| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department COMP_LIT Comparative Literary Studies Program (X) |
This course will examine cultural production and the ways in which we learn to talk about it. As such, we will consider culture in its high, low, media, mass and popular manifestations through a variety of theoretical and disciplinary vantage points, including but not limited to anthropology, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and cultural studies (in its British, American, and/or Latin American varieties). We will be especially attentive to the geopolitical location and displacement of culture, that is, to how culture is understood and deployed differently at various global sites. In their status as interfaces for the experience of culture, institutions such as the museum, journalism, and the university, among others, will be considered. We will take some of our examples for study from literature, music, the internet, tv, video, Âhigh art, film, photography, and performance. Students will be asked to engage actively in the analysis of cultural objects as well as the theories that surround them.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
What is lyric poetry? What are its roots, and what are its possibilities today? How does it stand in relation to the countless other varieties of rhymed and/or rhythmic languageÂhymns, pop songs, advertising slogans, campaign mottoes, bumper stickers, and so onÂthat surround us in our daily life? We will explore these and many other questions by way of examining lyrics past and present, from psalms and hymns to epitaphs, elegies, ballads, and love poems. This course will emphasize the varieties of lyric, both in English originals and in translation, with particular attention to the meanings of poetic form and the nature of poetic translation. The course will be conducted through a combination of lecture and discussion. Daily attendance is expected. There will be a series of daily, ungraded, exercises and brief evaluations along with 4 short graded assignments stressing close reading and critical thinking and a longer take-home assignment at the termÂs end.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
Few women writers are included in standard lists of the major canonical writers of the modern Japanese literary tradition. But especially since the 1960s, women make up a significant proportion of the most interesting contemporary writers. This course, in a sense a parallel to CLS 271-3 (Modern Japanese Literature), introduces a number of these newer creative voices, many of whom have won the major literary prizes in the past several decades. These more recent writers, and other writers from the late 19th and through the 20th centuries, show women meeting--sometimes triumphantly, often with great difficulty--the challenges of a changing social order with its changes in personal relationships between men and women.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
As an introduction to the outlines of Chinese literature from its ancient roots to its Âmodern flowering in the Song dynasty (A.D. 960), this course aims to provide insight into the humanistic Chinese tradition. We will work through masterpieces of prose and poetry in a roughly chronological manner. These include lyrical masterworks in the various poetic modes, fiction from early strange and supernatural Daoist-inspired stories to adventurous and sensual medieval tales, as well as exemplary essays, parables and jokes, vivid historical writings, and profound philosophical pieces. Close readings of texts will enable you to gain intimacy and familiarity with this long and rich literary tradition and, more importantly, will also equip you with the skills to interpret and reconstruct traditions though reading texts, composing papers and designing presentations. Although it is impossible to cover all ancient, early and medieval Chinese literature in one quarter, you will leave the course with an enhanced sense of the richness and the wonder of this literature, a basic blueprint of China's literary development, and hopefully an interest in roaming through it further. Conducted in English.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
The purpose of this course is to study selected works of modern Jewish literature in the context of their historical background. We will focus on certain themes and stories in the Bible and in Jewish folklore as well as on particular events and movements in European, American, and Israeli history as a way of better understanding this literature. Though most of this literature dates from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual and religious currents such as the Enlightenment, Jewish Mysticism, Zionism, and Socialism will help us to understand the literature in its changing historical and social context. Thus while some writers saw modern Jewish literature as a means of educating the masses to modern secular needs, others saw it as a means of reshaping older forms and religious values, while still others saw it as a means of reflecting timeless humanistic concerns. Among the writers we will read are Sholom Aleichem, I.B. Singer, Henry Roth, B. Malamud, Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, A.B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
The purpose of this course is to study selected works of modern Jewish literature in the context of their historical background. We will focus on certain themes and stories in the Bible and in Jewish folklore as well as on particular events and movements in European, American, and Israeli history as a way of better understanding this literature. Though most of this literature dates from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual and religious currents such as the Enlightenment, Jewish Mysticism, Zionism, and Socialism will help us to understand the literature in its changing historical and social context. Thus while some writers saw modern Jewish literature as a means of educating the masses to modern secular needs, others saw it as a means of reshaping older forms and religious values, while still others saw it as a means of reflecting timeless humanistic concerns. Among the writers we will read are Sholom Aleichem, I.B. Singer, Henry Roth, B. Malamud, Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, A.B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
This is the "gateway" course for the new CLS concentration in Translation Studies. It is a combination of seminar and workshop. Together we will translate four poems and study theoretical approaches to literary translation and brief accounts of translation practice. The practice of translation gives us valuable understanding of poetry and poetics, language difference, and ways of reading poetry. Theoretical essays broaden our sense of the linguistic, aesthetic, cultural and even ethical issues involved in the practice of translation. Working both individually and collaboratively, students will translate four short poems from four different languages and will produce a final portfolio containing revised translations and a research paper on literary translation.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
In the present course we shall trace the history of self-writing from antiquity to the present day. Authors to be analyze d include Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, Roland Barthes, Maxine Hong-Kingston. Alongside the primary texts we shall be reading and discussing theoretical explorations of self-representation.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar is designed as a forum for the independent development and completion of a substantive scholarly paper in the field of Comparative Literature. The paper must involve either the study of literary texts from different literary traditions or the study of literature in relation to other media, other arts, or other disciplines. To this end, a number of short written assignments will be required, including an abstract, an outline of the paper project and an annotated bibliography. The bulk of the coursework will be in the form of an oral presentation (15 minutes; 7-8 pages) and the senior paper (12-15 pages). The in-class oral presentation is designed to be a practice run for the Senior CLS Colloquium, which will be held at the end of the quarter. The colloquium requires that all students give a revised fifteen-minute presentation to a number of CLS graduate students, who will also be in attendance.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar serves as an introduction to a variety of contemporary literary and critical theories. The course is organized as four two-week units under the following headings: structuralist linguistics and poetics; phenomenology and ontology; ideology and the unconscious; deconstruction and disciplines. Readings include Saussure, Jakobson, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Irigaray, Foucault, Derrida, and de Man.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
Faith knows no questions. But questions nevertheless keep arisingÂeven among those who are the most faithful. In this seminar we will examine the clash between faith and questioning by examining a series of exemplary works of literature and film from a wide variety of cultures. We will begin with KierkegaardÂs and KafkaÂs troubling reflections on the case of Abraham, who is willing to sacrifice his son but who is utterly incapable of being able to say what he is doing. We will then turn to DostoyevskyÂs remarkable story of the Grand Inquisitor, who performs a prolix speech in favor of human sacrifice before a silent Jesus. We conclude the seminar by reading contrasting accounts of the silent terms in which the act of sacrifice takes placeÂone from ancient Greece, the other from modern Austria. All along, we ask ourselves: what can one say about a situation that leaves us, as we say, ÂspeechlessÂ?
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
As a survey introduction to the literature of twentieth century China, we will study selected examples of 20th-century Chinese literature, a literature that was produced during a period of unprecedented upheaval and that itself has been a battleground for political, cultural, and aesthetic issues. Since it is arguably the most important genre of modern Chinese literature and is convenient to work with in class, emphasis is placed on the short story, though we will also consider modern poetry and each student will select two novels to read. Brief class lectures will present important historical and literary background to the period under scrutiny: from the 1910s, through the May Fourth Movement, the radicalization of the 30s, the Anti-Japanese War, the period of socialist construction, the Cultural Revolution, and the liberalization of the post-Mao era. The chronological arrangement of the course will give the student a sense of literary development. Great importance is placed on class discussion and on creating a dialogue of interpretations of the texts we read. Close reading of the texts is strongly encouraged as students are expected not only to learn about this fruitful and rich literary tradition, but, more importantly, to reconstruct it though the texts we read and the papers and presentations you produce. It is hoped that students come away from this course having not only learned something about modern Chinese literature, but also about how literary texts work and the different ways readers may approach and appreciate these texts. All works are read in translation; no language background is necessary.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
The achievement of a select group of modern Jewish writers is dependent, in large measure, on the way in which their writing reveals a Jewish past. Their treatment of Jewish tradition and Jewish history are the particulars which, paradoxically, often give their best work its most distinctive claim to universality. This course will focus on modern European and American Jewish writers such as Martin Buber, I. B. Singer, Bernard Malamud, Ida Fink, Cynthia Ozick, and Francine Prose, who have reshaped the oral and Hasidic tradition of storytelling in Judaism to their own individual talents.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
In the year 1950, shortly after the end of WW2, the German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt speaks of a Âglobal linear thinking in order to describe the division of the Earth during the Age of Discovery by European colonial powers. This class will investigate how concepts of space and orientation in relation to politics manifest themselves in literary and philosophical texts of the 19th and early 20th century. By focusing on scientific debates and artistic representations of geopolitical spaces in Germany and the United States (oceans, prairies, borders, walls, etc.) we will delineate a history of disorientation and discuss connections between subjectivity, territory, nation, politics, and literature.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
Pier Paolo PasoliniÂs 1974 film Flower of the Arabian Nights (Il Fiore delle mille e una notte) serves as the focal point in an exploration of the classic written frame story One Thousand and One Nights (Âalf laylah wa laylah). The genre features of the frame story as a hybrid of the folktale and the hero tale genres (whose roots are in the oral tradition and the medium of oral performance) will be traced, as will the literary history of the Arabian Nights in the medium of writing. Course films will include, for comparative purposes, PasoliniÂs two other movies in his frame story ÂTrilogy of LifeÂÂThe Decameron (Il Decameron, 1971) and The Canterbury Tales (I Racconti di Canterbury, 1972); PasoliniÂs first film, Accattone/Scrounger, 1961, and The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, 1964); and relevant clip sequences from a number of his other films. Two additional complete films to be made available are Philippe de BrocaÂs 1990 Les 1001 nuits, and Steve BarronÂs Arabian Nights TV movie screened on ABC/BBC One in 2000. Required texts include Husain HaddawyÂs The Arabian Nights, a translation of Muhsin MahdiÂs definitive reconstruction of the ealiest Arabic text; HaddawyÂs Arabian Nights II, subtitled ÂSindbad and Other Popular Stories because it also includes ÂQamar al-Zaman (relevant to PasoliniÂs film), as well as ÂAladdin and ÂAli Baba and the Forty ThievesÂ; and Robert IrwinÂs The Arabian Nights, A Companion. Remaining required and recommended texts will be available in .pdf version on the courseÂs Blackboard site. Enrollment is limited to 20, as a number of class sessions will be conducted in the MMLC Mac workstation lab in KRG 1-315 using available digital media tools for course work.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
Athens in the fifth century BCE was engaged in unprecedented democratic practice, frequent warfare, and extraordinary new practices of architecture, sculpture, poetry (especially tragedy), rhetoric, history and other pursuits. It was the site of a transition from oral culture to writing culture, which made possible both drama and philosophy. Athens dominated ancient Greek trade, political power, and especially intellectual and artistic life. The tragic poet Sophocles drew on the ancient myth of the generations of the family of Oedipus (who was the subject of epic poems--now lost--and is mentioned in Homer's Iliad) when writing three of his tragic dramas: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone (to list them in order of composition, for they were not produced as a trilogy). The first and third of these are among the most remarkable, famous and influential plays in western literature; they still retain great theatrical, emotional and intellectual power, and have occasioned productions, adaptations, translations, and literary, philosophical and psychological commentary for 2500 years. We will study aspects of each play and also of the three plays as a larger narrative--including mythology, dramatic and narrative structure, characters and ideas, the poetics of ancient Greek tragedy, and the ceremonial, religious and political dimensions of tragedy in ancient Greece. Student papers may also focus on attitudes toward and ideas about these tragedies in subsequent eras, and how the plays are used in new contexts in a few dramatic and film versions and adaptations.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
In this seminar, we will be focusing our attention on works of theorists and poets central to the field of comparative literary studies and critical theory. In our discussions, we will approach the texts closely and indicate the most striking points in their structure. Students are invited to work on their individual interests in respect to the readings. The texts will include Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying in in an Extramoral Sense," Roman Jacobson's "Two Types of Aphasia," Sigmund Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and Individual Talent," William Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," Erich Auerbach's "Figura," William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (excerpts), Paul De Man's "The Rethoric of Temporality," and Jacques Lacan's "The Mirror-Stage."
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
This course offers an intellectual-historical survey of twentieth-century French Marxisms, with an emphasis on those tendencies and thinkers that have been especially important for literary criticism and theory. Our readings will trace the persistent reinvention of Marx and Marxism in relation to an array of cultural movements and historical developments, including existentialism, structuralism, anti-colonialism, and consumerism. While our corpus will be primarily theoretical and critical, we will also consider several literary and cinematic texts. Authors will include Sartre, Althusser, Baudrillard, Debord, and Kristeva.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar will study three theories of the Uncanny (in German: das Unheimliche), as articulated by Freud, Heidegger and Derrida. Through a reading of texts by these three authors, as well as the literary texts to which they refer, a certain number of questions will be explored. These will include: 1. The relation of the Uncanny to history 2. Its relation to language 3. Its relation to literature.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
The tumultuous cultural and political history of modern Japan (post-1868) has entailed enormous social, political, economic and aesthetic change. The paradigm shift has been described variously: feudal to modern; East-centered to West-influenced; class-determined to individualistic. This course explores some of the masterly short stories and novels manifesting the cultural, psychological and spiritual responses to the challenges of Japan's struggle to emerge from insularity into a cosmopolitan world culture. The writings reflect society from the end of the 19th century to the present.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
As a continuation of the journey through the vast literary horizons that inform the Chinese cultural heritage, in this course we will start with the rise of Neo-classical prose in the Tang and Song dynasties and explore a number of the "masterworks" found in the major genres of traditional Chinese poetry, fiction, and drama. These range from strange and supernatural Daoist-inspired tales to the adventurous and sensual Ming and Qing novels and dramas, as well as exemplary essays, vivid historical writings, and profound philosophical pieces. Close reading of the texts is strongly encouraged as students are expected not only to learn about this long and rich literary tradition, but, more importantly, to reconstruct it though the texts we read and the papers and presentations you produce. We will also examine the intertextuality between these genres -- how poetry blends into narrative, how fiction becomes drama, and drama inspires fiction. Through reading these selected works of traditional Chinese literature, we will examine some of the major features of traditional Chinese society: religious and philosophical beliefs, the imperial system and dynastic change, gender relations, notions of class and ethnicity, family, romance and sexuality. All works are read in translation; no language background is necessary.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
The course is primarily a survey of African oral verbal arts traditions, with an additional focus on the links between these traditions and African films. The original works of art, the objects of study in the course, are not literature in the strict sense of the termwritten verbal artbut rather take form in oral performance or electronic media like film, TV, radio, recorded disks, audio tape, etc. However, in print and in English translation, the course examples from various genres of African oral verbal arts performances (riddles, poetry, proverbs, panegyric, folktales, trickster tales, hero tales, epics) are all experienced as literature for purposes of analysis and interpretation. Four African films will also serve as primary course texts: Wend Kuuni (1982; Gaston Kaboré, dir.; Burkina Faso), Keita: Heritage of the Griot (1995; Dani Kouyaté, dir.; Burkina Faso); La vie est belle/Life Is Rosy (1987; Ngangura Mweze and Bernard Lamy, dirs.; Democratic Republic of Congo), and Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, Mali, 1987, 105 min.). A major goal of the course is to explore the analytic approaches employed by scholar Harold Scheub (specialist in African oral traditions and their relationships with other arts media) in order to develop a practical analytic methodology that will be put into practice in the courses writing assignments.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
This course traces the emergence of a Modern Hebrew literature in Europe. Tracing this literature to its origins, we consider the writings of the Hasidic leader, Nahman of Bratslav, and the writings of Hebrew Enlightenment figures in late 18th Century Berlin. We then trace the flowering of this literature in 19th and early 20th century Eastern Europe. The course includes analyses of various genres: the essay, poetry, short story, novel and autobiography. No prior knowledge of Jewish history or literature is required. All texts are in English translation.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
As a genre, epic, the songs of heroes, predates even writing, and continues to be produced, although in new forms and media. The ability of epic to endure through so many changes is in part predicted by some of its recurring themes: the challenges of tradition and memory; the difficulty with which a way of life is handed from one generation to the next; and how it is transformed in passing. In this course we will take up the ways in which the epic as a genre projects, recalls, and reworks its history as traditionliterally as what is handed overand follow several examples of epic through their cross-cultural contexts. We will also consider related issues such as the difference between literature and orature, or orally composed poetry; the differences between primary, secondary, and tertiary epic; the places of women in traditional and revisionary epics; the Romantic linking of epic and the nation; and some developments in the epic in the twentieth century. In handling four thousand years of epic poetry, we will at least glance at works like the anonymous Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Irish Tain, the Hildebrandslied, Dantes Commedia, Tassos Jerusalem Delivered; Ossian, the ancient Scots poet whose works were written in the eighteenth century; the Kalevala, gathered and recomposed by Finnish scholars in the nineteenth century, and modernist epics like Pounds Cantos or Joyces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The bulk of our time, though, will go to reading and analyzing Homers Iliad, Vergils Aeneid, The Song of Roland, Camões Lusiads, Miltons Paradise Lost, and Wolcotts Omeros.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page
The genre of drama presupposes dialogue. Unlike narrative prose or poetry, dramatic texts focus on conversations among the dramatic personae. There is rarely space in a dramatic work for descriptions of the protagonist's inner thoughts or the commentary of an omniscient narrator. Descriptions of past events are only possible if they constitute a part of the play's present action. This formal restriction defines drama rather than diminishes its expressive potential. Dialogue is both the form and the content of a play. In the modern drama, however, dialogue as a form becomes progressively problematic. In place of tensions between characters, tensions innate to the dialogic form come to the fore and failures of communication begin to dominate the stage. The dramatic personae of the modern theater fall silent, speak to someone absent, state their unwillingness to talk, or sink progressively into monologue. In this seminar, we will analyze the paradoxes inherent to dialogue in a number of plays from the end of the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and explore the effects of the crisis in the dramatic form upon dramatic action. Our readings will include theoretical texts such as Aristotle's Poetics and Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, as well as plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Beckett, Brecht, and Pirandello.
Score: 12.3873 Details | Listing | Web page