Undergraduate Courses Fall 2008

Comparative Literature 201: Introduction to Pre-Modern Literatures
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851
Lecture: MW @ 12:05 5208 Soc. Science

Creation Stories

This course will examine how different cultures, including our own, have understood the origin of the cosmos and humanity's place within it. In the first part of the course, we will study a wide range of texts that offer differing answers to fundamental questions such as: Is there a creator? How did evil enter the world? Does the world have one cause, two causes, or many causes? Was humanity created for a reason or did we simply emerge? We will discuss the philosophical and ethical implications that different answers to these questions may have.

After reading important texts from the ancient world, we will discuss how later writers such as John Milton and Mary Shelley used ancient stories of creation to address crucial social and political issues of their times. We will conclude by discussing how modern scientific theories of origin affect our understanding of ourselves and the world.

Tentative Reading List:

Genesis
The Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Creation Myth
Hesiod's Theogony
Selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses
African Myths of Origin , ed. Stephen Belcher
Primal Myths by Barbara C. Sproul
John Milton's Paradise Lost
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok

Comparative Literature 203: Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literary Forms :
Comics, Narrative and History

Professor Mary Layoun -
938 Van Hise - 262-9767
Lecture: MW @ 1:20 (3 credits)
165 Bascom

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 fifty years or so 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 if comics are the sequential construction of stories in both words and images, what can we learn from comics about history or narrative or ‘relational’ literacy? We read, talk, and think together about this and other questions.

Tentative Reading List:
Kris Benka & Jen Dresen: Manya
Neil Gaiman: Violent Cases
Ryan Inzana: Johnny Jihad
Konopacki & Zinn: People’s History of American Empire
Keiji Nakazawa: Barefoot Gen
Joe Sacco: Palestine
Art Spiegelman: Maus
Tezuka Osamu: Adolph

Comparative Literature 351 - Love Poetry of the Ancient Mediterranean
Meets with Classics 376
MW 8:25-9:15 / 114 Van Hise
Professor Patricia Rosenmeyer -

This class will introduce you to the love poetry of four ancient Mediterranean cultures: Egypt, Israel, Greece and Rome. Ideas of love and desire are culturally determined, reflecting assumptions often very different from our own. We will read a variety of lyric poems in the context of their socio-historical and artistic settings, and confront a
range of issues including physical vs. spiritual love, cultural ideals of beauty, literary representations of gender roles and sexual preferences, the dynamics of tradition and imitation in literature, and conventions of literary form.

Comparative Literature 368 Meets with Lit. Trans. 277 "Kafka and the Kafkaesque"
Professor Hans Adler-
Lecture: TR @ 11:00 - 12:15 - 121 Psychology

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 an 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. And indedd: reading Kafka 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, 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. A small number of short writing assignments might be required (depending on funding for TAs or readers). There will be a midterm and a final exam.

This course is open to freshmen.

Comparative Literature 371 / Literary Criticism
TR 9:30-10:45 / 205 Van Hise
Professor Irene Santos
942 Van Hise - 262-7347

Modernity & the Modern Lyric

We begin our study by considering the relevance in Western culture of the various phenomena variously designated as modernity, modernization, modernism, or the modern. Each age has its modern(ity), i. e. its being of its time. Some historical and political events are easily identifiable as constituting the modernity of a particular age: the "Discoveries," the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Imperialism, Colonialism, Globalization.

The aim of the course is to articulate the supposed timelessness of lyric poetry with its being of its time. After a brief survey of lyrical poems and commentaries from the Renaissance to Romanticism, and while problematizing the very concept of the "lyric," the course will focus on what has been consensually acknowledged as Western literary modernism. We will thus inquire into aspects of the theory and practice of lyric poetry in Western culture since the nineteenth century, by looking at key texts of German, English and American Romanticism, French Symbolism, Anglo-American Modernism, and the Portuguese Orpheu Movement. The objective is to enjoy the poems while grasping how lyric poetry is read in our time by philosophers and critics, as well as by the poets themselves.

Athenaeum , selection of fragments
Charles Baudelaire, poems and essays
William Blake, "To the Muses"; "Visions of the Daughters of Albion "
Paul Celan, selected poems and prose
Hart Crane, selected poems and letters
Emily Dickinson, selected poems and letters
John Donne, "To His Mistress Going to Bed"
Friedrich Hölderlin, "Empedocles"; "In the Forest "
Stéphane Mallarmé, selected poems and prose
Fernando Pessoa, selected poems and prose; The Book of Disquiet(ude)
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition"; "The Raven"
Arthur Rimbaud, selected poems and letters
Walt Whitman, selected poems and prose

Theoretical and critical essays by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Enrique Dussel

Comparative Literature 466/Meets with Lit. Trans 410 (French & Italian) - Literatures and The Other Arts
Lecture: TR 1:00-2:15 - 6224 Social Science
Disc: R 2:25 - 53 Bascom
Professor Ernesto Livorni

El, D'Annunzio and Pirandello: Novels and Plays

The course will focus on some novels and plays by the two Italian writers Gabriele D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello. Their works will be considered in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European literature. Some issues that will be discussed are: the cultural shift from an objective to a symbolic representation of reality; the notion of decadence; the struggle between life and art; the resistance to relativity.

Comparative Literature 475 / Poetics and Literary Theory - Existentialism & Literature
Professor Max Statkiewicz -
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise

Lecture 001 (3 credits): MW 2:30-3:45 / 599 Van Hise
Disc 301 (4th credit): M 4:00 - 486 Van Hise
Note: When registering for the Lecture for 3 credits: Pick Opt Section for 3 credits. When registering for lecture & discussion for 4 credits, Opt Sec. for 4 credits, you must enroll in the disc. section as well.

"Existentialism" is a somewhat imprecise and yet intriguing term under which various philosophical, religious, and literary texts are often grouped. There is hardly a common agreement between the teachers and the editors of anthologies as to the choice of texts; there is no existentialist canon. An attempt to constitute such a canon, to formulate a coherent series of principles that would define a way of thought conspicuously hostile to any system, might in fact be inappropriate. We will thus begin our study from the assumption that it is important to present the debates and controversies surrounding the term "existentialism," to re-apprise the legacy of existentialism (Schrift), to study the texts that programmatically reject the security of systematic knowledge and question Western metaphysics, essential humanism, and nihilism. Our own discussion will focus on such "existential" notions as "dread," "authenticity," "alienation," "being toward death," "facticity," "the absurd," "choice and responsibility," "freedom." One of the consequences of these considerations is that they force us to reconsider the apparently clear borders between various disciplines and in particular between philosophy and literature. Thus our texts will often flout the traditional generic divisions. Texts (required and recommended):

Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity
Camus, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Possessed (adaptation), Caligula
Dostoevsky, The Possessed, Notes from Underground
Duras, The Malady of Death
Heidegger, Being and Time (excerpts), "What is Metaphysics?," "Letter on Humanism"
Jaspers, Reason and Existenz: Five Lectures
Kafka, "A Hunger Artist," The Trial
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death
Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols
Pascal, Pensées (excerpts)
Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Sartre, Nausea, "Existentialism is a Humanism," No Exit, The Flies, "The Wall"

Photocopies of literary texts and theoretical essays

Comparative Literature 475 / Meets with Geman 741 - Poetics and Literary Theory
Professor Hans Adler-
Ph (608) 262-9863 - 870 Van Hise
Lecture: 002 (3 credits): R 3:30-6:00 - 209 Van Hise

A hedonist understanding starts from the assumption that consumers of literature do not have to make any efforts when reading: all they have to do is enjoy. If, however, we want to know why and how texts--read, performed, presented, 'evented'-affect us in an inimitable way, we have to reflect on literature and its particular qualities. In short: we look at the specifics of literature and its functions within their respective contexts. What is exclusively specific for literature (as opposed to, e.g., the visual arts, historiography, philosophy, etc.)? How, precisely, do we leap from enjoying to analyzing, and then to enjoying more "deeply" after the analysis of literary texts? What are functions of literature for the psychological economy of human beings? for societies? cultures? Does literature serve a purpose? What, then, is the purpose of literature that declares explicitly to not serve any purpose?

In this course, we will start from discussing some generic concepts that pertain to the field of literature as a subfield of human culture. Then, we will devote some of our time to very close readings of literary texts from different languages, authors, and times. Based on our reading experience, we will develop sets of questions that relate to the fundament of literary scholarship. We will start from our own set of questions and develop strategies (methods, i.e., controlled approaches) to find satisfying answers to our questions. Finally, we will seek support from authors who already invested energy and talent in this type of investigation. From close reading to reflecting to reflecting on (already existing) reflections leads us from simple stages of theorizing to complex levels of literary theory and poetics. Our goal is to better understand literary theory and poetics as 'windows on literature.'

The dominant form of this course will be in-class discussion. Participants will give short presentations on limited topics in class . A final research paper will be written in consultation with the instructor. Among the author we will read are Gustave Flaubert, Robert Musil, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, Theodor W. Adorno, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Barbara Johnson, Terry Eagleton, Hayden White, Clifford Geertz, and others.