Comparative Literary Studies Program Course Descriptions 2013-2014
Fall 2013
CLS 206: Literature and Media: Labyrinths
Lectures: TTh 11:00-12:20, Fisk B17
Instructor: Domietta Torlasco
Expected Enrollment:
Course Description: This course will trace a brief history of labyrinths through literature, architecture, cinema, and new media. From classical mythology to cutting-edge computer games, the figure of the labyrinth has shaped the way in which we ask crucial questions about space, time, perception, and technology. Whether an actual maze or a book or a film, the labyrinth presents us with an entanglement of lines and pathways that is as demanding as it is engrossing and even exhilarating. As we move from medium to medium, or pause in between media, the labyrinth will in turn emerge as an archetypal image, a concrete pattern, a narrative structure, a figure of thought, a mode of experience....Among the works which we will analyze are Jorge Luis Borges' celebrated short stories, Italo Calvino's experiments in detective fiction, Mark Z. Danielewski' hyper- textual novelHouse of Leaves, films such as Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), and Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), and the more intellectually adventurous video games.
Evaluation Method: 1. Attendance and participation to lectures AND discussion sessions (25% of the final grade). Please note that more than three absences will automatically reduce your final grade. 2. Two short response papers (15%). 3. Mid-term exam (25%). 4. Final 5-6 page paper (35%).
CLS 211 / ENG 211:Topics in Genre: Intro to Poetry
Lectures: MW 11:00-11:50, Harris 107
Discussion Sections: F 11:00, 1:00
Instructor: Susannah Gottlieb
Expected Enrollment: 100
Course Description: The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. The experience of poetry includes both of these models, and theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process.
Evaluation Method: Weekly reading exercises; two 5-7 page papers; final project; final exam.
Reading List: Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition Course packet available at Quartet Copies
CLS 274-1/ASIAN_LC 274-1: Chinese Lit in Translation
Class Meetings: TTh 12:30-1:50, Parkes 223
Instructor: Peter Shen
Expected enrollment:
Course Description: As an introduction to the outlines of Chinese literature from its ancient roots to its "modern" flowering in the Song dynasty (A.D. 960), this course aims to provide insight into the humanistic Chinese tradition. We will work through masterpieces of prose and poetry in a roughly chronological manner. These include lyrical masterworks in the various poetic modes, fiction from early strange and supernatural Daoist-inspired stories to adventurous and sensual medieval tales, as well as exemplary essays, parables and jokes, vivid historical writings, and profound philosophical pieces. Close readings of texts will enable you to gain intimacy and familiarity with this long and rich literary tradition and, more importantly, will also equip you with the skills to interpret and reconstruct traditions though reading texts, composing papers and designing presentations. Although it is impossible to cover all ancient, early and medieval Chinese literature in one quarter, you will leave the course with an enhanced sense of the richness and the wonder of this literature, a basic blueprint of China's literary development, and hopefully an interest in roaming through it further. Conducted in English.
Evaluation Method:
• Attendance: 10% • Class Participation: 20% • Presentation: 10% • First-paper: 10% (4-5) • Second Paper: 20% (6-7) • Final Paper: 30% (10-12)
Reading List: Stephen Owen, An Anthology Of Chinese Literature: Beginnings To 1911; a variety of handouts
CLS 278: Modern Hebrew Literature
Class Meetings: TTh 12:30-1:50, Fisk 114
Instructor: Marcus Moseley
Expected Enrollment: 25
Course Description: The effeminate, neurotic, isolated, erotically disoriented, painfully sensitive and introspective Jewish young man made his first appearance in Hebrew literature as early as the 19th century and he remains with us to this day. So central was this figure in Hebrew literary discourse that a new term was coined for him, the Talush (“uprooted man”). Who was this man? Whence, why, and how did he make his appearance on the literary stage? How, when and why did the Talush appear in female guise? What is the secret of this pathetic figure’s longevity in the Hebrew literary imagination? This course examines these questions from a variety of perspectives: literary-historical, sociological, psycho analytic, gendered etc. It also provides a splendid introduction to Modern Hebrew Literature from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The professor is intimately acquainted with the Hebrew original of all the texts to be taught in English translation. No prior knowledge of Jewish history, Judaism, or Hebrew is required.
Reading List: We shall read classic texts by M.Y Berdichevsky, Y.H Brenner and S.Y Agnon alongside excerpts from contemporary bestselling novels by Amos Oz, Zeruya Shalev and others. A further advantage of this course is that the professor is intimately acquainted with the texts in the original Hebrew and may thus critique and correct the English translations.
CLS 279 / JWSH_ST 279: Modern Jewish Literature in Translation
Class Meetings: MWF 10:00-10:50, Kresge 2-315
Instructor: Marcia Gealy
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: This course studies selected works of modern Jewish literature in the context of their historical background. We will focus on certain themes and stories in the Bible and in Jewish folklore as well as on particular events and movements in European, American, and Israeli history as a way of better understanding this literature. Though most of this literature dates from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual and religious currents such as the Enlightenment, Jewish Mysticism, Zionism, and Socialism will help us to understand the literature in its changing historical and social context. Thus while some writers saw modern Jewish literature as a means of educating the masses to modern secular needs, others saw it as a means of reshaping older forms and religious values, while still others saw it as a means of reflecting timeless humanistic concerns. Among the writers we will read are Sholom Aleichem, I. B. Singer, Anzia Yezierska, Primo Levi, Ida Fink, Ava Schieber, Philip Roth, and Amos Oz.
Readings include:
1. Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, ed. Stavans 2. Singer, I.B. Collected Stories 3. Levi, P. Survival in Auschwitz 4. Fink, A Scrap of Time I. 5. Schieber, Ava, Soundless Roar 6. Roth, P. Goodbye Columbus (and five short stories), Oz, Amos, Panther in the Basement.
CLS 304 / ENG 369: Studies in Theme: Borders in African Literature
Class Meetings: MW 12:30-1:50, Parkes 224
Instructor: Evan Mwangi
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: The course studies the representation of borders in African literature. We will be concerned with analyzing how borders, migrations, and global capital intersect under proliferating administrative and epistemic violence in Africa. We will revisit debates about African literature that touch on boundaries and border-crossing. Should texts written in languages originating from outside the boundaries of the continent be considered African literature? Should scholars consider as legitimate boundaries imposed on Africans by colonial powers? Should foreign critics comment on African literature? Gender concerns will be highlighted.
Evaluation Method: Two 6-page papers, weekly Blackboard postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). Take-home final exam.
Texts include: Essays on borders and violence written by Frantz Fanon, Simon Gikandi, Achile Mbembe; Creative works such as Wale Okediran ’s The Boys at the Border, Chris Abani’s Song for Night, Nuruddin Farah’s Maps and Sefi Atta’s “Yahoo Yahoo”.
CLS 312/ITALIAN 351/RTVF 351: Authors and Their Readers: Visconti & European Cinema
Class Meetings: T/TH 2-3:20, Kresge 2-420
Instructor: Domietta Torlasco , Permission of Instructor necessary
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) is unanimously considered one of Europe's greatest film directors. His body of work spans decades, including cinematic masterpieces like Obsession (1943), Senso (1954), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard (1963), and Death in Venice (1971), as well as a number of trailblazing theater and opera productions. A master of the melodramatic imagination, Visconti was always ahead of his times in showing the harrowing effects of love, passion, and betrayal as they take place in historically and socially specific contexts, from the working class environment of Rocco and His Brothers to the aristocratic setting of The Leopard. All of his films distinguish themselves for their intellectual rigor, audiovisual splendor, and emotional force. This course will follow the developments of Visconti's extraordinary cinematic style while situating it in the wider context of European literature and cinema, with a special focus on French poetic realism (Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne'), 19th century melodrama, and authors like Thomas Mann and Albert Camus, whose works Visconti adapted with unmatched sophistication.
CLS 375/ENG 386: Literature and its Others: The Image of War in Literature and Film
Class Meetings: T/TH 11-12:20, Crowe 1-125
Instructor: David Wittenberg
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: War is among the most extreme and ineffable of human experiences—and yet ironically one of the most frequent and familiar subjects for literature and film. In this course, we will consider the ways in which war or trauma can be represented and interpreted in film and literature, and some of the ways in which it cannot. We will discuss a range of written and visual texts, both fictional and nonfictional, that depict the experience and significance of war, or that seek to render the unspeakable into language, or the indescribable into image. Primary texts and films will focus on wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (World War II, Vietnam, Iraq, the "War on Terror"). In addition, we will read and discuss a selection of critical and philosophical works on violence, trauma, social and economic inequities in conflict, and the relation between politics and individual experience. Please note that the texts, images, and discussion topics in this class may at times be graphic and disturbing.
Evaluation Method: Evaluation will be based on two brief papers leading up to a final research project, as well as regular attendance and participation in class discussions.
Texts and Films: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; Toyofumi Ogura, Letters from the End of the World; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real; selected episodes of HBO's Band of Brothers; Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line; Jean Renoir's The Grand Illusion; David O. Russell's Three Kings; selected critical and philosophical essays.
CLS 398: Senior Seminar
Class Meetings: T 3:00-5:20, Crowe 1-125
Instructor: Harris Feinsod
Expected Enrollment: 10
Course Description: This seminar is designed as a forum for the independent development and completion of a substantive scholarly paper in the field of Comparative Literature. The paper must involve either the study of literary texts from different literary traditions or the study of literature in relation to other media, other arts, or other disciplines. To this end, a number of short written assignments will be required, including an abstract, an annotated bibliography (using bibliographical software), and a formal project outline. The bulk of the coursework will comprise the senior paper itself (12-15 pages) and an oral presentation of the project to the class. The latter assignment will serve as a dress-rehearsal for the Senior CLS Colloquium, which will be held at the end of the quarter. The colloquium allows (and requires) all students to present their projects to the entire CLS community, including faculty and graduate students who will be in attendance.
Winter 2014 CLS 201: Reading World Literature
Class Meetings: MWF 1:00-1:50
Discussion Sections: F 1
Instructor: Nasrin Qader
Expected Enrollment: 50
Course Description: This introduction to the study of world literature brings together literary works from five continents and nearly a millennium. But world literature is something other than simply literature from different countries, different times, written in different languages, and translated into English. Our attempt will be to approach literature as a way of making worlds and of inhabiting them, of setting them together, crossing between them, finding points of contact and of missed connections, finally, also, a way of transforming them. In other words, we will focus on how literary works themselves create a world through their own movement.
The course is organized around literary communications across frontiers, examining the ways in which various works respond to each other across traditions and languages. For example, how does J. M. Coetzee, writing Waiting for the Barbarians in English from South Africa picks up C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Awaiting the Barbarians” written in Greek and weaves it into a new work, transforming and translating it while at the same time accounting for this earlier work? Not all the works we study will communicate in this direct and explicit manner but rather require from us acts of reading and interpreting that constitute their relationships. In this way, we will participate in the construction of the worlds that come about through our own readings, doubling those of the writers themselves.
Evaluation Method: Students will be evaluated based on three papers: 2 short papers (4-6 pages) and a final paper (8-10 pages). These papers must be double-spaced and in Times New Roman 12pt font. Papers must be original and all citations and borrowings from sources clearly indicated in a bibliography.
Short papers 20% each Final paper 40% Participation 20%
Texts:
William Shakespeare Othello Tayeb Salih Season of Migration to the North Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness Herman Melville Benito Sereno “Shahrazad” A Thousand and One Nights Asad Muhammad Harvest of Anger and Other Stories Jorge Luis Borges “Garden of Forking Paths,” “Zahir” Tahar ben Jelloun The Sand Child J. M. Coetzee Waiting for the Barbarians C. P. Cavafy, “Awaiting the Barbarians” Franz Kafka “The Wall of China,” “The Arab and the Jackals” “The Penal Colony”
CLS 207/ PHIL 220: Intro to Critical Theory
Class Meetings: MWF 10:00- 10:50am
Discussion Sections: F 9,10,11,12
Instructor: Mark Alznauer
Expected Enrollment: 150
Course Description: In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber and Freud, paying particular attention paid to methods they devise and deploy in their treatment of moral and religious phenomena. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings. The goal is to learn about Marx, Nietzsche, Weber and Freud.
Evaluation Method: Assessment will be based on section participation, a quiz, two papers, and a take home assignment.
Section attendance and participation: 20%
Midterm: 20%
First paper (3-5pp.): 15%
Take-home assignment: 15%
Second paper (5-8pp.): 30%
Reading List:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition, edited by Richard Tucker (Norton, 1978) ISBN-10: 9780393090406; Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morality' and Other Writings: Revised Student Edition (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) [STUDENT EDITION] ISBN-10: 052169163X/ ISBN-13: 978-0521691635; Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Routledge, 2007) ISBN: 978-0415436663 (Note: The older, Oxford edition (1946) is perfectly fine though out of print.) Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay (Norton, 1995) ISBN: 0-393-31403-0 CLS 271-2 / ALC 271-2:Medieval & Early Modern Japanese Literature:
Class Meetings: M/W 2-3:20pm
Instructor: Phyllis Lyons
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: The first stage of modernity came to Japan in the 1600s, with the rise of an urban middle class. Much of the cultural production of the 17th to mid-19th century reflects the interests of this new social class. A wide variety of literary genres show the vibrant intellectual, emotional, economic and social life of people testing and expanding the boundaries of the Shogun’s political order. The three distinctive traditional forms of Japanese theater developed in the preceding medieval and new early modern periods: the mystical masked Noh theater; Bunraku, the masterly puppet theater; and the larger-than-life Kabuki. The prose fiction of the 17th century writer Saikaku included both stories of love and the world’s first business stories. New forms of fiction came with 18th century ghost stories and satire of Ueda Akinari; and Jippensha Ikku’s lively and humorous 19th century accounts of travel along the great Tokaido highway celebrated rising social energy. Haiku poetry developed under the perceptive guidance of Basho and his successors. Through these writings, the course traces changes in the consciousness of townsmen during this exciting time period.
Class Materials:
Ihara, Saikaku, Life of an Amorous Woman;
Photocopy packet (Quartet Copies)
CLS 271-4 / ALC 271-4:Modern Japanese Women Writers
Class Meetings: T/TH 2-3:20pm
Instructor: Phyllis Lyons
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: Few women writers are included in standard lists of the major canonical writers of the modern Japanese literary tradition. But especially since the 1960s, women make up a significant proportion of the most interesting contemporary writers. This course, in a sense a parallel to CLS/ALC 271-3 (Modern Japanese Literature), introduces a number of these newer creative voices, many of whom have won the major literary prizes in the past several decades. These more recent writers, and other writers from the late 19th and through the 20th centuries, show women meeting--sometimes triumphantly, often with great difficulty--the challenges of a changing social order with its changes in personal relationships between men and women.
Evaluation Method: Evaluation will be based on discussion participation, two short papers (4 pp.), and one long final paper (8-10 pp.).
Class Materials: • Birnbaum, Rabbits, Crabs, Etc. • Lippit and Selden, Contemporary Japanese Women Writers • Enchi, Masks • Yoshimoto, Kitchen • Course packet (Quartet Copies)
CLS 274-2 / ALC 274-2:
Intro to Chinese Literature: Late Imperial
Class Meetings: T/TH 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Peter Shen
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: As a continuation of the journey through the vast literary horizons that inform the Chinese cultural heritage, in this course we will start with the rise of Neo-classical prose in the Tang and Song dynasties and explore a number of the "masterworks" found in the major genres of traditional Chinese poetry, fiction, and drama. These range from strange and supernatural Daoist-inspired tales to the adventurous and sensual Ming and Qing novels and dramas, as well as exemplary essays, historical writings, and philosophical pieces. Close reading of the texts is strongly encouraged as students are expected not only to learn about this long and rich literary tradition, but, more importantly, to reconstruct it though the texts we read and the papers and presentations you produce. We will also examine the intertextuality between these genres -- how poetry blends into narrative, how fiction becomes drama, and drama inspires fiction. Through reading these selected works of traditional Chinese literature, we will examine some of the major features of traditional Chinese society: religious and philosophical beliefs, the imperial system and dynastic change, gender relations, notions of class and ethnicity, family, romance and sexuality. All works are read in translation; no prior knowledge of the Chinese language, history, or literature, is a prerequisite for taking the course.
The goal of the course is to introduce students to the major works that define the Chinese literary tradition and to build a solid foundation for further literary exploration. By the end of the course, students will acquire the ability to discuss and write critically and knowledgeably about Chinese literature.
Evaluation Method:
Attendance: 10%
Class Participation: 20%
In-class Presentation: 10%
First Paper: 10% (3-4)
Second Paper: 20% (5-6)
Final Paper: 30% (7-10) Texts Included: Owen, Stephen. 1996. An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York: Norton. Shen, Fu. 1983. Six Records of a Floating Life. New York: Penguin Classics.
CLS 301/ENG 386: Practices In Reading: Resisting Interpretation
Class Meetings: T/TH 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Susannah Gottlieb
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: Literature always resists - even as it demands - interpretation. In certain texts of modern literature, the resistance to interpretation issues into a particularly violent struggle in which points of defiance are difficult to distinguish from moments of defeat. This class will examine some of the literary texts of modernity and the tendency of these texts toward two interpretive gestures or situations: incomprehensible self-closure (and the attendant foreclosure of a space for self-legitimation) and an equally incomprehensible self-expansiveness (and the exhilarating, scary freedom it entails). We will begin the course with the enigmatic words of resistance repeated by Melville's odd scrivener, Bartleby ("I prefer not to"), and end with the apocalyptic conclusion to Ellison's Invisible Man ("Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?").
Evaluation Method: Three papers (one 3-4 pages; two 5-6 pages); in-class presentation; active class participation.
Texts Include: Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener -- A Story of Wall Street; Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; John Okada, No-No Boy; Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man; Course packet available at Quartet Copies; Three films: Bartleby, dir. Jonathan Parker; Ethan Frome, dir. John Madden; Henry Fool, dir. Hal Hartley.
CLS 302/GER 366/JWSH_ST 366: Major Periods in World Literature: The Rise and Fall of Modern Yiddish Culture
Class Meetings: T/TH 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Marcus Moseley
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: The Yiddish language is the most widespread of Jewish diaspora languages in world history. Prior to World War II, the language was spoken and read by around twelve million Jews, that is 40% of the global Jewish population.
From the late nineteenth century on, there began to develop a distinctively modern, secular Yiddish literature. By an extraordinarily accelerated process of development Yiddish literature essentially achieved in less than a century what had been in European literature in the course of half a millennium. Following the Holocaust, secular Yiddish literature and culture survived as a spectral, haunted remnant. While this magnificent literature is well represented in English translation, it remains for the most part a dark continent for the increasing number of students pursuing studies in fields outside Jewish Studies for whom Jewish history and culture is of significant or central concern.
This course is aimed toward such students and provides an overview of emergence of a modern Jewish language and literature from consideration of the three classic writers--Mendele the Bookseller; Y.L. Peretz; Sholem Aleichem—to high Yiddish modernist poetry in early 20th Century America; the post-Holocaust poetry of Avrom Sutzkever and the Isaac Bashevis-Singer phenomenon.
Questions to be addressed include: What is a belated literature? What is a minor literature? What is national literature? What is dead literature? Can Diaspora literature, stateless, landless, constitute a trans-territorial, stateless state (a “make-believe territory”—Kemoy teritorie in the formulation of one leading Yiddish thinker)? Where, why and how does Yiddish survive in literature written in non-Jewish languages, by Jews and non- Jews? Do we find a parallel to this odd universal life in death/death in life and elsewhere? It is hoped that student will bring theoretical perspectives derived from their own fields to bear upon the texts studied.
Evaluation Method: Two informal oral presentations, Class Participation and a Final Paper.
CLS 304(sec. 20)/ENG 311: Studies in Theme: Poetry of History in the Americas
Class Meetings: MW 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Harris Feinsod
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: Can modern poetry be a vehicle for writing historical experience? Or is history an obstacle that poets must overcome, subvert, or disfigure? To answer these questions, we will compare the literary histories of the 20th century long poem in the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean, sustaining a "trans- American" viewpoint toward history and poetic form alike. Topics include U.S. modernism, poetry and social commitment, new theories of poetry as a repository of historical value, the nature of cultural autonomy in the Americas after WWII, the role of poets in Cold War struggles for national liberation, and, ultimately, the global legacies of modernist literary techniques. What is the value in conceiving of a "poetry of the Americas," rather than of discrete national poetry canons? Does historical poetry give us as readers special knowledge of "hemispheric" history, and thus an understanding of the hemisphere as a shared venue of human creativity?
Teaching Method: Mini-lectures and seminar discussion.
Evaluation Method: Short annotation and blog assignments; ~5-page midterm essay; ~10-page research paper or creative final project. Participation is crucial.
Texts Include: Crane, The Bridge; Rukeyser, "The Book of the Dead"; Williams, In the American Grain and Paterson; Neruda, Canto General; Olson, Selected Writings; Brathwaite, The Arrivants, M. NorbeSe Phillips, Zong!; additional poems and essays by Whitman, Cardenal, Baca, Walcott and others; short essays by historians and theorists of poetry.
Note: All texts are written in English or furnished with translations, but knowledge of Spanish is advantageous.
CLS 304 (sec. 21)/ALC 390: Advanced Topics in Asian Languages: Dao of Sex: Sexuality in China
Class Meetings: T/TH 12:30-1:50 Instructor: Paola Zamperini
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: This survey course will focus on sexual culture in China, from pre-Qin times to the present. Using various sources such as ancient medical texts, Daoist manuals, court poetry and Confucian classics, paintings and illustrated books, movies and documentaries, as well as modern and pre-modern fiction written both in the classic and vernacular languages, we will explore notions of sex, sexuality, and desire. Through the lens of cultural history and gender studies, we will try to reconstruct the genealogy of the discourses centered around sex that developed in China, at all levels of society, throughout 5,000 years. Among the topics covered will be sexual yoga, prostitution, pornography, and sex-tourism.
Teaching Method: The course will combine lecture and discussion.
Evaluation Method: The final grade will be based on the following criteria: attendance and participation (involving consistent and enthusiastic presence preparation of readings, and contributions towards classroom discussion), 40%; essays, 35 %; assignments, 25%.
Class Materials (required): All required books will be available for purchase through the university bookstore. Please use only these editions, as all page numbers in your syllabus refer to them. Douglas Wiles, Art of the Bedchamber The Chinese Secual Yoga Class (ISBN:0791408868, 1993), Li Yu, Patrick Hanan, The Carnal Prayer Mat ISBN: 0824817982, Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook (0415551447), People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (1841504939). Additional Materials: All other readings and movies assigned for the course will be available on e-reserve.
CLS 375(sec. 20)/ ENG 386:Literature and Its Others: Criminal Minds
Class Meetings: M/W 2-3:20pm
Instructor: Sarah Valentine
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: Dexter, Raskolnikov, American Psycho. Killers, good and bad, have fascinated us for centuries. Psychologically, morally and philosophically we are drawn to the figure of the killer; we revel in the voyeuristic pleasure of entering the criminal mind while maintaining our own legal and moral codes. In this course we study works of fiction, film and TV that have the killer or murderer as their primary subject. We pose ourselves as investigators and analyze the minds and motives of characters as well as the cultures that generate them. We explore the appeal of the “moral murderer” and the “crime drama” genre that allow viewers to participate in a criminal act while allowing justice to prevail in the end. Our methods include close reading and traditional textual analysis, but we also borrow the tactic of psychological/behavioral profiling used in the criminal justice system and apply it to our fictional characters and texts.
Teaching Method: Seminar.
Evaluation Method: Weekly writing assignments, quizzes and a final paper or exam.
Texts include: TBA
CLS 375(sec. 21)/ ALC 290:Studies In Theme:Special Topics in Asian Language: India on Screen: Bollywood
Class Meetings: T/TH 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Laura Brueck
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: This course explores the history, music, and narrative conventions of popular Hindi cinema in India, commonly referred to as “Bollywood.” Bollywood movies, readily identified by their song-and-dance sequences and “masala”-style mixing of filmic genres, are among the most avidly watched films in the world. Focusing on films that engage major historical and cultural moments in more than sixty years of modern Indian nationhood, we will explore why Bollywood-style storytelling is so effective as well as examine how these filmic narratives both reflect and shape the culture and society in which they are created.
CLS 383/GER 346:Special Topics in Theory: Virtual Histories
Class Meetings: T/TH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Jörg Kreienbrock
Expected Enrollment: 15
Course Description: What if Hitler had won World War 2? What if Kennedy had lived? What if the Russians had won the Cold War? This class aims to examine the logic and history of these and similar hypothetical or counterfactual questions blending fact and fiction in a provocative way. It addresses on the one hand substantial philosophical problems regarding determinism, probability, and teleology while on the other hand looks at literature, cinema, and art. Science Fiction, utopian/dystopian imaginations, or thought experiments are examples of these fictional discourses. Imagining possible worlds, counterfactual histories and other “uchronias” are practices which transverse traditional disciplinary boundaries structuring the imagination of historians, writers, and philosophers alike.
Texts include:
Authors that will be discussed in class include but are not limited to: Livy, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Musil, Jorge Luis Borges, Philipp K. Dick, William Gibson, Robert Harris, Philipp Roth, Christoph Ransmayr.
Texts will be available on blackboard.
CLS 390/ GER 334: Topics in Comparative Literature: Writers & Their Critics
Class Meetings: M 2-4:00pm, Crowe 1-125
Instructor: Samuel Weber
Expected Enrollment: 15
Course Description: Franz Kafka’s writings will be reread through the perspective of some of his most important and distinguished critics, including: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot. These readings and their discussion will provide students with a better understanding of the variety of ways one of the most influential writers of the 20th century has been read and understood.
Evaluation Method: Attendance, Class Presentation, Term Paper
Class Materials: “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death” by Walter Benjamin, “Notes on Kafka” by Theodor Adorno, “Before the Law” in: Acts of Literature by Jacques Derrida, “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” in The Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot, The Complete Stories & The Man Who Disappeared by Franz Kafka
Spring 2014
CLS 104: Feshman Seminar
Instructor: Anna Parkinson
CLS 211/ SLAVIC 211: Topics in Genre: Lyric Poetry
Class Meetings: MW 11:00- 12:20pm
Discussion Sections: F 11
Instructor: Clare Cavanagh
Expected Enrollment: 40
Course Description: What is lyric poetry? What are its roots, and what are its possibilities today? How does it stand in relation to the countless other varieties of rhymed and/or rhythmic language‹hymns, pop songs, advertising slogans, campaign mottoes, bumper stickers, and so on‹that surround us in our daily life? We will explore these and other questions by way of examining lyrics past and present, from psalms and hymns to epitaphs, elegies, songs, and love poems. This course will emphasize the varieties of lyric, both in English originals and in translation, with particular attention to the meanings of poetic form and the nature of poetic translation. We will pay special attention to the significance--be it private or public, political or personal-- of lyric poetry in different cultures, with readings drawn chiefly from Anglo-American and Eastern European traditions. Poets to be read include: Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jan Kochanowski, Walt Whitman, Gwendolyn Brooks, e.e. cummings, Anna Akhmatova, Wislawa Szymborska, Seamus Heaney, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others.
CLS 211-0-21 / ALC 290: Living Epics: Ramayana and Mahabharata
Class Meetings: MW 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Laura Brueck
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: This course will introduce two fundamental mythological pillars of Indian society - the great Hindu epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Each thought to be composed almost three thousand years ago (give or take a few centuries), these two epic narratives have continued to be re-told and re-imagined in changing social and cultural contexts ever since. This course is dedicated to understanding the nature of these ancient epics as modern, "living" texts in contemporary Indian society. After an extensive introduction to both epics, we will explore them in the modern contexts of literature, comic books, film, television, and political rhetoric. We will ask whether the resonance of these epics varies in each of these modern contexts, or if their "meanings" are as immortal as the tales themselves.
Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion
Evaluation Method: Short papers, quizzes, discussion leading, final exam
CLS 274-3 / ALC 274-3: Introduction to Chinese Literature in Translation
Class Meetings: T/TH 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Peter Shen
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: As an introductory survey to the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century China, we will study selected examples of this literature that was produced during a period of unprecedented upheaval and that itself was and continues to be a battleground over political, cultural, and aesthetic issues. Focus will be placed on fiction, poetry, and the essay. Brief class lectures will highlight literary and cultural themes and concerns, as well as present important historical and literary background to the period under scrutiny: from the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 through the May Fourth Movement, the radicalization of the 1920s and 1930s, the Anti-Japanese War, the founding of the People\'s Republic of China in 1949, the period of socialist construction, and the liberalization of the post-Mao era. The chronological arrangement of the course will provide students a sense of literary, historical and political development. Great importance is placed on class discussion and on creating a dialogue of interpretations of the texts we read. Close reading of the texts is strongly encouraged as students are expected not only to learn about this rich literary tradition, but, more importantly, to reconstruct it though the texts we read and the papers and presentations you produce. All works are read in translation; no language background is necessary.
CLS 274-3 / ALC 274-3: (continued)
Evaluation Method:
Attendance: 10%
Class Participation: 20%
In-class Presentation: 10%
First Paper: 10% (5-6)
Second Paper: 20% (5-6)
Final Paper: 30% (8-10)
Reading List:
Lau, Joseph and Howard Goldblatt, eds. Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. NY: Columbia UP, 2007.
Shen, Congwen. Border Town: A Novel (Harper Perennial, 2009).
CLS 301 / CLASSICS 350: Practices of Reading: Contemporary Literary Theory & Ancient Texts
Class Meetings: T/TH 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Marianne Hopman
Expected Enrollment: 20
Prerequisite: Students are required to read or re-read Homer’s Odyssey before the first day of classes.
Course Description: What is literature? What is reading? How can we draw on contemporary theory to come up with richer and more productive readings of literary texts? This course will offer an introduction to contemporary approaches to literature including structuralism, oral poetics, deconstruction, Marxism, and feminism, in dialogue with ancient texts ranging from Homer to Latin poetry. Special emphasis will be put on the various ways in which current interpretations of Homer’s Odyssey have been shaped by, engaging with, and sometimes re-defining contemporary theory.
Evaluation Method: Response papers, oral presentation
Reading List:
Homer, Odyssey. Recommended translation: Richmond Lattimore. ISBN 978-0061244186
Selection from contemporary theorists, including Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, De Man, Althusser, Macherey, Beauvoir, Cixous, and J. Butler.
Selection from ancient texts including Hesiod, Pindar, Athenian tragedy, and Roman poetry.
CLS 304-0-20 / ENG 386: Alien as Other: The Politics of Science Fiction and the Science Fiction of Politics
Class Meetings: T/TH 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Sarah Valentine
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: Since the turn of the twentieth century, the image of the “alien from outer space” has served as a metaphor for countless real-world stories. This course explores the development of the alien genre from the late Victorian era up through the present day and focuses on how the degrees of otherness the alien represents help us gauge our definition of humanity through issues like race, gender, sexuality and political status. We also look at the political use of the term “alien” as a manufactured identity that can take on otherworldly tones, for instance in the government’s official designation “alien of extraordinary ability.”
Evaluation Method: Weekly reading assignments and written responses, a midterm project and a final paper or presentation.
Reading List: Texts include Heart of Darkness, Kindred, District 9, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as well as others TBA.
CLS 304-0-22 / SPAN 397: Labyrinths
Class Meetings: MW 12:00-1:20pm
Instructor: Elisa Marti-Lopez
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: The course examines the world of labyrinths as spaces, images, texts and films from the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and the medieval single-path labyrinth, to the present (the labyrinth as essential figure for Post-Structuralist thought). It explores representations of labyrinths both as real constructions and as a metaphor for knowledge and the human experience in the world. In particular, we will analyze the challenge posed by the labyrinth to narrative, and also its influence in film. We will pay special attention to the labyrinth in relation to certain genres: the thriller, science fiction, and Gothic and Neo-Gothic tales. Readings may include works by Lewis Carroll, Marcel Proust, Franz Kakfa, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, and John Barth. Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Lisberger, Larry and Andy Wachowski, Francis Coppola, and Alejandro Amenábar are some of the film directors whose works we will be discussing.
CLS 304-0-21 / ALC 390: Fashion Matters: Clothes, Bodies and Consumption in East Asia
Class Meetings: T/TH 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Paola Zamperini
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: This course will focus on both the historical and cultural development of fashion, clothing and consumption in East Asia, with a special focus on China and Japan. Using a variety of sources, from fiction to art, from legal codes to advertisements, we will study both actual garments created and worn in society throughout history, as well as the ways in which they inform the social characterization of class, ethnicity, nationality, and gender attributed to fashion. Among the topics we will analyze in this sense will be hairstyle, foot-binding and, in a deeper sense, bodily practices that inform most fashion-related discourses in East Asia. We will also think through the issue of fashion consumption as an often-contested site of modernity, especially in relationship to the issue of globalization and world-market. Thus we will also include a discussion of international fashion designers, along with analysis of phenomena such as sweatshops.
CLS 311 / ENG 306: Theory and Practice of Poetry Translation
Class Meetings: MW 11:00-12:20pm
Instructor: Reginald Gibbons
Expected Enrollment: 20
Prerequisite: A reading knowledge of a second language, and experience reading literature in that language. If you are uncertain about your qualifications, please e-mail the instructor at
Course Description: A combination of seminar and workshop. Together we will translate several short poems and study theoretical approaches to literary translation and practical accounts by literary translators. We will approach language, poems, poetics, culture and theoretical issues and problems in relation to each other. Your written work will be due in different forms during the course. In your final portfolio, you will present revised versions of your translations and a research paper on translation.
Teaching Method: Discussion; group critique of draft translations; oral presentations by students.
Evaluation Method: Written work ("blackboard" responses to reading, draft translations, revised translations, and final papers) as well as class participation should demonstrate students’ growing understanding of translation as a practice and as a way of reading poetry and engaging with larger theoretical ideas about literature.
Reading List: Essays by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Yves Bonnefoy, Dick Davis, John Dryden, Roman Jakobson, Octavio Paz, Gayatri Spivak, and others.
CLS 313-0-20 / ENG 386 / MENA 301: 20/21 Century Literature & Film from MENA: National Traditions, Global Influences
Class Meetings: MW 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Brian Edwards
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: This course has two objectives: first, to introduce the literary work of several novelists and a few filmmakers from postcolonial North Africa and the Middle East. Second, to interrogate the methodological question of what sort of evidence literature and film offers about contemporary reality. These two objectives are pursued simultaneously via close readings of fiction (including a graphic novel) and film from the region, with a special focus on three diverse sites (the Maghreb, especially Morocco; Egypt; and Iran), and methodological and theoretical readings that attempt to identify the place of literature and culture in society, including those that challenge this relationship. We will not assume an easy relationship of literature or the literary and society, but rather put that relationship on the table for consideration. Topics we will pursue include: Orientalism, ostcoloniality, globalization and literature, the field of cultural production, and the politics of literature and art. Theorists and critics include: Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Arjun Appadurai, Richard Jacquemond, Samia Mehrez, Tarek El-Ariss.
Reading List: Literature will be drawn from the following list of authors: Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mohammed Mrabet, Leila Abouzeid, Abdellah Taia (Morocco); Assia Djebar, Ahlam Mosteghanemi(Algeria); Hisham Matar (Libya); Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, Bahaa Taher, Alaa Al Aswany, Mansoura Ez Eldin, Ahmed Alaidy, Magdy El Shafee (Egypt); Sadegh Hedayat, Iraj Pezeshkzad, Marjane Satrapi, Shahrnush Parsipur, Shahriar Mandanipour(Iran). Filmmakers may include: Moumen Smihi, Nabil Ayouch, Laila Marrakchi,Faouzi Bensaïdi (Morocco); Youssef Chahine, Ibrahim El Batout (Egypt); MohsenMakhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran). Not all these authors and filmmakers will be covered; substitutes will be satisfying.
Note: All readings will be in English translation and films will be subtitled. Students who are able to read in French, Arabic and/or Persian/Farsi are encouraged to do so.
CLS 375-0-20 / ENG 386: Cowboys and Samurai in Fiction and Film
Class Meetings: MW 11:00-12:20pm
Instructor: Andrew Leong
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: The American cowboy and the Japanese samurai are often held to be paragons of masculine virtue, mythic embodiments of the “frontier” or “warrior” spirits that define their respective nations. However, despite their status as icons of national exceptionalism, the cowboy and samurai are surprisingly interchangeable. In the world of film, there is little distance between the Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven.
The gambit of this course is to examine the history of film through two genres of “historical film”: the Western and the jidaigeki (Japanese period drama). While films, and film genres will be at the center of the course, we will also examine the Western and jidaigeki in other media, including dime novels, manga, and theatrical spectacles. Many of the key questions of the class will revolve around the problem of “adaptation.” How are elements present in one national, cinematic, or literary context transposed or re-coded to fit within another? What can the various cross-adaptations of Westerns and jidaigeki tell us about the shifting relationship between Japan and the United States? How can generic conventions be “bent” or “queered” through practices of allusion, adaptation, and re-interpretation? What can the hyperbolic foregrounding of American and Japanese men tell us about who is left out or behind (outlaws, Indians, women, etc.)?
Evaluation Method: Grades will be based on regular attendance, active participation in discussion (both in- class and on the class blog), and writing assignments totaling 4-5 pages by the midterm and 8- 10 pages by the end of the quarter.
Reading List:
Nitobe Inazō, Bushidō (1899); Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912); Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003); Takehiko Inoue, Vagabond (1998-ongoing), and a substantial course reader.
Films include: The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903); Algie the Miner (Guy-Blaché, 1912); Last of the Line (Ince, 1914); Kosuzume Tōge (Numata, 1923); Humanity and Paper Balloons (Yamanaka, 1937); Stagecoach (Ford, 1939); Duel in the Sun (Vidor, 1946); Red River (Hawks, 1948); Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954); Musashi Miyamoto (Inagaki, 1955); The Magnificent Seven (dir. Sturges, 1960); Lady Snowblood (Fujita, 1973); Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992); Taboo (Oshima, 1999); Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005).
CLS 375-0-21 / MUSICOL 343: Music & Shakespeare
Class Meetings: MW 11:00-12:20pm
Instructor: Linda Austern
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: This course offers students the opportunity to explore some of the many intersections between Shakespearean drama and music from the late sixteenth century through the early twenty-first, not only in many sorts of performance of the plays themselves, but also in opera, ballet, film, musical theatre, art- song, popular music, and the symphony, to name only a few. Textual languages include not only The Bard’s original English and its more modern forms, but also French, Italian, Japanese, and Russian for starters. Given the character and complexity of the material, and the multimedia and interdisciplinary natures of Shakespeare-inspired musical works and scholarship, this course is open to students whose primary interest or field of study is comparative literature, film, English, performance studies, or theatre, as well as any area of music. It is hoped that the diverse backgrounds and perspectives that inform class discussion in this venue can further inspire unique collaborative and cross-disciplinary work long after the quarter is over.
CLS 383 / PHIL 315: Studies in French Philosophy: Reading Foucault
Class Meetings: T/TH 6:00-7:20pm
Discussion Sections: F 12, 1, TH 7:30 (Graduates only)
Instructor: Penelope Deutscher
Expected Enrollment: 30
Course Description: This course offers an overview of the work of one of the most important late twentieth century French philosophers, Michel Foucault. Focusing on his studies of madness, the medical gaze, incarceration, prisons and other institutions, gendered, sexed and confessing subjects, subjects seeking truth, knowledge, freedom or liberation, students will have the opportunity to consolidate their understanding of
Foucault's use of the terms: archaeology, power, biopower, discipline, interiority, resistance, strategy, dispositif, governmentality, genealogy, truth, knowledge, ethics and aesthetics of existence, through close reading of his main texts. The course is reading intensive: you should plan to read several of Foucault's major texts throughout the quarter.
Evaluation Method: Class participation, a presentation and/or short responses, and a final paper.
Readings: Paul Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon, 1984. Students are also asked to fully read their choice of several from among the following works: Foucault's Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge. Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality (volumes 1, 2 and 3).
Required Textbook:
Paul Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader, New York, Random House, 1984, ISBN 0394713400.
Recommended Textbooks: Choose at least two from among the following: 1) Foucault's Madness and Civilisation, Vintage, ISBN 067972110X
2) The Order of Things, Knopf, ISBN 0679753354
3) Discipline and Punish, Knopf, ISBN 0679752552
4) The History of Sexuality (VOL 1- ISBN 0679724699, VOL 2- ISBN 0394751221;
VOL 3- ISBN 0394741552)
5) The Archeaology of Knowledge, Pantheon, ISBN 0394711068
CLS 390 / ENG 365: Postcolonial Animal
Class Meetings: T/TH 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Evan Mwangi
Expected Enrollment: 20
Course Description: The course examines the representation of animals in texts from Africa, India, Caribbean and New Zealand. It will explore the intersection of postcolonialism and animal studies. While paying attention to the major debates in postcolonial studies, we will examine a variety of writers who use animals as themes, symbols, and agents of plot development in their work. What are the effects of Western writers comparing postcolonial societies with animals? Why do some foundational postcolonial texts use animals to argue against racial mixing? How has the use of animal images changed over time? As we discuss and write about these issues, we will pay close attention to the use of animals to (mis)represent indigenous cultures of the global south.
Teaching Method: Brief introductory lectures, structured debates, small-group discussions
Evaluation Method: Two 6-page papers, weekly Blackboard postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). Take-home final exam. Two 6- page papers, weekly Blackboard postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). Take-home final exam.
Reading List: Texts include Short excerpts on postcolonialism, politics, “otherness” and animals by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Wendy Woodward, Laurie Shannon, Levinas, Aristotle. Creative works about the postcolonial societies by Beryl Markham, Ernest Hemingway, Witi Ihimaera, Karen Blixen, Okot p’ Bitek, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and J.M Coetzee.