CL 212, #17353, DUGGAN, F 2-5, 410 Barrows
"Studies in Medieval Literature:
The Troubadours and the Troubadour Tradition"
The course will begin with an introduction to the troubadours, including instruction in their language, Medieval Occitan. After reading a representative selection of troubadour poems, the class will move to consideration of major lyric traditions that take their inspiration from, or are cognate with, the troubadours: the trouvères, Minnesang, the Sicilian School, the Dolce Stil Nuovo, the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amor, and strophic poetry in Arabic depending on the interests of the students. Among the topics to be considered are the social situation of poetry in the Middle Ages, the material remains of medieval lyric, the continuities and discontinuities of genre, the relationship between poetry and music, and links between oral and written traditions. Students who are interested in taking the course should contact the instructor in person or by e-mail.
Required: William Paden, An Introduction to Old Occitan (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1998).
CL 215, #17356, CLUBB, M 2-5, 6331 Dwinelle
Cross-listed with Italian 215
"Italian and Shakespearean Comic Structures"
An investigation of the technology that produced modern comedy from late fifteenth-century Italy to early seventeenth-century England. Considering raw materials, theatrical venues, ideological premises, experimental theory, economic and political forces shaping Renaissance drama as it moved from Italian courts to the commedia dell'arte to Shakespeare's London, we shall read comedies, tragicomedies and scenarios of Ariosto, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Pollastra, Aretino, the Intronati, Ruzante, Tasso, Pasqualigo, Guarini, Della Porta and Scala, and eight plays of Shakespeare.
Italian texts will be on sale at a local copy shop. Students may use any unabridged editions of The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Othello
CL 258, #17359, KAHN, W 2-5, 125 Dwinelle
Mimesis: History and Theory
This course will investigate the theoretical debates concerning the concept of mimesis (imitation) in the Western tradition. We will focus on three periods: classical Greece, early modern Europe, and the twentieth century. We will also consider the relevance of mimesis to plagiarism, legal cases on the right of personality, and The Americans with Disability Act. Readings will include: Plato, Republic; Aristotle, Poetics; Euripides, Medea; Corneille, Médeé; Racine, Phèdre; Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama; Brecht, Edward II, and selected essays; Michael Berube, Life as We Know It; Jann Martel, The Life of Pi. Reading knowledge of French or German desirable but not required. Students working in East Asian Languages are welcome and may write their term papers on a non-Western topic.
CL 260, #17362, SEIDMAN, Tu 3-6, 180 Barrows
"Problems in Literary Translation from Cicero to Postcolonialism"
This course will explore the theory and practice of literary translation from the classical period to post-structuralism. We will focus, however, on the politics of translation from Romanticism through the modernism of Pound, Benjamin and Buber-Rosenzweig and the post-colonialist and feminist approaches of contemporary literary translators. The course will also include opportunities for students to "workshop" their own translations.
CL 266, #17365, MASIELLO, W 3-6, 123 Dwinelle
Cross-listed with Spanish 280:4
"“Boomsday!” -- Joyce and the Latin American Literary
Boom."
This course is an exploration of the ways in which modern Latin American writers have borrowed from James Joyce in order to construct narratives about colonialism, identity, and the crisis of cosmopolitanism and the avant-garde in the 20th century.
Drawing from a claim made early in Ulysses that the “cracked lookingglass of a servant” is a symbol of Irish art, we’ll look at the ways in which culture is marked by the experiences in the colonial world. Joyce’s meditations on cultural politics and the estheticizing dimensions of language that might answer metropolitan powers effectively supply a rich field of inspiration for Latin American writers, especially those of the so-called literary ‘boom’ of the 1960s and 70s. This course will investigate those traditions that have taken liberally from James Joyce in order to accommodate a peculiar set of Latin American questions about the interrelationship between history and language, popular and high culture, modernist and postmodern esthetics, and national and sexual identities. We will consider two cases: the so-called “neobarroco” of Cuban writers starting with Lezama Lima and extending to Cabrera Infante and Sarduy; and the Buenos Aires tradition that belongs to Borges, Puig, Piglia, and the Lacan-o-americanos. In this line, the literary representation of the city--Dublin, Havana, and Buenos Aires--will occupy our attentions along with the representation of multiple voices, popular subjects, and endlessly nomadic figures that rebel against the authority of the State. We’ll also bring under the critical lens the ways in which cultural borrowing and translation work, ricocheting off the pages of the multilingual literary texts to be read during the semester.
Class presentations and a 20 page seminar paper. The readings will be in Spanish and English with class lectures in English.
