Fall 2004 Course Offerings:
Lower- and Upper-Division Undergraduate Courses

CL 24:1, #17271, TOLLEFSON, Tu 3-4, 204 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 40, #17275, SCHACHTER, TT 3:30-5, 259 DWINELLE

"Literay Redux: Rewriting Women in Literature and Film"

In this course we will examine the critical question of literary “rewritings,” adaptations, and cultural translations, through the lens of gender and sexuality. The texts and films I have chosen are all paired with at least one version or rewrite that specifically recasts the representation of gender from the original work. This strategy of rewriting might be an attempt to give voice to a silent or silenced character, as in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which takes us to the Caribbean to understand how the colonial project fortifies, makes plausible the madwoman in Jane Eyre. These literary rewritings are also an effort to interpret contemporary historical events through the lens of prior literary texts. We will explore how these restagings perform anxieties about gender and sexuality. For instance, how are women figured as national martyrs and resisters in Sophocles original and Anouilh’s 1940’s rewriting (under Nazi occupation) of Antigone. We will examine how Willa Cather recasts, in American terms, the model of female sexuality, class aspirations, and social morality constructed in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. As we reexamine these and other instances of “literary redux,” we will ask how these texts function dialectically in relationship to each other, how they establish and contest dominant paradigms of gender and sexuality, how women’s voices are heard and silenced. Our discussions will also by informed by contemporary feminist theory and literary criticism, including works by Luce Irigaray, Cathy Caruth, Judith Butler, and Harold Bloom.

Texts
  • James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce
  • Sophocles, Antigone
  • Jean Anouilh, Antigone
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  • Willa Cather, A Lost Lady
  • Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
  • Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
  • Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
  • Sigmund Freud, Dora
Films
  • Mildred Pierce
  • Clueless
  • Madame Bovary
  • Mommy Dearest

CL 41E, #17277, BERMÚDEZ, TT 12:30-2, 2320 TOLMAN
Additional Required Screenings: TH 5-8:00, 140 BARROWS

"Marginals, Aliens, Deviants, and Cyborgs:
Transborder Encounters in Literature and Film"

In this course, we will examine a variety of marginal subjects represented in minority and post-colonial cultural production from realistic, experimental, and futuristic genres. Although part of the course will deal with how alien others are produced and appropriated by mainstream literature and film, our primary line of inquiry will concern how such subjects negotiate their own displacements as real or imagined border crossers. Specifically, how are subjectivities and identities reconfigured in transnational, diasporic, or postnational spaces? What racial, gender, and sexual declensions arise from transborder negotiations? What kinds of dissent or political practices are possible from the border, imagined or real? Since this course will also consider newer visual technologies such as video and the internet, we will examine the emergent topographies of electronic transnationalism and diaspora, particularly as articulated through cyber-subjectivities, “terminal identities,” and cyber-ethnographies. Inthe process of reading and discussing a wide variety of texts and films, students will come to appreciate the challenge of comparing works across textual and visual media.

Course requirements include active participation, weekly online responses, informal presentations, a small research project, a mid-term exam, and a final exam or paper.

Note: We will be using a course website for the class, so students will be required to have an active email address and should have regular access to a computer and to the internet.

CL 60AC:1, #17278, WHITE, TT 12:30-2, 219 DWINELLE

"Conquests and Empires, Borders and Frontiers:
Colonialism and Not-So-Post-Colonialism
in Contemporary American Literatures and Cultures"
American Cultures

"Beginning with the arrival of Columbus in the New World in 1492, American history has been characterized by the contact and conflict between indigenous peoples and European and American empires. This course will focus on contemporary literature that takes up this imperial history and its attendant problems of race, ethnicity, and culture. These Native American, Mexican, Chicano/a, and Anglo-American texts invoke the colonialist histories of America, from the arrival of Columbus and Cortez on the shores of the New World to US expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond. In the process, indigenous American peoples and cultures were destroyed, disrupted, and displaced. The Mexican-American war led to the annexation of Mexican territory in the Southwest and the peoples living there. These groups continue to be marginalized by a dominant white nationalism. Each of our texts involves a dialogue between past and present, raising important questions about who makes history, who tells history, and whose histories are included in national and cultural ideologies. How are these histories woven into the stories of contemporary American literatures and cultures?

Readings will include poetry by Alfred Arteaga, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Simon Ortiz, Antonia Quintana Pigno, Adrienne Rich, Wendy Rose; short stories by Sherman Alexie, Carlos Fuentes, Carter Revard, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Sam Shepard; the novels Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya and The Crown of Columbus by Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris; articles, essays and (auto)biography by Gloria Anzaldúa, Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortez, Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Owens, Octavio Paz, Ron Takaki, and William Carlos Williams.

Texts
  • William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
  • Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico
  • Gloria Anzaldua, borderlands/La Frontera
  • Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
  • Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, The Crown of Columbus, Trans. J.H. Bernard
  • Gerald Vizenor, The Heirs of Columbus

CL 100:1, #17281, FRANCOIS, TT 2-3:30, 221 DWINELLE

"Open Secrets"

How do literary and filmic texts disclose and simultaneously keep their secrets? This course examines the role of secrets in producing and blocking narrative and dramatic movement, and in releasing and withholding meaning. Particular attention is given to secrets such as the gay closet or racial passing that seem to occur “in plain sight,” like Poe’s “Purloined Letter.” In comparing tragedies, films, case histories, novels, and short stories, we discuss the role of narrative and confessional acts in the construction, circulation and concealment of public and private identities, marked and unmarked by gender, sexual identity, race, or class. We also critically examine the implied analogies between interpretation and detective work, and between reading and religious election. What distinguishes interpretive “insight” from naïve reading? What role does irony play in defining the relationships between “blind” characters and “perceptive” readers?

Proposed Texts
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex tr. Fagles (Three Theban Plays)
  • Racine, Phedre
  • Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves
  • Poe, "The Purloined Letter"
  • Melville, "Billy Budd"
  • Kleist, The Marquise of O
  • Henry James, What Maisie Knew
  • Nella Larsen, Passing
  • Freud, Dora
  • Roland Barthes, S/Z
  • Further criticism by Derrida, Kermode, Lacan, and Sedgwick
Films
  • Ophuls, "The Earrings of Madame d'..."
  • Hitchcock, "Vertigo"
  • Coppola, "The Conversation"
  • Antonioni, "Blow-Up"

The course is designed to introduce students to basic questions of narrative theory as well as to methods of comparative study. Students should have reading knowledge of at least one foreign language and some familiarity with literary analysis. Course requirements include three papers and an oral presentation.

CL 100: 2, #17284, VOLPP, TT 11-12:30, 258 DWINELLE

"Textual, Visual, and Material Self-representation"

This course allows students to deepen their understanding of what it means to read comparatively -- across genres, cultures, and spans of time -- while exploring the problematics of textual, visual, and material self-representation. Key topics include autobiographical truth and the question of the autobiographical referent; the challenges of deconstruction and feminist theory to unitary conceptions of the self; post-modernist "autofiction" (fictionalized autobiography); the trend towards autoethnography in post-modernist scholarly writing; and the cultural politics of self-representation in the writing of diasporic subjects. We will also consider self-portraiture in visual media – photographs (Diane Arbus), film (Trinh T. Minh-ha) video (Margaret Cho), and comic books (Art Speigelman). Theoretical and critical writings include texts by Shari Benstock, Svetlana Boym, Emile Benveniste, Paul de Man, Caren Kaplan, Francoise Lionnet, Phillipe Lejeune, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Karen Shimakawa. Primary texts will include the following, either excerpted or in their entirety: Augustine, Confessions; Rousseau, Confessions; Frederick Douglas, The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas; Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road; Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life; Hyegyônggong Hong Ssi, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyông; Marguerite Duras, The Lover; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family; Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

Requirements include two in-class presentations, a paper of 5-7 pages and a paper of 10-15 pages. For the final paper, students have the option of writing an essay in which auto-ethnography or fictionalized autobiography is blended with theoretical speculation.

CL 112A, #17287, KOTZAMANIDOU, MWF 12-1, 222 WHEELER

"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 154, #17829, PRAGER, TT 11-12:30, 205 DWINELLE

"Romantic Visions: The Aesthetics of the Sublime"

This course is an analysis of European Romantic literature, art, and philosophy around 1800. It introduces students to Romantic aesthetics, paying specific attention to the question of the sublime. The Romantics understood the sublime to be central to the appreciation or awareness of art and nature. Both terrifying and exhilarating, sublime experience defined the work of authors and artists who sought to stretch the bounds of sensory perception, and it represented one of the most important challenges to the rationalism of Enlightenment thought. Throughout, this course undertakes to integrate literary explorations with a study of related tendencies in philosophy and art history. It begins by looking at two major philosophers of the sublime, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. The course then looks at sublime effects in Romantic painting. Both German works (C.D. Friedrich and Joseph Anton Koch) as well as British “picturesque” painting (Hearn, Gilpin, and others) will be considered. The course’s prose readings include shorter works and literary fairy tales by Romantics such as Novalis, Tieck, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, as well as selected longer texts by authors including Ann Radcliffe and William Blake. Requirements: class participation, three essays, a final exam.

Texts
  • William Blake, The Book of Urizen: A Facsimile in Full Color
  • Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
  • Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation
  • German Literary Fairy Tales, Ed. Frank G. Ryder
  • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Trans. J.H. Bernard
  • Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance
  • Course Reader

CL 155, #17290, LUCEY, MWF 1-2, 182 DWINELLE
Cross-listed with UGIS C146A and Women’s Studies C146A

"Existentialism, Phenomenology, Sexuality"

In France in the 1940s and 1950s there were two philosophical modes or movements that shared the spotlight: Existentialism and Phenomenology. In both of them, thinking about sexuality–and specifically about same-sex sexuality–had an important place. For most of the semester we will investigate (via philosophical writing, novels, and other literary prose forms) some of the thinking about same-sex sexuality and about sexuality in general that happened in these two philosophical modes. At the end of the semester we will turn to two American texts with some relation to the French context we have been studying, and see what can be gleaned from this particular comparative perspective. Philosophical texts (we will read excerpts) by Sartre (Being and Nothingness, Saint Genet), Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception), Bachelard (The Poetics of Space, The Poetics of Reverie), and Beauvoir (The Second Sex). French literary texts by Sartre (Nausea, The Age of Reason), Genet (Miracle of the Rose), Leduc (La Bâtarde). American literary texts by Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room), McCarthy (The Group).

CL 170:1, #17296, KOTZAMANIDOU, F 2-5, 125 DWINELLE

The Greek Historical Novel in the 20th Century

This course examines how 20th century Greek fiction, as a result of cultural, literary and aesthetic movements, has opened up for re-examination the standard definitions of the Historical Novel. However, the aim of this course is less to provide a new, singular definition for the Historical Novel and more to explore a broad range of historical experience through fiction. How are historical events, for example, dealt with by the consciousness of a child? By a community? By one shifting through family histories in search of identity? Or, by one suffering of the enduring effects of trauma, such as imprisonment or displacement? In the process of interrogating the relationship between history and fiction, the novels are examined in terms of the historical events that concern them but they are also placed within the literary context and historical climate of the time they were written.

Texts
  • Stratis Doukas, I Istoria Enos Aichmalotou (A Prisoner’s Story)
  • Rea Galanaki, O Vios tou Ismail Ferik Pasha (The Life of Ismael Ferik Pasha)
  • Panos Karnezis, Mikres Atimies (Little Infamies)
  • Ilias Venezis, I Ghalini (The Calm)
  • Alki Zei, O Megalos Peripatos tou Petrou (Peter’s War)
  • Alki Zei, To Kaplani tis Vitrinas (Wildcat under Glass)
Secondary Reading
  • The following works will be read in their entirety or in part, in the form of a reader
  • Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing
  • Richard Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece
  • Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History
  • Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture
  • Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism
  • Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel
  • Michael McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach
  • Apostolos Sachinis, To Istoriko Mythistorema (The Historical Novel)
  • Heyden White, Tropics of Discourse

CL 170:2, #17298, PRAGER, TT 2-3:30, 188 DWINELLE
Additional Required Screenings: M 7-10, 188 DWINELLE
Cross-listed with Film Studies 108:5

"The Holocaust on Screen"

This seminar explores how the Holocaust has been depicted on film in a variety of national and historical contexts. Drawing on films from 1945 to the present, from the U.S., Germany, Poland, France, and Italy, it considers to what end images of the Holocaust have been used. The course examines the question of how the horror of the Holocaust can be represented, or indeed whether it should be, by looking at the very different formal choices made by filmmakers. We will consider the distinction between the still image and the moving image, and between documentary and non-documentary film, in order to assess the particular relevance of these distinctions in the context of Holocaust representation. The course also pays specific attention to a number of related political and ethical issues: the implied audience for Holocaust images; the "hollywoodization" of the Holocaust (as in the case of Schindler's List); the question of whether aspects of this difficult topic can ever be taken lightly (as in the case of Life is Beautiful); and the cinematic depiction of perpetrators and survivors. The course explores not only critical theoretical responses to major Holocaust filmmaking, but key intellectual-historical texts as well, through readings of Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt.

Texts
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
  • Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler
  • David Engel, The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews
  • Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
  • Course Reader
Films
  • Das Experiment (Germany, 2001)
  • The Gray Zone (US, 2002)
  • Into the Arms of Strangers (US/UK, 2000)
  • Life is Beautiful (Italy, 1997)
  • Mr. Death (US, 1999)
  • Nazi Concentration Camps (US, 1945))
  • Night and Fog (France, 1955)
  • Passenger (Poland, 1963)
  • The Pawnbroker (US, 1964)
  • Photographer (Poland, 1998)
  • Schindler's List (US, 1993)
  • Seven Beauties (Italy, 1976)
  • Shoah (France, 1985 [selections])
  • The Specialist (France, 1999)
  • Train of Life (France/ Belgium, 1998)

CL 190:1, #17299, CASCARDI, TT 2-3:30, 125 DWINELLE

"The Writing of the Self"

As citizens of the modern world we tend to regard ourselves as unique and irreplaceable individuals; we conceive our personal identity as something to which we alone have privileged access. What are the origins of these beliefs and what are its various literary representations? In this course we will trace the fashioning of the modern “self” through confessional writing, essays, drama, literary portraiture, short stories, philosophical discourses, and poetry. We will ask about the extent to which the self is indeed a modern invention and we will consider the degree to which its very existence depends upon the development of certain modes of writing unique to the history of modernity. Additionally we will ask: What is the difference between selfhood and subjective self-consciousness? What particular forms of individualism mark the modern subject-self and what are its implications for the qualities and values we prize? What are the sources of our belief in authenticity and what are its limits? Finally, we will ask whether we have now entered an era when the self has vanished or when the uniqueness of personal identity has been eroded. Over the course of the semester we will devote equal attention to the literary production of the self and to the questions about self-awareness that these matters imply. Readings will be drawn from Shakespeare, Montaigne, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Whitman, and Borges, among others.

CL 190:2, #17302, PRESNER, TT 11-12:30, 123 DWINELLE

"War, Media Theory, and the Modernist Event"

This course examines twentieth-century media theory by looking at the relationship between modernist warfare, narrativity, and various representational practices. Starting with 9/11 and the most recent war in Iraq, we will test and historicize the hypothesis of convergence in which the war event, the representation of the event, and the dissemination of the representation now happen virtually simultaneously and, for this reason, require a renewed attention to our understanding of a “historic event.” Using Hayden White’s theory of the “modernist event” as a point of entry, we will examine the history of media (internet, television, film, radio, and photography) vis-à-vis warfare and problems of representation, especially narrative emplotment, in the twentieth century. Authors include: Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, W. G. Sebald, Slavoj Zizek, Don DeLillo, Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, Ota Yoko, Ernst Jünger, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, and Siegfried Kracauer. Students will be required to see a number of films outside of class. There will be no examinations. Reading knowledge of German is welcome but not required.

Students are required to actively participate in the seminar and write a final term paper.