CL 40 16563 A. BEN-YISHAI & J. WHITE TT 11-12:30 242 DWINELLE
"Abortion and the Control of Reproduction: Facts and Fictions"
This course will focus on attempts to control, police, and manage reproduction.
The issue of abortion is central in this course, but we also take it to
be inseparable from other social and legal issues such as sterility, fertility
management, forced sterilization, and birth control. We will read legal
cases, essays on social and legal aspects of the debate, and literary
texts. Our focus will be on contemporary US culture, but we will also
draw on its historical foundations and compare it to its cross-cultural
counterparts.
The course is intrinsically interdisciplinary. The debate over abortion
has been (and continues to be) a hotly contested issue in legal, political,
moral, and cultural arenas. Arguments in each of these arenas frequently
make use of claims from other arenas in order to justify and consolidate
their positions, even though these claims sometimes conflict. In this
course, we will try to make a distinction between these different concerns,
and conversely, to see how and why they are inextricable. Some of the
texts that we will read frame the theoretical, practical, and emotional
"edges" of this issue. Many of the novels, poems and short stories
also take positions of this debate and push them to their extremes, extremes
which show the illogic, even absurdity, of these positions, and afford
different critical vantage points.
Fiction
Margaret Atwood, "Hairball", The Handmaid's Tale (and/or
film version)
Ambrose Bierce, "Oil of Dog"
Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Lorraine Hansbury, Raisin in the Sun (play)
Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"
Joyce Carol Oates, The Rise of Life on Earth
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark
Alice Walker, Meridian
Essays
Roland Barthes, "Novels and Children," from Mythologies
Rosi Braidotti, "Mothers, Monsters, and Machines"
Judith Butler, "Introduction," from Bodies That Matter
Donna Haraway, from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Barbara Johnson, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion"
Catherine MacKinnon, "Privacy vs. Equality: Beyond Roe v. Wade"
"Roe vs. Wade: A Study in Male Ideology"
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy
of Sex"
Alice Walker, "A Child of One's Own"
Patricia Williams, "The Rooster's Egg"
Legal cases, including Bell v. Buck, Roe v. Wade
and Doe v. Bolton, and the case of Baby M.
Hebrew Bible excerpts, including the stories of Sarah, Rachel,
Hannah, and Samson's mother
Poetry, including Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Mother"; Bertold
Brecht, "Of the Child-Murderer, Marie Farrar"; Lucille Clifton,
"The Lost Baby Poem"; and Adrienne Rich, "To a Poet"
Film
Cider House Rules (1999)
Citizen Ruth (1996)
Course Requirements:
Attendance and participation in class discussions
Online journal entries and responses
Take-home midterm and final
Paper (7-10 pages)
CL 41C 16566 ELKINS TT 9:30-11 2038 VAL LSB
Introduction to the Novel: Crime and Punishment
This course will look at the novel from the perspective of one of its
most notorious subjects: crime and punishment. Not only will we investigate
crimes committed by individuals (Crime and Punishment), but also crime
as constitutive of a subculture (Day of the Owl), and crimes committed
under the rule of a colonial power (The Poisonwood Bible). What constitutes
a crime, and what are its consequences? Is there a relationship between
crime and punishment? Can criminal actions be explained or do they function
as the blind spot of the plot? Does crime ever pay, and if so in real
money or in counterfeit? In addition, we will ask what it might mean to
be falsely accused of a crime, and investigate the relationship between
detection and reading. Do we as readers enact our own court of law complete
with trial of characters, or do we read ourselves on trial, unexpectedly
arrested without explanation or recourse? Finally, by looking at novelistic
representations of criminal behavior we will discuss two possible and
contradictory roles of the novel. Do the crimes represented reflect societal
pressures and powers of the period in which the novel is written? Or does
writing about crime constitute its own transgression and critique of existing
social norms?
Required texts
Ellison, The Invisible Man
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Camus, The Stranger
Gide, The Counterfeiters
Sciascia, Day of the Owl
Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Kafka, The Trial
Chandler, The Big Sleep
There will also be a reader with articles by Foucault, Brooks,
Girard, and others.
CL 41D 16569 MONTECALVO 11-12:30 203 WHEELER
"Introduction to Drama: Tragedy"
Poisoned goblets, deadly duels, bloody murders, the downfall of kings
and potentates--are these the elements that define tragedy? Or is it rather
the anguish of unrequited love, the stark experience of poverty, alienation
from our peers? This course will sample plays from several periods of
Western literature to consider the different ways in which the nature
and function of tragedy have been understood. In particular, we will focus
on the transition from heroic tragedy to bourgeois tragedy. We will start
with the paradigms of tragedy established in antiquity and observe what
changes to the form of tragic drama have been effected by the response
of different audiences and the contribution of different dramatists. In
addition to our readings, we will view film adaptations of a few tragedies
(e.g. Wells' Othello, Depardieu's Cyrano).
Course requirements include two five-page papers, a short final exam,
and a creative project.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Shakespeare, Richard II
Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Tirso de Molina, The Trickster of Seville
Friedrich Schiller, Intrigue and Love
Heinrik Ibsen, A Dolls House
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Albert Camus, Caligula
CL 60AC:1 16572 GREIMAN MWF 10 219 DWINELLE
"Nostalgia and Commemoration in American Cultures" (American
Cultures)
Focusing on nostalgia and commemoration as twin operations of memory,
this course will examine the desire for something always lost and the
acts, performances, and behaviors that seek to bring it back. In each
of the texts on the syllabus, the personal histories of the narrators
and protagonists become entangled in the collective histories of their
ancestors. Through feelings of guilt, duty, haunting, mourning, and longing,
collective pasts loom large over the histories represented, and seem to
demand that the past be traced, re-enacted, and even re-animated. Emphasizing
the performances and behaviors that contribute to commemoration, we will
explore how more quotidian acts--rituals, habits--serve as sites of memory
that both reproduce and re-fashion the past. Since the list of texts includes
novels, memoirs, public art, film, a cartoon, and a work of anthropology,
the assigned projects will also draw from a variety of genres; in addition
to more traditional critical papers, everyone will do at least one creative
project and one (group) presentation.
This course satisfies the American Cultures requirement.
Required primary texts
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life... (1845)
Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935)
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes (1883)
Gerald Vizenor, Chancers (2000)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Art Spiegelman, Maus I and II (1986)
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976)
Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker (1995)
There will also be required secondary readings in a reader, as
well as films and videos.
CL 60AC:2 16575 HASAK-LOWY TT 9:30-11 219 DWINELLE
IMMIGRATION LITERATURE - BECOMING "AMERICAN" (American Cultures)
This course will examine the immigrant experiences of three loosely defined
groups - European Jews, Asians, and Latinos - who relocated in large numbers
to the United States in the twentieth century. Our main window into these
experiences will be novels written by first and second generation immigrants
from these populations. These texts will be read with an eye on the issues
(some shared, others particular) encountered by these immigrants as they
negotiate cultural difference in this country. These issues or dilemmas
emerge as fundamental components of identity are stretched between (at
least) two disparate cultures. Such issues include, but are certainly
not limited to, questions of language, gender, religion, and, of course,
nationality.
Novels will serve as the primary texts for this course. Thus our questions
will often be asked from a literary perspective. For instance, what narrative
strategies do these authors adopt, and how do these choices effect their
narratives? How do these authors or narrators position themselves with
regard to their stories? How do the texts represent English and other
languages as they tell their stories, stories which often engage bilingualism?
On a more general level, how are these texts themselves fundamental to
the experiences of immigration and cultural hybridity?
hese novels will be supplemented by readings from Literary Criticism,
Cultural Studies, and History which address twentieth century immigration
from different perspectives. A small set of films dealing with immigration,
identity, and assimilation will be included as well. Course assignments
include a mid-semester exam, a final paper, and an in-class presentation.
Class time will be divided between lectures, discussions, and group work.
Participation will be strongly encouraged.
TENTATIVE READING LIST:
Call it Sleep - Henry Roth
China Boy - Gus Lee
How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents - Julia Alvarez
The Woman Warrior - Maxine H. Kingston
FILMS:
Zelig - Woody Allen (director)
Lone Star - John Sayles (director)
CL 60AC:3 16578 RUPP TT 3:30-5 205 DWINELLE
"MASTERS & SLAVES" (American Cultures)
That power is no magic potion but relational is a commonplace. Its embodied
extremes - masters & slaves - sound quaint, metaphorical or subcultural
today. However, they retain a persistent hold over the human imaginary
so that the enlightened equation - no slaves, no masters - does little
to make them disappear. Rather than giving them the boot, this course
will play with their binary. We will read Hegel's fable of lordship and
bondage and trail its implications through various texts to see how its
traces have been recycled and updated and how these updates articulate
with subversion and hegemony. The short but packed selections from crucial
texts on power will serve us as search engines when we engage with literary
or filmic works that speak to them. We will try to work out a definition
of culture and explore how it fits in with power. The structure of the
text list mimes a certain rather culturally sensitive top/bottom relation
by being toploaded with (not quite) European theory while the bottom is
reserved for (not quite) local literature and movies. If we literalize
the top/bottom economy, we have a fixed set of winners and losers; if
we work with it - as we want to do in this class - the outcome might not
be as predictable as all that!
Reader (VERY Short Excerpts):
G.F.W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.
Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the reading of Hegel.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar I.
Foucault, Power/Knowledge & History of Sexuality, vol.
I.
Nietzsche, Will to Power.
Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism. New York : Zone Books, 1989.
Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks.
Books:
Octavia Butler, Kindred.
Arobateau, Red Jordan. Lucy & Mickey.
Kathy Acker, Don Quixote.
Movies:
Pink Flamingos.
Fakin' da Funk.
Billy Jack.
Coffy.
Amistad.
The Godfather or Blade Runner.
CL 100 16581 HAMPTON TT 9:30-11 258 DWINELLE
Introduction to Comparative Literature: "Literature and the
Sense of Place"
"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite
space--were it not that I have bad dreams."
--Hamlet
Comp. Lit. 100 is designed to present students with texts from various
genres and historical periods, to introduce them to the methods of comparative
study. This semester we will focus on the ways in which literary texts
represent and shape our sense of our location in the world. We will be
interested in how different genres define various spaces (the house, the
city, the nation-state), and represent movement through space. We will
read narratives of wandering and exile, to examine what it means to have
no "proper" place, and to analyze the relationship between writing
and placelessness. We will look at the history of literary space, and
at the relationship between imagined space and issues of gender and class.
And we will study essays by various contemporary critics and philosophers
who consider the relationship between space, literature, and power.
Required texts
Balzac, Old Goriot (Penguin)
James, Daisy Miller (Penguin)
Whitman, Leaves of Grass (American Library)
Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil (Oxford: World's Classics)
Racine, Phaedra trans. Wilbur (Harcourt, Brace)
Shakespeare, King Lear (Signet)
Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (Penguin)
There will also be a course reader featuring poems, and critical
texts.
CL 112A 16584 KOTZAMANIDOU MWF 12 412 M L KING
Modern Greek Language
CL 153 16587 KAHN TT 11-12:30 258 DWINELLE
The Renaissance
An Introduction to the major authors of the European Renaissance (1350-1650),
including Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Donne and Cavendish.
Topics to be discussed include: violence and the nation state, exploration
and self-discovery, gender relations and sexual identity, Renaissance
habits of reading and writing. Three papers, one exam.
Required texts
Machiavelli, The Prince
Machiavelli, Mandragola
Montaigne, Essays
Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun
M Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure
John Donne, Selected Poems
CL 155 16590 LIU TT 3:30-5 242 DWINELLE
"Traveling "Modernism"
This course explores aspects of "modernism" in a comparative
study of European, North American, Chinese, African, and Latin-American
texts. We begin with the "wanderer in the metropolis" of Hamsun's
Hunger and Conrad's European traveler in Africa in Heart of
Darkness. These and other European narratives will be read and analyzed
alongside the works of Fanon, Coetzee, Llosa, Hualing Nieh, and other
writers (in English translation) and artists. "Traveling Modernism"
is a working concept we adopt to reflect on both the fictional representation
of human dislocation and alienation in the modern world AND the literary
journey of "modernism" itself across the boundaries of national
literatures. Our goal in this class is to reconsider modernist texts in
a larger, global context in which Western and non-Western writers find
themselves engaged in direct or implicit dialogue (or debate) about the
meaning of self-identity, historical memory, primitivism, humanism, the
trauma of colonial and postcolonial dislocation, and the moral dilemma
of writing in the metropolitan or native languages.
Graduate students who wish to take the course must have reading knowledge
of one of the original languages. Requirements: mid-term, paper, and final
exam.
Required texts
Coetzee, Foe
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask
Hamsun, Hunger
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller
Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Nieh Hualing, Mulberry and Peach
A course reader containing additional materials will be ready
for purchase at Metro Publishing in the first week of class.
CL 156 16593 MASIELLO TT 11-12:30 205 DWINELLE
"North by South/South by North"
In this course, we will explore the ways in which the geographic, racial,
and social boundaries separating North and South America are reimagined
in creative literature. In other words, we will look at the ways in which
'others' are brought into literary texts, how outsiders are invented in
contemporary fiction and poetry. This is premised, of course, on the political
assumptions that North and South Americans might maintain about the landscape
and social life of the other culture named in their literatures. But it
is sometimes premised on the idea that "otherness" has a use
and responds to the market demands for the 'exotic' as set in place by
global culture. In this latter case, the other culture often fulfills
an audience desire for nostalgia or a lost sense of stability, a search
for lost 'family values'; usually this turns to sentimentality and kitsch,
topics that we will explore in the course. Finally--and in an effort to
overcome the kind of skepticism just noted--we will also read materials
that allow us to think of transnational connections among authors as they
seek to override stereotypes, and move instead to a dialogue about community,
art, and aesthetics.
Required Texts
Castillo, Ana. The Mixquiahuala Letters
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate
------. Como agua para chocolate (in Spanish)
Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo
-----. El gringo viejo (in Spanish)
Mastretta, Angeles. Tear this Heart Out
----- Arrancame la vida (in Spanish)
Poniatowska, Elena. Tinísima
Puig, Manuel. A Curse Upon the Reader of These Pages
-----. Maldición eterna a quién lea estas páginas (in Spanish)
Thornton, Lawrence. Imagining Argentina
Valenzuela, Luisa. Black Novel with Argentines
------. Novela negra con argentinos (in Spanish)
A reader will also be required.
CL 170:1 16596 KOTZAMANIDOU F 3-6 225 DWINELLE
Modern Greek Literature IN THE ORIGINAL
CL 170:2 16599 KOTZAMANIDOU W 3-6 235 DWINELLE
C A N C E L L E D
CL 170:3 16602 duBOIS TT 11-12:30 221 WHEELER
"The Metamorphoses of Oedipus"
This course will address Oedipus, legendary king of ancient Thebes, and
his haunting presence in modern literature and theory. We will first consider
Oedipus as a figure of ancient Greek tragedy and myth, and begin to situate
his representations in ancient Greek and Roman society. We will then look
at his exemplary status in the work of Sigmund Freud, and at the Oedipus
effect in modern and postmodern culture. Readings will include the Theban
plays of Sophocles and Euripides, Knox's Oedipus at Thebes, Seneca's
Oedipus, some texts of Freud including Totem and Taboo,
The Erasers, a novel by Robbe-Grillet, and the dramatic text Gospel
at Colonus.
Students will be asked to attend class, to participate in discussion,
and to submit a prelim-inary and a final paper.
Required texts
Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, tr. Fagles
B. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes
Seneca, Oedipus
A. Robbe-Griilet, The Erasers
S. Freud, Totem and Taboo
Euripides, Euripides 5: Three Tragedies
Gospel at Colonus
CL 190 16605 NAIMAN MW 10-11:30 203 WHEELER
"LOLITA"
This course will be devoted to a careful reading of Nabokov's most famous
novel and to texts (by Nabokov and by authors whom he admired or detested)
that preceded and shaped it. We will consider the critical and ethical
debates that have arisen around the novel, and we will look at the novel's
transposition to the screen (Nabokov's screenplay, Kubrick's and Lyne's
films). The novel will serve us as a focus for an investigation of critical
methodologies and their usefulness when applied to a resolutely self-conscious
text. We will read Lolita twice: once at the beginning and once at the
end of the semester.
Texts will probably include:
Dostoevskii: "The Double," "Notes from Underground"
Gogol: "The Nose," "The Overcoat"
Freud, "The Uncanny"
Poe, "William Wilson"
Vladimir Nabokov: The Annotated Lolita, Lolita: A Screenplay,
The Defense, The Enchanter , Nikolai Gogol, Lectures
on Literature, Pnin, Bend Sinister.
We shall also read a wide range of critical articles about Nabokov's
novel.
