Spring 2005 Course Offerings: 1A and 1B

"Between Language and the Senses"

What can we see while we are reading? And what can we hear? How does a literary text transcend the silence of the page and its black-and-white print? Does literature merely tell us of sensory experiences or does it also trigger our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch? In this class, we will examine the complex relation between sensory perceptions and art. Our task will be twofold: we will deal with the relation that literature establishes between writing and perception, between aesthetic expression and sensory experience, as well as with the complicated interactions between literature, the visual arts and music in their attempt to stimulate our senses. By reading, viewing and listening to lyric poems, songs, operas, novels, paintings, films and essays that invoke one or more of our senses, we will trace back the artistic fascination with sensory experience across cultures and time. We will study Romantic and Symbolist poetry, which blurs the distinctions between our five senses so as to transport us into the sublime. Further, we will consider the ways in which literary works transcend their verbal medium either by incorporating art objects in their texture, or by migrating to the other arts, as in the case of the Biblical story of Salome, which fascinated artists, composers and writers alike. Finally, we will see how twentieth-century writers attempt to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust by resorting to the senses and the other arts.

Required Texts

• Valdimir Nabokov, Pnin
• William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream
• Oscar Wilde, Salome

Recommended Texts

• Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
• Eduard Morike, Mozart's Journey to Prague
• Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Music

• Bach (fugues), Schubert (songs), Richard Strauss (the opera Salome)

Film

• Tampopo

There will be a Course Reader with poems, critical essays, or short stories by Baudelaire, Celan, Freud, Goethe, Keats, Lessing, Mitchell, Neruda, Rimbaud, Seghers, and Woolf, as well as selections from Plato's Republic and Homer's Iliad.

CL 1A:2, #17206, SPRINGER, MWF 10-11, 125 Dwinelle

"Old School: Education and its discontents"

The class will make a quick survey of theories of education, starting with those originating in classical antiquity. After reviewing these sometimes naive textbook ideas, we will see how the various novels address the student experience and treat the transmission of cultural values through “hidden curricula.”

Like much fiction dealing with formal or informal education, these novels share themes of alienation and rejection of authority, and the protagonists wield some of the worst attitudes in history, expressing their disgust with everything from sneers and derision to Visa cards to pointed sticks and MAC-10s. If you can appreciate people who have problems dealing with the educational system and growing up, this class may be for you.

Class discussions will involve style and narrative strategy, and we will examine how each writer uses different styles and approaches. We will observe the use of voice and persona in lyric poets, but the focus on novels requires attention to narrative techniques, such as point of view, focalization, and backgrounding/foregrounding of history.

Writing will amount to some 32 pages, and students will engage in extensive peer editing.

Texts

• Reader: Educational Theory and Lyric Poetry
• Annas, Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
• J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
• Shakespeare, The Tempest
• Simenon, The Little Saint*
• William Golding, Lord of the Flies
• Leon Bing, Do or Die
• Brett Easton Ellis, Less than Zero
• Hacker, The Bedford Reader

*Out of print; available from Amazon in used copies of the Fourth Simenon Omnibus

Film possibilities

• Dead Poets Society
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High
• Stand and Deliver
• Bowling for Columbine

CL 1A:3, #17209, ZUMHAGEN/Wells, TT 8-9:30, 182 Dwinelle

Trials and Tribulations:
Canny and Uncanny Sources of Detection and Judgment

In this course we will take up questions concerning the relationship among justice, truth and the law within the framework of a series of trial and detective narratives.

Texts will be chosen from among the following:

• Sophocles, Antigone
• Plato, The Apology
• William Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
• Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter" and “William Wilson”
• Jorge Luis Borges, “Death and the Compass” and “Garden of Forking Paths”
• Franz Kafka, “On Parables”, The Trial
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Fritz Lang, M
• Luisa Valenzuela, Black Novel
• Akira Kurosawa , Rashomon
• Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

CL 1A:4, #17212, HERBOLD/Shulman, TT 9:30-11, 210 WHEELER

"The Erotic and the Exotic"

We will explore the link between eroticism and adventure, both imaginary and real, in texts ranging from a Greek tragedy of the fourth century B.C. to poems written by African-American women in the twentieth century. How and why have sexual and geographical adventures been linked by such diverse writers? How, for example, do these texts raise questions of discovery, excess, loss of control, violation of rules or boundaries, and the forbidden? In particular, how and why do female desirers raise these issues?

Students will write and revise three essays and do several shorter writing assignments in addition to the assigned reading. There will be frequent quizzes, but no midterm or final.

Texts

• Euripides, Medea
• Shakespeare, Othello
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
• Marguerite Duras, The Lover
• Xeroxed selection of lyric poetry by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, and others

CL H1B, #17221, GREEN, MWF 11-12, 224 Wheeler

"Vision and Quest"

Is a quest a search for vision? Does vision require a quest? What are the levels of vision that may motivate a quest? How does quest alter one's vision? In "Vision and Quest" we shall query the relationships between seeking and seeing, finding and knowing, blindness and truth, and revelation and the fulfillment of a journey. Through close reading, critical and interpretive writing, and group discussion, we shall explore the themes of the course; students' individual explorations will culminate in a 10-12 pp. research paper.

Comp. Lit. H1B differs from Comp. Lit. 1B in that reading knowledge of a language other than English is required. Students will therefore have the opportunity to read and work through non-English texts through the course of the semester. Depending on the students¹ reading knowledge, these non-English texts may be those we read together in class or works of the students' own choosing.

Texts

• Homer, The Odyssey (Hackett)
• Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval: The Story of the Grail
• The Quest of the Holy Grail
• Dante, Inferno (selections)
• Dante, Paradiso (selections)
• Colonna (Francesco), Hypnerotomachia
• Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream
• Swift, Gulliver¹s Travels
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse

CL 1B:1, #17224, FORT, TT 12:30-2, 125 Dwinelle

"Literature and Philosophy"

This will be a course of intensive reading and composition in which we will explore the relationship between literary (fictional, poetic) modes of presentation and philosophical arguments and expositions. Special attention will be given to the ways in which the “literary” and the “philosophical” intermingle—how does fiction take on philosophical problems? in what ways does philosophy rely on fable and poetic devices?—, and to the attempts of each to exclude the other. We will also consider notions such as metaphysics, transcendence, sensation, knowledge, subjectivity, nothingness, experience, truth and time.

Texts

• Plato, The Symposium (Hackett)
• Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Hackett)
• Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Hackett)
• Sartre, Nausea (New Directions)
• Plus a reader with substantial selections from Homer, Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Heidegger.

CL 1B:2, #17227, SCHACHTER/Barzilai, MWF 9-10, 130 Wheeler

"The Case of Jewish Literature"

In this course we will read Jewish literature from a multi-lingual and multi-national perspective, looking at texts originally written in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and English. Jewish literature provides an especially rich lens for approaching problems of identity (ethnic, racial, national, sexual, gender) that remain pressing concerns for contemporary social, cultural, and political discourse, as well as literary studies. We will look at how Jewish literature can serve as a case study for defining minority literature. As part of this discussion we will examine the way in which Jewish literature situates itself along both national and non-national lines. We will be further asking, what kind of narrative and poetic forms are produced in response to historical events such as emigration, war, or genocide? How may trauma, if at all, be inscribed in writing? And, more generally, how do these works reconfigure the opposing terms of history and literature, reality and fiction? The texts included in this course cover a broad range of literary styles and periods, from the Hebrew Bible, to German modernism, and to Israeli post-modernism. Our discussions will be structured around close readings of texts, paying attention to formal issues and narrative strategies. The course will be writing intensive, practicing skills such as persuasive argumentation, close literary analysis, and correct usage of literary and secondary sources.

Readings include works by Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Anna Seghers, W. G. Sebald, Yehudit Katzir, Yehuda Halevi, Sholem Aleykhem, Rachel, Yehuda Amichai, and Ronit Matalon.

CL 1B:3, #17230, RAMEY/Moody, TT 9:30-11, 200 Wheeler

"How To Be A Parasite And Live Forever"

Worried about getting older? Looking for alternatives other than the traditional one (i.e., death)? Then this is the course for you. We will begin by observing that in this world there are “Givers” and there are “Takers.” We all adore and respect the nurturing, generous Givers, but this course will focus on the Takers—those charming, smiling yet utterly selfish individuals who somehow always let you pick up the tab. Our focus will have a twofold purpose: to learn to avoid being “had” by the Taker’s cheerful roguery, and to observe the peculiar similarity between the strategies of such parasites and the sly method by which living worlds, ideas, and characters—breathing, laughing, weeping—are made immortal through narrative art. In other words, we will be studying the mechanism by which narrative art can be conceived as a sort of parasitic entity that confers immortality to its creators, to its subjects, and (with any luck) to its readers.

Students must attend classes, participate in class discussions, work on group projects, and demonstrate thoughtful readings of the assigned texts. A total of about 32 pages of prose will be turned in throughout the semester: a diagnostic essay and two papers of substantial length, each of which will be subject to extensive revision. Students will be asked to participate in an ongoing web-based dialogue and to give an oral presentation. In order to take this class, you must be willing to stay alive for at least three hundred years.

Texts

• Homer, The Odyssey (translation by Robert Fagles)
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey
• James Joyce, Ulysses (selections)
• Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
• Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman
• Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
• Frederick Crews, The Random House Handbook

Reader

• Will include selected poetry, short stories, readings in cultural theory and discourse analysis, and critical approaches to the texts.

Films

• Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgousie
• Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire

CL 1B:4, #17233, RAMOS, TT 11-12:30, 125 Dwinelle

"Fires on the Plain:
Representing War in Literature, Film and Photography"

It is often stated that World War II, both in terms of its means and magnitude of destruction, ushered in a heightened (although not altogether novel) era of “total war” whereby traditional distinctions between civilian and soldier, innocent bystander and responsible participant, are suspended in moments of international conflict and civil strife. Indeed, the numerous instances of mass slaughter committed in the last fifty or so years has given the clausewitzian dictum (“war is state policy carried out through other means”) an urgent, if unsettling, relevance for rethinking the meaning and logic of modern warfare. Taking Clausewitz’ definition as our point of departure, we will examine the various ways in which literary, filmic and photographic texts explore, question, and reformulate the meaning of war and its clandestine variants (e.g., genocide, revolution, terrorism, coup d’etat, etc.). Two interrelated problems will serve as the guiding double-lens of class discussion. First, we will explore the highly charged and vexed relationships that bind victims and victimizers together as they pertain to questions of justice and retribution. Secondly, we will examine the ethics and aesthetics of representing suffering, both personal and foreign.

Required literary texts will be selected from the following

• Rigoberta Menchu, I, Rigoberta Menchu
• Shohei Oka, Fires on the Plain
• Bao Nihn, The Sorrow of War
• Tahar Ben Jelloun, This Blinding Absence of Light
• Alicia Partnoy, The Little School
• Amitav Gosh, The Glass Palace
• Pascal Kwo Thwe, From the Land of the Green Ghosts

Required filmic texts will be selected from the following

• Gillo Pontecorvo, Battle of Algiers
• Rithy Panh, S-21: The Khmer Killing Machine
• Barbara Sonneborn, Regret to Inform
• Patricia Flynn, Discovering Dominga

*Course reader will include theoretical texts from the following authors: Clausewitz, Arendt, Ignatieff, Baudrillard, Sontag, Freud, among others, as well as documents in international law (e.g., Geneva Convention, UN Declaration of the Rights of Man).

*Photographic texts will from Latin America and Southeast Asia will be examined in class alongside our discussion of literature and film.

CL 1B:5, #17236, WALTER, MWF 9-10, 182 Dwinelle

"La Malmariée"

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” These famous words from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina provide the initiative for a course on women whose marriages and engagements prove less than satisfying to them. The malmariée, or unhappy wife, is an important character of romance, lyric and fabliaux genres; as well, she is a staple of dramatic plots predating Italy’s commedia dell’arte. We will explore how her manifestations in literature reflect social anxieties about female sexuality and the role of the woman in marriage.

Texts

• Euripides, Medea
• Chretien, Chevalier de la Charrette or Anonymous, The Romance of Flamenca
• Shakespeare, Othello
• Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Edith Wharton, The Little School
• Pinter, The Homecoming

Films

• Ossessione (Visconti, 1943: 140 min.)
• Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944: 110 min.)
• Gaslight (Cukor, 1944: 114)
• A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavettes, 1974: 155 min.)

Reader

• Occitan and Italian medieval poems; period accounts of Marie-Antoinette; short stories by Perkins-Gillman, Sue Miller, Raymond Carver, and Margaret Atwood.

CL 1B:6, #17239, WALTER, MWF 10-11, 224 Wheeler

"Sadism"

This course examines works that manifest internal patterns of sadistic behavior. Our goal is to expose the diverse narrative strategies that artists employ to represent their fantasies of power. Beginning with tales of Narcissus and of Tereus and Procne from Ovid’s epic, Metamorphoses and passing on to the testimonies of Catherine of Sienna and Margery Kempe, we will shed sexual clichés and try to develop a more complex definition of sadistic subjectivity. The novels of Brontë and Woolf—and a drama of Pinter—will allow us to explore the aspects of sadistic behavior rooted in the structure of the family. Dark postwar films of Hollywood and fiction by contemporary Japanese artists will help us to connect the sadistic urge with socio-cultural trauma.

Texts

• Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Enchi Fumiko, Masks
• Tanizaki, Quicksand
• Pinter, The Homecoming

Films

• Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940: 130 min.)
• Scarlet Street (Lang, 1945: 103 min.)
• Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (Meyers, 1965: 83 min.)
• Belle de Jour (Buñuel, 1967: 101 min.)
• Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986: 120 min.)

Reader

• Selections from Ovid, Catherine of Sienna, Margery Kempe; Italian poetry by Compiuta Donzella; selections from Sade’s Justine; essays by Freud; poems by Plath; Kono Taeko’s short story “Toddler Hunting”.

Visual Art

• Photos by Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe.

CL 1B:7, #17242, TRAN/McEnaney, MWF 11-12, 121 Wheeler

"Adaptations"

This class looks at literary texts that have been adapted for another genre, another medium, or another historical moment. How have the works been re-created or re-worked? Why have they been revised as such? To answer these questions, we will have to look at the works’ similarities and differences simultaneously. We will probe the limits and capabilities of different aesthetic media and modes of representation. Attention will also be given to the socio-historical or cultural contexts surrounding various moments of cultural production.

The requirements for this class include: 32 pages worth of writing, weekly responses, presentations, regular attendance, participation, the occasional quiz, and attendance to screenings outside of class time. R1B also requires a research paper.

Our texts may include

• Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky novel → Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky film
• Bronte’s Jane Eyre novel → Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea novel
• Conrad’s Heart of Darkness novel → Achebe’s Things Fall Apart novel; Coppola's Apocolypse Now film
• Dante's Canto XV of, Purgatorio poem → Goodison’s “Brunetto Latini” poem; Bob Marley's “Mr. Brown” song
• Genesis biblical verse → Milton’s Paradise Lost poem
• Hwang’s M Butterfly play → Madame Butterfly opera and stage adaptations
• Nguyen Huy Thiep’s stories → various Vietnamese films
• Odyssey epic → Joyce’s Ulysses novel; Walcott’s Omeros poem; O Brother Where Art Thou film
• Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway novel → Cunningham’s The Hours novel → The Hours film

CL 1B:8, #17245, FISHER/Boyarin, TT 9:30-11, 223 Dwinelle

"One Bad Trip: Travel in Fact and Fiction"

Epic journeys, swashbuckling adventures, Arthurian quests, colonial missions, anthropological explorations, voyages of self-discovery: these familiar tales are all tales of travel. What is it about traveling that fascinates writers, and what is it about writing that fascinates travelers? Does the unknown entice or frighten? Hold the promise of utopia or suggest a threat to existing social order? Does travel foster understanding or beget colonialism and cultural hegemony? Do we travel to learn about others or about ourselves? This course will address these questions and more through examination of various literary representations of travel.

Texts

• Virgil, The Aeneid
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Forster, A Passage to India (selections)
• Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
• A course reader will include selections from the Hebrew Bible and pieces by Ibn Battuta, Mark Twain, Nhat Linh, and Chinua Achebe.

CL 1B:9, #17248, FORT, TT 9:30-11, 125 Dwinelle

"Literature and Philosophy"

This will be a course of intensive reading and composition in which we will explore the relationship between literary (fictional, poetic) modes of presentation and philosophical arguments and expositions. Special attention will be given to the ways in which the “literary” and the “philosophical” intermingle—how does fiction take on philosophical problems? in what ways does philosophy rely on fable and poetic devices?—, and to the attempts of each to exclude the other. We will also consider notions such as metaphysics, transcendence, sensation, knowledge, subjectivity, nothingness, experience, truth and time.

Texts

• Plato, The Symposium (Hackett)
• Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Hackett)
• Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Hackett)
• Sartre, Nausea (New Directions)
• Plus a reader with substantial selections from Homer, Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Heidegger.

CL 1B:10, #17251, CRUZ/Bhaumik, TT 12:30-2, 123 Wheeler

"Rethinking Community"

In his Keywords, Raymond Williams explains, “community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships.” What we define as a community, our community, is often difficult to pin-down specifically (though we’d like to think we know it when we see it). Still, it is this idea of community that can both define us and do us in. In this course we will consider texts from varied cultural and geographical locations where the question of community (How we define it? How it defines us?) is a central issue along with questions of kinship, ethics, aesthetics, language, and the law. In these texts, we will consider how community is essential to the development of both content and formal matters. We will be particularly concerned with the potentially negative effects community produces through its exclusionary gestures. Ultimately, in comparing these texts and through supplementary readings, our goal will be to articulate alternative ways of thinking community that aim to avoid these negative effects while capitalizing on the potential of its “warm persuasiveness.”

Texts

• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal
• Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
• Homer, The Iliad
• Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
• Herman Melville, Billy Budd
• Tomas Rivera, …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him
• Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth
• Course reader with supplementary texts

CL 1B:11, #17254, POPKIN, MWF 10-11, 182 Dwinelle

"Passing On Trauma"

While many post-Holocaust writers stress the ethical responsibility of passing on stories of trauma, many of these same writers also convey the essential impossibility of this very task. Narratives of the Holocaust often hit up against a barrier that resists representation. Indeed, the literature of trauma often points towards the way in which trauma must be passed on – retold – and the way it is often passed on – overlooked.

This course will examine why it is so difficult to pass on stories of trauma. We will consider this question on linguistic, psychoanalytic and philosophical registers. We will also probe the limits of what can be said, examining how witnesses reconstruct their stories in the face of this essential impossibility. How is language reshaped to account for this impossibility? Who has the right to testify? Are some representations inappropriate? We will also reflect on the ethical burden of the post-witness – the witness to the witness. How do we as students – and as interlocutors – respond?

Secondly, we will examine how the passing on of trauma shapes the identities of witnesses and post-witnesses, and more broadly, ethnicity, race and gender. We will pay close attention to the ways in which identity can both be torn asunder in the wake of trauma, and, also, paradoxically, how it can be constructed through the ‘wakefulness’ of trauma.

These questions will be pursued through a broad range of texts – the bible, fairy tales, fiction, autobiography, and news media. We will begin the course with a section on the retelling of traumas in foundational texts. Then we will study the responses to three collective traumas: American slavery, the Holocaust, and September 11.

Texts

• The Bible
• Song of Roland
• Brothers Grimm, Selected Fairy Tales
• Kafka, Metamorphosis
• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Elie Wiesel, The Accident, Night
• Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen
• Ed. Ulrich Baer, 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11
• A course reader to include critical and theoretical secondary literature and newspaper articles.

CL 1B:12, #17257, GOLD/WHITE, MWF 10-11, 20 Wheeler

"What Is That Thing Called Love?
The Transformative Power of Erotic Love"

This course’s primary objective is to hone students’ composition skills. In conjunction with our work on writing, we will consider literary and filmic depictions of the most volatile and the most pacifying of emotions--love. Of special concern will be interactions and overlap between erotic love and familial, brotherly, religious, and national loves. Rather than its highly destructive potential, we will focus upon eros as a force for growth and change in the individual and society--the way desires of the heart stretch and sometimes shatter accepted identities and traditional boundaries. Especially in relation to the lyric, we will investigate how the urgency and expressive frustrations of the lover occasionally expand formal conventions as well. Finally, our study of so potent and persistent a cultural myth as romantic love will likely also illuminate the way fundamental stories inform human life.

Attentive reading leads to good writing. To that end, we will stress close reading, revision and peer editing. Along with prose composition, students will also receive instruction and practice in researching topics in the humanities. Besides assigned essays, requirements of the course include active class participation, regular attendance, a group presentation and keeping an online, interactive journal.

NOTE: Students should wait until after the first class meeting to purchase books for this course.

Texts to include some of the following:

• Samuel 1 and 2
• Poems by Li-Young Li, e. e. cummings, Tess Gallagher, Philip Larkin, Anne Sexton, Frank O'Hara, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, and Sir Philip Sidney
• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (excerpts)
• Plato, "The Symposium"
• Marguerite Duras, The Lover
• Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
• Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

Films:

• George Cukor, The Philadelphia Story
• Max Farberbock, Aimée and Jaguar
• Patricia Rozema, When Night is Falling

CL 1B:13, #17259, GOLD/WHITE, MWF 9-10, 20 Wheeler

"What Is That Thing Called Love?
The Transformative Power of Erotic Love"

This course’s primary objective is to hone students’ composition skills. In conjunction with our work on writing, we will consider literary and filmic depictions of the most volatile and the most pacifying of emotions--love. Of special concern will be interactions and overlap between erotic love and familial, brotherly, religious, and national loves. Rather than its highly destructive potential, we will focus upon eros as a force for growth and change in the individual and society--the way desires of the heart stretch and sometimes shatter accepted identities and traditional boundaries. Especially in relation to the lyric, we will investigate how the urgency and expressive frustrations of the lover occasionally expand formal conventions as well. Finally, our study of so potent and persistent a cultural myth as romantic love will likely also illuminate the way fundamental stories inform human life.

Attentive reading leads to good writing. To that end, we will stress close reading, revision and peer editing. Along with prose composition, students will also receive instruction and practice in researching topics in the humanities. Besides assigned essays, requirements of the course include active class participation, regular attendance, a group presentation and keeping an online, interactive journal.

NOTE: Students should wait until after the first class meeting to purchase books for this course.

Texts to include some of the following:

• Samuel 1 and 2
• Poems by Li-Young Li, e. e. cummings, Tess Gallagher, Philip Larkin, Anne Sexton, Frank O'Hara, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, and Sir Philip Sidney
• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (excerpts)
• Plato, "The Symposium"
• Marguerite Duras, The Lover
• Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
• Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

Films:

• George Cukor, The Philadelphia Story
• Max Farberbock, Aimée and Jaguar
• Patricia Rozema, When Night is Falling

CL 1B:14, #17476, POPKIN, MWF 9-10, 125 Dwinelle

"Passing On Trauma"

While many post-Holocaust writers stress the ethical responsibility of passing on stories of trauma, many of these same writers also convey the essential impossibility of this very task. Narratives of the Holocaust often hit up against a barrier that resists representation. Indeed, the literature of trauma often points towards the way in which trauma must be passed on – retold – and the way it is often passed on – overlooked.

This course will examine why it is so difficult to pass on stories of trauma. We will consider this question on linguistic, psychoanalytic and philosophical registers. We will also probe the limits of what can be said, examining how witnesses reconstruct their stories in the face of this essential impossibility. How is language reshaped to account for this impossibility? Who has the right to testify? Are some representations inappropriate? We will also reflect on the ethical burden of the post-witness – the witness to the witness. How do we as students – and as interlocutors – respond?

Secondly, we will examine how the passing on of trauma shapes the identities of witnesses and post-witnesses, and more broadly, ethnicity, race and gender. We will pay close attention to the ways in which identity can both be torn asunder in the wake of trauma, and, also, paradoxically, how it can be constructed through the ‘wakefulness’ of trauma.

These questions will be pursued through a broad range of texts – the bible, fairy tales, fiction, autobiography, and news media. We will begin the course with a section on the retelling of traumas in foundational texts. Then we will study the responses to three collective traumas: American slavery, the Holocaust, and September 11.

Texts

• The Bible
• Song of Roland
• Brothers Grimm, Selected Fairy Tales
• Kafka, Metamorphosis
• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Elie Wiesel, The Accident, Night
• Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen
• Ed. Ulrich Baer, 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11
• A course reader to include critical and theoretical secondary literature and newspaper articles.

CL 2B, #17260, DEANGELIS, MW 10-12 & F 10-11, 123 Dwinelle

"Silence, Sense, and Non-sense"

We take for granted that the primary purpose of language is to communicate meaning. But what happens when language as we know it becomes insufficient? What happens when language loses its conventional meaning? How does one give language a new significance or break the “code” that upholds conventional linguistic and related political, religious, and social structures? In some of the works we will explore, it is the absence of “sense” which gives the work its significance, and in some, language serves to conceal and distance while silence rather reveals and connects. All of the works we will read—while drawn from vastly different time periods that each reflect a different set of concerns about language—explore silence and speech, meaning and code. And through our close readings of these “foreign” language texts, we, too, will explore the meanings and codes of language.

Discussions will be in French and English; long writing assignments will be in English, and some short writing assignments will be in French. All texts will be read in French.

Prerequisites: Three years of high school French or two years of college French (with a B+ or better average). You should feel comfortable reading in French.

Please wait until the first class meeting to buy your texts.

Texts

• Samuel Becket, Fin de partie
• Eugène Ionesco, La cantatrice chauve
• Nathalie Sarraute, Pour un oui ou pour un non
• Marguerite Yourcenar, Alexis ou le Traité du vain combat
• Béroul, Le Roman de Tristan
• Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide
• Heldris de Cornualle, Le Roman de Silence

Music

• Select songs from the rap CD Essence ordinaire by Zebda

Other

• There will also be a course reader which will include poetry, short stories, fabliaux, and lais.