| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT CL130 | GENDER IN ANCIENT GREECE | POGORZELSKI, R. | This course will examine the construction of gender in Ancient Greece. Using evidence from literature, oratory, law, medicine, and philosophy, we will investigate how the ancient Greeks understood gender and sexuality, both masculine and feminine. What were proper gender roles in ancient Greece? How were ancient Greek ideas of gender and sexuality similar to and different from our own? All readings will be in English and no previous knowledge of ancient Greece will be required. Non-Classics majors are most welcome.
Same as Classics 170/WS 171 |
| COM LIT CL143 | ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF THE MEDIEVAL MONASTARY | GONOSOVA | The focus of this course is an examination of the medieval monastery as both a consumer and a producer of medieval art and architecture, including the reception of art and architecture in the medieval monastic culture between ca. 900 and 1350. Class participation, oral report and a course paper will be required.
Same as Art History 198 |
| COM LIT CL150 | THE EPIC TRADITION | NEWMAN, J. | Is Will Smith’s I am Legend (2007) patterned after Homer’s Odyssey? If it is, what does it tell us about late post-modernity’s relationship to war, ‘home(land) security’, and relations between the sexes? In Comparative Literature 150, we will read a selection of the so-called ‘masterpieces’ of the Western literary tradition in dialogue with one another as a way of developing answers to such questions; Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Roman epic and poetry will be studied together with their afterlives in both the late medieval and Renaissance periods (Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pizan). Using theories of literary and cultural imitation and intertextuality, we will reflect on how the very idea that such texts constitute a ‘tradition’ requires that we develop theories of history and identity; such theories in turn help us pose the question of what it might in fact mean to be ‘modern’ (or post-modern, for that matter). Students write a series of reading logs in response to specific questions of a comparative nature; in a longer final paper, students set contemporary works—literary, cinematic or otherwise—in dialogue with those read during the quarter to see how texts interact across time and space (e.g. Argentinian or Nigerian reworkings of Sophocles’ Antigone, or contemporary African-American and Somalian reworkings of Dante). Of interest to all students of world literature, this course will be especially useful for students planning to focus on medieval and Renaissance literature and culture.
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| COM LIT CL9 | MULTICULTURAL MYSTERIES, IV, VII | JARRATT, S | “Everybody has something to conceal,” remarks Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon. Hammett’s famous detective offers one answer to the question that inspires this course: Why do masses of contemporary readers get such delicious pleasure from mysteries? Mysteries explore the secrets of the human mind and behavior, truth and appearance, disclosure and secrecy, rationality and interpretation. Reading mysteries raises questions about the relation between popular and elite literary production and the stance of the "knower" in the modern world. In this course, we will read classic 19th- and 20th-century examples of the genre by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dashiell Hammett, as well as contemporary U.S. texts: Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, Chang Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker, and Nevada Barr’s Track of the Cat. Later texts will demand that we consider how cultural difference is figured as a mystery in contemporary culture. Students will write regular Noteboard posts, as well as mid-term and final exams in essay form. This course fulfills Gen Ed requirement VII-A.
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| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | BARKER, S. | |
| COM LIT 60A | READG ACR BORDERS | RAHIMIEH, N. | Through plays, short stories, poems, and novels we will become familiar with the movement of ideas and the development of literary genres across time and place. Our discussions will highlight and explore encounters and conflicts across national and cultural borders. The readings will include Goethe’s Faust I, Claire de Duras’ Ourika, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Sharnush Parsipur’s Women without Men, and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. Students will write several short papers. This course fulfills Gen Ed requirement IV.
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| COM LIT 102W | MEDIEVAL WOMEN'S WRITING | DAVIS, R. | But God forbid that you should say or take it that I am a teacher, for I mean not so, and I meant never so; for I am a woman, unlearned, feeble, and frail . . . But because I am a woman should I therefore believe that I should not tell you the goodness of God, since I saw at the same time that it is his will that it be known?
Julian of Norwich, 14th-century anchoress
This course explores the history of writing for and by women during the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on the role female writers and audiences played in the development of English vernacular literature. Delving into issues such as literacy, language change, religious devotion, education, and gender identities, we will examine barriers to women’s opportunities for writing during this era, but also consider the circumstances in which some women did emerge as authors and otherwise influence literary production. Course readings range from anonymous Anglo-Saxon poetry, to the short romances of Marie de France, the testimonies of ystics and holy women such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, the allegorical visions of hristine de Pizan, and letters written by the noble women of the Paston family.
While the majority of our readings focus on female writers, restricting ourselves to texts that are unambiguously authored by women would not give a complete picture of women’s involvement in the earliest development of English literature. Our course readings will therefore encompass works written by male authors for female audiences and patrons, including saints’ lives and spiritual guidebooks, anonymous works, and texts that were the result of collaborations between women and men.
This course fulfills the University’s upper-division writing requirement. Course assignments focus on close reading, location and analysis of critical resources, and written response to both primary and secondary texts. Students will write and revise three 5-7 page essays and submit a final writing portfolio at the end of the term. |
| COM LIT 130 | REGULATING FEAR: IMAGINATIONS OF REBELLIOUS SLAVES | PUENTE, L. | The colonial relationship set up in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610) has been used as a basis for a body of hemispheric American anti-colonial and anti-racist work with the figure of Caliban as a point of entrance into critical assessments of Caribbean identity in and against colonial and hegemonic powers. In this class we will begin with a critical history of the uses of Caliban as a literary and political figure. We will then put this figure in conversation with histories of radical anti-slavery (the actions, violent or not, of the enslaved to resist their condition), to push the limits of this trope. How has radical anti-slavery been remembered, by whom and for whom? How have textual representations been used to mobilize people into action? Can the relationship and tensions set up in the comic Shakespearian drama help us to understand the fear and anger that is expressed in these texts? In his transformations and reappropriations over the centuries, and especially in the 20th century, Caliban becomes a multi-hemispheric, interdisciplinary figure, who has been both imposed by oppressive entities and appropriated by subaltern dissidents.
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| COM LIT 142 | COUNTRY AND CITY IF LITERARY HISTORY | GELLEY, A. | City, Memory, Intertext This course will explore the significance of the city as a "memory theater, that is, as a repertoire of cultural sites situated in historical cities and at the same time deployed in an intertextual network in literary works. We will trace how the new forms of city-space that became prominent around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries became available as cultural narratives during the 19th and 20th. The course will begin with a consideration of the pre-Romantic and Romantic concept of landscape, especially as a touchstone of aesthetic experience and judgment in the period. The flight from the city articulated in Wordsworth's "Residence in London" (The Prelude, Bk. 7) led to a differentiated theme of anti-nature in Baudelaire. In the writings of Poe, and then in the fiction of the mid-century (Dickens), the aura of landscape as a sheltering precinct came to be replaced by the phenomenon of the metropolis as site of new forms of human agglomeration and cultural commerce. Our course will study this development in literature dealing with three metropolitan centers: London, Paris, and New York, with works by Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Poe, Dickens, and Bellow. Critics and theorists will include Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and T.J. Clark.
Same as English 24136 |
| COM LIT 200A | HIST&THEORY COM LIT | SCHLICHTER, A. | This course is intended as an introduction to a locally grounded version of Comparative Literature and will present a diversity of practices and positions within the field (such as cultural studies, media studies, critical theory, intellectual and literary history, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial studies etc.). While required of first-year students in Comparative Literature, the class will be of interest to all students who wish to explore a range of approaches and methodologies within the Humanities. Different faculty will be coming to the class to discuss pre-assigned texts relevant to their understanding of Comparative Literature, including their own work. Visiting faculty include: Eyal Amiran, Alex Gelley, Jane Newman, Ackbar Abbas, Adriana Johnson, Susan Jarratt, and Gabriele Schwab. This class is pro-seminar only for Comparative Literature students. Assignments will be determined at the beginning of the quarter. A reading list will be posted in the summer.
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| COM LIT 200B | THRY OF TRANSLATION | NEWMAN, J. | Comparative Literature, with its proclivity for crossing borders of all sorts—linguistic, medium-specific, and theoretical—has long emphasized the centrality of translation as a concept and practice crucial to the field. Indeed, there could be no “comparative” literature without the implicit attempt to bridge, or to “translate,” the space between languages, cultures, nationalities, and traditions. It is in terms of this in-between of literary and textual studies in other media across a wide range of languages and cultures that scholars of Comparative Literature have been occupied by the inherently intercultural questions of translation theory and methodology. Moreover, post-colonial theorists, students of cultural studies, and practitioners of interdisciplinary approaches to reading writ large all agree that both literal and figurative translation is central to what they do. Literary translation—and the translation of literature—is, finally, both a major field in itself and a pre-condition of much that we do in our courses. This seminar will examine some of the fundamental questions about the practice, art, and politics of translation.
Readings will address the history of translation theory, historical and recent problematizations of the use of translations in Comparative Literature as a discipline and the often minoritized place of translation studies in the field, feminist and post-colonial approaches to the ethics of what is often the asymmetrical practice of translating, theories of authorship and the cultural authority of ‘originals’ and translated texts, and the challenges of creating ‘domesticating’ or ‘foreignizing’ translations that render original and translation visible or invisible in both the texts themselves and in the marketplace of ideas and material goods.
Students may fulfill one of the Comparative Literature language requirements by enrolling in this class and completing a translation project (with supervision from additional faculty when the translations are from languages other than French and German) that is accompanied by a substantive preface that engages the theoretical materials covered in the course.
Seminar options include such a project or a research paper. Pro-seminar options include two translation exercises and a short essay that embeds the student’s translating practice in the materials covered in the course. The pro-seminar option will not fulfill a Comparative Literature language requirement.
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| COM LIT 210 | MALLARME | BURT, E. | (Same as French 218, Lec A) Close readings of prose and poetic texts of Mallarmé, in the context of criticism by Szondi, Derrida, Frey, deMan, Blanchot, Macherey, and Newmark. Among the various problems to be examined (Mallarmé's impersonal poetry and lyric voice, representation and poetic language, allegories of poetry, the death of the poet), the vexed issue of the poet's task when confronted with the “double état de la parole” will occupy a prominent place. Criticizing the received idea of Mallarmé as high priest writing in an occult and nearly opaque language to the elite few, we will sift the text for evidence of a Mallarmean materialism. Comparative Literature students can do their written and oral work in English.
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| COM LIT 210 | CONTMP IRISH POETRY | O'CONNOR, L. | Contemporary Irish poetry has generated international critical acclaim and considerable popular interest. Today’s poets came of age in the late sixties, fifty years after the formation (and/or partitioning) of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland and at a time when campaigns for minority and women’s rights began to dominate the Western political agenda. In Northern Ireland, state suppression of civil rights marches by the Catholic minority ignited “the Troubles”; feminist campaigns for job equity and reproductive control contested the definition, enshrined in the Republic’s 1937 Constitution, of woman-as-Family-caregiver; and Irish-speakers organized against the second-class treatment of the nation-state’s “first because national” language. The minority politics of the late sixties and seventies replaced Ireland’s isolationism with a transnational outlook, but they were also embroiled, in one way or another, in debates about nationality and the internal exclusions of the postcolonial nation-state. Bearing in mind how the sectarian partitions that accompanied British withdrawal from several colonies are often paradoxically surrounded by disavowal and discursive invisibility, we’ll examine the poets’ formal and thematic strategies for representing the trauma of partition. We’ll explore the contrastive ways in which women poets attempt to redress gendered notions of lyric subjectivity and the masculinist biases of their literary traditions. We’ll also discuss how changing practices of literary translation have altered perceptions of Ireland’s bilingual heritage. And we’ll seek signs of another reversal, the ongoing economic meltdown of the so-called Celtic Tiger. Reading these poets in relationship to one another enables us to explore their diverse responses to their political and social milieux and to examine the signs of collaborative and rivalrous exchange among them. Participants are encouraged to read lesser-known and emergent poets along with their better-known contemporaries. The poets we’ll discuss include, but are not limited to, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Rita Ann Higgins, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Cathal Ó Searcaigh.
All participants are expected to write weekly response papers (c. 500wds). In addition, pro-seminar participants will write a take-home exam-essay or a conference paper. Seminar participants are required to write a 15-20 page research-paper, supported by a prospectus and an oral presentation of their research-topic, and to meet schedule deadlines.
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| COM LIT 210 | EMER SUBJCTVIES | SCHWAB, G. | This course looks at the formation of new types and boundaries of subjectivity and subjection under the forces of (bio-) technologies and transnational global cultures. New forms of subject ion include emergent forms of (neo-)colonialism and colonization, including the colonization of psychic space. The course is divided into two sections: I. Zones of War; Zones of Abandonment and II. Ethnographies of the Future.
Zones of War; Zones of Abandonment (I) focuses on the new wars and militarization of the globe as well as the related world-wide creation of what anthropologist Joao Biehl calls “zones of abandonment,” that is populations and spheres of life or modes of living that increasingly fall outside of a social contract.
The second section explores the recasting of the boundaries of the human in discourses of biogenetics and the new reproductive technologies, exploring the powerful effects such recasting has on the cultural imaginary. This section also looks at new forms of biocolonialism and ecological destruction as well as new modes of ecopolitics.
While the course has a strong emphasis on critical and cultural theories, we will anchor our discussions in materials from literature, film, ethnography and photography. Note that the theoretical texts listed below are meant to provide a basic bibliography from which we will select relevant sections for discussion in class.
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| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |
| COM LIT 299 | DISSERTATN RESEARCH | ABBAS, M. | For students who have completed coursework, are preparing for their qualifying exams, or who are ABD. |