Undergraduate Courses Fall 2004
CL 201 Introduction to Pre-Modern Literatures/Impact on the Modern World
Lecture MW@ 1:20 594 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
An introduction to the literary texts of Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The themes of love and death govern our readings. We shall explore the different views of life and death, especially in the form of the mythical descent to the underworld (katabasis) in Homer, Euripides, Plato, Virgil, and Dante. We shall also examine the influences of cultural context (archaic and classical Greece, imperial Rome) and literary convention (the genres of epic, tragedy, philosophical dialogue). We shall also consider the theme of Thanatos (Death) alongside the earthly theme of Eros (Love) in a number of different texts, including the biblical Song of Songs, Greek and Latin lyric poems, Plato’s Symposium, and in Dante’s Inferno.
Texts:
Homer, Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles
Grene, David and Richmond A. Lattimore (eds.), Greek Tragedies, vol. 1
Plato. Symposium. Translated by Nehamas & Woodruff.
The Song of Songs. Translated by Marcia Falk.
Virgil, Aeneid. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum.
Dante, Inferno. Translated by John Ciardi.
CL202: Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Literature
TR @ 11:00 - 272 Bascom Hall
Professor Prospero Saiz
Ph: (608) 262-1158 - 956 Van Hise Hall
Our study of literature takes place in the Humanities. If literature is an important component of the Humanities, the following questions arise: What is literature and what is humanity–and how do they relate to each other? Does humanity need literature for its realization and fulfillment?
In the current state of American culture, is it possible for us to have an experience with literature? Today, what claims, if any, can such an experience make on our lives? Does literature challenge us and “our values,” or has it now become something routine and indifferent to our needs? This course is designed not merely to survey literary works as such but to put the very “nature” and “function”of literature itself into question. We will start from this working assumption: the literary text can “say” anything, and, therefore, some texts may be considered to be dangerous or not palatable by some. Perhaps literary texts are potent forces of non-conformity. Perhaps they require that we think otherwise than the culture demands. We will put this to the test by reading in an active way, which means that we will try to establish a critical position with regard to current values. This requires that each student be willing to question his or her basic assumptions and attitudes about education in the Humanities. In a general sense, the texts chosen this semester deal with the relationship between literature and: evil, crime, ethics, and freedom.
TEXTS:
William Blake, “The Book of Thel”; “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones], Dutchman
George Bataille, Literature and Evil
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
203: Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literature - COMICS, NARRATIVE, AND HISTORY
Lecture: MW @ 12:05 - 272 Bascom
Professor Mary Layoun
Ph (608) 262-9767 - 938 Van Hise
What? Comics in a literature class?! Small books, big letters, lots of pictures. Men and women in bright tights, right? Easy reading? Well, no. Not quite.
CL 203 will begin with a brief survey of the various “beginnings” of comics – in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or pre-Columbian picture manuscripts, or 17th- century Japanese woodblock print series. (Right. That means comics didn’t begin with Disney Studios.) From those origins, we will turn to the critical reading and discussion of the sequential construction of words and images in “above” and “under” ground comics of the last 50 years from around the world.
And we will pay particular attention not just to characters in bright tights but to the interplay of comics’ words, and images as they tell stories of histories, both large and small – the bombing of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the occupation of one country by another, living on the border between Mexico and the US, living with AIDS.
For, if history is constructed as a narrative sequence of stories and comics are the sequential construction of stories in both words and images, what can we learn from comics about history or narrative or visual and historical literacy?
Tentative Reading List:
John Berger: Ways of Seeing
Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics
Kris Benka & Jen Dresen: Manya
Neil Gaiman: Signal to Noise
Ryan Inzana: Johnny Jihad
Jason Lutes: Berlin
Keiji Nakazawa: Barefoot Gen,
Joe Sacco: Palestine
Art Spiegelman: Maus
CL 289: Introduction to Literary Forms for Honors
Tragedy in Athens and London
MWF @ 11:00 - 479 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos
Ph: (608) 263-3851 - 950 Van Hise
This class will first focus on the Ancient Athenian tragic playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. For the second part of the semester we will study the Elizabethan English playwrights Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. As we turn to the Elizabethan period, we will examine why Renaissance authors began writing in the ancient genre of tragedy which had rarely been used for some fifteen centuries. In the beginning of the course, we will discuss ancient theories of tragedy, particularly the theories spelled out by Aristotle in his Poetics, where he defines the tragic hero as a man who is good and noble yet somehow “misses the mark.” When we read the Elizabethans, we will discuss different approaches to the genre ranging from the bold innovations of Shakespeare to Jonson’s attempt to compose a tragedy according to the principles of ancient literary theory.
Readings:
Aeschylus: Oresteia trilogy
Sophocles: Oedipus trilogy
Euripides: Medea, Bacchae
Shakespeare : Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
Ben Jonson: Sejanus
CL353 Drama: Early Modern
Shakespeare and Calderon
Lect. MWF @ 2:25 - 374 Van Hise
Disc. F @ 12:05 - 591 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos
Ph: (608) 263-3851 - 950 Van Hise
clivanos@wisc.edu
This course will examine a broad selection of plays from two of the major playwrights of the early modern period: William Shakespeare and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Among the many thematic issues dealt with in the class, we will concentrate on the idea of life as theatre which both authors express in some of their more important works. We will analyze how Shakespeare and Calderón both use dramatic roleplaying to examine and question the nature of the roles that are sometimes arbitrarily assigned to people in life. Instances of cross-dressing, commoners dressing as kings and vice versa, and other types of mistaken identity are some of the techniques Shakespeare and Calderón use to draw attention to the roleplaying that takes place in daily life and to ask what would happen if important roles were reversed. We will read a total of fifteen plays to focus in depth on different aspects of these two writers’ works.
Texts:
Calderón:
Life is a Dream
Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult
Devotion to the Cross
The Mayor of Zalamea
The Phantom Lady
The Crown of Absalom
Shakespeare:
Richard II
Henry IV, parts 1-2
Henry V
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
CL475 Poetics @ Literary Theory: Narrative Theory
Lect. TR - 11:00-12:15 / 382 Van Hise
Disc. R - 1:20 / 140 Van Hise
Professor Keith Cohen
An investigation of the theory of narrative carried out on two fronts: first, a charting of the development of the novel from bourgeois upstart to postmodernist poseur; and secondly, a look at the evolution of theorizing about the novel, from its tentative beginnings with Henry James to several systematic versions of narratology (Genette, Cohan & Shires), passing by reader-oriented analyses and ideology critiques (Jameson). I have tried to match historical essays with contemporary theory, grouping them around each of the five narratives chosen. So, for instance, in the case of Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or [Girl with the Golden Eyes], we read historical essays by Lukacs and Watt, a formal analysis by R. Fernandez (written in the 1920s) and a Freudian post-structuralist analysis by Shoshana Felman
Among the problematics of narrative theory to be addressed are: récit / histoire (or narrative / diegesis), temporal articulations, perspective and distance, reader affectivity, subject positioning, “production” of meaning and gender specificity. Tentative assignments: one midterm exam, several short papers or oral presentations, and the option of a final paper or final exam. Graduate students will be required to conduct research on a specially developed topic, which will become the basis for their final paper (not an option in their case). Some reading knowledge of French or Spanish is required for Comp. Lit. majors, since a part of their written work will be based on texts in the original language. (For possible exceptions to this, and for any further information, please contact me at lkcohen@wisc.edu)
Required texts:
Balzac, La Fille aux yeux d'or (Livre de Poche; trans. in History of the Thirteen, Viking Penguin)
Flaubert, Madame Bovary, (Classiques Garnier; trans. Ballantine)
James, "The Tree of Knowledge" (reader)
Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Gallimard or other; trans. Random)
García Márquez, Crónica de une muerte anunciada (Ed. Sudamericana; trans. Ballantine)
Walker, The Color Purple (Pocket)
Reader of photocopied texts: essays by H. James, R. Fernandez, G. Prince, M. Bakhtin, G. Lukács, W. Iser, S. Fish, S. Felman.
Barthes, S/Z (Noonday/Farrar Strauss)
Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Cornell)
Lovell, Consuming Fiction (Verso)
Genette, Narrative Discourse (Cornell)
Cohan & Shires, Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (Routledge)
Note: some readings will be found on reserve in Helen C. White Library
CL 768 Literature and Ideas: Idea of Naming
M @ 3:30-6:00 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
"Man gave names to all the animals, in the beginning . . ." Naming certainly belongs to the very nature of human being. But what exactly is to name? Just to provide a thing, a being with a mark, a sign? Heidegger suggests that "we have become very slovenly and mechanical in our understanding and use of signs." Is not, on the other hand, modern semiotics and structural linguistics a model of rigor in the domain of the human sciences. Yes, but at what cost? The principle of the arbitrariness of signs and of their link to the world takes out all mystery from the event of naming and justifies Heidegger's reference to mechanical procedure. We shall trace the origin of this view of language in Plato's Cratylus. But we shall insist on the other view, which can also be traced to Plato's dialogue. This other, Cratylian, "alchemical," mimological, tradition will be rediscovered with the help of Genette's unjustly neglected book Mimologics.
Tentative Reading List:
Homer, Odyssey
Hesiod, Theogony
Plato, Cratylus
Genette, Mimologics: Voyage en Cratylie
Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose
Proust, Swan's Way
Heidegger, On the Way to Language
Derrida, Of the Name, The Ear of the Other
Levinas, Proper Names
Saramago, All the Names
Course Reader
CL779 Mulitiple Ethnicities, Multiple Peripheries
T @ 3:30-6:00 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Keith Cohen
Ph. (608) 262-7999
lkcohen@wisc.edu
One of the most politically charged of literary situations of the late 20th century is that of the poet and novelist whose ethnicity is hybrid and whose nationality, due to colonialism, has become problematized. Such a writer is thus multiply at the margins. In the Caribbean, for example, the three languages that predominate officially are also the site of subtle and not-so-subtle subversion: official Spanish morphs into the spoken language of an oppressed minority group in Guillén’s, and an Anglophone poet’s persona fears he will be accused of “killing ‘de Queen’s English.” Using the Caribbean as a trampoline into this complex field, we will study texts also that treat the Philippines, North Africa, and parts of Latin America.
Main (tentative) texts
Guillén - selected poetry
Césaire - selected poetry, plays
Brathwaite - selected poetry
Walcott - selection poetry, plays
E. Danticat, Eyes, Breath, Memory
Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
M. Condé, La traversée du mangrove
Hagedorn, Dogeaters
Djebar, L’amour la fantasia
Glissant, selected prose and poetry
CL 822: Seminar in Translation
R @ 3:30 - 6:00 / 951 Van Hise Hall
Próspero Saíz- psaiz@wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 262-1158
Although CL 822 will briefly examine the history of translation, the focus of our seminar will be on the implications of modern literary theory for the translation of literary texts, stressing the following problems:
gender and “metaphorics” in the text;
erotics of transfer in the language relationship;
cultural difference and transfer;
interference of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real in the transfer.
Questions that will mark points of departure include:
*the affirmation (or not) of the identity (the self-same repeatability) of a given language or “text”;
*untranslatability or the incompleteness of translation;
*the shibboleth effect;
*babel and pure or ideal language;
*the idiom of “literature”;
*the pluri-logic of aporia.
* translation itself–what are its borders and how are they protected, since limits may be constituted as:
a. separate territories, countries, nations, states, cultures, languages, bodies, subjects;
b. separations between disciplines or domains of discourse;
c. concepts or terms which ultimately intersect and overdetermine all other limits;
TEXTS:
Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice
Lawrence Venuti, editor, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology
Seminar Reader