Undergraduate Courses Spring 2006

CL202: Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Literature
Professor Saiz
Lecture: MW @9:55 - 5208 Social Science

Our study of literature takes place in the Humanities. If literature is an important component of the Humanities, the following questions arise: What is literature and what is humanity–and how do they relate to each other? Does humanity need literature for its realization and fulfillment?

In the current state of American culture, is it possible for us to have an experience with literature? Today, what claims, if any, can such an experience make on our lives? Does literature challenge us and “our values,” or has it now become something routine and indifferent to our needs? This course is designed not merely to survey literary works as such but to put the very “nature” and “function”of literature itself into question. We will start from this working assumption: the literary text can “say” anything, and, therefore, some texts may be considered to be dangerous or not palatable ... by some. Perhaps literary texts are potent forces of non-conformity. Perhaps literary texts require that we think otherwise than the culture would like us to think. We will put this to the test by reading in an active way, which means that we will try to establish a “critical” position with regard to current values. This will require that each student be willing to question his or her basic assumptions and attitudes about education in the Humanities. In a general sense, the texts chosen this semester deal with the relationship between literature and evil, crime, ethics, and freedom.

TEXTS

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
LeRoi Jones [Baraka], Dutchman & the Slave
Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Poems by Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson

CL203: Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literature - Scary Monsters
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851
Lecture: TR @ 11:00 - 19 Ingraham

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 ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh 's portrayal of humanity rising to civilization from an earlier beast-like existence. After reading how monsters act as obstacles and markers on the journeys of two heroes finding their way home after the Trojan War in Homer's Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid , 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 The Hobbit . 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. 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
Homer: selections from the Odyssey
Vergil: selections from the Aeneid
Dante: The Inferno
Beowulf
The Saga of the Volsungs
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
John Gardner: Grendel
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit
H.P. Lovecraft: At The Mountains of Madness

There will also be a course reader with selected short stories.

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

This course will count toward the Ethnic Studies and Humanities requirements.

This course is not listed on the timetable yet, but will be offered:
Lecture: MW @ 1:20 (3 credits)
You will also need to register for a discussion section:

Professor Mary Layoun -
938 Van Hise - 262-9767
Professor Próspero Saíz -
956 Van Hise - 262-1158

CL205 will introduce students to the history of the idea of race, to its modern articulations in literary and cultural works, 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 and ethnicity in their own right and in relation 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: Sitt Marie Rose (Lebanon)
James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time (U.S.)
Oscar Zeta Costa: Revolt of the Cockroach People (U.S.)
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)

Non-Fiction:
Danielle Allen: Talking to Strangers
PBS interactive website: Race: The Power of an Illusion

CL289 - Introduction to Literary Forms for Honors: Tragedy
TR @ 1:00 - 2:15 - 155 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz - mstatkiewicz@wisc.edu
958 Van Hise - 262-7862

Tragedy, a common word referring in modern English to any kind of disaster, is also � and was originally � a literary form, a genre. The philosopher Aristotle considered tragedy a perfect art form and placed it at the center of his Poetics , which marked the whole Western tradition of literary theory and criticism. But tragedy has always been seen as more than just a literary form: a political institution, a metaphysical, cosmological, and anthropological reflection. We shall find such a view in another passionate reader of Greek tragedies, Nietzsche. It was his thought of the tragic that most vigorously opposed the (Aristotelian, but also Hegelian) notion of an aesthetic system able to integrate (purge, clarify, sublate, etc.) the tragic dimension of human being. A true tragedy expresses the experience of being at a loss in face of the uncanniness of human being � at the same time wonderful and terrible.

We shall begin by reading Greek tragedies with and against both Aristotle and Nietzsche, and then reflect on cases of modern, e.g., Shakespearian or Racinian, tragedy, before considering the possibility of tragedy's revival in our own times.

Reading :
Aristotle. The Poetics . Edited by Richard Koss. Dover , 1997.
Grene, David and Richmond A. Lattimore (eds.), Greek Tragedies , vol. 1. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Birth of Tragedy . Translated by Clifton Fadiman. Dover , 1995.
Racine, Jean. Phèdre . Translated by Ted Hughes. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Penguin, 1998.
Stoppard, Tom. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead . Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1976.
O'Neill, Eugene . Three Plays: Desire under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra . Random House, 1995.
Anouilh, Jean. Antigone . Translated by Gallantière. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman . Hungry Minds, 2000.
Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children . Translated by Eric Bentley. Grove We, 1976.

CL 372: Shakespeare & Cervantes: Origins of the Modern
Lecture: TR @ 2:30-3:45 - 490 Van Hise
Disc: T @ 1:20 - 586 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos -
Ph: (608) 263-3851 - 950 Van Hise

Cervantes and Shakespeare, who both died on the same day, wrote at a time when Europe was first encountering other cultures in the Americas, the Protestant Reformation had recently ended Western Europe's illusions of religious unity, the individual as opposed to the collective was gaining importance in social thought, and monarchs were working to replace medieval feudal governments with modern, centralized states. We will discuss how the two writers engage with all of these political, social, and philosophical issues as well as how psychological and narrative developments in their work mark a break with earlier literary conventions. Selections from medieval plays, romances, short stories, and novels will be read so we can analyze how Shakespeare and Cervantes changed the traditions within which they worked.

Text:

Shakespeare:

Hamlet
The Tempest
Henry IV, parts 1-2
Henry V
Twelfth Night
Romeo and Juliet
Othello

For one additional credit, students may enroll in a discussion section which will read works by other English and Spanish playwrights of the period.

CL690 - Proseminar: Art & Truth
TR @ 5:00 - 6:15 - 155 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz -
958 Van Hise - 262-7862

In Western thought, truth is traditionally paired with philosophy. So much so that art was often opposed not only to philosophy but also to truth, and not only by Plato and those who followed him in the "Platonic" West, but also by Nietzsche, who characterized his thought as "inverted Platonism." Plato's "old quarrel" between philosophy and poetry and Nietzsche's "dreadful discordance" between art and truth testify to this important problematic in Western tradition. But there is another way of understanding the relationship between art and truth: the view of the work of art as the "happening of truth," "setting-into-work of truth," or as "the revelation of the truth of time," which we will trace in Hölderlin and Heidegger, Proust and Deleuze, as well as other contemporary readers of Plato and Nietzsche.

Readings may include:

Plato, The Republic, Phaedrus
Aristotle, Poetics
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense"
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought
Derrida, Truth in Painting
Deleuze, Proust and Signs
Lacoue-Labarthe, "Sublime Truth"
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Proust, Swann's Way , Time Regained
Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers
Gombrowicz, Cosmos
Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Borges, selected stories
Selected lyric poetry