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Comparative Literature Courses for Spring 2008

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CMPL 130H Travel and Identity (Honors) LEC 3.0
34903 001 TR 03:30PM-04:45PM LEONARD, D R DE 0313
SECTION TITLE: GREAT BOOKS II HNRS

An introduction to some of the major texts of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, focusing on periods of romanticism, realism and modernism, and with some attention given to parallel developments in the arts and philosophy. We’ll be exploring the structure and meaning of each text in its own terms, and at the same time examining how it reflects certain formal features or ideas of its period. Throughout the course our emphasis will be on tracing central themes, in particular those dealing with explorations of human consciousness within its setting of space and time. Texts will be drawn from different countries and literary genres: Wordsworth, selected poems; Goethe, Faust I, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, Tolstoy Death of Ivan Ilych, Proust, Combray, Kafka, The Metamorphosis, Borges, Labyrinths, Camus, The Fall, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman.

CMPL 131 Introduction to Comparative Literature: Savage, Native, Stranger LEC 3.0
34883 001 MW 11:00AM-11:50AM FLAXMAN, GREGG GL 0101
CMPL 131 REC REC 0.0
34904 601 F 08:00AM-08:50AM STAFF DE 0313
CMPL 131 REC REC 0.0
34905 602 F 10:00AM-10:50AM STAFF DE 0313
CMPL 131 REC REC 0.0
34906 603 F 02:00PM-02:50PM STAFF AR 0218
CMPL 131 REC REC 0.0
34907 604 F 02:00PM-02:50PM STAFF AR 0118 N
CMPL 131 REC REC 0.0
34908 605 R 03:30PM-04:20PM STAFF SC 0201
CMPL 131 REC REC 0.0
34909 606 R 03:30PM-04:20PM STAFF SC 0200

This course is designed as an introduction to the discourses and methodologies of comparative literature. In particular, the course will follow 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. Over the course of the semester, we'll explore a variety of materials, ranging from literature to anthropology to philosophy to cinema. In the process, we'll organize our diverse reading around four basic concepts that have, historically, preoccupied the field: the savagery, the nativism, the otherness, and estrangement.

Readings will include:
Julio Cortazar, "Blow Up"
Jorge-Luis Borges, "Death and the Compass"
Clarice Lispector, Family Ties
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Michel Tournier, Friday
Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes
Plato, Menexenus
Claude Levi-Strauss, selections from The Raw and the Cooked
Clifford Geertz, selections from The Interpretation of Cultures
Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
Salman Rushdie, selected essays

Films will include:
Memories of Underdevelopment (dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea)
Fire (dir. Deepa Mehta)
The Year of Living Dangerously (dir. Peter Weir)

Note: Students who register for this course are also required to register for one of the following recitation sections: CMPL 131.601, CMPL 131.602, CMPL 131.603, CMPL 131.604, CMPL 131.605, or CMPL 131.606.

(fulfills Literary Traditions II requirement)

CMPL 250 (050 ) Approaches to Comparative Literature LEC 3.0
34910 001 TR 11:00AM-12:15PM BRODEY, INGER S GL 0301

This course will introduce students to central methods and issues in the comparative study of literature. Rather than develop any one single approach, the hope is that students will gain an appreciation of the rich literary opportunities available within the discipline, and master many of the tools necessary for the comparative study of literature. With the help of a Graduate Research Consultant (GRC), students will have the opportunity to develop a topic from the class into a Comparative Literature research project, using methods appropriate to the discipline.
In Part One of this course, readings of Plato, Aristotle and Horace alongside Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex will give the students a chance to understand the foundational role of Classical Poetics in the Western tradition of literary criticism. We will also study the intertwining (and often conflicting) roles of literature and philosophy in Plato’s writing in particular, with an eye toward understanding the difficulty of determining exactly "what is literature."
Part Two will introduce students to various forms of literary theory, using contemporary theoretical approaches and short work of poetry and fiction. Students will have the opportunity to study how these approaches differ and to apply them to poetry and film of their own choosing.
Part Three will explore issues in cross-cultural interpretation and inter-textuality, including the problems of translation across languages and transformation between verbal and visual media. It will use traditional writings on Chinese and Japanese aesthetics to contrast with readings in Part One.
Part Four will give students time to delve further in the revision of one paper. Students will learn research techniques that are specific to the field of Comparative Literature. In addition, they will learn about the ways in which comparatists justify projects that often draw on diverse disciplines, historical contexts, and cultures.
Part Five will allow each student to select and pursue one interdisciplinary approach to literature, involving visual art, music, or architecture. Possibilities include a comparison of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with the music of Bach and Mozart; an architectural approach to Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling; a comparison of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five with the architecture of the Holocaust Museum; or the role of visual art in concrete poetry.

This course fulfills the Writing Intensive requirement in the new curriculum.

CMPL 272 Global Queer Cinema LEC 3.0
34867 001 TR 03:30PM-04:45PM KUZNIAR, ALICE DE 0404
R 05:00PM-06:50PM DE 0404

This core course in the Program in Sexuality Studies is designed to introduce students to the varied production worldwide of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans gender cinema. After examining the representation of the homosexual in pre- Stonewall cinema, we shall study the groundswell of independent gay and lesbian film in the early 1990s, know as the "New Queer Cinema." Queer theory opened the gates for challenging an ahistorical, US-based, white-centered gay and lesbian identity politics, focused on a uniform coming-out narrative. In this class we shall pursue this critique by examining the different ways in which sexuality and gender can be expressed in different cultures. Questions that will guide our study are: How is sexuality culturally coded? How have models of migration and transnationality informed gender and sexual identities? How do the complexities of sexual identities mirror the complexities of the world in which we live? How is resistance to globalized cultural uniformity expressed in terms of gender and sexual diversity as well as independent, low-budget cinematic production? How does sexual desire come into conflict with ethnic, religious, and national identities and pasts? How can the metaphor of border crossings be deployed in reference to sexual transgression and, furthermore, to how travel on the internet has enabled new queer sub¬cultures to form? How have various new digitally-based media transmitted and altered sexual identities? How have queer sensibilities informed and critiqued the reception of mainstream entertainment? Inversely, how has queerness become an object of global consumption? Finally, how does our gaze as Western observers of sexual, gender, and national heterogeneity direct, marginalize, or normalize other identities? And how does gazing at the foreigner or being the foreigner evoke queer desires, which are often left unspoken? In sum, we shall see how queer cinematic production serves as a vehicle for documentation and education, for aesthetic and sexual experimentation, for cultural export and self-inquiry.
Note: This course is cross-listed with German 272 and Communication Studies 272.

CMPL 379 (094 ) Cowboys, Samurai, Rebels LEC 3.0
34911 001 MW 10:00AM-10:50AM BRODEY, INGER S GL 0431

34912 601 F 09:00AM-09:50AM STAFF DE 0313
CMPL 379 (094 ) COWBOYS,SAMURAI,REBELS LEC 3.0
34913 602 F 01:00PM-01:50PM STAFF DE 0313
CMPL 379 (094 ) COWBOYS,SAMURAI,REBELS LEC 3.0
34914 603 F 02:00PM-02:50PM STAFF DE 0313
CMPL 379 (094 ) COWBOYS,SAMURAI,REBELS LEC 3.0
34915 604 R 03:30PM-04:20PM STAFF AR 0118

This course deals with cross-cultural definitions of heroism, authority, individualism, and rebellion as portrayed in film, particularly with an eye to how stories have been translated across cultures. The primary "texts" will be a selection of films, many of which were directed by John Ford or Akira Kurosawa. Readings will include political and historical works on individualism, authority, and heroism, as well as short works of fiction from the United States, Japan, and France.
We will study the films in pairings of Japanese samurai films with complementary American Westerns, such as Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai with Sturges' The Magnificent Seven; Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress with Lucas's Star Wars; and Kobayashi's Harakiri with Ford’s My Darling Clementine. Other films will include: John Ford's Stagecoach, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, and John Ford’s The Searchers.
Undergraduate students will write two 6-8 page comparative papers and take two exams.

Fulfills Arts and Sciences Non-Western/Comparative Perspective. Theis course counts both towards the Comparative Literature Major and the Asian Studies Major.

CMPL 390 (095 ) Don Quijote LEC 3.0
34925 001 TR 12:30PM-01:45PM COLLINS, M S GL 0317

Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote of La Mancha (1605, 1615) is widely known as the first modern novel, and one could say that every novel written since Don Quijote establishes a creative dialogue with Cervantes' masterpeice. Don Quijote's influence in revolutionizing our concept of the imagination, and its role in life and literature, is perhaps just as important, but has received far less attention. In this course we will read and analyze Don Quijote, considering this work as a product of its time and culture, as the first modern novel, and as literature that has reshaped our notion of the human imagination. We will consider Don Quijote's engagement with literary genres current in the 16th century, Cervantes' experimentation with fictional form, the author's staging of debates about the imagination and imaginative literature, and the changing reception of Don Quijote in different times and countries, along with the changing critical conceptions of this work. We will also view and discuss illustrations of Cervantes’ novel, and changing visual representations through the centuries. What is the legacy of Don Quijote for the modern novel and the modern concept of the imagination?

CMPL 468 (181 ) Aestheticism LEC 3.0
Instructor: E. Downing, MWF 11:00-11:50 Maximum Enrollment: 30

This course is organized around the idea of aestheticism as both a discrete nineteenth-century movement and a major facet of modernism in literature and literary theory. The primary focus will be on attitudes toward both art and life; on the delineation of stylistic tendencies; and especially on the problems and predilections that arise out of the collusion and confusion of the spheres of life and art in the aestheticist worldview. Authors read include: Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Huysmans, Wilde, Gasset, Mann, Rilke, Nabokov, Dinesen, Barthes, and Sontag. Books for this course include: Kierkegaard, Either/Or; Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life; Nietzsche, Gay Science; Huysmans, Against Nature; Wilde, Artist as Critic and Picture of Dorian Gray; Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art; Mann, Death in Venice and Confessions of Felix Krull; Rilke, Selected Poems; Nabokov, Lolita; Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales; Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text and Roland Barthes.

Fulfills Arts and Sciences Aesthetic Perspective

CMPL 492 section 001 4th Dimension: Art & the Fictions of Hyperspace
Instructor: D. Leonard, TR 12:30-01:45 Maximum Enrollment: 20

The "fourth dimension" is a concept that originated in 19th-century non-Euclidean geometry, and was popularized in science fiction and writings on the occult. In the early 20th century it inspired various innovations in literature and the visual arts that transformed artistic representations of space and time. We’ll explore the development of the concept from its beginning in mathematics through its popularization in science fiction and the occult (E.A. Abbott, H.G. Wells, Ouspensky, Hinton), its expansion in the visual arts of early modernism (Picasso, Duchamp, Malevich, Lissitsky, Escher), and finally in texts and films of modernism and post-modernism, examining what resources writers and film-makers brought to bear on representations of this dimension (e.g., Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, and Chris Marker).

Fulfills requirements for Literary Arts (LA) North Atlantic World (NA)

CMPL 560, Section 001 Literary Translation
Instructor: M. Levine, TR 03:30-04:45 Maximum Enrollment: 15/25

"...a good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body," wrote John Dryden more than three hundred years ago. Deadly dull though some translations indeed may be, literary translation is a vital link in the transmission of cultures. Writers depend on translators to give them voice in languages they themselves do not command. If they are lucky, their translators represent them well, even brilliantly; if unlucky...

This course is about the scholarly art of literary translation. The readings focus on theories of translation practice, but the course is not all theory. Students will work at producing their own translations in order to test the theories and to understand through their own struggles the difficult choices translators face when moving a literary text from one language to another.