Spring 2002 Course Descriptions:
Lower- and Upper-Division Undergraduate Courses

CL 30B 16657 KAWASHIMA TT 12:30-2 240 DWINELLE

"Women in the Hebrew Bible, or, The Good Book's Better Half"

It goes without saying that the Bible is a "patriarchal" book. As such, in various circles past and present, it has been and continues to be used as a means of relegating women to the status of "the second sex." As we shall see, however, the Bible itself presents a more complicated picture than some traditional interpretations would have us believe. To this end, we will devote the bulk of this course to grappling with the portrayal of women in a wide range of biblical narratives, discovering along the way both compelling female characters and troubling turns of events. To supplement these stories, we will also read selections from ancient Near Eastern myths as well as biblical law and wisdom literature, which in turn will raise some interesting questions: What happens to the goddess in monotheism? When and why are women (and men) considered "unclean"? What constitutes the "ideal woman" in ancient Israel? Alongside these primary texts, secondary readings will raise various critical issues apropos of the themes and questions of our course. We will conclude by reading one contemporary novelist's imaginative response to the situation of women in the Book of Genesis: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Required texts
  • The Bible (recommended version: The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd edition)
  • Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
  • Course Reader
Recommended text
  • Alice Bach, editor, Women in the Hebrew Bible

CL 39D 16660 VERDUCCI MW 3-4, W 5-6 200 WHEELER

Epic Poetry A Writing Attentive Seminar

In this seminar on epic poetry, we shall read The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Aeneid, and Beowulf (the last accompanied by F.Gibson's CD of her reading of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation). The students will be directed to crucial passages for close reading in the discussion sections on Mondays and Wednesdays, although prior to discussion a complete reading of each epic will be required. In the Wednesday afternoon 500 seminar meetings, we shall read a small number of English lyric poems--long or small--that approach epic themes, values, or characters from a personal vantage. The writing-attentive dimension of the seminar will combine the two genres, epic and lyric, in the following way the subjects for student writing will be the great epic poems read in translation. The English lyric poems will be read for the light they shed on the issues and values of the primary epic texts. They will, additionally, be used to reintroduce the seminar members to the lexicon of English grammar, syntax and instruments of imaginative and expository style which is fundamental both to reading and to writing. The instructor will be available from the beginning of the semester and thereafter for group and individual tutorial meetings at times and places to be arranged to suit the students' schedules. The writing-attentive tutorials have in the past proven to be at the heart of the students' often dramatically increased power of literary expression as well as literary interpretation.

CL 40 16663 ANDERSON/ GOLD TT 12:30-2:00 223 DWINELLE
** Please Note Correction to Meeting Time **

“WOMEN WARRIORS: A Cross-Cultural Comparison”

Whether it be for their protection, recovery, or acquisition, women are traditionally the reason for which men wage war. Despite their close association with war, however, women rarely participate in combat. What happens when women enter that most male of all spaces: the battlefield? Do they lose an essential peaceful female quality? Do they become sexless? Or rather, by joining battle, do women become highly sexualized male fantasy figures? In this course, we will examine how female identity is constructed both through and against war in various literary and filmic representations. Our sources will come from both ancient and modern cultures, from the East as well as the West, from "high" literature and pop culture alike. We will begin chronologically, reading excerpts from Herodotus, the Mahabharata, the Bible, and Chinese yue fu poetry (all in translation). Next we will look at medieval and Renaissance representations of warrior women, ranging from Joan of Arc to the female characters in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered to the female scholar-warriors of Tang Dynasty stories. Finally, in the modern section of the course, we will read George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, and the poetry of Qiu Jin, a turn-of-the-century Chinese revolutionary and feminist. We will wrap up the course by reading a science fiction novel, Snow Crash, and by watching the following movies either in excerpt or in full: Aliens, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Courage Under Fire. Two TV shows we will consider are Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Required texts
  • Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, tr. Esolen
  • George B. Shaw, Saint Joan. A Chronicle Play
  • Maxine H. Kingston, The Woman Warrior
  • Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash
  • Aristophanes, Lysistrata, tr. Arrowsmith
Recommended text
  • Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers

CL 41D 16666 HAUSDOERFFER TT 12:30-2 203 WHEELER

“Figuring Difference: 'Playing the Other' in Classical and Early Modern Drama”

The theater played a key role in both Classical and Early Modern cultures, functioning not only as an important source of entertainment, but also as the central arena for both the construction and the criticism of cultural fantasies about 'alterity' (i.e. 'otherness'). In this course we will explore both the theoretical issues surrounding the representation of alterity in general and, specifically, the enactment of alterity in the theater itself. Thus, our close readings of individual dramatic texts will intersect with readings from theory and criticism in an effort to understand why playwrights produce, actors perform, and spectators watch figures of alterity so obsessively. The course is divided into two larger units (Classical Greek drama and Early Modern drama) and one shorter, final unit, in which we will seek to make connections between the two historically-distant cultures we study and our own, by looking at one 19th century play, The Octoroon, and several 20th century films.

Required texts
  • Course Reader (available at University Copy)
  • The Routledge Reader on Gender and Performance
  • Lott, Eric. Love and Theft
  • Aeschylus. Persians
  • Euripides. Medea
  • Sophocles. Trachiniae
  • Aristophanes. Lysistrata
  • Shakespeare, William. Othello and Merchant of Venice
  • Middleton and Dekker. The Roaring Girl
  • Behn, Aphra. The Feigned Courtesans
  • Boucicault, Dion. The Octoroon

CL 60AC:1 16666 WAREH TT 9:30-11 219 DWINELLE
(American Cultures)

“Singing the Self: Narrative and Identity in Nineteenth Century America”

In this course we will explore how varied notions and depictions of the self, primarily in nineteenth century American literature, served both political and personal ends at a time of great social changes, including the crisis of the Civil War, national expansion, and the Suffrage movement. We will examine autobiographies as well as poetry, essays, and speeches by African American, Native American, and European American authors as we seek to understand the relationships among individual, group, and national identity in this time of crisis.

Our focus will be on personal narratives, and we will pay particular attention to the tension between each speaker or author’s personal as well as public motives for writing. We will be concerned to explore not only the historical, social, and cultural moment in which each text finds its meaning, but also the author’s own position in the society that surrounds him or her, seen both in terms of his or her own culture, and the other American cultures in relationship to which that culture, in part, finds it meaning. As we consider each author’s cultural position, we will ask questions such as the following: How can the story of one individual’s development serve a political purpose? In what ways can autobiography become the story not only of one person’s life, but that of their whole cultural group? What role does race play in the construction of personal identity? How do African American and Native American authors both adopt and resist European American cultural values in their own personal narratives? How do personal narratives intertwine in these texts with arguments about various forms of oppression and deconstructions of the tenets that make it possible? How does the notion of the universality of the human soul provide a powerful means to critique the institution of slavery, the encroachment on Native American lands, or the lack of women’s suffrage? How do the acts of writing or speaking perform a liberating action, and what are the limits of that action?

Required texts
  • Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
  • Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself
  • Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Democratic Vistas, and selected poems
  • Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
  • Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes
  • Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks
  • Course Reader, including the Declaration of Independence, Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” Sojourner Truth’s “A’n’t’ I Woman,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Solitude of Self,” Chief Joseph’s Surrender Speech, Emerson’s “The American Scholar” and “Self Reliance.”

Course Requirements include active participation and attendance, a midterm exam, two to three papers, and a group presentation.

CL 60AC:2 16672 FULMER TT 11-12:30 219 DWINELLE
(American Cultures)

“Coming of Age in North America:
Assimilation and Adulthood in African, Irish, and Chinese American Communities”

This course addresses the question: What forms of rhetoric convey a culture’s ideal of adulthood? This course addresses the question of how a young person approaches adolescence while stepping from one culture into the next. The narratives in this course tell of young people who have either just left their previous country or are part of a family who have arrived more recently in the US. A few narratives recount the effects of an “internal” cultural migration--a movement between social classes in America. Out of the readings, the class will examine images of adulthood, ideas about what constitutes adulthood in the eyes of parents, employers, teachers, and other adult members of a culture, and how these images often differ between cultures.

The three groups covered include African Americans, Irish Americans, and Chinese Americans. Initially, students will read pieces portraying young adults in Africa, Ireland, and China. They will then compare portrayals of young adulthood in those works to portrayals from works that treat the point-of-entry and later-generation experiences of African-, Irish-, and Chinese American men and women. Students will observe how expectations change between the different stages and time periods, and how expectations differ between the cultural groups, as members of those cultures portray them.

Required texts
  • Sebranek, Kemper, and Meyer. Write for College: A Student Handbook
  • Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
  • Cary, Lorene. Black Ice.
  • Chang, Pang-Mei Natasha. Bound Feet and Western Dress: A Memoir
  • Lee, Gus. China Boy
  • Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon

I expect to put the remaining selections in the Course Reader.

CL 100:1 16675 CASCARDI MW 2-3:30 235 DWINELLE

“Strange Actions, Unexpected Consequences”

Literature offers fascinating insights into forms of action that do not correspond to what we experience in the ‘ordinary’ world. What are we to make of this? In this course we will take up the question of action as an introduction to the comparative study of literature. Beginning with Oedipus Rex and Antigone we will look at cases of action whose outcomes seem strangely to have been determined in advance, acts whose consequences appear wildly disproportionate to them, actions that do not seem to involve any kind of ‘doing’ at all, or that appear wasteful or purposeless. We will also look at cases in which the doer of an action is not human, and in which the power to act is invested in super-human beings (gods) and sub-human beings (insects, objects). Our readings will range widely over genres and periods. In addition to Greek tragedy, texts will include all or parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin, Kafka’s The Trial and Metamorphosis, works by Henry James and by Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot). Some supplementary readings ranging from Aristotle to Freud and moral philosophers will allow us to give theoretical consideration to the ways in which action is represented in literature.

Required texts
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
  • Sophocles, Antigone
  • Ovid, Metamorphoses (selections)
  • Lucretius, De rerum naturae (selections)
  • Cervantes, “Tale of Foolish Curiosity” from Don Quixote
  • Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin
  • Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
  • Kafka, The Trial, The Metamorphosis
  • Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame
  • Hitchcock, “The Birds”
  • Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies
  • Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Schopenhauer, “Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will”
  • Aristotle, Poetics
  • Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (selections)

CL 100:2 16678 SPACKMAN TT 11-12:30 2038 VAL LSB

In this course, we will examine the relation between narrative and desire in a selection of works from various historical periods, national traditions, and genres. Questions to be considered include: How do desires generate narratives? How do narratives produce desiring subjects? How might desire interrupt narrative? Does desire have a gender? What is the relation between epistemological desire and sexual desire? How might we understand the relation between self-knowledge and the desire for narrative? Texts will include Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Boccaccio, The Decameron, Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Freud, “The Wolf-Man,” Henry James, “The Aspern Papers” and „”The Beast in the Jungle,” Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Anna Banti, Artemisia, and Italo Calvino, If on a Winter‚s Night a Traveler. We will also look at a selection of critical essays that offer models of desire, of narrative, or of their relation; readings will be drawn from works of Peter Brooks, Judith Butler, René Girard, Teresa de Lauretis, J.Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Required texts
  • Boccaccio, Decameron
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
  • Freud, Three Case Histories
  • Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night..
  • Banti, Artemisia
  • Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories
  • Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
  • Flaubert, Madame Bovary

CL 112B 16681 KOTZAMANIDOU MWF 12 222 WHEELER

Modern Greek Language

CL 152 16684 WHITTA TT 2-3:30 258 DWINELLE

“Dissent and Heresy in the Middle Ages”

This course will have as its focus an examination of discourses of dissent formulated in the early and high Middle Ages by a variety of social groups in Western Europe. We will study the "origins of European dissent" both as concrete phenomena and as cultural metaphors, as signs of political and personal resistance to forms of externally-mandated control or censorship. Our central topic will be the rise of nation-state, religious and socio-cultural identities and the polarization of "outside" groups (Jews, Muslims, heretics, witches, sexual deviants, the diseased). We will look at the literature of the first Crusade, the rise of the Inquisition in Spain and France, the isolation of non-orthodox Christians and non-Christians (especially Albigensians, Waldensians, Knights Templar, Jews and Muslims), the "invention" of sodomy and witchcraft as categories of deviance, and the medicalization of deviance (leprosy, bubonic plague, syphilis), always with one eye focused on how these medieval discourses of dissent and heterodoxy remain powerful cultural constructions in our own day. Requirements: two papers, one mid-term and a final exam.

Required texts
  • The Song of Roland
  • The Poem of the Cid
  • R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent
  • E. Peters, ed., Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe
  • J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading
  • A. C. Kors and E. Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe: 400-1700

There will be a course reader containing a variety of primary (troubadour lyric, romance, drama, pilgrim's books, legal, historical and ecclesiastical documents) and secondary sources.

CL 155:1 16687 BERNSTEIN TT 3:30-5 205 DWINELLE

The Modern Period

Although its subject might be called "The Modernist Masterpiece as a Genre and a Goal,” I will not be concentrating solely upon the relationships of the works we are reading to any single over-arching motif, nor to various more traditional literary-philosophical taxonomies. Instead, I want to explore a set of works whose specific family resemblance will only emerge as our discussion itself unfolds. Close attention will be paid to the ways in which each of these writers experimented with the technical issues of form and structure as well as with their innovative use of new thematic materials.

In the first part of the semester, we will be reading texts by several of the most important modern poets. Works by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, are some of the poets who will likely be discussed, but there are enough possible choices to amend and expand this list to take into account the evolving interests of the class participants. In the second part of the semester we will read James Joyce‚s Ulysses, the archetypal modernist prose masterpiece. Regular and active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in copious reading are the principal prerequisites for the course.

Required texts
  • Ellmann and O‚Clair (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (W.W. Norton, paperback)
  • William Rees (ed.), French Poetry 1820-1950 (Penguin Books; paperback)
  • James Joyce, Ulysses, Random House (paperback)

CL 155:2 16690 RAM TT 11-12:30 121 WHEELER

“The European Avant-garde: from Futurism to Surrealism”

The literary avant-garde of the early twentieth century was the most radical expression of European modernism in literature and art. We will be focusing on the four most radical and creative of the avant-garde movements to have swept through Europe between the 1910's and the 1930's: Italian and Russian futurism, dada in Zurich and Berlin, and French surrealism. We will be reading avant-garde poetry, manifestoes, performance texts and plays, experi- mental fiction and memoirs. We will also be paying some attention to parallel developments in the visual arts and cinema.

Topics for discussion include literature and revolutionary politics, tradition and modernity, theoretical metalanguage and its relationship to artistic practice, poetic experimentation, the relationship of sound to meaning, the limits of art, the cult of technology, literature and utopia, and the relationship of writing to theories of the unconscious.

All texts will be reading in translation; no prerequisites

Writers include: Filippo Marinetti, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Ilya Zdanevich, Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, André Breton, Louis Aragon, René Daumal.

CL 156 16693 TARICA TT 2-3:30 234 DWINELLE

“Migration-Diaspora-Return"
Literature of the Americas

This course will examine contemporary Latin American and Caribbean prose and poetry to discuss how men and women writers have defined the native/natal land--often as a mother, as lost, unknown, corrupt, pristine, or new--and imagined a return to it. We will consider how this recurring theme has shaped responses to both colonial and modern histories of displacement from African, Asian, and Native American lands and cultures. Of particular concern will be: the gender dimensions of these representations; the relation between urban and rural spaces and identities; and the particular dilemmas faced by writers in largely oral cultures. Although drawing primarily on Spanish- and French-language texts, class will be conducted in English and all readings will be available in translation. Spanish majors will be expected to read the Spanish-language texts in Spanish and complete all written work in Spanish.

Requirements: several short papers, oral presentation, final exam.

Required texts
  • José María Arguedas, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo
  • * ---, The Fox From up Above and the Fox from down Below
  • Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos
  • * ---, The Lost Steps
  • Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
  • Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land
  • Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco
  • Maryse Condé, Heremakonon
  • Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse
  • Jacques Roumain, Masters of the Dew
  • Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
  • Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Juletane

CL 165 16696 REJHON TT 11-12:30 220 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.

Course requirements include a midterm and final examination. No prerequisites.

Required texts
  • Homer, The Iliad of Homer, tr. Lattimore
  • Hesiod: The Works and Days: Theogony, tr. Lattimore
  • The Odyssey, tr. Faizgerald
  • The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, tr. Young
  • The Tain, tr. Kinsella
  • Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales, tr. Ford
  • The Poetic Edda, tr. Larrington
  • Cath Maige Tuired: Second Battle of Mag Tuired, tr. and ed. Gray

CL 170:1 16699 KOTZAMANIDOU F 3-6 104 DWINELLE

Modern Greek Literature in the Original

CL 170:2 16702 RAM TT 3:30-5 130- WHEELE

East/West Encounters
"Quest and Conquest"

A source of riches to be plundered or a repository of wisdom to be tapped: the east has been imagined by the west chiefly in these two ways. The course proposes to read some great literary works by European, American and Asian writers in which the east/west dialogue is figured through this double prism of spiritual quest and imperial conquest.

Themes include:
  • The enigma of eastern religions in Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Foster
  • Western modernity and Indian cultural nationalism in Tagore
  • Conquest and resistance: Russian literary representations of the Caucasus
  • Tolstoy and Gandhi: the imperial state and the spiritual politics of non-violence
  • Violence and the ethics of cross-cultural desire
  • The Beat Generation and the literature of Californian Buddhism
  • Salman Rushdie and the globalization of Islam
Texts include:
  • Rudyard Kipling, Kim
  • E. M. Forster, Passage to India
  • Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
  • 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
  • Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
  • Tayib Salih, Season of Migration to the North
  • Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses

Prerequisites: All readings will be in English, no prerequisite for attendance.

CL 170:3 16705 SAS MWF 11 258 DWINELLE

Mass Media and Culture

What is the impact of mass media on our view of the world? How can we understand our place within the identity frameworks into which we are "thrown" and within which we perform our own cultural work? How does our consumption of so-called "trash" affect our notions of creativity, the role of the artist, the relevance of literature? This course examines influential arguments about the mass media (semiotics, critiques of ideology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, gender studies) in order to develop a repertoire of critical tools for the analysis and reading of mass media and its influences. The course draws examples from literature, film, television, animation, as well as from works (and groups) that confront or resist the assumptions of mass culture. Sub-topics: fashion, kitch, the construction of race and ethnicity in the media, sexuality and desire, computer culture, contemporary Japan, plastic surgery, memory, masquerade and performance.

Texts include:
  • Roland Barthes, Mythologies
  • Jean Baudrillard, Simulations
  • Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
  • Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body
  • Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
  • Dick Hebidge, Subculture: the Meaning of Style
  • H. Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan
  • Tania Modleski, ed. Studies in Entertainment
  • Anna Deveare Smith, Fires in the Mirror
  • Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories
  • John Treat, ed. Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture
  • [Film] Akira

CL 190:1 16708 MONROE TT 9:30-11 123 DWINELLE

"The Medieval Frametale 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 190:2 16711 ALTER TT 11-12:30 258 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