Spring 2005 Course Offerings:
Lower- and Upper-Division Undergraduate Courses

CL 39F, #17266, FRANCOIS, MWF 2-3, 321 HAVILAND

"Coffee and Cigarettes: The Literature of Boredom and Anxiety"

Is there a literature of what Adam Phillips has called “that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire”? Why has the “modern period” been called the Age of Anxiety? What makes “ennui” a specifically modern experience? Why does it emerge with the modern legislation of a secular right to the “pursuit of happiness”?

Under the rubric “coffee and cigarettes”—commodities whose introduction into Europe and the Americas somewhere between 1600-1800 marks the rise of colonialism and emergence of modern consumer economies—we will examine these and other questions in a range of literary texts and films, including works by Sade, de Quincey, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, Freud, Svevo, Chaplin, Renoir, Hawks, Rapper, and Malick. As we trace the literary and extra-literary circulation of coffee and cigarettes as double signs of industry and idleness, solitude and sociability, leisure and work, our ambition will be to use the socio-historical framework of coffee and tobacco production and consumption to ground our philosophical inquiry into peculiarly groundless psychological states (anxiety and boredom). But our analyses will probably more often lie with “coffee and cigarettes” as figures for the minor, everyday, futile pleasures of style. Particular attention will be thus given to the ways in which the works studied--literary and filmic stimulants and narcotics in their own right—define different ways of “passing” or “killing” time.

CL 40, #17269, SCHWARTZ, MWF 1-2, 219 Dwinelle

"Dancing Girls"

Whether the bodies onstage belong to a perfect gleaming row of Rockettes, or to a thunderous troupe of men in pink tulle tutus, the subject of gender and dance is complex intersection of gender and performance. In this class, we will look at “dancing” and at “girls” as terms that combine a tradition of artistic expression (sometimes sacred or ceremonial, sometimes profane and professional) with a host of political issues (class distinctions, race and national identity, labor laws, definitions of gender and sexuality). Delving into the history of ballet, for example, will help us understand the connection between the first skirt to reveal the ankle, at the Paris Opera, and the origin of the ballerina. We will read the autobiography of modern choreographer Twyla Tharp, crime fiction about Depression-era “dance marathons,” and an essay on the Mythology of Striptease. Our syllabus also includes medieval ballate and estampidas—infectiously rhythmic poems meant to be sung, clapped out, danced to—and Victor Hugo’s novel of a gypsy girl in Paris, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Dancing girls, as we will see in films starring Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong, are shaped in part by the pressures of race and class, and must negotiate a balance between exoticism, voyeurism, and the value of the spectacle. Gender and sexuality are as much a performance as the act of dance itself. One tiny slip—a man lifting another man in the pas de deux?—illuminates the tensions and anxieties that keep the dancing girl on her toes, as in the edgy choreography of Mark Morris. In Leslie Feinberg’s account of police raids on lesbian bars, two women dancing together constitute a crime. If one of them isn’t wearing at least three pieces of “women’s clothing,” it is grounds for arrest. Thus, in our class on Dancing Girls, the prettiest, pinkest, pointiest ballerinas will pirouette out of an all-male drag company called Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, every one of them rouged and ribboned.

Texts

• Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses Don’t They
• Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
• Twyla Tharp, When Push Comes to Shove
• Margaret Atwood, Dancing Girls and Other Stories

Stories and Essays

• Yasunari Kawabata, “The Dancing Girl of Izu”
• Elmore Leonard, “When the Women Come Out to Dance”
• Roland Barthes, “Striptease,” “Soap Powders and Detergents,” “Wrestling”
• Susan Au, Ballet and Modern Dance (excerpt)
• Cynthia Gralla, The Floating World (excerpt)
• *Selected essays by Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam, Joan Acocella, Katherine Liepe-Levinson.
• *Poems by Raimbaut de Vaiquieras, Pero do Ponte, and anonymous medieval authors.

Dance

• Mark Morris, “Salome,” “Mythologies”
• Selected pieces by Twyla Tharp
• Selected pieces by Suzanne Farrell
• Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, “Swan Lake,” “Go to Barocco,”

Films

• Shanghai Express
• Princess Tam Tam
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
• Live Nude Girls Unite!
• Moulin Rouge

Visual Art

• Medieval manuscript illuminations
• Selected sculpture, pastels by Degas
• Photographs by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin

CL 41C, #17272, LIU, TT 3:30-5, 310 Hearst Mining

"Introduction to the Novel: Play"

It has been argued that the emergence of the novel in Western literature was intimately connected to the rise of a new leisure class and a new culture of recreation. In this course, we will study several novels—traditional and postmodern, western and non-western—to reassess that thesis. In particular, we will be interested in the relation between the conventions of the novel (the tools and limitations of this genre) and narrative dynamics of play. Studying both formalist accounts of the generic features of the novel as a distinct literary form and cultural criticism that seeks to illuminate the history and ideology of the novel in its social context, we will explore the connections between the novelistic representation of pleasure and the rise of a consumer culture that is said to be the precondition for this genre. The culture of recreation, then, is not only an object to be internally represented as the theater and the gallery in The Wings of the Dove or the carnival in Beloved, but an external, structuring organization of social life that determines the history of the novel itself as a form of entertainment as well. We will therefore consider how the historical development of new recreational forms (such as the professionalization of boxing and baseball, the establishment of amusement parks in America, and the transnational circulation of pop music) shaped and organized the world of fiction. In addition to examining novels that positively respond to the culture of commodified amusement, we will also analyze novels that thematize the seductiveness and destructive power of play, such as Beloved and Notes of a Desolate Man. Finally, we will look at Kafka’s novelistic construction of nameless, undifferentiated, dehumanized functionaries as an excoriating critique of rationalized bourgeois society and the experience of alienation—as Kafka’s philosophical inquiry into the absence of play.

Texts

• Chu, Tien-wen, Notes of a Desolate Man
• Faulkner, William, Absalom! Absalom!
• James, Henry, The Wings of the Dove
• Kafka, Franz, The Trial
• Morrison, Toni, Beloved
• Murakami, Haruki, Norwegian Wood
• Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses
• Selected critical essays by Armstrong, Bakhtin, Cohn, Chatman, Honeywell, Genette, Watt, and Freud

CL 50, #1727, LARSEN, MWF 9-10, 289 Dwinelle

"Creative Writing: Script"

In this class we will decline the common assumption that “creative writing” is undifferentiated from word-processed type. Why, of all the modes of transmission available to the verbal artist, should modern typography be the default? What is this writing named by “creative writing,” and what separates it from the many forms and genres of “non-creative writing”? Unavoidably we will be forced to consider whether a purely verbal art can ever be unhitched from graphic representation, in theory or in practice.

Please note that in addition to artistic assignments, this class features a required reading component of some 40-50 pages per week (contained in one course reader). 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. The student who wishes to present work in the medium of type is welcome to do so, but she or he must be prepared to defend that choice of medium, as must students who present work in any of the various forms of handwriting, audio/video, textiles, etc.

CL 60AC:1, #17278, STENPORT, TT 9:30-11, 130 WHEELER

"Reading the Landscape of Ethnic Fiction: The Construction of Place-Based Diversity in the San Francisco Bay Area"
American Cultures

This interdisciplinary class presents a localized literary history of some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s ethnic groups and the ways they have imagined, shaped, and formed the diversity of a densely populated metropolitan area. The locations and ethnic groups in particular focus will be Asian American in San Jose (with a particular emphasis on the Vietnamese American community), African American in Oakland, and European American in San Francisco.

The reading and study of localized practices (on the ground and in text) will be complemented by a selection of theoretical texts (often by theorists active in and familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area) on race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, transnationalism, urban planning practices, and “diversity” construction. A portion of the reading will also be devoted to practices of landscape ideology in relation to ethnic communities. There will be at least two field trips and experts on Bay Area literature and urban culture will be invited to guest lecture. Students will undertake an independent semester-long research project on a Bay Area ethnic group and the representation of the place this group inhabits, taking advantage of the diverse student body’s interests and ethnic heritage. In fact, this class hopes to draw to a significant extent on students’ experiences of their ethnic background and the places that have shaped them and they continue to shape in their own turn.

CL 60AC:2, #17281, ALLAN, MWF 10-11, 88 Dwinelle

"The Politics of Representation"
American Cultures

What does an analysis of literature, and along with it reading, feeling and interpretation, bring to our understanding of political theory? This course sets out to explore the question of how literature relates to politics, and how discussions of race, ethnicity and gender have inflected ways of reading. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the delicate relationship between political theory and literature, entwined in the problem of representation and crucial to the question not only of what, but how we read.

In our exploration of race, literature and politics, we will investigate the convergence of two notions of representation: defined at once politically, in terms of speaking in one's place, and artistically, in terms of re-presentation. While it is common to read political theory in terms of the first use of representation, we will be shifting emphasis in order to ask in what ways legal documents function as literature. How does law impact the production and imagination of the self and the national community? And, in addition to questioning the literary dimensions of the law, the course will set out to explore literature, art and film as political theory. How do the arts complicate or nuance the abstract legal self at the basis of political theory? In what ways does the representational terrain of identity politics complicate, or even contest, the grounds of liberal politics?

Our exploration of these issues will draw us through a variety of texts, each of which confronts us with the challenge of how, and in whose terms, to read it. In the first few weeks of the course, we will investigate texts considered foundational to the discourse of American liberalism: the Federalist Papers, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This first portion of the course will lay the groundwork for a vocabulary of self, rights and community, and allow us to ask how it is that these terms have come to be read and understood legally. What is the race, class, gender of "the People," and how has the people altered with a political vocabulary of minorities? How might we think historically about how we understand our contemporary political vocabulary and the assumptions behind how the law is interpreted?

In the next few weeks, we will ask how it is that identity politics impacts and reworks the understanding of self, rights and community, and in turn, the very representational terrain of American liberalism. Beginning with Stuart Hall's essays on representation, Paticia Williams' "Alchemy of Race and Rights", and Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark", we will explore the possibility of racialized and gendered readings of a text. The various films, essays and novels that comprise the remainder of the course have been selected with attention to their engagement with reading, race and representation. The readings draw from African American, Chicano/a, Asian American, Anglo American and Native American literary traditions, while raising questions about religion, sexuality, gender and immigration. Each film, poem, novel or performance, provides a specific instance through we will analyze how certain texts have been, and can be, read.

In addition to an examination and a final project, there will also be weekly writing responses, discussions and class presentations, all of which will help to refine writing, speaking and critical thinking skills. I encourage students to meet with me throughout the semester to help coordinate their own goals with those of the course.

Political Theory

• Excerpts from The Federalist Papers and the Anti-federalist Papers
• United States Constitution
• The Bill of Rights

Critical Essays

• Toni Morrison, “Playing in the Dark”
• Patricia Williams, “Alchemy of Race and Rights”
• bell hooks, selected essays from, “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”
• Excerpts from Howard Zinn's, "A People's History of the United States"

Literature

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
• Malcolm X, excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
• David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
• Gloria Anzuldua, Borderlands/La Frontera
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée

Film

• D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation
• Spike Lee, Malcolm X
• Walt Disney's Pocahontas
• Marlon Rigg's Color Adjustment
• Marlon Rigg's Tongues Untied
• Steven Soderbergh, Traffic or Orson Welles' Touch of Evil

*A course reader and class website will offer recommended and supplementary readings, adapted to specific concerns raised in class and pertinent to each week's assignment.

CL 100, #17284, SAS, TT 11-12:30, 242 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 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, kitsch, the construction of race and ethnicity in the media, sexuality and desire, computer culture, contemporary Japanese popular culture, plastic surgery, memory, masquerade and performance.

Texts

• Don DeLillo, White Noise
• Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
• J. M. Coetzee, Foe
• Murakami Haruki, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Exerpts from

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies; Jean Baudrillard, Simulations; Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Dick Hebidge, Subculture: the Meaning of Style; H. Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan and essays by Hall, Adorno, Mallarmé, and Modleski.

Fims and Video

• Japanese anime, works of Sadie Benning, Carolee Schneeman, and others.

CL 112B, #17290, KOTZAMANIDOU, MWF 12-1, 279 DWINELLE

"Modern Greek Composition"

This course examines forms of writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills. ( Prerequisite: Comp.Lit.112A or Consent of the Instructor)

Texts

• A. Samarakis, Zetetai Elpis (Hope Wanted)
• G. Seferis, Exerpts from Mythistorema
• K. Kavafis, Selected Poetry
• A. Farmakides, Oedipus the King: A Free Rendition of the Ancient Drama into Modern Greek
• D. Holton et al., Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar
• P. Mackridge, The Modern Greek Language: A Descriptive Analysis of Standard Modern Greek
• E.Demiri-Prodromidou et al., I Glossa ton Idiotismon kai ton Ekfraseon ( The Language of Idiomatic Expressions)
• The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Greek

CL 152, #17293, REJHON, TT 9:30-11, 215 DWINELLE

"Medieval Literature"

The course will present a survey of major works of medieval literature from some of the principal literary traditions of the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on epic and on Arthurian romance. The epics that will be examined are the Song of Roland and Beowulf, as well as the Old Irish saga of the Táin; the romances are those of Chrétien de Troyes, along with Gottfied von Strassburg’s Tristan, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet, and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Arthurian section of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain will be read, as will several of the native tales and romances of the Middle Welsh Mabinogion. A selection of troubadour lyrics will round out the survey.

All texts will be available in English translation. Course requirements will include a midterm and a final examination.

Texts

• Anon., The Song of Roland
• Anon., Beowulf
• Anon., The Táin
• Anon., The Mabinogion
• Anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Chrétien de Troyes, Erec and Enide
• -“- , Lancelot or the Knight of the Cart
• -“- , Perceval or The Story of the Grail
• Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain
• Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan
• Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, Lanzelet
• Troubadour Lyrics

CL 155:1, #17296, ALTER, TT 11-12:30, 210 WHEELER

"The Modern Period"

The second and third decades of the 20th century, the heyday of what is sometimes called High Modernism, was a watershed for the development of European and American fiction, and we still live with its consequences. Writers, impelled by a sense of mounting historical crisis as well as by a desire to renovate and transform the inherited conventions of the 19th-century novel, undertook a bold renegotiation of the formal and thematic terms of the novel. The class will consider closely six major modernist novels, with attention both to their formal innovations and to how these various reshapings of form registered deep responses to the historical moment.

Texts

• Andrey Bely, Petersburg
• James Joyce, Ulysses
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, (vol. 1)
• Franz Kafka, The Trial

CL 155:2, #17298, BUELENS, TT 3:30-5, 102 WURSTER

"In Flanders Fields: The Great War in European Literature"

This course is first of all devoted to the very different ways in which the First World War is represented in European literature. British poets like Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Brooke and Graves are internationally known for their work – they are The War Poets. But in other languages as well, the Great War has produced important work - novels like Le Feu (Under Fire) by Henri Barbusse or memoirs like Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) by Ernst Jünger. Or poetry (by Mayakovsky, Ungaretti, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Stramm, Trakl…) that is not only remarkably modernist on a formal level – influenced as it was by the avant-garde movements that boomed in this very period – but also far less elegiac and nostalgic than their English counterparts. This course tries to account for these differences, focussing on the different political and cultural contexts in which these works were written. Special attention will be devoted to the WWI-poetry and grotesque stories of the Flemish (Belgian) poet Paul van Ostaijen. His Occupied City (1921) is not only a unique dada-influenced collage-type account of the German occupation of his native Antwerp, it also reflects on the intricate relationship of the Flemish nationalists whose main enemy turned out to be the Belgian State (and not the German occupier)

CL 170:1, #17299, KOTZAMANIDOU, F 2-5, 104 DWINELLE

The Search for a New National Identity and the Escape of Fiction
(1929-1949)

The disaster, which concluded the war in Asia Minor in 1922, the collapse of the irredentist dreams, which ended with the forced exchanges of populations and poured over one million refugees into the Greek cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, changed radically the character of Greek society and intellectual life. The division into Left and Right that defined the main political waves of the developed world in the 20th century became clearly reflected in Greek politics as well as in Greek society. The bankrupt ideologies of irredentist politics and the unbelievable economic and social problems in the re-settling and assimilation of the refugee population from the East demanded a complete re-evaluation of what it meant to be a Greek and a citizen of the Greek State. Clearly, a new conceptual context was necessary to replace the old, exhausted ideological framework of failed expansionism and nationalism. Fiction provided one of the major territories for such a search. This course will examine the various attempts of fiction to escape from the demands of nationalism by venturing into the realm of modernism and the urban novel.

History and Theory

• Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Modern Greece
• Thomas Doulis, Disaster and Fiction
• Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture
• John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis, Greece: the Modern Sequel
• Mary Layoun, Modernism
• George Theotokas, Free Spirit

Fiction

• Stratis Myrivilis, The School Mistress With the Golden Eyes
• Kosmas Politis, The Lemon Forest
• -----------------, Eroica
• George Theotokas, The Demon
• Margarita Lymberaki, The Straw Hats

CL 170:2, #17302, LARKIN, TT 2-3, 166 BARROWS
Cross-listed with NES 155

"Wonder and the Fantastic: The Thousand and One Nights in World Literary Imagination"

In this course we will study in depth the text of the Thousand and One Nights. After discussing the origins of the text and the various ways of approaching it, we will examine its reception by the West and its profound influence on Western literature. In addition, we will pay close attention to the role the Nights had in shaping Western notions of the Oriental “other.” This will be particularly evident in a number of feature films that manipulate material originally provided by these tales. Finally, we will consider how the themes of the Nights were treated by particular modern Middle Eastern writers.

CL 185, #17305, KURKE, MW 2-3, 4 LeCONTE
Additional Required Discussion Section
(see online schedule of classes)
Cross-listed with UGIS and Women's Studies 145 & Classics 161

"History of Sexualities"

This course will study sexuality and gender in two very different historical periods--ancient Greece and 19th-century Europe. Sexuality will be defined as including sexual acts (e.g. sodomy, pederasty, masturbation); sexual identities (e.g. erastes and eromenos); and sexual systems (e.g. kinship structures, subcultures, political hierarchies). Readings and lectures will focus on situating queer sexualities relative to dominant organizations of sex and gender. Topics will include Greek democracy and male homosexuality; the biology of sexual difference; the politics of sodomy; "romantic" friendship between women and men; and the emergence of strictly defined homosexual and heterosexual identities. We will read literary texts along with historical documents and secondary readings to constitute a comparative analysis of ancient Greece and 19th-century Europe.

Authors to be read include Hesiod, Sappho, Aeschylus, Plato, Wilde, and Freud.

There will be two papers and a final exam. There will also be regular in-class writing assignments that will count towards your final grade.

CL 190:1, #17320, MONROE, TT 9:30-11, 225 Wheeler

"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.

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, #17323, BERNSTEIN, TT 3:30-5, 203 Wheeler

"The Modernist Masterpiece"

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 and listening to music by several of the most important modernists figures involved in both the theoretical conception and the artistic creation of a new sense of what a masterpiece entails. These figures, in all likelihood, will include Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Wagner, 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 Texts

• James Joyce, Ulysses, Random House (paperback)
• The Course reader and various hand-outs