| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| COM LIT 10 | WITCH LIT: CULTURES OF MAGIC FROM HOMER TO HARRY POTTER | HALEY, B | “Witch Lit” focuses on witchcraft in literature from ancient Greece to recent practices and representations. The categories and issues that we will both consider and question include the relationship between witchcraft and other forms of religious practice, the gendering of
witchcraft, and the persistence of magical ways of thinking in some surprising as well as expected places. We will study early mythical and literary witches (Circe and Medea), Judeo-Christian representations and persecution of witchcraft, and witchcraft and law in Europe and the U.S. We will then turn to political and literary reflections and adaptations of witches and “witch hunts” from McCarthyism to the Harry Potter novels and films.
Our guiding questions include:
• How does witchcraft help us articulate points of contact between
spiritual and material, divine and human, unseen and phenomenal?
• How do race, class, and gender operate as categories for the legal
definition and persecution of witches?
• What is at stake in separating rationality from magic, magic from
rationality? |
| COM LIT 40B | 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 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)
WINTER 2013 TIMES:
Section A: M & W 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM in MAB 125
Section B: M & W 8:30 - 9:50 AM in MAB 125
Section C: M & W 8:30 - 9:50 AM in MAB 129
Section D: M & W 10 - 11:20 AM in MAB 125
Section E: Tu & Th 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM in MAB 125
Section F: Tu & Th 8:30 - 9:50 AM in MAB 125 |
| COM LIT 60B | READING WITH THEORY | TERADA, R. | An introduction to critical theory, from philosophical critique to Marx, Foucault, Derrida, antiracist theory and queer theory. The course will sketch the relation of these movements to one another and in interaction with literature and culture. In short papers, you’ll experiment with reading and writing with theory to enhance your analysis of culture and contemporary events. No previous experience is expected; discussion and debate will be encouraged. |
| COM LIT 120 | IN SEARCH OF THE SELF: PLATO TO FOUCAULT | PORTER, J. | This course will consider the origins and emergence of the self‹notions of self-identity, interiority, introspective practices (the meditation, the dialogue, the letter), but also social definitions of selfhood‹in Greek and Roman antiquity. Plato's Socratic dialogues will be the point of departure. Later writings will include meditations, letters, and philosophical reflections on life by Epicurus, Lucretius, Seneca, Pliny, Epictetus, Plotinus, and Augustine. Secondary writing by Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, and Bernard Williams will help guide us as we set up frameworks and questions for investigating these primary texts. |
| COM LIT 130 | RACE&MATRIX TRILOGY | CHANDLER, N. | This course examines the problem of how to understand the time of our own lives historically - conceived as a critical archaeology of the future. The Matrix Trilogy and related anime, will be our main text. Following the general question of the possibility of a common futural historicity for humankind over the coming centuries, in which the historicity of the African Diaspora over the past half-millennium, and perhaps over the next half-millennium, is exposed as a major strand of the trilogy, fundamental questions are raised: such as the meaning of sentience and intelligence, human (re)engineering, and hierarchy among forms of being (human, machine, and otherwise) – and the pivotal place of the idea of race therein. Classic and contemporary readings are from: Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Arnold Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzshce, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kitaro Nishida; as well as, Jean Baudrillard, Raymond Kurzweil, Roger Penrose, Octavia Butler, Stuart Kauffman, William Gibson, Hortense Spillers, Fredric Jameson, Edwin Black, Kevin Kelly, Dorothy Roberts, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, and Frank Wilderson III, among others. |
| COM LIT 160 | POLITICS LAT AM FLM | JOHNSON, A. | This course has three interrelated objectives: to teach something about film analysis, to teach something about the history of cinema in Latin America and to teach something about Latin American history through film. We’ll be concentrating on three of the four major national cinemas in Latin America (Cuba, Brazil and Argentina) from the 60s to the present day. Our starting point will be a movement which began in the early 60s called the New Latin American Cinema movement which produced what are still considered the great classics of Latin American film and whose legacy is still felt in even the most recent films. New Latin American Cinema linked aesthetics and politics in conditions of scarcity and underdevelopment and called for a new revolutionary practice of making films which would produce an “imperfect cinema” or an “aesthetics of hunger”. We’ll be screening 1-2 movies a week and reading essays on history and film; grades will be based on participation in class, short weekly writing assignments, a take home midterm and final paper. |
| COM LIT 200B | THRY OF TRANSLATION | JOHNSON, A. | This seminar will examine some of the fundamental questions about the practice, art, and politics of translation across a wide range of methods and disciplines. In addition to the history of translation theory, special emphasis will be placed on cultural translation, postcolonial perspectives on translation and translation in times of globalization. Students may fulfill one of the Comparative Literature language requirements by enrolling in this class and completing a substantial translation project (with supervision from additional faculty when the translations are from languages other than French and German) that is accompanied by an equally as substantial preface that engages the theoretical materials covered in the course. Seminar options include such a project or a research paper.
F 2:00- 4:50p, HIB 246 |
| COM LIT 210 | VOICE/VOICING | SCHLICHTER, A. | In recent years, an interest in the metaphorical and material dimensions of “the voice” has surfaced within various fields of study, such as philosophy, film and media studies, musicology, performance studies, African-American Studies, Anthropology etc. The range of approaches to the voice reflects an emergent interdisciplinary discourse, often referred to as “Voice Studies.” The objective of the class is both to provide an introduction to this new field by discussing different theoretical/methodological approaches to voice and auditory perception and to reflect on the question how our thinking of the subject and its form of embodiment might benefit from an integration of the notion of voice into our understanding of speech, language, and the body. The reading list might include Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology, Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Boyd, Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Audio-Vision, Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity and others Requirements: 20pp final paper for seminar option, two 5-7 pp position papers or annotated bibliography for pro-seminar option. Oral presentation, regular postings of analytical comments or discussion questions on class message board.
Th 12:00- 2:50p, HIB 246 |
| COM LIT 210 | GLBL POSTCOL AF NAR | THIONG'O, N. | The course examines issues and themes in African fictional narratives to help define the concept and phenomenon of postcolonialism. The postcolonial question cannot be divorced from that of globalism and globalization. Themes to be explored include the language of African narratives; the dictator in African fiction; the intersection of class, gender, ethnicity and race in African literature; and military coups in the shaping of nations and nation-states in the era of gobalization. While based on Africa, the course tries to narrow down the concept of the postcolonial by examining closely the ‘neo’ hidden in the ‘post’ of many theories of the post-colony and the globe.
Tu 3:00- 5:50p, HIB 246 |