Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2009

Comparative Literature 201: Introduction to Pre-Modern Literatures: Creation Stories
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851
Lecture: MW @ 12:05

5206 Social Science

We will study works from several ancient and medieval cultures concerning the origins of humanity and the world. First we will read the Greek poet Hesiod’s account of the origin of the gods and a selection from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which begins with the creation of the world and then tells of men and women surrounded by brutal forces in an ever-changing world. We will then read several hymns from the sacred Indian text the Rig Veda that tell of how the world was made and how different deities preside over both the natural world and the social order. Next we will study sacred scriptures of Zoroastrianism, especially the works of the prophet Zarathustra, who has been called the inventor of morality. In our reading of Zarathustra’s hymns, the gathas, we will discuss Zarathustra’s concentration on ethical questions and his introduction of the tremendously influential view of the world as a battleground between forces of good and evil. As we read the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson we will examine how the author combines his account of the creation of the world with a discussion of writing as a creative act. The connection between the work of the creator God and creative work of the poet will also figure in our discussion of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. We will read several passages from the Bible as we prepare to read Milton’s epic, and we will compare the biblical accounts of creation with that found in a related text, the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish. In the final part of the course we will read two Indian works of the first century, the sacred Hindu text The Bhagavad-Gita and Ashvaghosha’s Life of the Buddha, discussing how both texts deal with notions of creation found in the Rig Veda.

Comparative Literature 202: Introduction of Modern & Contemporary Literatures: Imaginary Maps of the Modern World: Justice, Injustice, & Cohabitation?

Professor Mary Layoun -
938 Van Hise - 262-9767
Lecture: MW @ 1:20 (3 credits, honors credit option)
5208 Social Science

What can literature say to us about the world? How does an imaginary universe - fictional, literary, graphic - point at both its imaginary self and at something else? These questions will guide our reading and discussion and your writing about a wonderful, wide-ranging, and slightly idiosyncratic configuration of readings.

Readings will likely include a selection of the following:

Deep Cuts: Graphic Adaptations of African Literature
Maryse Condé: Heremakhonon
Mahmud Darwish: Memory for Forgetfulness
Mahasweta Devi: "Draupadi"
Hayashi Fumiko: "Shitamachi"
Ghassan Kanafani: Men in the Sun and other Stories
Alex La Guma: A Walk in the Night and other Stories
Earl Lovelace: The Dragon Can't Dance
Zakes Mda: The Madonna of Excelsior: A Novel
Alan Moore: Watchmen
Walter Mosley: The Right Mistake
Oe Kenzaburo: "Prize Stock"

Comparative Literature 368 / Meets with Lit. Trans. 277 "Kafka and the Kafkaesque"
Professor Hans Adler-
Lecture: TR @ 11:00 - 12:15 - 5208 Social Science

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 375 Literature and Related Disciplines: Law and Literature
TR 2:30-3:45 / 205 Van Hise
Dr. Ralph Grunewald
942 Van Hise - 262-7347

Comparative Literature 379 / Meets with Modern Greek 105 (1st semester Modern Greek)
TWR 4:30-6 :00 (4 credits)
Instructor: TBA

Comparative Literature 473: Thematics - Modernity & the Lyric
Lecture 001: TR 9:30 - 10:45
Professor Irene Santos

The course will focus on the relevance in the western culture of the various phenomena variously designated as the modern, modernity, modernization, modernism, postmodernism. Each age has its forms of modernity, i. e. its ways of being of its time. Some historical events are easily identifiable as constituting the modernity of a particular age: the “Discoveries,” the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Nationalism, Feminism, Emancipation, Globalization.

The aim of the course is to articulate the supposed gratuitous timelessness of lyric poetry, its “actual present,” as Gertrude Stein would say, with its being of its time. In other words, the objective of the course is to try to understand how different historical events or intellectual movements impact on lyric poetry. We will be looking at key primary and secondary texts of German, English and American Romanticism, French Symbolism, Anglo-American Modernism, the Portuguese Orpheu Movement, and Brazilian Modernism.

Comparative Literature 473: Thematics - Flowers of War
Lecture 002: MWF 11:00
Professor Ernesto Livorni

The course focuses on a few representative poets who worked with the historical avant-garde movements in the years immediately before, during, and after World War I. The course aims at exploring war poetry as well as artistic venues and solutions that the Great War suddenly either made available or forced the poets to explore. Poets include Apollinaire, Pound, Ungaretti, Marinetti, Stramm, Owen, Brooke, Lichtenstein.

Comparative Literature 475 / Poetics and Literary Theory - "The Poetics of Cruelty"
Professor Max Statkiewicz -
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
Lecture 002 (3 credits): MW 2:30-3:45 / 583 Van Hise

Defending his notion of the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud writes in a letter to Jean Paulhan in 1932: "[t]his Cruelty is a matter of neither sadism nor bloodshed, at least not in any exclusive way. […] The word "cruelty" must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given. And I claim, in doing this, the right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck, in short to return to the etymological origins of speech which, in the midst of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete element." Thus, for the prophet of the modern theater, cruelty is a matter of language, of its innermost essence. Even when (in Seneca's play) Medea's children are murdered on stage against the rules of Aristotelian and Horacian decorum, even when Gloucester's eyes are gouged out on stage (in Shakespeare's King Lear), or Anabella's heart is exposed on the tip of her brother/lover's swo
rd (in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore), the cruelty resides predominately in the language of these poetic works, or perhaps in language as such, the cruelty of which these works are able to reveal. In this course we shall study the interaction between physical, sensuous (aesthetic) cruelty and the cruelty of language, both the language of the dominant ideology and the language of art that exposes it. We shall read the works of some of the authors who marked the two prophets of contemporary art, Nietzsche and Artaud (e.g., Aeschylus, Ford, Sade, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky), as well as the works of those who were marked by them (e.g., Rilke, Genet, Bataille, Beckett, Weiss, Pasolini).