CL 39C 16551 VERDUCCI MW 4-6 347 LE CONTE
sec. m 3-4 347 Le Conte
"Eros and Ideology, Sex and Culture, Gender and Punishment"
This course will be a 4 unit Writing Attentive Seminar. It will therefore have two distinct yet interrelated emphases. The first will be the reading and seminar discussion of literary works chosen to reflect the dominant conceptual framework of the class. The second will be writing preparation and instruction which will take various guises: seminar lecture and instruction, individual and group tutorials focussed on general areas of prose composition, as well as large and small meetings designed to lend clarity and validity to such literary interpretation of the reading material upon which the students' writing choices will necessarily depend for conceptual and formal content and design.
The writing attentive dimension of this course will have two rather special features. First, the students will be asked to recognize in their reading, and also to exhibit in their writing, English written prose conventions ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated in grammar and syntax. Nonetheless, it will at all times be the instructor's obligation to ask of the students nothing by way of control of the grammatical and syntactical forms of English or of different English rhetorical mechanisms and mannerism which she has not first properly either reviewed or introduced to the seminar members in her teaching.
The second special aspect of the writing attentive nature of this course is that student writing will by no means be confined to the conventional 'essay of literary interpretation.' Student written work will of course be expected to be critically responsible to the texts for the course; however, students may develop their intellectual and imaginative responses to the reading through writing in a variety of prose genres, and the writing choices will depend entirely on the students differing sensibilities, interests and talents; it will be the instructor's task to encourage and to help develop the critical and aesthetic dimensions of each student's one or several experiments in literary prose form.
Some of the verse or prose texts read during the course of the semester have been chosen, and may be emphasized, in order to reflect and to enhance the students' command of literary critical procedures. Yet all of the works chosen for this course, despite their range, are works which confront the relationship between sexual politics and gender in modes which exhibit a common history of audience outrage, or of mistaken obscene appropriation. And even when they have become treasured, or yet perennially abused, conduits to self-exploration for later times, each of them, to the last, was in its won millennium so significant an affront to audience authority that it was either banned or suppressed or at very least labeled a mishap of its author's aberrant imagination. The passage of time, even the passing of millennia, has not stifled the insult the works we shall read offer to the standards of event the most sophisticated readers in even the most alien worlds. In the past two decades, and in a critical climate which accepts bestiality and violence in all strata of the media, four of our texts have been labeled (albeit in different languages) "the most evil books ever written by man." In the judgement of the instructor, each of these works is justly considered dangerous, especially dangerous to any audience dedicated to hypocrisy if not complacency, and hostile to the frightening truths of gender in its own time. Still, again in the judgement of the instructor, each of these texts is a work of the very highest aesthetic and moral achievement. And each is a required text:
- Shakespeare's Othello
- Ovid's Art of Love
- Kenneth Koch's parody, The Art of Love
- Soren Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer (from Either/Or)
- Choderlos de Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Acquaintances)
- E.M. Forster's Maurice
CL 40 16657 HOSEK TT 3:30-5 220 WHEELER
"Getting Ahead: (Post)Feminism, Literature and Individualism"
This course seeks to interrogate the phenomenon of so-called postfeminism. What is it? Do we need it? Who comprises the 'we' here? The course hypothesizes that the disavowal of feminism primarily among younger and privileged women is due in part to an ideology of
individualism that, ironically, feminists of earlier generations and in other positions in society critique. How have some of us gotten here, do we know where here is, and do we want to stay --even if it means disavowing the support of our nurturers?
We'll attempt some answers by exploring literary, filmic and theoretical thematizations of individualism, particularly ones feminist. Our study will focus on texts treating periods of social and political turbulence--texts rich in reconsiderations of the relationships between and definitions of individual and society. In these texts, women's status as individuals fluctuates particularly greatly, for example between masculinely gendered, public sphere, autonomous individual and femininely gendered, private sphere, relational individual. We will consider constellations of texts that treat three very different historical moments: post-war West Germany, the (Re)unification of East with West Germany, and the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy in the United States. This diversity, approached comparatively, will yield
commonalities all the more telling, differences all the more interesting.
After W.W.II in (West) Germany, women who had performed many masculinely gendered tasks were returned to the pre-war 'normalcy' and community of the nurturing domestic sphere. The intersubjectively identified, caring mother/wife came to symbolize the post-war health of
the Nation. We will see how these issues are treated and critiqued in three filmic texts:
- "Die Ehe der Maria Braun" (The Marriage of Maria Braun) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder
- "Deutschland, bleiche Mutter" (Germany, Pale Mother) - Helma Sanders-Brahms
- "Die Mörder sind unter uns" (Murders Are Among Us) - Wolfgang Staudte.
German unification brought with it a reevaluation of the socialist GDR. The perception of an increased individuality in unified East Germany was countered with the realization that a sense of agency was bought at a price literally too high for many East Germans. Women in particular
suffered loss of social status as they were pushed out of jobs and into the home. The Third Way between capitalist individualism and socialist communal values didn't materialize. We will follow these problematics in the translated versions of:
- Tanz am Kanal - Kerstin Hensel
- Medea - Christa Wolf
The Civil Rights Movement is credited with engendering the Women's Movement, perhaps in part because women's roles in the C.R.Movement itself were fraught with tensions and possibilities. What did the C.R. Movement teach them and what did they teach it? What did they gain from it, lose from it? How did some of the ideas of the Civil Rights Movement impact women later - as backlash or as benefit? These are some of the questions that we will deal with using:
- Meridian - Alice Walker
- Paradise - Toni Morrison
A reader comprised of theoretical texts will inform our study of the literary and filmic texts. They will be organized around two main topics.
Conceptions of the Individual:
- Michel Foucault - selections from Discipline and Punish and The Order of Things
- Karl Marx - "Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right," selections from "On the Jewish Question" and The German Ideology
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - selections from The Social Contract
- C.B. MacPherson - selections from The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke
Individualism and Feminism:
- Susan Bordo - selections from The Male Body
- Jean Elshtain - selections from Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in Feminism as Civic Discourse
- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese - selections from Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism
- bell hooks - selections from Talking Back
- Valerie Miner - selections from Competition, a Feminist Taboo?
- Shane Phelan - "Feminism and Individualism"
- Adrienne Rich - "Of Woman Born"
- Joan Tronto - selections from Moral Boundaries
- Joan Williams - Unbending Gender
- Virginia Woolf - selections from A Room of One's Own
- "Rosie the Riveter" (documentary film) - Connie Field
In addition, the first weeks will be augmented by short presentations by teams of students. They will use excerpts from a literary or filmic text to concretize their conception of the quintessential "Individual." We will analyze these examples to compile characteristics of our model of "The Individual" for use throughout the course. This project will integrate students' backgrounds and knowledge into the course's theoretical core, enhancing the students' ability to relate to the class material.
Requirements: Student presentation, active class participation, one ten page paper, one final exam.
Required texts
- Christa Wolf, Medea
- Alice Walker, Meridian
- Toni Morrison, Paradise
- Robert Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader
CL 41D 16660 WAREH MWF 10-11 80 HAAS PAV.
"Playing Someone Else: Performance and Identity in Drama"
Confusion about identity is a theme that we encounter time and again in the history of drama. Not only do plays acted on the stage abound in examples of characters who switch places or are mistaken for each other, they also provide a forum for individual characters to question their relationship with the people and culture that surround them. Even as plays stage the
most private of feelings in a public setting, they also suggest that human interactions frequently involve playing a role.
In this course, we will look at various representations of disguise, and ask how these representations help to articulate the themes with which drama is so concerned. Throughout our examination of mix-ups, imposters, and identity crises in plays that range from ancient times to the present day, we will pay attention both to the generic conventions of drama, and to the changing social place of the theater. While the theatrical devices we will study might seem like simple formulas, what is fascinating about drama is the way in which the conventional building blocks of plays can be combined, innovated, and reworked in endless permutations of comedy and tragedy. Course requirements include a midterm examination, a final paper (8-10 pp.), and some shorter writing assignments. I also hope to schedule a class viewing of a locally performed play.
Required texts
- Euripides, Bacchae
- Plautus, The Menaechmus Twins
- Selected scenarios from Commedia dell' Arte
- William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors and Hamlet
- Moličre, Tartuffe
- Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
- Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
- Margaret Edson, Wit
CL 41E 16663 SHLENSKY MW 2-4 258 DWINELLE
"Remembering and Repeating in Cinema"
Schedule:
3 hours of classroom discussion per week
4 hours of required screenings per week
This course will explore the ways in which repetition is used thematically and formally in Hollywood classical narrative film, as well as in various alternative international modes, including American and European modernisms (e.g., auteurism and experimental film), and postcolonial cinema. How, we shall ask, were the Hollywood conventions of linear story-telling, or narrativity, invented and sustained? When, under what pressures, and with what goals, do filmmakers turn away from such traditional notions of narrative cinema? What are the political, social, and commercial forces that encourage or resist challenges to the conventional Hollywood narrative? And in what ways does the disruption of conventional narrative modes allow new forms of meaning to emerge in specific historical contexts? We will begin to answer these questions by looking at the uses of repetition in a wide survey of films from different periods, locales and filmic traditions. We will watch two films per week in the evenings or late afternoons, and discuss these along with assigned course readings during our two weekly seminars.
Materials:
A Course Reader, containing required course reading, will be available for purchase.
Tentative List of Films (pending availability and scheduling):
15 week schedule
Key:
* = available at the Media Resources Center
# = currently unavailable at the Media Resources Center
EARLY CINEMA (three weeks = 6 film units):
- Week 1: Walter Rutmann: Berlin: Symphony of a City*, Eadweard Muybridge: Motion Studies*
- Week 2: Lumičre brothers: Short works*, Oscar Micheaux: Body and Soul*
- Week 3: Sergei Eisenstein: ˇQue Viva Mexico!*, Dziga Vertov: Man With The Movie Camera*
CLASSICAL NARRATIVES (two weeks = 4 films):
- Week 4: John Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance*), Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep*)
- Week 5: Orson Welles (Citizen Kane* [Lady from Shanghai?]), Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo*)
AUTEURS (three weeks = six films):
- Week 6: Robert Bresson: Pickpocket# (or A Gentle Woman*), Akira Kurosawa: Rashomon*
- Week 7: J.L. Godard: Weekend* [or Breathless: postmodern notion of the remake and pastiche], R. W. Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz (selections)*
- Week 8: Alain Resnais: Hiroshima, Mon Amour*, Márta Mészáros: Girl# or Adoption#
AVANT-GARDES (four weeks = eight film units):
[Paul Sherits, "Touching"; Ernie Gehr, "Serene Velocity"; Michael Snow, "Back and Forth", Malcolm Legrice, "After Lumiere" (New York Film Co-op) - camera position and perspective and how the gaze shifts as a result. Dan Eisenberg's film, "Displaced Person" - Hitler coming into Paris. Or Peter Forgacs, "Free Fall." Anne Severson, "Near the Big Chakra" (Canyon)]
- Week 9: Luis Buńuel: Un Chien Andalou* and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie*, George Kuchar: Hold Me While I'm Naked* and Wild Ride in Reno*
- Week 10: Maya Deren: Meshes in the Afternoon*, Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man*
- Week 11: Chris Marker: La Jetée* and Sans Soleil*, Bruce Conner: Report# or Bruce Conner Films*
- Week 12: Leslie Thornton: Peggy and Fred in Hell*, Chantal Akerman: Jeanne Dielman# or Je Tu Il Elle* or shorts*) [or Peter Forgŕcs, Free Fall]
(POST)COLONIAL AND MINORITY PRODUCTION (three weeks = six films):
- Week 13: Djibril Diop Mambéty: Touki Bouki#, Sembene Ousmane: Xala*
- Week 14: Glauber Rocha: Black God, White Devil*, Charles Burnett: Killer of Sheep*,
- Week 15: Humberto Solás: Lucía*, Rea Tajiri: History and Memory*
CL 60AC:1 16666 CHATTERJI MWF 11 219 DWINELLE
"Translations: Language, Culture and Self in Contemporary American Literature"
(American Cultures)
This course is designed to examine the importance of language and translation in the writing of contemporary American authors. While all the texts in the course are written in English, we will examine how these works depict the ability to speak another language as a central problematic. This approach will lead to a series of questions that interrogate the relationship between language and culture, self and community, ethnicity and nation: What do we talk about when we talk about language? How does the ability to speak a certain language impact the construction of individual or community identity? Why do these authors so often depict their writings as an act of translation? What kinds of meanings are lost in translation? What kinds of meanings does translation create? We will explore these questions by looking at the thematic and stylistic questions raised by the literary works. We will also do a certain amount of reading on U.S. language policies, language politics (bilingual education, Ebonics, Hawaii Creole English) and theories of translation in both literature and anthropology.
Translation, which signifies equivalence, the coming together of two cultures, is particularly relevant to the works of recent American authors such as Eva Hoffman, Chang Rae Lee, and Toni Morrison. The protagonists of these works are often positioned as translators, creating equivalences between languages, cultures and generations. For them, translation signifies both their own sense of self as well as the text that they produce. They struggle with questions of authenticity and faithful transmittal while also attempting to carve out a sense of their own voice. Contextualized with readings in history and politics of language, we will consider how the way that the texts position themselves as works of literature become central to the way that they comment on cultural and political aspects of linguistic identity.
Required Primary Texts
- Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
- Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents
- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
- Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
- Chang Rae Lee, Native Speaker
- Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Films:
- Ghost Dog
- Mississippi Masala
- Course reader including essays, poems and historical material
CL 60AC:2 16669 GREIMAN TT 9:30-11 160 DWINELLE
"Narratives of Flight in American Cultures"
(American Cultures)
By examining tropes of escape, displacement, compelled migration, and search, this course will explore how narratives of flight organize a series of questions about American identity and experience. If fantasies of America have often invoked a promise of itinerancy as the path of the self-possessed, self-directed free subject, how might readings that follow the itineraries of more urgent travelers --fugitive slaves, displaced Native Americans, outlaws on the western frontier, and migrant workers --respond to that fantasy, exposing other modes of freedom and other paths to identity? How might the status of the person in flight be read as both the fulfillment and the undoing of such American ideals as errancy, civilization, and liberty? What happens to the idea of "flight" when it involves not compulsion, but a deliberate choice to set out in search of a new identity or an idea of home? And ultimately: What is the power and the threat posed by persons in flight that their stories not only inspire endless retellings in literature and popular culture, but also motivate laws that aim to fix and contain them in their itinerancy? In one sense, the course will trace a trajectory from imperative to desire as we examine the material realities that motivate escape, laws that seek to contain and define fugitives and migrants, as well as narratives of search and longing for homes and homelands. The requirements for the course will include short reading responses due every other week, a midterm, and a longer final writing project, not to mention attendance and participation.
Primary texts and films
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
- "The Defiant Ones," Dir. Stanley Kramer
- Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes
- "The Searchers," Dir. John Ford
- "The Outlaw Josie Wales," Dir. Clint Eastwood
- Gloria Anzaldua, selections from This Bridge Called My Back
- Anna Castillo, selections from My Father Was a Toltec
- Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Journey Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
In a reader:
- Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and documents
- Frederick Douglass "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"
- Gerald Vizenor, "Fugitive Poses"
- Excerpt from Leo Chavez, Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society
- California Proposition 187 and documents
- Excerpt from Ian Haney-Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race
CL 60AC:3 16672 HEREDIA TT 11-12:30 160 DWINELLE
"Geographies of Difference"
(American Cultures)
Within the notion of a "color blind" society lies a kind of utopian desire to view and treat people as equal. The notion suggests that race is a physical characteristic we can avoid by simply blinding our eyes to difference. In this course we will examine such assumptions and explore
how some writers have dealt with the extraordinary complexity of racial difference in literature. Most of the texts selected for this course take place in geographical locations that are gateways for immigration into the United States (e.g., Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco). This course will focus on the geographical location of the writers and their narrators: Do they write to/from an urban or rural location, to/from the recent or past, to/from the U.S. or other culture? We will explore how place, time and culture complicate the notion and the personal experience of race, and we will ask whether it is possible or even desirable to blind ourselves to racial difference.
Required texts
- Abbott, Shirley, "Why Southern Women Leave Home"
- Anzaldua, Gloria, Borderlands (Excerpts)
- Castillo, Ana, The Mixquiahuala Letters
- Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man and his essay "Hidden Name, Complex Fate"
- Garcia, Cristina, Dreaming in Cuban
- Fae Myenne Ng, Bone
- Hong Kingston, Maxine, The Woman Warrior
- Kincaid, Jamaica, Lucey
- McBride, James, The Color of Water
- Morrison, Toni, The Bluest Eye
- Ponce, Mary Helen, Hoyt Street
- Pham, Andrew, X., Catfish and Mandala
CL 100:1 16675 McCARTHY MW 2-3:30 205 DWINELLE
"Ladies' Men: Male Authors, Female Characters and the Critical Tradition"
This course will concentrate on two ancient authors (Euripides and Ovid) and two nineteenth-century authors (Trollope and Flaubert) whose popular and critical reception has centered on questions raised by their portrayal of female characters. We will work on two intersecting levels of analysis: first, analyzing the process through which each text constructs and naturalizes the concept of gender, and uses the opposition of gender to lend solidity to other oppositions (such as mind/body, individual/community, elite/popular), and second, analyzing the ways that the contemporary and later critics of each author have used the author's relationship to women characters as a framework for ethical and aesthetic judgment (for example, Aristophanes' skewering of Euripides or Henry James' feminizing description of Trollope's habit of observation). Students will be expected to do one or two in-class presentations in addition to writing assignments of varying lengths.
Required texts
- Euripides, Medea, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women
- Aristophanes, The Women at the Thesmophoria
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Art of Love
- Trollope, A., Miss Mackenzie
- Flaubert, G., Madame Bovary
- A reader will include shorter literary and critical readings.
CL 100:2 16678 RUTTENBURG TT 11-12:30 203 WHEELER
"Writing the Self"
From the perspective of the autobiographical memoir, both historical and
contemporary, and from various cultural locales, we will analyze a number of
topics of central importance to literary theory. These include the literary construction of selfhood and its constituent categories (gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.), the role of language in development of the self, the relational nature of the self (vis-ŕ-vis the family, "society," God), the cultural status of "individuality," the concept of childhood, the difference between reality and fiction, and the role of individual testimony in our understanding of history. Some short theoretical readings may be assigned, time permitting. Course requirements 20 pages of writing, an oral presentation, and active participation in class discussion.
Required texts
- Augustine, The Confessions
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
- Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
- Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt A Memoir
- Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
- Anchee Min, Red Azalea
- Mary Karr, The Liar's Club
CL 112B 16681 KOTZAMANIDOU MWF 12 125 DWINELLE
Modern Greek Language
CL 151 16684 WHITTA MWF 2 242 DWINELLE
(NOTE! NEW day/time/place)
"Gender and Sexuality in the Greek and Roman Worlds"
This course will examine representations of men and women in the Greek and Roman worlds, from archaic Greece to the consolidation of Christianity in the fourth century CE. By reading a wide variety of canonical texts, from lyric poetry to philosophy, forensic oratory to domestic manuals, romantic fiction to theological treatises, we will interrogate the processes by which Greek and Roman culture constructed male and female identities, gender categories and "sexualities," and placed these at the service of various ideologies of the self and community. Through this process, we will work an archaeology of knowledge on our own privileged, yet increasingly volatile, understandings of what "makes" men and women in the West. Primary authors to be read will include Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Sappho, Demosthenes, Lysias, Xenophon, Plutarch, Livy, Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Juvenal and Petronius, as well as early Christian material (hagiography, Augustine) and the book of Genesis.
Required texts
- Bing/Cohen, eds., Games of Venus
- Hesiod, Works and Days and Theogony, trans. Lombardo
- Plato, The Symposium and the Phaedrus: Plato's Erotic Dialogues
- Aeschylus, The Oresteia
- Euripides, Euripides I: The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 1
- Livy, The Early History of Rome
- Petronius, The Satyricon
CL 155 16687 ALTER TT 11-12:30 242 DWINELLE
The Modern Period
The second and third decades of the 20th century, the heyday of what is sometimes called High Modernism, was a watershed for the development of European and American fiction, and we still live with its consequences. Writers, impelled by a sense of mounting historical crisis as well as by a desire to renovate and transform the inherited conventions of the 19th-century novel, undertook a bold renegotiation of the formal and thematic terms of the novel. The class will consider closely six major modernist novels, with attention both to their formal innovations and to how these various reshapings of form registered deep responses to the historical moment.
Required texts
- Andrey Bely, Petersburg
- James Joyce, Ulysses
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (vol. 1)
- Franz Kafka, The Trial
CL 165 16690 REJHON TT 11-12:30 20 WHEELER
Myth and Literature
A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works. The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored. The Celtic texts that will be read are the Irish Second Battle of Mag Tuired and The Táin, and in Welsh, the tales of Lludd and Llefelys and Math; the Norse texts will include Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, the Ynglinga Saga, and the Poetic Edda; the Greek texts are Hesiod's Theogony and selections from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. All texts will be available in English translation. No prerequisites.
Required texts
- Snorri Sturluson: Prose Edda, trans. Jean Young
- Hesiod: The Works and Days, Theogony (2 vols.), trans. Lattimore
- The Iliad of Homer, trans. Lattimore
- Cath Maige Tuired: Second Battle of Mag Tuired
- Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales, trans. Ford
- The Tain, trans. Kinsella
- The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Fitzgerald
CL 170:1 16693 KOTZAMANIDOU F 3-6 123 DWINELLE
Modern Greek Literature-in the original
CL 170:2 16696 MONROE TT 3:30-5 107 MULFORD
"The Medieval Frame-tale Genre: Its Hispano-Arabic Roots"
The art of inserting stories within stories is typical of certain Oriental literatures, and was widely cultivated in Arabic. Via Spain, the Arabs transmitted this form of writing to medieval Europe. A masterpiece such as the Spanish Libro de buen amor, which stands as a unique work, with nothing else to which it may be compared within the context of Spanish literature, nevertheless bears comparison with certain Arabic works that preceded it. This course will study the structure, meaning, and function of the frametale genre, using examples from Arabic, Spanish, and English, including animal fables, romances, mirrors for princes, and picaresque narratives. It will show how individual tales found their way into the medieval West via Spain, and examine the Spanish borrowings from Arabic literature.
Required texts
- Ibn al-Muqaffac, The Book of Kalila and Dimna
- The Thousand and One Nights
- Badi al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, The Maqamat
- Juan Ruiz, The Book of Good Love
- Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
CL 170:3 16699 BHATT F 2-5 175 DWINELLE
(Rhet 196)
"The Aesthetic in an Anti-Aesthetic Postmodern Culture"
This seminar analyzes the role of philosophical aesthetics within the context of the modern-postmodern debates in contemporary visual culture. We will review critics such as Pierre Bourdieu, the philosophers of the Frankfurt school, the postmodernists and the post-structuralists who have put the category of the aesthetic to question. These critics argue that the aesthetic is not only complicit with oppressive ideology, but is itself an oppressive ideology; in so doing, they question its legitimacy as a political strategy and as a form of knowing (Foster, 1983; Bennett, 1996; Brecht, 1927). We will compare these postmodern claims with competing claims made by aesthetic theorists and philosophers of science. In aesthetics, we will read selected portions from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1951), David Hume's Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays (1965), and Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (1968). In philosophy, we will review selected portions from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (1985) and Hilary Putnam's Reason, Truth and History (1981).
The class discussions will focus on fundamental questions such as: what is distinctive about an aesthetic experience? How has our understanding of aesthetics been transformed with the rise of postmodernism? What is the relationship between aesthetics and politics? What are the distinctions between high art and popular culture? What does it mean to say that our aesthetic experiences are subjective? Or that they are objective? Can our aesthetic experiences be "rational?" In addition, I will bring to class the work of contemporary artists, architects and filmmakers to illustrate significant issues of the modern-postmodern debate in aesthetics. All readings in the course reader.
CL 170:4 16702 RAM MWF11 100 WHEELER
(Slavic 146)
"East/West Encounters: 'Quest and Conquest'"
In western culture the east has been imagined chiefly in two ways: as a source of vast riches to be plundered or as a repository of ancient wisdom to be tapped. The course proposes to read works by a series of major writers or cultural figures in which east/west dialogue is figured simultaneously through this double prism of spiritual quest and imperial conquest. We will begin in the colonial era, where the east-west divide appears most starkly, then examine the highly suggestive encounter between Gandhi and Tolstoy as marking the spiritual and political crisis of empire, and end by looking at the ethics of crosscultural desire and the recent phenomenon of global religions.
Topics include:
- The enigma of eastern religions in Kipling and Foster
- Western modernity and Indian cultural nationalism in Tagore
- Conquest and resistance: Russian literary representations of the Caucasus
- Tolstoy and the imperial state and Gandhi's spiritual politics of non-violence
- Violence and the ethics of crosscultural desire
- The literature of Californian Buddhism
- Salman Rushdie and the globalization of Islam
Texts (PLEASE NOTE CHANGES)
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
- E. M. Forster, Passage to India
- Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
- Mikhail Lermontov, Mtsyri
- Leo Tolstoy, Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoi
- G. I. Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men
- Leo Tolstoy, Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence
- Mahatma Gandhi, Selected Political Writings
- André Gide, The Immoralist
- Marguerite Duras, The Lover
- Tayib Salih, Season of Migration to the North
- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
- Gary Snyder, The Back Country
- Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses
CL 185 16705 BRITTO TT 3:30-5 242 DWINELLE
In this course, we will discuss a number of novels written by women and men from a variety of cultural and geographic backgrounds (including the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, and the Indian subcontinent). Through our readings of these novels, as well as selected theoretical texts, we will consider the ways in which identity is inflected by categories of gender and sexuality, and attempt to unravel the complex network of links tying these categories to issues of language, writing, culture, history, nation, and race. The cross-cultural nature of our readings will allow us to investigate not only the power of gender and sexuality to shape identity and narrative, but also the ways in which that power is itself shaped by different cultural contexts.
Required texts
- Bharati Mukherjee, Wife
- Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India
- Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy
- Tahar Ben Jelloun, L'enfant de sable / The Sand Child
- Mariama Ba, Une si longue lettre / So Long a Letter
- Myriam Warner-Viera, Juletane
- Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven
- Simone Schwarz-Bart, Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle / The Bridge of Beyond
CL 190:1 16708 SAS TT 3:30-5 235 DWINELLE
NOTE NEW TIME AND LOCATION
"Memory and Performance"
This senior seminar will explore various modes of performance: literary, theatrical, visual, and cultural. How do these performances enact and recreate memory? How do they change our understanding of what memory means? As we consider the intersections between the structures of memory and performance, we will observe not only theatrical performances, but also religious and cultural events that can be seen as enactments of collective or historical memory. As a senior seminar, this course will be shaped by the interests and needs of the participants. Assignments will include written essays and (optional) performances.
The seminar includes segments on languages of remembrance, creation stories, haunting and witnessing, and apocalypse as origin. We will read selected texts and view films and works by: Beckett, Benjamin, Marker, Pérec, Phelan, Proust, Scholem, Sellars, Silverman, Suzuki, Terayama, Woolf, and Zeami.
Required texts
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
- Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape
- Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
- Georges Pérec, W, or the Memory of Childhood
- Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
- Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1
- Kaja Silverman, World Spectators, 2000
CL 1902 16711 ALTER TT 11-1230 258 DWINELLE
The Literature of Suffering
One of the recurrent functions of imaginative literature has been to confront and try to make sense of what seems intolerable about human life--the suffering of the innocent, the helpless, and the young, the evident power of evil, the inexorable fact of human mortality. The course will begin with the Book of Job, a major point of departure for this sort of literature in the Western tradition. We will then consider King Lear, which in important ways invokes Job. During the last two months of the semester, we will explore three novels from three different modern literatures, Russian, German, and Hebrew, that wrestle with these same issues, though not necessarily through an intertextual engagement with Job.
Required texts
- The Book of Job, tr. Scheindlin
- Shakespeare, King Lear
- Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov
- Kafka, The Trial
- Agon, Only Yesterday
