Spring 2003 Course Descriptions:
Lower- and Upper-Division Undergraduate Courses

40, #17263, TINSLEY & SIEGEL, TT 930-11, 160 DWINELLE

“Whores and other feminists:
reading and re-evaluating sex work in world literature”

It may be the world's oldest profession: but where can we look to read its (hi)stories? From stiletto wearing street walkers to veiled harem wives... from geisha girls to tranny beach hustlers... this course dialogues with various representations of sex workers' bodies in attempts to listen to these stories. Focusing on the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, and class intersect in imaginations of these bodies, we will try to make feminist sense of the attraction, outrage, and controversy surrounding the exchange of sex for money.

Is a woman's place on her back? How are regulatory gender ideologies both supported and subverted by various forms of sex work? How is sex work connected to other forms of "traditional" women's labor including sweatshop work, the piecework of "Export Processing Zones", and unpaid domestic labor? What (hidden) role have sex workers such as African slaves, Native American concubines, and California's 19th century Chinese prostitutes played in nation building? Why were Arab and West African women the subjects of pornographic postcards? And how did sex workers come to organize in unions? Over the course of the semester we will explore these and many other questions, looking to acknowledge how and why whores are also feminists, labor agitators, anti-imperialists, human rights activists and performance artists.

41B, #17266, PARK, TT 930-11, 129 BARROWS

“The Line in Lyric”

This course aims to examine the music of the individual line in lyric poetry. We will consider the patterning of sound in the line, working our way through the complications of prosody. We will begin by examining the function of the line in different verse forms, paying special attention to Shakespearean and Miltonian sonnets. Small moments in which the set rhythm falters or reshapes itself will be especially important to our readings of these poems. What kinds of innovations are possible within the regimented line? From this focus on the sonnet, we will move to the Romantic reforms of poetic diction in Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. The innovations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud will show us further exuberant possibilities of a poetry formally shaped by an altogether different landscape. We will then examine the two, founding poles of the American poem: Whitman‚s excesses and Dickinson‚s compact mysteries. Finally, we will consider the modernist revolution of the lyric line in the advent of vers libre and the harder edges of Imagism. The formal properties of Poundian innovation will be our focus at this point. The course will close with later revolutions, from the chattiness of Frank O‚Hara to the jagged music of poets like Amiri Baraka. We will get a taste of the Beats as well and perhaps even delve into the perplexities of Language Poetry.

41C, #17269, SCHACHTER, TT 11-1230, 130 WHEELER

“Writing the Past; History and Memory in the Novel”
Introduction to Literary Forms: The Novel

The relationship between history and literature has emerged as a dominant theme in literary and historical discourse as scholars begin to question the basic premises of historical “truth” and literary representation. At the center of these arguments is the ability of writers to represent historical experience through literary texts. At stake in these debates is nothing less than who gets to represent history and whom these representations ultimately serve. In this class, we will explore the variety of ways literary texts navigate the murky waters between “fiction” and “actuality.” Beginning with the nineteenth century French novel, we will examine the “realist” aesthetic, and open our discussion of “historical” fiction as we move on to Conrad, Faulkner and Baldwin. We will then study “modernist” and “post-modernist” novels that exploit the structure of memory as a narrative form. Examining the different ways these works are driven by the associative and subjective qualities of memory, we will look at the variety of formal innovations they introduce and ask how these innovations shape the genre of the novel. We will also pay careful attention to how these novelists incorporate other genres, such as the diary, autobiography and even the encyclopedia. As we examine innovations in the form of the novel, we will consider how these transformations contribute to a fundamentally different understanding of historical actuality. Throughout the course, our discussions of these themes will be grounded in close readings including careful analyses of narrative structure.

Required texts

• Balzac, Cousin Pons
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain
• William Faulkner, A Light in August
• Virgina Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
• Georges Perec W or the Memory of Childhood
• David Grossman See Under: Love
• Nadine Gordimer: Burger’s Daughter

In addition there will be a course reader containing critical and theoretical texts.

41F, #17272, STENPORT, TT 11-1230, 80 HAAS PAV.

“Seeing is Believing: Theories of Urban Modernity”
Introduction to Theory

This course posits cultural and literary expressions of visuality to be fundamental tenets of the representation of European urban modernity from 1820 to 1920. During this period of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and dramatic social change, literature and art tries not only to represent this transformation into modernity, but also serve as active agents of that change. It has been argued that practices of observation and visual norms have had an extraordinary impact on how we interpret historical events, such as urbanization, and the arts of this time period; in this course we will read fiction about cities and theories about urban modernity to question and analyze that assumption. We will also try to ask broader questions about how ocular normativity has formed the understanding of what a contemporary urban environment may be.

As the course serves as a first introduction to theory, the syllabus will also provide a general overview of social, aesthetic, gender, and literary theories that take the city to be their subject matter. Via discussions of the mythic figure of the observing (male) fl=E2neur, the juxtaposition of public space with private, and the attention to topography and material realizations of city space, the course strives to address questions of visual hierarchization as important social and literary tools of the period. In our reading, we will also grapple with questions of narrative strategy, as in the use of omniscient and omnividient (all-seeing) novelistic narration; point-of-view; genre characteristics of realism and modernism; and aspects of ordering and manipulation of urban space. This course serves as an introduction to the multi-faceted relationships between urban modernity, scopic regimes, and their literary representations.

How will we accomplish this?

Since most texts that claim to be theoretical involve a certain coded language and, some would say, a specific jargon, we will spend considerable time and effort analyzing what the texts actually are proposing, whether overtly or not, and how they achieve their argumentative force. We will also try to get at some of the underlying presumptions and will make our best to locate the texts in relevant historical and cultural contexts. Reading theory can be demanding, but also infinitely rewarding when the salient arguments help one understand both literature and the surrounding world in new ways. The class will be taught in a seminar setting where active participation is not only encouraged, but also necessary in order to provide for discussion and argument analysis. There will be plenty of opportunity for individual exploration as well. Students are expected regularly to submit response papers to theoretical pieces, and also take turns presenting articles or questions to the class. Requirements include a mid-term paper, a small research project and a final take-home exam.

Required texts for purchase

• Emile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise
• Reader (available first week of classes)

Recommended texts

• Honore de Balzac, Old Goriot (Required chapters available on reserve for self-copying)
• August Strindberg, Five Plays (Required play available on reserve for self-copying)

Maps/Fiction/Art/Film

• City maps (in reader)
• E.T.A. Hoffmann: “My Cousin’s Corner Window” (in reader)
• Honore de Balzac: Old Goriot (Recommended for purchase. Required chapters on reserve)
• Emile Zola: The Ladies’ Paradise (Required for purchase)
• Selected impressionist paintings
• August Strindberg: The Ghost Sonata (Recommended for purchase. Copies available on reserve)
• Virginia Woolf: “Street Haunting” (in reader)
• Frtiz Lang: M and Metropolis (films, screening times to be agreed upon later)

Theoretical texts, compiled in a reader (provisional):

• Jonathan Crary: from Techniques of the Observer and Suspension of Perception
• David Frisby, “The Flaneur”
• Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flaneuse”
• Walter Benjamin: “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” and “The Flaneur”
• Anne Friedman: from Windowshopping
• Rita Felski: from The Gender of Modernity
• Michel de Certeau: “Walking in the City”
• Roland Barthes: “The Reality Effect”
• Georg Simmel: “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
• Christopher Prendergast: from Paris and the Nineteenth Century
• Guy Debord: from Society of Spectacle
• Sharon Marcus: from Apartment Stories: City and Home in 19th-Century Paris and London
• T.J. Clark: from The Painting of Modern Life
• Griselda Pollock: “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”
• Deborah Parsons: from Streetwalking the Metropolis
• Martin Jay: from Downcast Eyes
• Nigel Thrift and Amin, C, eds: from Cities.

50, #17275, LARSEN, TT 1230-2, 223 WHEELER

Creative Writing in Comparative Literature
"SCRIPT"

This will be a class on several activities named "writing." First and foremost, it is a creative writing workshop to which students will be required to make a significant contribution of their own work and participation. In this it will resemble any other "creative writing" class. This class will be unlike other workshops in its refusal to take for granted a common literary assumption about writing namely, that writing as such is undifferentiated from word-processed type, and that above all the other possible styles and systems of writing, modern typography is best suited for the poet or author's transmission of verbal art to a reader. The unreflecting choice of printed type (and its organizing receptacle, the Book) made in creative writing workshops and the wider worlds of publishing we will investigate as a social locator, which regulates the potential readership of a text in various ways. In so doing we will try to figure out just what constitutes this "writing" named by "creative writing," and what separates it from the many genres and forms of "non-creative" writing. Unavoidably, we will be forced to consider whether a pure "verbal" art can ever be unhitched from graphic representation, in theory or in practice. This will require frequent recourse to the texts and visual art of the modern and pre-modern world. All along, we will refuse to take for granted the priority of speech, raising instead the question of writing and drawing as a verbally generative ur-medium.

No medium or genre of writing will be barred to the student for the "creative writing" component of the class, not even word-processed type. A student who wishes to present work in type exclusively is welcome to do so, but she or he must be prepared to defend that choice of medium as will students who work in any of the various forms of print-making, handwriting, audio/video, etc. It is unclear whether students will emerge from the class as writers or artists of any kind, or whether they will wish to. They will however leave the class with a sharper sensitivity to any writing and reading, "creative" or otherwise, that they perform in the future.

This class has a weekly reading load of under 100 pages (in one xeroxed reader). Students need not bring a portfolio of their work to the first class and are welcomed from all disciplines and majors. Please note that credit from this class does not serve toward the Creative Writing Minor.

David Larsen is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature writing on archaic Greek and Arabic poetry. His art, writing, and art writing have appeared in several literary journals and numerous self-published booklets.

60AC:1, #17278, WHITE, TT 930-11, 258 DWINELLE

“How the West Was Won: The Frontier in American Literatures and Culture”
(American Cultures)
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jwhite/Spring2003/

This course takes as its focus the Western frontier, both as contemporary myth and as historical fact, and particularly the way the frontier is figured as space and is mapped onto the Western landscape of what has come to be the United States. We will be primarily concerned with interrogating the cultural, racial, and gendered 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?

Mainstream (white) representations of the frontier, with their focus on progress and nation-building, so often elide the violence and destructiveness that accompanied the move westward. How does this elision create a very specific mythology of the West? And how is this violence re-inscribed in texts from the point of view of those on whom the violence was inflicted? What sort of an alternate mythology is presented in Native American, African American, or Chicano texts? How do all of these texts present cultural difference and negotiate cultural conflicts?

Part 1
Our approach will be at first historical, looking at depictions of the beginnings of Westward expansion, the displacement or eradication of Native Americans that resulted, and the discussions of race and slavery that attended this aspect of nation-building.

Texts

• James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers
• excerpts from the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806
• Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”
• Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life among the Piutes
• Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don
• Willa Cather, O, Pioneers!

Part II
The second half of the course will focus on more recent evocations of the Western landscape, and the ways in which the historical process of settling and colonizing the Western frontier is viewed either with nostalgia or with anger, or both. Particularly in the Southwest, the meetings of white/English, Mexican/Spanish, and Native American cultures creates a borderland area, which brings up additional questions of cultural identity and language. We will examine specifically how Chicano culture defines itself and positions itself within this landscape and within these various cultures, particulary in reference to the mythical homeland of Aztlán.We will also examine the literary uses of Western fetishes --Cowboys and Indians, Route 66, buttes and canyons, cacti, wigwams, etc. Once again, we will focus on questions of gender, race, and culture, and on how those categories are constructed.

Texts

• Jack Schaefer, Shane
• Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
• selected poetry of Jimmy Santiago Baca, Antonia Quintana Pigno, and Adrienne Rich
• Americo Paredes, from The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories
• Gloria Anzaldua, from borderlands/La Frontera
• Guillermo Gomez-Peña, from The New World Border
• Nicole Brossard, Mauve Desert, trans. Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood
• Sam Shepard, from Cruising Paradise

Films

• The Searchers
• A “Spaghetti Western” (Fistful of Dollars; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; or Once Upon a Time in the West)
• The Rez or Smoke Signals
• Thelma and Louise

Course Requirements

• Class participation
• Student presentations
• Annotated bibliography
• Several short close reading assignments
• Midterm essay exam
• Final paper

60AC:2, #17281, GOLD, TT 1230-2, 182 DWINELLE

“Laughing in the Dark”: Race, Ethnicity and Humor in American Film
(American Cultures)

From Groucho Marx to Margaret Cho and Chris Rock, this course will use film comedy as a lens through which to examine racial and ethnic experience in America. We will compare the different ways African Americans, Asian Americans and Jewish Americans have portrayed themselves and been portrayed by others in Hollywood. The effects of the exigencies of assimilation on this mass medium will be considered, as will the afterlives of minstrelsy, orientalism and vaudeville. Along the way, we will explore what role humor plays in both mediating and exaggerating difference. In what ways does it express sorrow and rage as well as delight and play? How do types and stereotypes function in comedy? What are their social effects? We will also test the thesis that humor serves as a survival mechanism, not just for various groups and their individual members, but for the culture as a whole. Genres to be covered include romantic comedy, the concert film, teen comedy, and the buddy film. We will also view various genre parodies, such as the mocumentary, and consider how these parodies critique the dominant culture. After receiving instruction in fundamental terms and concepts of film analysis, students will be expected to approach the medium in its particularity. Evaluation will be based upon class participation, short written assignments, one longer paper, a midterm and a final exam. Attendance in class and at weekly film screenings outside of class is also required.

Written Texts:

• Film Art, by David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson
• A Short Guide To Writing About Film, by Timothy Corrigan
• course reader

(NOTE: Students are advised not to purchase books before the first class meeting.)

Films Likely to Be Covered:

• A Night at the Opera
• Amos n’ Andy
• Annie Hall
• The Wedding Banquet
• Living On Tokyo Time
• She’s Gotta Have It
• I’m The One That I Want
• Chris Rock: Bigger & Blacker
• Blazing Saddles
• Beverly Hills Cops
• Stir Crazy
• Brother From Another Planet
• Hollywood Shuffle
• Shanghai Noon
• Trading Places
• The Frisco Kid
• Bulworth
• Yellow
• Zelig
• My Geisha
• Too Tired to Die

100, #17284, KURKE, TT 11-1230, 205 DWINELLE

Comp. Lit. 100 is designed to present students with texts from various genres and historical periods, to introduce them to the methods of comparative study. The course will explore the connections between detective fiction and psychoanalysis, starting from the near synchronicity of their first appearances and their mutually reinforcing methods and narrative structures. We will read Sophocles' Oedipus the King as the archtype of both forms, considering why the question of guilt ("Who did it?") insistently in these texts becomes a question of identity ("Who am I?"). We will consider how fictional narratives structure identity around a hidden secret or crime, and conversely how Freud's case studies might be read as exemplars of detective fiction. We will also focus on other aspects of identity--sexuality, race, and class--that appear repeatedly imbricated in the explorations of self in these two genres. Course requirements include three papers (the third based on an oral presentation of a text chosen by the student and read outside of class).

Readings will include

• Apuleius, The Golden Ass (tr. J. Lindsay)
• H. de Balzac, "Sarrasine"
• W. Collins, The Moonstone
• A. Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Vol. 1
• W. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
• Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (selections)
  Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
  The "Wolfman" (in Three Case Histories)
• E. A. Poe, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter"
• Sophocles, Oedipus the King (in Three Theban Plays, tr. Fagles)

112B, #17287, KOTZAMANIDOU, MWF 12, 258 DWINELLE

152 #17290, WHITTA, MW 2-330, 20 WHEELER
(Cross-listed as Dramatic Art 126:2)

“Reading and Performing Medieval Drama”

"A dramatic text is a blueprint for mimetic action." (Martin Esslin)

Although Western Europe in the Middle Ages was in many ways a culture of the book, whose central metaphors for self-analysis were textual, medieval texts document a vibrant culture of performance as well. In this course, we will examine a broad sampling of medieval play texts (in English translation) with an eye to these performative qualities. We will attempt to reassess and (re)define the phenomenon of "medieval drama" viewed across a spectrum of cultural, linguistic and performance contexts, as we read both "canonical" and obscure plays originally written in Latin or the emerging European vernaculars. We will also examine the (in)famous Oberammergau passion play, the longest-running play still on the boards, as a record of late medieval and contemporary passions and prejudices. Our major focus will be the interplay between textual analysis and performance - an assessment of play texts as "blueprints for mimetic action." Workshop readings of scenes and short plays throughout the term, along with a final staged production, will form a central component of the course work. Actors, dancers, singers and musicians are encouraged to contribute their expertise to this collaborative seminar/workshop.

Required texts:

• James Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000)
• Course readers with individual play texts and secondary readings

165, #17293, REJHON, TT 11-1230, 121 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.

Readings

• Fitzgerald, Robert, tr. The Odyssey. Farrar, Straus & Girous, 1998.
• Ford, Patrick K., tr. The Mabinogi & Other Medieval Welsh Tales. Univ. of California Press, 1977.
• Gray, Elizabeth, ed. & tr. Cath Maige Tuired: Second Battle of Mag Tuired. Irish Texts Society, 1982.
• Kinsella, Thomas, tr. The Táin. Oxford Univ. Press, 1970
• Lattimore, Richmond, tr. The Iliad of Homer. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961.
• ---, tr. Hesiod: The Works and Days-Theogony. Univ. of Michigan Press, 1991.
• Young, Jean I., tr. The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson. Univ. of California Press, 1964.

170:1, #17296, KOTZAMANIDOU, F 3-6, 104 DWINELLE

Modern Greek Literature in the Original

170:2, #17299, BERNSTEIN, TT 330-5, 203 WHEELER

"The Modernist Masterpiece as a Genre and a Goal”

Although our subject is "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, in all likelihood including Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Pound, Eliot, and Celan. 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 text

• James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (paperback)

185, #17302, KAWASHIMA, TT 2-330, 205 DWINELLE

“Sex, Gender, and the Bible”

In this course we will investigate a series of questions regarding the mutual constitution of male and female in the Hebrew Bible. Through close readings of a range of biblical texts (narrative, law, wisdom literature), we will address such issues as: What happens to the goddess in monotheism? How does biblical narrative imaginatively realize the lives of women and men? What ideal roles are constructed and assigned to each? How are their bodies and sexualities legislated by biblical law? Secondary readings along with comparative evidence from Greek and ancient Near Eastern myths will help bring the biblical traditions into focus. We will conclude by reading one contemporary novelist’s imaginative response to problems of sex and gender in the Book of Genesis: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaidís Tale. Assignments will include midterm and final papers.

Required texts

• The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
• Michael David Coogan, Stories from Ancient Canaan
• Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia
• M. L. West, Hesiod’s Theogony, Works and Days
• Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses
• Course reader

190:1, #17305, MONROE, TT 930-11, 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

190:2, #17308, A. KAHN, TT 1230-2, 279 DWINELLE

“Travel Literature of the European and Russian Enlightenment”

The course will examine the literature of travel and exploration in the period of the Enlightenment. Particular attention will be paid to questions of genre and narratology; to the relation between didacticism and entertainment; to the philosophic nature of voyages of discovery; to the construction of personal and national identity through a comparative perspective; to the literary performance of the self; to representations of ethnicity and gender; to the inter-relation of ethnographic and scientific study and belletristic texts.

Required texts

• Montesquieu, The Persian Letters
• Voltaire, Letters concerning the English nation
• Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels
• Diderot, 'Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage'
• Smollet, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker
• Sterne, Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
• Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller
• Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow