CMLT

This interdisciplinary course focuses on the literary dimension of the gospels and on their artistic reception in modern culture. Starting from a presentation of narrative theory, it asks whether religious and secular narratives differ in structure, and illuminates narrative conventions of different media and genres. Both thematic aspects (what aspects of the gospels are selected for development in modern adaptations?) and features of presentation (how do different media and styles transform similar content?) will be considered. Principal works include Johann Sebastian Bach, The Passion According to St. Matthew (1720); Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (1865); Nikos Kazantzákis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955); Pasolini, The Gospel According to Matthew (1964); José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991); Norman Mailer, The Gospel According to the Son (1997); and Monty Python, Life of Brian (1979). Secondary readings include Mieke Bal, Narratology, and Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition.

This class will explore three sets of paired authors from ancient China and Greece: Herodotus/Sima Qian; Plato/Confucius; Homer/Book of Songs.  Topics will include genre, authorship, style, cultural identity, and translation, as well as the historical practice of Greece/China comparative work.

This course takes a number of variations on the myth of Orpheus as the basis for an exploration of critical problems surrounding medium specificity, interdisciplinary study, and topics arising from cultural studies such as race and gender. We will begin with early representations of the myth in Ovid and Virgil before proceeding to more recent interpretations in the work of Rilke, H.D., Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, Salmon Rushdie, and Neil Gaiman. Creative works will be considered alongside critical texts by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, André Bazin, Homi Bhabha, Kaja Silverman, Frederic Jameson, and Lauren Berlant. In keeping with the interdisciplinary theme of the course, film showings will be held regularly and music and visual materials will frequently figure as objects of study. 

This course takes a comparative approach to studying the innovations and legacy of the major European and American avant-garde movements, from Futurism and Surrealism through the postwar neo-avant-gardes to contemporary groupings such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. We will consider major theory, poetry, and prose texts by writers such as Mayakovsky, Bely, Marinetti, Breton, Huidobro, O’Hara, Sanguineti, Roubaud, Perec, and Cortazar. Foreign language texts will be read in translation, though knowledge of at least one of the original languages (Russian, Italian, French, or Spanish) is preferred. 

This course will be taught by Boris Maslov (Comp. Lit.) and Richard Neer (Art History) with the continuous participation of Leslie Kurke (Classics and Comp. Lit., University of California at Berkeley).  It will explore new ways of reading Greek poetry, and new disciplinary formations at the intersection of archaeology, art history, classics and comparative literature.  Coursework will consist of close readings of Pindar with an eye to material and institutional contexts of poetic production.  Topics will include the “thingly” or material nature of the poem; architectural metaphors; the emergent discourse of poetic professionalism; relation between epinician and traditional cult poetry; sites of poetic performance; Pindar’s allusions to monuments at Delphi, Olympia and elsewhere; the historical phenomenology of architecture and statuary; and the construction of sacred landscapes.Students wishing to develop a closer familiarity with Pindar and Pindaric scholarship will meet, as part of an informal reading group, run by Boris Maslov, in the Winter quarter (starting in Week 4); those wishing to take part should send an email tomaslov@uchicago.edu. Prerequisites: Classical Greek required; graduate standing (seniors may be admitted; should email Prof. Maslov or Prof. Neer in advance).

The Bible, a complex anthology of literature from a variety of religious, political, and historical perspectives from ancient Israel, has been primary textual authority in Western culture, politics, and religion. This class will explore how the authority of the Bible has been understood and used by people in Western societies in their political, historical, religious, and aesthetic contexts. We will accomplish this by a close reading of both the biblical texts and their reception in the texts, music, and visual arts of Western civilization, with a special emphasis on the use of these receptions in particular societies. The material covered in this course is necessarily selective; the course will give a basic literacy in the Bible and its use, and, more importantly, it will also teach the student to recognize and analyze biblical allusions in their future research.

The course looks at the realities of the Arab Israel conflict as portrayed by Palestinian and Israeli writers. We will explore works of poets, novelists, short stories writers, filmmakers and artists, and the meanings they ascribe to such concepts as “homeland,” “exile,” “nation,” “struggle,” and “liberation.” We will study the analysis novelists offer to moments of politicized violence in the region, and the reception on these analysis in the Palestinian and Israeli publics. Finally, we will study the fields of power related to production of these works: who has the power to write/film, and thus represent, the realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict? Which voices are silenced in these processes? How can historians reconstruct radical voices in their analysis of the events by reading works of literature? Reading materials include works by Emile Habibi, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmud Darwish, Amos Oz, Dahlia Ravikovitch and S. Yizhar.  The class is open to graduate and undergraduate students. No prior knowledge of Hebrew or Arabic is required.

Close reading of Tolstoy’s novel, along with additional fiction and background material

This course investigates 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 also think about differing models of masculinity, the figure of the gypsy as a metaphor for the national self in relation to the West, and the myths Balkans tell about themselves. We conclude by considering the role that the imperative to belong to Western Europe played in the Yugoslav wars of succession. Some possible texts/films are Ivo Andric, Bosnian Chronicle; Aleko Konstantinov, Baj Ganyo; Emir Kusturica, Underground; and Milcho Manchevski, Before the Rain.

This course examines a selection of literary texts from the Nordic countries - novels, plays, short stories, poems - by writers that figure prominently in the respective national canons and are also acclaimed internationally. It starts with the onset of modernism in the late 19th century represented by Henrik Ibsen and the young Knut Hamsun, continues with the great narrators of the 20th century including Karen Blixen, Halldór Laxness, and Vilhelm Moberg, and concludes around the millennium with playwright Jon Fosse, and the new voices of the novelists Linn Ullmann and Jonas Hassem Khemiri, the latter an eminent representative of  multicultural  writings,  so prominent in the international literary canon, now also featured in Scandinavia.  Readings in cultural and literary history as well as literary criticism will supplement the course in order to contextualize the literary works.