Winter

24189 Comparative Mythology: Methods and Madness

(RLST 24189, CLCV 21919)

Comparative Mythology has been one of the most controversial disciplines in the Humanities. Interdisciplinarity at its finest and most erratic, different definitions of Comparative Mythology have found their roots in linguistics, psychology, the history of religions, structuralism, and many more hybrid fields. Haunted by the question of “What is Myth?” and equally concerned with the toolkits that allow us to make sense of myths, it has been the source of constant fascination as an important part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history. Its ambitions cut across boundaries of time, geography, and languages. Its results have inspired revolutions in the academy with critical political consequences, building and destroying nationalistic essentialisms, forging communities and tearing them apart. In this course we will review its complex history and attempt to assert its role as an important catalyst of academic debate by focusing on the manner in which myth and poetry—two often inscrutable and difficult-to-define categories of cultural production—so often appear to work alongside each other in order to probe at ineffable mysteries whilst developing dazzling ideological programs that can grant us a purchase on the myriad ways in which poets, scribes, scholars, religious leaders, political agitators, and university professors have attempted to make sense of the world.

We will encounter myths from around the world. Readings will be drawn from Homer, Latin poetry, the Vedic Hymns, Norse poetry, Anatolian and Mesopotamian texts (such as Gilgamesh), Native American traditions, Chinese stories, and North African myths.

2019-2020 Winter

50205 Contemporary Critical Theory 1920-Present

(ENGL 50205)

This course (the second half of the required Comparative Literature introductory sequence) roams the cultural landscape transformed by Freud, Saussure, Shklovsky, the First World War, and the Russian Revolution. Readings from psychoanalytic, formalist and Marxist criticism, from the corresponding heresies, and their successors. The aim throughout is to locate theoretical texts in the polemical situations to which they originally were addressed, and others in which they subsequently were invoked.

2019-2020 Winter

25025/35025 Gender and Translation

(REES 25025/35025, GNSE 25025/35025)

The course will consider translation -- both theory and practice -- in relation to queer studies and gender and women's studies. Authors will include Naomi Seidman, Monique Balbuena, Yevgeniy Fiks, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kate Briggs, and others. For the final essay, students may write a research paper or translation project.

2019-2020 Winter

29600 The Literature of the Fantastic

(=ENGL 28903/48904,ISHU 29301,RUSS 26702/36702)

PQ: Open to graduates and undergraduates. This course will include texts by Russian and English authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Poe, H.G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde. Theoretical positions will be examined based on texts by Tzevtan Todorov, Jackson, Traill, Lachmann. All text will be in English.

2006-2007 Winter

28300 European Romanticism

(=GRMN 28300)

PQ: Reading knowledge of German. This course examines the philosophical foundations of Early German Romanticism and the major writers belonging to that period (i.e., F. Schlegel, Wackenroder, Tieck, Novalis, Bonaventura, Eichendorff ). Simultaneously, we consider the manner in which the Frhromantiker affected the English and French versions of Romanticism.

2006-2007 Winter

27000 Historicizing Desire

(=CLCV 27706,EALC 27410,GNDR 28001)

Course meets the critical/intellectual methods course requirement for students majoring in Comparative Literature. This course examines conceptions of desire in ancient China and ancient Greece through an array of early philosophical, literary, historical, legal, and medical texts (e.g., Sima Qian, Mencius, Book of Songs, Plato, Sappho). We attempt not only to bring out the cultural specificities of ancient erotic experience but also to make visible the historical and geopolitical contingencies of our own methods of reading. We explore the broader cultural background of the two ancient periods, and engage with theoretical debates on the history of sexuality, feminist and queer studies, and East/West studies.

2006-2007 Winter

26200 The Enlightenment and the Virtue of Selfishness in Its Historical Context

(=FREN 26200,HUMA 24904,ISHU 24904)

Course meets the critical/intellectual methods course requirement for students majoring in Comparative Literature. French majors and minors must read in French and do all written work in French for French credit. The overarching aim of this course is to examine the centrality of selfishness as a moral attribute to French literature and thought of the long eighteenth-century. As such, we relate the revalorization of amour-propre by thinkers such as D'Holbach, Diderot, Voltaire, and Condillac to both earlier and contemporaneous attacks on all forms of self-interest, such as those leveled by Pascal, Fénelon, Racine, and Rousseau. We conclude with Kant and Benjamin Constant.

2006-2007 Winter

21600 Comparative Fairy Tale: The Brothers Grimm, H. C. Anderson, and Asbjørnsen and Moe

(=GRMN 28500,HUMA 28400,NORW 28500,SCAN 28500)

In this course, we compare familiar examples from three national traditions of the fairy tale, those of the Brothers Grimm (German) and H. C. Anderson (Danish), and the less familiar Norwegian tradition of Asbjørnsen and Moe.

2006-2007 Winter

47900 Intertextuality and Memory Aspect

(=RUSS 47800)

PQ: Open to graduate students only. This course will include works by Andrei Bely, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Nabokov. Theoretical sources on intertextuality will include Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Riffaterre, and Lotman.

2006-2007 Winter

29800/39800 Jewish American Literature after 1945

(=ENGL 25004/45002,GRMN 27800/37800,YDDH 27800/37800)

No prior knowledge of Yiddish is required. All texts will be available in English. Students with reading proficiency in Yiddish are encouraged to read the Yiddish texts in the original. The course will develop a multilingual model for the study of American literature by examining Yiddish and English literature by Jewish writers in America after 1945. Despite the fact that Jewish literature in America exists in several languages, the study of Jewish American literature is overwhelmingly defined by an English-only approach. The main goal of the course is to expand the conception of the field of Jewish American literature from English-only to English-plus. In discussing novels and short stories by bilingual writers such as I.B.Singer and Scholem Asch, we will discuss the permeable borders that existed between American literature in Yiddish and English after 1945. The course will address how the Yiddish literary landscape influenced the resurgence of Jewish American literature in the 1950s and 1960s as represented by the works of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and Bernard Malamud. We will compare literature of the Holocaust by John Hersey, Chaim Grade and I.B.Singer with more recent works in the genre. Finally, we will examine how Dara Horn's In the Image (2002) and Pearl Abraham's The Seventh Beggar (2005) have renewed the engagement with the Yiddish literary tradition among a young generation of Jewish American writers. Primary texts: I.B.Singer, The Shadows on the Hudson (1957-1958); Chaim Grade, My Quarrel With Hersh Rasayner (1952); Sholem Ash, East River (1946); John Hersey, The Wall (1950); Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet (1971) and Something to Remember Me By (1990); Cynthia Ozick, Envy: or, Yiddish in America (1969) and The Shawl (1983); Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1978); Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2000); Pearl Abraham, The Seventh Beggar (2005); Dara Horn, In the Image (2002).

2006-2007 Winter
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