In this course we will rely mostly (but not exclusively) on a variety of written texts
to explore the relationship between music and the written word. Many writers make music
and/or musicians the subject of their work. Others turn to music to give their ideas form.
Musical terms such as motif, rhythm and improvisation permeate descriptions of texts.
Because of
its aurality, music may be thought of in contrast to the visual. "Seeing is
believing" but given the fleeting nature of sound, to hear is to doubt. Enlightenment
philosopher Locke said that "The perception of the mind is most aptly explained by
words relating to the sight." Since for Locke the mind was the seat of rationality,
music and aurality would therefore be aligned more closely with the irrational. In many of
the works we will read in this class, music begins where words stop making sense and music
becomes a kind of threshold to the irrational.
The relationship between what is taking place, what has taken place, and what is being
told about what has taken place will structure our discussion and writing work in this
course. Driving each of the six central texts below is a struggle between the demands of
the past and the characters in the present. Students in this course will work through a
careful sequence of paper assignments, including at least one non-expository paper and
several essays of increasing length.
Through the ages, people have viewed Nature as something to be celebrated, worshiped,
feared, or contained. It is the great Other that humans, apparently in all times and
places, must reckon with. Our view of Nature thus reflects, in turn, how we see ourselves
and the world we have created (Culture). Has civilization redeemed us from the savagery of
the animal kingdom or led us down a path of corruption and decadence? In this course, we
will study a number of works with a view to exploring the types of fears and aspirations
with which the literary and musical imagination has endowed Nature.
The readings in this course have otherworldly preoccupations. We will examine different
kinds of hauntings: ghostly dinner guests, unseen attic-dwellers, fantasy lovers. It's not
only the fantastic which haunts these texts, however; we'll consider texts in which the
infiltrating other worlds are different cultures and different literary works. This course
will interrogate how exactly these different texts configure "the other side"
and how they shape their varied conceptions of otherness.
Sophocles, Antigone
Shakespeare, MacBeth
Bronte, Jane Eyre
Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea
Ansky, Dybbuk
Anouilh, Antigone
Kingston, The Woman Warrior
A course reader containing selected essays and lyric poetry
CL 1B:1 16518 POPKIN MWF 9 123 DWINELLE
CL 1B:2 16521 SCHWARTZ MWF 10 220 WHEELER
CL 1B:3 16524 ZUMHAGEN MWF 10 224 DWINELLE
"Speaking to the 'Unspeakable': History, Memory and the Cultural
Imagination"
In this course, we will examine expressions of trauma and hardship in literature and
film with an eye to exploring some of the theoretical and ethical concerns associated with
the difficult task of bearing witness to and representing aesthetically personal
experiences of events which have been called unspeakable and unrepresentable. Throughout
the course, particular attention will be paid to considering notions of silence and
speakability as well as the role of first-person narrative and to ethical questions
surrounding the use of humor and romance in the elaboration of literary counter-histories
of traumatic events.
Course Requirements:
Active participation in class discussions, one in-class
presentation, two short papers (and rewrites of each) and one
final research paper.
Required texts
Maus, Art Spiegelman
W., Georges Perec
Cat and Mouse, Guenter Grass
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Narrstive of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
Niebelungenlied
Films
Anna Deveare Smith's Fire in the Mirror
Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful
Thomas Winterberg's The Celebration
In addition to these texts, a reader containing theoretical essays, poetry, and
several short stories (by Sherman Alexie, Charles D'Ambrosio Jr., Franz Kafka and Salman
Rushdie) will also be required.
CL 1B:4 16527 KAGANOVSKY MWF 11 243 DWINELLE
"Self-Reflections"
Why do wicked stepmothers ask the mirror for advice? Why did Alice want so much to get
to the Looking-Glass House? If Kim Novak already plays two roles in Vertigo, why do we
need to see her in a mirror? Noticing his own reflection, Pirandello's Moscarda is
"filled by a strange, inner dismay that is also revulsion." Freud
"thoroughly dislikes" his appearance when he catches a glimpse of himself in the
mirror. Whatever Madame Bovary sees there brings tears to her eyes.
How do novels and films use the mirror? Do they show the "other side" of the
character, suggesting that human nature is by definition divided? Women may be considered
vain, yet in literature it is frequently men, rather than women, who spend time gazing at
their own reflections. In this course, we will use the device of the mirror to ask
questions about the construction of gender and individuality. Metaphors of vision and
reflection will help us to think the problem of subjectivity that has preoccupied film and
literature for the last two centuries.
Required texts
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Nikolai Gogol, "The Nose"
Homer, The Odyssey
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Yurii Olesha, Envy
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
Films
All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)
CL 1B:5 16530 MONTECALVO MWF 11 123 DWINELLE
"Historical Fictions"
Scholarship has always defined a boundary between history and literature, between fact
and fiction. However, the very notions of history and fiction have changed continuously
since antiquity, often making the demarcation between them blurred. In this course, we
will read several works of literature that describe or interpret events deemed to be
historical to some degree. We will try to assess the extent to which these works make
claims of historical veracity, and the function of the fictional elements within them.
Ultimately, we will ask ourselves whether these plays and novels can be readily dismissed
as purely "artistic" texts with no historical significance, or whether they
indeed contribute to our understanding of history.
Required texts
Homer, Iliad
Friedrich Schiller, Maria Stuart
Georg Buchner, Danton's Death
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
CL 1B:6 16533 BALBUENA TT 8-9:30 175 DWINELLE
"IN EXILE: Dislocation, Identity, Multilingualism"
In this course we will discuss the theme of exile, trying to observe how the trope of
exile appears in different literatures. I am interested in the process of identity
formation through displacement, and how languages and cultures are intertwined and
negotiated in this process. In a broader sense, though, I would like us to consider how
issues of estrangement and language affect the very possibility of writing.
In our discussion about exile, we shall include the notions of stranger and outsider
that dominate modern aesthetics and literature. I do not take "exile" as a
universal or monolithic category, that is, I acknowledge that among many forms it can be
voluntary or involuntary, and that it can either be a physical displacement or a
repression of language. Taking that into account, and also considering that in different
times and places the notion and experience of exile means something different to each
writer, I want us to consider the possibility of textual production in an exilic
condition. How does a writer react and create a text in exile? How does a writer live his
or her experience of exile and how does this particular perception find its way into his
or her creative work? How does one redefine or renegotiate identity in exile: through
language? Through text? Through the existence
of a literary culture (or lack of it)? Exile also imposes the reality of a new language
and usually the need to choose between languages for one's own production. How does this
choice occur? What are the issues considered for this choice?
During the semester we will read authors who write in different languages (Greek,
Portuguese, French, Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, and even English!) and come from very
different literary traditions, such as Eva Hoffman, Albert Camus, Leïla Sebbar, Samuel
Rawet, Yehuda Amichai, Gloria Anzaldúa, and bell hooks. Through the reading of such and
other authors present in our list, I expect us to consider how estrangement, displacement
and exile participate in the definition of one's identity. I want us to observe how they
affect the very possibility of writing and orient the negotiation between the use of
different languages. Some of the questions I would like to raise are: How does a writer
react and create a text in exile? How does a writer live his or her experience of exile
and how does this particular perception find its way into his or her creative work? How
does a choice of language occur?
How and when does a writer try to suppress their multilingual tendencies? When does he
or she allow multilingualism to enter a text? How does this process contribute to the
definition of style, inventiveness or experimentalism of a text? How does the
multilingualism of an author affect the creation of a monolingual text? Among the issues
to be considered in this course are textual and cultural translation and the hybridization
of genres.
This course concurrently fulfills the 1B portion of the University's Reading and
Composition requirements. It is intended to help the students improve their writing skills
as well as refine their practice as thoughtful and critical readers. University
regulations prohibit P/NP enrollments in this course: it must be taken for a letter grade.
Required texts
Homer, Odyssey
Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom
Diana Hacker, A Writer's Reference
---Exercises to Accompany "A Writer's Reference"
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
Samuel Rawet, The Prophet and Other Stories
A course packet to be bought at Instant Copying and Laser Printing at 2015 Shattuck
(near the Burger King at the corner of University)
*Highly recommended: a good English/English dictionary
CL 1B:7 16536 ALANIZ TT 9:30-11 229 DWINELLE
"Death and Dissolution"
Death, "the muse of philosophy," is also the mother of culture. The present
course, a sequel of sorts to the Fall, 1999 1A course, "Death Represented,"
surveys how anxieties about mortality have shaped human behavior from deep antiquity to
our late, lamented 20th century. We will examine how death fears, both "coded"
and not, manifest themselves in literary works from several cultures and times: the
"heroic" death of the Greek epic, the outright misogyny of "death as
pollution" in Elizabethan drama, death as "soulless" consumer culture in
the postmodern novel, and death as spectacle in contemporary performance art, among
others. Throughout, we will maintain our focus on death as a fundamentally material
phenomenon, something natural and inevitable that happens to fragile, ephemeral, decaying
bodies, and the cultural responses such knowledge evokes.
In addition to a class reader of gleanings from disciplines and genres such as
psychology, essay, memoir, short story and literary criticism, the course readings will
include:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Edwige Danticat, The Farming of Bones
Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Don Delillo, White Noise
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, Watchmen
Homer, The Iliad
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
We will also screen the following films:
The Second Circle (d. Alexander Sokurov, Russia)
Hands on a Hard Body
Sick
Black Orpheus (d. Marcel Camus, Brazil)
CL 1B:8 16539 WEBBER TT 9:30-11 123 DWINELLE
"Travel Narratives"
Michelle Wallace writes, "writing is travelling from one position to another,
thinking one's way from one position to another." In this course, we will use the
writings of many travellers, fictional and not, to develop our own writing and thinking.
These travel narratives are written from a number of different perspectives. Some of the
travellers are willing explorers, eager to discover and describe a foreign land. Others
have not chosen to travel, but have been kidnapped, exiled, or otherwise had travel
inflicted upon them. In our discussions, we will consider such questions as the definition
of home, what it means to be foreign, and the impossibility of return.
Required texts
Shirley Abbot, "Generations"
Gloria Anzaldúa, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue"
Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
Tony Earley, "The Quare Gene"
Lars Eighner, Travels with Lizbeth
Francoise de Graffigny, Letters of a Peruvian Woman
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
June Jordan, "Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie
Jordan"
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
Louise Rafkin, "Hi, I'm Louisa. I Mean Eliza. I Mean Sam."
Touré, "Speaking in Tongues"
Virgil, The Aeneid
Films
John Ford, The Searchers
Ridley Scott, Thelma and Louise
Joel Schumacher, Falling Down
CL 1B:9 16542 LARSEN TT 11-12:30 79 DWINELLE
"Sleep"
We'll call it sleep --mimic of death, litter-bed of dreams, accomplice of sex, and the
gateway to our most agonizingly routine awakeness. Sleep as process, place, and practice.
Sleep at noon and sleep at night. Sleep as metaphor. Metaphor as sleep. Slumber.
Drowsiness. This might be the class for you!
Euripides, Alcestis and Other Plays
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Tales From the Thousand and One Nights
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
Also, a course reader including selections from the Hebrew Bible, the Qur'an,
and the works of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Renee Gladman.
CL 1B:10 16545 FLYNN TT 11-12:30 263 DWINELLE
"Assembling a Writing Self"
Comparative Literature 1B is a course in critical thinking, writing, and reading. In it
students will gain a basic introduction to certain important literary works, while also
improving their ability to write effectively and convincingly about them.
We will orient class discussion by looking at the way a number of twentieth-century
writers thematize the transition from childhood to adolescence. Specifically, we will
examine the way this pivotal transitional point from childhood to adolescence speaks to a
similar stage in the writers' literary evolutions, a stage at which they attempt to
re-write the self in a position outside of traditional narrative conventions. The writers
test the limits of language, while their characters test those of society and family. By
comparing and contrasting the nuances of this theme in French, British, and American texts
and films, we will explore the way socioeconomic, cultural, and gender differences inflect
this process of re-articulation.
Required texts
Virginia Woolf, "Nurse Lugton's Curtain,"
---"The Looking-Glass: A Reflection"
---"The Mark on the Wall" (in reader)
Nella Larson, Quicksand
Marcel Proust, "Ouverture," Swann's Way (in reader)
Samuel Beckett, Company
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood
Homer, The Odyssey
Joseph Williams, Style
Films
Alain Resnais & Maraguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour
Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo
CL 1B:11 16547 MACKENZIE TT 12:30-2 125 DWINELLE
"An Introduction to Eco-Criticism"
"Ecological literary criticism concentrates on linkages between cultural and
natural processes. ... to make humanistic studies more socially responsible."
(Karl Kroeber)
This course will explore the recent "greening" of literary studies. We will
read theoretical texts on literature's relationship with ecology and the environmental
movement. Informed by this critical framework, we will perform our own eco-criticism of
several literary texts and question, or put to the test, some of the claims made by
eco-critical theorists. What are the strengths and limitations of ecological readings of
literature? What kind of claims can literature make in its representations of nature? Is
"literary" discourse opposed to "scientific" discourse partly in how,
and why, it represents the natural world? Can one be an environmentalist and a scholar of
literature, or are the goals of the environmental movement best served by leaving our
books behind? Students will be expected to produce three papers, two of which they will
draft and rewrite with the feedback of other students. Active participation, and one oral
presentation in collaboration with another student, are also required.
Required texts
Introducing Ecocriticism
The Ecocriticism Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm
Writing the crisis
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Nationalism and Nature
Homer, Odyssey
Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia
Science and nature
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature;
---Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution
Selections from Renée Descartes, Francis Bacon, Paracelsus, and contemporary debates
about science (course reader)
"Nature Writing"
Henry Thoreau, Walden
Art & Nature : An Illustrated Anthology of Nature, by Kate Farrell
CL H1B 16515 SACHS TT 9:30-11 210 DWINELLE
"Narrating Identity: Art and Crisis"
In this course we will explore what is at stake in the narration and representation of
identity as we try to comprehend (and perhaps define) the relationship between
self-understanding and the exigencies of artistic creation. Are hysteria and hallucination
integral to the development of the autobiographical subject? What becomes of the
reader/audience in the rhetorical structure of the narration of personality? We will
regularly be considering the historical and artistic contexts that these works respond to,
rebel against, and implicitly or explicitly seek to produce. Students' interests and areas
of (potential) specialization will play an important role in shaping the course plan.
Required texts
Homer, The Odyssey (Trans. Cook, Norton Critical Editions, 1993)
Shakespeare, King Lear (Arden Edition, Routledge Press, 1997)
Sappho & Mina Loy: A Class Reader of Selected Poems
Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience (Trans. Sachs, Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001)
Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater (Houghton Mifflin, 1995)
John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation (Random House, 1991)
Recommended text
Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook, 6th Edition.
Course requirements include: * several short homework assignments and in-class
quizzes (including an in-class Midterm essay), one in-class presentation, and four papers
of varying length.
