Fall 2003 Course Offerings:
Lower- and Upper-Division Undergraduate Courses

CL 24:1, #17266, TOLLEFSON, Tu 3-4, 104 DWINELLE

"Reading and Reciting Great Poems in English"

People today don't have enough poetry in their heads, and everyone should be able to recite one or two of their favorite poems. In addition to its purely personal benefits, knowing some poetry by heart has practical applications: in a tough job interview, you can impress the prospective boss by reciting just the right line, say, from Dylan Thomas: "do not go gentle into that good night/rage rage against the dying of the light." Or at a party sometime, you'll be able to show off with a bit of T.S. Eliot: "in the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo."

In this class we will read a number of "classic" poems as well as a number of other (perhaps lesser, but still memorable) poems, and discuss them. The poems cut across centuries and types, and students will be encouraged to find other poems for the group to read.

Students will be required to memorize and recite between 50 and 75 lines of poetry throughout the semester. In addition, students will prepare a short anthology of their favorite poems, with an explanatory introduction for each poem.

CL 24:2, #17268, McCARTHY, M 4-5:30, 235 DWINELLE (P/NP)

"Stories about Stories"

Although we tend to take for granted many of the forms of story-telling which we use in everyday life, putting together narratives and understanding them depend on a number of complex processes which draw together our intellectual, social and aesthetic lives. In this class, we will look at a small set of texts, representing a variety of genres and media, in which the story is about the ways that people organize and make sense of (as well as make use of) narrative. The four major texts we'll study are an ancient Roman novel (Apuleius' The Golden Ass), a contemporary Irish novel (Deane's Reading in the Dark), a film (Kurosawa's Rashomon) and a semi-fictional travelogue about post-communist Albania (Jones' Biografi). There will be some brief writing exercises to help students synthesize the ideas of the course, but no major paper.

CL 24:3, #17479, MONROE, Th 1-2, 211 DWINELLE (P/NP)

"The Golden Age of Arabic Literature:
The Early Abbasid Period in Baghdad (132/750-334/945)"

This seminar will focus on representative readings in verse and in prose, from Arabic authors writing at the caliphal court in Baghdad from the eighth to the tenth centuries, a period considered by many to constitute the Golden Age of Arabic literature. Poems and prose works will be analyzed in translation, while close references to the original Arabic will be provided. At the end of the course, a brief term paper will be expected.

CL 40, #17269, STENPORT, TT 12:30-2, 20 WHEELER

"From Automatons and Aesthetes to Autonomy:
The fin-de-siècle in theme and form"

In the fantasy of woman as a perfect machine -- a feminine, submissive, and modern Eve -- is where our journey through the European fin-de-siècle imagination of femininity will begin. Then we will make our way through a fecund terrain of late nineteenth-century understandings of femininity and what was meant by the female sex: from the decadents’ fascination with the feminized male to the complex celebration of early lesbian representation, to the portrayal of the New Woman and the early suffragette movement. The course spans French, British, German, and Scandinavian texts that are all intensely preoccupied with the demarcations of sexuality and gender roles during this period of rapid social change, especially in terms of urbanization. Through a series of close readings, we will analyze in depth some of the underlying presumptions of the prevailing views of gender and also relate these representations to more ”main-stream” versions of gender formation at the time. In addition, this course will look closely at how these in many ways quite radical texts also achieve their force on formal and narrative levels, and where some of them can be seen as precursors in their representation of desire and subjectivity to the modernist movement.

Texts

• Villiers de l’Isle Adam: Future Eve (1886)
• Rachilde: Monsieur Venus (1886)
• William Beardsley: selections from The Yellow Book
• Max Nordau: selections from Degeneration (1893)
• Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
• Sarah Grand: The Heavenly Twins (1893)
• Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman (1894)
• Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House (1879)
• Charlotte Gillian Perkins: Herland (1915)
• Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
• A reader with recent critical work on the decadent movement, the New Woman, late nineteenth-century gender formation and social criticism, desire, and idealism.

CL 41B, #17275, ADLER-PECKERAR, TT 11-12:30, 205 DWINELLE

"Formal Explosions in the Lyric"

This course is devoted to the close reading of the lyrical mode in poetry and, to a lesser extent, in film. Our first objective is to master a vocabulary of poetics that will facilitate both our discussions and our written work on the texts. Looking closely at prosody and versification, we will see how formal considerations relate to broader topics in the reading of lyric poetry. There are three main components to the class: masters of prosody and verseforms; innovations and transformations of form; and the lyric in film. The first part of the course will be centered on a core group of 15 English language poets. These 15 are: Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, June Jordan, Philip Larkin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Ogden Nash, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth.

The remainder of the class will examine poets collected into our course anthology. This will consist of poets whose work may be written in any language but will be read in English translation. Each participant in the class will choose one poet to be represented in our anthology. Our discussions of these works will be devoted to understanding the poetics of each poet and the history of poetic forms with which the poets are engaged. The third component of the course will be devoted to a number of “lyrical” films. We shall see how the lyric “translates” to the screen. What is lost or enhanced by the presentation of poetry on film and how does the filmic representation of the lyric alter our reading of the written word?

Required Texts:

• The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, T.V.F. Brogan (Editor)
• 2 Course readers, one including the 15 core group and critical/theoretical material; the other for the class selected anthology
• Five Films
  • Hiroshima, mon amour, Alain Resnais
  • Home of the Brave, Laurie Anderson
  • I am Cuba, Mikhail Kalatozov
  • Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann
  • Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders

CL 41C, #17272, LIU, TT 9:30-11, 205 DWINELLE

"Introduction to the Novel: ‘Play’"

It has been argued that the emergence of the novel in Western literature was intimately connected to the rise of a new leisure class and a new culture of recreation. In this course, we will study several novels-traditional and postmodern, western and non-western-to reassess that thesis. In particular, we will be interested in the relation between the conventions of the novel (the tools and limitations of this genre) and different narratives of play. We will explore the connections between the novelistic representation of forms of pleasure and recreation and the rise of a consumer culture that is said to be the precondition for this genre. The culture of recreation, then, is not only an object to be internally represented as Harry Potter’s Quidditch, the theater and gallery in The Wings of the Dove, or the carnival in Beloved, but an external, structuring organization of social life that determines the form and history of the novel as well. To understand how the novel engages economies of play both formally and historically, we will read Robinson Crusoe, one of founding texts in the development of the novel in England, and Roadside Picnic, a Soviet science fiction novel, as two different endeavors at imagining and constructing an alternative social organization of labor, exchange, and relations of production. We will pay close attention to the nature of pleasure as explored and interpreted by these fictional accounts, and varied ideas about how pleasure defines itself in relation to work. We will then consider the ways in which the historical development of new recreational forms (such as the professionalization of boxing and baseball, the establishment of amusement parks in America, and the transnational circulation of pop music) exert pressure on the language and material of the fantasy universe of Harry Potter and Norwegian Wood. We will be particularly interested in examining different novelistic strategies these two works employ to respond to a culture of commodified amusement that is specifically modern, post-industrial, western(-ized) and capitalist. We will also analyze the ideological implications of the type of character or plot development that thematizes the seductiveness and destructive power of play, as in the case of Beloved and Wild Kids. Finally, we will look at Kafka’s novelistic construction of nameless, undifferentiated, dehumanized functionaries as an excoriating critique of rationalized bourgeois society and the experience of alienation--as Kafka’s philosophical inquiry into the absence of play.

Reading List

Primary texts:

• Chang, Ta-chun. Wild Kids.
• Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe, selections.
• James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove.
• Kafka, Franz. The Trial.
• Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved.
• Murakami, Haruki. Norwegian Wood.
• Strugatsky, Arkady, and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic.

Secondary texts:

• Armstrong, Nancy. "Preface" to Desire and Domestic Fiction.
• Bakhtin, M.M. "Discourse in the Novel."
• Watt, Ian. "The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel."
• Marx, Karl. Selections from Capital.

CL 60AC:1 -- CANCELLED

CL 60AC:2, #17284, GOLD, TT 3:30-5, 219 DWINELLE
Additional Required Screenings: Mon 5 - 7 pm, 33 DWINELLE

"Laughing in The Dark: Race, Ethnicity and Humor in American Film"
American Cultures

From Groucho Marx to Margaret Cho and Chris Rock, this course will use film comedy as a lens through which to examine racial and ethnic experience in America. We will compare the different ways African Americans, Asian Americans and Jewish Americans have portrayed themselves and been portrayed by others in Hollywood. The effects of the exigencies of assimilation on this mass medium will be considered, as will the afterlives of minstrelsy, orientalism and vaudeville. Along the way, we will explore what role humor plays in both mediating and exaggerating difference. In what ways does it express sorrow and rage as well as delight and play? How do types and stereotypes function in comedy? What are their social effects? We will also test the thesis that humor serves as a survival mechanism, not just for various groups and their individual members, but for the culture as a whole.

As a mass medium, film provides a window onto American mores and attitudes. The connection is two-way, as popular film both responds to market forces and creates collective fantasies to which the culture as a whole adapts. Also, as a collaborative enterprise, film often defies narrow categorization and raises complicating questions regarding authorship and representation. Because of its tendency to express anxieties and break social taboos, humor is an especially rich expressive field for the investigation of ethnic and racial categories of identity. Comedy is also of special interest for its subversive power--its tendency to disrupt social structures and present backhanded critiques.

The texts for this course will include film, film criticism, theoretical writing regarding humor, and Film Art, a comprehensive guide to the formal elements of the medium. We will use these materials to gain insight into the varying American experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans and Jewish Americans and to thoughtfully encounter some especially playful responses to these experiences.

Genres to be covered include the romantic comedy, the concert film, and the buddy film. We will also view various genre parodies, such as the mockumentary, and consider how these parodies critique the dominant culture. Class time will be spent in lecture and discussion directed toward gaining familiarity with certain fundamentals of film analysis and toward developing close-readings of the films on the syllabus as a means to better grasping the relationship between humor and racial and ethnic identity.

After receiving instruction in fundamental terms and concepts of film analysis, students will be expected to approach the medium in its particularity. Evaluation will be based upon class participation, participation in online discussions, a paper, a group presentation and a final exam. Attendance in class and at 5pm Monday evening film screenings is also required.
NOTE: ONLY STUDENTS WHOSE SCHEDULES WILL PERMIT THEM TO ATTEND THESE 5 PM MONDAY SCREENINGS MAY TAKE THE CLASS.

CL 60AC:3, #17287, WHITE, TT 12:30-2, 160 DWINELLE

"From Sea to Shining Sea: The Frontier in American Literatures and Cultures"
American Cultures

This course will focus on representations of the frontier in American literatures and cultures as the locus of cultural contact and conflict, from the 17th century to the present. The landscapes in which these encounters take place are variously imagined as wild and picturesque, malicious and benevolent, closing in and wide open, empty and peopled, threatened border and line of advancement. We will be primarily concerned with interrogating the cultural, racial, and gendered assumptions and ideologies that underlie these representations of the frontier. We will investigate how the transition from “wilderness” to “civilization” is portrayed, whether as expansion or invasion. The connections and clashes between cultures, races, and empires are central to the idea of the frontier, and we will question the ways in which (what came to be) the United States both imagined the frontier as a line of opposition to the indigenous and/or neighboring American cultures, and frequently erased the idea and the actuality of these peoples as a necessary ideological corollary to its drive for expansion. We will pay particular attention to the themes of nature, nation, the law, domesticity, war and violence, freedom and captivity, identity, and possibilities for mediating or translating cultural difference. We will question the frontier both as a historical and ideological construct and as a trope of popular culture, and pay special attention to its importance in representing national and cultural identity.

Texts**

• Mary Rowlandson, from A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1677)
• Last of the Mohicans (film, 1992)
• James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823)
• from The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1804-1806)
• Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes (1883)
• Frederick Douglass, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
• Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass (1881)
• Américo Paredes, “The Gringo” (1953)
• The Searchers (film, 1956)
• Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima (1972)
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1978)
• Gloria Anzaldua, from borderlands/La Frontera (1987)
• Jimmy Santiago Baca, from Martín & Meditations on the South Valley (1987)
• Sherman Alexie, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)
• Smoke Signals (film, 1998)
• Luis J. Rodriguez, from The Republic of East L.A. (2003)
• Sam Shepard, from Cruising Paradise (1996)

**Some of these texts, along with supplementary readings, will be available in a Course Reader

CL 100:1 -- CANCELLED

CL 100: 2, #17293, WHITTA, TT 9:30-11, 2038 VLSB

"Epistolary Fictions: Love, Letters, Literature"

This course will examine the phenomenon of literary love, "literally," in narratives that articulate the workings of desire in epistolary form. We will consider the ways in which erotic epistolary fiction from various cultural contexts and historical periods has centered on questions of interiority, intimacy, identity and gender-formation. How do epistolary narratives invent psychological spaces of personal integrity and power? establish conditions of intimacy between reader and writer? configure the absent (beloved, addressee) as present? represent the dialogic nature of discourse? mediate or "screen" communication? establish ideologies of romantic desire? When or how does epistolary fiction turn itself into a fetish displacing reader and writer, transferring libidinal energy onto itself and its own processes of textual production? How do letters become "literature," a commodity circulating in political, economic and historical contexts? These and other questions will engage us as we read a variety of epistolary fictions, from the ancient Roman verse epistles of Ovid's Heroides to contemporary cybernetic narratives of "virtual" love. Theoretical readings and viewings of relevant films will enhance our experience of primary texts. Requirements: several in-class presentations, two 5-pp. papers, one 10-pp. paper.

Required texts for purchase:

• Ovid, Heroides
• Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (abridged)
• Denis Diderot, The Nun
• Johann W. von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
• Natsumi Soseki, Kokoro
• Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love
• Junichiro Tanizaki, Kagi
• Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
• Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

CL 112A, #17296, KOTZAMANIDOU, MWF 12-1, 205 DWINELLE

"Modern Greek"

Modern Greek is unique among languages in that it is the only modern language directly descended from Ancient Greek. In this course, the student studies reading, writing, pronunciation and use of contemporary spoken idiom; all within the historical and cultural context of the language. By the end of the course, the student should have a strong grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today. (No Prerequisite)

CL 120, #17299, ALTER, TT 11-12:30, 220 WHEELER
**NOTE NEW LOCATION**

"The Biblical Tradition in Western Literature"

The course will focus on a selection of biblical texts and of novels that respond to them. It will have the double aim of learning how to read the artfully concise literature of the Bible and following the afterlife of the Bible in a line of novels that displays a rich variety of the possibilities of intertextuality. Because the Bible is associated in Western culture with the notion of religious and moral authority, we will also consider in what ways that authority is imaginatively assimilated or challenged by later writers.

Readings

• Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
• Franz Kafka, America
• William Faulkner, Absolom, Absolom!
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• Herman Melville, Moby Dick
• The Bible

CL 151, #17302, McCARTHY, MWF 10-11, 200 WHEELER
Cross-listed with Classics 130

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

Religion and literature are two systems of thinking through which people organize disparate experiences into meaningful wholes. In the ancient pagan societies of Greece and Rome, where a shared experience of both religion and literature was a defining element of the community, these two systems were particularly inter-dependent. In this course we will read a variety of texts (e.g. epic, philosophy, tragedy) and examine the complex ways that literary constructs like plot, character, closure and genre interact with religious ideas such as causation, moral justice, divine power, cosmology. In addition to primary literary readings, students will also be required to read secondary works on ancient religion and literature. Two short (4-7 pp.) papers and a final exam are required.

CL 153, #17305, HAMPTON, TT 11-12:30, 251 DWINELLE

"Literature and the Age of Exploration"

Through a reading of a selection of major authors from the Renaissance, we will study the impact on European identity of the great voyages of exploration and discovery that mark the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We will examine the ways in which literature reflects and responds to increasing contacts with the “non-European,” be it in America, Asia, or Africa. We will study the emergence of ideologies of colonialism and imperialism, and we will look at how increasing awareness among European writers of the ”edges of Europe” leads to new notions of identity, literary authority, and ethical action. Major literary works will be read in dialogue with selections from “non-literary” accounts of exploration by such authors as Columbus, Vespucci, Leo Africanus, Da Gama, and Ricci, and with a certain number of contemporary critical accounts of the impact of exploration on Europe.

Texts:

• Shakespeare: Othello (Signet)
• Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Cohen (Penguin)
• Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Cohen (Penguin)
• More, Utopia, ed. Surtz (Yale University Press)
• Camoens, The Lusiads (Oxford World’s Classics)
• Montaigne, Essays.
• Plus a course reader.

CL 155, #17308, SPACKMAN, MWF 1-2, 242 DWINELLE

"Basic Decadence"

This course will examine the so-called "Decadent" movement in European literature of the late nineteenth century. We will be interested in the discourse of degeneration as it migrates between criminological and literary texts, in artificial paradises and drug-induced states as productive of alternative realities, in the tropes of sickness and convalescence as they are intertwined with gender and epistemology, and in literary stagings of a variety of perversions, including masochism and fetishism. Texts will include J.K. Huysmans, Against Nature, Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, Wilde, Salome, De Quincy, Confessions of an Opium Eater, Rachilde, The Juggler, D'Annunzio, The Innocent, Nordau, Degeneration, Sacher Masoch, Venus in Furs, and Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

CL 170:1, #17311, KOTZAMANIDOU, F 3-6, 175 DWINELLE

"History as an Image: Cinema and the Popularization of Greek History"

This course examines how the traumatic historical events in 20th century Greece produced cinematic responses, from the part of individual filmmakers, attuned to the predilections of mass culture. From the black and white war-dramas and melodramas, to the revivals of ancient plays, to neo-realist and expressionist undertakings, 20th century Greek history is thus being re-interpreted by the cinematic image. On the screen, on the level of the image, memory, emotion and identity converge as creative imagination brings together the individual and the collective.

(A list of readings in Greek history, in film and history theory, as well as the list of films for the course can be obtained from the instructor. Readings are in English; films are in Greek, some with subtitles.)

CL 170:2 -- CANCELLED

CL 170:3, #17317, RAM, MWF 2-3, 258 DWINELLE
Cross-listed with Slavic 146 and SSEAS 120

East/West Encounters: "Quest and Conquest"

In western culture the east has been imagined chiefly in two ways: as a source of vast riches to be plundered or as a repository of ancient wisdom to be tapped. The course proposes to read literary works by a series of major writers from Europe, Asia, Africa and America in which the east/west dialogue is figured simultaneously through this double prism of spiritual quest and imperial conquest.

We will be examining literary works gathered in loose geographical clusters: Britain and India, Russia and the Caucasus, French Indochina and North Africa. Each work will be read as a literary document of crosscultural encounter, betraying the author's unique vision, the historical moment of its appearance, and the literary and cultural codes in which it is embedded. In the process we can hope to learn more about literary movements such as romanticism, realism and modernism, the historical shift from the colonial era to the postcolonial, about national perceptions of self and other and the possibilities of dialogue between cultures.

Topics include:
The enigma of eastern religions in Kipling and Foster
Western modernity and Indian cultural nationalism in Tagore
Conquest and resistance Russian literary representations of the Caucasus
Violence and the ethics of crosscultural desire
The Beat generation and Californian Buddhism
Salman Rushdie and the globalization of Islam

Reading List

• Rudyard Kipling, Kim
• E. M. Forster, Passage to India
• Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
• Mikhail Lermontov, Mtsyri*
• Leo Tolstoy, Haji Murat (from The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoi )
• Ilia Chavchavadze, Letters of a Traveller*
• André Gide, The Immoralist
• Marguerite Duras, The Lover
• Tayib Salih, Season of Migration to the North
• Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
• Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses

(* indicates texts which will be distributed in class; the remainder are available at the Cal Student Store)

CL 170:4, #17319, LARGIER, TT 12:30-2, 234 DWINELLE
Cross-listed with German 112

"Fantasy Unbound: Baroque and Cyberspace"

European cultures of the 16th and 17th centuries have been obsessed with the power of images and of imagination. Poetic practices of mirroring, linking, and folding are in the center of this visual culture of imagination that can, in many ways, be compared to the forms in which images are used in cyberspace. The course will deal with this topic from different angles. First, we will reconstruct the rhetorical theories of the power of images, which were developed in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Then we will discuss documents and artifacts from the early modern, pre-enlightenment period, focussing on literary documents, i.e., visionary texts, baroque theater, poetry, and the art of emblems. Based on this, we will investigate the structures of cyberspace and of the use of images in cyberspace. This will include the question of how pre-enlightenment uses of images might help to understand postmodern imagination and the production of virtual identities. Although the Germanic tradition will be in the center of these explorations, texts will be read in English, and the visual culture of the baroque will be analyzed in a context that includes other European literatures.

CL 190, #17320, BUTLER, TT 2-3:30, 279 DWINELLE
NB: Enrollment limited -- permission of instructor required.

"Loss, Mourning, and the Life-Tasks of Literature"

This course will consider violence, loss, and mourning in the context of selected 20th century writings. We will consider the challenges to narration posed by mourning losses that carry both personal and political dimensions. We will also consider how mass destruction is lived and registered through a variety of narrative means at the same time that we will consider whether such stories “fail” to relay their events as well as the significance of that failure. The course will bring together writings from different 20th century sites of loss, including the Shoah, postwar Europe, AIDS, and from colonial and racial destitution in order to understand the relationship of literary works to the task of affirming life.

Primary Texts:

• Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
• Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After
• Marguerite Duras, The War
• W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction
• Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Millennial Approaches
• Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
• Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of My Mother
• Edeet Ravel, Ten Thousand Lovers
• Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness

Critical texts:

• Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia"
• Douglas Crimp, "Moralism and Melancholia"
• Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss
• Eng and Kajanzian, Loss
• Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama
• William Haver, The Body of this Death
• Ross Chambers, Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author
• Robert Antelme, The Human Race