Undergraduate Courses Fall 2007

CL202: Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Literature
Instructor: Kerstin Schaars
Lecture: MW @ 1:20 5206 Soc. Science

"Gathering (the) America(s), Moving Bodies: A Survey of How Movement Makes Literature"

This course is an introduction into modern and contemporary literature. Our textual range will range from the United States down through the Caribbean, and Chile. We also will gesture towards not only Europe, but also toward parts of Africa. The focus of our readings is as follows: we will approach each text by paying close and thoughtful attention to how descriptions of bodies in motion, vibrations of sound and the shifting sequences of images and characters actually move a literary text along . We will survey not only how bodies, images and tropes move within a literary text, but also how motion might flow "in, among and in-between words." In doing so, we will discover that writing is not as stable an entity as we might wish to assume. Our focus on movement in literature demands that we necessarily transgress the boundaries of genre. Thus, the very act of reading literature will move us in, among and between poetry, drama, song, short stories and the novel. In our continual motion we will happen upon strange and potentially uncomfortable places including, but not limited to: prison cells, cotton fields, coal mining, juke joints, theatrical stages, urban riots and revolutionary moments. We will encounter knife-fights, loving, dancing, singing, wailing and crying. As we do so, we will argue, and challenge the following question: how is a gathering of just this sort of vibrating, oscillating, active "stuff," -loving, dancing, fighting and the like -is not only the "stuff" of literature, but also the "stuff" of life?

Possible Texts:

The Tempest William Shakespeare
Amerika Franz Kafka
As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
Return to My Native Land Aimé Césaire
Dutchman Amiri Baraka.
Selected Poetry of Pablo Neruda
I, Tituba, Sorciere Maryse Condé
The Wretched of the Earth Excerpts. Franz Fanon

CL205: Introduction to Comparative Race & Ethnicity:
Literature, Society, and History – In and Beyond the U.S.

This course satisfies both the Ethnic Studies and Humanities requirements. You will also need to register for a discussion section

Professor Mary Layoun -
938 Van Hise - 262-9767
Lecture: MW @ 12:05 (3 credits)
5208 Social Science Bldg.

CL 205 is an introduction to the comparative history of the idea of race, to the modern literary and cultural articulations of race, and to the modern cultural and social practices predicated on that idea and its articulations in and beyond the United States.

We will examine modern and contemporary literary and cultural constructions of race in its own right and as distinct from the “ethnic” or the “minority” as well as the relation of those constructions of race to cultural and historical processes.

While at least half of our reading will focus on and originate from the U.S., CL 205 will also include illustrative examples from societies and literatures outside of the U.S.–this semester from Lebanon, Sudan, South Africa and Japan. For understanding race in the U.S. is also realizing the boundaries of its definitions, fictions, and practices here as illustrated by its considerably different configuration elsewhere. The course will focus both on the historical and social context(s) of race matters and on their literary articulations. For, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us about literature, it seeks to “fill the conditions of collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in the milieu: literature is the people's concern."

Fiction:
Etel Adnan: Sit Marie Rose (Lebanon)
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (U.S.)
Shusaku Endo: Samurai (Japan)
Nadine Gordimer: Something Out There (South Africa)
Walter Mosely: Walkin’ the Dog (U.S.)
John Okada: No No Boy (U.S.)
Tayeb Saleh: Season of Migration to the North (Sudan)
Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony (U.S.)

Non-Fiction:
Danielle Allen: Talking to Strangers (U.S.)
Amiri Baraka: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (U.S.)

Web materials:
Race: The Power of an Illusion: www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm

Additional required reading will be drawn from the following anthologies:
Rudolfo D. Torres, Louis F. Miron, and Jonathan Xavier Inda, eds.: Race, Identity, and Citizenship: A Reader
John Stone and Rutledge Dennis, eds.: Race and Ethnicity: Comparative and Theoretical Approaches (excerpts)
Ronald Takaki: A Larger Memory: A History of Our Diversity, with Voices
Thomas F. Gossett: Race: The History of an Idea in America

Course Requirements:
• careful reading and listening and thoughtful reflection on your reading and listening;
• three take-home essays–due roughly in the fifth, the tenth and the final weeks of the semester–in response to questions and topics handed out in lecture and discussed in lecture and in discussion sections;
• a 1 - 2 pages report on participant observation of social interaction in a community gathering place
• additional, occasional ungraded but for credit in-class writing exercises,

Your grade will be based on the compilation of the following (calculated with mathematical precision and poetic clarity):
1st essay, 2 - 3 pages: 10%
2nd essay, 3 - 4 pages: 15%
participant observation report: 20%
final essay, 4 - 5 pages: 25%
attendance and participation in lecture and discussion section: 30%

Comparative Literature 287 -The Epic
MWF 11:00 / B223 Van Vleck
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851

This course will examine how poets in a variety of cultures from ancient through early modern times have used heroes, and sometimes anti-heroes, to represent the aspirations and values of their communities. We will begin with The Epic of Gilgamesh, a meditation on the meaning of civilization from one of the world’s earliest civilizations. We will then move on to Homer’s and Vergil’s stories of war, homecoming and community building. When we read Dante and Milton, we will study their own important contributions to epic literature as well as their textual engagement with Homer and Vergil.


Readings:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
Vergil: The Aeneid
Dante: Divine Comedy
John Milton: Paradise Lost

Comparative Literature 310 / Introduction to Literary Crticism
MWF 1:20 / 116 Ingraham
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851

The Fantastic

We will read a variety of theoretical and critical texts on non-realist literary genres including science fiction, fantasy and horror. In our readings, we will become acquainted with several theoretical schools, such as formalism through the works of Tzvetan Todorov and Psychoanalysis through the works of Sigmund Freud. The monster and the alien as symbolic representations of the other will be topics of special concern in this course. The question of whether or not fantastical genres are fundamentally liberating--in that they allow a radical questioning of reality--will also be a central topic.

Texts may include:

Freud: The Uncanny
Todorov: The Fantastic
David Williams: Deformed Discourse
Julia Kristeva: Powers of Horror
Rosemary Jackson: Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion
Nicholas Royle: The Uncanny: An Introduction
Elain L. Graham: Representations of the Post/Human

Comparative Literature 351 - Lyric and Poetry's Dialogue
Lecture: TR 1:00-2:15 / 14 Ingraham
Disc: R 2:25 / 591 Van Hise
Instructor: Irene Santos

Focusing on the poetry and poetics of Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, this course aims at rethinking modern lyric poetry and some of its problems. Primary texts (whether in their entirety or in excerpts) will be such self-interruptive "epics of the modern consciousness" as Crane's The Bridge (1930), Pessoa's Mensagem (1934), Neruda's Canto general (1950), Stevens's Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), H. D.'s Helen in Egypt (1960), and Próspero Saíz's "Chants of Nezahualcoyotl" (1996). The Book of Disquiet(ude) , by Pessoa's "semi-heteronym" Bernardo Soares (first published posthumously in 1982), will guide us throughout.

Texts:

Hart Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Letters . Ed. by Langdom Hammer (Library of America)
H. D., Helen in Egypt (New Directions)
Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems . Ed. Arnold Rampersad (Vintage)
Pablo Neruda, Canto General . Trans. by Jack Schmitt (U of California P)
Fernando Pessoa, Always Astonished. Selected Prose .Ed. and trans. by Edwin Honig (City Lights)
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet . Ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin Classics)
Fernando Pessoa, Poems . Ed. and trans. by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (City Lights)
Fernando Pessoa, Selected Prose . Ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Grove)
Próspero Saíz, Chants of Nezahualcoyotl & Obsidian Glyph (Ghost Pony Press)
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America)

Some critical and theoretical material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.

Comparative Literature 358 / Meets with Scandinavian 450
Scandinavian Decadence in its European Context
MW 2:30-3:45 / 483 Van Hise
Professor Susan Brantly -
1366 Van Hise - 262-9637
MW 2:30-3:45 / 483 Van Hise

And Niels Graff spoke--about that which is dying. Niels Graff said: "I am a Darwinist and a decadent. I believe that the brutal will live and the beautiful will die. In the battle for existence, waged between those social organisms which are called states, those will triumph whose crudity is greatest and those will fall whose soul is refined, and whose striving is directed toward the highest goal. I believe that societies develop as animals and plants do. The earth is filled with the crudest and roughest sorts, while the beautiful and the fine ones become rarer and rarer, and are destroyed.

Johannes Jørgensen, The Tree of Life , 1893

Nuts and Bolts: This course meets three times per week. We will often enjoy guest lectures in this class, and students are urged not to miss any classes. Comparative Literature students should read the texts in their target languages in the original. Scandinavian Studies majors should plan to read all Scandinavian texts in the original. Literature in Translation students may read all the texts in translation.

CL368 Meets with Lit. Trans. 277 Kafka and the Karkaesque
Professor Hans Adler-
Lecture: TR @ 11:00 - 12:15

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) is one of those authors whose impact on World literature cannot be underestimated. Born an Austrian Jew, living in the German-speaking Diaspora of Prague, making his living during the day as a relatively successful employee of an insurance company and desperately trying to create fiction that meets his own extreme expectations, constantly at odds with the expectations of his family, friends, and fiancées/female acquaintances, and plagued by frail health, Franz Kafka struggled his entire life to reconcile the irreconcilable: life and writing. He published only very few texts during his lifetime, and on his death bed he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all remaining manuscripts—a last will with which Brod did not comply. Kafka’s texts constitute a new level and quality of literature that has triggered innumerable responses in many languages, media, and discourses. He is an “international” author of a new type of “world literature,” the quality of which is clear yet denies all attempts to approach it by way of traditional means of interpretation: Kafka’s texts demand a transdisciplinary and comparative approach. It is perplexing: We understand the words and sentences of Kafka’s texts, but when it comes to envisioning the world created by these texts, our imagination falls short of being able to grasp both the universe of his texts and its internal logic. Similar to Kafka’s characters, who are losers from the outset, the readers of Kafka’s texts seem doomed to fail in their attempts to understand this uncanny world, created only from common language. And here lies the uncomfortable paradox: We can understand his texts but we struggle to follow their logic and the mysterious world created by them. The term “Kafkaesque” makes clear that the type and dimension of Kafka’s texts has been perceived as strange, uncanny, and resistant to any classification. Other authors have tried to adopt the Kafkaesque, situating themselves in the literary tradition of the uncanny that relies on the world of the mystified city of Prague with its long Jewish tradition as well as on Romanticist and Gothic texts.
In this course, we will read a wide selection of texts by Franz Kafka in order to prepare our understanding of his universe in comparison with other contemporary authors as well as authors from other cultures and eras (Borges, Poe, Meyrink, Y. Rosenberg, D. Frishman, H. Leivick, W.G. Sebald, T. Pynchon, H. Mulisch). In particular we will read texts from the literary tradition of the Golem, which can be traced back to the Psalms and Talmudic tradition, and which has been transformed several times into movies. And, believe it or not: As a poem by P. Celan, J.L. Borges’s El Golem (1958) and J. Hollander’s response (1971) as well as contemporary fiction in English show, the Golem is still alive! Lectures will also highlight literature, film, and art works in the tradition of the Kafkaesque. The discussion sections will offer intense, focused reading, and discussion of selected texts. In addition to the lectures, discussion, and weekly reading, a small number of short writing assignments and a final paper (5-7 pages) will be required.

This course is open to freshmen. One of the discussion sections will be offered in German.

Comparative Literature 372 / Meets with Classics 373: Ancient Novel and its Influence
M. Goldman-
MW 2:30-3:45 / 201 Van Hise

This course is an examination of the ancient novels and their influence on later fiction, focusing on the representation of love and sexuality, social life, and narrative technique. Ancient texts: Xenehon of Ephesus, Chariton, Archilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus, Petronius, Apuleius; Later Fiction" Lazarillo de Thormes, Sidney's 'new' Arcadia, Walpole's Castle of Otranto.

Comparative Literature 475 - Poetics and Literary Theory-The Problem of Metaphor
MW 2:30-3:45 / 583 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz -
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise

Metaphor-a major poetical and rhetorical figure, sometimes emblematic of figurative language in general-has become recently an object of intensive research and philosophical questioning. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and de Man, for example, associate metaphor with the
representational mode of metaphysical thinking. In America, Lakoff, Johnson, Turner and others see metaphor as a function of the basic cognitive function of the human mind, susceptible of empirical inquiry. Ricoeur attempts to defend metaphor against the critique of Heidegger
and Derrida in a synthesis of continental and analytical thought.

In this course we shall survey the traditional theories of metaphor and then introduce the current debate over its metaphysical, poetical, rhetorical, cognitive, political, etc., status. Throughout our course of study we shall test the proposed theories against some famous examples
of "poetic" metaphors.

Tentative Reading:
Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor
Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor

Course Reader (including literary texts and theoretical essays)