Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2009
203: Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literature - Scary Monsters
MW @ 12:05 - B102 Van Vleck
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851
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 Children of Hurin. 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 provides 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
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Children of Hurin
H.P. Lovecraft: At The Mountains of Madness
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 @ 1:20 (3 credits)
6210 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."
Tentative
Fiction:
Etel Adnan: Sitt 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
Race: Are We So Different?: http://www.understandingrace.org/
Additional selected readings 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
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 page report on participant observation of social interaction in a community gathering place
~ occasional ungraded but for credit in-lecture 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 (15%) and discussion section (15%): 30%
Comparative Literature 351 - Novels and Short Stories
Meets with French 211
TR 1:00 - 2:15/ 215 Van Hise
Professor Richard Goodkin -
640 Van Hise - 262-0581
Comparative Literature 375 - Law and Order: Of Literature
TR 2:30-3:45
Professor Max Statkiewicz
Law and Order: Of Literature
This course will provide an introduction to the complex relationship between law and literature. On the simplest level, legal problems will be studied as a theme in tragedies, comedies, dialogues, novels, short stories etc. On another level the question of order in the society will be brought together with the question of order in the structure and hierarchy of literary genres. We shall investigate these questions in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and The Furies, Sophocles’ Antigone, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Melville’s “Billy Budd” and “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Shaw’s Saint Joan, Kafka’s Trial, Camus’s The Stranger. Some modern and contemporary thinkers, such as Hegel and Derrida, will help us to conceptualize and to problematize the interrelationship between law and literature.
Comparative Literature 475 - "Re-Reading the Sacred"
MW 2:30-3:45 / 590 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos-
Ph (608) 263-3851 - 950 Van Hise
We will discuss the interpretive nature of writing as we examine how every sacred text reinterprets previous texts, often in ways quite different from the original text's apparent meaning. Hebrew Scriptures will be studied in the context of Ancient Near Eastern sacred literature. We will then examine how the Christian Scriptures respond to, and sometimes claim to supercede, the sacred texts of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Platonism, and other traditions. When we study the sacred texts of the ancient Near East, we will discuss not only the canonical texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also lesser known and extinct belief systems such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism. The ancient Gnostic idea that the story of the Garden of Eden is true but the serpent was really the hero and God the villain is one of several creative interpretations we will study as we attempt to understand the complex ways in which people come to terms with tradition.
The first part of the course will discuss scriptural traditions that originated in the ancient Middle East . We will then discuss South Asian texts, focusing especially on how Hinduism and Buddhism respond to each other, often reinventing themselves in the process of reinterpreting each other's sacred texts.