Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2010

203: Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literature - Tolkien & The Middle Ages
Professor Chris Livanos -
950 Van Hise - 263-3851
MW @ 12:05 - 5206 Social Science Bldg.

We will read the major works of J.R.R. Tolkien and several of the medieval texts from which he drew inspiration.  We will also read the Finnish epic The Kalevala, which greatly influenced Tolkien and which, like Tolkien’s own work, is a latter-day work based on earlier traditions.  The course will examine how Tolkien used medieval source material to give modern perspectives on topics such as war, ecology and the nature of power.  In addition to Tolkien’s better-known works, we will read the recently published The Children of Húrin, written while Tolkien was recovering from wounds sustained during combat in World War I.  In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Tolkien translated, we will discuss how the hostile and beneficial aspects of nature are depicted differently in the text and in Tolkien’s own writings.  In the Saga of the Volsungs, we will study topics such as a cursed ring, dragons, and the idea of some crimes being so monstrous that they cause the transgressor to lose their very humanity (as happened to Gollum).  In the Silmarillion we will study the story of the creation of the world and discuss how Tolkien introduces notions that are unprecedented in mythology and quite different from the teachings of his own Christian religion.

Texts
Tolkien:
The Lord of the Rings
The Hobbit
The Silmarillion
The Children of Húrin

Other Texts:
Beowulf
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Saga of the Volsungs
The Kalevala

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)
5208 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 Readings:
Fiction:
Etel Adnan: Sitt Marie Rose (Lebanon)
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (U.S.)
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 358 - Scandinavian Decadence in its European Context
Meets with Scandinavian 450
TR 2:30 - 3:45/ 382 Van Hise
Professor Susan Brantly-
640 Van Hise - 262-9737

Comparative Literature 379 / Meets with Modern Greek 106 (2nd semester Modern Greek)
TWR 4:30-6 :00 (4 credits)
Instructor: Matthew Hogan

Comparative Literature 473: Buddhism & Literature
Lecture 001: MW 2:30-3:45
Professor Chris Livanos
Ph (608) 263-3851 - 950 Van Hise

We will study literary texts from a variety of Buddhist traditions as well as modern texts influenced by Buddhist thought.  The class will discuss the development of the Buddhist religion and differences between the various forms of Buddhism.  In the works of Ashvaghosha, we will discuss how the author changes the genre of epic poetry (normally used to tell stories of heroic warriors), to tell a story of enlightenment.  In our reading of the Jataka tales (stories of the Buddha’s past lives) we will discuss how folk tales are incorporated into the Buddhist tradition.  In the work of the eighth-century Chinese poet Wang Wei, one issue we will address will be the contrast between the poet’s remarkable ability to invoke the beauty of the physical world and the Buddhist tenet that worldly existence is unsatisfactory.  We will then study parts of Osamu Tezuka’s series of graphic novels based on the life of the Buddha. 

Texts:

Ashvaghosha’s Life of the Buddha
Ashvaghosha’s Handsome Nanda
The Lotus Sutra
Poems of Wang Wei
Selected Jataka Tales
Songs of Milarepa
Osamu Tezuka The Forest of Uruvela (Buddha vol. 4)

Comparative Literature 473: Grand Tour
Lecture 002: MWF 12:05
Professor Ernesto Livorni

The Grand Tour and the Romantic Myth of Italy

The course focuses on that literary phenomenon that took place from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. In that period intellectuals and artists from Germany, England, and France came to visit Italy and to appreciate the remnants of the great past of the country, from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. Needless to say, Florence was always one of the most attractive places to visit. The course includes readings from Goethe, Madame de Stael, Byron, Foscolo, Shelley, Keats, Leopardi, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Comparative Literature 475 - Biopolitics
M 2:25-4:55
Professor Sara Guyer-
Ph (608) 263-3706 - 7165 Helen C White Hall

In the late-eighteenth century, governments began recognize populations, health, sanitation, sexuality, race, etc. as their domain and to marshal power through the management of human bodies. More recently, the emergence of stem cells, health care, world hunger, and human rights, as major political issues, also suggests the centrality of biological life to politics. Philosophers, anthropologists, and literary theorists, among others have analyzed this convergence of politics and life, and it will be the aim of this course to survey the various theories of biopolitics as a means towards understanding a key development in contemporary critical theory. Authors to be read include: Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, Barbara Johnson, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Paul Rabinow.

Comparative Literature 475 - Existentialism: Between Philosophy & Literature
R 4:00-6:30
Professor Max Statkiewicz-
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise

The popularity of "existentialism" in our time is not only the result of fashion. It is true that "existentialism" has been associated at various times with such fashionable figures as Juliette Greco, James Dean, or Jim Morrison, even if their way was to resist rather than to create fashions. In any case, existentialism has never been just a fashion. It could even be defined as resistance to fashion, and to other manifestations of orthodoxy or correctness, of "inauthentic" ways of living – that is, if it didn't resist the correctness of definition as well. Thus, existentialism as an academic term might designate first of all a problem – the problem of the limits of scientific and of ideological orthodoxy, of academic education, and of literature as an alternative way of approaching the world, of "being in the world." Our contemporary world, the "fashionable" world of the twenty-first century, is in a particular need of resisting the ever-growing uniformization of life. Existentialist texts, which thematize the uniqueness of human experience, are crucial for realizing the need for such resistance.
            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 and to formulate a coherent series of principles that would define a way of thought conspicuously hostile to any system would 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 (Alan 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." These considerations will 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. They will include SOME of the following:

Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity
Albert Camus, Caligula, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, The Possessed (an adaptation of            Demons)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground and Demons or The Brothers Karamazov 
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling or The Concept of Anxiety or The Sickness unto Death
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Antichrist
Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, The Flies, Nausea, "The Wall," Existentialism is a Humanism
Martin Heidegger, "Letter on ‘Humanism’" and "What is Metaphysics?"
Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz
Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist," The Trial
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being,
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Miguel de Unamuno, On the Tragic Sense of Life