INTRO TO COMPARATIVE LITERATUR
Introduction to the study of literature from a comparative and cross-disciplinary perspective. Readings will be selected to promote reflection on such topics as the relation of literature to the other arts; nationalism and literature; international literary movements; post-colonial literature; gender and literature; and issues of authorship, influence, originality, and intertextuality.
INTRO TO TRANSLATION STUDIES
Introduction to the major theories and methods of translation in the Western tradition, along with practical work in translating. Topics include translation in the context of postcolonialism, globalization and immigration, the role of translators in war and zones of conflict, gender and translation, the importance of translation to contemporary writers. Completion of Intermediate II or equivalent in any foreign language.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Peter T Connor
CULPA: 13
Info
- 3 points
City & Country in the Comparative 19th-c
CITY&COUNTRY IN 19TH C. N
This seminar explores the relationship of the nineteenth-century realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, “knowable communities,” how do fictions of the city and imaginings of the country represent individual identity as it is shaped by physical, built environments? In this light, we will consider questions of youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism, local custom and globalism. In class, we will juxtapose close readings of novels with analyses of other cultural forms (translations, paintings, operas, popular entertainment, maps) so that we come away with a broader sense of nineteenth-century pan-media culture and its international afterlives as well as a working knowledge of one of its most meaningful manifestations: the novel. French novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, English novelists Charles Dickens and George Eliot, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and the Chinese novelist Lao She (Shu Qingchun, 舒慶春) will provide case studies. Such long novels benefit from nuanced and intensive seminar discussion in which all voices are critical.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Monica F Cohen
CULPA: 8
Info
- 3 points
Literary Worldmaking: Two Case Studies
This seminar engages students in the immersive and intensive reading of two masterworks of modern prose fiction:
Middlemarch
, published by George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) in 1871-2 in England, and
The Story of the Stone, or the Dream of the Red Chamber
, composed by Cao Xueqin (and continued by Gao E) in the late 18th-century moment of Qing-dynasty China. While using devices and conventions from different narrative traditions, these novels operate in the mode of realism and do so at a monumental and panoramic scale, creating literary worlds that reflect the realia of historical lifeworlds. Beyond representing aspects of empirically recognizable worlds, these novels also incorporate philosophical reflection on their own means of representation, on their very status as fiction, on the power and limits of imaginative worldmaking.
By studying these novels as cases of literary worldmaking, we will take the opportunity also to reflect critically in this class on the world that emerges–and the process of worldmaking that gets activated–in our very experience of studying these texts together. We will consider how cosmopolitanism, as a guiding ideal of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment university, may be renewed by literary study to help us inhabit a world of common humanity that is richer and more complex than is evident in particularist localisms or a satellite-view, techno-economic globalism.
Middlemarch
we will read in its entirety. For the sake of time, we will read, in David Hawkes’ translation, the 80-chapter version of
The Story of the Stone, or the Dream of the Red Chamber
, attributed to Cao Xueqin, instead of the 120-chapter version, with the last 40 chapters attributed to Gao E. If you can and wish to read the text in Chinese, please speak to Professor Sun about the option of scheduling extra discussion sessions.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- 4 points
IN OTHER WORDS: WORLD POETRY & COSMOPOLI
WORLD POETRY & COSMOPOLIT
What is “world poetry”? This course will try to give an answer to this vexing question. You are being introduced to a number of influential poets who have entered a dialogue about what it means to write, read, translate and appreciate poetry in a global context. The impact of globalization is most visible in a number of anthologies which made considerable efforts to move beyond the existing range of national representatives and to make an English-speaking audience familiar with the names and works of poets who are bilingual or who write in their native language. Throughout the semester, we will read English translations of these poems (but feel free to read the original if you know the language). Secondly, the global context is of great importance for understanding each poet’s vision of the world since poets are involved in processes of “world-making” as well as reacting to the world’s past and present. s the semester progresses you will see that the poets are part of a larger conversation; some themes, forms and issues we discovered at the beginning will return in the middle or toward the end of the term. The selection of poets is based on considerations of gender, race, age and religious affiliation; many of the poets whose works we are going to discuss are iconic figures; in studying other cases, you will be exposed to new voices (for example, young South African poets) whose significance will emerge in a critical discussion of the anthologists’ rationale and criteria for selecting poets and marginalizing others.
THEATRE AND DEMOCRACY
What links concepts of theatre and concepts of democracy? How does theatre promote democracy, spectators’ civic participation, and vice versa, how do concepts and modes of theatre prevent the spectators from assuming civic positions both within and outside a theatrical performance? Arranged in three sections—“Tragedies and Democracies,” “Theatrical Propriety and Liberal Democracy,” and “Rhapsody for Theatre”—this class explores both the promotion and the denial of democratic discourse in the practices of dramatic writing and theatrical performance.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Hana Worthen
Info - 4 points
MAD LOVE
The history of irrational love as embodied in literary and non-literary texts throughout the Western tradition. Readings include the Bible, Greek, Roman, Medieval, and modern texts.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Alfred Mac Adam
CULPA: 40
Info
- 3 points