| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| COM LIT 40B | DEVELOPMNT OF DRAMA | REYNOLDS, B. | Same as Drama 40B. |
| COM LIT 50B | PERIODS & MOVEMENTS | HALL, J.M. | |
| COM LIT 101 | IDEOLOGY & LIT | GELLEY, A. | "To suggest an analogy between literature and ideology contradicts both their most common definitions. Literature, we have been taught, is a vehicle for abiding truths, and ideology, a system of interested deceit. Any conception of ideology implies that class and convention are intimate components of individual behavior, so that ideological analysis is inevitably a study of the limits of self-definition." This paradox (as formulated by Myra Jehlen) lays out the framework of the course. We will consider certain thinkers (Heidegger, Benjamin, Foucault, Lyotard), works of fiction and poetry (Baudelaire, Hölderlin, Poe, Malraux, Brecht), and movies (by Godard, Bertolucci). Requirements: Student reports and short papers. |
| COM LIT 102 | NARRATIVE THEORY | GELLEY, A. | What's the point of a story? Very often to convey a message, to provide a moral lesson. There is a long tradition of narratives with a pragmatic (real-life, practical) application. In the exemplum (as it was known in classical rhetoric) a narrative incorporates such a performative intention. This course will look at some relevant theories of rhetoric and argumentation and then examine instances of this form in classical writing (Aesop, LaFontaine) and in modern literature as well as film (Kieslowski's Decalogue). |
| COM LIT 103 | ASNAM LIT/FLM ADAPT | SHROFF, B. | (Same as AsAm 114/HA 101) This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American texts have been adapted into films. There is a vast body of Asian American Literature but very few texts have been adapted to cinema since issues of audience and market are primary considerations. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920's to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. This course examines the interplay between literary texts and their film adaptations. We will analyze different literary genres such as novels and dramas, for example Amy Tan's novel "The Joy Luck Club", and David Henry Hwang's drama, "M. Butterfly". Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes retitle and reconstruct texts as suitable for a mass audience, such as "Heaven and Earth" directed by Oliver Stone and others such as "Hot Summer Winds" directed by Emiko Omori based on two Hisaye Yamamoto short stories from "Seventeen Syllables". We employ literary and film theory in reading the novels and plays to analyze language, structure, characterization and historical representation. We also discuss how the literary form translates into a visual medium, and the modifications of story/plot and characterization for the screen--for instance, how dramas lend themselves to screen adaptation more easily than do novels. We interrogate the strengths of each medium such as the scope of the fictional framework, and the spatio-temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium. There will be two assignments, a midterm and a final essay.
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| COM LIT 103 | LU XUN | HU, Y. | (Same as East Asian 150, Lec B) When asked what books he would recommend to young readers in China, Lu Hsun (1881-1936) famously said: “Not a single Chinese book!” How did the foremost Chinese modernist think through the relationship between traditional culture and the importation of Western literature? How did he handle it in his own literary practice? How did the historical context of his time inform his theory and practice? In this course, we read Lu Hsun’s original works of fiction, essay and poetry alongside his works of translation, which include literature by Czechoslovakian, English, German, Japanese, Polish and Russian writers. We investigate the political and cultural milieu of his times and the conditions for his translation practice. We pay special attention to such issues as the conception of the audience and the role of the translator in shaping a particular vocabulary of modernity in China.
All readings are in English. The course alternates between lecture and discussion. Students are required to read all material before coming to class. Grades are based on short papers and examinations.
Sample Texts
LU Hsun, Old Stories Retold
------, Selected Stories
------, Wild Grass
Selections from
Modern Chinese Literary Thought, ed. K. Denton
Works by Nicolai Gogol
Twentieth-century Russian Reader, ed. Clarence Brown.
The Linden tree; an anthology of Czech and Slovak literature, 1890-1960 trans. Edith Pargeter et al
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| COM LIT 103 | ROMANTIC FAIRYTALES | LILLYMAN | |
| COM LIT 103 | SUBJECT TO FANTASY | HALL, J.M. | |
| COM LIT 103 | MADNESS IN THE RENAISSANCE | REGOSIN, | Madmen, fools, dolts, and simpletons inhabit the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance in great number. This course will examine the social, cultural, and aesthetic implications of the representations of madness in four major literary works of the period: Erasmuss The Praise of Folly, Rabelaiss Third Book, Cervantess Don Quixote, and Shakespeares King Lear. The complex and paradoxical richness of madness as insanity, frivolity, and presumptuousness, stupidity and wisdom; as both object and instrument of criticism; as variously comic and tragic, will inform the discussion. Term paper, midterm, final exam. In English.
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| COM LIT 103 | LUSO-BRAZ SHRT STRY | FERREIRA, A.P. | Same as Spanish 150, Lec A. |
| COM LIT 104 | LITERATURE BETWEEN WORLDS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | (Same as Asian Am 110) Double-consciousness, Alienation, Ethnic hy-phenation, Marginality: these bitter sweet concepts will be among the recipes of our intellectual feast as we explore the phenomenon of "between-ness." What is the relationship between home and location? What are the connections between: "identity politics "and "the politics of representation? How do writers and artists who belong to more than one culture or history manage to give voice to the spaces of the "between?" Are these spaces comfortable or painful? How do Culture and System play a role in coordinating the space of the "between?" We shall be raising these questions symphonically as well as cacophonously as we look at the categories of nationality, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class, and their reciprocal interactions and interventions. We will be paying particular attention to the literary strategies that the writers of the "between" employ in their attempts to connect their political being with their aesthetic being, and their individual realities with collective possibilities. Texts will include Meena Alexander's Fault Lines, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Nadine Gordimer's Burger’s Daughter, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands, and excerpts from Trinh Minh-ha's and Edward Said's theoretical works. Welcome between, I mean aboard.
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| COM LIT 104 | CONCEPT OF EUROPE | AVILES, L. | (Same as Hum 101A, Lec A) The purpose of the course is to study and evaluate the experience and contact between Europeans and members of other cultures. The course will begin by arriving at a working definition of culture and contact through a variety of critical and theoretical readings, and how these texts may help us define what Europe may mean in terms of its cultural plurality. Intercultural contact will be considered an intellectual instrument that allows for a more complex and inclusive view of Europe as both a geographical entity, and as a space that is transformed by its constitutive differences. A select group of literary texts will help us illustrate the complexity of cultural contact by means of several paradigmatic examples: contacts with Islam (both Turkish and Arabic encounters in Cervantes and Shakespeare), with the native populations in America (Columbus, Montaigne), and between England and Spain (again, Cervantes). Issues related to "otherness" may also include contact with free slaves, gypsies, and the challenges posed by a Jewish presence. Students will be required to write critical short papers. |
| COM LIT 104 | MODERN YOUTH | AL-KASSIM, D.L. | (Same as Womens Stds. 170, Lec A) "Modern Youth" tracks the emergence of a new figure in British, French and American literature and culture of the modern city from the mid-19thc to the late 20thc: the vagrant, unruly, dangerous, consuming urban youth. Beginning with late 19th century British anxieties surrounding the homosexuality and civic status of urban boys, we examine the Aestheticist and Decadent response to the emerging legal subject, the youth, in the texts of Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud and Freud. Moving from the claim that the masculine youth becomes a category of social discipline in the mid and late 19th century to continental modernist preoccupations with early childhood, historical regression and states of “primitive” development (in psychoanalysis, social commentary and literature) the course develops the notion that temporal figures of regression (e.g. arrested development, degeneration, taint) offer ambivalent support for normative narratives while simultaneously these figures become crucial modes of resistance to the dominant forms of sexual subjection. We will examine modernist understandings of the social panic aroused by the specter of youth by studying several works of literary criticism, theory and cultural studies (Foucault, Genet, Wojnarowicz, Lewis). |
| COM LIT 200C | PERV & AVNT-GRD | HALL, J.M. | |
| COM LIT 200C | SEX SOMEWHRE ELSE | HALL, J.M. | |
| COM LIT 200D | ANCNT GREEK RHET | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 220 | TRANSLATION WRKSHOP | NGUGI, W.T. | |