Undergraduate Courses Fall 2005
CL 201: Introduction to Pre-Modern Literatures/Impact on the Modern World
MW @ 12:05 494 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 - Literary Geographies
Instructor: Valerie Reed
Lecture: MW at 9:55 5208 Social Science
Literary texts often chart new territories, imaginary locales and fantastic journeys. They arrive in some strange places, if they arrive at all � for those journeys often encounter some substantial delays. In this course we will explore some of the strange worlds and tortuous paths modern and contemporary literature has traced. We will read works that are ostensibly set in real places; that map unimaginable places; that juxtapose places that can hardly be juxtaposed; works in which journeys are led off track, or simply never arrive. Utopias, dystopias, or heterotopias, the places we encounter in our texts will also help us to ask what the �place� of literature is in the modern world � what literature does, and how we encounter it.
Course readings may include:
Balzac, History of the Thirteen
Rimbaud, Illuminations (selections)
Eliot, The Waste Land
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Borges, selected short stories
Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Calvino, Invisible Cities
Condée. Crossing the Mangrove
(Selected shorter texts will be available in a course reader.)
203: Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literature - Literature & Film
Lecture: MW @ 11:00 - 19 Ingraham
Monday Movie Screening: 145 Birge 4:00-6:00 or 5206 Social Science 7:00-9:00
Nozomi Irei
This course offers an introduction to the comparative study of literature and cinema [film]. First, we will explore and compare how the experience of reading a literary text differs from the experience of viewing a movie. At this stage, we will be interested in understanding the basic, distinct modes of communication offered by literature and cinema. This will prepare us to study how specific literary works and specific films intersect. The various points of intersection are complex. We will focus, for example, on historical, technical, formal and ideological intersections. Throughout the semester, then, we will explore some predominant themes and problems concerning the study of literature and cinema, such as narrative, spectacle, adaptation, representation, etc. Our approach to the comparative study of literature and cinema will be one that tries to avoid collapsing the differences between literature and cinema into the more general notions of art, mass media, or entertainment.
Our comparative approach will be one that sees "conjuctions" between literature and cinema while respecting the differences in both media, since literary "language" speaks differently than cinematic "language." Since literature and cinema both rely heavily on the image, we will investigate the specific ways in which the image "appears" and "moves" in various types of literary texts (epic, lyric, dramatic, novel) and films (silent films, talkies, films dominated by "movie music"). Furthermore, cinema's ties to technology and capitalism will be analyzed, since such ties enable film to "capture" and incorporate many other artistic practices. In its relations with capitalism, we will be interested in analyzing how cinema functions as a specifically modern instrument which tries to construct a totalizing way to "see" the human.
An integral part of the course will be learning how to question the implications of extending literary studies to incorporate the study of other "arts." Some questions the course will take up include the following: What if writing and making a film are both tied to a certain kind of effacement of the human, rather than a representation of the human? What if what we now call "literature" and "cinema" is that which appears in the wake of such an effacement?
LITERARY TEXTS
Ashbery, John: "Forties Flick"
Ballard, J.G.: Atrocity Exhibition
Duras, Marguerite: Malady of Death
Kafka, Franz: The Trial
Mishima, Yukio: "Patriotism"
Shakespeare, William: King Lear
FILMS
Resnais, Alain & Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima Mon Amour
Eisenstein, Sergei: Strike
Godard, Jean-Luc: Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Kurosawa, Akira: Ran
Lang, Fritz: Metropolis
Mishima, Yukio: Patriotism
Welles, Orson: The Trial
ARTICLES
Benjamin, Walter: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility"
Levinas, Emmanuel: "Reality and Its Shadow"
Selections from Orr, John and Olga Taxidou (Eds): Post-war Cinema and Modernity: A Film Reader
Comparative Literature 287 - The Epic Tradition in Western Literature
MWF @ 1:20 - 144 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851
Epic is a literary genre in which the poet, often claiming to speak on behalf of society, defines a society’s values and beliefs. It has been said that an epic attempts to tell the story of a nation.
In this course we will begin with the Epic of Gilgamesh, a text from Ancient Mesopotamia which tells the story of humanity’s shift from animal-like existence as part of nature to life in the world’s first civilizations. We will then study Homer’s Iliad and its attempts to establish a common Greek identity as well as the Odyssey, the story of an individual rather than of a society. In reading Vergil’s Aeneid, we will study how Vergil’s tale of the founding of Rome attempts to combine the Iliad’s focus on a people at war with the Odyssey’s focus on the life and deeds of one man. The long dead Vergil will then come back to guide us and Dante through the afterlife in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Finally, we will study John Milton’s Paradise Lost as an attempt to use the techniques of ancient, pagan epic to narrate the biblical account of the fall of man.
Reading List:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Homer: The Iliad
Homer: The Odyssey
Vergil: The Aeneid
Dante: The Divine Comedy
John Milton: Paradise Lost
CL288 - Masterpieces of Literature for Honors II
MWF @ 9:55 - 144 Van Hise
Professor Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos
Modernity, Knowledge, and Violence
Bringing together a variety of literary works from different parts of the modern Western world, this course is designed to encourage the students to develop their skills of textual analysis and critical interpretation, and to challenge them to reflect theoretically on the acts of writing and reading. The concepts of modernity, knowledge, and violence will provide a focus for reflecting on the connections between literature and other realms of human experience. Assessment will be based on regular participation in class, oral presentations and written
reports, and a final research paper.
Luís de Camões (c. 1524-1580), The Lusiads (1572) (selections)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Tempest (1616)
Goethe (1749-1832), Urfaust (1775)
Georg Büchner (1813-1837), Woyzeck (1879)
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), A Doll’s House (1879)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), selected poems
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), A Season in Hell (1873)
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909)
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), selected poems
Adrienne Rich (1929-), selected poems
Editions:
The Lusiads, trans. Landeg White (Oxford World’s Classics)
The Tempest (Signet)
Urfaust, trans. Dan Farrelly (Carysfort Press)
Woyzeck, trans. Dan Farrelly (Carysfort Press)
A Doll’s House, trans. Christopher Hampton (Samuel French)
A Season in Hell, trans. Andrew Jay (Crescent Moon)
Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (Ecco)
CL 310: Introduction to Literary Criticism
Lecture: MWF @ 2:25 - 574 Van Hise
Disc: M @ 3:30 - 387 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz
Ph: (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the basic currents in literary theory and their terminology. We shall read literary works and compare some traditional, modern, and contemporary readings of these texts: Oedipus the King with Aristotle, Schelling, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Vernant and Vidal-Naquet; Antigone with Hegel, Hölderlin, Irigaray, Jacobs, and Butler; the Odyssey with Auerbach and Genette; Hamlet with Eliot, Jones, Showalter, and Greenblatt; Mallarmé with Blanchot, de Man, Johnson, and Derrida; and Heart of Darkness with Jameson and Achebe.
CL377: The Grand Tour and the Romantic Myth of Italy
Lecture: TR @ 9:30-10:45 - 474 Van Hise
Disc: R @ 1:20 - 148 Van Hise
Professor Ernesto Livorni - 752 Van Hise - 262-4068
The course explores the idea of cultural exchange as it developed and involved all the artistic (literature, music, painting) and political forces of England, France, Germany, from the second half of the 18th century to the unification of Italy in 1860. In that period many writers and artists visited Italy; however, during their visits, those intellectuals became familiar with the contemporary situation, often joining the Italian political upheaval for the unification (this happened with Byron and Shelley) and deciding to sojourn in Italy even longer than first planned. On the other hand, some Italian writers went to live abroad (Baretti and Foscolo to England; Manzoni was in contact with Parisian circles) and developed an understanding of modern Italian culture in those countries they visited. There was by all means a sharing of experiences that shaped a somewhat mythical image of Italy, caught between a past of splendor and a present of chaos, which was nevertheless attractive. Besides the above-mentioned authors, there will also be a consideration of the involvement of music (Verdi's
operas especially) and the figurative arts (the German Nazarene painters in Rome). Among the authors we will read there are Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Madame de Stael, Stendhal, Foscolo.
CL379: Literature & Ethnic Experience: Political Uses of Minor[ity] Literature
Lecture: T/ R: 11:00 - 12:15 - 582 Van Hise
Disc: T 1:20 - 575 Van Hise
Professor Próspero Saíz
956 Van Hise Hall
Ph: (608)262-1158; e-mail:
Frantz Fanon: "... colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns out to be the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it." Thus, in some ways, the colonizer knows the colonized better than they know themselves, since the process of colonization has created the categories which were implanted at the deepest point of the culture and interiority of the colonized by the colonizing process. These categories long after actual colonization continue to legislate the knowledge that the ex-colonized have of themselves as a "subjected people." In many respects, this is still the condition of many minority and immigrant groups in the U.S.A. today. In this condition the People as Subject falls to the condition of a People Subjected. The issue of "identity" becomes a treacherous problem from the position of minorities, because it is easily linked to the category of the ethnic, a category we will criticize and dismantle. We will examine how the identity minorities must assume in speaking, in saying I (the descendant of slaves, the native survivor, the immigrant, etc.), has been fabulized and serves to subject them further. [We will examine the dominant and minoritarian modes of fabulation.] This condition of enunciation is intolerable, and we will approach it from those concepts specific to "minor literatures," derived from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The dominant institutions of language and culture will be vigorously questioned, since they reflect the pre-conscious interests of the dominant nation-state and dominant class formations Minor literatures, then are a kind of "war machine" against these dominant institutions which function in the interest of the so called national-character or in the spirit of American Culture and values. A "minor" literary machine resists capture by the State-form which seeks to provide it with its meaning, with its end, which end is a war directed against the minorities themselves in the form of a dominant national memory and the distorted story-telling function of the culture. In other words, this dominant form (which includes much "critical"work done in the universities) works on this imperative: if minor literatures de-territorialisze, destabilize, and dismantle the ossified structures and constraints of the social world, they must be captured, i.e., re-territorialized.
Our point of departure stems from the following questions posed by Deleuze and Guattari:
"How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is a problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of minor literature, but also the problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path?"
Minor literature texts contest "national" languages from within. They unleash minoritarian forces within these languages. Hence, they disarticulate majority consensus and strongly resist the constraints of convention, law, and the state. The daunting task of a minor literature is to make the collective emerge, or in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, "to fill the conditions of collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in the milieu: literature is the people's concern."
Possible Texts:
Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America
Rudolfo Anaya, Heart of Aztlan
Rudolfo Anaya and F. Lomeli, Aztlan: Essays on the Chicano Homeland
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice
Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture & Latino Identity
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Dutchman & The Slave; Blues People
Franz Kafka, The Castle; The Complete Stories
Toni Morrison, Jazz; Sulla
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Robert Vizenor, Chances