Survey of the relation of theater to cinema from 1905 to the 1960s. Theater-positive tendencies include Melies, Eisenstein, and German Expressionists. Examines cinematic resistance to theater in the opposition to sound film in France and the Soviet Union, Vertov's kino-eye, and Bresson's barring actors from film.
A critical overview of detective fiction (and selected films) from Arthur Conan Doyle to contemporary and postmodern reappropriations. Lectures provide historical background and introduction to genre theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique.
Introduction to the Western theatrical tradition through the study of dramatic form in social context.
Instructor
Mary-Kay Gamel
Quarter offered
Fall, Summer
An introduction to the study of ethnic literatures, addressing issues of voice, political agency, and the construction of subjectivity across racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries in the U.S. Topic: Slavery and the literary imagination.
Quarter offered
Fall, Summer
An introduction to women writers from a variety of cultures and historical eras.
Instructor
Pascale Gaitet
Study of the Renaissance in Italy as concept and educational/artistic revolution with special attention to literary works and to the dialogue among the arts and sciences. Authors vary but may include Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Michelangelo.
Critical examination of medieval texts that represent and comment upon social changes in Europe and Asia from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries. Readings include such texts as Crusade narratives, the Inferno, Piers Plowman, and the Book of Margery Kemp.(Formerly course 66A.)
Presents an interdisciplinary overview of writing in and about Ireland from the 1801 Act of Union to the 1980s, with special attention to historical events and conditions; colonial discourse and English nationalism; ethnographic and literary representation; gender, sexuality, and nationalism; and the problem of violence. (Formerly course 63A.)
A study of novels, short stories, and fairy tales by authors from America, England, France, and Germany. Readings include works by Poe, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, Goethe, Hoffman, Rousseau, and Merimee. (Formerly course 80M.)
Examines literature's relationship to the past and to the experience of history. Considers diverse modes of understanding the past: myth, tradition, chronicle, novel-writing, and scientific history.
No book has so decisively influenced the development of the Western world as the Bible. Traces the Bible's influence on narrative, themes, and ideas in Western literature. Explores major Biblical stories and themes in a comparative context and traces their reappearance in Western literature and imaginative works.
A survey of ancient novels from the first to the fourth centuries B.C.E. as tales of adventure and romance. Discussions of the meaning of romance, the history of the erotic novel, the history of texts, ancient sexuality, ancient literary production, and the contemporary romance novel.
This introductory course explores literature and culture of the first half of the 20th century. Course materials may include literary texts, films, philosophy, visual arts, and critical essays.
General Education Code
TA
Quarter offered
Spring, Summer
Examines the ideological functions of the representation of the Middle Ages in literature and film from the 19th century to the present, with special attention to issues of cultural contact, the formation of nationalisms, and the uses of history and fiction.
Through films, literary texts, historical, sociological, and anthropological writings, explores topics pertaining to Latin American culture and society. Course topic changes; please see the Schedule of Classes for current topic.
Instructor
Lourde Martinez-Echazabal
An introduction to modern Italian literature from the 19th century to the present, with emphasis on social, political, and gender issues, and the development of narrative prose from realism to myth.
Close reading and analysis of Aristotle's Poetics,with special attention to the subsequent fate and influence of the notions advanced in the book.
A follow-up to Literature 101, consists of readings and discussion of theoretical texts.
Considers the tradition of literary criticism with the tradition of Marxist thinking about society and culture with particular attention to some classic texts in the tradition.
Examines novels from around the world published since 2000. Class discussion focuses on the novel form and its condition at the beginning of the new millennium.
Introduction to some of the major works by authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Emphasis on close analysis of the texts, but also considers the special role literature has played in German cultural life, and the relationship between the works covered and the dominant intellectual and social movements of the times. Authors include Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Mann, and Kafka. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
Focus is on the corpus of the 17th-century English woman writer Aphra Behn. Examines the role of genres, culture, literary history, colonialism, gender, and the theater in the genesis of Behn's writing career. Critical approach designations: Canons, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Selected poetry and prose. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Advanced introduction to an author whose influence on post-war fiction is acknowledged by writers in Latin America, the United States, Europe, and beyond. Readings include Marcovaldo, Italian Folk Tales, Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
Focuses on Emily Dickinson's letters and poems with emphasis on genre, audience, art and the erotic, and on current textual editing issues. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
General Education Code
TA
Through close readings of essays, poems, and critical studies, examines how the vision of cultural poetics, strong selfhood, and will to national sublimity of Emerson represents the creative-destructive dynamics of American capitalism. Manifest destiny, imperial subjectivity, class, and globalization are issues. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Study of fiction of James Joyce, emphasizing narrative innovations, cultural conflicts, and crisis of nationalism in the early 20th century. Topic: Ulysses. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
Concentrates on poetry and drama of García Lorca but also includes works by Nobel Laureate in Literature Vicente Aleixandre, and other important poets of 20th-century Spain. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
A critical study of John Steinbeck's novels and short fiction, with close attention to both formal and thematic elements in the author's work. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
Students read The Voyage Out, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts, plus selections from The Collected Letters. The foci of the course are critical, biographical, and historical. Concerns are also with expressions of feminism present in Woolf's work, and the importance of a female community in providing a framework for the development of her vision. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres.
Close reading of the Iliad, Odyssey, and fragments of Sappho and other lyric poets of the Archaic Age. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Focuses on two innovative modernist writers, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, in their artistic, cultural, and historical contexts. Critical approach designations: Canons, Power and Subjectivities.
A close reading of selected dialogues of Plato. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, and Plato will be read as products of their own time and culture, as sources of Western artistic, intellectual, and moral traditions, and as works still meaningful today. Topics include heroism, relationships between thought and action, conflicts between the individual and society, the nature of divinity and its relationship to human beings. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
A study of the development of the courtly love tradition in medieval Italy and France, with close attention to the construction of gender and authorship, and to the interconnections between Eros, madness, and death. Works include troubadour poetry, the romances of Chretien de Troyes, tales of Marie de France, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Focuses on theory and practice of translation, and on Midrash, their interrelation and the ways in which they inflect our understanding of literary and cultural interpretation. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Murray Baumgarten
Overview of literature of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah from antiquity to the present. Focuses on primary texts including the Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, Talmud, Midrash, Medieval/Spanish Kabbalah, Kabbalah of Safed, Sabbatianism, Hasidism, and contemporary authors. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global, Pre-1750.
Wide-angled exploration of the cultural worlds connected with Jewish liturgy across the diaspora. Offers an anthropological approach to the connections between written text and oral cultures in Judaism: classical and contemporary texts, poetry, music, architecture, and synagogue life. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
A survey of selected British poets from the late 19th century through the present. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
General Education Code
TA
A study of the major periods in Spanish American poetry from the movement known as modernismo to the present. Concentrates on those authors who have changed the course of poetry by introducing new forms and themes in the constitution of a new poetics. Poets studied include Darío, Storni, Hidobro, Vallejo, Neruda, Mistral, Paz, Parra, Castellanos, Cardenal, Orozco, Ferré, Pacheco, and Lihn. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global, Poetry.
A survey and analysis of primary epic: Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Exodus. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Close reading of Greek and Roman lyric poems, including major works by Sappho, Catullus, Pindar, and Horace. Special attention to poetics and aesthetics; to social, political, and economic contexts; to the influence of Greek and Roman lyric on later literatures; and to independent parallels seen in lyric forms from non-Western cultures. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Examines varying interpretations, appropriations, and exploitations of the Orphic myth in its threefold manifestation as harmony, descent, and dismemberment. Topics include the regeneration of language, the poet as priest, and the re-sacralization of an increasingly secularized world. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
The figure of the Beloved is a medieval invention. Course traces its development from the Mozarabic Jarchas to Petrarch, and includes Provençal Troubadours, German Minnesaenger, French Trouveres, the Spanish Libro de Buen Amor, and The Romance of the Rose. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Arthurian, realist and allegorical romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries studied in their social and historical context. In English translation.Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Sharon Kinoshita
A comparative examination of poetry in the modern world, and of poetic responses to social change and crisis. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
Close reading of five genetically linked self-portraits that have determined the dominant tradition of self-representation in the West: Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, Montaigne, Rousseau. Topics for discussion: the concept of identity, narrative strategies for presentation of the self, the interplay between discursive operations (language, reading, writing) and lived experience, the policing of the body, and sexual difference as a basis for self-determination. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Explores three related problematics (authority and literature, writing and subjectivity, historical and literary discourses of memory) through the genealogical study of a genre: the testimonial narrative in Latin America. Colonial, republican, and contemporary texts are studied. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Surveys Italian novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
Examination of contemporary narrative from Latin America. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
Detailed literary analysis of novels by Gogol, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pasternak. Focus upon aesthetic devices of texts, as well as upon ethical and philosophical issues that inform them. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Quarter offered
Fall, Summer
Representative works of 19th- and 20th-century detective fiction, including works by Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Sayers, Hammett, Chandler, P.D. James, Paretsky, and others. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
An analysis of the structure and effects of the peculiar narrative genre called le Fantastique through a comparative study of certain 19th- and 20th-century short fictions. Readings in Balzac, Poe, James, Nerval, Blanchot, and Freud. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Modern Italian fiction, emphasizing the non-realist traditions of fantasy and the fantastic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Traces major developments in the historical novel, looking at how this popular genre has taken up a series of different forms, concerns, and questions about history and the different senses of historicity that fiction can express. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Explores the strands and streams of creative non-fiction in postwar American literature. Topics range from the non-fiction novel and the New Journalism, to experiments in autobiography, media, art, and cultural criticism that make up the world of publishing today.Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies.
Analysis of leading figures, periods, and problems in French philosophy. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
An introduction to satire as both an individual genre with a unique literary history, and as a discursive technique present in other literary genres. Students will investigate a range of satiric works from the classical, early modern, and modern periods. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Cross-cultural study of magic, divination, and astronomical prognostication as rituals of power that both express and negotiate differences in gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Literature 101 or previous experience with critical theory strongly recommended. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Readings in Italian literature and culture ranging from Romanticism to the post-modern. Emphasis on Italy's relation to modernity in terms of artistic innovation; politics and social life; family and gender relations; regional, national, and international identities. Topics vary from year to year. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Exploration of issues in postmodern writing through readings of several substantial Italian texts, in translation. Authors include Gadda, Calvino, Morante, and Eco. Focus is on questions of interpretation, textuality, and authority. Critical approach designations: Canons, Geographies.
A survey of major works in classical Japanese novels and poetry of ancient and medieval times. Reading includes such works as The Ten Thousand Leaves, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, The Tale of Heike, Twenty Plays of the Noh Theater. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global, Pre-1750.
Surveys poetry and poetic theories in the contexts of literary and intellectual history from the eighth century to the 1970s, with emphasis on the dynamics of tradition and innovation. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Important 20th-century novels and short stories in English translation including works by Soseki, Kawabata, Mishima, Oe, and significant women authors. Discussion of literary themes in the context of changing Japanese society and thought. Japanese language skills not required. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. Distribution requirement: Global.
Introduction to 20th-century Francophone literatures through the study of selected texts from Africa and the Caribbean. Particular emphasis is placed on the social, cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts within which these works can be situated. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
A survey of writing from South Africa since 1948, focusing on social and political themes. Authors include Paton, Gordimer, Mphahlele, Fugard, Ndebele, Head, Brutus, Coetzee, and others. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
ER
Focuses on the more prominent theories of biological determinism and on the responses to their theories. In the case of America: the debate over integration versus segregation and on the Pan African movement. In the case of South Africa: the intertwined issues of the institutionalization of segregation and the growth of Afrikaner nationalism. Offered in alternate academic years. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Compares literatures and histories of slavery, abolitionism, and nationalism in 19th-century Cuba and the U.S. Readings include slave narratives by Juan Francisco Manzano (Cuba) and Harriet Jacobs (U.S.) and antislavery novels by black nationalist Martin Delany, Cuban nationalist Cirilio Villaverde, and sentimental reformers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Focuses on American modernist expatriate writers and travelers including Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, Paul and Jane Bowles, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, John Reed, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Examination of 20th-century writers' response to 19th- and 20th-century canonical models of community and escape, particularly in relationship to evolving ideas of wilderness and utopian community. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Examines poetic regionalism, with particular attention to theories and practices coming out of the San Francisco Bay Area from 1945–65: opposition to war, alternative practices of publishing communities, and artistic collaborations and inter-related artistic and poetic communities.Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Quarter offered
Winter, Summer
A study of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism as they emerge out of Near Eastern traditions (Greek, Egyptian, Semitic, Iranian), and their ultimate convergence in Judaism as the teaching and practice of Kabbalah. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global, Pre-1750.
Historical study of the concept of power as institutionalized in Indo-European society, elaborated in the ancient world, and bequeathed to the nation-states (Eastern and Western) of today. Focus is on the logic and ideas implicit in basic political, military, economic, and social structures. Readings in history, anthropology, linguistics, religion, political science, and myth. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750. Taught in conjunction with course 210.
Sampling of early modern English prose, verse, and drama. Topic: Jews, Race, and Renaissance England. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Margo Hendricks
Study of Renaissance in Italy as concept and educational/artistic revolution, with special attention to literary works and to dialogue among the arts and sciences. Authors vary but may include Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Works from various genres including the Poem of the Cid, the Celestina, and Lazarillo de Tormes. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Examines the proliferation of advice literature in early modern Europe as indication of the widespread impression that the world was undergoing unprecedented change. Readings include advice books for state rulers (Machiavelli), instructions for educating daughters (Vives), books on manners (Della Casa), and exercises for spiritual discipline (Ignatius of Loyola). Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Discussion of selected major works of 17th-century European literature in their historical and philosophical context. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
A consideration of the complex attitudes of 18th-century English society toward the individual family structure, sexuality, gender, and class. Historical texts are read along with drama, fiction, and nonfiction prose. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Major works of European fiction in their social, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Works are read in translation. Course topic changes; please see the Schedule of Classes for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
General Education Code
TA
Masterpieces of poetry and prose from the Golden Age of Russian literature, from Pushkin to Chekhov. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
Extensive study of literary productions of 20th-century Britain. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Examination of major writings of the Harlem Renaissance, with attention to cultural and historical background. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivies. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Instructor
Nathaniel Mackey
Surveys American literature in and around the climate of modernism. Beginning with texts written at the turn of the century, course ranges widely through the early to mid-20th century. Special attention will be given to works produced before and between World Wars, as well as to the various artistic, social and international movements characterizing that period. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Instructor
Louis Chude-Sokei
Considers the writing and mythos of D. H. Lawrence and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in the culture of Great Britain between 1910 and 1930. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Survey of 20th-century Soviet literature, from the revolution to the death of Stalin. Readings include modernist and avant-garde texts of the 1920s and socialist realism. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Global.
General Education Code
CC
Quarter offered
Fall, Summer
Survey of literature, music, and film associated with leftist social movements and culture. Situates literary and cultural representations in an historical context. Course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media.
Instructor
Christine Hong
Study of various literary reactions to Nazism. Examines cultural conditions at the time the movement arose, authors who supported it, authors who opposed it, and post-war writers who have attempted to deal with the Nazi past. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Survey of major works of post-WWII British fiction. Emphasis on postmodernism and experimental fiction, questions of social and sexual identity, utopia and dystopia, and problems of historical representation in fiction. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
What difference in world history do books make? Topics in the history of literary institutions, including the production, distribution, and reception of printed works. The transition from manuscript to print. The history of reading. The end of the book? Critical approach designations: History, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
How writing functions before the emergence of the nation, class, capitalist relations, the individual, and printing. Theories of world history/periodization; the social and political character of literacy; technologies of writing. Focus is on early imperial China and post-Carolingian Europe. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Provides theoretical background and practical experience in the translation into English of literary works of poetry and prose originally written in another language. A thorough knowledge of at least one foreign language is required. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Readings in Aristophanes, Plautus, Hroswitha, Shakespeare, and various women playwrights. Women as agents of social change on the stage are discussed in historical and theoretical contexts. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Examines early modern theories of theatricality, cultural, and social values. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
The courtly, popular, and populist traditions in Renaissance comedy from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Emphasis is placed on the way in which particular social and historical factors conditioned the forms of dramatic representation which flourished during the Renaissance. Among authors to be studied are Aretino, Machiavelli, Poliziano, and examples of the commedia dell'arte. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Analyzes theater during the Golden Age (16th and 17th centuries) of Spanish literature, when the theater was a democratic meeting point and a social barometer. The popularity of playwrights such as Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca is comparable to the stars of Hollywood of today. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
Masterpieces of French classical theater from the reign of Louis XIV, with particular attention to the social, cultural, and political context of their production: Corneille, Moliere, Racine. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Examines drama in the United States. Issues such as race, sexuality, gender, class, and the art of drama are explored.Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Margo Hendricks
Studies in British dramatists, including Shaw, Eliot, Beckett, Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard, Bond, Orton, and Churchill. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Authors include Nobel Prize winners Luigi Pirandello (1934) and Dario Fo (1997). Topics: relation of modern theater's innovative forms to medieval street performance and early modern commedia dell'arte, theme of the inversion of reason and madness as instrument of social critique, modern dramatic theory. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media.
Survey of major avant-garde movements relating literature and other arts. Movements considered include cubism, futurism, expressionism, vorticism, surrealism, Black Mountain, and minimalism. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media.
Films are considered both as texts in their own right and as expressions and contributions to larger social discourses around the specific tensions of British society and culture. Course topic changes; see the Class Critical approach designations: Histories, Media.
General Education Code
IM
Explores how the colonial encounter, anti-colonial struggles, neo-colonial impositions, and postcoloniality as an evolving construct have been registered in (predominantly fictional) films from the U.S., Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Surveys a range of cinematic representations of the U.S.-Mexico border region from Hollywood, independent, Chicano/Latino, Mexican, and local sources. Studies the border in both concrete and symbolic registers. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Media. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Julianne Burton-Carvajal
A survey of recent American feature films in which graphic depiction of physical violence is an important element. Primary emphasis on analysis of formal, textual, and generic elements; some attention is paid to psychological, sociopolitical, and ideological contexts and implications of representing violence. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Instructor
Mary-Kay Gamel
Howard Hawks: nearly complete survey of a major auteur of the classic Hollywood cinema plus close reading of major works from Scarface to the Rio trilogy, and influence on later films. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Surveys the theory and practice of comedy in several contexts and media including stage, film, and television, with special attention to questions of gender and sexuality. Texts include Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, Moliere, Orton, Chaplin, Seinfeld, Freud, Bakhtin. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Instructor
Mary-Kay Gamel
General Education Code
IM
1. Psychoanalysis: Barthes and Lacan; 2. Chaucer and fabliau: The Miller's Tale; 3. Verdian opera; 4. Films of John Carpenter. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Introduction to opera from Mozart to Berg. Close analysis of text setting, musical form, dramaturgy, and performance (singing/acting), with particular attention to politics, gender, subject-formation, and opera's constitutive role in the rise, as well as critique, of modern bourgeois culture. No previous training in music theory required, although some affinity for classical music desirable. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Interactions between the media of opera and film from the silent era to contemporary movies and television. Special attention will be paid to the flowering of opera films in the eighties, from Losey's Don Giovanni to Zefferelli's Otello, and to Peter Sellar's postmodern reworkings of Mozart for television. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Recent scholarly attention has focused on identity construction among individuals, collectivities, and even products (branding). This seminar focuses on getting one's bearing in a changing organization of knowledge and on determining one's place within it. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Texts about encounters with unknown and/or foreign cultures (designated by the Greek term barbarian) provide the basis for historicizing the emergence of Western colonialism, racism, and sexism. Homer, Odyssey; Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places; Euripides Bacchae; documents relating to the discovery of the New World. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Focus is on the construction of race and gender in ancient Greek culture. Literary, historical, philosophical, dramatic, and medical texts (Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Euripides, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle) as well as visual media (vase painting, sculpture) are studied. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Theory and practice of popular culture in the U.S. We will address how popular culture forms have historically adapted racial and sexual stereotypes and formulas in relation to nationalism, whether to challenge or to confirm the nation. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities.
Selections from writers from around the world, whose common theme is resistance to domination. In most cases, the domination is multiple and complex, involving gender oppression, and racial and colonial domination. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Charts, through examination of literature, film, and historical documents, the legacy of Afro-Asian encounters within the Americas and on the global stage with a focus on comparative racialization, slavery, and colonialism, Third World liberation, and inter-ethnic tensions. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Christine Hong
General Education Code
ER
Examines major Jewish writers in Italy. Course materials include films, poetry, cultural documents. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
An introduction to Hebrew literature since the 1940s, and to Israeli culture and history of this period. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Examines modernity as Jewish challenge and catastrophe, and focuses on the American experience. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
General Education Code
ER
A study of the various strands of contemporary feminist thought and scholarship, and an investigation of the usefulness of feminist insights for the analysis of a particular culture and its texts. Readings in Middle English and in translation. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Offers an introduction to the work and thought of three 20th-century French women writers: Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Monique Wittig. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Examination of literary texts and feminist works of Italian women writers; special attention to the relationship between women's writing, constructions of authorship and gender, and the historical-cultural context. While most of the works are from the 20th century, some earlier writings are also explored. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
Explores literary production by women in relation to social movements and historical events. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
Lourde Martinez-Echazabal
Survey of women's writing and representations of women in Russian and Slavic literature from the medieval folk tale through the contemporary period. Topics include Baba Yaga tales, woman as subject in 19th-century literature, Soviet memoir literature, and evolution of the persona of the female author. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Instructor
William Nickell
Readings of innovative fiction, poetry, and essays by women writers from 1900-1950. We will discuss issues of gender and sexuality as they affect literary theme and form, female literary collaboration and lesbian salons, and the critical framing of women's writings by feminism and modernism. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Focuses on the political, historical, and ontological construction of the body in ancient Greek culture. Literary, historical, philosophical, and medical texts (Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates) as well as visual media (vase painting, sculpture) are studied. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field of humanities (literature, philosophy, ethics, history, and religion) concerned with its application to medical education and practice. The humanities provide insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, and our responsibility to each other; and offer an historical perspective on medical science. Course helps prepare students for the reading comprehension and writing parts of the MCAT. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Students cannot receive credit for this course and Literature 80K.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 145E
Focuses on the development of extended creative writing projects, and may be used by students to prepare for the creative writing senior.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Literature and history of early modern (16th, 17th, or 18th century) France. May include poetry, prose, and drama. Topics include the study of identity and difference in premodernity, gender, sexuality, and travel narratives. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750. (Formerly Early Modern France.)
Instructor
Carla Freccero
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Study of 19th- and 20th-century literary innovation and/or representations of sociohistorical events. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. (Formerly Introduction to Modernity.)
Instructor
Richard Terdiman
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies. (Formerly Studies in Narrative.)
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in French required. Literary texts studied in the context of the development of other arts (visual, cinematic, musical, architectural) in the same historical period. Consideration of the relation between the written text and visual or acoustical images. May be repeated for credit as topic varies. Critical approach designations: Histories, Media. (Formerly Literature and the Arts.)
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. An introduction to the language and literature of the Middle High German period (circa 1200). The material studied will include selections from the great epics (including Das Nibelungenlied) and from the Minnesang poets (including Walther von der Volgelweide). Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. A look at carefully selected poems by major German poets from 1730 to 1900. Authors read include Goethe, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Heine, Mörike, Hofmannsthal, and Rilke. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories, Media. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. A study of women writing in German as well as of the social and political contexts in which they wrote. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. A study of travel narratives, both fictional and autobiographical, focusing on how German-speaking travelers have responded to foreign cultures and often gained, through travel, new perspectives of their own. Authors include Goethe, Heine, Eichendorff, Hesse, and Wolf. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Pursues the development of German identity from the Middle Ages to the present and approaches this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective, using literary, anthropological, historical and political texts. What is German identity after a 40-year history of division and a reunification process that continues? Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Referring to the Debates on Realism of the 1930s, considers a variety of counter-textual forms: the fantastic, the grotesque, melodrama, the avant-garde, dada. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Close study of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. An intensive study of the works of Franz Kafka, with close readings in particular of the aphorisms and shorter texts, and with reference to the literary, social, and historical context in which Kafka's work emerged. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. Study of the three leading figures among German writers of bizarre and fantastic stories. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in German required. An intensive study of the works of Thomas Mann, with particular attention given to his portrayal of pre-fascist and fascist European culture. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
Close readings of a small number of texts representing major authors, periods, and genres (lyric, dramatic, narrative) of Italian literature. Intensive practice in spoken and written Italian. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. The courtly, popular, and populist traditions in Renaissance comedy from the fourteenth- through the seventeenth-centuries. Emphasis is placed on the way in which particular social and historical factors conditioned the forms of dramatic representation which flourished during the Renaissance. Among authors to be studied are Aretino, Machiavelli, Poliziano, and examples of the commedia dell'arte. Critical approach designations: Media, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirements: Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Survey of the chief writers in Florence and Ferrara at the turn of the 15th century and the early 16th century. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. A close thematic and stylistic study of the poetics of romanticism in Italy. Readings include the epistolary novel and lyrics of Ugo Foscolo and the Canti of Giacomo Leopardi, as well as selections from his prose dialogues, Le Operette Morali. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirements: Poetry.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Examines various critical perspectives on the writing of autobiography in Italy, including issues of gender; the construction of the self; theories of representation and narratology; cultural and political context. Principal readings in Italian: Dante, Cellini, Renaissance female poets, Alfieri, Pellico, Aleramo, Ginzburg, Levi. Selected readings from St. Augustine and Rousseau. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Major currents in the 20th-century Italian theater, from D'Annunzio to the contemporary avant-garde. The dramatic texts are approached from a variety of different perspectives: semiotic, anthropological, and sociological. The differentiation between the literary and the theatrical codes is a major focus. Among authors studied are D'Annunzio, Pirandello, Betti, De Filippo and Fo. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. A study of the development of the novel in Italy with attention to the cultural context. Critical approach designations: Genres, Geographies.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Italian required. Study of the literary and political works of one of the most influential political thinkers of modernity. Readings include The Prince, selections from the Discourses and from Machiavelli's letters, at least one of Machiavelli's comedies, and his misogynist novella, Belfago. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories.
Reading proficiency in Latin required. An introduction to Latin prose composition. Begins with formal composition exercises, progresses to close stylistic analyses of selected passages and free compositions modeled on them. Critical approach designations: Canons, Genres. Distribution requirement: Poetry, Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Study of the phenomenon of the boom of a literary genre in Renaissance Spain: the autobiography. Why do soldiers, conquerors, picaros, and monks reveal their selves and their life experiences? What are common aspects and what do these texts reveal about the historic reality? Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. An introduction to representative works of the main genres of the period by authors such as Garcilaso de la Vega, Luis de León, San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa de Jesús, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Calderón de la Barca, and to life in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. An overview of the development in Spanish theater during the sixteenth and 17th centuries. Special emphasis is placed on the works of Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca. Shows how Lope e Vega, considered the father of theater in Spain, changed the medieval conception of theater and influenced the creation of theater of the same epoch. In this context, plays of Sor Juana and Ruiz de Alarcón are studied. Critical approach designations: Canons, Media. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Readings in the poetry of Spain since 1898 with a study of the main currents in Spanish and European poetry in the 20th century. Course concentrates on the works of García Lorca, as well as the poetry of Alberti, Machado, Aleixandre, and others. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Focuses on the problematics of exile as it affects Spanish poetry, granting central attention to the period of Francoist dictatorship. Course work includes readings of Prados, Cernuda, Alberti, Altolaguirre, et al. Secondary readings on appropriate history and literary and cultural criticism. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Poetry.
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. Examines the forms and functions of film and video documentary throughout Latin America from the 1950s to the present. Emphasizes engagement with historical events, political conflicts, and social movements, along with changing theories and perceptions of documentary. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Global
Instructor
Julianne Burton-Carvajal
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. By reading Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican texts, explores questions of modernity and postmodernity, of cultural, political, gender, and racial identities, while also addressing the position of Caribbean literature within the Latin American literary canon. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global
Instructor
Lourde Martinez-Echazabal
Speaking, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish required. By reading sociological, historical, and political writings dealing with race mixture, race relations and cultural/national identity in Latin America, delves into the ideology of Mestizaje particularly African-Spanish and African-Portuguese, and its representation in visual and literary texts. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global
Instructor
Lourde Martinez-Echazabal
Focuses on theories of meaning advanced in premodern and early modern Europe. Authors include Aristotle, Augustine, Capellus, Plato, and Shakespeare. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750, Senior Seminar.
A study of the development of the courtly love tradition in medieval France and Italy; examination of the construction of gender, authorship, and the interconnections among Eros, madness, and death. Works include troubadour poetry, romances of Chrètien de Troyes, tales of Marie de France, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750, Senior Seminar.
Examines the emergence of a common culture in western Europe, 1050-1500. Topics include internal colonization and frontier societies, Latin Christendom and vernacular cultures, and crusades and the perception of cultural differences. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750, Senior Seminar.
Study of selected authors or issues in early modern British literature. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirements: Pre-1750, Senior Seminar.
Introduces several major works of world literature through their shared employment of the frame tale. Topics: permutations of stories as they pass from collection to collection, frame's narrative structure, meaning of storytelling within such collections. Readings: The Arabian Nights, The Decameron and selected modern texts. Critical approach designations: Genres, Histories. Distribution requirement: Pre-1750, Senior Seminar.
The horror genre in film: Nosferatu (1921) to the present. Using the U.S. as a reference point, the course considers problems of genre definition and canon formation, historical and international developments, social and psychological perspectives. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Students will read novels by such 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century novelists as Ann Radcliffe, Elizabeth Inchbald, Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Critical, historical, and theoretical texts will be assigned, and a lengthy seminar paper is required. Critical approach designations: Genres, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Carmen as literary text, opera, and film. Critical approach designations: Genres, Media. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Intensive study of selected authors or other issues in 20th-century British literature. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Instructor
Vilashini Cooppan
An intensive study of Thomas Mann's great novel of ideas, The Magic Mountain, with a focus on its brilliant analysis of German and European culture in the early years of the 20th century, and its prophetic anticipation of the rise of German Nazism and other Fascist movements. Critical approach designations: Canons, Histories. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
Studies tropes, narratives, discourses, and genres used to represent the Pacific as a region of (a) Euro-American fascination and control since the era of colonial contact; (b) counter-hegemonic, local, and indigenous perspectives that have reclaimed cultural-national identity since decolonizing ferment of the 1970s. Critical approach designations: Geographies, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Senior Seminar.
An introduction to current theory and research on the teaching of writing and discussion of practical strategies for applying that research not only in composition classes but throughout the curriculum as well.
The course topic changes; please see the Schedule of Classes for the current topic.
The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.
Twentieth-century Russian literary theory from Formalism and Marxism to Bakhtin and contemporary Soviet semiotics. Seminal theoretical and literary texts are discussed in the context of Soviet literary culture and politics: literary polemics of the twenties, subsequent consolidation of Communist Party control and the monopoly of Socialist Realism, post-Stalinist thaw, and the development of the Moscow and Tartu schools of semiotics.
Historical study of the concept of power as institutionalized in Indo-European society, elaborated in the ancient world, and bequeathed to the nation-states (Eastern and Western) of today. Focus is on the logic and ideas implicit in basic political, military, economic, and social structures. Readings in history, anthropology, linguistics, religion, political science, and myth.
Examines theories of film melodrama, genre theories, film language and visual style, and constructions of the nations as exemplified by Asian, European, Latin American and U.S. films, with special emphasis on Mexican, Cuban, and Argentinian examples. No prior film expertise necessary.
Examines changing paradigms of gender in Latin American feature films (1940-1990), exploring the applicability of currents of western feminist, gender theory to these peripheral texts. Provides instruction and practice designing college-level film courses.
1. Psychoanalysis: Barthes and Lacan; 2. Chaucer and fabliau: The Miller's Tale; 3. Verdian opera; 4. Films of John Carpenter.
The study of assorted fiction, poetry, and interpretive writing by women, with an eye to the implications of gender for literary theory and practice.
Through literary, critical, and theoretical texts, explores fantastic fiction as the subversive other of the bourgeois novel: a form which interrogates conventional narrative forms and theories of genre and reveals cultural anxieties about sexuality, subjectivity, racial and gender identity, religion, science, and the family. Authors include Walpole, Austen, Radcliffe, Le Fanu, de Sade, M. Shelley, Poe, E. Bronte, Hawthorne, Melville, B. Stoker, Conan Doyle, H. James, Conrad, Faulkner, Kafka, Toni Morrison, Lacan, Kristeva, Edmund Burke, Fanon, E. Said, P. Macherey, F. Jameson, Freud.
An in-depth overview of the early-mid periods of Freud's thought, beginning with the Project for a Scientific Psychology through the metapsychological texts of 1914-1918. The later Freud is discussed in the contexts of the career and writings of Jacques Lacan, in particular Lacan's doctoral dissertation, and the Seminars I and II. Both writers are assessed individually and in dialogue in discussions framed by contemporary critical theory, semiotics, and questions concerning cinematic practice. Special attention is paid to Lacan's analysis of Poe's The Purloined Letter.
Close reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as the basis of modern critical thought. Focus is on the theory of representation and its reception both in 19th-century philosophy (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche) and 20th-century literary theory (Saussure, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, de Man, Foucault, gender and cultural studies).
Explores fundamental concepts and aesthetico-political principles of key avant-garde movements: futurism, expressionism, Vorticism, Proletcult, and constructivsm. Particular focus on the interpretations of basic avant-garde frameworks in national contexts ranging from Great Britain to Italy and Germany to countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Key debates and central theorists of postmodernism.
Instructor
Richard Terdiman, Jody Greene
Quarter offered
Winter, Spring
Concentrates on a reading of 19th- and 20th-century texts that interrogate the mainstream Western anthropocentric humanist tradition. Issues include the values of self-consciousness, autonomous agency, individual rights, hostility to technology, prostheses, cyborg identity and boundary confusions, postmodern technosublime, paranoia, and the domestication of cyberspace.
An in-depth study of a topic in Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquity.
Narrative fiction from the age of Alexander through the first centuries of the Christian era, with particular attention to the influence of Near Eastern and African cultures on the formation of the European novel. Principal readings: The Alexander Romance, Petronius, Apuleius, Khariton, Achilles Tatius, Heliodoros.
Focuses on the political, historical, and ontological construction of the body in ancient Greek culture. Literary, historical, philosophical, and medical texts (Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates) as well as visual media (vase painting, sculpture) are studied.
Primary texts from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. in Athens, including drama, historical narrative, philosophy, zoological and medical treatises will be read in their historical, political, and spatial or architectural contexts and in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory. Knowledge of Greek is not required.
Devoted to situating Greek tragic production within the political, historical, and cultural contexts of the polis and the western canon. Topics include the origins of tragedy, tragedy as a civic and political institution, the dramatic festival, the tragic construction of gender, mimesis.
Examines varying interpretations, appropriations, and exploitations of the Orphic myth in its threefold manifestation as harmony, descent, and dismemberment. Topics include the regeneration of language, the poet as priest, and the re-sacralization of an increasingly secularized world.
Medieval reworkings of stories and motifs drawn from the barbarian or Germanic tradition, including Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, Snorri Sturlason: King Harald's Saga from Heimskringla, Njal's Saga.
Explores the European inheritance of definitions of woman (and by implication, man), through a study of key literary texts and historical documents from the early modern period. Emphasis on Italian and English texts; work in other European languages welcome.
Seeks to understand the recent convergence in early modern scholarship between queer theory and Renaissance studies and to explore the definitions and articulations of queer theory as a mode of textual criticism and practice.
Instructor
Carla Freccero
In early modern Italy several factors converged to foster a boom in women's writing and publication. Course addresses context and content of these writings, dealing with key theoretical and historical issues surrounding women's entry into authorship in Europe. Knowledge of Italian not required.
Libertinism as a literary, philosophical, ethical, and cultural movement in England and France, 1650-1800. Three distinct but overlapping definitions of libertinism: religious atheism, philosophical materialism, and sexual license. Readings include Moliere, Behn, Rochester, Montesquieu, Diderot, Cleland, La Clos, and Sade.
Examines Italy's epic tradition against backdrop of its political and cultural history. Readings may include (subject to availability) Pulci's Morgante, Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Reading knowledge of Italian highly recommended.
What are the advantages and limitations of using postcolonial theory to study the Latin Middle Ages (twelfth–fifteenth centuries)? Topics include changing modes of cultural contact (commerce, crusade), the representation of internal minorities (Jews, heretics, slaves), and the emergence of nationalist thinking.
Deals with some reigning models of global/local dialectics, with literary and filmic texts as examples and challenges to these dominant theoretical frameworks. Also discusses tactics and emergences of transnational cultural studies in Asian-Pacific contexts.
Examines select modern French/Francophone philosophical and psychoanalytic discussions of difference in the work of Lacan, Fanon, Irigaray, Derrida, and Deleuze and their influence on current critical theory. Texts are studied in French although students may use translations.
Instructor
Carla Freccero
Examines various critical perspectives on the writing of autobiography in Italy, including issues of gender; the construction of the self; theories of representation, narratology, and lyric form; political context. Principal readings in Italian: Dante, Petrarch, Renaissance female poets, Ugo Foscolo, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi. Selected readings from St. Augustine, Rousseau, R. Barthes.
Study of the development of the Italian lyric from Romanticism to the present, with close stylistic and thematic analyses of the works of Leopardi, D'Annunzio, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Pavese, and Montale.
Close reading of several texts that participate in Italian post-modern writing. Discussion of the postmodern return to narrative and its emphasis on readers; the attenuation of grand narratives of history, politics, and science; the functions of pastiche and play; self-reflexivity. Readings and discussion conducted in Italian.
Addresses Italy's literature and film of the postwar period, with emphasis on the use of these media in the nation's attempt to come to grips with its experience in fascism and the Resistance.
Critical study of the Decameron.
Study of the literary and political works of one of the most influential political thinkers of modernity. Readings include The Prince, selections from the Discourse and from Machiavelli's letters, at least one of Machiavelli's comedies, and his misogynist novella, Belfagor.Course taught in Italian.
Close reading of the poetry of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374); examination of his construction of a modern lyric subjectivity and a poetics of desire.
Study of the phenomenon of the boom of a literary genre in Renaissance Spain: the autobiography. Why do soldiers, conquerors, picaros, and monks reveal their selves and their life experiences? What are common aspects and what do these texts reveal about the historic reality?
Focuses on different genres of the Renaissance period that flourished before the creation of Cervantes' Don Quijote. The course topic changes; see the Schedule of Classes for the current topic.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
Study of the prose works of Cervantes (excluding his masterpiece Don Quixote) in order to understand the sociohistorical implications, and his ideology and style, which ultimately leads to a better understanding of Don Quixote. The texts studied give a panorama of the literary genres (pastoral novel, picaresque novel, etc.) during the Golden Age period and, simultaneously, serve as an introduction to the literature of Renaissance Spain.
In-depth examination of mysticism: Jewish, Christian, and Arabic; and of eroticism. Also looks at the idea of union in mysticism and eroticism.
Explores three related problematics: emergence of literature as a specialized social discourse, nationalism and education, coloniality and postcoloniality. Important questions: what are the national language and culture, what is the gender/genre of the nation.
By reading literary, critical, and theoretical texts, the seminar explores the various courses mapped by the genre in Spanish America since 1816 to the present. However, because of its board chronological range, it is done by focusing on selected topics and/or periods. May be repeated for credit as seminar topic varies.
Since its origins, the novel in Spanish America has been one of the strongest vehicles for social protest and identity quest. Concentrates on novel theories as expressed by Spanish American novelists from the 19th through 20th century, showing the development and uniqueness of the genre in Spanish America. Novelists include: de Lizardi, Gómez de Avellaneda, Isaacs, Azuela, Gallegos, Asturias, Carpentier, Bombal, Castellanos, García Marquez, Fuentes, Puig, Vargas Llosa, Sarduy, Ferré, Barnet, Allende.
A study of the essay in Spanish America from Sarmiento to the present which has fundamentally concentrated on problems of national or cultural identity. Authors include Martínez, Estrada, Mariátegui, Paz Castellanos, Salazar Bondy, Benedetti, Poniatowska, J.L. Gonzalez, Retamar, Monsivais, Ferré.
Addresses the ways in which poets and poetic movements have responded aesthetically to the region's (Latin America) geography of social, political and cultural experience. Trace the private and public voices who responded imaginatively creating a new poetics. Major movements such as modernismo, poesía pura las vanguardias, la anti-poesía poesía conversacional, pos-vanguardismo, and their major exponents are studied, as well as other poetic voices previously overlooked or underestimated.
By reading Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican texts, explores questions of modernity and postmodernity of cultural, political, gender, and racial identities, while also addressing the position of Caribbean literatures within the Latin American literary canon.
Explores the literary creation of authors of African descent in Latin America. In addition to the study of Island, or Plantation literatures/societies, this course also derives into areas of the South American Pacific Rim where, by virtue of its natural resources, economics, and mode of colonization, a different kind of Afro-American literature, culture, and society has been produced. Students must be fluent in Spanish.
Modern Mexican women writers' struggle for interpretive power. Concentrating on autobiographical fictions, texts are read against Latin American feminist and cultural theories. Special attention is given to the particular problematics of gender, nation, and narration in postrevolutionary Mexico.
Addresses the problematics of these concepts as they relate to literary and cultural production in Latin America.
An examination of Latin American and Latino films in connection with relevant social and cultural issues and theories. Reading knowledge of Spanish is required.
Construction of new discourses of Spanishness after 1975, their negotiation in the context of European integration/globalization and against historical memories.
Instructor
Jorge Aladro Font
What is the role of reading in the theoretical revisions encompassed under the rubric of Latin American Cultural Studies? What changes and contributions have brought about the Cultural Studies emphasis on key words such as production-reception, consumption, resemantization, and reappropriation? These questions provide a framework for a historical-theoretical reconstruction of the place of reading and readers in Latin American cultural history.