CMLT

The course will initiate students into the complex allegorical narrative of the Roman de la Rose and its images. Through discussion of topically organized scholarship on the Rose and its historical ambient the seminar will provide students with the historical and historiographical orientation required for sophisticated interpretation of the work. The seminar will provide a setting for discussion and debate that draws from the special disciplinary skills of seminar participants and works toward a more integrated and mutually engaging conversation about how we can work to 'see' the Rose collaboratively.

This course will investigate the complex relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze for whose benefit the nations stage their quest for identity and their aspirations for recognition. We will focus on the problems of Orientalism, Balkanism and nesting orientalisms, as well as on self-mythologization and self-exoticization. We will also think about differing models of masculinity, and of the figure of the gypsy as a metaphor for the national self in relation to the West. The course will conclude by considering the role that the imperative to belong to Western Europe played in the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s.

This course is designed as an overview of major cinematic works from Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Rumania, former Yugsolavia and Turkey. While the main criterion for selection will be the artistic quality of the work, the main issues under consideration will be those of identity, gender, the poignant relation with the Western World, memories of conflict and violence, socialism, its disintegration and subsequent emigration. We will compare the conceptual categories through which these films make sense of the world and especially the sense of humor with which they come to terms with that world. Some directors whose work we will examine: Vulchanov, Andonova (Bulgaria), Kusturica, Makavejev, Grlic (Former Yugoslavia), Guney (Turkey), Boulmetis (Greece), Manchevski (Macedonia).

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.

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.

This course seeks to trace the narrative dynamics and literary means of Post-Holocaust Hebrew Literature. The course focuses on works that break with the conventions of realism, and study the specific forms and means by which each work does so. In the center of the discussion will stand questions such as: what are the constraints of the literary discourse on the Holocaust, what is the role of anti-realist depiction of the Holocaust, and in what ways the fantastic threatens the collective memory. We will read works by writers such as: S.Y Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, David Grossman, Itamar Levi, Yoel Hoffmann and Michal Govrin. Classes will be conducted in English, but students with knowledge of Hebrew are encouraged to read texts in the original.

This course enquires into the work of power that is done by the portrait of the powerful. We will interrogate the portraiture of the President of the United States (and of those who would be President) not simply for its systems of meaning, its legibility, nor only in the spirit of diagnostic criticism, but most crucially for the portraiture's efficacy. This last is the most treacherous question of all for image studies, and it is the one we will articulate and pursue: What is it that portraits, in and of themselves, are able to do? What is the power of the portrait of the President? We will thus consider what we mean by power and by representation, and how the portrait tradition effects both. Louis Marin's The Portrait of the King will offer us a bundle of rich theoretical premises and analytical models. Other readings will include portrait theory, literature on US presidential portraiture, and a minor critical tradition linking the portrait of the monarchic bust to the portrait of the political ruler (Foucault on coins and caricatures; Barthes on election posters; Fresnault-Deruelle on French presidential portraiture). We will focus on four contemporary genres of representation of the President and of the presidential: money; election posters; official presidential portraits; and television talking heads. All students will be enrolled in the two hour Monday class, in addition to which they will choose between one of two meeting times on Wednesdays. Students wishing to read in English only will need to attend the 9:30-10:30 session on Wednesdays. Students who are literate in French and who wish to take the course with a French language component will need to attend the 10:30-11:30 session on Wednesdays, where they will read the key set text in the French original (Louis Marin's Le Portrait du roi), along with a selection of other set texts in French (e.g. Barthes, Foucault). The choice of session on Wednesdays is workload neutral.