| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | KUBIAK, A. | A one-year lecture-discussion course (each quarter may be taken independently) in the development of Western Drama, concentrating on the drama’s intellectual, social, and artistic foundations. About 10 plays and supplementary critical material are read each quarter. 40A: Greek Drama through Shakespeare. Readings from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the anonymous playwrights of the medieval theater. |
| COM LIT 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | NEWMAN, J. | People call movies like Avatar (dir. James Cameron) (2009) ‘epics’. Are post-modern movies like Avatar patterned after Homer’s pre-modern epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey? If so, what can these earlier texts tell us about our own late post-modern relationship to war, ‘home(land) security’ and the environment, or about relations between the species and the sexes? Why in turn have contemporary Nigerian, Caribbean, and Irish writers based plays on ancient Greek tragedies? Is this the ‘globalization’ of literature, a sign of the increasing interconnectedness of diverse cultures that produces a new canon of ‘World Literature’, or a sign of ‘western’ hegemony, the seeping into all corners of the earth of a single dominant (western) canon? In Comparative Literature 60A, we will read a selection of the so-called ‘masterpieces’ of (western) World Literature in dialogue with one another as a way of developing tools with which to answer such questions, using theories of literary and cultural imitation and intertextualiy to reflect on what ‘World Literature’ (or, for that matter, ‘the West’) is. Texts by Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Roman epic and poetry, together with their afterlives in both the late medieval and Renaissance periods (Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pizan), will be our experimental base. Students will then set contemporary works—literary, cinematic or otherwise—in dialogue with this canon to see how ‘texts’ interact across time and space to create a variety of worlds. Issues of translation – both literal and between genres and media – will also be discussed. Students write a series of short reading logs on the texts assigned in response to specific questions. In a longer final project / paper (5-7 pages) developed over the course of the quarter, each student will use the methods learned in the class to read a contemporary text of his / her choice (with text here broadly understood to include film, video games, performance art, comics). |
| COM LIT 102 | AFRICAN NOVEL | THIONG'O, N. | Colonialism was simultaneously a practice of power, production of knowledge and social engineering. The colonial system and experience have profoundly affected intellectual production in the world. With the theme of colonialism as the unifying principle, the course explores the work of a number of African writers from the different parts of the continent to cover Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusaphone traditions. Though based on the African literary production, the issues raised are relevant to all post-colonial societies and indeed modernity. |
| COM LIT 105 | GLOBL MULTICULTRLSM | SCHLICHTER, A. | The class offers a look at multiculturalism as “contact zone” through the examples of cultural production of various minority groups in the United States and Germany. We will discuss literary, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music in order to explore both the historical and contemporary conditions of two different multicultural societies in a global context (such as their histories of nation building and migration, notions of citizenship, discourses of race and ethnicity etc). Materials will include essays by Marie Louise Pratt, Angela Davis and R. Radhakrishnan, literary writings by Gish Jen, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Honigman as well as movies on the tensions between East and West German cultures (such as Good-Bye Lenin, dir. Wolfgang Becker) and on German Turkish life (Head-on, dir. Fatih Akin) and German and US hip hop,
Requirements: regular attendance, midterm and final, short writing assignments (short essay or blog). A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter. |
| COM LIT 132 | ILIAD IN LIT & FILM | GIANNOPOULOU, Z. | Homer's Iliad, one of the foundational texts of the western literary canon, has influenced artists of all stripes throughout the millennia. Its graphic depictions of warlike violence, capricious gods, heroes and cowards, and its snapshots of domestic life, death, and the quest for immortality have moved and inspired readers across time and space. In this course, we will read most of the poem and three contemporary literary adaptations of it, Simone Weil's philosophical-theological essay The Iliad, or The Poem of Force (1940-1), Crista Wolf's novel Cassandra (1984) and David Malouf's novel Ransom (2009). We will also watch Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy (2004). Stress will fall on the poetics of adaptation and reception. The grade will be determined on the basis of class-participation, two exams, an oral presentation, and a final paper. |
| COM LIT 140 | OUTSIDER LIT&MEDIA | AMIRAN, E. | Outsider artists and writers by definition do not have significant exposure to mainstream art and writing, or operate so far outside the norms of other literature as to seem that way. Generally they work alone and for themselves. Many have been lifelong inmates of hospitals for the insane, or have lived in isolation or solitude. The work we will read is sought out and collected, often after the authors’ death. Does it show a pre-social innocence? Does it embody social obsessions, reflecting ourselves back to us in a raw form? Or does it show inclinations of the human mind toward the paranoid fantasies that often structure this work?
This course will ask such questions by focusing on religious vision, paranoia, and ideas of space in the mostly 20C American work. Authors studied will include the amazing writer and artist Henry Darger, paranoid racist Frances E. Dec, visionary preacher Howard Finster, pacifist topiary artist Pearl Fryer, cartoonist hero George Herriman, worst writer ever Amanda McKittrick Ros, and hallucinatory spiritualist Hannah Weiner, along with theoretical work by Artaud, Freud, Schreber, and Lefebvre. |
| COM LIT 160 | NEW CHINESE CINEMAS | ABBAS, M. | Asian Cities, Asian Cinemas
The course is not concerned with asking what is specifically 'Asian' about Asian cities but with testing the assumption that the urban concepts useful for thinking the Asian city are likely to be the concepts crucial for an understanding of urbanism today. It is arguable that Asia is where some of the most radical urban and cultural experiments of the twenty-first century will be taking place. Transformed at unprecedented speed by new forms of capital, politics, media, and technology, the Asian city today threatens to outpace our understanding of it. The Asian city reminds us that the city exists not just as a physical, political and economic entity, but also as a cluster of images, a series of discourses, an experience of time and space, and a set of practices that do not necessarily add up. Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Mumbai, Istanbul -- each of these cities is like a jig-saw puzzle of the mind, made up of cognitive/experiential fragments, of historical residues and aspirations. We need to provide new term to describe Asian cities and rethink old term. Besides films, the course will draw on novels and memoirs, urban and cultural theory, architecture, music, and performance art to evoke the Asian city today. Topics will include:
1) Koolhaas's "China" and the warped space of 'globalization": Zhang Yuan's "Crazy English"
2) Affective spaces in Hong Kong cinema: Wong Kar-wai's '2046'
3) Violence and Information: Mark and Lau's 'Infernal Affairs'.
4) Taipei: Hou Hsiao-hsien's 'Millenium Mambo'
5) On Chinese Women: Ning Ying's 'Perpetual Motion'.
6) Figures of Disappearance: Lou Ye's Suzhou River'
7) Documenting Demolition: Jia Zhangke's 'Still Life'
8) Deceptive City: Lee Ang's 'Lust, Caution'.
Course Requirements: Attendance, a short mid-term test, final 10-15 page term paper
Some references:
· Gary Xu: 'Sinascape: contemporary Chinese Cinema'
· John R. Logan(ed): 'The New Chinese City'
· Tsung-Yi Michelle Huang: 'Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers'
· Sheldon H. Lu: 'Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics'
· Bishop, Phillips, Yeo (eds): Postcolonial Urbanism' |
| 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 (including 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. This class is pro-seminar only for Comparative Literature students. Assignments will be determined in consultation with the students at the beginning of the quarter. A reading list will be posted in the summer. |
| COM LIT 210 | PHL&CINMA DELEUZE 2 | ABBAS, M. | This is the second of a 2-part seminar on Deleuze’s groundbreaking cinema books. Each seminar can be taken independently. Fall 2012 will focus on Cinema 2.
For Deleuze, philosophers construct concepts, while filmmakers construct images, so much so that filmmakers can be classified in terms of the type of image they create. The cinema books do not give us a ‘philosophy of cinema’, or treat filmmaking as ‘thinking in images’. Rather, ‘thinking’ and ‘image-making’ are seen as independent but related activities; which is why the books on cinema can complement and extend Deleuze’s philosophy in important ways. Taking a hint from Bergson, Deleuze organizes cinematic images into two main types, the Movement-Image (Cinema 1), and the Time-Image (Cinema 2). Like in Cinema 1, Cinema 2 contains many provocative analyses of particular films, including the work of the Italian neo-realists, Godard, Resnais, and Welles. At the same time, the rethinking of the nature of cinema begun in Cinema 1 is taken further when Deleuze broaches topics like ‘ the powers of the false’, ‘thought and cinema’, and ‘cinema and politics’.
The seminar will not encumber students with excessive readings. Instead, students will themselves write a ‘textbook’ on the subject of the seminar, based on lectures, discussions, and further research. |
| COM LIT 210 | CONCEPTS OF WORK | KARANIKA, A. | The notion of labor is neither stable nor precise. It has undergone shift and transformation
in meaning in various times and cultures. The main focus of this course is to examine the
changes in the construction of the concept of work from early Greece to the Middle ages.
The anthropology of work as expressed in our earliest sources often evolved around
questions regarding the aversion to work or conversely the joy that derives out it, interwoven
with notions of productivity. Some of the earliest texts in different cultures present work as a
‘necessary evil’ that man cannot escape. In late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the classical
idea of leisure gave way to work as an ideal in its own and an indispensable tool to
overcome idleness and vice. As primary texts we consider selections from a variety of texts
(to be read in English translations) that include the Hesiodic corpus (Works and Days),
Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Chaucer. The aim of
this course is to go beyond tracing literary and philosophical trends and engage our ancient
and medieval sources in an approach that seeks to see possible reflections or even social
responses from the viewpoint of socio-economic history. In other words, this seminar
seeks to provoke further work that explores how e.g. a possible dominance of the
idealization of leisure or work, accordingly, interacts with major historical, social and cultural
changes. How is the notion of work ‘manipulated’ or adjusted to fit in specific social,
gender or religious parameters? |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | STAFF | |