Program in Comparative Literature Course numbers, sections, times, and campus locations are listed below in the left margin. See online schedule of classes for more information. Web Site: http://complit.rutgers.edu/ COURSE OFFERINGS – SPRING 2018 195:101 Introduction to World Literature – Study of outstanding works of fiction, plays, and poems from European, 90 & 91 North and South American, African, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Middle-Eastern parts of the world through a Online different theme every semester. Focus on questions of culture, class, gender, colonialism, and on the role of TBA translation. Fulfills SAS Core Requirement AHp. 195:135: 01 Short Fiction – Study of various genres of short fiction, in English translation, by some of the most important TTh6 writers in world literature. Course themes focus on the city, the nation, migration and exile, colonialism, science 4:30-5:50pm fiction, the fantastic, magical realism, horror, mystery, among others. Fulfills SAS Core Requirement AHp. TBA CAC 195:135: 90 Short Fiction – This introductory comparative literature course looks at the form, function and history of short Online fiction in modern Western literature. We’ll consider how the novella, the short story, and flash fiction work with Bishop an eye to identifying the literary devices and narrative structures that make for good storytelling in a short CAC amount of space. In addition to investigating how authors construct their short fiction, we’ll ask what short narrative achieves that longer forms do not and what kind of fictional worlds these condensed genres give us access to. We will situate the works we read within their corresponding historical moments and literary traditions, so that students will leave the class able to recognize the fundamental components of fiction and analyze how they work, as well as knowledgeable in the preoccupations and cultural contexts that shape the history of Western literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism. Please note: this will be a hybrid course whose online work will be supplemented by periodic in-person class and individual meeting times. Face-to-face meeting times TBA in advance of the semester. Fulfills SAS Core Requirement AHp. Required Texts Please purchase the noted editions of the novellas; the rest of the works will be available in a coursepack on sale at the Rutgers University bookstore. Novellas: Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russia; 1886) New York: Bantam Books, 1981. ISBN: 0553210351 Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties (France; 1965) Boston: D. Godine, 2010. (Verba Mundi) ISBN: 1567921574 Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Colombia; 1981) New York: Vintage Press, 2003. ISBN: 140003471X Grading and Requirements Participation (online and in person): 10% Weekly blog posts: 10% Midterm exam: 25% 3-pp short textual analysis: 15% 6-pp final paper: 40% Extra credit assignment: an original work of flash fiction (750 words or less) 195:135:91 Short Fiction – Study of various genres of short fiction, in English translation, by some of the most important Online writers in world literature. Course themes focus on the city, the nation, migration and exile, colonialism, science TBA fiction, the fantastic, magical realism, horror, mystery, among others. Fulfills SAS Core Requirement AHp. 195:150:01 World Mythology – Story, structure, and meaning in myths of many cultures. Myth as a primary literary MW7 phenomenon, with some attention to anthropological and psychological perspectives. 6:10-7:30pm TBA, CAC 195:150:90 World Mythology – Story, structure, and meaning in myths of many cultures. Myth as a primary literary Online phenomenon, with some attention to anthropological and psychological perspectives. TBA Literature Across Borders: Music and Literature – This course is an introduction to the field of Comparative Literature, and is required of all majors and minors. “Literature Across Borders” illustrates the concept and 195:201 practice of comparative literature across historical periods, cultures, and genres. For the Spring 2018 semester 01, 02, 03 we will engage with the topic of “Music and Literature” by looking at musical motifs in literary works, and MH2 (01) literary motifs in musical works. Among our many possible questions: does music as music tell stories, and if 9:50-11:10am M2H3 (02) so, how does musical story-telling compare to literary fiction? Is music a language? Does it make sense to name 9:50-11:10am sound patterns musical “sentences”? Can poetry be described as musical? A work of music as poetic? In the 11:30-12:50pm wake of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature: are song writers poets? Is classical music history? How about M2H4 (03) the literary canon? What makes a musical piece classical and what does this teach us about canonization 9:50-11:10am generally? Do novels have rhythms? Do they have a music? Is the opera novelistic, the novel operatic? What 1:10-2:30pm does music as medium teach us about “language" as medium? Our primary materials will consist of poetry, E. Efe music, films, musical plays and operas, novellas and short stories from a variety of cultural traditions – English, CAC Italian, French, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, German, Indian, American, Japanese, among others. Each week a different distinguished scholar of Comparative Literature and/or Music, from Rutgers and elsewhere, will lecture and/or perform in class, challenging us to think in new ways about literature's relations with music. Assessments will take the form of weekly responses, a midterm and a final paper. Fulfills SAS Core Requirements AHo and AHp. Grading and Requirements: Weekly responses and participation (%30); midterm (%30); final paper (%40). The Global Ecological Imagination – The mainstream media and popular culture represent indigenous and 195:220 aboriginal communities as models for re-imagining our own relationship with nature. Nevertheless, these stories 01,02,H1 can’t help but to be melancholic: the damages brought by modernization seem to be unstoppable; progress is MH2T4 (01) always desirable even if it disappoints us; and indigenous and aboriginal cultures apparently have no choice but 9:50-11:10am to adapt or to protect their way of life by heroic means. In this course we will explore this conundrum from 1:10-2:30pm below. How are indigenous/aboriginal peoples impacted by planetary and local environmental changes? How MH2T5 (02) are they reacting to them? And how are their lives changed by their own responses and activism? We will focus 9:50-11:10am on feature films, documentaries, fictions, and testimonies produced by indigenous or aboriginal intellectuals, or 2:50-4:10pm by authors in close collaboration with such communities. Their stories take place in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, MH2T3 (H1) Haiti, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, Peru, and South Africa. We will learn about the conflict but also the 9:50-11:10am 11:30-12:50pm confluence between traditional aboriginal and indigenous beliefs of the human and the nonhuman, on the one Marcone hand, and modern economic development, scientific knowledge, and Western environmentalism, on the other. CAC Fulfills SAS Core Requirements 21C and AHo. 2 Required Texts: Witi Ihimaera. The Whale Rider. 1987. New Zealand. Ken Saro-Wiwa. Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy. 1992. Nigeria. Mayra Montero (Cuba-Puerto Rico). In the Palm of Darkness. 1998. Haiti. Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness. 2000. South Africa. Amitav Ghosh. The Hungry Tide. 2004. India. Required Films: Tambogrande: Mangos, Muerte, Minería (2007); Perú. Douglass Media Center. RU 10-1048. Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009); Ecuador. Douglass Media Center. RU 10-2824. Waste Land (2010); Brazil. Douglass Media Center. RU 10-2849. The Life of Pi. (2012). Douglass Media Center. Instructor’s copy. Detrás del TIPNIS (2012); Bolivia. Sakai. Introduction to the Literatures of South Asia - South Asia as a region includes the Republic of India; the two 195:243:01 modern nations that were formerly part of British India: Pakistan and Bangladesh; Sri Lanka; Nepal; and the TH6 Maldives. A single course could never hope to cover the literatures of all of these nations, and this course will 4:30-5:50pm concentrate only on India, with some attention to Pakistan. We will analyze the relationships between the human Mangharam and the divine, men and women, and tradition and modernity; and caste and communal relationships as they are CAC articulated in texts translated from several South Asian languages from ancient times to the present. Fulfills SAS Core Requirements AHo and AHp. Course Cross-listing: 013:231:01 Required Texts: Works will be chosen from among the following: excerpts from the Bhagavad Gita, The Ramayana, and the Mahabharata ; The Little Clay Cart; love poetry of the Tamil poets; poems of Ghalib; the bhakti (devotional) poetry of Kabir and Mirabai; stories of Rabindranath Tagore, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Mahasweta Devi, and Qurratulain Hyder; and the recent films In Custody and Earth. All texts will be available on Sakai. 195:244:01 Introduction to Mythology –This course presents a Jungian approach to myth. Starting with Jung’s MH3 definition of myth and a description of its powers, discussion will then turn to a series of myths as 11:30-12:50pm articulated in literary and filmic texts: Walker, S. The Shadow and Evil in the dybbuk figure—the Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man CAC The Shadow—Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Evil—Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles Scapegoating and Shadow Projection—The Book of Job Love and the Contrasexual Other—The Romance of Tristan and Iseult Apocalypse—Peter Weir’s film The Last Wave The Heroine—Tom Tykwer’s film Run Lola Run The Hero—The Romance of Tristan and Iseult Myth as Cultural Compensation—the Hindu myth “The Marriage of Gunasundari” The Power of Myth—Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” Fulfills SAS Core Requirement AHp.