CL 24 16548 RUTTENBURG M 11-12 321 HAVILAND
"Dostoevsky, Emancipation, and Authorship" (Freshman Seminar)
After serving a ten-year sentence for his participation in an illegal political group
that opposed the enslavement of the Russian peasants, Dostoevsky returned to St.
Petersburg in 1861, the year that Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs. His efforts to
reconceive his role as a Russian author would be greatly affected, not only by his long
absence from the capital, but by this momentous event as he struggled to reconcile the
brutal realities of his prison experience with the radical ideals of democratic reform. We
will concentrate on the period between his early short fiction of the 1840s and the
emergence of his "great novels" in the late 1860s. Readings will include
"The Double," Memoires from the House of the Dead, Notes from the
Underground, as well as selected letters and essays. Knowledge of Russian is not
required. Grading: P/NP.
Required texts
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Memoires from the House of the Dead
--- Great Short Works
--- selections from Notes from Underground
CL 30B 16551 REJHON TT 2-3:30 321 HAVILAND
"Seminar in World Literature: Medieval Literature of King
Arthur"
The course will explore the earliest medieval manifestations of the legend of King
Arthur as well as later developments of his legend in texts originally written in English,
French, Welsh, and Latin. We will trace in discussion and lecture, the development of the
myths surrounding this most famous of legendary kings; we will examine not only the image
and social function of the figure of Arthur in each cultural context, but how his
reception in each culture reflects the concerns of that particular milieu. The English
Arthurian texts that will be read are Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and
selections from Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur; the French works are The
Quest of the Holy Grail, and Chrétien de Troyes' romances, Lancelot and Perceval;
the Welsh works will include the native Arthurian tales, Culhwch and Olwen and The
Dream of Rhonabwy, and the early Arthurian poems, "What Man the
Gate-Keeper," "The Spoils of the Otherworld," and "A Conversation
Between Arthur and Guenevere." Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of
Britain will also be read.
The course is open to freshmen and sophomores. All works will be available in English
translation.
Course requirements will include an oral presentation by each student, a midterm exam
and a substantial term paper.
Required texts
Jones, G. & T. Jones, trs. The Mabinogion
Matarasso, P.M., tr. The Quest of the Holy Grail
Raffel, B., tr. Chrétien de Troyes: Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart
Raffel, B., tr. Chrétien de Troyes: Perceval, The Story of the Grail
Stone, B., tr. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Thorpe, L., tr. Geoffrey of Monmouth: History of the Kings of Britain
Wilhelm, J., ed. The Romance of Arthur. New ed. Garland Publ.
CL 39A 16554 CASCARDI W 2-5 80 HAAS PAV
"Speaking of the Arts" (Freshman/ Sophomore Seminar)
In discussions of literature we learn how to use words to talk about other words. But
how does one talk about arts that have no words, or about those that offer a combination
of word and image? In this seminar we will look at criticism of the non-verbal and hybrid
arts. We will examine examples of criticism and, more important, we will use experiences
of the non-verbal arts to test the range of the critical abilities we use with literature.
Examples of painting, sculpture, drama, music, and film will be drawn from those provided
by various campus resources, including the Pacific Film Archive, the University Art
Museum, and Cal Performances. Faculty from across the campus will be invited to share
their experience in the various arts with the class.
Required texts
Susan Feagin and Patrick Maynard, eds., Aesthetics, Oxford University Press>
Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed., Aesthetics: The Big Questions, Blackwell Publishers
CL 39B 16556 VERDUCCI MW 2-4 233 DWINELLE
"Reading and Writing about Lyric Poetry--A Clearing in the
Imagination" (Freshman/ Sophomore Seminar)
It is the goal of this course that students begin to learn how to read lyric poetry,
how to understand the intellectual and emotional claims poetry makes upon us, and how to
write about poetry as persons who share the world of imagination and insight which lyric
poetry inhabits. Most of the class hours will be devoted to the close reading and
discussion of poems selected by the instructor for the force with which they reveal how a
shared critical discourse empowers us to find pathways into the alternative worlds of
language and imaginative perspective by which poetry makes its claims upon us. As a
Writing-Attentive Seminar, the course will provide a milieu for a kind of writing workshop
process. Each student will present several short careful drafts of short papers about
poems chosen in concert with the instructor. These drafts will not be considered in any
sense final but instead entirely preliminary. After individual meetings with the
instructor, and often after open (but anonymous) class scrutiny and discussion, these
preliminary papers will be revised for expository clarity. Equally, they will be revised
in terms of their adequacy to illuminate the means by which the poems chosen have created
their authority to disclose unfamiliar landscapes of experience and perspective hitherto
undreamt of in our imagination. It is, therefore, the premise of this course that by
learning a minimal yet common critical discourse, and, through writing, undergoing the
revision of self which poetry so often claims of us, we may become far more than a passive
audience for the lyric: rather, we may come to share in that dimension of life from which
poetry draws its power, and to enter landscapes of language and imagination free for our
own undiscovered creation, feeling and thought: "The critic's task is not to try to
deflate, shrink, or contain the scope of poetry; rather, the task is to try to provide a
space in which creation can take place, a clearing in the imagination."
CL 40 16557 PERCIALI TT 9:30-11 223 DWINELLE
"Men Writing Women"
"....and women writing back." Starting with the proposition that the feminine is a
voice that exceeds language and narrative, this class proposes to look at various
instances of women written into, and exceeding, narrative structures. Each of these works
involves a caged female, caged both in the plot in some manner, but especially caged by
language, by forms of representation, and by a desiring male gaze. However, of course,
these categories are made to be questioned. We will also try to find spaces of liberation
and resistance, in the texts written by men as well as by women.
Required texts
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman
Denis Diderot, The Nun0
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
paintings by Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet.
CL 41A 16560 STARR-REID MWF 1 225 DWINELLE
Introduction to Literary Forms: The Epic
Epic is a narrative of cosmic or social origins, of primordial conflict. Epics are
filled with alien meetings--of gods and men, of men and monsters, of men or women as
monsters. In the 18th and 19th centuries, European scholars drew epic into doctrines of
European superiority; "ancient" epics were even forged (or forgered) to create
venerable kernels of national traditions where none had existed. At a time when people are counting the cost of
racialist mythologies in earlier generations, we are left with the very open question of
how to interpret these texts now--often narratives of violent meetings with other
cultures-in a multi-cultural and post-colonial world. The first part of this course will
address European epic traditions in the ancient and medieval periods; the second part will
consider epic and epic-like texts from the Americas, from the 1500s to the twentieth
century.
Course work will include readings of about 100 pages per week, one midterm examination
(worth 35% of the grade), a brief oral presentation and write-up (25%) and a final
examination (40%).
Required texts
Homer, The Odyssey
Virgil, The Aeneid
The Song of Roland (Oxford version)
Dante, The Inferno
Derek Walcott, Omeros
John G. Neihardt, Songs of the Indian Wars
Selections from: Homer, The Iliad; MacPherson/Ossian, Fingal;
Kinsella, ed., The Tain; The Nibelungenlied; Pablo Neruda, Canto General;
Archibald MacLeish, Conquistador; Hiawatha; Cantares Mexicanos/Songs
of the Aztecs; Guahayona; McCarthy, Blood Meridian
CL 41B 16563 BARRETT TT 9:30-11 262 DWINELLE
Introduction to Literary Forms: The Lyric
In classical usage, the term "lyric poetry" referred to poems that were put
to music or sung to the "lyre." In the nineteenth-century, William Wordsworth
defined lyric poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," while
John Stuart Mill declared that the lyric poem is an "utterance that is
overheard." What these three different definitions all have in common is their
emphasis on the idea of "voice." Lyric poetry, all three suggest, paradoxically
offers us the opportunity to hear--or overhear--a human voice as we read a text from the
page.
The idea of "voice" in a poem is, of course, nothing more than an illusion:
this illusion or effect will form the central area of inquiry for this course. In our
readings, we will consider a variety of definitions of the "lyric" and weigh
against these models poems from the Romantic and Modern periods, as well as poems by Bay
Area experimental writers. The course will thus investigate the invention of the lyric
voice, as that invention is proclaimed in the works of English Romantic poets and
radically disrupted in the works of Modernist poets from France, Germany, and the U.S. We
will read selections from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Charles
Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Langston Hughes and Paul Celan, among others. We will also
read work by Bay Area experimental poets, including Pamela Lu, Elizabeth Robinson, and
Linda Voris. The class will feature guest presentations and readings by some of these
local writers.
Required texts
Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems
William Wordsworth, Selected Poems: William Wordsworth
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
Pamela Lu, Pamela: A Novel
Elizabeth Robinson, In the sequence of falling things
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen
Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan
Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
CL 41E 16566 KAKOUDAKI TT 3:30-6:30 258 DWINELLE
Introduction to Literary Forms: Film
"Cinematic Spectacle and the Genre Film"
In this class we will explore how film assaults or alters human vision through the
self-conscious representation of the spectacular. We will focus on the moments that make
us notice film as a medium for astonishment: extravagant visual detail, impossibly closed
or open spaces, running crowds, helicopter/car/rocket/motorcycle chases, fantastic human
or non-human bodies, super-fast whirling dance or martial arts sequences, hallucinatory
colors, impossible filming techniques, or impossible narratives. We will formulate a
theoretical background for the many different kinds of techniques for spectacle, trace
their historical developments, and discuss contemporary theories of film art and
spectatorship. In order to enable a historical and theoretical understanding of spectacle,
each week we will
focus on two films which explore similar formal experiments but in different genres.
How do the formal "codes" change when they are transposed from a classic
Hollywood melodrama to an action film? Since genre difference is considered primary in
most film criticism, we will study the specific formal makeup of a variety of genres, but
at the same time attempt an integrative theory of the spectacular moment.
Our discussion will include both "popular" and "classic" films from
the early twentieth century to the present. In "Part One: Definitions and Some Film
History" we will reverse the usual order of film study by formulating a vocabulary of
the spectacular through experimental films. In "Part Two: What is Spectacle? History,
the Future, and Space" we will focus on the representation of the "large scale" movie spectacles that often participate
in political propaganda: historical epics and science fiction, for example, both traffic
in the cultural myths we create about the past and about the future. "Part Three:
Motion, Emotion and Visible Bodies" will focus on the popular genres of melodrama,
action film, suspense thriller, and musical, as carriers of the main methods of
astonishment: representing the extreme in pain, speed, fear and movement. Finally, in "Part Four: Postmodern Themes,"
we will look at recent versions of the spectacular moment in relation to gender, race,
sexuality and class.
I expect that we will be able to view and discuss two feature films each week, and
possibly some shorter experimental material. Students do not need a formal background in
film theory or the history of film. There will be three short response papers (2 pages),
each on a different aspect of film criticism; one midterm paper (5-7 pages); one creative
project or group presentation; and a final analytical paper (6-8 pages).
CL 60AC:1 16569 RONAN MWF 10 219 DWINELLE
"In the Tales of Others: Storytelling and Self-Discovery in
America" (American Cultures)
This course will explore the importance of story-telling to the formation of personal
(as opposed to social) identity. While the question "what am I?" can be answered
according the categories that one finds on a job application (race, gender, age etc.), the
question "who am I?" seems to require a story as its response. One must listen
to the stories of others to know about everything from one's own birth to the history of
one's ancestors. Beginning with Gothic horror tales of Edgar Allen Poe and the slave
narrative of Harriet Jacobs, we will discuss a wide variety of 19th and 20th Century
American myths and narratives, including works written by and about African Americans,
Asian Americans, European Americans, Latinos and Latinas and Native Americans, in order to
explore relations of storytelling, identity and culture in the United States.
Required texts
Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks
Edgar Allen Poe, Great Short Works of Edgar Allen Poe
Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
CL 60AC:2 16572 FLYNN MWF 11 182 DWINELLE
"Fashioning American Women: Expanding
a Nation's Cultural Corsets" (American Cultures)
The course will examine the ways in which women of diverse racial, ethnic, and
socioeconomic backgrounds have negotiated the dominant trends in American fashion since
the late nineteenth-century. In it we will focus on the interplay between individual women
and a "melting-pot" fashion system. We will see how such interplay provokes
constant changes in American dress codes, changes which perpetually redefine what it means
to be an American woman. Looking closely at the cultural cross-over that is at the heart of the nation's
fashion system, we will extrapolate upon a similar cross-over at the core of America's
social system and at the root of American identity.
Throughout the semester, we will pay particular attention to the works of
African-American, Asian-American, and European-American writers and critics who both
problematize mainstream fashion's tendency to whitewash cultural diversity and offer
alternative ways of layering difference within fashion. Studying novels, articles,
stories, poems, films, style books, magazines, advertisement campaigns, and critical
essays, we will address the following questions: How do mass-produced tastes disseminate
within American society?
At the turn-of-the-century who determined such trends? Who followed them? Who
determines and follows them now? How do current fashions get under one's skin? More
precisely, how does something as seemingly superficial as a GAP t-shirt inscribe one's
body at both social and psychic levels? How does this inscription differ in distinct
groups? More generally, how can one read the diverse sartorial codes that consistently
re-inflect what it means to be American?
We will explore these questions in four units. In the first unit we will study the
"trickle-down" model of fashion that dominated America into the nineteenth
century. We will then examine alternative models (e.g. "street up" /
"inside-out") that are now pertinent. In the second unit we will focus on select
novels, poems, and films in which women characters of diverse backgrounds struggle both to
accommodate and to challenge white, bourgeois fashion constrictions. In the third unit we
will examine ways in which people use their clothing to rearticulate American ideals of
femininity. Finally, we will turn our attention to various contemporary ad campaigns,
asking how fashion ads market racial, sexual, and cultural differences in America.
Students will maintain an ongoing journal/scrapbook in which they will respond to the
reading material and collect and analyze ads. At the semester's end small groups will
create and present their own ad campaigns. Students will write two papers and take a final
exam. Excerpts from the following texts (most of which are in a class reader) will
orient discussions and papers.
Georg Simmel: "Fashion"
Elizabeth Rouse, Undertanding Fashion
Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication
Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes
Lois Alexander, Blacks in the History of Fashion
Lois Banner, American Beauty
Gilles Lipovetsky, "Hundred Years of Fashion"
--- "Open Fashion" from The Empire of Fashion
Nicholas Coleridge, The Fashion Conspiracy
Fred Davis, "Antifashion: The Vicissitudes of Negation"
Bernard Barber & Lyle Lobel, "Fashion in Women's Clothes and the American
Social System"
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Luce Irigaray, "The Power of Discourse"
--- "Women on the Market," from This Sex Which is Not One
Ruth Forman, "White Flower Day or Macy's from the Top Down" from We are
the Young Magicians
Audre Lorde, "Good Mirrors Are Not Cheap"
Marie Hara, "The Beauty Contest"
--- "Old Kimono" from Growing Up Asian American
Nellie Wong, "When I Was Growing Up"
Janice Mirikitani, "Doreen"
Mary Jo Bona, "Amazone"
Patricia Smith, "Blond White Women"
Nella Larson, Quicksand
Chay Yew, The Rest is Easy
Jamaica Kincaid, Girl
Chitra Divakaruni, "Clothes"
Naomi Wolf, selections from The Beauty Myth
Constance White, Style Noir: the first how-to guide to fashion written with Black
women in mind
Kobena Mercer, Black Hair/Style Politics
Ted Polhemus, Street Style
Rachel Bowlby: "Commerce and Femininity"
Janet Lee, "Care to Join Me in an Upwardly Mobile Tango?"
Diana Fuss, "Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look"
Kaja Silverman, "Fragments of a Frashionable Discourse"
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
--- The Psychic Life of Power
CL 60AC:3 16575 CHATTERJI TT 3:30-5 106 MOFFITT
"Brave New Worlds" (American Cultures)
In this course we look at a number of novels, essays and films which deal with
experiences of immigration and diaspora in the context of American culture. The idea of
America as "new world," a key term in various immigration histories, is a way of
rethinking the negotiations of cultural identity having to do with geography, language and
community. We will ask what it means to define home in the face of the fracture between
"old" and "new," and examine how this act of definition reflects onto
discourses of nationalism.
Our readings address these issues from a variety of perspectives. We look at texts by
and about first generation immigrants dealing with immediate issues of geography and
language. Our discussion of texts by African American writers centers around the concept
of dispossession and nostalgia. Finally, in our readings of Hawaiian texts, we consider
how the idea of "new world" gets refigured in the language and land debates in
which local and continental issues come into conflict.
Required texts
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker
Toni Morrison, The Song of Solomon
Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents
Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Blu's Hanging
We will also use a class reader containing essays, short stories and poetry.
CL 100:1 16578 FRANCOIS MWF 3 246 DWINELLE
"Open Secrets"
How do literary and filmic texts represent and at the same time keep their secrets?
This course examines the role of secrets in producing and blocking narrative and dramatic
movement, and in releasing and withholding meaning. In Sissela Bok's words, the secret can
be "something sacred, intimate, private, unspoken, silent, prohibited, shameful,
stealthy, or deceitful." But there are also open secrets, unacknowledged but
unconcealed, such as Poe's "Purloined Letter," or the gay closet and racial
passing. In comparing tragedies, films, case histories, novels and short stories, we
discuss the role of narrative and confessional acts in the construction and circulation of
public and private identities, marked or hidden by gender, race, or class. Other questions
include: what is the violence of interpretation? How far can we push the analogy between
reading and detection? What relationships define blind characters and seeing readers? What
is the status of a knowledge one can neither speak nor act upon?
Readings
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, tr. Fagles (Three Tehban Plays)
Racine, Phedre
Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
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
criticism by Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, and Sedgwick.
Films
Max Ophuls, "The Earrings of Madame d' . . ."
Alfred 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 16581 NAIMAN TT 11-12:30 2070 VAL LSB
Introduction to Comparative Literature: The Gothic Novel
This course will trace the history of the Gothic novel from its earliest exemplars to
its more recent progeny. We will use Gothic writing as a prism through which to examine
questions of genre--definition, literary evolution and parody. Our reading of novels will
be supplemented by critical texts which will permit us to use "the Gothic" as a
device for the investigation of diverse strategies of reading.
Required reading
Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Lewis, The Monk
Austen, Northanger Abbey
Sue, The Mysteries of Paris (excerpts)
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria"
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
W. Collins, The Woman in White
Films
Hitchcock, Psycho
Demme, The Silence of the Lambs
Critical texts by Shklovsky, Fowler, Barthes, Showalter, Fiedler, Medvedev, Kahane,
Russ, Tynianov, Wolff, Irigaray and Bakhtin
CL 112B 16584 KOTZAMANIDOU MWF 12 223 WHEELER
Modern Greek Language
CL 153 16587 HAMPTON MWF 1 247 DWINELLE
"Renaissance Literature: "Literature and the Age of
Exploration"
In this course we will read a selection of major authors and genres from the European
Renaissance. Central to our concerns in the course will be 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 how increasing awareness among European writers of the "edges of
Europe" leads to the elaboration of new notions of identity, literary authority, and
ethical action. In addition to the books listed below, we will read Xeroxed selections
by such writers as Dante, Milton, Montaigne, Columbus, and Vasco da Gama.
Required texts
Shakespeare, Othello (Signet)
Shakespeare, The Tempest (Signet)
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Cohen (Penguin)
Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Cohen (Penguin)
Camoens, The Lusiads (Oxford U.P.: World's Classics)
More, Utopia, ed. Surtz (Yale University Press)
CL 165 16590 FITZGERALD TT 12:30-2 122 BARROWS
Myth and Literature
Ovid's Metamorphoses is not only a compendium of ancient mythology, but also an
epic of transformation: gods become humans, humans become animals, flowers and other
natural objects; boundaries of all kinds are transgressed and strange couplings take
place. Starting with Ovids' epic, one of the most influential books ever written, we will
examine the theme of bodily transformation in European literature, art, and film. What
issues are dealt with through this theme, and how does its treatment change in different
historical periods, genres, and media: Besides Ovid, we will be reading Apuleius' Golden
Ass (a Roman novel about a man who becomes an ass), Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's
Dream, Kafka's Metamorphosis (man into bug), John Howard Griffin's Black
Like Me (white into black), Virginai Woolf's Orlando (man into woman), as well
as some science fiction (Calvino, Butler, Bear); we will also be watching two movies
called The Fly (man into fly) and taking a brief look at this theme in the visual
arts.
Required texts
Octavia Butler, Dawn
Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
Greg Bear, Blood Music
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Ovid, Metamorhoses, tr. A. Melville
Apuleius, The Golden Ass, tr. P. Walsh
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, tr. Corngold
John H. Griffon, Black Like Me
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
CL 170 16593 KOTZAMANIDOU F 3-6 210 DWINELLE
Modern Greek Literature (in the original)
CL 185 16596 LUCEY TT 12:30-2 20 BARROWS (ugis 149)
"Renovation/Innovation: Representing Sexual Identities"
What would it mean to imagine a new sexual identity? To renovate an old
one? What would it take to sustain a newly imagined or re-imagined sexual identity
across time? What kind of social forces or institutions would be necessary to
sustain such imaginings? What social forces or institutions would inhibit such
imaginings or perhaps cause such an imaginative process to flag as time passes?
These are the kinds of questions we will be asking by way of a reading of a series of
novels by Virginia Woolf, Colette, and a few others. Our attention will be drawn
both to the literary innovations French, English, and American women of the early
twentieth century strove for, and to the rapidly changing social circumstances in which
such women were working to reimagine their social and sexual possibilities.
Required texts
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
--- Mrs. Dalloway
--- The Years.
Colette, Claudine at School
--- Claudine Married
--- Cheri
--- The Last of Cheri
H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica
Raymond Radiguet, The Devil in the Flesh
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
CL 190:1 16599 BUTLER W 2-5 331 LE CONTE
"Philosophical Fictions" (Senior Seminar)
This course will conduct a series of close readings of some of Kafka's fictional
writings, focusing on the problems of law, judgment, and ethical violence. We will also
read selected theoretical works on Kafka from Benjamin, Adorno, Blanchot, and Derrida.
Required texts
Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony
--- Parables and Paradoxes
--- Amerika
--- The Great Wall of China
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (recommended, not
required)
CL 190:2 16602 WEISINGER TT 11-12:30 123 DWINELLE
"X-Rays, Gossip and Aesthetics in James, Proust and Mann" (Senior Seminar)
This course will concentrate on a few works of narrative fiction written in pre-WWI
Europe. They represent the attempt to accommodate art to what James calls the "Age of
Trash Triumphant." We will examine the works in detail, reading certain passages very
closely, to see how art both transcends and embraces the triumphant trash. Above all, we
will examine the ways the concept of artistic representation is changed by the advent of
"trash." For example, in Mann's Magic Mountain, how does the emergent field of
x-ray photography change the concept of the traditional "Bildungsroman." How
does gossip function to create art in Proust? Why is James obsessed by "the real
thing" in "The Real Thing"? The course will function as a seminar with
students expected to participate fully in class discussions, make research reports to the
group, give the group summaries of the final paper which will be turned in at the end of
the semester.
Required texts
Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories
Turn of the Screw and Other Stories
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, tr. Wood
Death in Venice
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past vol.I
