Winter

PQ: Consent of instructor, outside students will be accepted, with the class size limited to 15 students, as long as the majority of students are ComLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature. Fulfills the core course requirement for CompLit students. This course introduces graduate students to some of the fundamental conceptual issues raised by novels: how are novels formally unified (if they are)? What are the ideological presuppositions inherent in a novelistic view? What ethical practices do novels encourage? Readings include Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Austen, Emma; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man; critics covered include Lukacs, Bakhtin, Watt, Jameson, and others.

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.

This course covers the classics in the field of marxist social theory (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Reich, Lukacs, Fanon) as well as key figures in the development of Marxist aesthetics (Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Marcuse, Williams) and recent developments in Marxist critiques of new media, post-colonial theory and other contemporary topics. It is suitable for graduate students in literature depts., art history and possibly history. It is not suitable for students in the social sciences.

May be taken in sequence with CMLT 20500/30500 or individually. This course is a survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the late seventeenth century into the twentieth: Molire, Goldsmith, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw, Brecht, Beckett, and Stoppard. Attention is also paid to theorists of the drama, including Stanislavsky, Artaud, and Grotowski. 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 some 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 ComLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature. Fulfills the core course requirement for CompLit students. A course on the methods and procedures of a few poet-critics of the 19th and 20th centuries: Matthew Arnold, R. W. Emerson, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Charles Bernstein. To what extent is the history of criticism a record of the work of poet-critics? Are these writers models for contemporary critics? Insofar as they are, how? Insofar as they are not, why not? This course will focus to some extent on the essay form and on prose style.

This course examines a series of major twentieth-century works of fiction that explore the nature of human freedom. Our concern is not only to delineate the theme of freedom but also to attempt to understand the link between that theme and the fictional form the author chooses. A further concern is the position of the reader as it is figured in the texts examined. Authors considered include Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Maurice Blanchot, and Imre Kertsz.

This course concentrates on works of the classic period (from the 1930s to the 1960s). It does, however, begin with representative authors from the nineteenth century (e.g., Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard), as well as some works from the early twentieth century (e.g., David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus , H. P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness ). Worth special attention are authors (e.g., C. S. Lewis and Ursula LeGuin) who worked in both genres at a time when they were often contrasted. The two major texts discussed include one from each genre (i.e., Tolkien's Lord of the Rings , Herbert's Dune ). Most texts come from the Anglo-American tradition, with some significant exceptions (e.g., short works by Kafka and Borges).

PQ: This seminar is for graduate students (MA and PhD) who have taken courses in either African/ post colonial literature or in film studies. Those uncertain of their qualifications should consult the instructor at the end of *autumn* quarter. This course will address the theoretical and methodological problems posed by the thoroughly Northern metropolitan category of the 'postcolonial' and its imposition of supposedly global categories on to distinctly local cultural forms and contents in South Africa. In addition to building knowledge of South African materials, seminar participants will thus develop tools for critiquing northern especially North American assumptions about 'postcolonial' generalities in form and content, which can be profitably used in other contexts that make up the global South. We will begin by interrogating the persistent power of Alan Paton's Cry Thy Beloved Country (novel and film) in the American imagination, from its initial publication in New York (1947) to it adoption in Oprah's Book Club (2001), as against local tastes in the same period from Nadine Gordimer's fiction to films like Come Back Africa and continue to examine local responses and challenges to metropolitan norms of literary form, especially in fiction and drama, as well as film. We will consider the impact of apartheid and anti apartheid writing (1960s to 1980s) on metropolitan as well as local audiences and also examine post apartheid local/global configurations that run south/south rather than south/north, including emergent writing by 'Indian' and other 'minority' South Africans.

In this seminar we will interpret Kleist's writing (letters, essays, stories, plays, journalism) from three distinct but complimentary points of view: as an elaboration of the skeptical imaginary (including skepticism about knowledge, meaning and other minds); as a play with contingency (metaphysical, narratological, semiotic); as an experiment in modes of intensity (energetic, affective, aesthetic). A major task of the seminar will be to elaborate a unified conception of Kleist's literary project that accounts for its historical and structural specificity. Students will be expected to engage critically with major contributions to the secondary literature. (Graduate students only. Readings and discussion in German).

This course explores the literature of nation-building. Readings include the Aeneid; Kipling's White Man's Burden and The Man Who Would Be King ; Conrad's Lord Jim ; T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom ; and various contemporary writings on Iraq.