Undergraduate

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.

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.

This course meets the critical/intellectual methods course requirement for students who are majoring in Comparative Literature. This course critically examines European fascination with non-Western peoples, their bodies and sexual practices from the late Renaissance to the 20th century. Along with select incursions into visual art and film, the class will focus on English and French literature that imagines cross-cultural contact in its most shocking form: interracial sexuality. We will try to assess the political questions - race fetishism, the ethics of desire, economic exploitation, to name but a few - these representations provoke. In addition to this literary output, we will examine European proto-anthropology that detailed the sexual aberrations of subaltern peoples. We will consider the role both types of discourses had in stimulating interest in imperial exploration and how the logic of territorial capture dovetailed with the masculinist metaphor of sexual conquest. We will take recent contributions by postcolonial, feminist, queer and Marxist critics as a starting point for discussion and for formulating our own views on this problematic. All works will be available in English, but students with a reading knowledge of French will be encouraged to read French works in the original. Literature to be read includes works by Shakespeare, Behn, Diderot, Byron, C. Bront, Haggard, Gide and Forster.

This course traces the history of Latina/o intellectual work that helped shape contemporary Latina/o cultural studies. Our focus is on how Chicanas/os and Puerto Ricans have theorized the history, society, and culture of Latinas/os in the United States. Themes include folklore and anthropology, cultural nationalism, postcolonialism, literary and cultural studies, community activism, feminism, sexuality, and the emergence of a pan-Latino culture. Throughout, we pay attention to the convergences and divergences of Chicana/o and Puerto Rican studies, especially as contemporary practitioners have encouraged us to (re)think Latina/o studies in a comparative framework.

The idea of Europe as a shared cultural space, in which different national cultures and literatures can engage in a dialogue, emerges in the second half of the nineteenth century in the works of the Western-European authors and several outsiders who include Gogol, Turgenev, and Henry James. This course examines the connections between the development of realist fiction and the formation of the transnational cultural conception of Europe as a realist-age successor of Goethe's conception of Weltliteratur. Our texts include fictional works, essays, and criticism by Goethe, Mme. de Stael Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Henry James. Texts in English and the original; discussion and papers in English.

PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing and consent of instructor. This course is a study of Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Fontane's Effi Briest that emphasizes the search for self-identity and the erratic pursuit of happiness. Classes conducted in English. Students who are majoring or minoring in French read the French texts in the original and participate in a weekly French discussion group.