| source Harvard (X) |
level |
department Literature (X) |
Examines how the 1001 Nights is transformed and adapted for different media and genres. Focuses on a variety of films, (e.g., The Thief of Baghdad, Chu Chin Chow, Aladdin), illustrations/images (eg., Dore, Chagall, Matisse), musical and balletic renditions (e.g., Rimsky-Korsakov, Fokine), translations (e.g., Galland, Lane, Burton, Haddawy), and re-tellings of stories (e.g., Poe, Barth, Mahfouz, Sebbar, Zimmerman). Also considers the role of the 1001 Nights in contemporary popular culture.
Score: 8.720693 Details | Listing | Web page
Focuses on transformations of colonial and postcolonial spaces in North Africa that include Morocco, Tunisia, and especially, Algeria by way of literature, film and theory. Readings include Albert Memmi, Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Driss Chraibi, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, Malika Mokkedem, Amara Lakhour, Amin Maalouf, Helene Cixous, Nina Bouraoui. Further readings by Deleuze and Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said and others. Special attention is given to problems of language, subjectivity, identity and citizenship, nation and community.
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Examines a series of novels from 1980 to the present that build consciously on recent literary and cultural theory. Also explores the relation of fictional narrative to history, social problems, and ideology. Authors treated include: Don DeLillo, Marguerite Duras, John Irving, David Malouf, Christoph Ransmayr, Patrick Susskind, Graham Swift, and Christa Wolf. Theorists include: Barthes, Bhabha, Baudrillard, Derrida, Hassan, Lacan, and White.
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This course examines problems of existence in relation to self and other in the world from the early Christian era to our days. It shows how existence preoccupies major writers who have approached its implications (and the dilemmas it inspires) in different ways. At stake are the redemptive powers of religion, thoughts about the death of God, the limits of atheism, and philosophies of becoming.
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It has been argued that the poetic "I" in premodern literatures is not a vehicle for self-representation, but an archetype of the human. The course will examine this thesis against the rise of autobiographical writing in medieval and early modern Europe. Readings include spiritual autobiographies (Augustine, Kempe, Teresa of Avila), letter collections, maqama literature, troubadour lyric, Hispano-Jewish poetry, pilgrimage narratives, medieval allegories, Dante and the picaresque novel. Theoretical perspectives by Spitzer, Lejeune, Zumthor and DeCerteau.
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From its foundation in 1909 through WWII, futurism developed into the first international cultural-political avant garde. Its aim was the revolutionary transformation of all spheres of life, and its influence extended from Europe to the Americas to Asia. Topics include machines and culture; poetics and war; futurism's ties to bolshevism and fascism. Media: poetry, performance, music, painting, photography, radio, and film. Writers: Marinetti and Mayakovsky. Visual artists: Boccioni, Bragaglia, Russolo, Malevich, and El Lissitzky.
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How do visual representation and narrative figuration contribute to construct urban identity? Explores the urban imagination in different artforms: architecture, cinema, literature, photography, and painting. Topics to be mapped out include: cities and modernity, metrophilia and metrophobia, the museum and cultural archaeology, the ruin and the construction site, interior space and public sphere, technology and virtual cities. We will focus on the European city, as we travel through Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Naples, and Rome
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An introduction to the basic issues of literary culture. How do works demand different modes of reading and interpretation? What is the relationship between thought, language, and writing? How can we relate texts to the cultural and economic contexts in which they are read? The course engages these and related questions through a wide range of literary and theoretical readings. Authors include Plato, Shakespeare, Milton, Marx, Tolstoy, James, Kafka, Nabokov, and Barthes.
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What is a Jewish language? What is Jewish literature? General topics are alphabetization, translation, oral tradition and diaspora. Languages worldwide include Hebrew as well as Judeo-Spanish, -Aramaic, -Arabic, -French, -Greek, -Italian, -Persian, -Spanish, -Malayalam, Yiddish, and other secular Jewish languages. Readings usually include love stories, medical and philosophic texts, and writings on science, travel, and music. Guest scholars visit most weeks. No language requirement.
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Examines literary forgeries and mystifications from the late 18th century to the present, focusing on their poetics, their ideological motivation and their role in modern political mythmaking (some texts considered: Ossian, The Igor Tale, the Czech manuscripts, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Ern Malley). Also considers the psychology and esthetics of simulation and mystification as reflected in the works of Gide, Borges, Nabokov, Pavic, Eco, and Calvino.
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Explores how literature in different historical periods represents and reshapes the ideas, methods, and language of science. Compares the ways reason and the imagination function in literature and science. Considers how literature rethinks the cultural and historical significance of the scientific enterprise. Primary texts include Lucretius, Donne, Copernicus, Kepler, Cavendish, Fontenelle, Shelley, Goethe, Darwin, Calvino and Gibson.
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Examines how literature from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe has addressed environmental concerns and crises. Focuses on literary works that explore the uneasy relationship between human desire and the survival of the non-human world. Introduces concepts of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, ecology, environmental criticism and environmental justice. Critical readings by Adamson, Bhabha, Buell, Conley, Dimock, Foucault, Glotfelty, Said, Stein, Snyder, Williams, and others.
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Explores relationships among literature, gender, and revolution in China, Cuba, Iran, Japan, Korea, and Russia from the late 19th century to the present. Readings by Butler, Chukovskaya, Danishvar, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Mikiso Hane, Kim Ilyop, Loynaz, Marruz, Pleck, Qiu Jin, Scott, Tamura Toshiko among others.
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A comparative examination of select works of French and German literature that deal with music and the problem of the voice. Topics: verbal and musical form; musical meaning; reading and listening; music and psychoanalysis; evanescence and silence. Readings in : Diderot, Kleist, Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Balzac, Mallarme, Thomas Mann, Bernhard, Lacan, and Quignard.
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Is there one Art, or are there many arts? We will consider affinity and difference among literature, painting, music, and other arts. Student projects will investigate works of art that submit to or reject a particular material medium. Theory from Plato (Ion), Aristotle, Lessing, Burke, Diderot, Rousseau, Hegel, Pater, Greenberg, Heidegger; examples from Homer, Leonardo, Turner, Monet, Rossetti, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Apollinaire, Schoenberg--and others.
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Explores the history of Western lyric poetry and how lyric has given voice to the recurrent themes of love, death, and subjectivity. Poetic techniques and forms will be examined, as will the roles that lyric has played as a vehicle for intellectual and cultural values. Poets to be read include Sappho, Catullus, Ovid, Bertran de Born, Dante, Petrarch, Donne, Quevedo, Sponde, Goethe, Labe, Blake, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Holderlin, Rimbaud, Celan, Pound, Akhmatova, and Carson.
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An examination and analysis of narrative techniques and strategies in a variety of texts ranging from simple to complex narrative forms. Texts from different narrative contexts and cultures will be considered and will include the 1001 Nights, The Odyssey, Frankenstein, Madame Bovary, The Sound and The Fury, and Season of Migration to the North. Will also consider theoretical works by Chatman, Genette, Bakhtin, Brooks, and others.
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What is theory? What is the difference between literary, critical and cultural theory? What is the relation between theory and reading? This course introduces students to various concepts of theory (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Balibar, Adorno, Benjamin, Freud, Saussure, Cixous, Kristeva, Butler and others). Focuses on theoretical texts and will bring in literary texts where necessary.
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Examines theories of translation from various periods (Dryden, Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, de Man, among others). Also looks closely at specific translated texts (e.g., various English translations of The Thousand and One Nights), and considers such topics as the notion of "unequal languages," the problem of cultural translation, translation post-9/11, and the possibility of untranslatability. Final project involves an original translation and commentary.
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This course examines the aesthetics, motives, and history of the literary essay. Attention will be given to the essay's forms (and formlessness), styles, subjectivities, receptions, and some of its characteristic content. Exemplary essayists to be studied include: Montaigne, Bacon, Johnson, Voltaire, the Schlegels, De Quincy, Beaudelaire, Woolf, Turgenev, Lu Hsun, Emerson, Thoreau, Benjamin, Borges, Mencken, Baldwin, Davenport, Sontag, Suleri, Berry, Eco, Dillard, and Foster Wallace.
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Coming-of-age narratives from the non-Western world are analyzed to understand how postcolonial writers and heroes conceived the tension between modernity and tradition, freedom and responsibility, conformity and adventure. The literary genre of the bildungsroman, which centers on the young hero's early development, is explored through the lens of postcolonialism. Salient themes of postcolonial literature are introduced including: cultural imperialism, economic development, religious and Western pedagogy, cultural conflict, identity crisis.
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Why read texts from the French Enlightenment today and how? Analysis of works from the 18th century juxtaposed with novels, plays, media events, and films of the 20th-21st centuries that explore debates in literature and philosophy about cultural differences, universality, and the search for belief and confidence in a society undergoing dramatic change. Readings include Beaumarchais, Beauvoir, Derrida, Diderot, Foucault, Franklin, Graffigny, Kant, Kundera, Laclos, Lyotard, Rousseau, Obama, Potocki, Voltaire.
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A close reading of select works by E.T.A. Hoffmann and his reception in the work of Balzac focuses on Realism's indebtedness to the imaginative realms of the fantastic and the grotesque. Topics: music and inspiration; societal decadence and caricature; magic and the uncanny; experience, observation and expression.
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Studies Bellow's major works in the context of the intellectual and literary community that constituted America's first European style "intelligentsia." Considers work of Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, writers of Partisan Review and Commentary.
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Points of departure: Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric.
Score: 8.720693 Details | Listing | Web page