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.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Brian D O'Keeffe
CULPA: 28
Info
- 3 points
UTOPIAN LITERATURE
Oscar Wilde wrote that "a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth
glancing at." Ernst Bloch argued that in order to see our own world clearly "we need the most
powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness." For Wislawa Szymborska, Utopia was an island whose highlights included "The Tree of Understanding" and "the spring called Now I Get It." Latin American thinkers grappled with the concept, too, and Venezuelan novelist Arturo Uslar Pietri suggested that it was Columbus's voyages to the Americas that produced plausible space on the map for Utopia's appearance. At once political, aesthetic, and educational, Utopia began its lexical and political life in literature and has remained a feature in Transatlantic Western discourse from the age of colonial empires to our present-day debates on human rights and economic inequality.
In this course we will read and analyze the concept of Utopia from Columbus and Thomas More to the advent of modem socialism with special attention to the themes of economic inequality, gender emancipation, and the limits of cosmopolitan sensibility. We will also take care to look at essays and manifestoes as well as utopian novels, and to include Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. Readings by Tommaso Campanella, Margaret Cavendish, Madame de Stael, Friedrich Engels, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Magda Portal.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Ronald D Briggs
CULPA: 4 Info - 3 points
Trees of Knowledge: Ecocriticism and Wor
ECOCRITICISM & WORLD LIT
This survey of modern and contemporary world literature deals explicitly with environmental issues as a main theme. The course is supposed to serve as an introduction to the new field of “ecocriticism” in the Humanities and to a wide range of literary responses to current ecological concerns and transformations of natural habitat. All texts are available in English, though students will have the opportunity to read them in the original if they desire to do so.
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.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Monica F Cohen
CULPA: 8
Info
- 4 points
ADVANCED WORKSHOP TRANSLA
Maurice Blanchot once described translators as the “hidden masters of culture.” Indeed, though our labor and craft often go unrecognized in the age of Google Translate, translators play an essential role as tastemakers, bridge-builders, advocates, and diplomats, not to mention the most intimate readers and re-writers of literature. In this workshop, we will explore translation as a praxis of writing, reading, and revision. Together, we will also interrogate translation's complex and often fraught role in cultural production. What ethical questions does translation raise? Who gets to translate, and what gets translated? What is the place of the translator in the text? What can translation teach us about language, literature, and ourselves? Readings will include selections from translation theory, method texts, and literary translations across genres, from poetry and prose to essay and memoir. Students will workshop original translations into English and complete brief writing and translation exercises throughout.
- W 11 a.m.-12:50 p.m.
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Instructor:
Jhumpa Lahiri
Wikipedia Info - 4 points
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 8:10 a.m.-10 a.m.
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Instructor:
Hana Worthen
Info - 4 points
INDEPENDENT RESEARCH
Independent research, primarily for the senior essay, directed by a chosen faculty adviser and with the chair's permission. The senior seminar for majors writing senior essays will be taught in the Spring term.
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Instructor:
Linn C Mehta
CULPA: 18
Info
- 1-4 points