Fall 2003 Course Offerings: 1A and 1B

CL H1A:1, #17203, MOORE, TT 9:30-11, 223 WHEELER

"Transformations"

In this course we will take a comparative approach to examine various representations of transformation across several historical periods, literary genres and films. Throughout our discussions, we will consider how different authors working within (or against) generic constraints employ transformation: In what ways do these transformed protagonists support or undermine society’s ideals? How do race, gender and class figure into the mix? We will supplement the primary texts with critical essays (in the reader), expanding both the scope of our questioning and the depth of our analysis in the process.

This course will focus on improving paper writing techniques, including thesis development, sentence and paragraph structure, and textual analysis. Class discussions and writing assignments will focus on honing students’ close and critical reading skills.

Students will be required to read assigned works carefully, attend classes and participate actively in class discussions, and produce approximately 32 pages of thoughtful prose (in the form of 4 papers of increasing length, each of which will be subject to extensive revisions). Additional requirements include several informal writing assignments and two oral presentations. As an honors course, the workload and expectations will be higher than a non-honors 1A, both in terms of required reading and writing assignments. Students will have the opportunity to select and read a text that is not on the syllabus in its original language. Prerequisites: reading ability in a second language.

Required texts
  • The Sand Child, Tahar Ben Jelloun (JHU Press)
  • News from Edouard, Michel Tremblay (Talonbooks, Ltd.)
  • Metamorphoses, Ovid (Penguin Classics)
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (Bantam Classics)
  • The Marriage of Figaro, Pierre de Beaumarchais (Penguin Classics)

A Course Reader will also be required for purchase.

Films
  • Mifune
  • Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch
  • Mulholland Drive, David Lynch

CL 1A:1, #17206, GREEN/Rowan, MWF 9-10, 220 WHEELER

In this class, as we read and discuss together works of various genres and periods (from the Roman epic to the nineteenth-century novel), we will examine the ways in which reason and passion, two powerful forces within the human psyche, are central to the authors’ concerns in their exploration of such topics as political rule; ethics; creativity; violence; self-mastery; and the relationships between self and family, the lover and the beloved, and the individual and society. We shall engage the question of the relationship between reason and passion within multiple contexts: Are they direct opposites, and therefore mutually exclusive, or do they complement each other? Are they particular to gender, class, or occupation/social function, or do they allow for the stretching of boundaries within assumed social or literary situations? Finally, how do the values around the relationship between reason and passion change across genres and time? Is it ever possible to speak of reasonable passion or passionate reason?

Close and critical reading of our common texts will serve as the basis for class discussion and the development of argumentative and interpretive essays. Most formal writing assignments will include revisions. Through group presentations, students will be responsible for sharing the teaching of one class during the semester. Note: There will be no final exam for this course.

Required Texts:
  • Plato: Selections from The Republic and Phaedrus
  • Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
  • Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
  • Virgil: The Aeneid (Books I, IV, and XII)
  • Ludovico Ariosto: Orlando Furioso
  • William Shakespeare: The Tempest
  • Jean Racine: Phèdre
  • Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility
  • Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde

CL 1A:2, #17209, CUDAHY/Kay, MWF 10-11, 205 DWINELLE

"Lethal Passions"

Death, by murder, illness or suicide is the end result in many of literature’s most compelling stories of romantic love. From the topos of the fallen woman that permeates the 19th century novel, to the performances of awesome vengeance in Hedda Gabler and Medea, women heroines often take the brunt of society’s censure of “inappropriate” passion. The feminization of Shakespeare’s Othello and Mann’s Aschenbach will broaden our understanding of gender stereotype and romantic devastation. The protagonists are always marked by their difference, a difference that extends far beyond their illicit yearnings, and that precedes its development in the plot: they are made strange in comparison to other characters. They are somehow smarter, more interesting, more confused, and more demanding than the rest of society. These tales inspire agile reading practices that incorporate an understanding of authorial, cultural and historical pressures at work in the formation of the text.

In this course, you will be expected to write in a number of ways: 1) a series of papers of increasing length, all of which will be extensively edited and re-written, 2) one-page response papers, and 3) in-class freewriting. In addition, you will be responsible for group presentations on literary and historical issues that will be assigned in the beginning of the semester.

Texts
  • Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise von O-
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  • Theodore Fontane, Effie Briest
  • Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
  • Hinrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
  • Euripides, Medea
  • Shakespeare, Othello
  • Selected Poetry
  • Lunsford/Connors, The Everyday Writer

CL 1A:3, #17212, TREAT, TT 12:30-2, 233 DWINELLE

Philosophies of Love

This course is about love's many dimensions, and especially about same-sex desire. We start by examining the Greek concept of love through Plato's Symposium, then we will discuss Shakespeare's Sonnets, addressed to two lovers -- one young, male, and fair, the other an older, dark female. As we move into more modern texts, we will give special attention to the "transgressive" nature of love and ask, what happens when love is a forbidden love -- because of race, gender, class, age, or family relation? What are the attractions and perils of taking an older lover? A lover of another race? A lover of the same sex? A family member? What special kind of magnetism is generated by "love triangles"? Why is hatred so often a part of love? And why is death often presented as the inevitable outcome of love? These questions and more will be explored throughout this course.

CL 1A:4, #17215, TRAN, TT 8-9:30, 222 WHEELER

"Welcome to the Land of Oz"

This course looks at the "unreal" in a number of literary texts, with specific attention given to the fairy tale and the theme of metamorphosis. Fittingly, we will begin with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, then continue with the traditional fairy tale, noting its variants and diverse origins, yet also identifying its shared elements, characteristics and form.

For the latter half of the semester, our focus will be the relationship between the fairy tale and other types of prose fiction, where the fairy tale, manipulation, distortion, ambiguity and unreliability are prevalent themes. These texts include: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw and Nguyen Huy Thiep’s Collected Stories.

The requirements for this class include: 32 pages worth of writing, weekly responses, presentations, regular attendance, and participation. There will also be the occasional quiz.

Required texts:
  • Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
  • Grimm Brothers, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
  • Henry James, Turn of the Screw
  • Kafka, The Metamorphosis
  • Nabokov, Pnin
  • Nguyen Huy Thiep, Collected Stories
  • Ovid, Metamorphoses
  • William Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale

*There will also be a course reader.

CL 1A:5, #17218, PERCIALI/DeAngelis, TT 12:30-2, 200 WHEELER
**NOTE NEW LOCATION**

"Finding Things Out"

Identifying a murderer, discovering a secret, diagnosing a type, detecting a motive - many literary plots are built on the process of finding something out. Even the basic operation of describing the world and telling a story involves discovering and then communicating new knowledge. But how exactly do we find out what we find out when we read literature? And what are the limitations of this knowledge? All the works on this list reveal a secret or uncover a mystery, but their methods of doing so are very different. From works that seem quite confident of the ability to know, to ones that actively demonstrate the impossibility of knowing, these texts will help us consider what lurks beneath knowledge, and how we know what we know. We will also try to understand the role played by not knowing, and the power of mystery and the unknown. Finally, we will consider the role of bias and underlying assumptions in coloring what we see as much as what we are capable of knowing.

Texts
  • Honoré de Balzac, Sarrasine
  • Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackyroyd
  • William Faulkner, Absalom Absalom!
  • Sigmund Freud, Dora and selections from The Interpretation of Dreams
  • Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
  • Shakespeare, Othello
  • poetry from Ann Sexton and Adrienne Rich
  • theoretical selections from Roland Barthes and Peter Brooks

CL 1A:6, #17221, CHATTERJI/Haacke, TT 12:30-2, 221 WHEELER

"Border Crossings"

What does it mean to cross a border? What if a border is not just a mark of difference but also space of habitation? What happens when borders are displaced? In this course we look at various works that represent movement between different kinds of cultural and imaginary experience. Our readings will lead us to consider borders both as spatial boundaries and as boundaries in the self in order to ask questions about gender, homelands, nation, memory and language.

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.

The course discussions will be derived from the following works:

  • Ovid, Metamorphosis
  • Shakespeare, Othello
  • Edgar Allen Poe, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
  • Tayeb Salah, Season of Migration to the North
  • Amitav Ghosh, Shadow Lines
  • Poetry: Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du mal; Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera; Elizabeth Bishop, "Geographies"
  • Film: Welles, Touch of Evil

CL 1A:7, #17224, HAUSDOERFFER/Nathan, TT 11-12:30, 242 DWINELLE

"Doubles, Substitutes, and Shadows in Film and Literature"

Art of all forms seems drawn to the idea of the double, to the game of substitution, and to the ambiguity of the shadow. In this course, we will consider the issue of doubling, of substitution, and of shadowing in both literature and film. Although we primarily will be interested in the mirrorings that occur between characters, we will also consider mirroring at the level of plot (between “main” and “sub” plots) and at the level of language itself (the echoing of words and phrases that create subtle links between otherwise dissimilar things in literature).

To explore these issues, we will examine texts from a range of genres, including lyric poetry, the short story, ancient and early modern drama, and the modern novel. We will then turn our attention to film, since film seems, even more so than literature, inexorably drawn to patterns of doubling, substitution, and shadowing.

Since this is an R1A writing course, our focus will be on writing short critical essays. Students will be responsible for writing a total of eight 2-3 page short analyses and four 5 page critical essays.

Texts:
  • Course Reader (lyric poetry selections).
  • Borges, Jorge Luis. selected short stories (in course reader).
  • Euripides. Helen. (Penn Greek Drama edition).
  • Puig, Manuel. The Kiss of the Spider Woman. (Vintage Press edition).
  • Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. (Arden edition).
Films:
  • Almodovar, Pedro. All about My Mother.
  • Hitchcock, Alfred. Rebecca.
  • Medem, Julio. Tierra.

CL 1A:8, #17227, CRUZ, TT 11-12:30, 223 WHEELER

"Travel and Identity"

A person’s concept of self, according to many theories, is formed through the encounter with others. Along these lines, the trope of travel in literature is usually associated with the development of some sense of identity for the character undergoing the travel. In this course, we will look at texts from a wide range of time periods where travel is an integral part of the main character(s)’ process of identity formation. We will consider how the encounter with the other, new lands, different cultures and languages produces a subject. More specifically, we will consider what kind of subject is produced. At the same time, we will be careful to question this primary assumption as we encounter some texts that suggest that a person brings as much to an experience of contact with the other as he or she takes from it. Thus, we might counter our original question by asking to what extent the commonplace of travel as a changing and formative experience is a fallacy? Furthermore, our investigation will move between canonical texts that represent a primarily white Western male perspective and non-canonical texts that voice the experience of gender, sexual, and racial minorities to try and discern how this trope of travel works differently for different subjects.

Required Texts:
  • Homer, The Odyssey
  • Shakespeare, The Tempest
  • Christopher Columbus, Four Voyages
  • Catalina De Erauso, Lieutenant Nun
  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  • William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
  • John Rechy, City of Night
  • Tomás Rivera, …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him
  • Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
  • Course Reader containing secondary material and excerpts from other texts

CL 1A:9, #17230, DILLON, TT 8-9:30, 125 DWINELLE

"Rebel Children, Rebel Parents"

While classic films like Rebel Without a Cause may have made defiance of patriarchal structures by children famous, recent films like American Beauty have looked at the comical shirking of parental responsibility and the consequent breakdown of the family structure. Rebellion in the family is not exclusive to contemporary social drama. This class aims to look at various literary and cinematic works that span history and put the fun in the portrayal of the dysfunctional family structure. We will analyze, construct and deconstruct motherhood, fatherhood, womanhood, manhood, boyhood, childhood and neighborhood. Beginning with classical tropes of rebellion, we will then look at the recursion and transformation of these tropes in literature and then conclude by analyzing how literary portrayal of rebellion can be used in different ways as a social critique.

Texts:
  • Sophocles, Antigone
  • William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
  • The Hebrew Bible
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  • Richard Wright, Black Boy
  • Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
  • Clarice Lispector, Family Ties
Films:
  • Stanley Kubrick, Lolita
  • Elia Kazan, East of Eden
  • Sam Mendes, American Beauty

CL 1B:1, #17233, CUDAHY, MWF 9-10, 205 DWINELLE

"Lethal Passions"

Death, by murder, illness or suicide is the end result in many of literature’s most compelling stories of romantic love. From the topos of the fallen woman that permeates the 19th century novel, to the performances of awesome vengeance in Hedda Gabler and Medea, women heroines often take the brunt of society’s censure of “inappropriate” passion. The feminization of Shakespeare’s Othello and Mann’s Aschenbach will broaden our understanding of gender stereotype and romantic devastation. The protagonists are always marked by their difference, a difference that extends far beyond their illicit yearnings, and that precedes its development in the plot: they are made strange in comparison to other characters. They are somehow smarter, more interesting, more confused, and more demanding than the rest of society. These tales inspire agile reading practices that incorporate an understanding of authorial, cultural and historical pressures at work in the formation of the text.

In this course, you will be expected to write in a number of ways: 1) a 5-6 page paper and a 7-8 page paper, both of which will be extensively edited and re-written, 2) one-page response papers, and 3) in-class freewriting. In addition, you will be responsible for group presentations on literary and historical issues that will be assigned in the beginning of the semester.

Texts
  • Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise von O-
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  • Theodore Fontane, Effie Briest
  • Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
  • Hinrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
  • Euripides, Medea
  • Shakespeare, Othello
  • Selected Poetry
  • Lunsford/Connors, The Everyday Writer

CL 1B:2, #17236, BROWN, TT 9:30-11, 262 DWINELLE

"Confessions… True or Otherwise"

A confession is a serious thing. A signed confession of guilt makes for powerful evidence in a court of law. Some churches urge their members to confess regularly. Modern psychiatry encourages patients to recall and describe their past experience - an exercise in first-person narration that could be compared to a confession. Yet DNA evidence has proven that people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit, and psychiatric therapy has sometimes led patients to invent - and believe - childhood memories of events that never took place. Thus a confession’s truth-value can be called into question as it becomes the object of competing interpretations.

In its mediation between the private and the public and in the way that it invites interpretation, the confession has much in common with literary texts. In fact, it became a literary genre in its own right more than 1600 years ago with the publication of Augustine’s Confessions. This course, therefore, will focus on Augustine’s text and a number of others that involve some sort of confessional speech. We shall examine what happens when individuals attempt to reveal themselves through words, and we shall ask what effect the different discursive situations (a writer directly addressing God or the reader; one character speaking to another or to the ghost of one of his victims; a patient speaking to a doctor) have on the kind of confession produced. This will lead us to consider the different roles that both the text and its interpreter can plan, and to question the categories of "literary" and "non-literary" with which we classify different kinds of discourse.

Our readings will begin with creepy tales of crime and guilt by Edgar Allen Poe and with Sigmund Freud’s case studies on hysteria. We shall go on to read not only the autobiographies of Saint Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also Biblical and Shakespearean depictions of corrupted kings, the work of the metaphysical poets, and the first "modern" novel.

The class is designed to develop students' analytical writing, and we shall practice close reading as a method of literary analysis and work on thesis development and essay structure. Students will write and revise several short analytical essays, summaries of/responses to pieces of critical writing, a final research paper, and a brief retrospective essay.

Texts:
  • Poe, selected tales
  • Freud, Studies on Hysteria
  • Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves
  • First and Second Samuel and selected Psalms (Authorized Version)
  • Augustine, Confessions
  • Herbert and Donne, selected poetry and prose
  • Dante, Inferno
  • Shakespeare, King Richard III
  • Rousseau, Confessions

CL 1B:3, #17239, LARSEN, MWF 11-12, 205 DWINELLE

"Soil"

The most tangible figure for any inhabited place is its soil. In this class we will investigate the deployment of soil as both symbol and material fact in various texts and traditions, along with the commonly associated practices and concepts of agriculture, property, nationhood and belonging. We will also learn the essential principles of composting. This might be the class for you!

Texts
  • Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • The Odyssey, Homer
  • King Lear, Shakespeare
  • Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles
  • A reader including texts by Robert Smithson, Wes Jackson, Ugo Betti, Theresa Cha, Susan Sontag, Victor Hugo, Sophocles and Steven King.

CL 1B:4, #17242, ZOU, TT 8-9:30, 123 DWINELLE

Modernist Subjectivity

This course will examine the diverse modes of modernist subjectivity in poetry. We will look into Western modernist conception of the self, its relationship to cosmopolitan landscape, to new ideas of history and language, and compare Western modernism with the concept of modernity in 20th century Chinese poetry. We will start with romantic poetry and its depiction of "nature" by reading William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats. Then we will read Emily Dickinson, William Yeats, Gertrude Stein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, and Marianne Moore, and Chinese poets Bing Xin, Wen Yiduo, Dai Wangshu, Bian Zhilin, He Qifang, and Feng Zhi. We will pay particular attention to how landscape and figures of women serve as images of modernity, and how, in various ways, women and landscape are linked.

CL 1B:5, #17245, INCIARTE, TT 8-9:30, 235 DWINELLE

"Looking Awry: A wry look at society through the eyes of rogues, rapscallions, and pícaros"

This course will consider a set of works that represent the distinctive and satirical world view of characters who stand at the margin of their societies: pícaros, fools, men hidden in animal bodies, gypsies, conversos, vampires, etc. Why does the picaresque genre attract misfit authors? How does it permit a freedom of expression not found in other genres? How do picaresque characters deliver their indictments of society? We will consider a variety of works that allow us to trace part of the historical evolution of this genre that specializes in the view-from-below. The course fulfills all reading and writing requirements for Comp. Lit.1B. The book list depends on availability so be prepared for substitutions.

Readings
  • Apuleius, The Golden Ass
  • Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1
  • Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground
  • Defoe, Moll Flanders
  • Zapata, Luis, Adonis García - A Picaresque Novel
  • Selection of Lyric Poetry (Byron’s "Don Juan," Lorca’s Romancero Gitano)
  • Selection of Short Stories (Eudora Welty, "Why I Live at the P.O."; Julio Cortázar, "Axolotl"; from al-Hamadhani, Makamat; from Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Novels; Flannery O’Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find")

CL 1B:6, #17248, POPKIN/Sayar, TT 9:30-11, 242 DWINELLE

"Ground Zero: Passing On Trauma in Literature, Film and the Media"

This course will examine why it is so difficult to pass on stories of trauma. To what extent are stories of trauma passed on (narrated), and to what extent are they passed on (overlooked)? What makes it possible for them to be narrated, and what limits this possibility? We will consider the role of language, the psyche, shame and pleasure in answering these questions.

Secondly, we will examine how the passing on of trauma shapes the identities of survivors, bystanders, and more broadly, ethnicity, race and gender. We will play close attention to the ways in which identity can both be torn asunder in the wake of trauma, and also, paradoxically, how it can be constructed through the 'wakefulness' of trauma.

These questions will be pursued through a broad range of literature, film and the news media. We will consider how these questions are addressed from the positions of survivors, bystanders and perpetrators -- and the instability between these boundaries which often occurs.

Required Texts
  • The Bible
  • Song of Roland
  • Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved
  • Leo Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata
  • Marquis de Sade, Philosophy of the Bedroom
  • Slavenka Drakulic, S. A Novel About the Balkans
  • Films including Life is Beautiful and Wag the Dog
  • A course reader to include newspaper articles and psychoanalytic and philosophical essays on the course topic

CL 1B:7, #17251, SPRINGER, TT 9:30-11, 220 WHEELER

"Down the Rabbit Hole"

Course readings focus on physical, psychological, and artistic voyages of discovery. Works read in the course describe a wide range of journeys, with outcomes ranging from the transcendent to just plain scary.

Writing assignments include position papers, literary critical analyses, group presentations on The Tempest, and a book review. Final grades will reflect grades on papers, participation in class, attendance--and improvement in writing style.

Texts
  • Aeneid, Virgil (Mandelbaum translation)
  • The Tempest, Shakespeare
  • Jacques the Fatalist, Diderot
  • Tales of Power, Castaneda
  • The House of Blue Mangoes, Davidar
Course Reader
  • Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls
  • Excerpts from Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Dante's Inferno
Movies
  • A Brilliant Mind
  • Fight Club
  • The Lost Weekend

CL 1B:8, #17254, POPKIN/Allan, TT 11-12:30, 123 WHEELER

"Ground Zero: Passing On Trauma in Literature, Film and the Media"

This course will examine why it is so difficult to pass on stories of trauma. To what extent are stories of trauma passed on (narrated), and to what extent are they passed on (overlooked)? What makes it possible for them to be narrated, and what limits this possibility? We will consider the role of language, the psyche, shame and pleasure in answering these questions.

Secondly, we will examine how the passing on of trauma shapes the identities of survivors, bystanders, and more broadly, ethnicity, race and gender. We will play close attention to the ways in which identity an both be torn asunder in the wake of trauma, and also, paradoxically, how it can be constructed through the 'wakefulness' of trauma.

These questions will be pursued through a broad range of literature, film and the news media. We will consider how these questions are addressed from the positions of survivors, bystanders and perpetrators -- and the instability between these boundaries which often occurs.

Required Texts
  • The Bible
  • Song of Roland
  • Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved
  • Leo Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata
  • Marquis de Sade, Philosophy of the Bedroom
  • Assia Djebar, Fantasia
  • Films including Muriel, ou, Le temps d'un retour, and La jetee
  • A course reader to include newspaper articles and psychoanalytic and philosophical essays on the course topic

CL 1B:9, #17257, CHATTERJI, TT 11-12:30, 224 WHEELER

"Border Crossings"

What does it mean to cross a border? What if a border is not just a mark of difference but also space of habitation? What happens when borders are displaced? In this course we look at various works that represent movement between different kinds of cultural and imaginary experience. Our readings will lead us to consider borders both as spatial boundaries and as boundaries in the self in order to ask questions about gender, homelands, imaginary-real experience and language.

This course is designed to fulfill the University's 1B reading and composition requirement. We will spend considerable time in class on improving students' writing skills by working on clarity, argument development and research basics. Students will keep reading journals and work on preliminary drafts of their essays. Student will complete final drafts of 2 short essays and 2 longer essays during the course of the semester.

The course discussions will be derived from the following works:

  • Homer, The Odyssey
  • Poe, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
  • Woolf, The Voyage Out
  • Tayeb Salah, Season of Migration to the North
  • Ghosh, Shadow Lines

Film: Welles, Touch of Evil

Reader: including essays, poems and stories by Gloria Anzaldua, Salman Rushdie, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, James Clifford

CL 1B:10, #17260, MANALO/Wellmon, MWF 9-10, 121 WHEELER

"Romantic Nations"

This course considers the relationship of literature and philosophy to the experience of nationality--and the extent to which this relationship can be understood under the problematic of "Romanticism." Often derided as too fantastic, otherworldly, or even pathological, "Romanticism" is nonetheless concerned with questions about nation-building, emergent linguistic communities and the intimate connections between aesthetics and politics, questions that continue to preoccupy us today. We will analyze the cultural, aesthetic, and political work of "Romanticism" across historical and geographical boundaries by touching upon the following topics: sovereignty and nationhood, competing universalisms and cosmopolitanism, language and translation, nature and history, myth and the city, kinship and the gothic, perpetual peace and imperialist nostalgia.

As a 1B, this course will also introduce students to stylistic, argumentative, and literary techniques, which can be used for close rhetorical and theoretical analysis. Requirements include a few short papers, a longer final paper, and oral presentations. Our weekly expectations will include class participation and willingness to read a lot.

Required Texts:
  • Frederick Beiser, Cambridge Companion to Early Romantic Political Philosophy
  • Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
  • Albert Camus, L'Etranger [The Stranger]
  • Heinrich von Kleist, Marquise Von O and Other Stories
  • Shakespeare, Hamlet
  • Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme [The Charterhouse of Parma]
  • Course Packet will include short excerpts from: Plato, Hoelderlin, ETA Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Hugo, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Fanon, Fichte, Schleiermacher and others.

CL 1B:11, #17262, RAMEY, MWF 11-12, 221 WHEELER

"Exile, Subjugation and the Return"

To lose something is one of the fundamental experiences of human existence-but just so is the experience of regaining something that was lost. This course will explore the intimate connection between the shock of exile and the creation of literary and cinematic masterpieces in different periods and political and cultural contexts. We will scrutinize exile as a precursor to the subjugation of indigenous peoples-and individuals-by analyzing representations of domination in various forms of discourse. In the works we will examine, debauchery, licentiousness and violent excess are common responses to the displacement of exile. Why is this the case? How is it relevant to history and to contemporary culture? How does excess in exile shape literary and cinematic creativity? Finally, crucial to our understanding of exile and subjugation will be the phenomenon of the exile’s return to the homeland-a return that without exception transforms both the exile and the homeland regained.

Students must attend classes, participate in class discussions, and demonstrate thoughtful readings of the assigned texts. A total of about 30 pages of prose will be turned in throughout the semester (three brief response papers and two formal papers, each of which will be subject to extensive revision). Each student will give at least one oral presentation.

Required Texts:
  • The Aeneid - Virgil
  • Gargantua - François Rabelais
  • Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
  • Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
  • Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
  • Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo
  • Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Films:
  • Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston)
  • Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel)
  • Aguirre: Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
  • Our Lady of the Assasins (Barbet Shroeder)

Course Reader: will include selected poetry, short stories, readings in history, cultural theory and discourse analysis, and critical approaches to the texts.

CL 1B:12, #17263, DIMOVA, MWF 11-12, 20 WHEELER

"Exile, Displacement, and the Literary Imagination"

It has been said that with the unprecedented upheavals of the 20th century, exile and displacement have become the norm, rather than the exception, of the human condition. But at the same time, exile occupies an ages-old place in the literary consciousness, as reflected in works as ancient as the Hebrew Bible and classical Chinese poetry. This course will take a cross-cultural and cross-temporal approach to the question of exile, following its depiction across centuries and continents in novels, stories, poems, and essays from both East and West. In these works, we will encounter archetypal stories of mythological figures, as well as stories deeply enmeshed with history: writings engendered by war and violence, and narrated in the voices of refugees, immigrants, the colonizers, and the colonized. We will consider narratives of homecoming alongside narratives of no return, looking closely at the concepts of home, identity, language, and memory. Finally, in seeking to uncover what these texts share and how they differ, we will come to see how their authors have imagined, responded to, and perhaps transcended the experience of exile.

Required texts
  • Homer, The Odyssey
  • Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  • Tayyib Salih, Season of Migration to the North
  • Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine

There will also be a course reader containing readings from the Hebrew Bible and classical Chinese poetry, in addition to poems, essays, short stories, and criticism by writers including Ovid, Celan, Brecht, Seghers, Pushkin, Brodsky, and Rushdie. All course readings are in English translation.

CL 1B:13, #17264, COPENHAFER, MWF 12-1, 130 Wheeler

"Love Stories"

Taking our cue from Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse we will ask after the nature of 'love' in a variety of literary and philosophical texts. How is love to be differentiated from desire or from sexuality? Is love primarily a feeling or a way of acting/doing? How does writing structure love and how does love structure writing? These are some of the questions that will motivate our investigations over the course of the semester.

Students will be expected to attend faithfully and to produce 25-30 pages of thoughtful prose.

Texts
  • Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
  • Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  • Ellison, Invisible Man
  • Plato, The Symposium
  • Shakespeare, Hamlet
Films
  • Godard, Breathless
  • Marker, La Jetee

R2A -- CANCELLED