Summer 2002 Course Offerings

Comparative Literature n1B (8-week session), Shaden Tageldin

"Intimate Enemies"

In Cracking India, Pakistani writer Bhapsi Sidhwa describes power as the "tyranny of magnets over metals." We tend to think of metals as the more sinister of the two: say "metals," and we imagine guns, ships, warplanes, barbed wire; say "magnets," and we imagine irresistible attraction, seduction. But, as Sidhwa suggests, love can be war. In this course, we will think about what makes enemies intimates, and intimates enemies, in postcolonial literature. As we examine the fiction and poetry of peoples struggling to rediscover and remake themselves after colonial domination, we will ask why the electricity of attraction, even love, crackles on the live wire of antagonism that continues to run between former empires and postcolonial states. Readings will include Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade; Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North; and Agha Shahid Ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas.

Comparative Literature n40 (8-week session), Tyson Hausdoerffer

"Female Impersonations: 'Woman' and Cultural Fantasy on the Classical Greek and Renaissance English Stage"

In both Classical Greece and Renaissance England, the theater had tremendous political and cultural influence. One of the most striking similarities between these two theatrical traditions is that the dramas were written exclusively by male authors and the roles were performed exclusively by male actors. Yet these overwhelmingly masculine dramatic productions seem to be obsessed with putting female characters on center stage. Our basic question is: if the conditions of theatrical production were so male-dominated, then why do the productions themselves so persistently focus on female figures? What can we make of these male representations of females? What can they tell us about the historical reality of being female in those times? What can they tell us about male attitudes towards females, or about cultural fantasies of femininity?

Our readings will include both 'primary' literary texts such as Euripides' Medea and Shakespeare's Macbeth and 'secondary' critical texts such as Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. In addition to works by male playwrights, we will also devote time to the poetry of Sappho from Archaic Greece and to the works of Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn from the seventeenth century in order to provide us with alternative, female perspectives on femininity.

Comparative Literature n60AC (2nd 6-week session), Josephine Park

"Outsiders and Imposters in American Cultures"

This course examines solitary figures at the outer edge of American cultures. Ethnic and racial groups stigmatized for a visible difference lay bare the ideological labor involved in constructing Americans. Yet these groups have their own boundaries: certain figures, because of differing allegiances, pressures and choices, stand beyond the sites already marked as unassimilable. This course will explore these figures across different historical periods and ethnic communities by reading narratives of exclusion as well as theoretical texts which provide a critical framework. We will begin by examining the nativist project of the twenties and its racialized counterpart in the Harlem Renaissance. We will then look at the kinds of allegiances forced upon minority groups during the second World War, in which individuals find themselves at the fringes of their ethnic communities because of forced allegiances to the American war effort. Finally, we will read texts of the late twentieth century which illustrate the plight of characters adopted into families and communities different from their ethnic backgrounds. It will be the work of this course to see how these outsiders and imposters manage and are managed by the existing structure of a dominant culture and its margins. Readings will include: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, John Okada's No-no Boy, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony.