Undergraduate Courses Spring 2005
CL202: Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Literature
TR @ 11:00 - 113 Psychology Building
Professor Keith Cohen
Introduction to the critical study of literature from the Renaissance to the 20th century. The emphasis will be twofold: on the texts as complex language structures that challenge readers to make sense of and enjoy them; and on the contexts in which the authors created these texts, including historical, social and economic backgrounds. In an effort to chart changing political and moral belief systems in the West, we shall pay particular attention to the ideologies that each work tended to foster or to resist.
All students will be required to attend lectures and meet with their discussion groups (=15% of final grade); in addition, there will be a 6-weeks exam (=25%), a short paper (=30%), and a final exam (=30%).
Texts:
Montaigne, Essays (Penguin)
Shakespeare, The Tempest (Signet)
Césaire, A Tempest (Ubu Theatre)
Sor Juana de la Cruz, Response and other Writings (Penguin)
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Norton)
Chateaubriand, Atala, René
Coetzee, Foe (Penguin)
Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton)
Brecht, The Good Person of Setzuan
García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
203: Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literary Forms
Topic: Literature & the Confessional Mode: East vs. West
Lecturer: Nozomi Irei
Lecture: TR @ 1:20 - 5208 Soc. Science
Historical, cultural, and social contexts are important considerations when we attempt to compare different texts. Yet, does our experience of reading reach a point at which the singularity of each individual text demands (or at least challenges) that we relinquish conventional categories in order that the text may "stand on its own?" Are there other aspects that come into play in the text which may betray designations such as "East" and "West" -- and, similarly, other terms which are used to demarcate cultural limits? We will explore this problem by studying the various techniques of "staging" which may be at work in literary texts, specifically the confessional mode. Our premise will be that confessional texts may be a site where varying degrees of prosaic and poetic energies can intersect, allowing the writer to dramatize his/her "confession." Confession, as a certain mode of communication which the writer enters, offers the writer many possibilities to express what it means to write. We will explore this in light of Rainer Maria Rilke's statement that "if a man is a deep writer, all his works are confessions." If this is the case, the dramatizing of "confession" may be, in more than one way, the story of what it means to write.
An integral part of the course will be to study the implications of literary texts written in the confessional mode. This means we must explore, above all, the critical aspect of confession. Confession seems to presuppose a concept of a "self." What kind of presentation of the
self happens in the confessional mode? The various ways in which the self is conceived (guilty, shameful, etc.,) would then determine the approach to the confessional mode -- and to writing as a whole. Some questions that arise include the following: Does confession hold a different status in the "East" than in the "West?" Beyond linguistic differences, are the structures of "Eastern" and "Western" writing different? This approach implies that there is a point of intersection between "East" and "West." Yet, we must also pay attention to whether
there is something about writing which is prior to other demands: cultural, ethnic, and otherwise.
Course Requirements:
discussion participation (25%)
essay #1 (15%)
essay #2 (15%)
essay #3 (20%)
final exam (25%)
Texts:
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
Franz Kafka: "The Burrow"; "In the Penal Colony"
Kuki Shuzo: Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of IKI
Herman Melville: "Bartleby the Scrivener"
Yukio Mishima: Sun and Steel
Shusaku Endo: Silence
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Tanizaki Junichiro: "The Tattoo Artist"
The Book of Hosea
CL288: Masterpeices of Literature for Honors II
Self-Expression in Modes of Critical Response
Lecturer: Ingrid Markhardt
Lecture: MWF @ 9:55 - 474 Van Hise
This course will focus on developing critical thinking as a form of self-expression in response to a variety of literary works. Some time will be spent on acquiring basic familiarity and some proficiency with poetic and literary terms, rhetorical strategies, and argument. Each of the literary works will be read in conjunction with very brief readings from psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism and critical theory. We will proceed through close in-class readings, presentations, feedback and discussion, with the aim that each student will take a critical position expressive of his or her own authentic responses to two or three of the works. Students will be required to write 5 short papers (2-3 pages), one of which will be developed into a final presentation and a final paper.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Friedrich Hölderlin, �Brod und Wein�
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
Fyodor Dostoievski, Notes From Underground, �The Grand Inquisitor�
Leo Tolstoy, �Death of Ivan Ilych�
Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Ubervilles
D.H. Lawrence, �The Prussian Officer,� �The Rocking Horse Winner,� �Sun�
Albert Camus The Plague
Eugène Ionesco, Rhinocéros
Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
CL 289: Introduction to Literary Forms for Honors
Scary Monsters
TR@ 1:00-2:15 155 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos -
Ph: (608) 263-3851 - 950 Van Hise
Note: This course is not available to students who took CL 287: Scary Monsters in Fall 2002.
We will examine how and why the human imagination creates non-human monsters. The monster helps humanity define what we are by showing clearly what we are not. Sometimes we disown our own undesirable traits by projecting them onto monstrous others and having an imaginary hero destroy them.
We will begin by studying the ancinet Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh’s portrayal of humanity rising to civilization from an earlier beast-like existence. We will then turn to Dante’s use of various monsters as symbols of different human vices. Beowulf and The Saga of the Volsungs will provide us with a sound sense of Tolkien’s background in Medieval Literature as we read the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In addition to preparing us to read Tolkien, The Saga of The Volsungs will show us examples of transgressors whose crimes cause them to forfeit their humanity and become monsters or animals. Here we will discuss how portrayal of the animal differs from portrayal of the monster, and how humanity relates to each.
Mary Shelley and John Gardner provide a modern twist on the monster story by sympathizing with the monster as a well-meaning but misunderstood social outcast. Shakespeare’s Richard III presents a portrait of a man who has internalized the label “monster.” We will finally examine H.P. Lovecraft’s construction of extraterrestrial, malign, and superhuman monsters as the embodiment of the modern fear that man is not the center of the universe, the measure of all things, or really very significant at all.
Tentative Reading List:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Dante: The Inferno
Beowulf
The Saga of the Volsungs
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
John Gardner: Grendel
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
Shakespeare: Richard III
H.P. Lovecraft: “The Call of Cthulhu,” selected other stories
CL310 Intro to Literary Criticism
Lect. TR @ 11:00-12:15 - 478 Van Hise
Disc. R @ 1:20 - 140 Van Hise
Professor Gerhard Richter -
Ph: (608) 262-2193 - 836 Van Hise
We will familiarize ourselves with some of the basic theoretical problems that arise in the comparative study of literature, including such topics as the literariness of literature, theories of interpretation, the concept of translation, and the function of comparative literary theory. Concepts such as “author,” “performative language,” “intention,” “critique,” “representation,” “aesthetic ideology,” and “textuality” will be investigated as we familiarize ourselves with a series of significant debates in the history and theory of literary criticism. Throughout our discussions, we will pay particular attention to the very notion of the “comparative.” What does it mean to compare? And if, in principle, anything can be compared with anything else, what is at stake in comparing something with itself?
Readings may include:
Vincent Leitch et.al. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds.), Critical Terms for Literary Study
Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature
Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading
Roland Barthes, S/Z
CL351 Lyric Poetry: Petrarch, Shakespears, and Donne and their Influences
Lect. TR - 9:30-10:45 - 155 Van Hise
Disc. R - 2:25 - 374 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos -
Ph. (608) 263-3851 - 950 Van Hise
This course will focus on lyric poetry that expresses psychological change and traces the shifting moods and psychological states people go through, especially when they are in love.
We will concentrate on two semi-autobiographical sequences of poems: Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Lyric is more suited to representing emotions and sensations that take place in an instant than to narrating events, yet lyric poets can create a sense of narrative by arranging their poems to form a chronicle of their emotional development. Petrarch’s writings on idealized love spawned many imitators whom Shakespeare and Donne later parodied, but Petrarch himself kept his sense of humor and recognized the dangers of falling in love with love and placing people on pedestals. As we read Petrarch, we will discuss how his psychological introspection and emphasis on self-awareness influenced the development of European autobiography and affected modern notions of individualism. We will then examine Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a later example of a European tradition which Petrarch popularized. Shakespeare’s narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece will give us further insight into differences between the genres of lyric and narrative. The course will conclude with John Donne, who transformed the lyric tradition to express the complex social, religious, and personal issues he faced.
The first several weeks of the course will be devoted to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the lyric works of the medieval troubadour Arnaut Daniel and the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti. Ovid’s work is frequently alluded to by the later poets, and Cavalcanti and Daniel introduced and popularized many of the themes, techniques and forms of lyric poetry which became influential in European literature.
Texts:
Selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Tales from Ovid translated by Ted Hughes
Poems by Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel in Ezra Pound’s Translations
Petrarch Canzoniere, translated by Mark Musa
Shakespeare, Sonnets and Poems
John Donne’s Poetry, selected and translated by Arthur L. Clements
Comparative Literature Graduate Course Descriptions Spring 2005
CL466 Literature and Cinema
Lect. MW - 2:30-3:45 - 386 Van Hise
Disc. W - 12:05 - 574 Van Hise
Professor Keith Cohen
A study of the interrelation among the arts during the classic modernist period, 1857 to 1959, with the main emphasis placed upon the changes that literature undergoes after the advent of cinema, ca. 1895. Students will take stock of the extensive intermedia experimentations among the arts and the frequent crossing of generic boundaries within literature during this seminal period. Dime novels, comic strips, verse plays, calligrams–these hybrid forms challenge the idea of an official literary history as well as a strict distinction between high culture and popular culture. As cinema’s dominant form becomes narrative, the new art may be compared to the novel in terms of its story-telling capacties. Consequently, the semiotic specificities of each art form, each medium, will be open for debate.
The course is divided into five units:
• the revolution in seeing ushered in by impressionist painting and Japanese prints, the ideology of the visible deriving from Renaissance perspective, and the development of film sensibility amidst a fin-de-siècle decadence;
• narrative as a system of semiotic relations that both permit exchanges between film and novel, even as economic factors unique to print culture and to the movie industry mitigate such an exchange;
• cinematic form in literature: multiple perspectivism, time shifts, montage...;
• mass cultural forms vs. the avant-garde; the critique of consumerism;
• shaping of postmodernist sensibility by radical departures in film form.
Requirements for the course:
☞ class attendance and film screenings (held in “lab” every other week), plus discussion section for those enrolled for 4 credits;
☞ mid-term exam;
☞ analytic paper (5 pages);
☞ final paper requiring original research (10-15 pages)
* Theoretical readings include: Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition, Eisenstein, Film Form; Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, selections (in photocopied Reader) from W. Benjamin, E. Panofsky, Arnheim, Balazs, Bazin, Barthes, et. al.
* Primary readings include: Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Stein, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” Joyce, excerpt - Ulysses; Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz; Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman
* Films include: “Primitives” such as Lumière, Méliès, Porter; Eisenstein, The Old and the New, Lang, Metropolis, Kurosawa, Rashomon, Coppola, The Conversation
CL 473 Literature and Myth
Lect. TR - 2:30-3:45 - 374 Van Hise
Disc. T - 1:20 - 478
Professor Max Statkiewicz -
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
A study of myth is a difficult, perhaps impossible task; at least if, following such authors as Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, one deconstructs the traditional opposition between muthos and logos (incidentally, one can find the seeds of such deconstruction in Plato, the supposed founder of Western logocentrism). If myth, including the myth of logos, tends to occupy the totality of social, political, and cultural space (the modern absence of myth is a myth, says Bataille), there seems to be no place from which to analyze myth in a non-mythic, scientific way (a rigorous logic of myth is necessarily a "mythics," says Nancy). In this course, we shall consider literature as the place of myths origin, of its absence (the myth of the society without myth), and especially of its interruption, and thus perhaps the only place of resistance to the
totalitarian system of mytho-logy (even, some would suggest, to totalitarianism itself). We shall examine some ancient and modern texts that found or attempt to revive Western myths, and those that initiate their interruption (which might in fact be the same texts).
Readings may include texts by: Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Herder, Schelling, Kleist, Nietzsche, Casirer, Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot, Rilke, Anouilh, Cocteau, Camus, Barthes, Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe.
CL690 Proseminar - Unpresentable
T - 5:00-7:30 - 209 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz -
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
The art and literature of our time is sometimes characterized by its
attempt to "put forward the unpresentable in presentation itself"
(Lyotard). This notion should be carefully distinguished not only from the
aesthetic enjoyment of beautiful forms, but also from a desire to share the
nostalgia for the unattainable, that is, not only from the traditional
aesthetics of the beautiful, but also from that of the sublime. Yet, it is
in the latter that the problematic of the unpresentable has been first
introduced. We shall investigate this tradition of the sublime. Beginning
with Longinus, we shall read some of the texts that form the basis of his
theory: Homer, Sappho, Sophocles, Plato. The more recent questioning of the
limits of presentation, especially the limits of language, will be studied
in Burke, Kant, Heidegger, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Agamben, together
with the literary texts that require this questioning.
Readings will include texts by: Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Longinus, Burke,
Kant, Deguy, Lyotard, Agamben, Baudelaire, Pascoli, and Celan
CL771 Literary Criticism: States of Theory
R @ 4:00-6:30 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Próspero Saíz -
Ph. (608) 262-1158 - 956 VanHise
We start with a question: Today, what are the states of critical "theory" (in the general--not the Frankfurt School--sense of the term)? In order to approach the question, we must raise questions about theory itself, such as, what is the nature of "theory," which means asking after its history, presuppositions, its limitations, its effects, and its possibilities. Or again: how do the different forms of theory join critical practices? Here we will seriously consider whether theorizing has inhibited the critical process itself. For it is possible that every theoretical "ism" attempts to protect itself by its announced or unannounced restrictive effects, as well as by its claims of ownership or guardianship of its foundations. Our task will be to analyze the assumptions, presuppositions, and limitations of some significant critical theories of the last thirty years or so. This means that we will have to question the givens of various critical textual fields--that we not simply accept the givens as determining. It also means that we must attempt to grasp how some "dominant" theories have become institutionalized in the university.
We will organize our study (1) around the problem of "the irresolution of epistemic differences," as reported by Herman Rapaport; (2) around issues concerning the "micropolitics of critical theory,"as articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, with special attention given to rhizomatic possibilities; (3) around Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the differend and ethics; (4) around Paul de Man's critique of aesthetics; and (5) around Peggy Kamuf's analysis of the questions that literature and the teaching of literature put to the university.
REQUIREMENTS: each student, in consultation with the instructor, will research and write on a critical theory area of his/her choice, e.g., feminism, structuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, deconstruction, or compromise formations such as cultural studies, postcolonial studies and New Historicism. In addition, each student will write a 1-2 pp. position paper on one of the following: (1) the question of history, (2) the question of aesthetics, (3) the question of critique,(4) the question of ethics. And a second 2 pp. position paper on one of the following general approaches: (1) formal analysis, (2) content analysis,(3)ethical analysis, (4)social analysis, (5)psychological analysis, (6)aesthetic analysis, (7)philosophical analysis.
TEXTS:
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community
Maurice Blanchot, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka, Toward A Minor Literature
Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology
Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature or the University in Deconstruction
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute
Herman Rapaport, The Theory Mess
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine
Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity
ARTICLES:
Giorgio Agamben, "The Original Structure of the Work of Art"
Jacques Derrida, "Some Statements & Truisms About Neo-logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, & Other Small Seismisms"
Jean-Luc Nancy, "Finite History"
Wolfgang Iser, "The Aesthetic and the Imaginary"
J. Hillis Miller, "Face to Face: Plato's Protagoras as a Model For Collective Research in the Humanities"
Jean-Francois Lyotard, "After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics
CL 975 The Invention of Aethetics
M @ 4:00 - 6:30 - 374 Van Hise Hall
Professor Adler -
Phone: (608) 262-9863 - 870 Van Hise
Aesthetics were not always what they are considered to be today. The discipline was first labeled “aesthetics” in 1735 and elaborated fragmentarily in 1750/58 by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. He developed an idea of aesthetics that went far beyond a theory of the arts or the beautiful. His concept of aesthics was situated at a high level of epistemology and psychology. With this idea, Baumgarten developed a discipline that was supposed to fill a gap in the contemporary philosophical system, but as a matter of fact eroded the system from the inside and created a new holistic discourse about the human being. What Baumgarten envisioned as an integral part of the then contemporary philosophical system failed to pass the test of transcendental philosophy of the Kantian mold and fell victim to two centuries of collective oblivion. In this seminar we will first read texts of pre-Kantian aesthetics in order to watch how a new concept comes into being and how it relates to the European context (e.g. Descartes, Leibniz, Locke). Then, we will read and contextualize Kant’s aesthetics within his system of transcendental philosophy. Readings of Romantic texts concerning aesthetics as well as parts of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics will follow. The goal of this seminar is to heighten the awareness of a suppressed concepts of aesthetics that has resurfaced vigorously over the past two decades within the context of continental philosophy and postmodern thinking. All participants will give a 30 minute presentation on a limited topic and write a research paper. The topics will be decided upon in close contact with me.
Text:
There will be a reader
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the power of judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer.
Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge University Press
2000. ISBN (paperback) 0 521 34892 7.