Course Offerings in Comparative Literature
The following are a list of courses that are offered in Comparative Literature on a regular basis.
*All 12x (120-129) courses fulfill the Literary Traditions I (formerly Great Books I) requirement.*
120: Epic and Lyric Traditions (3). This course focuses on the development of epic and lyric genres, from ancient Greece through the seventeenth century. Students will learn about changing conceptions of poetic genre and literary decorum as well as about the various challenges to "epic" values issued by poets working across a wide range of lyric traditions (pastoral, georgic, love lyric, and the satire/epigram tradition).
121: Romancing the World (3). Explores the diverse and complex literary mode of romance, how that mode has served in various ways to examine and interrogate the experiences of travel and cross-cultural contact and exchange from classical antiquity to the present. Students will trace ways in which the history of romance as a literary mode is bound up with changing representations of the "exotic" or the "foreign" in both European and non-European literature.
122: Literary and Visual Traditions from Antiquity to 1700 (3). Offers students a survey of mutually supportive developments of literature and the visual arts from classical antiquity until around 1700. In each unit, students will read one or two literary and/or philosophical texts from a specific cultural and historical moment while simultaneously studying several representative artistic monuments from the same culture and time period.
123: Literature and Politics from Classical Antiquity to 1750 (3). Examines comparative literary texts in the context of developments in political thought and practice from classical Greece up through the eve of the French Revolution. Students will read representative literary texts from different cultures and historical periods side by side with appropriate works of political philosophy.
124: Literature and Science, Antiquity through 1750 (3). Examines developments in literary and scientific thought from classical antiquity through around 1750. The emphasis of the course is on how poets, dramatists, and other writers of fiction struggle to represent, defend, or challenge various disciplines of natural philosophy, including magic, cosmology, natural history, and physiology.
*All 13x (130-139) courses fulfill the Literary Traditions II (Formerly Great Books II) requirement.*
130: Travel, Belonging, and Identity in World Literature (3). Introduces students to translated literary classics from Argentina, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, China, England, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia that address the questions concerning travel, community, and self-definition. Students will learn techniques of literary analysis and compare the works thematically across boundaries of culture, language, place, time, and genre.
131: Savage, Native, Stranger, Other (3). Introduces students to the discourses and methodologies of Comparative Literature by following the broad trajectory of the discipline as it struggles to reconcile its own, predominantly western, lineage with the recognition of other, lesser known and non-western textual traditions.
132: Performance and Cultural Identity in the African Diaspora: African, Afro-American, and Carribean Linkages (3). Explores theories on the existence of the African Diaspora, cultural identity/-ies, and the manner(s) in which "performance" contributes to the articulation of experiences within the Diaspora. Students will read and discuss literary texts for their ability to present "performance" in terms of social dramas, social performances, and cultural performances.
133: Imaging the Americas: Late 18TH Century to the Present (3). Explores the intersection between word and image in the representation of the Americas in the hemispheric sense.
143 Introduction to Global Cinema (3). This course is designed to introduce students to the remarkable richness and baffling complexity of what has come to be called "global cinema." In the wake of the emergence of a new or global sense of capitalism, media like the cinema have become imbricated in increasingly intricate multi-national structures. While we still speak of national cinemas, the cinema itself has become a global phenomenon.
250 [050] Approaches to Comparative Literature (3). This communications-intensive course familiarizes students with the theory and practice of comparative literature: the history of literary theory; translation; and literature combined with disciplines such as music, architecture, and philosophy (sample syllabus).
251 [051] Introduction to Literary Theory (3). Familiarizes students with the theory and practice of comparative literature. Against a background of classical poetics and rhetoric, explores various modern literary theories, including Russian Formalism, Frankfurt School, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, New Historicism, and others. All reading in theory is paired with that of literary texts drawn from a wide range of literary periods and national traditions.
252 [062] Popular Culture in Modern Southeast Asia (ASIA 252, INTS 252) (3). This course examines popular culture in Southeast Asia as a response to colonialism, nationalism, modernization, the state, and globalization. Topics include: theater, film, pop songs, television, rituals, and the Internet.
269 [069] Representations of Cleopatra (CLAS 269, WMST 269) (3). Study of the life of Cleopatra and how her story has been reinvented in postclassical societies, often as a mirror image of their own preoccupations, in literature, art, movies, and opera.
321 Medieval and Modern Arthurian Romance (ENGL 321) (3). Representative examples of Arthurian literature from the Middle Ages and nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with some attention to film, art, and music.
364 [064] The Classical Background of English Literature (CLAS 364) (3). Study of classical writers influential on selected genres of English literature.
373 [096] Modern Women Writers (WMST 373) (3). The development of a women's literary tradition in the works of such writers as George Sand, George Eliot, Isak Dinesen, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Yourcenar.
379 [094] Cowboys, Samurai, and Rebels in Film and Fiction (ASIA 379) (3). Cross-cultural definitions of heroism, individualism, and authority in film and fiction, with emphasis on tales or images that have been translated across cultures. Includes films of Ford, Kurosawa, and Visconti (sample syllabus).
380 [084] Almost Despicable Heroines in Japanese and Western Literature (ASIA 380, WMST 380) (3). Authors' use of narrative techniques to create the separation between heroines and their fictional societies and sometimes also to alienate readers from the heroines. Austen, Flaubert, Ibsen, Arishima, Tanizaki, Abe.
383 [083H] Literature and Medicine (3). Examines the presentation of medical practice in literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Readings include some medical history, novels, stories, and recent autobiographies of medical training.
385 [090] Modernist and Postmodernist Narrative (3). A study of the structure of various types of modernist and postmodernist narrative, including texts by such writers as Proust, Faulkner, Camus, Hesse, Duras, Mann, Woolf, Robbe-Grillet, Kundera, Simon.
390 [095] Special Topics in Comparative Literature (3). Course topics vary from semester to semester.
392 [092] Women and Work, 1850-1900 (WMST 392) (3). An explanation of the problems of work for women in the later nineteenth century, drawing on historical and fictional materials to illuminate each other.
393 [093] Adolescence in Twentieth-Century Literature (3). An analysis of the literary portrayal of adolescence by major twentieth-century English, American, and European writers, focused on dominant themes and modes of representation.
435 [135] Consciousness and Symbols (ANTH 435, FOLK 435) (3). This course explores consciousness through symbols. Symbols from religion, art, politics, and self are studied in social, psychological, historical, and ecological context to ascertain meanings in experience and behavior.
450 [150] Major Works of Twentieth-Century Literary Theory (3). Comparative study of representative works on literary and cultural theory or applied criticism to be announced in advance.
452 [170] The Middle Ages (3). Study of selected examples of Western medieval literature in translation, with particular attention to the development of varieties of sensibility in various genres and at different periods.
454 [172] Literature of the Continental Renaissance in Translation (3). Discussion of the major works of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Ariosto, Tasso, Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, Cervantes, and Erasmus.
456 [174] The Eighteenth-Century Novel (3). English, French, and German eighteenth-century narrative fiction with emphasis on epistolary novel. The relation of the novel to the Enlightenment and its counterpart, the cult of sentimentality, and on shifting paradigms for family education, gender, and erotic desire.
458 [173] Sense, Sensibility, Sensuality 1740-1810 (3). The development of the moral aesthetic of sensibility or Empfindsamkeit in literature of western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
460 [175] Romanticism (3). An exploration of the period concept of Romanticism, using selected literary works by such writers as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe, Novalis, Schlegel, Hugo, Nerval, Chateaubriand.
462 [176] Realism (3). An exploration of the period concept of Realism through selected works by such writers as George Eliot, Dickens, James, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola.
464 [177] Naturalism (3). The Naturalist movement in European and American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on its philosophical, psychological, and literary manifestations in selected plays and novels.
466 [178] Modernism (3). An exploration of the period concept of modernism in European literature, with attention to central works in poetry, narrative, and drama, and including parallel developments in the visual arts.
468 [181] Aestheticism (3). Aestheticism as a discrete nineteenth-century movement and as a major facet of modernism in literature and literary theory. Authors include Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Nietzche, Huysmans, Wilde, Mann, Rilke, Nabokov, Dinesen, Barthes, Sontag.
470 [180] Concepts and Perspectives of the Tragic (3). History and theory of tragedy as a distinctive literary genre and as a more general literary and cultural problem. Authors include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner, Mann, Samuel I and II, Faulkner. Also engages theorists, ancient and modern.
472 [184] The Drama from Ibsen to Beckett (3). The main currents of European drama from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Includes Chekhov, Strindberg, Pirandello, Lorca, Brecht, Anouilh.
476 [191] Autobiography as a Literary Form (3). The rise and evolution of interest in the self in literary forms from St. Augustine's to Rousseau's Confessions and from Abelard through Dante, Petrarch, Cellini, and Montaigne.
481 [182] Rhetoric of Silence: Cross-Cultural Theme and Technique (ASIA 481) (3). The uses of literary silence for purposes such as protest, civility, joy, oppression, nihilism, awe, or crisis of representation. Authors include Sterne, Goethe, Austen, Kawabata, Soseki, Oe, Toson,[GB1] Camus, Mann.
482 [142] Philosophy in Literature (PHIL 482) (3). Selected literary classics from ancient times to the present, emphasizing changing approaches to such perennial problems as human nature and destiny, evil, freedom, and tragedy.
483 [183] Cross-Currents in East-West Literature (ASIA 483) (3). The study of the influence of Western texts upon Japanese authors and the influence of conceptions of "the East" upon Western writers. Goldsmith, Voltaire, Soseki, Sterne, Arishima, Ibsen, Yoshimoto, Ishiguro (sample syllabus).
485 [185] Approaches to Twentieth-Century Narrative (3). An examination of central trends in twentieth-century narrative.
486 [186] Literary Landscapes in Europe and Japan (ASIA 486) (3). Changing understandings of nature across time and cultures, especially with regard to its human manipulation and as portrayed in novels of Japan and Europe. Rousseau, Goethe, Austen, Abe, Mishima.
487 [190] Literature and the Arts of Love (3). Love and sexuality in literary works from various historical periods and genres. Authors include Sappho, Plato, Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, LaClos, Goethe, Nabokov, and Roland Barthes.
490 [195] Special Topics (3). Topics vary from semester to semester (sample syllabus).
492 [192] The Fourth Dimension: Art and the Fictions of Hyperspace (3). An exploration of the concept of the fourth dimension, its origins in non-Euclidean geometry, its development in popular culture, and its impact on the visual arts, film, and literature.
535 Boccaccio and European Narrative (ITAL 535) (3). Boccaccio's Decameron within the context of previous narrative traditions and subsequent development of narrative in Europe. Class discussion in English; readings in Italian for majors and in translation for nonmajors.
560 [160] Reading Other Cultures: Issues in Literary Translation (SLAV 560) (3). Starting from the proposition that cultural literacy would be impossible without reliance on translations, this course addresses fundamental issues in the practice, art and politics of literary translation.
621 [153] Arthurian Romance (ENGL 621) (3). British and continental Arthurian literature in translation from the early Middle Ages to Sir Thomas Malory.
685 [179] Literature of the Americas (AMST 685, ENGL 685) (3). Prerequisite, two years of college-level Spanish or the equivalent. Multidisciplinary examination of texts and other media of the Americas, in English and Spanish, from a variety of genres.