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Fall 2004 Course Offerings: 1A and 1BCL H1A:1, #17203, LIU, TT 9:30-11, 123 DWINELLE "Literature and the Unconscious"This course examines the relation between literary conventions for representing consciousness and psychoanalytic/philosophical accounts of “the unconscious.” By comparing literary techniques that were developed in different historical and social contexts to make human consciousness an object of fictional representation (“stream of consciousness,” first-person narrative, “the fool,” guilt in mythology, etc.), we will seek to understand the historically contingent character of literary forms—that is, the extent to which formal innovations are predicated on the ideology embodied and reproduced by the forms themselves. We will then also consider “the unconscious” as a socially produced and policed experience, and continue to draw on literary and theoretical models to formulate ideas on the connection between consciousness and social power. In H1A, each student will read one literary text in its original (non-English) language, which can be a text on our syllabus or another text of your own choice. Students wishing to enroll in CLH1A must therefore have reading knowledge of a second language. Texts
CL 1A:1, #17206, SAYAR/Brenner, MWF 9-10, 121 WHEELER"Literature and Music"Classical antiquity endowed music with the high charge of praise and exultation of Gods and heroes alike and yet figures such as the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey betray an anxiety about the uncontrollable, potentially destructive power of music. We will examine the function of gender and femininity in the construction of music as an immense force in such figures as the Sirens and Orpheus, both in classical antiquity and in neo-classical intertexts. We will then study the relationship between music and death in Romanticism, explore modernist experiments with incorporating compositional techniques in literary writing, and engage the question of recording technology and its destabilizing impact on identity in the 20th century. We will consider the definitions of “lyric” and the relationship between “lyrics”, such as those of Bob Dylan, and so-called “high” poetry. We will conclude by analyzing the cultural struggle between Arab and Euro-American musical traditions in contemporary Israel, as represented in the poetry of Sami Chetrit. Texts
A course reader including opera libretti, critical and theoretical reading, selections from Homer's Odyssey and the myth of Orpheus, and poems by Sami Chetrit. Film
Music by Monteverdi, Beethoven, ETA Hoffmann, and Bob Dylan CL 1A:2, #17209, TRAN/Singleton, MWF 10-11, 20 WHEELER"Being Self-Conscious"“Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness.” John Barth This course looks at a number of literary texts that are quite aware of their artifice as literary texts. How do such works reflect upon themselves as structures of words? How do they explore and expose themselves? As constructions of fictional worlds, are such works capable of representation? Do they point to the limitations of representation, or do theses fictional worlds exceed the limitations of realism? How problematic is the relationship between literary artifice and ‘reality’? Similarly, what is the rivalry between the real world and the representation we make of it? These are some of the questions we will probe with our readings, which will include novels, short fiction, poetry and drama. The requirements for this class include: 32 pages worth of writing, weekly responses, presentations, regular attendance, participation, and the occasional quiz. Texts
A reader will contain works by Barthes on Robbe-Grillet, Barth, Borges, Mallarmé, Ovid, Poe, Stevens and others. CL 1A:3, #17212, HILL, MWF 9-10, 263 DwinelleThe ClassicThis course will consider the question of the “classic” in a comparative context. Our focus will be the careful examination of five works, including an epic, a romance, a novel, a collection of essays, and a film. Apart from asking, What is a classic?, we will want to explore questions of genre, intertextuality, and aesthetics. We will examine the relationship between literature and history: both how the classic represents history, and how history represents the classic as part of a particular canon, national or otherwise. We will also explore the implicit challenge to the classic from structuralism, and the explicit challenge posed by feminism and multiculturalism. Ultimately this course aims to raise questions about the role of literature departments within the academy today. Our texts will include Virgil’s Aeneid, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, as well as a selection of critical works by Altieri, Auerbach, Culler, Guillory, Kaplan, Kermode, Sainte-Beuve, among others. CL 1A:4, #17215, SPRINGER, TT 12:30-2, 210 WHEELER"Gold in them thar Hills"The reading list focuses on frontiers and natural resources, with emphasis on the greed typically surrounding them. Therefore, much of the reading is set in California. As indicated in the thumbnail descriptions below, the scope of this class is very wide in genre, historical periods, and overall content. While the overall topic involves the treatment of greed, our reading over the semester will ultimately move from the simpler, literal aspects of greed (gold!) to its more complex intellectual manifestations in the last 150 years. By fate or chance, the State of California offers much in art, history, and life to illustrate the movement from greed based on real property to greed based on intellectual property. This is a first-year reading and composition course, so the work includes a lot of reading and writing. While students are undoubtedly familiar with general approaches to reading literary works, some of the items on the reading list pose exceptional challenges: Lucretius examines ethics, science, religion, and human behavior in a large, epic poem; Shakespeare comes to us from a different century and writes in a language very different from modern English; Ellroy intertwines large municipal growth issues, the rise of corporate entertainment, and tales of numerous troubled protagonists in one very large and complicated novel. However, this is not a lecture course, and students are free to express their opinions in class—and they should. Given the scope of the course, topics of interest should arise for one and all. Ultimately, a high level of student participation is a crucial factor in making this type of class worthwhile for all involved. De rerum natura, Lucretius - This is a translation of a 2000-year-old Latin poem dealing with a mélange of subjects we are accustomed to seeing in prose. The Tempest, Shakespeare - The Bard’s version of Survivor? McTeague, Norris - This novel looks at the gold rush and how volatility in agricultural resources correlates with volatility in human behavior. Hollywood, Vidal - A fictionalized version of how one of the large studios sank its claws into Hollywood. L.A. Confidential, Ellroy - See above. The Devil in Silicon Valley, Pitti - This is a non-fiction work examining how the land grab converged with the idea grab in our own backyard. Reader: lyric poems and very short short stories Films
CL 1A:5, #17218, STENPORT/Freed-Thall, TT 9:30-11, 20 WHEELER"Mirror Images"In reading ranging from Plato and Ovid, via Strindberg and Woolf, to Sexton and Sebbar, we will discuss questions of visually construed duplication in form and content. Topics addressed will be acts of representation and visual imagery, ghosts and dreams, alienation and reflection, narcissism and doubling, and modernism's love of surfaces yet obsession with 'perspective.' The image of the mirror will also structure how we analyze the act of writing about literature. How does literary analysis relate to its source text; as a reflection, refraction, or distortion? Or are those terms even meaningful when it comes to writing creatively about another text while learning how to master a certain academic genre and style? The class will be writing intensive and significant work on continuous revisions will be required. Texts
Course Reader
Visuals and Films
CL 1A:6, #17221, HAUSDOERFFER/Chan, TT 11-12:30, 219 Dwinelle"Writing (about) Difference in Literature"All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange - J. Derrida Can we reconceive our reading and writing as a kind of “experience open to the future” that prepares us to “accord hospitality” to difference? Can we take literature itself, despite its apparent familiarity, to be the textual embodiment of difference—what Derrida calls the “monstrous arrivant”? In this class, we are going to spend the semester exploring the various ways in which writing is an encounter with difference. We will “explore” writing and difference in several senses. Our first and most basic consideration will be to look at how a wide range of authors use various kinds of writing to negotiate the issue of difference. These kinds of writing fall into three rough groups: (1) “fictional” writing (namely: poetry, drama, and short fiction), thought of here as a way of imaginatively staging encounters with difference in terms of different times, strange lands, and foreign peoples; (2) “non-fictional” historiography, thought of as a discourse that claims to tell or witness the “truth” about difference in terms of (again) past times, exotic lands, and foreign peoples; and (3) “scholarly” writing (namely: the critical or theoretical essay), thought of as a form of discourse that licenses itself to write “directly” about the concept of difference and about the issue of difference in literature. The second way that we’ll be exploring writing and difference will be more self-reflexive. On the one hand, we’ll consider the act of reading itself as an encounter with, or “traversal” of, the differences that texts recount—in other words, the text itself is thought of as a “meta-space” of difference, internally structured by familiar and unfamiliar spaces. When we read literature, how do we negotiate our way through these strange spaces? On the other hand, we’ll examine our own writing practices and think about what it means to write about literature. In writing about literature, can we avoid making the unfamiliar overly familiar? Is there a way to write that makes the text legible in interesting ways without completely explaining away and effacing its strangeness? As part of this examination of writing, we’ll also look at various models for how to write good essays about literature, examining the assumptions of each model, and weighing its advantages and disadvantages in relation to “writing difference.” Texts
Course Reader
CL 1A:7, #17224, DEANGELIS/Borrego, MWF 11-12, 121 Wheeler"Faeries, Witches, and Other Magical Ladies"From Snow White to Cinderella to the Wizard of Oz, we are very familiar with faeries, witches, and other magical ladies. While they seem to be simple characters in playful little tales, behind them lies a rich and complex tradition of magical and powerful women in literature. In this course, we will look at examples of shape-shifters, faeries, hags and more in our examination of how magical women have changed in literature over time as well as why the power of so many women in literature comes in the form of magic (and what constitutes magic). Finally, we will examine the cultural assumptions implicit in the association of women and otherworldly power, paying special attention to how modern authors have retreated the Celtic, classical, and medieval predecessors of the magical women in their works. Texts
Performance (videorecording)
CL 1A:8, #17227, WALTER, TT 9:30-11, 225 WHEELER"Scenes, Scenesters & Salons"This class takes a look at some of the enduring hipsters—both real and fictional—in literature, film and the arts. We begin in ancient Athens with Plato’s Symposium and continue on to the famous Italian courts (Castiglione) and the London of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. Other stages for our salons will include Paris during the Restoration and around the time of the Great War, and New York from the Harlem Renaissance to Warhol’s Factory. Texts
Film and Visual Art
Reader
CL 1A:9, #17230, ROWAN, TT 12:30-2, 223 DWINELLE"Literature and Pleasure"What pleasures do works of imaginative literature have to offer? Do different works give different pleasures? Can two works of literature please us for entirely different reasons? In this course we will search for answers to these and related questions as we consider the pleasures we encounter in Homer, Austen, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Kafka. This is also a course on composition, and considerable in-class time will be given to discussion of its elements. You will be required to produce 32 pages of writing spread out over various assignments. Please be sure to acquire the editions listed below. Since we will spend a lot of time looking at particular passages, it's important that we all have the same pagination. I will give daily quizzes to make sure everyone is keeping up with the reading. Attendance and participation are required. Texts
CL 1B:1, #17233, RAMEY/Bhaumik, TT 11-12:30, 229 DWINELLE"Conquerors, Poets, Parasites"What do all the fiendish dictators, cruel colonialists and mad murderers you’ve ever heard of have in common with all the great writers and filmmakers you’ve ever heard of? To begin with, you’ve heard of them. You also remember something about them. In fact, without people like you remembering them, they would not exist in the way they do. The frightening examples of tyrants and slaughterers would be lost to time, and the inspiring examples of poets, novelists, and filmmakers would be equally extinguished. The thing that keeps all these individuals alive is sometimes called “cultural memory.” But if we’re to believe these figments of time past truly possess some kind of “life,” then what category of life is it? The American Heritage Dictionary defines “parasite” as “An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.” Since the dead depend on us to remember them in order to stay alive in the cultural memory, this course will explore the notion that the snarling devils of history, as well as the writers and filmmakers who capture them in artistic representation, are, in effect, nothing more than parasites inhabiting our brains. As the course progresses, you may expect to discover a growing corpus of parasitic company in your head, a swarming, palpitating mass that is highly unlikely to contribute to your survival. On the other hand, you will have obtained some excellent object lessons in how to become a bloodthirsty oppressor or a successful writer or filmmaker (de gustibus non est disputandum). And you will learn a few things about how the memory of yourself might one day become its own fledgling parasitic plague determined to keep your fame pupating in other minds for centuries to come. Immortality, by any other name, is the humble offering of this semester. Students must attend classes, participate in class discussions, meet outside of class to work on group activies, and demonstrate thoughtful readings of the assigned texts. A total of about 32 pages of prose will be turned in throughout the semester; papers will be subject to extensive revision. Students will be asked to give an oral presentation. Experienced despots, poets and other immortal beings welcome. Texts
Films
Course Reader
CL 1B:2, #17236, GREEN, TT 12:30-2, 258 DWINELLE"Image and Text: Beyond the Verbal and Visual Divide"“Poetry is like painting,” --Horace, first century, B.C.E. Writers and visual artists and those who interpret and enjoy their work have long been interested in the relationship between words and images--their limitations, possibilities, intersections, and differences. In some periods words have held cultural primacy, in others, images have dominated. We may ask in this age of information and pervasive advertisement: Are we living in a literary or a pictorial age? Are we dominated by words or images--or some combination of the two? Through our reading of critical and theoretical essays on the relationship between the literary and visual arts, we will study the ways in which ideas about texts and images have shifted across the centuries in the Western world. We will study literature and visual art which challenges us to contemplate the ways in which texts may be visual and art may “speak” or set forth narrative--and the ways in which different media enjoy their own particular means of expression. Finally, we will analyze film for its capacity to blur the historical distinctions between literature and the visual arts and form a category of its own within the text/image debate. 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. Critical and Theoretical Works
Literary Works
Visual Art
Film
CL 1B:3, #17239, CHATTERJI, MWF 10-11, 224 WHEELER"Viewing Positions: Spectators in literature and film"This course has two major goals: to introduce students to some of the central questions in the field of visual studies, and to examine how visual motifs are used in literary texts. In order to achieve these goals, we will focus our attention on the figure of the spectator. From peeping toms, and captive audiences, to big brothers, and even the window shopper spectators have been a subject of literary and philosophical intrigue. In this course we will examine how the figure of the spectator and the act of spectatorship mobilize discourses about power, sympathy and identification, gender relations, and cultural difference. 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 participate in writing workshops and be asked to complete two small and two large essays, including a research project. Our discussions will be drawn from the following works
Reader
Films
CL 1B:4, #17242, INCIARTE, MWF 11-12, 222 Wheeler"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. 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 modern historical evolution of this Hispano-arabic genre that specializes in the view-from-below. We will be looking at the ways in which different literary traditions interpreted the power of the pícaro. We will also consider the role of criticism and theory in the study of literature. The course fulfills all reading and writing requirements for Comp. Lit.1B. Texts
CL 1B:5, #17245, WALTER, TT 8-9:30, 182 Dwinelle"Who's Your Daddy? Orphans, Urchins and Estranged Children"Beginning with Oedipus and selected stories from The Bible, this class charts the literary career of the parentless child through some of its major phases. Balzac and Dickens will illustrate how the gothic imagination lays hold of the orphan, so commonly used in prior centuries to resolve dramatic plots, and transforms him or her into an important character of the 19th Century. Later works we examine - which include films, comic strips, photography and biographical sketches - trace the plight of the orphan as symbolic of the economic and racial struggles of the American depression. Texts
Films
Reader
CL 1B:6, #17248, FORT/Ramos, MWF 10-11, 88 DWINELLE"Autobiography, Memory and Fiction"This is a course of intensive reading and composition. We will focus primarily on texts that are autobiographical in nature--whether they are "literal" autobiographies or fictional works that take the form of autobiography. We will explore the problems raised by these works in terms of truth, fiction, testimony, historical accuracy, the impulse to tell one's own story, and the ambiguities and distortions involved in the narration of one's memories. Texts
There will also be a course reader including texts by Montaigne, Freud, Proust and Beckett. CL 1B:7, #17251, DIMOVA, TT 11-12:30, 222 WHEELER"Reading With Your Senses"What can we see while we are reading? And what can we hear? How does a literary text transcend the silence of the page and its black-and-white print? Does literature merely tell us of sensory experiences or does it also trigger our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch? In this class, we will examine the complex relation between sensory perceptions and art. Our task will be twofold: we will deal with the relation that literature establishes between writing and perception, between aesthetic expression and sensory experience, as well as with the complicated interactions between literature, the visual arts and music in their attempt to stimulate our senses. By reading, viewing and listening to lyric poems, songs, operas, novels, paintings, films and essays that invoke one or more of our senses, we will trace back the artistic fascination with sensory experience across cultures and time. We will study Romantic and Symbolist poetry, which blurs the distinctions between our five senses so as to transport us into the sublime. Further, we will consider the ways in which literary works transcend their verbal medium either by incorporating an art object in their texture, as in Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn," or by migrating to the other arts, as in the case of the Biblical story of Salome, which fascinated artists, composers and writers alike. Finally, we will see how twentieth-century writers attempt to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust by resorting to the senses and the other arts. Texts
Music: fugues by Bach, Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata," songs by Schubert and Schumann, Richard Strauss' Salome. Films: Girl with a Pearl Earring, Pillow Book, Tampopo. There will be a Course Reader with poems, critical essays, and short stories by Baudelaire, Brenatno, Celan, Goethe, Keats, Lessing, Mitchell, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Seghers, as well selections from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. CL 1B:8, #17254, SCHWARTZ/Shulman, TT 12:30-2, 121 WHEELER"Women Behind Locked Doors"Sequestered and enclosed, under lock and key, women are allegedly protected from the dangers of the wolfish world just outside the door. Still, every lock has a keyhole to be peered through, and even the most heavily guarded chamber has a window to be opened. In this class, we will examine the tense huddle of anxieties about the mobility of women. In many of our texts, the problematic idea that a woman is dangerous unless locked up is conversely correlated with a voyeuristic compulsion to spy upon her in this enclosed space. We will investigate several versions of eroticized interior feminine spaces: the harem, the bathhouse, and the lady’s bedroom. Then we will reverse the perspective, stop squinting through the keyhole, and work from the inside out. A long tradition of feminist writing argues for a woman’s right to “A Room of One’s Own,” in which her privacy and autonomy are maintained by choice. This space allows for personal exploration, both sexual and artistic. As a contrast to this deliberate self-isolation, we will also discuss the fascination with portraying escapist adventures; in particular, the lesbian overtones in the portrayal of groups of girls who collectively go astray. Our texts range from anchorite’s handbooks to novels about girl-gangs, and the syllabus also includes a variety of media: eighteenth-century Japanese wood-blocks, luminous black-and-white French films, and contemporary conceptual art installations. Wherever we go, we will develop our own set of tools as readers and writers—the kind of lock-picks that will open up any text. Texts
Poetry
Stories and Short Works
Film
Visual Art
CL 1B:9, #17257, FORT, MWF 9-10, 187 DWINELLE"Autobiography, Memory and Fiction"This is a course of intensive reading and composition. We will focus primarily on texts that are autobiographical in nature--whether they are "literal" autobiographies or fictional works that take the form of autobiography. We will explore the problems raised by these works in terms of truth, fiction, testimony, historical accuracy, the impulse to tell one's own story, and the ambiguities and distortions involved in the narration of one's memories. Texts
There will also be a course reader including texts by Montaigne, Freud, Proust and Beckett. CL 1B:10, #17260, ZUMHAGEN/Wells, TT 8-9:30, 20 WHEELER"I Confess: Experiments in Truth, History and Identity"Beginning with an examination of some of the classic texts in the confessional literary tradition, this course examines a variety of (literary, filmic, psychoanalytic, religious and historical) confessions, memoirs and testimonials. Whether these mostly first-person narratives are fueled primarily by desires to exact revenge, engage in religious atonement, conduct therapeutic analysis, achieve personal catharsis, expand established parameters of literary representation, fight for political justice, set the facts straight and challenge the status quo with counter-historical testimony (or any combination of the above), each is marked by its own negotiation of some of the weightier dichotomies (truth/lie, fact/fiction, objectivity/subjectivity, etc) which underlie the concatenation of complex issues associated with public “truth-telling” and identity creation. Required texts will be chosen from among the following:
Films will include two of the following:
A course reader will include excerpts from the following texts:
CL 1B:11, #17263, ALLAN, MWF 9-10, 223 WHEELER"Global Reading: The Geopolitics of Literary Form"What is world literature, and what is its relation to globalization and empire? Who or what are global readers? Could there be such a thing as global literacy? This course will address the problem of literary form in relation to global political theory and economics, paying special attention to the emergence of a so-called global market, the development of local languages and particular practices of cultural consumption. We will draw from a range of critical essays, films and various literary genres to explore the dynamics of world literature. Texts
CL 1B:12, #17266, FISHER, TT 9:30-11, 224 WHEELER"The Use of Stories"“What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” Haroun asks his father the storyteller in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In this course, we will explore the ways in which texts from a variety of genres, languages, and time periods address this question and its ramifications: when and how do these texts reflect upon their own status as literary and artistic projects, and upon the relation between fiction and “reality?” When and how does storytelling function as a medium of culture or politics? When and how does storytelling become related to the art of seduction? In what way do the answers to all these questions (and more) depend on literary form, cultural context, gender, and other variables? We will engage these questions through close examination of the following texts:
Film
There will also be a course reader CL 1B:13, #17269, STENPORT, TT 11-12:30, 223 WheelerFamily Ties: Nation, Narration, and the Nordic ImaginationThis course investigates the family as a concept, construction, and thematic approach to narrative and national identity. As an introduction to Comparative Literature, the course will analyze the forms of epic, novel, drama, essays, and cinema by authors ranging from medieval Iceland to nineteenth- and twentieth century Germany, USA, England, and Scandinavia. Questions posed to the material will include: what is the function of family in literature of different times and places, both thematically and formally? How do family narratives become conventional -- or don’t they? What is off-limits to family narration? How are ties, breaks, bonds, and relations conceived in artistic works that both depend on and reject notions of the family and/or nation as a cohesive construct? How are thematic complications of familial co-existence also indicative of some of the structural challenges posed to textual and cinematic representation during the twentieth century? The class will combine close reading of literary texts with focused attention to academic writing. It incorporates regularly scheduled writing workshops, in which students will be expected to discuss their work-in-progress, peer-edit one another’s work, and work collaboratively on enhancing their writing skills. Texts
On Writing
*films available at Library and video stores. Screenings to be arranged |