Spring

Course meets the critical/intellectual methods course requirement for students majoring in Comparative Literature. This course will take as its starting point two radical positions that rethink the nature and purpose of theatricality in the 20th Century: Brecht's idea of the alienation-effect and Artaud's theatre of cruelty. It will look at recent playwrights influenced by this tradition, including Heiner Müller, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Valère Novarina, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Athol Fugard and Jon Fosse. Close attention will be given to how these plays are self-conscious of their own theatricality, and how this self-consciousness is related to these dramas' political message, their investigation into subjectivity, and their violence. All texts will be read in English, but students with knowledge of French or German will be encouraged to read the texts in the original.

This seminar examines the implications of modern theories of multiculturalism and world systems for the study of classical literatures. It asks students to historically and theoretically explore the relation of classical literatures and ancient cultures to area studies, national and comparative literature departments, as well as to disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics and archaeology. How does scholarship on ancient cosmopolitanism, tracing ever more extensive networks of material and linguistic exchange, compel us both to reread ancient texts and to rethink their relation to the present? Who determines to whom a text or cultural artifact belongs? The class is primarily organized around theoretical readings relating to a set of problems (e.g. notions of cultural property, translation, writing systems, race, Silk Road Studies), but will also include readings of classical texts (primarily Chinese and Greek) available in translation. Authors will include Appiah, Bernal, Derrida, Engels, Frank, Kuper, Plato, Sima Qian, Spivak.

PQ: Reading knowledge of German is required. This course will focus largely on the relation of lyric poetry to extreme historical experience, to the Shoah in particular. We will focus on Celan's poems for seven weeks, and then on Plath's late work for three weeks.

This course will examine postmodern notions of the subject, subjectivity, and the gendering of these. Readings will include texts by Butler, Foucault, Derrida, C. Taylor, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, Certeau and Irigary. We will also be reading from a variety of other contemporary theorists. Open to graduate students only. Requirements include one seminar paper and presentation.

PQ: Knowledge of ancient Greek, Latin, or French, or permission of the instructor. French students work must be in French, including the final paper, for French credit. A close comparative reading of Euripides' Hippolytus, Seneca's Phaedra, and Racine's Phedre. There will be one seminar meeting each week for the whole class and one additional session to discuss the texts in the original language with those students who can read it. This course is a two-quarter course and will meet for the first five weeks of the winter term and the last five weeks of the spring term. There will be one grade report at the end of spring quarter. Students are mandated to register for both quarters.

PQ: Prior or current registration in CMST 10100 required; CMLT 22400/32400 strongly recommended. The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History, An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

In this course, we will look at the works of the major nineteenth century writers and poets from the Balkans. We will examine how their works grapple with the issues of national identity, with the emergence of their nations from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and with their countries? place in the Balkans and in Europe. We will map our work on two major axes: syntagmatic difference-how each work develops its own rules of reading-and paradigmatic similarity-how working through the difference, one uncovers systematic correlations in the ways the texts go about structuring their universe. We will pay attention to the historical context and will investigate the main philosophical categories through which these works make sense of the world. It is the hope of the instructor that by the end of the course, these older foreign texts will no longer seem impenetrable and strange because we will have learnt to understand the power and beauty with which these texts speak.

As a genre the manifesto provides a unique opportunity for studying the political and aesthetic movements of modernity. It thrives on a culture of crisis by articulating demands, galvanizing public opinion, and dividing the body politic. This class will study the politics, poetics, and geography of the manifesto form between 1870 and 1930. Readings will include symbolist, futurist, dada, and surrealist manifestoes. Additional texts by Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Leon Trotsky, Hugo Ball, Andre Breton, Kazimir Malevich, Wyndham Lewis, Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov. Films by Rene Clair, Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Luis Bunuel.

This course meets the critical/intellectual methods course requirement for students who are majoring in Comparative Literature. The Silk Road is a modern idealization of a pre-modern crossing of peoples, ideas, and cultural traditions across a Eurasian continent. The array of texts that falls under this rubric has historically grown from a few ancient Greek and Chinese narratives to embrace any number of works that exemplify or narrate cross-cultural encounters between a notional East and West. This course introduces students to some basic problems in cross-cultural comparative reading through the example of the Silk Road. We will look closely at a selection of Silk Road fictions and their relation to multiple literary or aesthetic traditions, and consider the ways in which writers have used, translated, and even forged ancient manuscripts in constructing cross-cultural history. We will also consider theories of world literature, cosmopolitanism, and bilingual and bicultural texts. Primary readings will include The Monkey and Monk (from the 16th century epic Chinese novel The Journey to the West ), the Greek Alexander Romance , Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes , and David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly . Knowledge of classical Greek or Chinese is helpful but not required.

This course explores the curious proximity between literature and the discourse on madness in the modern era. Discussion topics include definitions of insanity and their evolution across time, insane or deviant characters and their function in drama and fiction, the topos of the poet as madman, and the poetics of madness. Authors discussed may include Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tieck, Hoffmann, Bchner, Poe, Gogol, James, Hauptmann, Dblin, Pirandello, Schnitzler, Kant, Pinel, Reil, Lombroso, Schreber, and Freud.