CL 1A:1 #16506 LIU MWF 9 125 DWINELLE
"Freaks, Mutants, and the Literary Invention of Normative
Identities"
It has been argued that the invention of "low" characters in Western
literature was directly connected to the rise of a new philosophy of private life. Since
low characters can easily eavesdrop on the most intimate secrets of other characters, this
literary strategy was effectively employed to render private life visible and to overcome
the static dichotomy between individual time and social time. In this course we will
examine works from different national literary traditions (Roman, American, British,
Chinese, Italian, Japanese, German, French), historical periods (ancient, Renaissance,
modern), and genres (novel, drama, short story, poetry) to reassess that thesis. Studying
characters who are either explicitly branded as "freaks" and "mutants"
or implicitly compared to other "normal" characters, we will investigate the
ways in which these characters become privileged to observe everyday life in certain
literary traditions and excluded from everyday life in other traditions. Why must certain
characters be ostracized and even demonized to be the bearers of truth, trauma, and
history? How do these marginalized beings articulate thoughts otherwise unspeakable, or
live lives previously unimaginable? How are bodies transformed, deformed, and reformed,
and how does that transformation serve to accentuate these characters' otherness and, at
the same time, problematize our normative notion of human identity?
Reading list
Apuleius. The Golden Ass
Morrison, Toni. Beloved
Oe, Kenzaburo. The Silent Cry
Rushdie, S. The Satanic Verses
Shakespeare, W. The Tempest
Selected poems and short stories by Rilke, Baudelaire, Calvino, Kafka, and Lu Xun (in reader).
"Southpark" episodes
CL 1A:2 16509 TINSLEY MWF 10 121 WHEELER
"Unwelcome guests, inhospitable hosts: Troubling visits in World
Literature"
In a century of mass travel and mass migration--frequent fliers, car trips, raft rides,
wire jumping--most of us will find ourselves, at one point in our lives, strangers in a
strange land: border-crossers seeking hospitality in new territory. But what happens when
hosts and guests breach expected codes of hospitality? How does the definition of
"guest" and "host" change when the "homeland" itself becomes
a hostile or es-strange-ing place? What is it to be a stranger in one's own land? This
course aims to provide students with an introduction to critical reading and writing while
exploring answers to these questions. Beginning with a consideration of Homi Bhabha's
concept of the unhomely and our own experiences of relocation, we will dialogue with
poems, songs, drama, short stories, dance, films, and novels dealing with this subject:
enunciating personal perspectives on travel, (in)hospitality,and what it means to be a
citizen of more than one "world."
Readings will include:
Ella Fitzgerald, "Miss Otis Regrets" (She's Unable To Lunch Today)
Lauryn Hill, "Doo Wop (That Thing)"
June Jordan, Haruko: love poems (selections)
Jeanne Benguigui, Selected Poems
Homi Bhabha, The location of culture (selections)
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Andy and Larry Wachowski, Bound (film)
Ousemane Sembene, La Noire de... (film)
David Rousseve (dance)
Euripides, Medea
Shani Mootoo, Out on Main Street and other short stories
Leila Abu-Zeid, Year of the Elephant (novella)
Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts and other stories
Edwidge Danticat, Breath Eyes Memory
Albert Memmi, Statue of Salt
Calythe Beyala, Loukoum: The Little Prince of Belleville
CL 1A:3 16512 CHATTERJI MWF 11 242 DWINELLE
"Art in Public"
What kinds of scandals are provoked by art? How does art help us determine the division
between public and private life? In this class we look at artworks and read books that
were the actual cause of public scandal. We also look at depictions of scandalous
representation in film and text. What happens when the public experience of art is
represented as purely private? How do debates about religion, pornography, and nationalism
highlight aesthetic questions about individual desire and communal responsibility?
This course is designed to fulfill the University's 1A reading and composition
requirement. We will spend considerable time in class on improving students' basic writing
skills such as sentence and paragraph structure and thesis development. Students will
write a number of short essays of increasing length from 2 to 6 pages during the course of
the semester.
Our class discussions will be drawn from the following works:
Required texts
Plato, The Republic
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Shelley, Frankenstein
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Reader:
Selections from Ovid; Balzac, "The Unknown Masterpiece"; Kafka,
"The Hunger Artist"; Yourcenar, "How Wang-Fo was Saved"; Poetry by
Keats, Baudelaire, Stevens, Rich; essays and clippings on recent art controversies, essays
on graffiti.
CL 1A:4 16515 WACKS TT 8-9:30 222 WHEELER
"The City"
In this course we will examine the role of the city in literature. What is the
city's relationship to its citizens and residents? How is the city portrayed not
just as a backdrop but as an agent, or even a character? How does technology and ideology
shape the city; how are these changes played out in various genres of literature across
time periods and cultures? What are the centrifugal effects over time on the fabric of the
city? We will examine the works of several theorists, classical, medieval and modern, as
they relate to the works of fiction, film, drama and poetry on the syllabus.
Works of Drama and Fiction:
Aristophanes, The Clouds
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Selections from Modern Poets:
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
Hart Crane, The Bridge
Federico Garcia Lorca, Poet in New York
Alan Ginsberg, Howl
Piri Thomas, Selected Poetry
Films:
Metropolis
El callejón de los milagros: Midaq Alley
The Matrix
Selections from classical and medieval theorists:
Aristotle, The Politics
Livy, The History of Rome
St. Augustine, City of God
Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddimah (An Introduction to History)
al-Makkari, History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain
Selections from Modern theorists:
Lewis Mumford, The City in History
Max Weber, The City
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
CL 1A:5 16518 STAFF TT 9:30-11 225 WHEELER
CL 1A:6 16521 HOCHBERG TT 9:30-11 205 DWINELLE
"Heroes and Anti Heroes"
The greatest literary works of all times present us with "Anti Heroes" as
their central characters. We read about tragic, mentally sick, obsessed, weak, poor and
miserable men and women. We spend time with these "losers" and give them the
attention we would never give them in "real life". What makes us so attracted to
these characters we would never choose to be our close friends? Why are we so fascinated
by them? What does literature and artistic representation in general "do for these
anti Heroes" that makes them so heroic after all? These questions and more will be
addressed in this course.
Required texts
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Lu Xun, Diary of a madman and Other Stories
Recommended readings
Toni Morrison, Sula, J.D Salinger, Catcher in the Rye. In addition to
this list there will be a Reader including essays (Freud, Aristotle, and others),
poetry (Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton and others), short stories (Franz Kafka, Flannery
O'Connor and others). We will also watch some films relevant to the course subject:
Welcome to the Dollhouse and Muriel's Wedding
CL 1A:7 16524 WAREH TT 11-12:30 223 WHEELER
"We The People"
In this writing-intensive course we will examine literature both about and for the
people. How do authors conceive of "the people"? How do they use language in
order to sway the minds of the people? Beginning with Socrates' speech to the citizens of
Athens, and ending with modern poetic conceptions of American dreams and dilemmas, we will
ask how authors configure their words in order to achieve varying personal and political
effects. This approach will enable you to examine closely the rhetoric of the literature
we study, even as you work towards strengthening and polishing your own ability to
construct written arguments.
Required texts
Plato, Apology and Crito
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, Volume I
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas
Course Reader
containing the poetry of (among others) Carl Sandburg and Langston
Hughes, as well as speeches by such figures as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
CL 1A:8 16527 STEVENS TT 11-12:30 121 WHEELER
"The Trial"
What does the law have to do with justice? How can a wrong ever be righted? What does
it mean to speak "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth"?
Literature has long been obsessed with the scene of the individual on trial. Indeed, some
of the founding texts of both literature and philosophy revolve around the question of the
proper administration of justice. In this class, notions of justice, revenge, forgiveness
and forgetting will be examined in the framework of the trial narrative.
Students will be expected to produce a total of 20-25 pages of writing during the
semester, divided up into two shorter papers and one longer paper. Students will also be
expected to choose one text to discuss in an in-class presentation. Attention will be paid
to the technical demands of writing (rhetoric, grammar, organization, etc.).
Reading List
Plato, The Apology
Machiavelli, The Prince
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
Franz Kafka, The Trial
selected poems of Dickinson and Blake
films
Orson Welles, The Trial
Otto Preminger, Witness for the Prosecution
Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon
CL H1A 16503 COKAL TT 9:30-11 223 WHEELER
"Love, Pain, and Dis-ease"
Most works of literature present characters meeting challenges, combatting an opponent
or opposing force over which they ultimately have some power. In these travails, the one
thing most people feel they can count on is their own bodies. When someone falls sick,
however, the body speaks a different language, takes control of its owner (just as disease
has taken over the body); individuals lose whatever control they exert over their fates.
Thus one principal theme of this course will be the examination of the body's language
during illness--how it exerts this control--and what interest individual authors and
cultures as a whole might have in constructing the suffering body as romantically
interesting, repulsive, helpless, uncanny, etc. What happens to our sense of character,
and to the shape of the text itself,when the vague and general threat of plague becomes
personal? How can an individual assert his/her will in time of epidemic or personal
sickness?
Literature is also often about love, the passion that also takes over the body and
fills it with hitherto unknown and unexpected tremblings, urges, and other symptoms. And
love is often seen as the bridge between sickness and health, unhappiness and bliss. This
course will also ask questions about the ways love itself is like a sickness, and (perhaps
most importantly) explore conceptions of the truths that are revealed or concealed by
disease and/or love.
Reading List:
Philoctetes, Sophocles
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare
Katinka, Herman Bang
Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Marquez
Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson
The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman (film)
Course reader to include excerpts from Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir,
by Paul Monette; The Decameron, Boccaccio; Illness as Metaphor/AIDS and Its
Metaphors, by Susan Sontag
CL 2A 16560 BALBUENA MW 10-12 224 WHEELER
F 11-12 224 WHEELER
*ORNAMENT AND ARTIFICE * DANDYISM AND DECADENCE
This course will study the figure of the dandy, more specifically, that of the
writer-dandy. A man who re-invents himself in reaction to society, the dandy claims the
mask and the artifice, and makes his body the stage for his aesthetic ideas. Out of
himself he fashions a "personnage de création"--self-controlled, sober,
impassible, elegant, "raffiné."
Focusing on "écrivain-dandys" such as Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire,
Mallarmé and Oscar Wilde, we will observe how dandysm and writing constitute two parallel
attempts to live this "vie de roman." We will discuss issues of
identity-formation and gender construction in the background of 19th century Paris and
literary "Decadence," but will center our analysis on Huysman's À Rebours,
the synthesis of decadent dandyism. Among the topics we will cover are the search for
beauty in the aesthetization of daily life; denial of nature and quest for artifice;
fashion, decoration and landscaping.
Some questions to be raised in the course are: Why is the dandy always a male? How does
he construct and manipulate his masculinity? How does this construction affect the image
and the role of women? Is there a correspondence among the language, the look and the
lifestyle of the writer-dandy?
A proficient reading and speaking knowledge of French is required for this course. When
working on a French text, class will be conducted in French. Writing will be done in
English.
Required texts
J.-K. Huysmans, À Rebours
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (poèmes choisis)
Petits poèmes en prose
Le Peintre de la vie moderne (passages)
Salon de 1846 (passages)
Stéphane Mallarmé, "Toute l'âme résumée"
"Prose pour des Esseintes"
Jules Laforgue, Spleen (poèmes choisis)
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (Préface)
Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Lucio's Confession
Oscar Wilde, "Pen, Pencil and Poison"
"The Critic as Artist"
"The Decay of Lying"
"The Truth of Masks"
"Decorative Art in America"
E.A. Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher"
"The Man in the Crowd"
"Philosophy of Furniture"
"The Domain of Arnheim"
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Ovid, Metamorphoses
A reader to be bought at Instant Copying and Laser Printing at 2015 Shattuck
(beside Burger King at the corner of University, phone 704-9700).
CL 1B:1 16530 MWF 9 223 WHEELER
CL 1B:2 16533 MWF 9 222 WHEELER
CL 1B:3 16536 LISOWSKI MWF 10 205 DWINELLE
"Pasts and Histories"
The relationship between present and past--between what is taking place, what has taken
place, and what stories are told about what has taken place--will structure our discussion
and writing work in this course. Driving each of the six central texts below is a struggle
between the demands of the past and the characters in the present. Students will work
through a careful sequence of paper assignments, including at least one non-expository
paper and one comprehensive final paper.
I: Violence and the Past: Retribution and Reconquest
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
II: Presenting the Past: Language and Embodiment
Seamus Heaney, from Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
from Modern Arabic Poetry, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi
III: Discovery and the Past: Instruction and Identity
Homer, Odyssey
Joyce, Dubliners
Recommended text:
Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
CL 1B:4 16539 MWF 10 242 DWINELLE
CL 1B:5 16542 HAUSDOERFFER MWF 11 205 DWINELLE
"Boy Meets Girl, blah, blah, blah: Romance and Anti-Romance in Film
and Literature"
One of the oldest and most widespread narrative patterns is unquestionably that which
has come to be called the romance narrative. Almost as old and prevalent, however, are
texts which satirize or treat ironically the typical pattern and elements of romance
narratives. In this course we will consider a wide variety of texts and films from
different cultures in an effort to understand both what it is about romance narratives
which so fascinates and what it is about them that encourages the composition of texts
that ridicule and criticize the fantasies and ideologies which fuel romances. The readings
and assignments of the course are broken into three units: ancient mediterranean
narratives, 18th & 19th century novels, and 20th century films. The writing
assignments will become progressively longer and more involved as we progress through the
three units, finishing with a 10 page paper that will take a broad critical perspective on
the nature of romance and anti-romance.
Required texts
Homer, The Odyssey.
Achilles Tatius, Leukippe and Kleitophon (in course reader)
Petronius, Satyrica
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
Marquis de Sade, Justine (selections, in course reader)
Marquis de Sade, Juliette (selections, in course reader)
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye
Films
Claude Chabrol, Les Bonnes Femmes
Pretty Woman
Oliver Stone, Natural Born Killers
CL 1B:6 16545 COWAN TT 8-9:30 125 DWINELLE
"DEVIANTS, DELINQUENTS AND PERVERTS"
In this class, we will be reading a range of books with particular attention to a topic
that has fascinated writers over the centuries: deviancy. We will examine some of
literature's greatest cases of "criminality" and "perversion," from
Kriemhild's excesses (Nibelungenlied) to the immoralism of Andre Gide's hero, from the
transgressions of the Princess of Cleves to the anti-naturalist polemics of Europe's fin
de siecle decadents. Beyond the pleasure in reading about bad guys and girls, our
discussions will take shape around issues such as the following: the intimate relations
between the "normal" and the "deviant," the role of surveillance, the
obsession with secrets and their unveiling, the rhetoric of pathology employed by 19th
century Europe in the production of its most significant others, and cultural
reappropriations of deviancy as a sign of superiority or genius.
Required Texts:
The Nibelungenlied (Anonymous)
The Princess of Cleves (Madame de Lafayette)
Against Nature (Joris-Karl Huysmans)
The Immoralist (Andre Gide)
Course Reader (available in August???)
CL 1B:7 16548 STENPORT TT 9:30-11 224 WHEELER
"Cities in Literature"
In this course we are looking at different conceptions and constructions of urban
space. We will be investigating images of real and unreal cities, of utopian and dystopian
locations, and of representations of historic, modern and contemporary urban places. The
readings will be questioning the interrelations between concepts of modernity and the
city, in order to see how ideologies of urbanity play out in different times and places.
Texts include representations of cities as diverse as contemporary New Delhi and New York,
turn-of-the-century Stockholm, conceptions of city settlement in the Hebrew Bible and on
the Western American Frontier of the last century, as well as modernist representations of
Europe and Scandinavia. Through close and careful readings of novels, short stories, epic,
poetry, and film, we will also look at how cities in literature are portrayed depending on
genre. There will be close attention paid to writing and analytical strategies
throughout the semester. Three papers are required: two mid-length, and one longer
comparison paper at the end. There will be a final exam.
Required texts
Charles Baudelaire: Selected poems from The Flowers of Evil
E.T.A. Hoffmann: "My Cousin‚s Corner Window"
Soren Kierkegaard: The Diary of a Seducer
Edgar Allen Poe: "The Man of the Crowd"
Walter Benjamin: "Poe's Man of the Crowd"
August Strindberg: Days of Loneliness
Virginia Woolf: "Streethaunting"
Fritz Lange: Metropolis (film)
Hebrew Bible: Samuel I and II
Willa Cather: The Professor's House *
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: "Development and Progress", "Great Expectations"
Fredrick Crews: The Random House Handbook, 6th ed.*
Please purchase only the texts marked with an asterisk. The other texts will be
supplied in a course reader.
CL 1B:8 16551 ZUMHAGEN TT 9:30-11 20 WHEELER
"Canonical Weirdos: Outsiders and Dreamers, Monsters and Freaks
in Anglo-American, French, German and Japanese Literature"
Required Texts
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
Homer, The Odyssey
In Reader:
Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist and A Report to the Acadamy
Edgar Allan Poe, selections fromTales of the Grotesque
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
Christina Rossetti, "The Goblin Market"
Jorge Luis Borges, selected stories
Julio Cortzar, selected stories
Tanizaki, Selected stories
CL 1B:9 16554 HAFFNER TT 11-12:30 125 DWINELLE
"What’s in the Box?, or, Detecting Bodies"
In the recent movie Jumanji, the success of one of the characters’ two thousand
hours of psychoanalysis, she says, depends on Robin Williams’s having been hacked to
pieces by his father in 1969 and hidden in the house’s nooks and crannies.
Unfortunately for her, he has really been stuck in the "Jumanji" game box, and
now he’s out and ready to continue playing. Why should that "really"
somehow be more real? How is "what’s in the box"—an elephant/rhino
stampede, giant mosquitoes, a relentless manhunter—related to what’s going on
outside? What’s "really" inside the box? Some think it’s a matter of
detection. What does the one in the role of detective detect? How is the box’s
content gendered or sexualized? How does the box’s content gender or sexualize the
act of detecting, of knowing, the detective’s psychic organization(s)? Is it the
detective’s job to discover the contents, or is the process of detection the ruse
allowing the detective to avoid "knowing too much"? If such knowledge is
excessive, what could it be excessive to? Why are bodies and body parts always floating
around s though they just don’t fit in? How does Hamlet fit in? For answers, look in
the box...
Requirements
(50%) 250-500-word essay due each week
(30%) one 2500-word final paper
(20%) class attendance and participation.
ALERT! You can’t pass the course if you miss one third or more of the class
meetings.
Texts
This course will emphasize good writing style, good sentence construction, and lucid,
text-based argumentation. Excerpts from The Practical Stylist by Sheridan Baker
will be in the course reader.
Written
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art (chapters 6-9)
Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep
Sigmund Freud Three Case Histories
Henry James "The Turn of the Screw" (course reader)
Edgar Allan Poe "The Purloined Letter" (course reader)
William Shakespeare Hamlet
Virgil The Aeneid (course reader)
Movies
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
Fargo (Joel Coen, 1995)
Jumanji (Joe Johnston, 1995)
Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
Some additional optional articles in the course reader
CL 1B:10 16557 BANBAJI TT 11-12:30 182 DWINELLE
"Literature and Politics"
In this course we will discuss moral and political aspects of literary works. Through a
reading of a series of literary and programmatic texts we shall explore the different ways
in which literature tries to represent reality and to act upon it. In this context we will
raise questions concerning the (sometimes high) price that "politically
effective" literature exacts in terms of oversimplifications and dogmatism.
Students will be expected to attend classes, to participate in class discussion, to
read carefully the assigned works and to write 25-30 pages of thoughtful prose. Additional
informal writing assignments, as well as one short oral presentation, are required as
well.
Required texts
Aharon Appelfeld: Badenheim 1939
Bertolt Brecht: The Resistible Rise of Arthuro Ui
Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse
Herman Melville: "Billy Bud"
Franz Kafka: The Trial
Homer: The Odyssy
Course Reader
