| source Indiana University Bloomington (X) |
level |
department Comparative Literature (X) |
Please see Schedule of Classes for sections/times. meets A&H, Cultural Studies Requirements and fulfills the COLLEGE, School of Business and School of Education composition requirements when taken with English W143. Finally, a good reason to hang out with the wrong people and get credit for it: charismatic, deceitful, mysterious, cursed, unpredictable people. We will see just what makes a character a bad influence, how that influence spreads, and what other characters do about it. All sections will read ShakespeareÂs Othello, Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, and Herman MelvilleÂs final masterpiece Billy Budd. This is your chance to meet Iago, OthelloÂs friend and one of ShakespeareÂs most famous villains. Sophocles shows us what happens to the man who killed his father and married his mother, while MelvilleÂs hero is so angelic he creates a scandal on the high seas. Each section will read additional works unique to that section that may include short stories, poetry, novels, and drama. Individual sections may also include television, art, music, and film. This course focuses on developing skills in critical thinking, clear communication, and persuasive composition. The workload includes three essays, mid-term and final exams, as well as shorter writing assignments. For composition credit, students must follow this course with CMLT-BE 146 (ÂMajor Themes in LiteratureÂ) in the spring semester. Both BE 145 and BE 146 are automatically bundled with English W143, a one credit hour addition, to certify composition credit on your transcript.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
MW 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm Fulfills CS & A & H requirements What are Yin and Yang and how are they represented in Feng Shui? Why do Asians put their last name first? Our inquiry into the East will illuminate the ways in which these everyday, mundane questions are in fact related to much deeper issues such as the tension between self and society and the meaning of one's existence. Am I dreaming this dream of butterfly or is the butterfly dreaming of me? Or is the reality that I call nothing but the shadows on the wall while I am stuck in a cave? What does a ball of wax have to do with proving my existence? How has the idea of "good life" been imagined and formulated in the East and the West? How does the force of globalization affect and shape the relationship between the two? This class aims to provide a survey of Eastern and Western conceptions of the self and society through discussing literature, painting and film without privileging either perspective. By pairing Eastern texts with comparable Western counterparts, the understanding of both sides will be enhanced. The readings range from classical texts such as Plato, Descartes and Confucius to modern works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre and Murakami Haruki. Assignments include one short essay (4-5pp), midterm exam and final paper (7-8pp). No prior knowledge of either Western or Eastern philosophy and literature is expected.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 5:45 PM - 8:00 PM Fulfills A & H and CS requirements What is "popular" culture and what is its relationship with that which appears to be its opposite, "high" culture? What does Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? have to do with Homer? What does Bride and Prejudice, or, for that matter, what do zombies have to do with Jane AustenÂs Pride and Prejudice? How and why would popular culture revisit ancient myths or canonical authors? In this course we will try to answer these questions by pitting contemporary movies and texts against ancient epics, ShakespeareÂs plays, and "established" novels. In order to define "popular" as well as "culture," we will be exploring the strange and perplexing ways in which old tales are retooled in order to tell new stories about facing adulthood in contemporary America: the expectations, fears, and responsibilities that various "popular" characters need to give a voice to. Course requirements: one exam, one presentation, two papers and several short assignments. This course will require your presence for several film screenings in the evening.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm Fulfills A&H and CS requirements What is "popular" culture and what is its relationship with that which appears to be its opposite, "high" culture? What does Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? have to do with Homer? What does Bride and Prejudice, or, for that matter, what do zombies have to do with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice? How and why would popular culture revisit ancient myths or canonical authors? In this course we will try to answer these questions by pitting contemporary movies and texts against ancient epics, Shakespeare's plays, and "established" novels. In order to define "popular" as well as "culture," we will be exploring the strange and perplexing ways in which old tales are retooled in order to tell new stories about facing adulthood in contemporary America: the expectations, fears, and responsibilities that various "popular" characters need to give a voice to. Course requirements: one exam, one presentation, two papers and several short assignments. This course will require your presence for several film screenings in the evening.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
MW 9:30-10:45 3 cr. fulfills A&H, CS requirements Different in terms of production, international appeal and longevity, Hollywood and Nollywood (Nigeria) cinema industries are today producers of a genre of movie heavily marked by elements of the supernatural. The popularity of this specific film genre among spectators on both sides of the Atlantic begs for a comparative study of Hollywood movies such as Harry Potter, The Lord of Rings and Nollywood films such as Thunderbolt that make extensive use of the occult. Adding documentaries, scholarly and popular magazine articles to our tools of investigation, we will look for more points of convergence and/or divergence between the Hollywood and Nollywood occult movies, reasons for their appeal among spectators, and we will see what they suggest about the modern viewer.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 9:30-10:45 3 cr. A&H and IW credit In this course, we will read examples of influential food writing from the nineteenth century until today to learn more about how people use food to express their needs, desires and particular predilections. By juxtaposing texts from multiple genresÂphilosophy, memoir, novel, food reviews, and journalistic exposéÂand from various countries, this course asks you to appreciate the wide impact that food has on how people see themselves, their relationship to each other and to their environment. You will learn how to critique writing about food, whether in fiction or literary nonfiction, as well as to write analytically about food yourself. This class carries A&H and Intensive Writing credit. Assignments will include four short, formal essays and a revision. Also, you will be required to eat out at least once and formally review your meal.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 2:30-3:45 *required for CMLT majors* This course introduces students to methods of comparative literary analysis. We will study works from a range of genres, periods, and national traditions, with a focus on texts that are themselves about writing or otherwise conscious of themselves as texts. By exploring the literary techniques that these works use to call attention to their status as works of art, we will trace the development of ideas about what literature is and how it creates meaning. We will also learn to expose additional, hidden potential readings and meanings in these and other literary texts. Students will refine their close- reading skills and improve their ability to craft essays in literary criticismÂto write about writing themselves. Readings may include selections from Ovid, Metamorphoses, and Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; William Shakespeare, The Tempest; short stories by Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino; A. S. Byatt, Possession; Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; and a selection of lyric poems.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 2:30-3:45pm 3 credits Fulfills A&H requirements This class will examine various trends in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. We will deal with works of imagination produced both in the so-called free West and in totalitarian societies. While exploring larger themes of technology, religion and gender, we will also consider the ideological dimension of artistic creations born under different political regimes. Our reading list will include works by Ray Bradbury, Robert Sheckley, Stanislaw Lem, Mikhail Bulgakov and others.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm Fulfills A & H requirment In this course, we will examine the nature of genre in a variety of television shows, stories and other texts. We will discuss the ideological and practical implications and limits of genres by comparing the differences within each genre as it is represented in literature and television. These genres include: biography/memoirs, reality TV, detective fiction, SciFi, diaspora literature, comedy and others. Some of the questions we will try to answer include: What is a genre and what are the possibilities and limitations of genre? Has the 20th century evolution in the media (tv, internet videos, etc.) changed the idea of a genre? How did literature depict the same genres before the advent of television? How do both television and literature blur the boundaries between fiction and reality? Has television created genres that cannot exist in literature, or vice versa? To answer these questions, we will compare texts with TV shows every week, as well as other media. (There will be a separate time for TV showings). Texts/shows may include Kings (Bible & TV), Battlestar Galactica, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Sherlock Holmes, CSI or Bones, Bridget Jones Diary, Sex and the City, Kafka, the 7- Up series, Sarte and Red Dwarf.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 9:30 am - 10:45 am Fulfills CS & A & H requirements This is the course that takes us into the creative mind of the modern artist, composer and poet and into the analytical mind of the critic. In C255, we analyze works of art (painting, music and literature) of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, compare how these works interrelate and discover how they are unique. We learn what motivates the creative personality and how such a person turns materials, sounds, silences and language into art. We also observe how styles in the arts change over time. Students of C255 see, hear and comprehend art in new, exciting and discriminating ways. For example, we discover how a musician paints a seascape, how a painter composes motion and how a poet creates musical and visual effects in verbal expression. We also study how the arts evolved from the 18th century, through the Romantic era, and the early modern period. By the end of the course, the student-through her/his own secured powers of discernment, increased confidence and strengthened abilities of perception - will determine what constitutes a work of art. Requirements, Assignments and Course Activities: Visits to the IU Art Museum. Two 3-4 page papers and one 6-8 page comparative paper. Midterm and final exam; possible group or individual project. No prerequisites and no previous experience in literature, painting or music is required or expected. Attend at least three cultural events. Required readings (subject to minor change): Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther Poetry anthology, revised throughout semester (Oncourse) Maupassant, selected short stories (Oncourse or e-reserve) Vaughan, Romanticism and Art Gay, Modernism Other short readings to be assigned throughout the semester (check Oncourse and e-reserve and stay tuned)
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
Meets: MW 11:15  12:30 Provides Art and Humanities and Cultural Studies A credits When cultures collide, what happens to the people who get caught in the middle? Can they save their culture, create a new one, or learn to live in someone elseÂs? What do they see when they look across the cultural divide: themselves, an alien, a lover, a better way of life, the demise of civilization itself? We will see cultures and their conflicts defined by language, religion, politics, gender, love, and economics. Our authors come from ancient Rome (Tacitus), medieval France (Christine de Pizan), 19th century America (Herman Melville), and modern South Africa (J.M. Coetzee). The scope of the course welcomes students interested in literature, history, geography, cultural studies, religion, political science, sociology, and gender studies. We will examine how authors represent the meeting of cultures real and imagined, and especially how tales of foreign lands reflect on the cultures of the characters homelands. Workload will consist of two analytical essays, a final exam, short papers, and quizzes. There are no prerequisites for this course; however, completion of the university composition requirement is highly recommended. For more information: jwjohnso@indiana.edu
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
MW 11:15-12:30 This is a course which focuses on politics as a topical issue in contemporary African cinema. Working through the popular assumption that new generation African filmmakers prefer to deal with formal and aesthetic issues at the expense of the kind of political filmmaking which preoccupied their precursors, the course looks at recent films which give equal weight to politics and aesthetics. Readings, screenings and class discussions will focus on a number of issues, including the relationship between art and everyday life, the impact of immigration and professional mobility on contemporary cinema, and the economics of filmmaking. Films to be studied may include Bamako, The Night of Truth, Moolaade, Amazing Grace, Sometimes in April, and Ezra.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 1:00-2:15 This course will address questions of gender as they arise in the reading, analysis and interpretation of poetry. We will examine both poems whose relation to gender might seem obvious - love poems, poems written by men speaking in a woman's voice and vice versa, poems about abortion - as well as more formal aspects of poetry whose intersection with gender issues may be less obvious - genre, poetic language, intertextuality. Is the sonnet an inherently feminine genre? In what ways does the history of poetic address (often dead to women) create gendered expectations for the speaker? What is the relationship between the gender of the poet and modes of allusion?
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
MW 6:15-7:30 Fulfills: A&H There is arguably no book of world literature that has been more embroidered, distorted, and misread than the Hebrew Bible. As the basis of Christian theology and the ultimate source of Jewish law, it is routinely commended even today as a moral and metaphysical guide,or as a repository of dogmatic truth. But there is a significant strain in the Bible--perhaps the predominant strain-- that is impatient with piety and suspicious of dogmatic wisdom, particularly the wisdom of those who presume on their knowledge of the uncanny central figure it calls God or Yahweh. Indeed, if one reads against the grain of tradition, the Bible is a book that revels in contradiction, invites questions but frustrates answers, views human morality, like divine "goodness," with skepticism, and treats its characters, legendary or historical, with irreverent license. In this course, we shall be exploring this skeptical strain in biblical literature, beginning with the books of Ecclesiastes and Job, continuing with parts of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic history, and concluding with the Gospel of Mark. Theoretical questions about the epistemology of reading (how we know what we know) will be a constant focus, but we shall approach them through specific readings and narrowly focused discussion. Secondary texts will include essays on general and special hermeneutics as well as selections from modern biblical scholarship. Students will be asked to write several short exercises and a final paper. Prerequisite: a good background or active interest in literature or philosophy. A prior course on the Bible would be helpful but is not essential.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
Class meets 5:45 - 8:15 pm TW Fulfills CS & AH credit This course covers the study and interpretation of a playscript on the theme of power, taught by Senegalese filmmaker Joseph Gai Ramaka. Since the dawn of history and never more than today, political regimes abuse power, perpetrate violence on their own people with ripple effects reaching well beyond national borders, and are sometimes toppled. Through reading, reciting, gesture, and movement, the class will explore the meaning of Joseph Gai Ramaka's allegorical play Two and One-Thousand Voiced Fragments, about dictatorship in a fictive country.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
Meets TR 11:15-12:30 A guest arrives and a drama is set in motion. This is what happens in tragedies, comedies, and other dramatic forms from ancient Greece and Rome to modern Europe, America, Asia and Africa. The guests may be invited and welcome or else surprise visitors whose presence is highly undesirable; they may be imposing on the hospitality of an individual, a family or an entire city. Regal or humble, beneficent or malevolent, these guests and their hosts engage in ways that have created some of the most stimulating and enjoyable dramas of world literature. We will examine the staging of the guest/host relationship and its perversion in various theatrical and cultural contexts. The works we will be reading include: Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, Philoctetes), Euripides (Medea), Shakespeare (King Lear), Molière (Tartuffe), Racine (Andromache), Ibsen (Hedda Gabler), Chekhov (The Seagull), Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), Pirandello (Henry IV), Lorca (Blood Wedding),Brecht (The Good Woman of Setzuan), Mishima (Lady Aoi, Hanjo), Pinter (The Birthday Party, The Room), Soyinka (Death and the KingÂs Horseman). Assignments: one 5-6 page paper, one 7-8 page paper, a final exam.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 1:00-2:15 *This course satisfies A&H requirements* This course will introduce students to the variety of narrative forms found in literatures from different times and cultures. We will examine some of the ways in which critics and theorists interpret the aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical aspects of narrative. Among the issues we will explore are the social functions of narrative texts, the relationship of gender and narrative form, the role of inter-textuality in narrative tradition, and the interplay of closed and open forms of narrative. In addition to examples of myth, fairy tale, parable, and legend, we will study more complex forms such as epic, romance, frame narrative, and novel. The readings for the course will include texts from ancient times to the twentieth century. We will begin with a selection of myths, fairy tales, legends, and ancient and modern fables, and then turn to longer narrative forms: The Odyssey, The Tale of Genji, The Arabian Nights, Yvain, Inferno, The Decameron, Lazarillo de Tormes, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Pride and Prejudice, To the Lighthouse, Things Fall Apart, and In the Labyrinth. Writing Requirements: Students will write one comparative essay (5-7 pages), complete two short projects on critical terms, and take a final exam.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
Tue/Thurs 2:30-3:45 This course carries the College Arts & Humanities credit. There is a literary world much bigger than Charles Dickens, and much older than the English language. This course surveys the world heritage of literature in translation from the beginning of history to 1500 AD. Rather than focusing on a small number of authors and books, this course will offer a smorgasbord of texts organized around themes such as: creation myths across the world, epic poetry from Greece, Rome, and India, the lyric imagination of China and Japan, Islamic and Buddhist conversion, the courtly love of medieval Europe, drama in the civic realm, philosophies of death and the good life, and much more. Homer, Virgil, and Dante are not neglected, though they are trimmed for those eager to see what the non-Western world has to offer. The performative context of these texts will be explored through reconstructed music, drama, and recitation. We will reflect on a number of key questions such as: how can we define a truly inclusive notion of world humanity? What can our pre-modern forebears teach us about existence? What is world literature?
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
MW 9:30-10:45 Romanticism is an aesthetic movement that flourished in Western Europe in the first part of the 19th century and influenced European sensibilities for decades to come. This seminar offers an introduction to romanticism in literature through a close reading of selected works from various national traditions. During the course of the semester, we will review the philosophical origins of romanticism, examine the aesthetic principles of romantic literature, and consider the rethinking of romantic ideas in subsequent historical periods. Readings will be drawn from such authors as Novalis, Schiller, Goethe, Hoffmann, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Pushkin among others.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TR 11:15-12:30 The Renaissance court, according to Baldassare Castaglione in his Book of the Courtier: a center for elite humanist studies and the enlightened patronage of great art in all media. The Renaissance court, according to Niccolò Macchiavelli in The Prince: the crucible of new, increasingly ruthless and amoral means of gaining and keeping political power for its own sake. We will study one Italian, one French, and one English court of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, examining the literature, art, architecture, and music produced for their rulers and by the members of their courts. We will read these products of the court against popular works produced for the public sphere in order to test our conclusions about the distinctive features of each court and to uncover shared concerns and points of contention between court and popular culture. By exploring the myths that these courts construct about themselves and the reactions they drew from citizens outside their circles, we will arrive at a rich and nuanced appreciation of the interactions of various Renaissance art forms among each other and with their social contexts. Authors and artists to be studied may include Niccolò Macchiavelli, Angelo Poliziano, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Savonarola, Filippo Brunelleschi, Marguerite de Navarre, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, the School of Fontainebleu, Gilles le Breton, Domenico da Cortona, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Nicholas Hilliard, and Robert Smythson.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
MW 1:00-2:15 Meets w/ HON-H400 What is an image? What is the meaning and significance of this all pervasive term that has occupied philosophy and religion, as well as the life of the artists, for the last few millennia? It is this question that will be at the center of this class. The status of the image has always oscillated between being, in classical philosophy, and to an extent in the Hebraic Bible, a block to real vision, that which prevents us from seeing the truth, blinding us to its power, or deceiving us away from it, and on the other hand being, mainly in some Christian theological discussions of the nature of the image, as well as in recent discussion in contemporary philosophy, a guide to a better vision , a vision beyond everyday perception, a vision of the real or of truth. We will try to examine these traditions of writing about the image, as well as interpretations of the image as embodied in artists ranging from Renaissance painters to contemporary filmmakers. We will attempt through this trajectory to understand what exactly is the image, and what is it that it can do to our vision, how it effects our capacity to see. Readings include, Plato, the Bible, theological writings on the image, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jean-Luc Marion, Cavell. Viewings include painters from Caravaggio and Breugel to Vermeer, to filmmakers such as Eisenstein, Bunuel, Hitchcock, and Brian De Palma.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
M 5:45-8:15 One of the most pressing questions of our time is the need to rethink the concept of the world and of what it can mean for us today to live in a world, rather than exclusively within the borders of a specific nation, language, or religion. A major contribution of some of the most advanced theoretical developments of the last fifty years, this course will argue, is to allow us to develop such a rethinking of the concept of a world, thus, of that which is shared and communicated across humanity in excess of every delimiting border. This new thinking of a dimension, the dimension of the world, communicating in excess of every border, should be distinguished, we will argue, from several previous models of thinking: It should be distinguished from the dream of a cosmopolitanism, of a unification of humanity through the cancellation of the borders and languages separating it, as well as from the dream of finding the ultimate ideal of truth, value, and meaning in which all of humanity can share (enlightenment humanism). It should also be distinguished from the conception of the world as consisting of a relativistic plurality of separate and autonomous cultures, each having its own ideals and values which cannot be judged by another. If there is a dimension of humanity which communicates across borders, it will not mean the cancellation of borders but a new thinking of the logic of the border, a thinking which will also have to invent a new logic of the universal. If there is an essential thinking of multiplicity in this new logic, it will not be the thinking of a relativistic plurality of separate and complete entities, but of an essential multiplicity of fragmented and incomplete entities exposed to each other. It is the task of comparative literature, we will argue, to become the discipline activating this new thinking of the borders and of the discovery of a new notion of the world, and it will be the task of this class to elaborate this new way of thinking by creating a framework through which to think together several of the essential theoretical contributions of our time.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
TUE/THU 11:15-12:30 This is not a stereotypical survey of the tired old Greats. Rather, this course proposes to examine the ancient novel, a genre that has been neglected by many literary historians for whom fiction is a certain mark of modernity. Our first task in understanding this orphan is to survey the wide range of Greek and Roman works it draws from, including the Odyssey, Hesiod, Sappho, Herodotus, PlatoÂs Symposium, Euripides Hippolytus, Thucydides, Theocritus, Menander, Ovid and other epicists, and, above all, the sophists and the rhetoricians. Our second task is to tackle the erotic fiction of Chariton, Longus, Heliodorus, and Petronius. These works will enable us to challenge and complicate FoucaultÂs influential History of Sexuality, which neglects such Âunreliable fictional sources for prescriptive, non-literary sources. The course concludes by contextualizing the ancient novel (1) in the development of early world fiction, and (2) in relation to theories of the (modern) novel. This course satisfies the pre-modern requirement for CMLT students.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
MW 4:00-5:15 This is a seminar on the intellectual relationships between the African continent and the progressive world in the second half of the 20th century, focusing upon three related historical and aesthetic formations: the recovery of African agency in the pre-1945 collaborations between nationalists and diasporic and liberal intellectuals and activists; the rise of tricontinental liberation movements and anti-colonial artistic cultures (cinema, literature, music) for which the journal Presence Africaine and the Cuban revolution were catalysts; and the unfolding reassessments of postcolonial political culture in the aftermath of Soviet communism and apartheid regime. The course works with the premise that these formations are unavoidably internationalist, given that the leading figures are diasporic intellectuals dealing with issues of race and class in multiple contexts. Readings will be organized around the decisive role of the African continent in the structural relations between contemporary discourses of cosmopolitanism and the global migrations of the late-19th century. Authors may include Abrahams, Césaire, Conde, Derrida, Du Bois, Edwards, Fanon, Guevara, James, Pasolini, Soyinka, and Wright.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar will explore the burgeoning field of translation studies and the central role of translation in the field of comparative literature. A survey of the history of translation, with emphasis on the English tradition, will provide the background for an in-depth examination of modern developments in translation theory. Concepts such as translatability, dynamic equivalence, naturalization, and reception will be analyzed in relation with various models of language, social communication, and poetics. Participants in this seminar will be expected to play an active role in presenting theoretical readings to class and leading discussions of the material. Our discussions of theory will be complemented by the presentation, critique, and preparation of actual translations. Each participant will be asked to research the translation history of a key work or genre from one foreign literature into English and to consider the implications of theoretical models through short translation projects. Required texts: The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, second edition (New York, 2004); The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, edited by Peter France (Oxford, 2000); and a volume of the Penguin series Poets in Translation to be determined. These texts will be supplemented by other selected readings available in electronic format.
Score: 10.049551 Details | Listing | Web page