Fall 2004 Course Offerings: Graduate Seminars

CL 200, #17329, ALTER, TU 2-5, 4104 DWINELLE

"Introduction to the Study of Comparative Literature"

We will read two seminal works of literary criticism and theory from the mid-twentieth century, one that follows the evolution of Western literature from antiquity to modernist fiction (Auerbach’s Mimesis), the other that puts forth a series of far-reaching propositions about language, literature, and the course of literary history (Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination). We will try to see in what ways these two works might provide valuable perspectives for the study of literature and in what ways they involve assumptions that could be qualified or challenged. In conjunction with Auerbach and Bakhtin, we will read two foundational texts of the Western tradition, the Odyssey and the Book of Genesis, and one modern work, Joyce’s Ulysses, which makes bold and revisionist use of both earlier texts. Through these readings, the large theoretical topics with which we will be concerned are: the representation of reality in literature (what that might mean, how assumptions about its meaning shift), the role of language in literature (as well as in the social reality out of which language evolves), and intertextuality as an essential dimension of literary expression and literary tradition.

CL 201, #17332, MASIELLO, F 12-1, 4104 DWINELLE

"Comparative Literature Proseminar"

This course is designed to give all new graduate students a broad view of the department’s faculty, the courses they teach, and their fields of research. In addition, it will introduce students to some practical aspects of the graduate career, issues that pertain to specific fields of research, and questions currently being debated across the profession. The readings for the course will consist of copies of materials by the department’s faculty.

CL 225, #17335, PRESNER, M 2-4, 282 DWINELLE
Cross-listed with German 214

"The Dialectics of German/Jewish Modernism"

Although a number of important studies have reopened the question of the German-Jewish dialogue (such as those by Klaus Berghahn, George Mosse, Paul Mendes-Flohr, and, most recently, Jonathan Hess), the “place” of Jews and Jewish thought within German modernism is still contested ground. This is partly due to Gershom Scholem’s famous critique that the German-Jewish dialogue never took place. This course will begin by reassessing and, ultimately, rejecting Scholem’s position in favor of alternative models for studying the cultural histories and geographies of German/Jewish modernism.

Rather than considering German-Jewish modernism as a problem of “dialogue” (or lack thereof), we will look at a number of critical case studies, which allow us to re-imagine the cultural genealogy of this modernism as a complex of dialectical relationships, tensions, and responses between Jewish thinkers and German thinkers. Possible case studies include: Dohm’s idea for the “civic improvement” of the Jews and Mendelssohn’s challenge to Jewish regeneracy in Jerusalem; the place of Jews within Hegel’s Philosophy of World History and Heine’s “deconstruction” of Hegel in his Reisebilder; the emergence of Goethe’s transnational “German” subject in the Italienische Reise and Kafka’s immigrant subject in Der Verschollene; and Freud’s representational practice of memory in The Interpretation of Dreams and Sebald’s reworking of Freud in his novel Austerlitz. Using Mendes-Flohr, Hess, and Benjamin’s reflections on history as our jumping-off points, we will attempt to imagine alternative models for understanding and historicizing German-Jewish modernism. We will conclude by looking at the consequences of this reconsideration, such as the deterritorialization of the German language, nation, and culture, and the emergence of cultural models of hybridity, transnationality, and contamination. Students are expected to develop and present individual research projects as well as write a research paper. This course will be taught in English, and the readings will be available in German and English translation.

CL 227, #17338, BRITTO, TH 3-6, 183 DWINELLE

"Dislocated Narratives"

In this course we will read a selection of literary texts produced within the past thirty years, all of which foreground the movement of individuals or communities across national borders. Reading this literature alongside theoretical texts, we will discuss a number of interrelated questions, including but not limited to the following: how do contemporary immigrant writers attempt to come to terms with the profound historical ruptures and geographic displacements brought about by the experience of transnational movement? How do they seek to render into language and narrative the confusion of conflicting cultural structures, and in what ways are their characters defined and deformed by their status as immigrants? What sorts of transformations do concepts of “home” and “nation” undergo in their texts? How do these authors represent immigrant bodies as objects that circulate within transnational circuits, variously commodified, eroticized, or pathologized, variously situated in relation to legal structures of recognition? Over the course of the semester we may consider one or two films, along with the following literary texts:

  • Agha Shahid Ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas
  • Azouz Begag, Le gone du Chaâba
  • Tahar Ben Jelloun, La réclusion solitaire
  • Sakinna Boukhedenna, Journal "Nationalité: Immigré(e)"
  • Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge
  • Medhi Charef, Le thé au harem d'Archi Ahmed
  • Maryse Condé, Desirada
  • Edwidge Danticat Breath, Eyes, Memory
  • Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
  • le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For
  • Alain Mabanckou, Bleu blanc rouge
  • Bharati Mukherjee, Wife

CL 232, #17341, MONROE, TU 3-6, 4407 Dwinelle

"The Shadow Plays of Ibn Daniyal"

Despite the fact that three shadow plays written in Egypt by the Iraqi author, Ibn Daniyal (d.710/1310) have been known for some time, first in manuscript, and then in a woefully inadequate edition from which two-thirds of the text was expurgated, it has become accepted wisdom that there is no theater in medieval Arabic literature. A more recent edition of the shadow plays now makes it possible to rectify this negative judgment and to assess the value and significance of the surviving texts.

This seminar will concentrate on a close reading of the Arabic text in order to determine its meaning and significance. Parallels will be drawn between the Arabic shadow theater and dramatic forms that preceded and followed it, such as the mimes of Herondas, and the commedia dell’ arte. Attention will also be devoted to the depiction of certain characters, inherited by the Arabs from Antiquity.

A reading knowledge of Arabic, plus a term paper are required.

Textbook
  • Three Shadow Plays by Muhammad Ibn Daniyal, ed. By the late Paul Kahle with a critical apparatus by Derek Hopwood. E.J. Gibb Memorial, New Series No. 32 (Gibb Memorial Trust: Cambridge, 1992).

CL 240, #17347, SAS, M 2-5, 2030 VLSB

"Reading Walter Benjamin"

This course will explore the writings of Walter Benjamin and his interlocutors. We will consider selections from Benjamin's writings and correspondence. Benjamin's own modes of reading will provide a guide to understanding topics such as: paradoxical temporalities, Surrealism, translation, urban space, visual cultures and the image, Marxism and psychoanalysis, messianism, and chance encounters.

Knowledge of German or French is welcome (and will be incorporated into discussion) but is not required.

Texts
  • Walter Benjamin, Reflections
  • Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
  • Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 (Adorno & Benjamin)
  • Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
  • Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing
  • Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution
  • and selections from Adorno, Arendt, Baudelaire, Brecht, Breton, Felman, Scholem, and Szondi
  • Recommended: Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volumes I-IV.

CL 265, #17350, KRONFELD, W 3-6, 140 BARROWS

Gender Sexuality and Culture: (Re)Writing the Land as Woman

The focus of this seminar is the cultural topos of the land as woman and its rearticulations in diverse poetic traditions. Taking our investigation beyond the generalized association of earth with woman, we will start with the foundational biblical metaphor of Zion -- the city, nation, or land -- as woman or wife; and of God, speaking through the (male) prophet-poet, as lover or husband. The most familiar extension of this metaphor in the Prophets maps a woman's deviation from patriarchal sexual norms such as modesty and fidelity onto the nation's deviation from the norms of biblical monotheism, figuring the unfaithful wife/city as a whore that must be punished. We will explore the consequences of this metaphorical system for the history of poetry in the west, where normative poetic address involves a masculine lyrical "I" who is modeled on the biblical prophet, and through him metonymically on God; and where the feminized city, land or nation are typically the addressee, the recipients of inspired poetic message. At the center of our investigation will be the question: If writing the land/nation has been modeled on heterosexual love, if poetic agency has always been male and the nation only figuratively female, what has that meant both for the possibility of a female poetic voice and for the construction of woman as a (literal) national subject? How has the feminized land served the poetic discourses of nationalism and colonization? Most importantly, what happens when women poets appropriate the topos and speak as (homoerotic) lover/spouse of the land or nation?

The course will combine linguistically and historically informed close readings of poetry in the participants' different languages of specialization with a discussion of feminist and postcolonial accounts of the land and the nation's association with the female body.

Course Reader: (available 1st week of classes at Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2015 Shattuck). Readings include selections from Annette Kolodny's classic The Lay of the Land, as well as from Susan Aiken, Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Timothy Beal and David Gunn, Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, Writing Women and Space, Caren Kaplan et al, Between Woman and Nation, George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, Stephen Moore, God's Beauty Parlor and Other Queer Spaces in and Around the Bible, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Andrew Parker et al, Nationalism and Sexualities, Susan Merrill Squier, Women Writers and the City, Nelly Stienstra, YHWH is the Husband of His People, Helen Weinreich-Haste, The Sexual Metaphor, and others.

Requirements: 1 in-class presentation and 1 seminar paper. Collaborative projects will be encouraged.

CL 266, #17353, MASIELLO, TH 3-6, 233 DWINELLE
Cross Listed with Spanish 280:2

"SUR/South"

This seminar is devoted to an investigation of the concept of “South” in the imagination of colonizers, explorers, and creative writers beginning in the 19th century, stretching through the fantasies of high modernists and social realists, and reaching today’s novelists and poets. To approach the idea of “South,” we’ll focus in particular on the representation of that southernmost frontier known as the Patagonia. . Starting with Darwin’s observations, we will read about the ways in which the South enters the cultural imagination of those who see in the remote geographic outpost the possibility of challenging cosmopolitan sensibilities and rethinking the role of the state. Our work will require a study of the operations of travel discourse, the estheticization of nature, the building of cultural difference (based on race, language, and nation), and the literary representation of social injustice.

In addition to the texts listed below, we will also see a number of films (among them, “La Patagonia Rebelde,” “Caballos Salvajes,” “Sur,” “Mundo Grúa”) and read materials from social historians and creative writers (among them Joyce, James, Poe, Gonzalez Tuñon, Coloane, Mistral, Neruda, Zurita), to be included in a class reader.

Texts
  • Cesar Aira, La liebre, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1992
  • Eduardo Belgrano Rawson, Fuegia, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1991
  • Diana Bellessi, Sur, Buenos Aires: Tierra Firme, 2000
  • Leopoldo, Brizuela, Los que llegamos más lejos: relatos, Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2002.
  • Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia, New York: Penguin
  • Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle,New York: Penguin
  • Libertad Demitrópulos, Un piano en Bahía Desolación,Buenos Aires: Braga, 1994
  • Lobodón Garra, La tierra maldita. Relatos bravíos de la Patagonia salvaje, Buenos Aires: Zagier & Urruty, 2001.
  • W.H. Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.
  • Sylvia Iparaguirre, La tierra del fuego, Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1998
  • Melville, “Benito Cereno” (any edition)
  • Manuel Rojas, La ciudad de los Césares, Santiago de Chile, Zig-Zag
  • David Viñas, Los dueños de la tierra, Madrid : Orígenes, 1978

CL 360S, #17389, HERBOLD, W 12-1 and F 12-2, 211 DWINELLE

"Those Who Can, Teach"

The purpose of this course is to introduce new GSIs to the theory and practice of teaching Comparative Literature 1A and 1B (and other courses taught by Comp Lit GSI’s). More generally, the course will help you prepare for a career as a college teacher of literature and for the teaching component of job applications. This course is a 4-unit, S/U class.

Nearly every week, we will read one or more articles by experienced scholars and teachers and evaluate how their perspectives can inform our practice. We will also make time to talk about how your classes are going and share suggestions on how to improve teaching skills. Each week individual students will initiate discussion of the reading by giving a short oral response to it. Several times during the semester, experienced GSI’s in the department will share with you some of their favorite techniques.

Course Requirements:

Participants will be asked to do brief-in class presentations and write and hand a teaching journal and regular writing assignments. Attendance is also required.

Texts
  • Course Reader, available at Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way