? In
some of the works we will explore, it is the absence of “sense” which
gives the work its significance, and in some, language serves to conceal
and distance while silence rather reveals and connects. All of the works
we will read—while drawn from vastly different time periods that each
reflect a different set of concerns about language—explore silence and
speech, meaning and code. Our exploration of these issues will move beyond
the words on the page, as we will explore the language of performance,
of the body, and of visual media in addition to issues surrounding textual
criticism in the early modern and medieval works we will read.
Texts
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
- Caryl Churchill, The Skriker
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
- Samuel Beckett, Endgame
- Shakespeare, Macbeth
- Chrétien de Troyes, Erec and Enide
- Heldris de Cornuälle, The Romance of Silence
Film
- La Belle et la Bête (Cocteau)
There will also be a reader which will include poetry, fabliaux, and
lais.
CL 1A:1, #17206, SCHWARTZ/Bodik, MWF 10-11, 221 WHEELER
"Backstage"
On the boards of the brightly lit stage, the show is always going on;
night after night it plays out a faithful repetition of music, gesture,
dialogue, movement, and pretended emotion. While the audience sits rapt
in the darkness, watching the performance, what mass of hidden characters
is animating the backstage? In this class, we will look at the unseen
spaces and private theatrics that do not find their way into the programs
and critics’ reviews. In the subterranean canals of the Paris Opéra, a
ghostly apparition poles his silent boat into secret chambers; when the
curtain goes down on a Broadway show, the lively dramatic genre known
as the “backstage musical” takes its cue.
Our syllabus ranges from films and novels to Aristotle’s Poetics and
reconstructions of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. In several cases, we will
look at pairings that turn a dramatic idea inside out: we will view Japanese
Noh plays, for example, alongside a novel of historical fiction about
Noh’s founders in 14th-century Japan. We will discuss the strategy of
setting a play within a play, and then see what happens when the inner
performance seeps into its actors’ lives. Along the way, these texts will
raise issues of self-performance, dramatic and theatrical conventions,
and whether the characters in a play have the right to tell their author
to get his act together…
Books
- Aristotle, Poetics
- Nobuko Albery, The House of Kanze
- Doris Lessing, Love, Again
Plays
- William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew
- Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
- Selected Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraki dramas
Films
- Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925)
- Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn Roy, 1933)
- Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, 1953)
- The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1968)
- Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)
- Swimming to Cambodia (Jonathem Demme, 1987)
Poems, Essays, Stories
- “Backstage” & other poems (The Weary Blues) –Langston Hughes & Charles
Mingus
- “Sarasine” –Honoré de Balzac
- Theater History of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater
- Zeami Motokiyo’s treatise on Noh theater
CL 1A:2, #17209, FREED-THALL/Gurton-Wachter, MWF 9-10,
121 WHEELER
"The Art of Forgetting"
In this course, we will read texts that explore the productive, creative
possibilities of forgetting. First, we will acquaint ourselves with shifting
metaphors of memory from Antiquity to the present, including the wax tablet,
the loom, the storehouse, the camera, and the computer. Then, reading
literary works from Montaigne and Rousseau to Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud
Darwish, as well as theoretical texts by psychoanalysts, neurologists,
and historians, we will examine narratives that emerge out of oblivion,
or that explicitly thematize detour, distraction, and procrastination.
Among our considerations: the relationship between history and memory,
between literature and the senses (especially the “minor senses”), the
impasses of mourning, and the pleasures of vagrancy.
Texts
- Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness
- Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
- Shakespeare, Hamlet
A course reader will include selections by Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine,
Montaigne, Rousseau, Poe, Baudelaire, Borges, Woolf, Celan, Proust, Neruda,
Perec, Auster, Nietzsche, Freud, Sacks, and Suárez-Araúz.
Films
- Nolan, Memento
- Hitchcock, Vertigo
CL 1A:3, #1712, HAACKE, MWF 10-11, 125 DWINELLE
"Literature and Gravity"
Since the United States dropped the first atom bombs in 1945, there has
emerged a new consciousness of global gravity, uncertainty and terror.
As Hannah Arendt writes in her book The Human Condition, the earth has
come to be seen as not only a home to inhabit, but a prison to escape.
This course will investigate some of the ways in which arts and letters
have taken up this global situation while at the same time attempting
to rise above it. After reading certain relevant classical and early modern
texts, we will focus on post-1945 literature, films and performance that
revolve around U.S. American power and imperialism, World War II and the
Holocaust, the Cold War, the Atomic Age, weapons of mass destruction and
the “war on terror.” In weighing aesthetic, critical and theoretical texts
against each other, our discussion will focus on questions of tragedy
and comedy; history and memory; survival and resistance; relativity, translation
and transference; mobility and return; time, space and narrative; imperialism
and sovereignty; worldliness and earth politics. We will find birds, angels,
people falling in love, getting depressed and seeking relief, pilots,
airplanes, astronauts, spaceships, aliens, bombs and The Bomb recurring
as exemplary figures.
In this way, we will take “gravity” both literally, as the force that
keeps us bound to the earth, and as a figurative and metaphorical notion
of increasing currency and significance in this age of space exploration,
neocolonial globalization, nuclear power and terror. Our main academic
question will be whether historical narrativization is indeed a “burden"
for readers to carry, as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests; if so,
we will ask how and why, and if not, we will discover what storytelling
may be able to achieve instead. This will lead to some big questions:
How does language bear the weight of history, memory, and society? Do
the stories we tell lift us out of everyday life or do we carry them around
with us? What is the value of fiction or the force of fact in representing
or changing the world?
Essays, poems, plays and novels will likely include
- Italo Calvino, "Lightness" and "Quickness" in Six Memos for the
Next Millenium
- Ovid, "Icarus and Dedalus" in Metamophoses
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sysiphus
- Mahmoud Darwish, "On This Earth," “Athens Airport,” “Earth Presses
Against Us”
- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- Bertolt Brecht, Galileo
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
- Tony Kushner, Angels in America
- Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour
- Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
- Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
- Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden: The U.S. and the Phillipine
Islands"
- J.G. Ballard, "Love and Napalm: Export USA"
- Bharati Mukherjee, "The Management of Grief"
- W.G. Sebald, "Literature and Air War"
- Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
Selections in course reader from: Hannah Arendt, Gayatri Spivak, Edward
Said, Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud,
Walter Benjamin, Jean-Luc Nancy, Andreas Huyssen, Ward Churchill
Films
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)
- I Live in Fear/Record of a Living Being (Akira Kurosawa, 1955)
- Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
- Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
- Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
- Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki,
1989)
As part of the Consortium for the Arts’s “Atomic Age” series, there will
be a number of related lectures and events on campus, screenings at the
Pacific Film Archive, and an opportunity to see the premiere of the Peter
Sellars/John Adams opera “Dr. Atomic” at the San Francisco Opera House.
CL 1A:5, #17218, POPKIN/Lorenz, MWF 9-10, 2301 TOLMAN
"From Tragedy to Trauma"
While many who write about trauma stress the ethical responsibility of
passing on their stories, many of these same writers also convey the essential
impossibility of this task. Indeed, the literature of trauma often points
towards the way in which trauma must be passed on – retold – and the way
it is often passed on – overlooked.
This course will begin with an examination of tragedy, and then compare
it to writings on modern trauma. Why it is so difficult to pass on stories
of trauma. We will consider this question on linguistic, psychoanalytic
and philosophical registers. We will also probe the limits of what can
be said, examining how witnesses reconstruct their stories in the face
of this essential impossibility. How is language reshaped to account for
this impossibility? Who has the right to testify? Are some representations
inappropriate? We will also reflect on the ethical burden of the post-witness
– the witness to the witness. How do we as students – and as interlocutors
– respond?
These questions will be pursued through a broad range of texts. We will
begin the course with a section on tragedy, and then study writings about
three collective traumas: American slavery, the Holocaust, and September
11. We will look at fictional, allegorical, autobiographical and media
accounts of these events.
Texts
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
- Shakespeare, Hamlet
- Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Morrison, Beloved
- Wiesel, The Night Trilogy
- Borowski, This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentleman
- Prose, Guided Tours of Hell
- Kafka, Metamorphosis
CL 1A:6, #17221, BEN-YISHAI/Nielsen, MWF 10-11, 210 WHEELER
"Misbehavior"
In this course we will look at fictional and poetic representations of
misbehavior. The texts we will read vary not only in their genres and
approaches to misbehavior but also in their languages of origin and in
the historical periods in which they were written. They raise questions
of good and bad, deviancy and normalcy, objectivity and subjectivity,
femininity and masculinity. We will move from a discussion of misbehaving
characters, to one of misbehaving texts and readers: who makes the rules,
and who gets to break them?
Good reading, hopefully, will lead to good writing, but so as not to
leave that to chance we will stress close readings as a method of textual
analysis, and revision and peer editing as part of an intensive focus
on writing skills. Course requirements include regular participation in
class discussion, class presentations, weekly on-line bulletin board entries
and 5 papers (two of which will be substantial revisions).
Texts
- Apuleius, The Golden Ass
- William Shakespeare, King Lear
- Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
- Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro
- Thomas Pynchon, V.
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Course Reader with critical articles, poems, parables, and short stories.
CL 1A:8, #17227, WELLS, TT 9:30-11, 223 WHEELER
"Nostalgia, Utopia, Apocalypse"
This course will focus on the strange effects produced by the off-kilter
temporalities (and, at times, geographies) of nostalgia, utopia and apocalypse.
While nostalgia produces the eruption of the past in the present, utopia
works at representing a space outside of historical or man-made time.
Apocalypse, in turn, figures the seizing up of an established mode of
time, along with its ultimate destruction.
The works we will examine chart their relationship to time in very different
ways, among them the theological, political and aesthetic. Apocalypse,
for example, is at once a figure for the experience of divine judgment
and for the unruly experience of a secular modernity. We will examine
these shifting views in order to grapple with a series of questions regarding
temporality and its relationship to the literary. What are the different
effects produced by these models of time? Do they provoke us to rethink
our understanding of historical time? What are the ethical implications
of these defamiliarizing temporalities?
As this is a writing course, we will be focusing on how to create and
substantially develop arguments about the implications of divergent forms
of temporalities through close readings of the works at hand.
These are to be chosen from among the following (i.e., please
don’t purchase books until after the first day of class):
Longer works
- Thomas Moore, Utopia
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
- Zoey Valdez, Cafe Nostalgia
- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
- Shakespeare, Othello
- Flannery O’Connor, Good Man is Hard to Find or The Violent
Bear it Away
- Walter Salles, Terra Estrangeira/Foreign Land (film)
Shorter works and selections
- From the Quran (e.g. Surah of the Earthquake)
- The Book of Revelations (New Testament)
- Plato, from The Republic
- Euclides de Cunha, from Rebellion in the Backlands
- I’ll Take My Stand (Southern Agrarian Manifesto)
- Julio Cortázar, “Apocalypse at Solentiname”
A reader with short selections from some of the following thinkers---Liebniz,
Ghazalli, Bloch, Fourier, Marx, Reinhart Kosseleck, Marshall Berman, Svetlana
Boym and Lois P. Zamora---will help us with framing questions as we approach
the texts.
CL 1A:9, #17230, BOYARIN, TT 11-12:30, 222 WHEELER
"Heroes, Anti-Heroes, Heroines and Super-Heroes"
Course Description: We are all familiar with great heroes: men and women
who struggle mightily against Gods, other men, and themselves. Overcoming
great odds, heroes have founded cities, converted the unbelievers, saved
the planet, and romanced women. But what happens when the hero does not
want to save the day? What happens if the hero does not want to “get the
girl”? What if the hero is the girl? And what happens after the
heroic achievement? In this class we will read tales of heroes and heroism
that deal with these questions, and we will discuss in class and in writing
the nature of heroic acts and the problems they present. Throughout the
semester, you will use this topic to use and improve your analytical and
writing skills.
Texts
- Euripides, Medea, (Dover Thrift Edition)
- The Story of Deborah, Hebrew Bible
- Life of St. Martin of Tour
- The Story of Lancelot
- Tennyson, Ullyses
- Shakespeare, Othello, (New Cambridge Edition Sanders)
- Salih, Season of Migration to the North, (Penguin 2003)
- Superman (movie)
- Tolkien, The Hobbit, (Collins Modern Classics 1998)
CL 1B:1, #17233, BRUCKEL, TT 9:30-11, 229 DWINELLE
"Representing War and the Writing of the Disaster"
“With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which
has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war
that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but
poorer in communicable experience?” (Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”
- 1936)
In this course we will explore the many ways in which war has been represented
by male and female authors from various places and eras. The texts we
will read range from a Greek epic of the eighth century B.C to twentieth
century poems written during both World Wars, and also to a novel and
short stories dealing with the Algerian War (1954-62). With our main focus
on the rhetorics, poetics and aesthetics of a given text, we will try
to define each author’s particular way of writing (about) the war. What
have been some of the challenges encountered by writers who suddenly faced
a reality which proved to be difficult if not impossible to describe?
What kind of language would a writer adopt, in view of which readership
and finally for what purpose (to simply bear witness, to confirm the status
quo, to resist and/or find a new literary self)? Does the very
process of representing a disaster not suggest that writing, if affected
by it, could turn into some kind of a disaster itself?
Besides raising some of these literary questions, we will discuss the
texts also as social documents, situated in their own time and history.
Several authors saw actual combat, others (mostly women, children, parents)
experienced the war and its various forms of devastation on the home front.
Some texts will involve a more detailed discussion of how and why the
act of representing war is bound to be complicated by issues of gender.
Students will write and revise three essays (5-6 pages long) and do several
shorter writing assignments in addition to the assigned reading. There
will be frequent quizzes, but no midterm or final exam.
Texts
- Homer, The Iliad (selections)
- Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front
- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, mon amour
- Mohammed Dib, The Savage Night (selections)
- Assia Djeba, Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian
War
Xeroxed selection of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Siegfried Sassoon,
e.e. cummings and others
Reader
Will include selected poetry, short essays, literary excerpts, readings
in cultural theory and literary analysis (i.e. G. Apollinaire, S. Sassoon,
S. Weil, H. Barbusse, E. Wharton, V. Woolf, W. Benjamin, C. Forché,
H. Rousso, F. Fannon, A. Memmi etc.)
Films
- Lewis Milestone, All quiet on the Western front
- Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, mon amour
- Gillo Pontecorvo, Battle of Algiers
CL 1B:2, #17236, ALLAN, TT 9:30-11, 224 WHEELER
"Critical Encounters: Literature, Anthropology, Critique"
This course sets out to explore what is known as critique. We will begin
by asking what it means to read critically and will continue by investigating
how encounters frame the critical positions we take. Our goal, beyond
charting the dynamics of reading and responding, will be both to question
the grounds from which we feel, understand and act politically, and to
ask how literature informs our sense of commitment to a certain position.
We will be concerned, then, not only with what we read, but with how and
in whose terms we respond, whether a matter of affection or disgust. Our
semester will be divided into four key units: 1) literature and the poetics
of reading, 2) the politics of difference, 3) secular criticism and its
other, and 4) colonial discourse and post-colonial critique. Readings
will be drawn from the book list below and a course reader containing
essays by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Amy Hollywood, Talal Asad, Edward
Said, Barbara Johnson, Michael Warner, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Roland
Barthes.
The course will consist of three primary essay assignments, weekly writing
responses, discussions and class presentations, all of which will help
to refine writing, speaking and critical thinking skills. Because film
screenings will be an integral part of our course, please be prepared
to attend screenings outside of class hours.
Texts
- Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
- Herman Melville, Billy Budd
- The Song of Roland
- Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of a Minaret
- Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure
- Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
Films
- Jean-Luc Godard, Ici et ailleurs
- Claire Denis, Beau Travail
- Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 9-11
- Walt Disney’s Pocahontas
CL 1B:3, #17239, RAMOS, TT 11-12:30, 223 WHEELER
"States of Exception:
Culture and Politics at the Zone of Indeterminacy"
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben recently noted that President Bush,
by expressly reminding the public of his status of “Commander in Chief
” after September 11, is effectively “attempting to produce a situation
in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between
peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible.”
Implicit in Agamben’s observation is a preoccupation with what many political
and legal theorists for some time now have been calling the state of exception.
In its original formulation, wartime German jurist Carl Schmitt paradoxically
defines the state of exception as both a “borderline” and “general” concept
in the theory of the state, that is, at once peripheral and central to
politics, at once defining and defying the contours of the law. Given
the peculiar nature of its conception, the state of exception has been
the subject of much recent debate, from the indefinite detention of prisoners
at Guantanamo Bay to the controversy surrounding the death of Brazilian
national Jean Charles de Menezes, mistakenly suspected of terrorism and
shot to death by London police officers. In light of these recent controversies,
in this course we will examine instances in modern culture where an inversion
of social norms takes place; that is, where the law is suspended and the
exception becomes the rule. Two interrelated sets of questions will animate
class discussion:
1. Juridico-political:
What challenges does the theory and practice of the state of exception
present to democratic culture and how can these challenge s be best understood?
For example, what social and political conditions make it possible for
the law to be circumvented or even mobilized in the service of death and
coercion? At what point does the distinction between friend and enemy,
peace and war, foreign and civil war no longer become applicable, and
what juridico-political factors explain the collapsing of these categories?
What historical antecedents, moreover, must we turn to as examples, and
what lessons can we extract from them? Is it possible, for instance, to
locate “thresholds of irreversibility”, whereby the political climate
in each case reaches a decisive boiling point, culminating in the transformation
of the juridico-political system into a killing machine, to use Agamben’s
terminology?
2. Aesthetic-formal:
What is the value of culture in the age of heightened national security?
In other words, what role does cultural production play, either emancipatory
or repressive, creative or destructive, in transforming the realm of politics?
Similarly, we will be concerned with the affective indeterminacy of aesthetic
experience, that is, its unfixed relation to both mental cognition and
physical sensation. What effects does individual or subjective aesthetic
experience bear upon the collective, social realm in which they take place?
How might texts (both literary and visual, both fictional and documentary)
that largely deal with political repression question traditional notions
of the aesthetic as divorced from the realm of politics? How might they
help us rethink the relation between reality and representation, sign
and referent, art and life?
The objective of this course, then, will be to read the formal heterogeneity
and distorted social realities these texts represent in relation to each
other, so as to devise reading strategies that seek ways out of the impasse
of marginality, troubling facile notions of particularist versus universal
literatures, resistant versus hegemonic politics, and minoritarian versus
majoritarian struggles before the law. In so doing, we will investigate
if reading for aesthetic form allows for a blueprint of political transformation
to emerge from the pages of the text itself.
Course Requirements: Four major essays, two formal presentations,
and near perfect attendance and participation
Fiction
Film
- Pontecorvo, Battle of Algiers
- Guzman, The Pinochet Case
- Nava, El Norte
- Bassani, Garden of Finzi-Contonis
- Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will
Criticism
- A lengthy course reader including texts by Agamben, Anzaldua, Arendt,
Balibar, Butler, Clausewitz, Foucault, Mbembe, Scarry, Schmitt, as well
as documents in international law.
CL 1B:4, #17242, SHULMAN/Singleton, TT 12:30-2, 156 DWINELLE
"‘Dearly Beloved’: Trauma, Memory, and Loss in Women’s
Narrative"
In this class, we will examine the ways in which women have told stories
of loss, focusing on how they grapple with their memories of bereavement.
How do they voice their stories, and how does the form of the narrative
reflect the characters’ attempts at articulating what seems inexpressible?
We will look at some texts in which women attempt to reject their conventional
roles as wives or lovers, examining how they cope with the attendant breakdown
of family structure. We will then move to specific historical contexts
of narratives that deal with the legacy of slavery and of the Holocaust.
How do women who are oppressed not only as women but also, and equally,
as blacks or Jews, cope with the violent, traumatic disruption of the
most elementary human bond, that between parent and child? As we encounter
“motherless daughters” and “daughterless mothers,” we will examine the
ways in which these women attempt to recover aspects of the mother-daughter
relationship by engaging in imaginary conversations with their lost loved
one, and we shall see how they view their own implication in the rupturing
of that bond. Finally, we will turn to narratives of homelessness and
alienation, in which women express their yearning for a home that no longer
exists except in memory. As we explore these issues throughout the course
of the semester and through a variety of media, we will question the usefulness
of distinguishing such categories as the historical and the fictive, the
autobiographical and the imaginary. What are the limits of these categories,
and how do the narratives explode or move beyond them?
Texts
- Selections from the Hebrew Bible – “Song of Songs,” “Song of Deborah”
from Judges,Lamentations
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
- Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of My Mother
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
- Cordelia Edvardson, Burned Child Seeks the Fire
- Cynthia Ozick, Rosa and The Shawl
- Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
- Course Reader with poems by Ingeborg Bachmann, Emma Howell, Else Lasker-Schüler,
and Nelly Sachs
Films
- Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust
- Naomi Ben Natan-Schory, Liora Kamintzky, Born in Berlin
CL 1B:5, #17245, WHITE/Caballero, MWF 11-12, 209 Dwinelle
"Where Should We Be Today? -- Travel and Landscape in
New World Literature"
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
[...]
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
--Elizabeth Bishop
In her 1965 poem "Questions of Travel," Elizabeth Bishop wryly wonders
which is better, the fantasy or the reality of another place; she refers
to the landscapes of that other place as dreams, focusing our attention
not on the real sites but on our conception of them, mediated by culture
and ideology. These are as much ethical questions as philosophical and
representational ones: what power relations determine our notions of travel,
landscape, and the foreign? To what degree does the pasts blunt conflation
of native peoples with their wild landscape survive in our contemporary
dreams? How much do the encounters of the past between "modern" explorers
and "native," "authentic" locals survive in our modern forms of tourism
and travel, or in our modern forms of narrative?
Of course, to answer these questions requires first a careful examination
of those past forms and their construction of difference between the traveler
and the encountered landscape/people. Western empire has created, extended,
and identified itself, in large part, by reinforcing difference, coded
variously as civilized vs. savage, culture vs. nature, masculine vs. feminine,
mobile vs. static, traveler vs. native, self vs. Other. The West defines
itself over and against this "other," an "other" that has been encountered,
explored, surveyed, and defined through travel. Expeditions of discovery
and conquest were followed by expeditions in the name of science, all
of which served to incorporate new areas into Western systems of power
and representation. Whether the surveyor filling in the "blank" spaces
on the map, the missionary, the biologist cataloguing flora and fauna,
or the anthropologist, the Western traveler has embodied power, knowledge,
and authority. The practices of travel and travel writing are not simply
manifestations of this power, but constitutive of it.
These questions will be addressed in a wide variety of texts, from Odysseus
and his epic wanderings (identified with the very "beginnings" of Western
literature itself) to various narratives of wandering and encountering
in the Americas, from the 18th thru the 20th centuries. Taking seriously
Mary Louise Pratt's notion that the travelogues of the 18th and 19th centuries
were at least as widely read and influential as the strictly "fictional"
accounts of such travels, we will be looking at excerpts from the travelogues
of Alexander von Humboldt, William Henry Hudson, and Charles Darwin; Melville's
more formally advanced, coded meditations on the subject will also be
considered. We will also be looking at the ways this can of worms gets
re-opened in the 20th century, in texts ranging from César Aira's pseudo-scientific
expedition across the Argentine pampas to Jim Jarmusch's anti-western
film Dead Man, through examinations of America's landscape legacy in short
stories by Sam Shephard and the experimental poetry of Susan Howe, with
a layover in the Caribbean courtesy of Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff,
and a jaunt to Brazil with the American poet Elizabeth Bishop.
We will stress close readings as a method of textual analysis, and revision
and peer editing as part of an intensive focus on writing skills. Course
requirements include regular participation in class discussions, peer
editing and self-evaluation exercises, a weekly interactive (online) reading
journal, and several papers (at least one of which will be a substantial
revision, and one of which will require a research component).
Texts may include
- Homer, The Odyssey
- Cesar Aira, Benito Cereno
- Herman Melville, The Riot Act
- Jim Jarmusch (dir.), Dead Man (film)
- Susan Howe, "Thorow"
- Elizabeth Bishop, selected poems
- Sam Shepard, from Cruising Paradise
- Michelle Cliff, from The Land of Look Behind
- Jamaica Kincaid, from A Small Place
- Excerpts from the travel narratives of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles
Darwin, William Henry Hudson
- Excerpts from the critical works of Mary Louise Pratt, James Clifford,
Michel de Certeau
CL 1B:6, #17248, BHAUMIK/Eleasar, MWF 10-11, 121 WHEELER
"Comparative Partitions: Between Literature and Dispossession"
Challenging representations of race and geography, colonialism and national
overcoming, event and fiction, this class interrogates commonplace notions
of territory, citizenship and sovereignty. Students will be asked to turn
to the complexity of spatial relations and subject formation in fiction
in order to question social policies and governmental doctrines established
as a means of resolving so-called “communal conflict.” Extrapolating from
narratives about the traumatic separation of North and South Korea, the
Bangladesh/India/Pakistan Partition, Northern Ireland and Ireland, Israel
and Palestine, the U. S. Civil War we will examine the trope of the divided
nation in print culture, cinema, and political theory. While recognizing
the historical and cultural specificity of each of the above mentioned
scenarios, the texts we encounter will ask students to dissect the intersection
between art and narratives of individual emancipation, democracy, ethnic
or religious homogeneity. Instead, by way of the literary imagination,
we will examine the social and psychic effects of arbitrary territorial
delineations on ideals of tradition, modernity, progress, freedom, and
belonging.
Texts
- Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun
- Suji Kwock Kim, Notes from a Divided Country
- Tom Paulin, The Riot Act
- Edith Ravel, Ten Thousand Lovers
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
- Sophocles, Antigone
Films
- D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation
- Neil Jordan, Crying Game
- Deepa Mehta, Earth
- Meghe Dhaka Tara (dir. Ritiwk Ghatak)
A reader will include the criticism, short fiction and poetry from: St.
John de Crevecouer, Urvashi Batalia, Veena Das, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Seamus
Heaney, Sadat Hasan Manto, John Montagne, Amir Mufti and Gyan Pandey.
CL 1B:7, #17251, DWYER, MWF 11-12, 223 WHEELER
"Adventure, Exploration, Exile:
Literature about travel (and about those who stay at home)"
From ancient times until today audiences have been captivated by tales
of travel and adventure. In this class we will read and write about literary
journeys from such diverse times and places as ancient Greece, nineteenth-century
Russia, fin de siècle Europe, and twentieth-century Sudan.
We will discuss the ways that travel organizes literary texts and the
role that the journey has played in the development of literature as we
know it. We will also be particularly attuned to the following questions:
What motivates the traveler to leave home? How does the traveler observe
both himself and others? What kinds of relationships and tensions develop
between those who travel and those who stay at home? Between the traveler
and the people he observes? Between the traveling narrator and his audience?
As we trace these questions through different historical periods and traditions,
we will address matters of nationalism, colonialism, gender, exile, and
modern explorations of the psyche.
This course fulfills the second portion of the undergraduate reading
and composition requirement and is designed to help you develop clearer
and more effective writing as you also hone your critical reading skills.
There will be a significant research component to the class.
Texts will be chosen from among the following
- Homer, The Odyssey
- Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
- Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
- Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
- Isaak Babel, The Red Cavalry
- Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
There will be a reader with selections from the Hebrew Bible and pieces
by Sigmund Freud, Milan Kundera, Anna Seghers, Suzanne Vega, George Van
den Abbeele, Viktor Shklovsky, Joseph Brodsky, and others.
CL 1B:8, #17254, BRAWN/ROBERTS, MWF 12-1, 182 DWINELLE
"Irony and Idealism"
Since The Aeneid and The Odyssey, literary forms have been
used to express individual and societal ideals, often through the actions
and thoughts of their main protagonist. But, it seems, the modern reader
is often tempted to interpret these ideals as ironic, as though the very
presentation of idealism was an invitation to parody. In this course,
we will look closely at how ideals of social utopia, personal virtue and
praise-worthy behavior are represented in a range of different literary
forms from the 11th century to the present day. Our readings include an
epic, novels, films, plays and a philosophic treatise, allowing us to
consider how the form of a literary text can be used to affect the reader
in different ways. Does the representation of idealism strike us as more
authentic in a medieval epic than in a 20th-century film? Is a medieval
knight inherently more heroic than a modern day angsty adolescent? Are
the ideals expressed by children more easy to accept as sincere than those
of adults? What freedoms and constraints do the novel, the play, the film
and the philosophical treatise each offer the author?
We will also look at the related themes of morality, ethics, mockery
and subversion.
Texts
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
- François-Marie Voltaire, Candide
- William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
- Homer, The Odyssey, Books I – XI
- Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
- Frederick Crews et al, The Random House Handbook
Films
- Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands
- Jason Schwartzman, I Heart Huckabees
CL 1B:9, #17257, WHITE, MWF 1-2, 222 WHEELER
"Where Should We Be Today? -- Travel and Landscape in
New World Literature"
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
[...]
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
--Elizabeth Bishop
In her 1965 poem "Questions of Travel," Elizabeth Bishop wryly wonders
which is better, the fantasy or the reality of another place; she refers
to the landscapes of that other place as dreams, focusing our attention
not on the real sites but on our conception of them, mediated by culture
and ideology. These are as much ethical questions as philosophical and
representational ones: what power relations determine our notions of travel,
landscape, and the foreign? To what degree does the pasts blunt conflation
of native peoples with their wild landscape survive in our contemporary
dreams? How much do the encounters of the past between "modern" explorers
and "native," "authentic" locals survive in our modern forms of tourism
and travel, or in our modern forms of narrative?
Of course, to answer these questions requires first a careful examination
of those past forms and their construction of difference between the traveler
and the encountered landscape/people. Western empire has created, extended,
and identified itself, in large part, by reinforcing difference, coded
variously as civilized vs. savage, culture vs. nature, masculine vs. feminine,
mobile vs. static, traveler vs. native, self vs. Other. The West defines
itself over and against this "other," an "other" that has been encountered,
explored, surveyed, and defined through travel. Expeditions of discovery
and conquest were followed by expeditions in the name of science, all
of which served to incorporate new areas into Western systems of power
and representation. Whether the surveyor filling in the "blank" spaces
on the map, the missionary, the biologist cataloguing flora and fauna,
or the anthropologist, the Western traveler has embodied power, knowledge,
and authority. The practices of travel and travel writing are not simply
manifestations of this power, but constitutive of it.
These questions will be addressed in a wide variety of texts, from Odysseus
and his epic wanderings (identified with the very "beginnings" of Western
literature itself) to various narratives of wandering and encountering
in the Americas, from the 18th thru the 20th centuries. Taking seriously
Mary Louise Pratt's notion that the travelogues of the 18th and 19th centuries
were at least as widely read and influential as the strictly "fictional"
accounts of such travels, we will be looking at excerpts from the travelogues
of Alexander von Humboldt, William Henry Hudson, and Charles Darwin; Melville's
more formally advanced, coded meditations on the subject will also be
considered. We will also be looking at the ways this can of worms gets
re-opened in the 20th century, in texts ranging from César Aira's pseudo-scientific
expedition across the Argentine pampas to Jim Jarmusch's anti-western
film Dead Man, through examinations of America's landscape legacy in short
stories by Sam Shephard and the experimental poetry of Susan Howe, with
a layover in the Caribbean courtesy of Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff,
and a jaunt to Brazil with the American poet Elizabeth Bishop.
We will stress close readings as a method of textual analysis, and revision
and peer editing as part of an intensive focus on writing skills. Course
requirements include regular participation in class discussions, peer
editing and self-evaluation exercises, a weekly interactive (online) reading
journal, and several papers (at least one of which will be a substantial
revision, and one of which will require a research component).
Texts may include
- Homer, The Odyssey
- Cesar Aira, Benito Cereno
- Herman Melville, The Riot Act
- Jim Jarmusch (dir.), Dead Man (film)
- Susan Howe, "Thorow"
- Elizabeth Bishop, selected poems
- Sam Shepard, from Cruising Paradise
- Jamaica Kincaid, from A Small Place
- Excerpts from the travel narratives of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles
Darwin, William Henry Hudson
- Excerpts from the critical works of Mary Louise Pratt, James Clifford,
Michel de Certeau
CL 1B:10, #17260, SCHWARTZ/Goldstein, MWF 9-10, 122 WHEELER
"Still Life with Model"
In Ovid’s story of Pygmalion, a sculptor fashions an ivory statue of
a woman which is so beautiful—so unbearably, artistically perfect—that
he falls in love with her, and wishes she would come to life. When Pygmalion’s
wish is granted by the goddess Venus, he is stunned into rapturous disbelief
that his creation is now a blushing, breathing woman. Hasn’t the sculptor
destroyed his masterpiece, though, by bringing her out of the realm of
the arts and into his mundane mortal world—his cramped little studio,
his humble scattered chisels and piles of ivory chips? What is at stake
in the transition from exalted, untouchable muse to woman with her own
will, desires, and perspective?
This course centers on the problems of the artist’s model and the ungovernable
muses. In four thematic sections—Myths of the Muse, The Muse and the Makeover,
Film Stills, and The Life Model Goes Mad—we will look at works of poetry,
photography, film, painting, novels, critical essays, and installation
art that examine the relationship between artists, their media, and their
sources of inspiration. We will spend time learning about the aesthetic
ache felt by the artist who cannot “capture” his model; we will discuss
texts in which the writer impersonates her subject in order to write an
“autobiography;” and we will examine photographic self-portraits in which
the artist and the model are apparently the same person (although one
or the other is in disguise). Our test case will be a tight and sometimes
viciously intimate circle in Paris that included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude
Stein, the photographers Cecil Beaton, Lee Miller, and Man Ray. This cluster
of artists tended to cannibalize each other in search of models. Thus,
for example, we have Picasso’s Cubist portrait of Gertrude Stein alongside
Cecil Beaton’s photographs of both of them; meanwhile, Gertrude Stein
was writing arch character sketches of the artists who frequented her
apartment.
Besides the question of what happens when the muse turns artist, the
class will address the problem of “stilling life” in terms of media. When
the living model is turned into an object, or a set of chemicals on paper,
we get the chance to read the Pygmalion story backwards. Is there an element
of death that creeps into the artist’s exercise known as “the still life”?
When the model is frozen as an image, what is lost? This class welcomes
your questions and insights as well, and you will have the chance to write
on the subjects that interest you most on the syllabus. Over the course
of the semester, we will be developing our own, individual ways of seeing
deeply into the texts we encounter. As John Berger says, “It is seeing
which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that
world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded
by it.”
Fiction and Criticism
- Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
- Wendy Lesser, His Other Half (excerpt)
- Peter Steinart, The Undressed Art (excerpt)
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing (excerpt)
Films
- George Cukor, My Fair Lady
- Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard
- Olivier Assayas, Irma Vep
- Davide Ferrario, Dopo Mezzanotte (“After Midnight”)
- Ross Kauffman, Zana Briski, Born Into Brothels
Plays and Poetry
- Ovid, Metamorphosis
- George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
- Davide Ferrario, Dopo Mezzanotte (“After Midnight”)
- Selected poems by William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley
Paintings, Photographs, and Other Visual Art
- Paintings by Georgia O'Keefe
- Photographs by Alfred Steiglitz (of Georgia O’Keefe)
- Photographs by Lee Miller
- Photographs by Man Ray (of Lee Miller)
- Photographs by Cecil Beaton (of himself, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso)
- Paintings by Pablo Picasso (of Gertrude Stein)
- Photographs by Edward Weston (of Charis Wilson)
- Photographs by Cindy Sherman (the series “Untitled Film Stills”)
- Visual Art by Tracey Emin
CL 1B:11, #17263, HILL, TT 8-9:30, 223 WHEELER
"Marriage, Narrative, and Civilization"
Sex and religion, monogamy and polygamy, patriarchy and adultery, property
and therapy, privacy and public vows, children and divorce, miscegenation
and same-sex unions. In this research and writing course we will consider
a few of the classic texts that tell stories about marriage. Emphasis
will be given to the narrative strategies these stories employ, and how
the idea of marriage in the West has evolved over time. Class time will
also be spent on the techniques involved in writing a scholarly essay:
from locating and evaluating sources to correctly acknowledging them in
the final draft. From the Book of Genesis we will move on to read selections
from Plato, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Additional material will
include short stories from Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Raymond Carver,
et al.; historical narratives by John Boswell, Nancy Cott, and Marilyn
Yalom; the U.S. court rulings Loving v. Virginia and Goodridge v. Department
of Public Health; and a sampling of relevant criticism. Requirements include
three papers of increasing length, a midterm, a final, and regular quizzes.
Texts
- Robert Alter, Genesis
- Plato, Symposium
- Chaucer, The Wife of Bath
- Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
- Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation
CL 1B:12, #17266, GOLD, MWF 9-10, 123 DWINELLE
"Inventing Innocence"
This course’s primary objective is to hone students’ composition skills.
In conjunction with our work on writing, we will consider poetry, fiction
and film that use young narrators to convey a moral landscape. To what
effect have different authors played with the special privileges and limitations
of this perspective? How does the inventiveness of a child’s mind, especially
when negotiating troubling adult realities, broaden narrative possibilities?
In what ways are children both the most and the least reliable of narrators?
Also, what might the representation of children teach us about sentimentality
and authenticity in different eras and cultures? Finally, in an age when
literary studies pays special attention to “marginalized voices,” we will
consider children--whose voices are nearly always heard within the literary
establishment via the mediation of adult authors--as a limit-case of this
category.
Along with prose composition, students will also receive instruction
and practice in researching topics in the humanities. Besides assigned
essays, requirements of the course include active participation in classroom
and online discussion, regular attendance and a group presentation.
Reading and viewing list
- **NOTE: Students are requested not to buy texts for this course
prior to the first class meeting.**
- Italo Calvino, The Path to The Nests of Spiders
- Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
- Charles Laughton, The Night of The Hunter (film)
- François Truffaut, The Four Hundred Blows (film)
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks and Dylan Thomas (in course reader)
- Short fiction by Ben Okri (in course reader)
- Excerpts from Genesis and Exodus; I & II Samuel (in course reader)
CL 1B:13, #17269, FORT, TT 8-9:30, 224 WHEELER
"Memory, Fiction, and Transformation"
This is a course of intensive reading and composition in which we will
explore the relationship between memory and fiction or artifice. In what
ways is memory structured as a fiction? Does personal memory necessarily
include an element of artifice and invention? From these broad questions,
we will narrow the focus by looking at narratives in which characters
have extreme experiences that challenge the very possibility of recounting
memories, or even of maintaining a stable identity. In particular, we
will examine stories in which characters are caught up in a circular (or
repetitive) movement of death (disappearance, destruction, oblivion) and
return (rebirth or resurrection, transformation, remembrance). We will
be concerned with studying the ways in which this process, and its articulation
in narrative (or filmic) language, involves various modes of fiction (as
a lapse, an indulgence, a form of trickery, a re-enactment of the past,
a trap, an escape...) and the ways in which such fictions both create
and problematize identity.
Texts
- Homer, The Odyssey
- Kafka, The Metamorphosis
- Duras, Hiroshima mon amour
The rest of the reading will be included in a reader containing the
following
- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense
- Kafka, The Metamorphosis; The Silence of the Sirens; Poseidon
- Borges, Funes, His Memory; Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius; The Library
of Babel
- Blanchot, The Instant of My Death
- Chris Marker, La jetée (text of the film)
Films
- Chris Marker, La jetée
- Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour
- Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo
- John Frankenheimer, Seconds
CL 1B:14, #17271, GOLD, MWF 10-11, 203 WHEELER
"Inventing Innocence"
This course’s primary objective is to hone students’ composition skills.
In conjunction with our work on writing, we will consider poetry, fiction
and film that use young narrators to convey a moral landscape. To what
effect have different authors played with the special privileges and limitations
of this perspective? How does the inventiveness of a child’s mind, especially
when negotiating troubling adult realities, broaden narrative possibilities?
In what ways are children both the most and the least reliable of narrators?
Also, what might the representation of children teach us about sentimentality
and authenticity in different eras and cultures? Finally, in an age when
literary studies pays special attention to “marginalized voices,” we will
consider children--whose voices are nearly always heard within the literary
establishment via the mediation of adult authors--as a limit-case of this
category.
Along with prose composition, students will also receive instruction
and practice in researching topics in the humanities. Besides assigned
essays, requirements of the course include active participation in classroom
and online discussion, regular attendance and a group presentation.
Reading and viewing list
- **NOTE: Students are requested not to buy texts for this course
prior to the first class meeting.**
- Italo Calvino, The Path to The Nests of Spiders
- Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
- Charles Laughton, The Night of The Hunter (film)
- François Truffaut, The Four Hundred Blows (film)
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks and Dylan Thomas (in course reader)
- Short fiction by Ben Okri (in course reader)
- Excerpts from Genesis and Exodus; I & II Samuel (in course reader)
CL 1B:15, #17473, YANSON, TT 9:30-11, 2301 TOLMAN
"Family Trouble: The Theme of Incest in Literature"
Each society puts a taboo on incest; each society interprets incest and
the problems associated with it differently. Prohibitions on a legitimate
sexual union can vary from a narrow restriction on marriage between the
members of a nuclear family to a wide ban on marriage within the seventh
degree of consanguinity. In any event, the social response to incest is
never neutral: both law and literature attest to that. From Antiquity
through the Middle Ages to modern times, incest remains one of the favorite
literary themes providing a continuous dialogue between the texts from
various historical periods and different genres (drama, lyrical poetry,
romance, holy legend, novel). In this course we will look at the literature
of incest in its historical, cultural, and literary context. Several of
the texts on the reading list represent literary pairs: they provide two
or more treatments of the same plot by authors from different time periods
and cultures. In analyzing these texts we would try to address a variety
of psychological, historical, cultural, literary, and gender questions
associated with the literary treatment of incest.
Texts
- Sophocles, Oedipus
- Euripides, Hippolytos
- Hartmann von Aue, Gregorius
- Shakespeare, Pericles
- Racine, Phèdre
- Byron, Manfred
- Mann, The Holy Sinner
CL 1B:16, #17476, SHUH, MWF 9-10, 223 WHEELER
"A Semester at Sea"
What does the sea represent for literature? This vast and encompassing
feature of the natural world inspires and constitutes a wide range of
texts: from the voyage of Odysseus to the poetic revolution of Rimbaud,
from the monumental sea tale of Melville’s Moby Dick to the modernist
psychology of Woolf’s The Waves, and back around again to Patrick
O’Brien’s seafaring adventure novels. In our readings, we will investigate
what is at stake in the portrayal of the ocean. We will study its symbolic
and narrative force, its social, economic and political function, and
its role in defining the relation of the self to the world.
Course requirements will include regular and active participation in
class discussions, peer editing, and a weekly reading journal in addition
to several papers. The texts listed below will be supplemented by critical
readings and essays as appropriate.
Texts
- Homer, The Odyssey (selections)
- Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander
- Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat
- Mark Kurlansky, Cod
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
- Shakespeare, The Tempest
- Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Film
CL 1B:17, #17479, BRUCKEL, MWF 11-12, 279 DWINELLE
"Representing War and the Writing of the Disaster"
“With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which
has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war
that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but
poorer in communicable experience?” (Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”
- 1936)
In this course we will explore the many ways in which war has been represented
by male and female authors from various places and eras. The texts we
will read range from a Greek epic of the eighth century B.C to twentieth
century poems written during both World Wars, and also to a novel and
short stories dealing with the Algerian War (1954-62). With our main focus
on the rhetorics, poetics and aesthetics of a given text, we will try
to define each author’s particular way of writing (about) the war. What
have been some of the challenges encountered by writers who suddenly faced
a reality which proved to be difficult if not impossible to describe?
What kind of language would a writer adopt, in view of which readership
and finally for what purpose (to simply bear witness, to confirm the status
quo, to resist and/or find a new literary self)? Does the very
process of representing a disaster not suggest that writing, if affected
by it, could turn into some kind of a disaster itself?
Besides raising some of these literary questions, we will discuss the
texts also as social documents, situated in their own time and history.
Several authors saw actual combat, others (mostly women, children, parents)
experienced the war and its various forms of devastation on the home front.
Some texts will involve a more detailed discussion of how and why the
act of representing war is bound to be complicated by issues of gender.
Students will write and revise three essays (5-6 pages long) and do several
shorter writing assignments in addition to the assigned reading. There
will be frequent quizzes, but no midterm or final exam.
Texts
- Homer, The Iliad (selections)
- Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front
- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, mon amour
Xeroxed selection of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Siegfried Sassoon,
e.e. cummings and others
Reader
Will include selected poetry, short essays, literary excerpts, readings
in cultural theory and literary analysis (i.e. G. Apollinaire, S. Sassoon,
S. Weil, H. Barbusse, E. Wharton, V. Woolf, W. Benjamin, C. Forché,
H. Rousso, F. Fannon, A. Memmi etc.)
Films
- Lewis Milestone, All quiet on the Western front
- Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, mon amour
- Gillo Pontecorvo, Battle of Algiers
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