Undergraduate Courses Fall 2006

CL202: Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Literature – “Violence in the Time of Love ”
Instructor: Kerstin Schaars
Lecture: MW @ 1:20 B10 Ingraham

This course approaches love and violence by analyzing how love is figured in the western tradition. Recalling that love, like hate, is a passion, we return to an ancient figuration of love: in the myth of cupid, love is a battle. As such, everyday notions of love that link this passion to philosophical and theological concepts of the “good ” become questionable. How might literature offer a set of questions concerning love and violence that are outside of those to which we are already familiar? How might a literary text challenge and transform the very ideas that guide how we think of love and violence? The texts of the course will provide a challenge to how one might approach the relations not only between love and violence, but between violence, love and a “time ” of war, violence and desire in the “space ” of a story, and how violence and love possibly condition one another in unusual, thought-provoking ways. To this end, literature offers us an approach into the un-thought aspects of both love and human life, and it often does so by taking a questioning stance. We might begin with the following proposition: what if violence and love are the two conditions which make the human being, human?

Possible texts:

Tristan and Isolde
William Shakespeare. Hamlet
Emily Brönte. Wuthering Heights
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground
Franz Kafka. The Trial
Marguerite Duras. Malady of Death or The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Love in the Time of Cholera
George Bataille. Literature and Evil

Reader:

---Giorgio Agamben. Selections from Idea of Prose . Selected poems by Emily Dickenson and Richard Crashaw. Etchings by Hildegaard of Bingen.

203: Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literature -
Lecture: MW @ 12:05 - 5206 Soc. Science
Instructor: Amy Johnson

Rushdie readings

This course will ask students to think about how we represent the world to ourselves both verbally and visually. How do those representations affect our relationships with others? With History? How does our experience of others and the world inform our representations of them? Important considerations of both verbal and visual works involve questions of attention-what do we pay attention to and what sort of attention is it?-and ethical questions - what are our obligations to others and how are they determined or informed by representations of others?

With these questions in mind, we will read a range of major literary works from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, from places as diverse as Spain, Russia, Turkey and England. Some of the texts consider the effects of narrative representations, like the Quixote and Madame Bovary. Others, like Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, juxtapose themselves to visual forms of art like painting. Many of these texts ask what are the consequences of making onself -or others-like art. Wilde's novel, Kafka's story and Angela Carter's novel each consider the human being as a work of art. Since the literary texts raise the question of their relationship to other arts, we'll also look at some examples of visual art. How is our relationship to visual art different than our relationship to literary art? How do the visual works address the questions of attention and ethics? The visual art we'll look at is, for the most part, referred to explicitly in the literary works, though there will be some additional art works which were contemporary with the literature. Looking at both literary and art works will also require us to consider the differences between verbal and visual forms of representation, and the critical readings will help give us a framework for thinking about those differences.

Possible Texts

Cervantes, Quixote Part 1 (1605)
Keats, "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" (1817) and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1820)
Browning, "My Lasst Duchess" (1842
Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Kafka, "The Hunger Artist" (1922)
Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts" (1938)
Nabokov , Laughter in the Dark (trans. 1960; 1938)
Borges, stories (trans. 1961 etc)
Carter, Night at the Circus (1984)
Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (trans. 1999)
Pamuk, My Name is Red (trans. 2001)

Art and Criticism:
To include: Pieter Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558), and others; Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632); and illuminations; Walter Benjamin: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility"; W.J.T. Mitchell, selections; John Berger, selections

Comparative Literature 287 - Ghost Stories
TR 9:30-10:45 / 144 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851

This course will examine different ways ghosts have been represented in literature as a way of demonstrating the lingering influence the dead have on the living. We will examine how representations of the afterlife have changed in different times and cultures. For the first few weeks, readings will be from Ancient Greek and Roman literature. Following that we will read selections from medieval ghost narratives, and finally we will turn to the Early Modern and Modern periods. A central theme of the course will be the connection between “phantom ” and “phantasia, ” (imagination), which suggests that to imagine is to engage with phantoms that have imprinted themselves on the mind just as ghosts are often described as imprinting themselves on haunted locales.

Tentative Reading List:
Aeschylus: Oresteia
Seneca: Thyestes, Agamemnon
Juan Rulfo: Pedro P áramo
Toni Morrison: Beloved

Selected short stories by authors including Sheridan LeFanu, M.R. James,
Algernon Blackwood, Edith Wharton, and Muriel Spark.

CL288 - Masterpieces of Literature for Honors II
TR 11:00-12:15 / 54 Bascon
Professor Irene Santos
942 Van Hise - 262-7347

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 377: Early Modern Drama
Lecture: TR 1:00-2:15 - 487 Van Hise
Disc: W @ 11:00 - 55 Bascom
Professor Chris Livanos
Ph: (608) 263-3851 - 950 Van Hise

The first part of this course will be devoted to a broad range of tragedies from early modern Italy , Spain , England , and France . After the basic problems and principles of tragedy are discussed, we will study comedy as a genre that inherently contains tragedy but adds the coping mechanism of humor. At the beginning of the course, we will read Aristotle's Poetics and discuss the influence of his literary theories on Early Modern playwrights. As we read plays by the Renaissance theater's great innovators, particularly Lope de Vega and Shakespeare, we will study how and why they departed from the conventions spelled out by Aristotle. Special attention will be given to how Early Modern Drama was at once a revival of ancient traditions, a continuation of medieval forms, and an original art form expressing contemporary concerns.

Authors: Shakespeare, Racine, Lope de Vega, Tasso, Machiavelli, Moliere.

CL378: The Haitian Revolution in Circum-Atlantic Modernity
Lecture: TR @ 2:30-3:45 - 495 Van Hise
Professor Deborah Jenson
642 Van Hise - 262-9740

In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the first successful revolution by slaves, now known as the Haitian Revolution, influenced philosophical and literary representations ranging from Hegel's 1806 paradigm of lordship and bondage to ideas of pan-Africanism in texts from the Negritude movement and the Harlem Renaissance. This course will examine the importance of the Haitian Revolution to epistemologies of modernity, following Sibylle Fischer's claim that “If we do not take into account to what extent modernity is a product of the New World, to what extent the colonial experience shaped modernity ” in Europe and elsewhere politically, economically, and aesthetically, talk of modernity is just a reinstantiation of a Eurocentric particularism parading as universalism. The drama of the defeat of the Napoleonic army in Saint-Domingue will be introduced using historiography by Bryan Edwards and Marcus Rainsford from the Haitian Revolutionary era, and David Geggus from the current moment. We will then read texts generated from within the African diaspora in Saint-Domingue, including the Creole « Oath of the Cayman Woods » pronounced by slaves at the beginning of the revolt, selected correspondence between Napoleon and Leclerc, excerpts from the memoirs of Toussaint Louverture, and proclamations by Dessalines and other Revolutionary leaders. The main body of the syllabus will be devoted to literary representations, read in English, by authors from the Haitian, French, English, American, German, and Spanish traditions, including Wordsworth, Victor Hugo, John Greenleaf Whittier, Harriet Martineau, Wendell Phillips, Kleist, Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, Baron Vastey, and others. In the domain of philosophy, we will read problematizations of emancipation and agency, race and universalism, as influenced by the paradigm of the Haitian Revolution, by Hegel, Davis, Genovese, and Kojève. Students will write a research paper on a selected aspect of the Haitian Revolution's influence on modernity in at least one other national/linguistic tradition.

CL475: Poetics & Literary Theory: Literary Representation
Lecture: MW 2:30 - 3:45 - 144 Van Hise
Disc: M 4:00 - 474 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz
Ph: 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise Hall

To free ourselves from the constraints of a representational mode of dealing with the world has often been proclaimed as the task of modern and contemporary philosophy, literature, and art. One could think of such influential figures in the West as Hölderlin and Heidegger, Artaud and Deleuze, Newman and Lyotard. But is such a thing possible? Other thinkers of our time, such as Derrida or Nancy, claim that it is not, because of the very structure of language, and they maintain that the play of deconstruction that brings representation to a "closure" is the only way to undermine the reign of representation. The purpose of this course is to investigate the modes of representation that have dominated Western literature and art throughout its history and their major theorizations in order to be able to take a position in the debate over representational thinking - a major aesthetic, but also philosophical, religious, and political debate of our time.

Course readings may include:
Homer, Odyssey
Petronius, Satyricon
Stendahl, Le Rouge et le noir
Balzac, Père Goriot
Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Auerbach, "Figura," Mimesis
Heidegger, Nietzsche ; Poetry, Language, Thought
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
Brecht, A Short Organon for the Theater
Ricoeur, On Mimesis
Foucault, The Order of Things, This is Not a Pipe
Derrida, "La Parole soufflé," "Closure of Representation"
Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography
Marin, On Representation (selections)