Spring 2002 Course Offerings: 1A-1B

CL 1A:1 16603 SYSON MWF 10 223 WHEELER

“Persuasion and Misrepresentation”

In this course we shall examine the dangers and the rewards that result from succumbing to persuasion. Central to each of these texts is anxiety about how far appearances, whether visual or shaped by words, correspond to reality, and about the effects of these appearances. We shall therefore look at the relationship between verbal eloquence and physical objects, such as bodies (alive or dead), possessions, or gifts, and consider how different forms of eloquence build authority in a social or political sphere. This reading will provide the basis for a sequence of assignments designed to help you strengthen your own persuasive voice as a writer.

Required texts

• Euripides: Medea and Hippolytus
• Melville: Billy Budd
• Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing
• Austen: Persuasion
• Ovid: selections from the love poems
• Blake: selections
• Woolf: Orlando
• Course Reader to include: Angela Carter, Goethe, Perrault (selections), and excerpts from writing handbooks. Available from Metro Publishing, 2440 Bancroft

CL 1A:2 16606 HILL MWF 11 123 DWINELLE

“Impersonations”

Works from a variety of genres, from antiquity to last year, and which involve the theme of impersonation are the basis for frequent student writing in this course. In addition to the primary texts below, we will discuss a number of essays with an eye to the techniques of exposition, argumentation, and revision.

Required texts

• Ovid, Metamorphoses
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
• Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal
• Han Ong, Fixer Chao

Suggested: D. Hacker, The Bedford Handbook

Film: Hitchcock, Vertigo

Plus a reader with prose by Berger, Castiglione, Davis, Didion, Freud, Raspberry, Swift, Woolf; and poetry by Bishop, Browning, Clifton, Dickinson, Keats, Sidney, and Shakespeare.

CL 1A:3 16609 HOCHBERG TT 9:30-11 123 WHEELER

“In Love with Death”

Why do so many works of literature, film, opera, theater end with the death of the heroine? Why is the "death scene" so often graphic and detailed? What is it about death that makes it so intriguing? And what are the relationships between gender and death? Sex and death? Giving birth and death? Desire and death? These questions and others will be discussed throughout the semester as we engage a variety of literary texts, films, and operas.

Required texts

• Sophocles, Antigone
• Shakespeare, Othello
• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

In addition, there will be a reader including short stories, essays, and poetry. Every student is required to own his/her own reader. We will also watch operas (film version) and a couple of films.

CL 1A:4 16612 GAJARAWALA TT 9:30-11 223 WHEELER

“Spaces of Confinement: Prison Literature’s Voices from the Cell”

CL 1A:5 16615 COPENHAFER TT 11-12;30 205 DWINELLE

“On Violence”

What is the origin of violence? How is violence related to punishment? What is the relationship between violence and justice? How does violence, particularly when it is said to be just or perhaps justified, tend to invoke a logic of substitution (e.g.: "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," capital punishment for so-called capital crimes, mutual assured destruction, etc.)? What authorizes a given substitution or equivalence? Is violence always only destructive or can it also be productive or transformative? Can we conceive of an end to violence?

These are some of the questions we will address in our class on violence. We will also try to relate our literary and philosophical investigations to contemporary events, racial and sexual violence, war and terrorism.

Required texts

• Aeschylus, The Orestia
• Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
• de Troyes, Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart (trans. Raffel)
• Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
• Melville, Billy Budd
• Morrison, Beloved
• Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
• Shakespeare, Macbeth
• The New St. Martin's Handbook (writing textbook)

A reader will contain a selection of poetry as well as texts by Foucault, Scarry, Thoreau and others.

CL 1B:1 16621 MOORE MWF 9 125 DWINELLE

“Unfaithful Subjects: Narratives of Infidelity”

Infidelity scandals provide tabloids and talk shows with best-selling material; yet tabloids are not alone in their focus on this fascinating subject. Stories of infidelity are and have been popular topics for the daily news as well as for literature and movies. In this course, we will explore the compelling nature of infidelity and seek to understand why infidelity is the subject of so much cultural production. In our readings, we will examine infidelity from various angles, expanding our analysis to include infidelity not only as a function of romantic love, but also in terms of fidelity to family, nation, or ideology. We will consider different cultural and historical treatments of infidelity as we discuss its social and political significance, the often disastrous repercussions, and the role of gender.

How does the personal become topic for public consumption? How do our discourses about infidelity betray a basic anxiety about truth and knowledge? Do discussions of infidelity function to maintain gender hierarchies within culture or to critique social order? This course aims to provide students with an introduction to critical writing and reading while exploring answers to these questions.

Students will be required to read assigned works carefully, attend classes and participate in class discussions, produce approximately 30 pages of thoughtful prose (in the form of 1 diagnostic paper and 3 formal papers of increasing length, two of which will be subject to extensive revisions), as well as several informal writing assignments and one oral presentation.

Required texts

• Song of Roland, anonymous (Modern Library)
• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (A New Directions Book)
• Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi (Scribner)
• Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman (Penguin)
• Native Speaker, Change-Rae Lee (Riverhead Books)
• Despair, Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage Books)
• I'm Not Stiller, Max Frisch (Harvest Books)
• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (Anchor)

Course Reader, with a selection of short stories, essays and critical pieces

Films:

• Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch
• The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola
• Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock

CL 1B:2 16624 TINSLEY MWF 10 121 WHEELER

“On the Other Side of the Line:
Passing and Cross-dressing in World Literature”

"Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of... identity... What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better."
--Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

Public bathrooms, public schools, and public assistance applications organize entrants by requiring them to choose one and only one race and gender. But what happens when subjects refuse to stay inside prescribed boxes? What are the transgressive--and dangerous--possibilities of passing and cross-dressing: that is, of imagining that race and gender are constantly, consciously transformable? This course aims to provide students with and introduction to critical reading and writing while exploring answers to these questions. Dialoguing with representations of tragic mulattas, drag queens, and women warriors in texts which themselves "pass" between North America and Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Spain and Chile, China and France, we will focus on how problematic lines between races and genders are simultaneously constructed and subverted in specific historical and geographic settings. Reading these subversions as at once play and battle--danger zones and promised lands--we will experiment with ideas on how bending race and gender borders can cross/out limits to personal and/as political identities.

Required texts

• Nella Larsen, Passing
• José Donoso, Hell Has No Limits
• Mayotte Capécia, from I am a Martinican Woman
• Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
• The Bible
• Sherry Velauso, The Lieutenant Nun
• Michelle Cliff, Free Enterprise
• David Henry Hwang, M Butterfly
• Mayra Santos Febres, Sirena Selena
• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

CL 1B:3 16627 LOUAR MWF 10 123 DWINELLE

This course will explore the concept of translation and its relationship with memory. Translation will be approached not only as the passage from one given language into another, but also as the ability to translate experience into words. The process of writing will be at the core of our investigation. The relations between language, identity, and art are some of the questions we will pursue as we study literary and theoretical texts to improve our reading, writing, and critical thinking skills.

A selection of theoretical texts will first inform our inquiry into the subjects of translation and memory, will provide us with the vocabulary needed to discuss the literary texts selected for this class, and will act as prompts for class discussions.

In the course of the semester students will acquire a solid and informed reading technique and develop their writing skills.

Required texts

• The Niebelungenlied
• Eva Hoffman. Lost in Translation
• Joyce, J. Dubliners
• Saphira. Push
• Nabokov. Speak, Memory
• Kafka. Diaries
• a Course Reader

CL 1B:4 16630 POPKIN MWF 11 80 HAAS PAVIL

“Passing On Trauma: Literature, Film, Media”

This course will focus on two sets of questions. First, how are representations of trauma in literature, film and media passed on? When traumas are “unspeakable,” how is the knowledge of trauma passed on to others? What is passed on, when not knowledge, and how? Is trauma contagious? How and when are traumas of others re-experienced, assumed and/or rejected? Is there a pleasure of witnessing the trauma of the other, a pleasure that is central both to literature and film, if not also the media? What role does the witness play in the construction and force of the trauma of the other? The second set of questions will focus on how trauma inflects, reinforces and subverts ethnic, racial and sexual identity. We will consider, for example, one critic’s claim that every woman’s life contains, explicitly or implicitly, the story of a second-hand trauma.

We will examine these questions through a broad range of literature, film and media. We will begin with a medieval epic in which violence and trauma serve as an attempt to consolidate a civic and religious identity; then we will then move to the nineteenth century with Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, a text in which a wife murderer claims to have come face to face with the masked, potentially explosive violence at the very center of all relationships; and then we will turn to the twentieth century and look at texts which reflect on slavery, the Holocaust and the Balkan crisis. The course readings will also include a reader that will examine these questions from psychoanalytic and philosophical perspectives.

CL 1B:5 16633 LISOWSKI MWF 11 225 WHEELER

“Narrative and Identity”

What structures each of the three pairs of texts below is a set of relationships between narrative, the telling of the story of the past, and identity, the building of a self. Students' work toward improving their expository writing skills in this course will build on the skills and techniques learned in the 1A course (or equivalent coursework) and will be shaped by these three pairs of texts. Moving through an ordered sequence of paper assignments of increasing length, students will develop further their skills with thesis formation, argumentation, and the related skills of drafting and revision. As the course moves from the first pair of texts, in which the relationship between narrative and specific violent memories is relatively clear, to the second and third pairs, in which the relationship between narrative and self-constitution grows more complex, so too will the arguments and papers which make up a student's body of work be expected also to develop and become increasingly complex, culminating in a comprehensive final paper.

I: Narratives of Violence
-Toni Morrison, Beloved
-Aeschylus, Agamemnon

II: Narratives of Discovery, Narrative and Discovery
-Sophocles, Oidipous the King
-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

III: Narrative and Self-Constitution
-Seamus Heaney, Selected Poems
-Homer, Odyssey

Required texts

• Toni Morrison. Beloved. New York: Penguin Books. 1988.
• Aeschylus. The Oresteia. M. Ewans, tr. New York: Everyman Press, 1996.
• Sophocles. Four Dramas of Maturity. M. Ewans, ed. New York: Everyman Press, 1999.
• C. Brontë. Jane Eyre. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
• S. Heaney. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.
• The Odyssey of Homer. R. Lattimore, tr. New York: HarperCollins, 1965.

Recommended text

• Strunk and White. The Elements of Style. New York: Pearson, 1959.

CL 1B:6 16636 SPRINGER TT 8-9:30 125 DWINELLE

The course focuses on uses and abuses of power in politics and art. We will look through the lens of art at power struggles involving gender, class, ethnicity, occupation, and other boundaries, and our primary readings will take us from the founding of Rome over two thousand years ago to the streets of Los Angeles in the early1950s. Supplementary reading-and writing-will bring us back to the current day.

We will look at power and its representations. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God? Are artistic critiques of power merely the inevitable byproducts of the structures they purportedly criticize? Or is the Trojan Horse still a viable strategy? How does a narrator’s voice work with or against the multiple voices and narrative constructs of the individual characters?

The goal of this course is to hone critical abilities in speech and in writing. Students will have an in-class or take-home writing assignment almost every week, and everyone will participate in individual and group presentations. Class members will also analyze each other’s writing, albeit anonymously and without viewing grades.

All parties are expected to arise early and attend class conscientiously at the appointed hour (8:00 a.m.). Empirical evidence shows that 1A-1B students whose attendance decreases over the semester are significantly more likely to fail the class. But those who make a responsible effort will be rewarded with stimulating readings, frank and open discussions, and a forward-looking approach to writing.

Required texts

• Aeneid, Virgil
• Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf (Jeanne Schulkind, editor)
• Richard III, Shakespeare
• Splendeurs Et Miseres Des Courtisanes, Balzac
• Song of Solomon, Tony Morrison
• L.A. Confidential, James Ellroy
• Xeroxed materials: lyric poetry and narrative theory

Movies:

• L.A. Confidential
• Richard III (1995 version)
• Four Little Girls

CL 1B:7 16639 LARSEN TT 9:30-11 121 WHEELER

“Crime”

“America can’t have what it wants, so it has America’s Most Wanted instead.”
--Hakim Bey

From Cain and Abel to cops and robbers, this class will be an extended meditation on crime, as a category of behavior and rhetoric equally. “What,” we will ask, “is behind Western culture’s apparently bottomless appetite for representations of crime?” We may even find some answers, in our examination of canonical and lowbrow literature as well as television, comics, popular music, and whatever else comes to hand. Does “crime” depend on a prior concept of “law,” or is it rather “law” that cannot exist without “crime”? What’s love got to do, got to do with it? This might be the class for you.

Required texts

• Sophocles, The Theban Plays
• Dante, The Inferno
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
• Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

A course reader including writings by Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Raymond Pettibon, Jack Spicer, Thomas de Quincey, and selections from the book of Genesis.

CL 1B:8 16642 BALBUENA TT 9:30-11 224 WHEELER

CL 1B:9 16645 HAFFNER TT 9:30-11 225 WHEELER

“What’s in the Box?, or, Detecting Bodies”

In the recent movie Jumanji, the success of one of the characters’ two thousand hours of psychoanalysis, she says, depends on Robin Williams’s having been hacked to pieces by his father in 1969 and hidden in the house’s nooks and crannies. Unfortunately for her, he has really been stuck in the “Jumanji” game box, and now he’s out and ready to continue playing. Why should that “really” somehow be more real? How is “what’s in the box”--an elephant/rhino stampede, giant mosquitoes, a relentless man hunter-related to what’s going on outside? What’s “really” inside the box?

Some think it’s a matter of detection. What does the one in the role of detective detect? How is the box’s content gendered or sexualized? How does the box’s content gender or sexualize the act of detecting, of knowing, the detective’s psychic organization(s)? Is it the detective’s job to discover the contents, or is the process of detection the ruse allowing the detective to avoid “knowing too much”? If such knowledge is excessive, what could it be excessive to? Why are bodies and body parts always floating around like they just don’t fit in? How does Hamlet fit in? For answers, look in the box...

Requirements

• (50%) 250-500-word essay due each week
• (30%) one 2500-word final paper
• (20%) class attendance and participation.
• ALERT! You can’t pass the course if you miss one third or more of the class meetings.

This course will emphasize good writing style, good sentence construction, and lucid, text-based argumentation. Excerpts from The Practical Stylist by Sheridan Baker will be in the course reader.

Required texts

written

• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art (chapters 6-9)
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
• Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories (Collier, MacMillan ed. only)
• Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw” (course reader)
• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (course reader)
• William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Oxford edition only)
• Virgil, The Aeneid (course reader)

movies

• Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
• Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)
• Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
• Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
• Fargo (Joel Coen, 1995)
• Jumanji (Joe Johnston, 1995)
• Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
• Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

*Some additional optional articles in the course reader on the web site.

CL 1B:10 16648 SCHACHTER TT 11-12:0 210 WHEELER

The Storyteller’s Story: Self-conscious Narration and Beyond

This course will focus on a series of narratives which thematize storytelling and narration, as well as the transmission and interpretation of narratives. As we read texts that take as their central subject matter reading and writing, we will address the following questions: To what ends can an author foreground the production and consumption of narratives and their conventions? In what ways do such texts demonstrate the power of acts of narration and interpretation? What happens when this thematization includes the removal of the boundaries separating the author from the fictional world of his or her story? What can our experiences with the characters of these texts-who themselves function as authors, readers, storytellers, and interpreters-teach us about our own experience with such activities? Finally, can we ourselves become better-or at least more aware- readers and writers by observing these practices in each of our texts?

Required texts

• Hebrew Bible - Samuel I
• Lawrence Sterne - Tristam Shandy (out of print)
• David Grossman - See Under: Love
• Andre Gide- The Immoralist (trans. Richard Howard)
• Toni Morrison - Beloved
• Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
• Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness

CL1B:11 16651 BANBAJI TT 11-12:30 123 WHEELER

Prophecy and Morality in Literature”

In this course we will discuss some literary and philosophical expressions of ancient modern prophecy and its relation to political and moral issues. Reading texts that range from the Hebrew Bible to Bertolt Brecht, we will ask ourselves how literature modifies both prophecy and morality.

Requirements: Students will be expected to attend classes, to participate in class discussion, to read carefully the assigned works and to write around 30 pages of thoughtful prose. Additional informal writing assignments, as well as one oral presentation, are required as well.

Required texts

• Aharon Appelfeld: Badenheim 1939
• Bertolt Brecht: The resistible Rise of Arthuro Ui, The Measure Taken
• Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener “
• Franz Kafka: The Trial
• Sophocles: “Antigone”
• Reader

CL 1B:12 16654 WHITE TT 11-12:30 222 WHEELER

"Where the Buffalo Roam..."

The narrator of Sam Shepard’s short story, “Gary Cooper or the Landscape,” asks which of the two is more important, the actor/character or the space through which he moves. The landscape for this course is primarily the wide open spaces of the American West and Southwest, but also includes Cesar Aira’s Argentine pampas and Gwendolyn Brooks’ urban frontier. It is primarily concerned with interrogating the gendered, racial, and cultural assumptions that underlie the representation of these spaces and of those who move through them. Are these wide open spaces as empty as they seem? How are they represented as a frontier, with its implications of imperialism? What types of mobility (freedom?) enable movement through and appropriation of these spaces? What is the relation of these spaces to the enclosed or domestic spaces that are created within them?

We will stress close readings as a method of textual analysis, and revision and peer editing as part of an intensive focus on writing skills. Course requirements include regular participation in class discussions, peer editing and self-evaluation exercises, a weekly interactive (online) reading journal, and 6 papers (two of which will be substantial revisions).

Texts

• Virgil, The Aeneid
• James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers
• Willa Cather, O, Pioneers!
• Nicole Brossard, Mauve Desert (trans. Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood)
• Cesar Aira, The Hare (trans. Nick Caistor)
• Sam Shepard, from Cruising Paradise: “Gary Cooper or the Landscape” and “Dust”
• poetry, including Rudolfo Anaya, “Walt Whitman Strides the Llano”; Jimmy Santiago Baca, “Black Mesa,” “Dust Bowl Memory,” and “Choices” (from Martin & Meditations on the South Valley); Gwendolyn Brooks, “Strong Men, Riding Horses” and “The Blackstone Rangers” (series); Joy Harjo; Campbell McGrath, “Plums” (from Road Atlas); Pat Mora; Gregory Orr, “Lines Written in Dejection, Oklahoma”; Antonia Quintana Pigno, “La Jornada”; Adrienne Rich, “North American Time,” “Turning the Wheel,” and “For Julia in Nebraska”
• films, including Thelma & Louise, The Searchers, and a “sphaghetti western” (Fistful of Dollars; The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly; or Once Upon a Time in the West)
• essays, including Guillermo Gomez-Pena, from The New World Border; and Richard Slotkin, “Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West’ and the Mythologization of the American Empire” and selections from Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America

CL 1B:13 16656 ZUMHAGEN TT 8-9:30 225 WHEELER

"Puzzles, Con-Games, Secrets and Codes:
Interpretation and Detection in Literature and Film"

In this course, we will be concerned to examine a series of literary and filmic texts each of which, in its own peculiar way, can be said either to represent as a whole or contain within it certain interpretive and/or ethical puzzles which demand (whether implicitly or explicitly) that readers or viewers learn to hone and develop their imaginative and detective skills in order to engage in the challenging kind of interpretive work these texts ask of them.

Required texts

• Beowulf
• Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions
• Julio Cortzar, Selected Stories
• Roberto Arlt, Selected Stories
• Franz Kafka, Selected Stories
• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• James Joyce, Dubliners
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
• Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

Films will include two of the following

• Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity
• Brian Singer, The Usual Suspects
• David Mamet, The Spanish Prisoner
• Fritz Lang, M

Students will be required to read assigned works carefully, participate in class discussions, offer one oral presentation, produce several informal writing assignments as well as 3 short papers of increasing length (each of which will be subject to extensive revisions) and one longer research paper, due at the end of the semester.

H1B 17718 GREIMAN TT 9:30-11 107 MULFORD

“Sibling Stories”

The readings in this course explore the stories of brothers and sisters which also tell stories of the foundation and foundering of communities and nations. Along with our primary texts, we will consider a variety of recent scholarship on kinship and nationhood to ask: How is the language of kinship used in the imagination of a nation or community? If words like "fraternité" suggest non-patriarchal, egalitarian familial bonds as the foundation of social and political ties, why do metaphors of siblinghood also appear so often in texts that narrate the disintegration of communities and nations? Why are these foundations so often very shaky, and what does that tell us about the stability of the metaphor of siblinghood? Primarily, this class is designed to hone compositional skills, so we will do a lot of writing, with a particular focus on refining thesis statements, revision, and on improving close readings. There will be short (around 400 words), biweekly writing assignments that will allow you to brainstorm possible arguments and readings, which you will develop in the longer essays (5-7 pages). There will be a final research project, the topics for which we will develop as a class. As an honors course, you will also have the opportunity to select and read a text that is not on the syllabus in its original language.

Required texts

• Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
• Maryse Condé, Segu
• Sophocles, Antigone
• Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
• Toni Morrison, Sula

Films

• Roman Polanski, Chinatown
• John Sayles, Lone Star