Graduate

This is the first part of a two-quarter course. The two parts may be taken individually, but taking them in sequence is helpful. The aim of this course is to introduce what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological. We also discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.

May be taken in sequence with CMLT 20600/30600 or individually. This course is a survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, and Dryden. The goal is not to develop acting skill but, rather, the goal is to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report. Students have the option of writing essays or putting on short scenes in cooperation with other members of the class. End-of-week workshops, in which individual scenes are read aloud dramatically and discussed, are optional but highly recommended.

PQ: Consent of instructor, outside students will be accepted, with the class size limited to 15 students, as long as the majority of the students are CompLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature. Fulfills the core course requirement for CompLit students. This course will explore major trends in Western literary criticism from Plato to the late eighteenth-century conceived of as the prehistory of comparative literature as a discipline. The course will take as its particular focus the critical treatment of epic in some of the following: Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Giraldi, Montaigne, Tasso, Sidney, Le Bossu, St. Evremond, Dryden, Addison, Voltaire, and Burke. The course will also examine both twentieth-century comparative approaches to epic (e.g., Auerbach, Curtius, Frye) and more recent debates within comparative literature in order to assess continuities and discontinuities in critical method and goals. Students will be encouraged to write final papers on subjects and authors of their choice while addressing issues treated in the course.

Taste has long been a concern of public policy. This course examines the history of efforts to define, monitor, control, and shape public tastes. Among the questions to be considered are: what constitutes a taste? What do tastes consist of? How can tastes be measured? What is hip, and how does fashion or faddishness affect tastes? What is the difference between good taste, distastefulness, and bad taste? How do these distinctions manifest themselves, and what ideological work do they do? What norms, principles, and interests underlie the distinction between good and bad taste, high-brow/middle-brow/lowbrow, the excellent and the merely popular? What tools are available for shaping tastes? We will discuss a few classic discussions of taste (Hume, Veblen, Adorno); more recent work on the subject by cultural critics, sociologists, and economists (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Paul Dimaggio, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Peterson, Gary Becker); and recent policy research and governmental initiatives designed to affect public tastes. We will also be looking at some cases where works of literature, art, dance, film, and antiquities-collecting generated conflicts about taste.

PQ: Reading knowledge of German. This course is a study in poetic idealization. Ancient Greece is unlike most other literary cultures: it stands for the actual historical realization of the highest artistic and broadly cultural values. No poet is so audacious as to suggest that Greece was somehow not quite good enough. Hölderlin and Pound, a century apart, imitated and translated Greek poetry. What did they see in that ancient poetry that fulfilled their own desires for the poems of their own times? Was Hölderlin's Sophocles the poet Pound translated into the 20th century? Why did Hölderlin admire and Pound despise the praise poems of Pindar? These are some of the questions we will engage in our reading of these poets. The course will be organized as a seminar. Each student will give one oral report and write one long essay.

The idea of Europe as a shared cultural space, in which different national cultures and literatures can engage in a dialogue, emerges in the second half of the nineteenth century in the works of the Western-European authors and several outsiders who include Gogol, Turgenev, and Henry James. This course examines the connections between the development of realist fiction and the formation of the transnational cultural conception of Europe as a realist-age successor of Goethe's conception of Weltliteratur. Our texts include fictional works, essays, and criticism by Goethe, Mme. de Stael Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Henry James. Texts in English and the original; discussion and papers in English.

This graduate seminar introduces students to problems in cross-cultural comparative reading through the example of the Silk Road. We will explore ways of reading classic literary texts associated with the Silk Road (e.g. the Greek Alexander Romance , the epic Chinese novel The Journey to the West ), particularly in their relation to multiple literary or aesthetic traditions. We will also address the modern conception of the ancient Silk Road, both as a cosmopolitan ideal spanning East and West and in its relation to the nineteenth century politics of Central Asia, through historical and theoretical debates on world systems, world literature, philology, and translation. Other primary readings will draw from Sima Qian, Herodotus, Marco Polo, Jamyang Norbu. Knowledge of classical Chinese or Greek is recommended but not required.

PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing and consent of instructor. This course is a study of Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Fontane's Effi Briest that emphasizes the search for self-identity and the erratic pursuit of happiness. Classes conducted in English. Students who are majoring or minoring in French read the French texts in the original and participate in a weekly French discussion group.

Though aesthetic philosophy first developed as an autonomous field in the mid-eighteenth century, it has important roots in earlier eighteenth- and seventeenth-century debates concerning literature and the arts. In the wake of Cartesian rationalism, could reasoned method be reconciled with non-rational creativity, or decorous order with the unruly sublime? Just what kind of truth was revealed by poetry or painting? Readings will include Boileau, Racine, Bouhours, Perrault, Du Bos, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, as well as the French reception of British writings on the subject by Pope and Addison.

We confront Virgil's Aeneid in translation as a poem, as an artifact and representation of Greco-Roman culture, as a response to a millennial oral (Homeric) poetic tradition and a particular historical (Augustan) moment, as a reflection of ancient thought rich with significance for contemporary questions about human life, and as a central piece of world literature. Readings include comparative study of English poetic translations ranging from early modernity (Caxton, Douglas, Phayer, Surrey, and Dryden) to the twentieth century (Taylor, Lewis, Jackson Knight, Mandelbaum, and Fitzgerald) and beyond (Lombardo and Fagles). Students who are majoring in Comparative Literature compare versions of a book of the Aeneid in at least two languages.