Past Courses

Spring 2009

L16 115 Freshman Seminar: The Acceleration of the World; Speeding and the Arts
This course explores the ways in which the accelerating speed of technology and communication has changed the ways we think about the world and the nature of artistic representation. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, many writers expressed their anxieties about the uncontrolled acceleration of technology, and debated the nature of such "progress." We will examine how, in the late nineteenth century, Emile Zola represented the express train as a mythological monster. We will also examine why some modernists like Apollinaire related the increased speed of transportation and communication systems to the prophetic role of the poet, and why Filippo Marinetti proclaimed the "new beauty of speed" in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Other works to be studied include Zola's Human Beast, De Quincey's Glory of Motion, Proust's "Impressions from an Automobile," the Futurist painters, poetry by Whitman and Cendrars, as well as theories of the impact of speed on our modern world as explored by Stephen Kern, Culture of Time and Space, and Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics.
TuTh
10:00 - 11:30 a.m.
L. Cuillé

L16 204 Crossing Borders: Intro to Comparative Literature An introduction to some of the ideas and practices of literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This course is designed for majors and prospective majors in comparative literature and comparative arts - and other students interested in reading literature from many parts of the world and exploring issues in literary studies including questions of epistemology and representation, the cultural biases of readers, semiotics, translation theory, and Orientalism. Plays, novels, and poems by writers including Euripides, Vergil, Racine, Rilke, Henry James, Borges, Mellah, and Puig, and closely related short excerpts by theorists from Aristotle to Bhabha. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or permission of the instructor.
TuTh
1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
Kafalenos

L16 215c Introduction to Comparative Practice: Representing Violence This course will explore how violence is depicted in works of the 20th and 21st centuries. Though we will focus mostly on the literature following the First and Second World Wars in Europe, we will also direct our attention to works created in response to the War in Bosnia, French Colonialism in the Caribbean and Africa, the German Autumn, and 9/11. We will study how the experience of violence gave rise to new forms of artistic expression, which might be read as documents of collective trauma. Works to include André Breton’s Magnetic Fields, Antonin Artaud’s Jet of Blood, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, Albert Camus’s Stranger, Ilse Aichinger’s Bad Words, Günter Grass’s Tin Drum, Sony Labou-Tansi’s Antipeople, and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, and also films by Falk Harnack (The Axe of Wandsbek), Christopher Roth (Baader), and Oliver Stone (World Trade Center). Film screening times to be arranged in accordance with students’ schedules.
MWF
12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
L. Haegele

L16 376 Topics in Comparative Literature II: Monsters of the Middle Ages In this course we will study why monsters loomed large, literally and figuratively, in the medieval imagination. Texts such as Beowulf, Sir Gawein and the Green Knight, Mandeville's Travels; Old French tales about werewolves; Grettirs saga and other Old Icelandic works featuring monstrous heroes and the re-animated dead; and 15th-century German pamphlets about the bloodthirsty tyrant Vlad Tepes of Wallachia, also known as Dracula, pose challenging questions about the difference between the Human and its Other in the medieval period. We will pay particular attention to tensions between the real and the marvelous, the profane and the religious, gender roles, and notions of the body. An additional focus on "reading" medieval maps--many of them richly illustrated with beasts and monsters--helps us to locate the monstrous in spatial, theological, and aesthetic terms.
MWF
10:00 - 11:30 a.m.
Layher

L16 449 Topics: Fictional Biographies and Autobiographies Reading novels and stories that resemble autobiographies and biographies, we will focus on issues that remain as central to studies of fiction as they have recently become in autobiography theory: how we determine whether the stories that characters and people tell are reliable; to what degree telling stories creates the self as well as the fictional self; and whether textual cues exist that permit us to differentiate autobiographies and biographies from fiction. Theorists will include Dorrit Cohn, Lubomír Doležel, Philippe Lejeune, James Phelan, Donald P. Spence, Marie-Laure Ryan, Hayden White, Tamar Yacobi. Primary works will include short fiction by Borges, Cortázar, Fuentes, Joyce, Kafka, and Maupassant; Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury; the multi-authored The Whole Family, and Krauss’s History of Love as well as films by Kurosawa (Rashomon) and Antonioni (Blow-Up) and photographs by Cindy Sherman and Jack Pierson.
TuTh
4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Kafalenos

L16 507 Literary Theory After a brief review of some of the most important moments and figures in the history of aesthetic theory from Antiquity to the present, this course will focus on the development and expansion of literary theory and critical methodologies in the twentieth century. We begin with an examination of the linguistic innovations of Saussure and their utilization in Russian formalism, phenomenology and structuralism. We will then examine many different forms of poststructuralist and postcolonial thought, treating in detail important areas of theoretical activity in gender/queer studies, New Historicism, and other contemporary approaches to texts and culture. The primary goal of the course is to make students critically aware of and professionally comfortable with the rich diversity and usefulness of a wide range of contemporary literary theories. Required for all graduate students in French. Taught in English. Same as L34 5071.
W
2:00-4:30 p.m.
Metzidakis

L16 552 Literary Translation II A review of translation theories and the study of translation practices of various literary forms (prose, poetry, drama) and media. A more general approach to translation and cultural exchange in a globalizing world than Part I, with specific examples to be drawn more from (East) Asian than from European literatures. Topics will include the ideological underpinnings of translation, the political uses of language in intercultural communication, and the multiple uses of translations of all kinds of literature in a multicultural world. We will consider not only written texts, but also film subtitles. Students will choose a text that has already been translated for critique in addition to producing their own translation; students will be expected to report orally on the process and the product of this project several times during the semester. Prerequisite: native or near-native competence in English and another language. Also open to qualified graduate students not in the Certificate Program.
MW
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Hegel

L16 5521 Translation Module 1 The first of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.

L16 5522 Translation Module 2 The second of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.

L16 5523 Translation Module 3 The third of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.

Fall 2008

L16 213 From Romanticism to Modernism: Literature and the Arts in 19th-Century Europe The idea of genius finds expression, in the 19th century, in painting and music as well as in stories, poems, and plays. We will follow the evolution, from Romanticism into the modern period, of a new interest in the individual perceptions of the "genius" and others, along with a simultaneous breakdown of faith in objectivity. Beginning with Goethe's Werther (1774), we will move through the 19th century, focusing on movements including Symbolism and Impressionism, and conclude with the Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Texts, slides, tapes. Three essays, a report, one creative project, attendance at concerts and plays. No prerequisites; freshmen are welcome.
TuTh
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Kafalenos

L16 215c Introduction to Comparative Practice: Death, Decadence, and Femininity Exploring notions of the fallen woman prevalent since Eve, this course will study how 19th- and 20th-century authors and visual artists link the female body to indulgence, wrong-doing, and weakness. We will consider how the idealized 19th-century woman stands in opposition to woman as a symbol of moral decay. The class will examine conventional gender roles along with family dynamics, focusing on how authors, artists, and filmmakers associate the woman's role with death, decadence, and moral decay. Works to include Schnitzler's Ronde, Reuter's From a Good Family, Fontane's Effi Briest, Zola's Thérèse Raquin, and James's Portrait of a Lady; paintings by Klimt; and also Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut.
MWF
12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
S. Marcu

L16 255c Text and Tradition: The Emergence of the Modern Mind: Modern Literature Through a wide sampling of Western literary works, the course explores themes and tones characteristic of the rise of modern consciousness from the Renaissance forward: we trace debates on aesthetics, the transformation of autobiography, writers' persistent distrust of books, and their relentless assaults on perversions of cultural idealism. Books by such authors as Cervantes, Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Twain, Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. Preference given to Text and Tradition and IPH students.
01 TuTh 2:30 p.m. - 4 p.m.
L. Cuillé
02 MWF 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
S. Kirk
03 TuTh 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Erlin

L16 3301 Topics in Chinese Literature and Culture Using films and literary texts from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, this course will examine the fin-de-siecle, "the end of the century," as a unique historical, cultural, and psychological moment. It is a moment of being in-between the past and the future. Issues related to the fin-de-siecle include decadence, marginality, nostalgia, exoticism, among others. We will examine how Chinese writers and filmmakers capture significant cultural, social, and political changes at the end of the twentieth-century, such as the handover of Hong Kong, China in the crossroads of socialism and capitalism, and postmodern materialism in Taiwan. As we examine these phenomena, we will also reflect back in history on how China entered the modern era at the end of the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth century, what issues and crises occupied the creative minds of the Chinese at that time. All readings are available in English. All films are subtitled. Limited to upper level undergraduate students. Graduate students should enroll in Chinese 4891. Regular reading assignments and a major research project will be required.
MW
4 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Chen

L16 338c Genres: Textravel: Postmodern Fiction An introduction to Postmodern texts, mainly from the 1960s and 1970s, along with selected 19th-century fiction, to illustrate the guideposts and passageways of the process of reading. Approaching a "story" as a place to be explored and an itinerary to be chosen, we will learn to find paths even through works with several entrances and multiple routes. Emphasis on experiencing and visualizing Postmodern constructs, and considering how they mirror the world in which we live. Texts by Borges, Nabokov, Calvino, Federman, Fuentes, Robbe-Grillet, and Barthes. Essays, diagrams, projects. Sophomore standing; no other prerequisites, although a penchant for paintings or puzzles may be of use.
TuTh
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Kafalenos

L16 3405 History of World Cinema The course surveys the history of cinema as it developed in nations other than the United States. Beginning with the initially dominant film producing nations of Western Europe, which soon found themselves threatened by the economic power of the Hollywood film industry, this course will consider the development of various national cinemas in Europe, Asia, and Third World countries. The course will seek to develop an understanding of each individual film both as an expression of a national culture as well as a possible response to international movements in other art forms. Throughout, the course will consider how various national cinemas sought ways of dealing with the pervasiveness of Hollywood films, developing their own distinctive styles, which could in turn influence American cinema itself. REQUIRED SCREENING TIME: Tuesday at 7:00pm.
TuTh
1 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
W. Paul

L16 390 Lyrics of Mystical Love, East and West

How can mystical experience be put into words? How did the mystic poets, from various world traditions, attempt to express the inexpressible? How should we "read" and "interpret" these poetic images? This course deals with these and similar questions while examining key mystical/poetic concepts such as silence, union with the divine, or human versus mystical love. The lyrics of the world-renowned mystic Rumi will be used as the main text with frequent comparisons to the writings of other prominent figures such as St. John of the Cross, Yunus Emre, John Donne, Kabir, and Meister Eckhart. All poems will be read in English.
TuTh
1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Keshavarz

L16 4901 Topics: Around Paris: Captial Lives This course will construct a cultural map of literature and the visual arts through century-by-century comparisons linking Paris with different Western capitals. We will study Rabelais's ideals of a humanist education along with the flourishing of art in Renaissance Florence; the court culture of Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves and the art of Vermeer and his contemporaries in Delft and Amsterdam; the libertinism of Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons in conjunction with the London exploits of Richardson's Pamela; and middle class desire as it radiates from Paris through Vienna in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Vuillard's paintings, and Freud's Dora. These comparisons will enable us to define a context for literature that engages political, religious, and social concerns. A study of Butor's Parisian hero's return to Rome in Change of Heart (La Modification) along with Paul Auster's New York Trilogy will focus on how, by experimenting with narrative structure, some modern literature defines a culture rooted less in sociopolitical concerns than in the writer's own ability to relate the impact of city life on the consciousness of his hero. Photographs of Paris and New York by Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Stieglitz, Strand, Hine, and others will offer additional perspectives for considering how, over time and over borders, Paris remains central to our sense of culture.
TuTh
2:30-4:00 p.m.
H. Stone

L16 494 Seminar: Truth or Fiction? Autobiographical Fiction and Fictional Autobiography Examining how, in the last decade, literary and popular media have focused on several scandals involving fraudulent autobiographies (including the fake Holocaust memoir Fragments, by Benjamin Wilkomirski, and James Frey’s fabricated account of drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces), this course raises important questions about the borders of the literary genre of autobiography. We will examine a variety of 20th-century narratives and films that self-consciously transgress the boundary between fiction and autobiography and violate the conventions of the “autobiographical pact.” We will consider the how these issues relate to the construction of the self through writing, the reliability of memory, and notions of authenticity in self-representation. Works to include modernist and postmodernist texts by Roland Barthes (Roland Barthes), Raymond Federman (The Voice in the Closet), Franz Kafka (Letter to the Father), Imre Kertész (Fatelessness), Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior), Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way), Henry Roth (Mercy of a Rude Stream), Art Spiegelman (Maus), Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), and Benjamin Wilkomirski (Fragments); and films Europa Europa and I’m Not There.
MW
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
McGlothlin

L16 495 Seminar: The 19th Century European Novel Our investigation of the classic European novel of the 19th century begins with the assumption that the novel is the preeminent literary form of middle-class, urbanized, economic modernity. Through a detailed critical reading of seven representative novels, we will be exploring such topics as the pressure of social and geographical mobility and of larger historical forces on the exposed modern individual. Our readings will also engage questions of form, in particular the rise of realism as the primary mode of expression of the novels of this period. We will be reading novels by Goethe, Stendhal, Sand, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Conrad.
MW
1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
Bailin

L16 511 Seminar: Walter Benjamin & Co. This course will explore the seminal work of Walter Benjamin, one of the major figures of early 20th-century theory and cultural criticism. Our discussions will focus on how his thought reflected and inspired contemporary conversations about the role of art in society; the cultural logic of capitalism; the specificity of older and newer media; the tasks and limits of literary translation; the relation of history, memory, and theology; and the historical transformations of sensory perception. This seminar engages with some of the most important texts and critical interventions of Benjamin from the 1920s to 1940, including "Goethe’s Elective Affinities," “The Task of the Translator,” One-Way Street, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," and The Arcades Project. We will read these contributions against the backdrop of the texts, authors, traditions, sites, and conceptual constellations that were at the center of Benjamin’s intellectual pursuits, looking at works by Adorno, Baudelaire, Breton, Eisenstein, Goethe, Kafka, Klee, Kracauer, Lukacs, Marinetti, Marx, Proust, Riegl, Valery, and Weber will help us to illuminate Benjamin’s thought, highlight the interconnectedness and interdisciplinary vibrancy of his work, and probe the continued actuality of his writing about the dialectic of the aesthetic and the political, of history and redemption, of modernity and myth, of progress and catastrophe.
W
4:00 - 6:30 p.m.
Koepnick

SPRING 2008

L16 115 Freshman Seminar: Science Fictions
Exploring how science fiction plays with reality through artful distortions of time and place, we will study how authors and filmmakers further amplify the effects of their speculative worlds by referring to each other's speculative worlds. Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Turing’s Delirium present a complex web of allusions and cross-references that heighten the effects of a world that is at once recognizable and fantastic, part of another reality that oddly resonates with our own. By exploding the various realities that we attempt to inhabit, these works challenge us to reconsider the relations between what might be, what could be, and what we perceive to be.
MWF 1:00-2:00 p.m.
A. Brown

L16 204 Crossing Borders: An Intro to Comparative Literature
An introduction to some of the ideas and practices of literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This course is designed for majors and prospective majors in Comparative Literature and Comparative Arts--and other students interested in reading literature from many parts of the world and exploring issues in literary studies, including questions of epistemology and representation, the cultural biases of readers, semiotics, translation theory, and Orientalism. Plays, novels, and poems by writers including Euripides, Vergil, Racine, Rilke, Henry James, Borges, Mellah, and Puig, and closely related short excerpts by theorists from Aristotle to Bhabha. Sophomore standing or permission of the instructor required.Excellent reading skills and curiosity about literature as a professional discipline useful. Four essays.
TuTh 2:30-4:00 p.m.
E. Kafalenos

L16 215c Intro to Comparative Practice - Glimpses of Africa: Exoticism, Negritude, Post-Colonialism
Presenting major British, French, African, and American writers and painters of the late 19th and of the 20th centuries, this course focuses on works whose settings in African locales raise issues about European colonialism and its aftermath. We will examine how literature and art contributed to perpetuating or critiquing assumptions about the superiority of European civilization over the African continent. Discussions will address issues of race, class, and gender, as well as questions of progress, religion, freedom and democracy. Texts to include novels by Conrad, Gide, Waugh, Bowle, Naipaul, and Fanon; poems by Baudelaire, Senghor, and Césaire; and Isabelle Eberhardt's travelogue, The Oblivion Seekers. Visual art to include Orientalist paintings by Delacroix and Ingres and African-influenced Cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque; Pollack's film Out of Africa; and Julien's documentary Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask.
MWF 10:00 – 11:00 a.m.
E. Pourroy-Braud

L16 2140 Cross-Currents I
This course revisits the cultural and intellectual terrain of Classical to Renaissance Literature (Hum 201) and Early Political Thought (Hum 203), purposefully mixing a different set of texts of very different kinds. We'll delve into how works belonging to the same cultural moment but different genres can reflect upon one another, and we'll address how works issuing from different periods can speak to one another. Along the way we'll work on refining our talents as close readers and careful writers, and we'll think carefully about the critic's role in creating canons and inventing intertextual dialogues. Authors studied include Aristophanes, Euripides, Plato, Seneca, Boethius, Dante, and Petrarch. No prerequisite required. 3 units. Same as home course L93 Hum 214.
MW 1:00-2:30 p.m.
M. Sherberg

L16 227c Theatre Culture Studies II
Addressing theater history (mainly through primary documents), political/cultural history, and dramatic text, this course examines theater produced and written between 1500 and 1800 from transnational points of view. We'll consider international influences and encounters, both within Europe (the pressure of Italian drama on Shakespeare, for example) and without (e.g., representations of the Turk in early modern drama, drama produced in the New World, etc.). Some attention will also be paid to the language of Shakespeare and his English contemporaries (e.g., metaphor, style, prosody, rhetoric) and to formal dramatic elements that can be conveyed in translation (e.g., the construction of character, time, place, plots and plotting, etc.). We'll read plays by such authors as Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, Calderón, Racine and Molière. 3 units. Same as home course L15 Drama 229C.
TuTh 2:30-4:00 p.m.
R. Henke

L16 364 Literature and Ethics: The Art of War
Focusing on accounts of war in novels, poetry, and film, we will study the critical contribution of the arts to our understanding of historic conflict. We will examine ethical questions raised in authors' depictions of wars that occurred during their lifetimes, including some in which they were involved directly as fighters or witnesses. The construction of heroes and the flourishing of national identity are two issues that will engage us as we consider epics such as Homer's Iliad. The epic will serve as a model for our interpretations of depictions of the Battle of Waterloo by Stendhal in The Charterhouse of Parma and Hugo in Les Miserables. We will also examine Voltaire's critique in Candide of the ideological mechanisms that justify war, comparing his depiction of "heroic butchery" with praises of war in Apollinaire's Calligrams and Marinetti's Futurist Manifestos. Novels and films offering different perspectives on WWI will allow us to measure the shared human toll of war as colored by particular national interests. We will study the moral dilemmas that war imposes on individuals in Remarque's All's Quiet on the Western Front, Jünger's Storms of Steel, Barbusse's Fire, Grance's Wheel, Renoir's Grand Illusion, and Morris's Fog of War. In addition, Malraux's Man's Fate will engage us in discussions of what differentiates a terrorist from a soldier. We will evaluate how Malraux's depiction of the hero's experiences during the Chinese Revolution—a fictional account of history—offers interesting parallels with war today, notably the Iraq war as mediated in real time by journalists, scholars and soldiers.
MWF 2:00-3:00 p.m.
L. Cuillé

L16 393 Literary Theory: Unwrapping Psychoanalysis
From its classical beginnings in the late nineteenth century through the present, psychoanalysis has played a major role in science and medicine, in the academy, and in our everyday lives. We will study the broader social and cultural implications of psychoanalytic theory through an examination of the influence of Freud's ideas on a century-long interrogation of the unconscious that includes Lacan, who reworked Freud's ideas; feminists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, who challenged them, and, more recently, Slavoj Žižek, who engages them in a critical analysis of culture. Students will consider not only the importance of dreams and desires but also how the unconscious is shaping gender relations, cultural productions, and even politics. The class will read Freud's Ego and the Id, Interpretation of Dreams, Civilization And Its Discontents, and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality As Well As Lacan's Écrits, Kristeva's Tales of Love, Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One, Butler's Gender Trouble, and Žižek's Enjoy Your Symptom! and Plague of Fantasies. Same as L14 E Lit 393, L21 German 329.
TuTh 10:00-11:30 a.m.
S. Schindler

L16 411 - The Price of Culture: Economics and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
This seminar will explore the various ways in which economic concerns inform the literature of nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. Focusing on the profound economic transformations occurring in the period, we will consider how the nineteenth-century novel is shaped by industrialization, globalization, and the rise of the corporation, as well as by the spread of consumer culture and mass entertainment. In addition, we will explore how economic concepts and assumptions penetrate and structure literary works and how authors reflect on their status as commodity producers in the literary marketplace. Four novels, by Goethe (Elective Affinities), Dickens (Hard Times), Zola (The Ladies’ Paradise), and Norris (The Octopus), will provide a foundation for our discussions. Primary readings will be supplemented with theoretical texts by Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and others. Same as L08 Classics 456.
MW 2:30-4:00 p.m.
M. Erlin

L16 419 - Feminist Literary Theory
This course is intended to acquaint students with basic ideas and issues raised by a diversity of voices in contemporary feminist criticism and theory. Readings will cover a wide range of approaches and tendencies within feminism, among them: French feminism, Foucauldian analyses of gender and sexuality, lesbian and queer theories, Third World/postcolonial feminism, and feminism by women of color. Given that feminist literary theories developed in response to and in dialogue with wider sociopolitical, cultural, and philosophical currents, the course will include application of theory to literature, but also will explore feminist literary theory in an interdisciplinary context. NOTE: This course is in the core curriculum for the Women and Gender Studies graduate certificate. Prereq: Advanced course work in WGS or in literary theory (300-level and above) or permission of the instructor required. 3 units. Same as home course L77 WGS 419.
TuTh 10:00-11:30 a.m.
A. Tsuchiya

L16 449 - Between Image and Text: Telling Stories
Images generally tell stories most precisely when accompanied by language--whether caption, title, or balloon. Stories told in words, in contrast, may be enhanced by but do not require illustration. Although this hierarchy of meaning in which language restricts the message that an image conveys usually prevails, some works positioned on the border between image and language introduce strategies that reverse the hierarchy. We will examine two types of borderline works that tell stories: 1) hybrid forms in which image and language combine (including a graphic novel) and 2) media that re-represent other media (films based on novels and novels that re-represent visual artworks in words, through ekphrasis). Hybrids by Barthes, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet/Magritte, Satrapi, Sebald, and Vargas Llosa. Films by Kieslowski and Kurosawa. Fiction that includes ekphrasis by Balzac, Borges, Cortázar, Henry James, Robbe-Grillet. Theory by Barthes, Kibédi Varga, Hagberg, Heffernan, Lessing, McCloud, Reid, Ryan, Spence, Steiner, Sternberg, Yacobi.
TuTh 11:30-1:00 p.m.
E. Kafalenos

L16 551 Methods of Literary Study: The Theory and Practice of Literary Translation
This course combines a review of translation theories with a study of translation practices. We will investigate how translations reflect changing literary and cultural values and tastes. In addition, we will examine how the nuances of language and culture (source and target) influence the translator's choice of whom and what kind of text to translate. Guest translators will occasionally discuss their work.
M 4:00-6:00 p.m.
G. Williams

L16 5521 Translation Module 1
The first of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.

L16 5522 Translation Module 2
The second of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.

L16 5523 Translation Module 3
The third of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.

FALL 2007

L16 115 Freshman Seminar: Mapping the City
A study of urban life as characterized in literature, the visual arts, and film, this course focuses on depictions of the city that offer themselves as maps of human experience. In addition to examining actual maps, we will explore ways in which narratives are structured to allow us to chart the trajectory of characters' relations to one another and to their environment. If for some the path to power and success seems direct, for others the city functions like a labyrinth, entangling and preventing even the most skilled from finding their way. Counterbalancing the anonymity, suffering, and political alienation of the city is its compelling beauty. The aesthetic appeal of the city's rivers, architecture, and monuments will also inform our analysis of texts and images from the Middle Ages through the present. Works to include Christine de Pizan's Treasure of the City of the Ladies; Sarah Dunant's bestselling historical novel of Renaissance Florence, The Birth of Venus; paintings by Johannes Vermeer and his contemporaries; Markman Ellis's cultural history The Coffee House; Nikolai Gogol's Petersburg Tales, Charles Baudelaire's prose poems, Michel Butor's Passing Time, Pamuk's Istanbul; Amos Gitai’s film House in Jerusalem, and contemporary photographs by Andreas Gursky and Abelardo Morell. 3 units. TuTh 11:30 – 1:00 p.m.
H. Stone

L16 211 World Literature: Crossing Lines
Crossing lines means entering new space: new country, new language, new identity. This course will follow the histories of individuals who cross lines, examining what they take with them, what they leave behind, and what they encounter. Points of conflict and points of convergence will mark our examination of the consequences for the characters, for the texts themselves, and for the authors, when they and their stories cross regional and national lines. Among the writers we will read are Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Naguib Mahfouz, Antonio Skármeta, Janette Turner Hospital, Marjorie Agosin, Qiu Xiaolong. 3 units.
MW 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Berg

L16 213E From Romanticism to Modernism: Literature and the Arts in 19th-Century Europe
The idea of genius finds expression, in the 19th century, in painting and music as well as in stories, poems, and plays. We will follow the evolution, from Romanticism into the modern period, of a new interest in the individual perceptions of the "genius" and others, along with a simultaneous breakdown of faith in objectivity. Beginning with Goethe's Werther (1774), we will move through the 19th century, focusing on movements including Symbolism and Impressionism, and conclude with the Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Texts, images, and music. Three essays, a report, one creative project, attendance at concerts and plays. No prerequisite; freshmen are welcome. 3 units.
TuTh 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. E. Kafalenos

L16 215 Intro to Comparative Practice I: Apocalyptic Visions in Literature, Art, and Film
From train travel and mass warfare to surveillance tools and cyberspace, advances in technology have radically affected the basic structure of modern life, even threatening our biological, social, and political stability. Prominent authors, artists, and filmmakers have addressed the theme of technology and its negative consequences for society. We will examine their “apocalyptic visions,” exploring the connections they make between modern machines, increased speed and efficiency, violence, and the notion of impending catastrophe. Readings will include Orwell’s 1984, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Christa Wolf’s Accident: A Day’s News, W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn; poetry by Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot; and selections from the Cyberpunk genre and Japanese A-Bomb literature. We will also study paintings by Menzel, Beckmann, and Picasso and films by Godard (Alphaville), Lynch (Blue Velvet), and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner). 3 units.
MWF 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
T. Graves

L16 255C Text and Tradition: The Emergence of the Modern Mind: Modern Literature
Through a wide sampling of Western literary works, the course explores themes and tones characteristic of the rise of modern consciousness from the Renaissance forward: we trace debates on aesthetics, the transformation of autobiography, writers' persistent distrust of books, and their relentless assaults on perversions of cultural idealism. Books by such authors as Cervantes, Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Twain, Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. Preference given to Text and Tradition and IPH students. 3 units.
TuTh 10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Cuillé
TuTh 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Schmidgen

L16 3301 Topics in Chinese Literature and Culture: The Chinese City in the Global Context
In this course, we will situate major Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore in the global context to gain new perspectives on Chinese culture. We will examine issues such as alienation, decadence, and cosmopolitanism that are closely associated with urban culture. We will also focus on the global circulation of cultures and discuss the possibilities of conceiving a new cultural geography that will allow us to view the world in a new kind of global spatial order, instead of looking at the world as composed of a body of nations. This new inter- and cross-cultural map will show that a global urban culture has been in the making within the proposed Chinese global cities, and that in fact they share more in common with each other than with the cultures of the state where these cities exist. Literary texts, films, videos, and multi-media art works will be examined. All readings are available in English. All films are subtitled. Limited to upper-level undergraduates. Graduate students should enroll in Chinese 4891. Regular reading assignments and a major research project will be required. 3 units.
TuTh 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Chen

L16 332 Literature and Art: Modernisms; Literature, Art, and the Politics of the New
As it emerged in the last decades of the 19th century, modernist literature, art, music, and film broke with the legacy of the past so as to experiment with new and often highly self-reflexive forms of artistic expression. Modernist artists sought to divorce art from all social or moral obligations. But they also debated whether the modern state was itself the most spectacular of all artworks. This course discusses the origin, trajectory, and demise of various strains of modernist aesthetic culture in Europe and the United States between, roughly, the 1850s and the 1930s. Our focus is on how different writers, visual artists, and musicians defined the modernist project; how modernist works explored the specificity of their medium and struggled over competing ideas of what might make modernism modernist; and how key modernist movements (e.g., impressionism, aestheticism, expressionism, surrealism, socialist realism) coupled aesthetic innovation with specific social and political agendas. Works include paintings by Cezanne, Duchamp, Picasso, Malevich, and Hoech; prose fiction by Wilde, Kafka, Mann, Marinetti, Woolf, and Dos Passos; poetry by Baudelaire, Rilke, and Schwitters; films by Eisenstein, Vertov, Bunuel, and Riefenstahl; photographs by Atget, Sander, Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Rodchenko, sculpture and ready-mades by Rodin, Boccioni, El Lissitzky, and Duchamp; compositions by Wagner, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Russolo; and theoretical perspectives by Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Greenberg, Bürger, and Jameson. 3 units.
MWF 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. Koepnick

L16 3405 History of World Cinema
The course surveys the history of cinema as it developed in nations other than the United States. Beginning with the initially dominant film producing nations of Western Europe, which soon found themselves threatened by the economic power of the Hollywood film industry, this course will consider the development of various national cinemas in Europe, Asia, and Third World countries. The course will seek to develop an understanding of each individual film both as an expression of a national culture as well as a possible response to international movements in other art forms. Throughout, the course will consider how various national cinemas sought ways of dealing with the pervasiveness of Hollywood films, developing their own distinctive styles, which could in turn influence American cinema itself. REQUIRED SCREENING TIME: Tuesday at 7:00pm. 3 units.
TuTh 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
B. Paul

L16 355C The Flowering of Islamic Literature 500-1200
Exploration of the multilingual (Arabic, Persian, Turkish) literary cultures of a civilization that stretched from Spain to India. Themes and genres include early court patronage, bedouin odes, wine poetry, social satire, mystical poetry, national epic, and the literature of love and romance. Comparisons to contemporaneous Hebrew and ancient and medieval Western literatures. Readings in English. 3 units.
TuTh 2:30 – 4:00p.m.
Staff

L16 390 Lyrics of Mystical Love, East and West
How can mystical experience be put into words? How did the mystic poets, from various world traditions, attempt to express the inexpressible? How should we "read" and "interpret" these poetic images? This course deals with these and similar questions while examining key mystical/poetic concepts such as silence, union with the divine, or human versus mystical love. The lyrics of the world-renowned mystic Rumi will be used as the main text with frequent comparisons to the writings of other prominent figures such as St. John of the Cross, Yunus Emre, John Donne, Kabir, and Meister Eckhart. All poems will be read in English. 3 units.
TuTh 11:30 – 1:00p.m.
Keshavarz

L16 391C The Ancient Novel
Many modern readers are familiar with the mythological and dramatic literature of Greco-Roman antiquity, but fewer are aware that the same cultures developed a tradition of prose fiction concerned with romance, human psychology and sexuality, exotic travel and adventure, and religious experience. The European tradition of extended fictional narrative begins with the Greeks, and their novels, along with Apuleius' Golden Ass and Petronius' Satyricon, had a formative influence on later narrative traditions. Students read and analyze all the surviving examples of the Greco-Roman novel, including some fragmentary works, with the goal of throwing light on the history and conventions of the genre, its appeal, and its influence. 3 units.
TuTh 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
TBA

L16 402 Introduction to Comparative Literature
An introduction to the discipline and practice of Comparative Literature, exploring the concepts most frequently discussed and the methods most successfully practiced. What is revealed of texts when they are examined cross-culturally? What differences between texts emerge when themes and genres are followed across more than one national literature? The course includes a short history of the discipline and recent debates about the nature and scope of the field. Topics to be discussed include genres and forms, influence and intertextuality, translation, world literature, exile, and cross-cultural encounter. 3 units.
TuTh 10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
R. Henke

L16 430 Narrative Theory: An Introduction
Approaches to sequential representation, whether in literature, historical records, films, television dramas, cartoons, graphic novels, or (when ordered sequentially) paintings or photographs. We will consider focalization, the implied author, characters, the narratee, gaps, frequency, metalepsis, and the effect of these and other structures on readers' and viewers' experience. Exemplary narratives: Flaubert's Madame Bovary, James's Ambassadors, Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, and Robbe-Grillet's Maison de Rendez-vous; stories by Hoffmann, Borges, and Cortázar, and probably a film or a photo-novel. Theory by Barthes, Chatman, Cohn, Doležel, Genette, McHale, Nünning, Prince, Rimmon-Kenan, Ryan, Sternberg, others. Students of history, the visual arts, and film, as well as literature, are very welcome. 3 units.
MW 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
E. Kafalenos

L16 4690 Europe, an Imagined Community: Identity Discourses since 1750
Nation states and their cultures have been changed by globalization. Within this process continentalization has played an important role. The European Union is only half a century old, but continental unity has been discussed and demanded by European writers and thinkers for hundreds of years. We will read essays and poems on Europe (its identity, its cultural diversity and its cultural roots, contemporary problems, and future goals) by writers like Coleridge, Madame de Staël, Novalis, Chateaubriand, Heine, Nerval, Hugo, Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, T. S. Eliot, Klaus Mann, de Madariaga, Kundera, Enzensberger, Frischmuth, and Drakulic; we will discuss studies re-inventing Europe by philosophers like the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Ortega y Gasset; we will deal with the mythological figure of Europa and her resurrections in the world of art; we will study the Nazarene painters of the early 19th century in Rome and will discuss portraits of Bonaparte by French painters of the time. The Europe discourse has been a reaction to the great wars, and its goal was a pacified and unified continent. The comparisons between Europe and the United States as well as between Occident and Orient are of particular relevance. The readings will be accompanied by the study of theoretical contributions in the areas of identity formation, memory, multiculture, cosmopolitanism, and globalization. All texts to be read and discussed will be available through ERes. 3 units.
Tu 4:00 – 6:30 p.m.
M. Lützeler

L16 552 Methods of Literary Study: The Theory and Practice of Literary Translation II
A review of translation theories and the study of translation practices of various literary forms (prose, poetry, drama) and media. Prerequisite native or near-native competence in English and another language. Also open to qualified students not in the Certificate Program. A more general approach to translation and cultural exchange in a globalizing world than Part I, with specific examples to be drawn more from (East) Asian than from European literatures. Topics will include the ideological underpinnings of translation, the political uses of language in intercultural communication, and the multiple uses of translations of all kinds of literature in a multicultural world. We will consider not only written texts, but also film subtitles. Students will choose a text that has already been translated for critique in addition to producing their own translation; students will be expected to report orally on the process and the product of this project several times during the semester. 3 units.
MW 8:30 – 10:00 a.m.
R. Hegel

L16 5521 Translation Module 1
The first of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.

L16 5522 Translation Module 2
The second of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.

L16 5523 Translation Module 3
The third of a series of three 1-unit courses devoted to the practice of translation. The student will translate a published text of 20-30 pages (or, exceptionally, an unpublished text) from either literature, literary criticism, or literary theory related to the course material, pre-approved by the faculty member teaching the class, due at the end of the semester in which the class is taught.