39E, #17278, WHITTA, TT 2-3:30, 156 Dwinelle
“Gods and Monsters: Concepts of the Alien Other in the
European Middle Ages”
The medieval world used the categories of the "demonic" and the "monstrous" to think about many things. Especially important as a means of defining the self in society, such oppositional categories of deviance or heterodoxy helped to establish norms for self and society - and police their borders. In this seminar, by examining a wide variety of medieval literary and visual evidence, we will attempt to formulate a sense of how non-normative categories of being or experience were defined and contained in the Western European Middle Ages. We will look at specimens of heterodox, marginalized, "dangerous" thought (religious dissent and heresy, witchcraft and demonology, non-Christian belief systems), sexuality (prostitution, sodomy, androgyny, transgendering or cross-dressing), and bodily integrity (plague, syphilis, leprosy, cannibalism, theriomorphism) as primary modes of the "demonic" or "monstrous" at work in medieval culture. In the process, students will gain both an appreciation of the difficulty of assessing a remote historical period and locate points of comparison with our own cultural uses of the deviant, dissident or marginal.
40, #17281, SCHWARTZ, TT 9:30-11, 85 Evans
“Femmes Fatales, Lady Killers, and Babes in Arms...
When a murder can’t be handled by the homocide department...
Among the most darkly fascinating literary and dramatic characters are the murderesses, whose crimes put them dead center in the debate on sex, gender, violence, and taboo. At center stage, there is Medea’s act of “domestic violence,” a vengeance killing of her own children; closer to the empathies of the audience, Russell Banks’ novel of an accidental schoolbus catastrophe evades snap judgements of blame and justice. The high-heeled crimes of film noir passion can be matched against other intense and disturbing portraits, like Artemesia Gentileschi’s bloody, furious Judith & Holofernes, or Cindy Sherman’s grotesque Fairy Tale photography series.
We will use texts from theater, cinema, dance, poetry, photography, painting, and prose novels to discuss the questions which arise from the intersection of guilt and gender. On the flip side of sex & death, too, we can find humorous and quirky portrayals of the macabre: Arsenic and Old Lace showcases two sweet old ladies with a cellar full of permanent guests, and Foxfire is the wildly careening story of a teenage girl gang. Modern dance plays with classical tragedy when it choreographs newly fluid meaning into the storylines, including gender-switching (Mark Morris’ burly, broad-shouldered Dido) and re-mythicizing (Martha Graham’s visceral Medea).
The ways in which these characters reveal themselves will draw us into very different narrative modes, especially as we explore first-person voices, disjunction & blackout, flashback & premonition, and the unorthodox empathies these tactics induce. We will also stretch the categories in order to look at suicides, at mesmerized or “innocent” murderesses, and at some of the archetypes of destructive female forces-the Indian goddess Kali, the succubus, the siren, and Salomé, among others. In addition, we will discuss the flippant pop attraction of Armed Babes, as it crops up in cult flicks like Faster Pussycat Kill Kill.
41C, #17284, HORNBY, TT 11-12:30, 205 Dwinelle
“The Experimental Novel”
This course will explore novelistic works which self-consciously lay claim to some sort of experimental or avant-garde status. The experimental novel might be thought of as a slush-heap of remainders from previous novelistic efforts, composed of scraps and fragments gleaned from other media, and resulting in something new, different, and often difficult. We will begin by considering the nineteenth century realist novel as a precursor to the experiments of the twentieth century. We will then turn to various modernist and post-modernist texts that question a received notion of realism, and that offer new and challenging forms of representation. Writers we may encounter include Gustave Flaubert, Emil Zola, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Alain Robbe-Grillet and W.G. Sebald. The fiction will be supplemented by critical accounts of the genre that pay attention to the novel's troubled and productive intersection with modernism and postmodernism and that offer aesthetic, ethical and political interpretations of experimentation and the avant-garde.
41F, #17287, PERCIALI, TT 12:30-2:00, 109 Dwinelle
“Introduction to Theory: Marxism and Literature”
This class serves as a survey of foundational texts and debates in Marxist theory, and a first encounter with some of the most influential and exciting ideas in intellectual history. We will embark on a close theoretical engagement with Marxism as an analytic method and a way of reading literature. Marxism is more than a theory of history or economics; it is a method of understanding culture and representation. To get at key cognitive concepts like dialectics, base and superstructure, ideology, reification, and fetishism, we will work intimately and critically with the method and form of the theoretical texts we read. The course will draw upon two novels, Flaubert's The Sentimental Education and Austen's Emma, and two films, My Beautiful Laundrette and Gosford Park. Throughout the semester, they will serve as our workshop in gaining a more intimate and practical facility with Marxist thought, and as reminders of ways it can always be refined.
50, #17290, LARSEN, TT 12:30-2, 289 Dwinelle
“Creative Writing in Comparative Literature: Script”
This will be a class on several of the activities named "writing." The class will be part creative writing workshop and part forum for critical readings of primary and secondary texts. We will refuse to take for granted the common assumption about writing: namely, that artistic writing 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. 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. 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 formatted exclusively in type 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.
100: 1, #17299, BRITTO, TT 11-12:30, 242 Dwinelle
“Introduction to Comparative Literature: Rewriting the
Canon"
In this course, we will examine a number of texts by authors from Africa and the Caribbean, all written in self-conscious relationship to earlier works from the European canon. Working closely with these texts and their sources, we will read comparatively so as to explore the ways in which similar stories, characters, and narrative structures are transformed by authors writing from different historical, cultural, and geographic locations.
Texts:
- Shakespeare, The Tempest
- Aimé Césaire, A Tempest/Une tempête
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
- J. M. Coetzee, Foe
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
- Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- Maryse Condé, Windward Heights/La migration des coeurs
100: 2, #17302, SAS, MWF 3-4, 210 Dwinelle
“Off Center: Performance, Narrative, Ethnography”
This course introduces key arguments and reading strategies of comparative literature. Designed for majors and prospective majors, the course engages theories of gender and sexuality, studies of subjectivity, and questions of context, historiography, and ethnography within comparative literature. The course also touches on performance studies, new historicism, theories of trauma and memory, narrative and nostalgia.
In this course we will explore stories told from the margins and peripheries of culture and the impact of this telling. We will study rural folk-tales of Japan (and ethnographers retellings of them), new historicist studies of literature, theoretical texts, novels and film.
Texts will include The Tales of Tono (Yanagita Kunio), Foe (J.M. Coetzee), as well as works by Greenblatt, Silverman, de Man, Johnson, Sedgwick, Laclau/Mouffe, and others.
112B, #17305, KOTZAMANIDOU, MWF 12-1, 279 Dwinelle
“Modern Greek Composition”
This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.
Prerequisites: Comparative Literature 112A or consent of the instructor.
A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.
152, #17308, WHITTA, TT 9:30-11, 210 Dwinelle
“Saints and Sinners: Sanctity and Its Discontents in
Medieval Europe”
This course will examine concepts of sanctity and sin formulated in the early and high Middle Ages in Western Europe. We will sample the literatures of hagiography and heterodoxy to see how such categories were used to define and police normative selves and cultural agendas. Beginning with representations of Christ's body and sanctity, we'll look closely at exemplary saints' lives (from Antony and Macrina to Francis of Assisi and Joan of Arc) and representations of the holy in other literary genres (drama, romance), set against powerful counter-examples of deviant or dissident identity (demons, witches, heretics, non-Christians, mystics, sodomites, prostitutes, transvestites, victims of leprosy or plague); in doing so, we'll consider how central medieval institutions (the solitary or monastic life, marriage, monarchy) were formulated in terms of these polarities. Some readings will be enhanced by film and visual art. Requirements: a variety of short writing assignments (response, 5-pp. essays), presentation, final paper.
153, #17311, CASCARDI, M 2-5, 104 Dwinelle
“Renaissance and Modern: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne,
Descartes (and related authors)”
This course will investigate the transition from “Renaissance” to “modern” in a comparative context. We will take Cartesian philosophy as one paradigm for “modern” thinking, and we will look at its relationship to the predecessor culture. We will consider problems of the self, of action, and of belief and cognition, and we will focus on the transformations of writing during this period. We will pay special attention to the differences between fictional and philosophical writing.
155, #17314, RAM, TT 11-12:30, 121 Wheeler
Cross-listed with Slavic 131
“The European Avant-garde: from Futurism to Surrealism”
The literary avant-garde of the early twentieth century was the most extreme expression of European modernism in literature and art. We will be focusing on the four most radical and creative of the avant-garde movements to have swept through Europe between the 1910s and the 1930s: Italian and Russian futurism, dada in Zurich and Berlin, and French surrealism. We will be reading avant-garde poetry, manifestoes, performance texts and plays, experimental fiction and memoirs. We will also be paying some attention to parallel developments in the visual arts. (L&S Breadth: satisfies Arts & Literature.)
170: 1, #17317, KOTZAMANIDOU, F 2-5, 104 Dwinelle
“The Irrational in Modern Greek Fiction”
By placing each novel in its own context, this course examines the different strategies through which the violation of the bonds of reason in the narrative reflects a reaction against social, political, historical or economic conditions. Madness, unexplained powers, prophetic visions, narrative of an apocalyptic style etc. disrupt an imposed order, demand redefinitions of roles and articulate positions of protest against individual powerlessness and vulnerability.
Texts:
- Alexandros Papadiamantis: I Fonissa (The Murderess)
- George Vizyinos: Moskov Selim
- Stratis Myrivilis: I Panayia Gorgona (The Mermaid Madonna)
- George Theotokas: I Kampanes (The Bells)
- Vasilis Vasilikos: To Fyllo (The Plant)
- Margarita Karapanou: O Ipnovatis (The Sleepwalker)
170: 2 , #17320, MONROE, Tu 2-5, 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.
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
190:1, #17323, ALTER, TT 11-12:30, 125 Dwinelle
"James Joyce's Ulysses and its Heirs"
Joyce's ULYSSES was not only one of the central achievements of modernist fiction but also a watershed novel, representing an ultimate realization of the process of interiorization of narrative that had been evolving in European fiction during the latter part of the nineteenth century. We will devote about half the semester to a close reading, episode by episode, of Joyce's novel, and then will consider three later novels, in three different national-literary traditions, that in different ways emulate and carry forward Joyce's precedent.
dents will be expected to write two papers of eight to ten pages each during the semester, one on ULYSSES and one another novel of their choice, topics to be determined in consultation with the instructor. There is no examination.
190:2, #17326, REJHON, TT 11-12:30, 129 Barrows
“The Image of Arthur in the Middle Ages”
The course will focus on Arthurian romance in medieval French, Welsh, and English literatures. The figure of Arthur-his image and social function-will be examined in the three cultural contexts with special attention devoted to how his reception in each culture reflects the concerns of that particular milieu. The French works that will be read are Chrétien de Troyes’ romances, Erec and Enide, Yvain, Lancelot, and Perceval; Marie de France’s Lanval and the anonymous lais, Graelent and Guingamor; Robert de Boron’s Romance of the Grail; and Perlesvaus. The Welsh works are: the Arthurian romances, Owein, Peredur, and Gereint; the native Arthurian tales, Culhwch and Olwen and The Dream of Rhonabwy; the early Arthurian poems, “What Man the Gate-Keeper,” “The Spoils of the Otherworld,” and “A Conversation Between Arthur and Guenevere.” The English Arthurian texts will include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and selections from Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur and from The Alliterative Morte Arthur. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain will also be read as will the Irish tale, The Voyage of Bran, and extracts from the German romance Lanzelet.
The course is open to students with a competence in reading at least one of the literatures in the original language; all works will be available in English translation. Particular emphasis will be given to the Celtic aspect of the Arthurian texts.
Course requirements will include a midterm and a final examination, an oral report and a term paper.
