Fall 2001 Course Offerings:
Lower- and Upper-Division Undergraduate Courses

CL 40 16660 ELKINS TT 3:30-5 205 DWINELLE

"Women and Crime"

This course will explore both ancient and modern representations of women and crime. We will be reading about women on the edge: murderesses and poisoners, seductresses and adulterers, witches and thieves. First we will compare an ancient representation of murder (Medea) with Shakespeare's dramatic Macbeth. Are these women portrayed as cold-hearted killers or as women on the verge? Is there a difference between Medea and Lady Macbeth and the female poisoners in Arsenic and Old Lace and Thérèse Desqueyroux? While reading, we will consider the evolution of definitions of criminal behavior. Have our notions of female criminality really changed over time, especially as regards sexual transgression? Trying to answer this question, we will compare stories of seduction in The Scarlet Letter, Sula, Lolita, and Manon Lescault. Is there a difference between Toni Morrison's Sula and Hester or Manon, characters written earlier and by men? Is Nabokov's modern Lolita portrayed differently? Is she a modern temptress or innocent victim? We will then compare traditional representations of witchcraft (Macbeth, The Scarlet Letter) with a fictional model written from the witch's perspective (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem). Do female powers of healing get rewritten as criminal? If so, why? Next we will read the story of perhaps the most famous female thief, Moll Flanders, who is lead to a life of crime following a sexual transgression. What is the link between sexuality and crime? Does one invariably lead to another? Are they somehow equated? We will end with perhaps the most famous tale of criminal creation written by a woman: Frankenstein. Does Shelley's story provide a counter-story to those stories of criminality written by men? What, in the eyes of this female author, truly constitutes criminality?

CL 41B 16663 ANDERSON TT 11-12:30 20 WHEELER

Introduction to Literary Forms
Comparing Lyric Traditions

In this class, we will read poetry from many different times and cultures. In addition to reading modern American poets such as June Jordan, Galway Kinnell, Anne Carson, and Robert Hass, we will read in translation selections of early Chinese poetry (from the Classic of Poetry and Tao Qian), of Greek poetry (Sappho and Simonides), and Roman poetry (Catullus and Ovid), along with poems the students themselves have selected for the reader. We will also read various critical essays on the lyric.

The class will begin by focusing on a basic definition of the lyric genre. We will then proceed to discuss the problems and challenges posed by comparing lyric poetry from different cultural traditions. What kind of vocabulary, for example, can one use when comparing poetry as radically different as that of ancient China and the modern United States? Can one use western terms such as metaphor and apostrophe, say, when speaking about Chinese poetry?

Once we have established at least a basic vocabulary for talking about poetry from different times and traditions, we will concentrate on specific structural questions concerning the lyric (e.g. what literary devices are particularly definitive of the lyric genre?) as well as consider broader questions about how culture determines poetic aesthetics. We will also explore the history of the lyric genre, looking at questions of voice and performance, and examine whether the textual lyric possesses a kind of residual orality. These areas of inquiry may seem very basic but I believe that they must be explored before any productive comparison of lyric poems can be accomplished.

Ultimately, I hope that students will gain from this class not only a solid understanding of what lyric poetry is, but also a heightened appreciation of the range, scope, and beauty of the genre.

Reading List

(The following is a suggested list of poets. Students will participate in determining the final selection of poets for the reader.)

  • Chinese Lyric Poetry: selections from the Shi Jing, Chu Tzu, Han yue fu, Si Ma Xiang Ru, Ruan Ji, Tao Qian, Du Fu, Li Bai, Wang Wei, Han Yu, Li He
  • Greek Lyric Poetry: Archilochus, Sappho, Simonides, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Pindar, Solon, Stesichorus, Theocritus, Callimachus
  • Roman Lyric Poetry: Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Martial
  • American Lyric Poetry: Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, e.e.cummings, Hart Crane, Anne Sexton, Jorie Graham, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hass, Linda Gregg, June Jordan, Billy Collins, Anne Carson, Galway Kinnell.
  • Misc. Poetry: Rumi, Basho, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Shelley, Blake, Cavafy, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Lorca, Paz, and student selections.
  • Reader: To contain essays on the lyric, in addition to poems by the above poets. Readings will include excerpts from David Lindley's Lyric, Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato, Anne Carson's Eros, the Bittersweet, as well as essays by John Stuart Mill, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Culler, Stephen Owen, Barbara Johnson, and Stanley Fish.

CL 41C 16666 HASAK-LOWY TT 9:30-11 100 WHEELER

Forms of the Novel
"Fictions of Self: Fashioning Identity in the Modern Novel"

This course will investigate the novel's remarkable tendency-- within its larger fictional context--to use narrative to distort, reinvent, and fabricate identities, both individual and collective. As we trace this practice in the novel we will seek to answer a series of basic questions: which fundamental features of the novel equip (and perhaps predispose) it to treat identity in this way? At what level of the narrative do these distortions occur and how, if ever, are they resolved? What does this practice say about the relationship between narrative and subjectivity? Why might the destabilization of identity become such a central concern of the novel from modernism to the present?

Our readings will begin with a nineteenth-century novel and then move into two well-known novels representing modernist and postmodernist instances of this tradition. The second half of the course will focus on the application of this practice in emerging and contested national, ethnic, and postcolonial literatures. These texts will allow us to discuss how the disruption of the basic epistemological assumptions of the genre-via the destabilization of identity-takes on political and ideological salience in contemporary fiction.

Required texts
  • The Confidence Man - Herman Melville
  • Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
  • The Floating Opera - John Barth
  • The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston
  • Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih
  • Mr. Mani - A.B. Yehoshua
  • Arabesques - Anton Shammas
  • Operation Shylock - Philip Roth
  • A course reader containing a collection of readings in theory and criticism

CL 60AC:1 16669 SHLENSKY MWF 10 219 DWINELLE

"Displacements of Identity:
Collective Memory and Contested Histories in 20th-Century American Literature and Film

This course will address questions of race and ethnicity in the American context by situating these terms in relation to what has come to be known as "collective memory." We will ask how it is possible to compare the accounts of memory and identity given by the three focal groups of this course, African-Americans, Chicanas/os, and Jewish-Americans. As a way of framing this question, the course will be divided into three units, corresponding to the three areas of theoretical and conceptual work that we will undertake during the semester. The first unit of the course will explore current debates about the "construction" or "essence" of racial and ethnic identity categories; the second unit will explore the construction of collective memory, and how the way in which one remembers and narrates the past (or omits material from such narrations) reflects the ways in which race and ethnicity are implicated in the present; and the third unit will explore problems in the conceptualization of memory, wherein a "master narrative" of history is challenged by the very instability and radical contingency of any account of memory.

The "displacement" of this course's title may be understood to refer both to the questions we shall be asking about how race and ethnicity are variously constructed in and through memory, as well as to the cultural, historical, and geographical displacements that the three focal groups of this course often conceive as constitutive of their respective identities. In response to the unmarked (White, Christian, middle-class, male) identity that lurks beneath the question, "Are you an American?," we will ask whether the memories of the three focal groups can be brought into relation with each other on the basis of an unforgettable awareness that their unique diasporic histories suggest that they have come from somewhere. That "somewhere" is a geographical elsewhere, but it is also a place seared in the memory, an awareness that what is manifest for themselves as Americans is not destiny but the unequal relations of power with which these groups have always had to contend. While remaining aware of the critical differences among the experiences and articulations of these groups, therefore, the course will attempt to ask, in each of its units, how a particular text written within a particular cultural context indicates some ways in which a particular understanding of identity is evoked-and how that understanding is put into question.

Requirements: Reading for this course will range up to 100 pages per week of fiction, essays, and theoretical articles. There will also be occasional evening screenings of films; attendance at these screenings will be mandatory. The course will include three in-class quizzes covering the assigned reading and the film screenings, and there will be a mid-term paper and a final essay due. Participation in class discussions will be highly encouraged.

Required Texts and Film/Video Screenings

By and about African-Americans

  • Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Plume, 1987)
  • Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep (35mm film, 90 min., 1977)

By and about Asian-Americans

  • Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Blu's Hanging (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997)
  • Rea Tajiri, History and Memory (Video, 60 min., 1995)

By and about Chicanos/as

  • Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek (Vintage, 1991)
  • Richard Rodriguez, "Introduction," "India," and "Asians," in Days of Obligation (Penguin, 1992) (excerpts in the Course Reader)
  • Feature film (TBA)

By and about Jewish-Americans

  • Short stories by Grace Paley, I.B. Singer, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Naomi Seidman, et al. (in the course reader)
  • Sidney Lumet, The Pawnbroker (Film, 1965) or Gregg Bordowitz, Fast Trip, Long Drop (Film, 54 mins., 1993)
Also to be included in the Course Reader

On the construction of racial and ethnic identity

  • Michael Omi & Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (excerpts)
  • Maria Damon, "Jazz-Jews, Jive and Gender"
  • bell hooks, Black Looks (excerpts)
  • Mitsuye Yamada, "Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster"
  • Excerpts from Representations 55, "Race and Representation"

On the construction of memory

  • Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (excerpts)
  • Bruce Connerton, How Societies Remember (excerpts)

On problems in the construction of memory and identity

  • Articles from Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma Explorations in Memory

CL 60AC:2 16672 GREIMAN TT 9:30-11 160 DWINELLE

"Nostalgia and Commemoration in American Cultures"

Focusing on nostalgia and commemoration as related operations of memory and history, this course will examine the desire for something always lost and the acts, performances, and behaviors that seek to call it back. In each of the texts on the syllabus, the personal histories of the narrators and protagonists become entangled in collective histories. Especially in autobiographies and in first-person narratives, the identity of the writing "I" would seem to occupy the center of the text, yet in each of these texts of self-fashioning, this "I" is full of other people. Through experiences of guilt, duty, trauma, haunting, mourning, and longing, collective pasts loom large over the personal histories represented, and seem to demand that the past be traced, retold, and even re-enacted. These past stories are often long lost or imaginary, yet they flood forward and often provide the occasion for writing that establishes the author's own voice and identity. Also 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 graphic novel, 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 in-class group work.

Required primary texts
  • Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1845)
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
  • Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes (1883)
  • Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935)
  • Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976)
  • Art Spiegelman, Maus I and II (1986)
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
  • Chang-Rae Lee, A Gesture Life (1999)
Required films and videos
  • "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" (Video)
  • Anna Deveare Smith, "Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities"

CL 100:1 16675 BRITTO TT 11-12:30 258 DWINELLE

"Rewriting the Canon"

In this course, we will examine a number of texts by authors from Africa and the Caribbean, all written in self-conscious relationship to earlier works from the European canon. Working closely with these texts and their sources, we will read comparatively so as to explore the ways in which similar stories, characters, and narrative structures are transformed by authors writing from different historical, cultural, and geographic locations.

Required texts
  • Shakespeare, The Tempest
  • Aimé Césaire, A Tempest/ Une tempête
  • Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
  • J. M. Coetzee, Foe
  • Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
  • Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
  • Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
  • Maryse Condé, Windward Heights/ La migration des coeurs

CL 100:2 16677 KAWASHIMA TT 1230-2 121 WHEELER

"Time and Narrative"

Aristotle suggested that tragedy should attain a certain "unity" of time, roughly one day. Yet most narratives, beginning with antiquity, have sought instead to show the passage of time, often many years, some meaningful span of a hero's life. Amongst these, time does not treat all heroes the same. Some, in spite of many hardships, seem never to age; others show its ravages, both in body and soul. Finally, some modernist novels have experimented with temporal form, at times, even, returning to Aristotle's unity, as though a day in a life might tell us all we need know about a person. In this course we will examine various ways time has been represented in narrative, asking ourselves in each case, for what reasons and toward what ends time is treated in this way and not that. Secondary readings will raise relevant literary and philosophical issues.

Required texts
  • Enuma Elish
  • Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days
  • Genesis 1-11
  • Homer, The Iliad (and selections from The Odyssey)
  • Sophocles, Oedipus the King
  • The Books of Samuel
  • Heliodoros, The Aithiopika
  • Jane Austen, Emma
  • E. M. Forster, Room with a View
  • Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
  • Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol 1 (Combray) and possibly selections from Time Regained

Reader: secondary readings by Aristotle, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Russell, McTaggart, Banfield, Forster, Woolf, et al.

CL 112A 16678 KOTZAMANIDOU MWF 12 235 DWINELLE

CL 120 16681 ALTER TT 11-12:30 205 DWINELLE

The Biblical Tradition in Western Literature

This course will explore the biblical tradition in Western literature by a series of close readings of selected biblical texts in conjunction with a series of novels written in different languages from the eighteenth century to the twentieth that make central use of these biblical sources. One underlying concern of the course will be the nature of intertextuality, that is, how writers confront and transform their literary antecedents, and how a literary tradition articulates itself through a process of restless allusion. No previous familiarity with the Bible is presumed, and thus one of the goals of the course will be learning to read precisely and to appreciate the distinctive literary structures and conventions of the Bible.

Required texts
  • H. Fielding, Joseph Andrews
  • W. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
  • F. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
  • H. Melville, Moby Dick
  • F. Kafka, Amerika
  • The Holy Bible

CL 151 16684 McCARTHY TT 9:30-11 20 WHEELER
(Classics 130)

"Slavery and Literature in the Ancient Greco-Roman World"

Slavery was one of the central institutions of life in classical Greece and Rome and had a profound affect on the ways these societies represented themselves and their world. In this course we will first spend some time learning about the historical condition of slavery in these two societies, then read a variety of works that show some of the ways that slaves and slavery operated in the intellectual and imaginative life of ancient authors. The three genres we will focus on are philosophy, drama (both tragedy and comedy) and the novel. There will be a variety of writing assignments of differing lengths, a midterm and a final exam.

Tentative list of readings
  • Aristotle, Politics I
  • Seneca, On Benefits, selected letters
  • Epictetus, Discourses
  • Euripides, Andromache, Ion, Cyclops
  • Plautus, Mostellaria, Captivi
  • Terence, The Eunuch
  • Petronius, Satyricon
  • Apuleius, The Golden Ass

CL 155 16687 LIU MWF 11 2062 VAL LSB

"Traveling Modernism"

This course explores aspects of "modernism" in a comparative study of European, South Asian, African, Chinese, and Latin-American texts. We begin with the "wanderer in the metropolis" of Hamsun's Hunger and Conrad's European travelers in Africa in Heart of Darkness. These and other European narratives will be read and analyzed alongside the works of Fanon, Rushdie, Llosa, Can Xue, 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 journey of literary "modernism" itself across the boundaries of national literatures. Our goal in this class is to reconsider modernist texts in a broader, global context in which Western and non-Western writers engage themselves in direct or implict dialogue (or debate) about the meaning of self-identity, historical memory, humanism, the trauma of colonial and postcolonial dislocation, and the moral dilemma of writing in the metropolitan or native languages.

Requirements: mid-term, two papers, and final exam.

Required texts
  • Can Xue. Old Floating Cloud
  • Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness
  • Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Mask
  • Knut Hamsun. Hunger
  • Franz Kafka. "The Metamorphosis"
  • Mario Vargas Llosa. The Storyteller
  • Vladimir Nabokov. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
  • Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children
  • Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse

A course reader containing additional materials will be ready for purchase at Metro Publishing in the first week of class.

CL 170 16690 KOTZAMANIDOU F 3-6 225 DWINELLE

Modern Greek Literature--in the original

CL 185 16693 WEIL TT 12:30-2 122 WHEELER

"Androgyny/ Hermaphroditism: Theories and Fictions"

The dream of a whole, complete being who is both and/or neither male and female has long been associated with an idealist tradition in literature and art. An alternate tradition, however, associates representations of the androgyne, or more appropriately the hermaphrodite, not with sexual transcendence, but with sexual confusion and even the monstrous. This course will examine this dual tradition from Plato to the current intersexual movement asking 1) what such manifestations of sexual transcendence and/or confusion might tell us about the status of sexual identity and difference at various historical and cultural moments, 2) what and whose fantasies may be served by the androgynous ideal, and 3) what other relations (of power, culture, nation) may be involved in the conquest of sexual difference. Readings may include Plato, Ovid, Balzac, Gautier, Woolf, as well as selections from psychoanalytic, biological and feminist theories of sexual development.

Texts
  • Plato, Symposium
  • Foucault, ed., Herculine Barbin
  • Woolf, A Room of One's Own
  • Hwang, M. Butterfly
  • Foucault, History of Sexuality vol.1
  • Barthes, S/Z
  • Gautier, Mlle de Maupin

CL 190 16696 FRANÇOIS TT 2-3:30 404 MLK Stud U.

"Eros and Enigma"

This course explores the relationships between love, beauty, and knowledge in a number of literary and philosophical works. Readings and film screenings will focus on three types of experience that are not easily explained or put into language and yet demand communication: the sacred, the erotic and the aesthetic (sublime and beautiful). How do these films and texts pass on their secrets? How do narratives of instruction and initiation negotiate the choice between enlightenment and enchantment, violence and seduction?

Readings will include theoretical texts by Blanchot, Freud, Lacan, Kant, Kierkegaard, Levinas and Plato; a selection of Romantic and Modernist poetry; short fiction by James, Lafayette, and Melville. Room will be given to the particular interests of the participants in shaping the reading list.

Required texts
  • Plato, The Symposium and Phaedrus
  • Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments
  • Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
  • Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories
  • James, The Beast in the Jungle and Other Stories
  • Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves
  • Course reader