ATTENTION STUDENTS: Please be aware that information on courses offered by other departments is subject to change, and that you should check with the
Directory of Classes and with the individual departments to confirm course availability, times and locations.
>> Undergraduate-level joint courses
CLCZ W4035: The Writers of Prague.
C. Harwood. TR 2:40pm-3:55pm, location to be announced.
Survey of the Czech, German, and German-Jewish literary cultures of Prague
from 1910-30. Emphasis on Hask, Capek, Kafka, Werfel, and Rilke.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3220: Science Fiction.
L. Kucukalic. TR 1:10pm-2:25pm, location to be announced.
This course will offer a historical survey of canonical science fiction
novels and short stories from the turn of the century, through the "pulp
fiction" period of the 1920s-1940s, the Golden Age era of the 1950s, the New
Wave works of the 1960s and the1970s, the Cyberpunk movement of the 1980s, to
the current writings at the turn of the 21st century (probably best described
as a hybrid between mainstream and science fiction literature). Science
fiction has a broad reach in popular culture and is often considered a field
that includes "Star Trek" as well as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." In this
course, we will focus on literary science fiction, not the broader media
output rooted in the genre. The authors to be studied include: H. G. Wells,
A. E. Van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert
Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, James Blish, Thomas
Disch, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling,
William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The course
will feature a comparison between Russian and American science fiction and an
overview of theoretical approaches. Students will apply these critical
approaches to the novels and stories read throughout the semester. The
students' final grade will be based upon three short papers, a midterm, a
final exam, participation, and a brief class presentation.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3370: Literature of the Black Atlantic.
B. Edwards. TR 10:35am-11:50am, location to be announced.
This course will consider the ways the literatures of the African diaspora
have imagined the interconnections and points of correspondence between
Africa and the New World. We will focus especially on writing that imagines
the Atlantic as a vibrant and treacherous space of dispossession, encounter,
and transformation, whether in relation to the European slave trade or to
colonialism and globalization in the twentieth century. Readings may include
some of the following: theoretical and historical scholarship by C.L.R.
James, Paul Gilroy, Peter Linebaugh, and Sylvia Wynter; and autobiography,
fiction, and poetry by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Martin Delany, Pauline
Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, Aimé
Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amos Tutuola,
Maryse Condé, David Dabydeen, Charles Johnson, Caryl Phillips, Fred
D'Aguiar, M. N. Philip.
Requirements: a take-home midterm and a final paper.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3740: Comparative Modern Texts: Coetzee and Ishiguro.
H. Puchner. T 2:10pm-4:00pm, location to be announced.
J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro, contemporary masters of the novel in
English, struggle with the most pressing problems of form, including the
return of realism, the relation between novels and ideas, meta-fiction. At
the same time, they examine central ethical challenges, such as the rights of
animals, cloning, and the representation of war. The seminar combines minute
literary analysis with a discussion of how literary style confronts the
contemporary world.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3791: Comparative Literature Seminar: Aestheticism.
K. Lamb. T 11:00am-12:50pm, location to be announced.
Oscar Wilde once remarked, "One should either be a work of art, or wear a
work of art." This course examines aestheticism as at once a theory of art, a
literary movement, and a way of life. We will discuss, among other topics,
the relationship of aestheticism to the so-called autonomy of the work of
art, the motto of art for art's sake, theories of beauty, cosmopolitanism,
decadence, dandyism, perfectionism, perversion, and sexual and formal
experimentation. Readings will combine fiction and poetry with works of
criticism and philosophy, including several works that cross genres. Likely
authors include: Stéphane Mallarmé, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter
Pater, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Ronald Firbank,
and Djuna Barnes. French and German texts may be read in the original or in
English translation.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3851: Special Topics in Literary Studies: Literature of Lost Lands.
G. Viswanathan. TR 4:10pm-6:00pm, location to be announced.
This course consists of readings in the literature of lost and submerged
continents, as well as of remote lands hidden from history. Often relegated
to the stuff of science fiction, accounts of submerged land-masses were among
the most serious popular literature of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and readers were riveted by the enduring mystery about
the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Works about these and other lost
lands inspired a form of "occult ethnography": one such example is Bulwer
Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), which drew on the popular
fascination with buried land-masses to re-imagine alternative narratives in
which the "imperial English" would be colonized by a new race of people
rising from the forgotten depths of the earth. The unsettling of established
and familiar conceptions of nation, history, and cultural identity through
the exploration of lost or drifting lands reaches an apex in José
Saramago's The Stone Raft (1986), with which the course concludes.
In probing the enduring fascination with lost or separated lands in the
cultural imagination, the course hopes to illuminate the importance of such
literature in unveiling the processes of colonization, ethnography,
nationalism, evolution, and technology, as well as understanding the writing
of history itself: i.e., what is included in mainstream accounts and what is
left out.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3931: Narrative Texts and Theories: Multiculturalism and Narrative Form.
W. Jin. R 4:10-6, location to be announced.
What can narrative fiction teach us about how we should compare the different forms of multiculturalism that prevail in different nations? How does the language of fiction embody and question the logic of analogy? How does fiction do this by employing such figurative devices as metaphor and allegory and by translating between different cultures and histories? These are the central questions we will explore in this course. We will read recent English-language fiction that engages one or more of a cluster of interconnected geographical locations, including England, the West Indies, South Africa, Asia, as well as the United States. The syllabus will include Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Michelle Cliff, Meena Alexander, J. M. Coetzee, and Alex Kuo, among others. Discussion will focus on how these authors explore histories of racial and ethnic formation as well as the workings of personal and collective memory across multiple local or national contexts. We will also look closely at selected readings in theories of narrative form, critical multiculturalism, and contemporary globalization. [Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W4021: European Literature in the Middle Ages: Medieval Cosmopolitanisms.
S. Legassie. TR 1:10pm-2:25pm, location to be announced.
As contemporary critics have observed, the concept of "cosmopolitanism" is a
promising paradox because it invites individuals and groups to reconsider
their obligations to a local community (polis) in light of their
role as sojourners in a larger world (cosmos). This course examines
the challenges of cosmopolitanism in the European Middle Ages, a time period
that is normally excluded from such considerations because of its presumed
insularity. Looking to literary genres such as romance, travel narrative,
mystical visions, and the frame tale collection, we will examine a range of
medieval engagements with the foreign and consider the extent to which those
engagements enriched, destabilized, and displaced the conventional ways in
which individuals and groups thought about their relationships to the world.
We will also consider how our own engagement with medieval cosmopolitanisms
challenges the methods we use to study the cultural production of the
European Middle Ages. Readings of literary works and criticism will be in
English translation, although students are strongly encouraged to conduct
research in at least one other language.
This course is designed with the intention of inviting both specialists in
medieval European studies as well as non-medievalists who might be interested
in the development of travel writing and the cultural history of travel;
theories of gender, race, and sexuality; and the history of Europe's contact
and exchanges with the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The course will be
divided into three units, each of which addresses an emergent area of inquiry
in medieval studies: Chivalric Cosmopolitans, Tuscan Cosmopolitans, and
Mediterranean Cosmopolitans.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W4121: Renaissance in Europe.
K. Eden. MW 4:10pm-5:25pm, location to be announced.
Key texts of 15th- and 16th-century humanism in their rhetorical and
philosophical contexts, including works by Petrarch, Erasmus, More,
Machiavelli, Castiglione, Sidney, and Montaigne.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W4540: Post-Modernist Texts & Theory: Postcolonial African Literature and Theory.
J. Slaughter. TR 4:10pm-6:00pm, location to be announced.
A survey of postcolonial African literature and theory. Likely authors
include: Abani, Achebe, Adichie, Aidoo, Armah, Dangarembga, Eric, Farah,
Gurnah, Ngugi, Sembène, Soyinka, and Tutuola. The literary readings
will be supplemented with critical and theoretical essays meant to introduce
students to the major issues and problematics of postcolonial studies within
a Sub-Saharan African context (from colonial contact to contemporary
globalization). We will also examine primary historical, sociological, and
cultural documents from the imperial and postcolonial "archives."
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W4560: Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory.
R. Hamilton. MW 4:10pm-5:25pm, location to be announced.
What are the intellectual antecedents of contemporary critical, cultural, and
social theory? Where do the vocabularies and questions that occupy us most
urgently today, or that we occupy--history, the subject, the other, the
aesthetic, culture, society, discourse, and so on - come from, and how does
this history illuminate their current challenges and relations? How do we
interpret the tension between theory and the current aggressive return of
"history"? This course will look back at certain thinkers of the 18th, 19th
and early 20th centuries (Rousseau, Kleist, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche,
Bergson, Bakhtin, Freud, Weber) who offer indispensable continuities with and
counterpoints to the methodologies of academic literary theory from the New
Criticism to the more recent practices of cultural studies. Though some
knowledge of feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory would be
helpful, only minimal acquaintance will be presumed; selected 20th-century
readings that illustrate lines of connection will be provided.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W4822: The 19th-Century Novel In Europe: Country and City in the
Nineteenth-Century European Novel.
N. Dames. MW 10:35am-11:50am, location to be announced.
The European novel in the era of its cultural dominance. Key concerns: the
modern metropolis (London, Paris, St. Petersburg); the figures of bourgeois
narrative (the parvenu, the adulterer, the adolescent, the consumer)
and bourgeois consciousness (nostalgia, ressentiment, sentimentalism,
ennui); subjectivity and its relation to class tactics, labor, money, and
social upheaval; the impact of journalism, science, economics. Works by
Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLLN W3101: Introduction to Linguistics.
A. Timberlake. R 6:10pm-7:25pm, location to be announced.
An introduction to the study of language from a scientific perspective. The
course is divided into three units: language as a system (sounds, morphology,
syntax, semantics), language in context (in space, time, and community), and
language of the individual (psycholinguistics, errors, aphasia, neurology of
language, acquisition). Lecture, weekly homework.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLLN W4202: Cognitive Linguistics.
B. Gasparov. MW 6:10pm-7:45pm, location to be announced.
Reading and discussion of scholarly literature on the cognitive approach to
language, including: usage-oriented approaches to language, frame semantics,
construction grammar, theories of conceptual metaphor and mental spaces;
alongside of experimental research on language acquisition, language memory,
prototypical and analogous thinking, and the role of visual imagery in
language processing.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLME W3542: Introduction to Israeli Literature.
D. Miron. MW 2:40pm-3:55pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLRS V3224: Nabokov.
C. Nepomnyashchy. MW 2:40pm-3:55pm, location to be announced.
Examines the writings (including major novels, short stories, essays, and
memoirs) of the Russian-American author, Vladimir Nabokov. Special attention
to literary politics and gamesmanship, and the author's unique place within
both the Russian and Anglo-American literary traditions.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLRS W4011: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the English Novel (in English).
L. Knapp. TR 9:10am-10:25am, location to be announced.
A close reading of works by Dostoevsky (Netochka Nezvanova; The Idiot; "A Gentle Creature") and Tolstoy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; "Family Happiness"; Anna Karenina; "The Kreutzer Sonata") in conjunction with related English novels (Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). No knowledge of Russian is required.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLSL W4001: Climbing the Tower of Babel: Multilingual Literature from Five Centuries in its
Political and Semiotic Context.
K. Beck. MW 2:40pm-3:55pm, location to be announced.
What do the medieval Czech comedy The Ointment Seller, 19th century
War and Peace, modernist Finnegan's Wake and postcolonial
Return to the Native Land have in common? They are all written in
more than one language. This course examines the theoretical and
philosophical implications of mixing and juxtaposing languages in a literary
text in different historical and cultural settings from medieval Europe
through colonial Brazil and postcolonial Haiti back to postsocialist Europe.
The reading list includes works by Rabelais, Tolstoy, Jesuit missionaries,
Joyce, Aimée Cesaire, Primo Levi and Jachym Topol as well as
excursions into the blogosphere and other contemporary forms of writing.
Knowledge of foreign languages is not required but students who want to get
credit for comparative literature have to read in the original in at least
one language other than English.[Link to registrar listing]
CLSL W4075: Post-Colonial/Post-Soviet Cinema.
Y. Shevchuk. T 6:10pm-10:00pm, location to be announced.
The course will discuss how film making has been used as a vehicle of power
and control in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet space since 1991. A body
of selected films by Soviet and post-Soviet directors that exemplify the
function of film making as a tool of appropriation of the colonized, their
cultural and political subordination by the Soviet center will be examined in
terms of post-colonial theories. The course will also focus on the often over
looked work of Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, Armenian,etc. national film
schools and how they participated in the communist project of fostering a as
well as resisted it by generating, in hidden and, since 1991, overt and
increasingly assertive ways their own counter-narratives.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLSS W4040: Cinemas of the Former Yugoslavia.
Instructor, times and location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLSW W3610: Scandinavian Writing Since the 1960s. (English)
V. Moberg. F 12:00pm-2:30pm, location to be announced.
This course will examine the literature of the five Nordic nations
(through English translations) from the 1960s to the present-a period
marked by a flourishing experimentation (e.g., new political poetry,
documentarism, satires of bureaucracy, and political-historical fiction)
as well as a reaffirmation of traditional forms (epics of generations
of welfare-state citizens, psychological dramas, and poems of elegant
imagery, word play, and symbolism). Writers read will include Peter Høeg
and Inger Christiansen from Denmark; Gerd. Brantenberg, Torbjørg
Wassmo, and Knut Faldbakken from Norway; Kerstin Ekman, P. O.
Enquist, Göran Palm, P. C. Jersild, Tomas Tranströmer, Kristina Lugn,
Lars Norén, Sara Lidman, and Anna-Karin Palm from Sweden; Märta
Tikkanen from Finland; and Hrafnhildur Hagalin from Iceland.
[Link to registrar listing]
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>> Graduate-level joint courses
CLEN G6031: Studies in Medieval Literature: Court Performance and Theory
S. Crane. R 11:00am-12:50pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN G6920: Perspectives on the Modern.
V. Rosner. W 4:10pm-6:00pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLFR G4000: Theory of Literature I.
A. Compagnon. M 4:10pm-6:00pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLGR G4215: Spirits and Ghosts from Kant to Marx. (English)
S. Andriopoulos. M 2:10pm-4:00pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLGR G4410: Freud. (English)
K. Barry. M 4:10pm-6:00pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLGR G6155: The Documentary in Fiction. (English)
M. Anderson. W 11:00am-12:50pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLGR G6195: The History of Science and Literary Theory. (English)
Instructor to be announced. R 11:00am-12:50pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLME G4106: Culture and Power in Iraqi Literature.
M. Al-Musawi. R 11:00am-12:50pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLME G4525: The Bible as Literature
G. Anidjar. M 4:10pm-6:00pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLME G6225: Arabic Literary Production.
M. Al-Musawi. F 11:00am-12:50pm, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
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