Spring

This seminar is an introduction to the formal study of narrative. Its purpose is to provide students with a set of conceptual instruments that will be useful to them in a broad range of research contexts. Narratology, although it originated within in literary studies, is today an indispensable dimension of inquiry in the Human Sciences generally. Topics to be considered include: 1) the structure of the narrative text; 2) the logic of story construction; 3) questions of perspective and voice; 4) character and identification; 5) narrative genres; 6) narrative in non-linguistic media. After a brief consideration of Aristotle’s Poetics, we will move on to fundamental contributions by (inter alia) Propp, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Greimas, Genette, Eco, Lotman, Marin, Ricoeur, finishing with recent work in analytic philosophy and cognitive science. There will be NO papers or examinations. Rather, the course material will be introduced in lectures and subgroups of course participants will carry out circumscribed projects of narratological research.

Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht.

Tolstoy’s novel is at once a national epic, a treatise on history, a spiritual meditation, and a masterpiece of realism. This course presents a close reading of one of the world’s great novels, and of the criticism that has been devoted to it, including landmark works by Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Isaiah Berlin, and George Steiner. (B, G)

Le poète romantique éprouve une fascination pour la nuit, lieu des mystères et des passions cachées. La lune est l’élément sublime par excellence, déchirant la nuit, confondant mystère et grandiose. Le thème du clair de lune devient un thème de prédilection du Romantisme, et en particulier des peintres, des poètes et des compositeurs. A travers une étude des œuvres majeures du Romantisme français et allemand (poésies, tableaux, lieders et sonates), nous tenterons d’examiner les différentes phases de la lune, afin de comprendre la versatilité des enjeux et des topoï du Romantisme. C’est l’occasion de revoir des genres littéraires consacrés (le sonnet, la ballade) mais aussi des genres musicaux ou picturaux traditionnels du Romantisme (le paysage surplombant, le nocturne, le lied).

La lune entraîne le poète romantique dans une rêverie, et revêt tantôt un rôle consolateur (dans une symbiose parfaite avec la nature), tantôt un rôle mélancolique, le poète y voyant le symbole de la féminité et de l’être aimé. Parfois, le mystère de la lune qui avait d’abord frappé le poète laisse place à l’évocation de la mort ou d’une menace. Il arrive enfin que le poète se trouve embarqué dans un voyage extraordinaire : la lune devient alors le fantasme d’une destination surnaturelle et idéale. Nous adopterons également une perspective comparatiste dans ce cours, en examinant les liens entre texte et image, ou bien entre musique et contexte politique.

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of “graphic novels” aimed at adult readers concerning Jewish society, history, and religion. This course explores the history of comics through the lens of its Jewish creators and Jewish themes, and the history of twentieth century Jewish culture through the lens of graphic storytelling. We learn to interpret this complex art form that combines words and hand-drawn images, translating temporal progression into a spatial form. Reading American, European, and Israeli narratives, our discussions will focus on autobiographical and journalistic accounts of uprooting, immigration, conflict, and loss. Authors whose work we will study include: Art Spiegelman, Rutu Modan, Leela Corman, Joann Sfar, Joe Sacco, R. Crumb.

This workshop begins in Autumn Quarter and continues through the middle of Spring Quarter. While the BA workshop meets in all three quarters, it counts as a one-quarter course credit. Students may register for the course in any of the three quarters of their fourth year. A grade for the course is assigned in the Spring Quarter, based partly on participation in the workshop and partly on the quality of the BA paper. Attendance at each class section required.

This course explores twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and cinematic works from the countries of North Africa. We will focus in particular on the region of Northwestern Africa known as the Maghreb—encompassing Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Situated at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, the Maghreb has a layered colonial past culminating in France’s brutal occupation of the region through the 1960s. Inflected by this colonial history, Maghrebi studies tends to privilege Francophone works while overlooking the region’s rich Arabic and indigenous traditions. Understanding the Maghreb as both a geopolitical as well as an imagined space, our course materials reflect the region’s diverse cultural histories and practices. We will consider the Maghreb’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism in dialogue with broader questions of cultural imperialism, orientalism, decolonization, and globalization. Fictional and cinematic works will be paired with relevant historical and theoretical readings. In light of the recent ‘Arab Spring’ catapulted by the Tunisian uprising in January 2011, we will also touch on contemporary social and political happenings in the region.

This course will focus upon the two most important Renaissance Christian epics, Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata/Jerusalem Delivered (first pub. 1581) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (first pub. 1667), and two brief Biblical epics, Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad (1535) and Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671).  We will examine these four Renaissance epics as ambitious efforts to revive an ancient and pagan form in order to depict Christian and self-consciously modern visions.  We will consider how Renaissance epic poets imitate and emulate both their classical models (primarily Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and Judeo-Christian sources (primarily the Bible); seek to forge an elevated and appropriate language for epic in Latin, Italian, and English; espouse new visions of the human, the heroic, and gender relations; and adumbrate distinctively modern national, imperial, and global ambitions.  All non-English texts will be read in translation, but students who can read Latin or Italian will be encouraged to read the originals.

This course fulfills the Poetry and 1650-1830 distribution requirements for English majors.

Recent work in history and anthropology has stressed the need for deeper models of origins and relations, perhaps even dispensing with “prehistory” as an alternative to more familiar forms of historical self-understanding. This class will look at how the ancestral in literature imagines such deep forms of historical belonging, staging modes of revenance whose cryptic vitalism challenges the phenomenological basis of new materialism. Readings will include Martin Heidegger, Ronald Hutton, Ethan Kleinberg, Quentin Meillassoux, Hans Ruin, and Anna Tsing, poetry by Li He and Osip Mandelstam, weird fiction by H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and futurology by Cicely Hamilton, Jean Hegland, Sarah Moss, and Will Self.

Course meets the critical/intellectual methods course requirement for students majoring in Comparative Literature. We read Racine's Phdre closely for its dramatic and poetic structures as well as its philosophical, psychological, and moral themes. We consider Racine's principal ancient sources, Euripides and Seneca, placing all three versions in their intellectual and aesthetic contexts. We study twentieth-century translations of Phèdre (Wilbur, Hughes) in light of translation theory and practice. Textual study is complemented by scene study performance. Classes conducted in English. Optional French discussion sessions offered weekly. French majors do all written work in French. Comparative Literature majors read one tragedy in the original (French, Latin, or Greek).