| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 8 | FOOD & LITERATURE | RAHIMIEH, N. | In this course you will study literary representations of food from different cultural traditions. The required readings will be in English and will include novels, short stories, memoirs, and essays primarily from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to literary works you will become acquainted with critical approaches to understanding what meanings are attached to food and how writing about food is part of social and cultural production and is subject to issues of class, gender, ethnicity. Among the writers you will read will be Arlene Avakian, Diana Abu-Jaber, Laura Esquivel, Joanne Harris, Marsha Mehran, and Banana Yoshimoto, and Emile Zola. |
| COM LIT 40A | DEVELOPMENT 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 theatre.
40B: Restoration Drama through Ibsen. Readings from Neoclassic, Romantic, and Naturalistic European playwrights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Molière, Racine, Congreve, Goethe, Ibsen, and Chekhov are included.
40C: Contemporary Drama. Post Naturalistic theatre: Expressionism, Epic Theatre, Theatre of the Absurd, and Contemporary American Theatre. Among the playwrights studied are Stein, Shaw, Pirandello, Ionesco, Beckett, Williams, Brecht, Weiss, Albee, Churchill, and Duras.
Same as Comparative Literature CL 40A, B, C. Drama and Music Theatre majors have first consideration for enrollment. (IV, VIII) |
| COM LIT 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | NEWMAN, J. | People call movies like Avatar (dir. James Cameron) (2009) ‘epics’. Do post-modern movies like Avatar mimic 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. Throughout the quarter we will 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 | CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN LITERATURE | THIONG'O, N. | The course examines themes in African Writing in English and translations into English: drama, poetry and fiction. It is both an introduction to the field and an in-depth look at the issues animating the African imagination. The relationship between language, literature, aesthetics, ethics, and power in society is the connecting thread. The course introduces some key literary movements, such as negritude, as well as writers of the new generation and looks at new trends such as crime fiction. |
| COM LIT 102W | POET & CITY | SCHLOSSMAN, B. | Course title: Modern Poetry – the Poet and the City
Instructor: Beryl Schlossman
Prerequisites: This course is an upper-division writing course. Successful completion of the lower-division writing requirement is a prerequisite.
Description: From Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth century -- via the poets of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and others) and the lost generation (Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings) – the works of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Koch, George Oppen, and Theodore Roethke, among others, shape the poetry of modernity. Through a close study of form and content, tradition and the avant-garde, in a range of major works, this course will explore the development of modern American and English poetry with emphasis on the poet’s vision of the city. Students will be asked to write short essays, an research paper, and a final exam.
The required textbook is The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, volume 1: Modern Poetry. |
| COM LIT 105 | GLOBALIZED MULTICULTURALISM | 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, colonialism and migration, notions of citizenship, discourses of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality). 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 | ECOPOLITICS | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 143 | MELODRAMA | TERADA, R. | In this course we consider several films—in various languages— from the classic period of melodrama (rougly 1935-1960) and some that comment upon them or contrast with them. Melodrama is a slightly pejorative term, with connotations of the unrealistic and the formulaic (not to mention the cheesy); but we will try to uncover and experience nonjudgmentally the ways in which melodrama is deeply, interestingly weird. Film melodrama is known for depicting emotions in a way that seems at once extravagant and overly scripted, leading some to see these emotions as false. But hyperbolic emotions and the restricted possibilities of melodrama plots reflect normative models of self, concepts, and possibility. Often, melodrama’s world of people who can’t seem to produce the “right” emotions suggests criticism of the society that demands certain emotions, and certain plots, even as the films sometimes seem to lack a vocabulary for protest. The fact that the complexities of film melodrama don’t always seem to be generated entirely intentionally by the filmmakers only makes them more complex as a cultural phenomenon. Melodramas help us think about what it would mean to be free or unfree without answering the questions they raise. |
| COM LIT 210 | REPRESENTATION BETWEEN THEOLOGY & HISTORY (ERIC AUERBACH) | NEWMAN, J. | “Creatureliness: Representation between Theology and History (Erich Auerbach)”
Exactly halfway through his great book, Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), the German-Jewish philologist, Erich Auerbach, dwells at length on what he calls the “‘creatural’ aspect of Christian anthropology” in fifteenth-century French narrative; here, in radical contrast to “the classico-humanistic picture of man,” there “is nothing but flesh.” While the term “creatural” (German: kreatürlich) resonates with many contemporary concerns with theories of the non- or post-human, its discursive origins were theological in nature for Auerbach and his generation of early twentieth-century thinkers. Like all other creatures (and thus equal to them), that is, humans are created by a divine Creator and dwell in a world of immanence, where they are constantly reminded of their embodiment, their being in time, in (natural) history, and in the world. Humans nevertheless also struggle in cyclical fashion (here, Auerbach appeals to the work of Giambattista Vico) to negotiate an (always troubled) relationship with their only true ‘other’ in the transcendent world by becoming creators, artists, and makers of culture. In this course, we will use Auerbach’s life-long belief in the explanatory power of Christian theology (esp. in his work on Dante), on the one hand, and his equally as persistent dedication to considering (also pre- and non-Christian) humanity within its self-produced history (esp. in his work on Vico), on the other, to think through the problem of our common creatureliness as it intersects with contingencies of place, class, and time. My hope is that by reading texts by Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Corneille, Molière, or Racine, Cervantes, Pascal, and Vico alongside / with Auerbach’s readings of them (as well as selections from Hebrew Scripture, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, and maybe Spinoza), we will be able to productively unsettle standard narratives about the relation between pre- and early modern sacred economies of meaning and (post)modernity’s alleged secularist engagement in the work of representation via an interrogation of what Auerbach calls “creaturely realism” and how it is diversely informs literature, philosophy, and art. Edward Said, who engaged with Auerbach as the first theorist of critical humanism throughout his life, will accompany us as we investigate how these earlier periods and concerns might continue to be relevant today. Of interest to students who would like to understand pre- and early modern versions of (post) modern theories of “the (non)human,” engage with questions of representation and “realism” across genre and medium, and not be afraid to engage with theology as a discourse of theory. Seminar or pro-seminar.
02:00pm - 04:50pm, TU HIB 246 |
| COM LIT 210 | POLITICAL INTERIORITY | TERADA, R. | What difference does it make to how we theorize structures to approach them from “within”? This is not the same as to personalize or individualize them. “Interiority” refers not only to a private psyche, but also to a group’s sense of the lining of the area they are in. Further, given the overlapping of areas and the fact that the “individual psyche” itself is never individual in the first place, “interiority” here names, not a distinct and more real realm, but a way of describing and evoking impersonal structures—one that rejects the schematization of an exterior and a whole. Thinking about the “interiority” of a political space emphasizes its interpretation from a particular location and the imbrication of economic and political, material and imaginary factors.
This seminar will explore this question through theory, film, and literature, revisiting thinkers such as (possibly) Arendt, Balibar, Fanon, and Jameson while placing them in dialogue with other works, usually films. Possible works: Adachi, Wakamatsu and others, A.K.A. Serial Killer; Adorno, Dream Notes; Audiard, A Prophet; Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene; Berardi, After the Future; Daneliya, I Walk Around Moscow; Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa; Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders”; Michel Gondry, “Interior Design”; Guzman, Nostalgia for the Light; Jameson, The Political Unconscious; Petzold, Yella; Leiris, Nights as Day, Days as Night
W 3:00- 5:50p HIB 246 |