2012-2013 Courses
View 2012-2013 Course Prospectus in PDF format.
Note: Because courses in comparative literature are general rubrics under which a variety of topics are offered, students may repeat courses provided that the topics are different.
Primarily for Undergraduates
COLT 0510 LITERARY CREATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE
COLT 0510J Modern Arabic Literature
An introduction to the canonical and not-so-canonical texts—poetry as well as prose—of modern Arabic literature. Our study will be guided by an interrogation of each term in the course title: what does “modern” mean in the context of Arabic literary history? Is all “Arabic” literature written in Arabic, and how is this topic treated in the texts themselves? Finally, is the Arabic “adab” the same as the English “literature”? Readings by al-Muwaylihi, Mahfouz, Habibi, Ghali, Cossery, Salih, Shammas, Darwish, Adonis, and others. [Creswell]
Fall J hour
COLT 0510K The 1001 Nights
Explores the origins, performance, reception, adaptation, and translation of the 1001 Nights, one of the most beloved and influential story collections in world literature. We will spend the semester in the company of genies, princes, liars, slaves, mass murderers, orientalists, and Walt Disney, and will consider the Nights in the context of its various literary, artistic, and cinematic afterlives. [Muhanna]
Fall C hour
COLT 0510L What is Tragedy?
Introduction to tragedy. Readings may include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hegel, Chekhov, Chan-wook Park, and Jia Zhangke. Enrollment limited to 20 first year students. FYS [Saval]
Spring H hour
COLT 0610 THE FUNCTIONS OF LITERATURE
COLT 0610D Rites of Passage
Examines a seemingly universal theme-coming of age-by focusing on texts from disparate periods and cultures. Proposes that notions of "growing up" are profoundly inflected by issues of class, gender and race, and that the literary representation of these matters changes drastically over time. Texts from the Middle Ages to the present; authors drawn from Chrétien de Troyes, Quevedo, Prévost, Balzac, Brontë, Twain, Faulkner, Vesaas, Rhys, Satrapi and Foer. Enrollment limited to 20 first year students. FYS [Weinstein]
Fall J hour
COLT 0610E Crisis and Identity in Mexico: 1519-1968
Examines four moments of crisis or critical moments for the forging of Mexican identity: the Conquest, the hegemonic 17th century, the Mexican Revolution, the “Mex-hippies” of the 1960s. We especially explore how key essayistic and literary writings have dealt with Mexico’s past and present, with trauma and transformation. Excellent preparation for study in Mexico. In English. No prerequisites. WRIT [Merrim]
Fall K hour
COLT 0710 LITERATURE AND ITS HISTORY
COLT 0710C Introduction to Scandinavian Literature
An introduction to major works of Scandinavian writers, painters and filmmakers over the past 150 years. Figures include Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Strindberg, Munch, Hamsun, Josephson, Södergran, Lagerkvist, Vesaas, Cronqvist, August and Vinterberg, as well as children's books by Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson. [Weinstein]
Spring H hour
COLT 0710I New Worlds: Reading Spaces and Places in Colonial Latin America
An interdisciplinary journey-combining history, literature, art, film, architecture, cartography-through representations of the many worlds that comprised the colonial Hispanic New World. We traverse the paradisiacal Antilles, the U.S. Southwest, Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, Lima, Potosí. We read European, indigenous, and Creole writers, including: Columbus, Las Casas, Bernal Díaz, Aztec poets, Guaman Poma, Sor Juana. In English. Excellent preparation for study abroad in Latin America. Enrollment limited to 20 first year students. FYS WRIT [Merrim]
Fall O hour
COLT 0810 IDEAS, MYTHS AND THEMES
COLT 0810H How Not to Be a Hero
Shakespeare wrote two great and intense plays about ancient characters who were irredeemable failures: Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. What can failure teach us when no good comes of it? What kind of strength may a language of failure possess? We will also read the ancient sources themselves (Livy, Lucian, Plutarch), and modern adaptations of these stories (Bertolt Brecht, T. S. Eliot, Günter Grass, Wyndham Lewis). [Haynes]
Fall D hour
COLT 0810M Uncanny Tales: Narratives of Repetition and Interruption
Close readings of short narratives with special attention to how formal and thematic elements interact to produce the effects of uncertainty, anxiety and incoherence peculiar to "the uncanny." Topics include: the representation of the self in images of the arts; the representation of speech; instabilities of identity and spatial and temporal boundaries; doubles, monsters, and automata. Texts selected from: Walpole, Shelley, Hoffmann, Kleist, Poe, Dostoevsky, Freud, Wilde and Kafka. [Bernstein]
Fall D hour
COLT 0811M Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Travel and Transport in Modern Literature and the Arts
This course studies how new modes of transportation and the experiences they enabled stood as symbols of both the fears and joys of rapid modernization in 19th- and 20th-century literature, film, and visual art. How did the speeding locomotive, the plane’s aerial view, and the personal freedom of the automobile transform the ways people traversed space, experienced time, traded, and came into contact with one another? In formal terms, how did these experiences inspire innovations in the media we examine by Whitman, Kipling, Baudelaire, Marinetti, Brecht, Woolf, Huxley, Stein, Ruttman, Wegman, Picabia, Duchamp and others? No prerequisites. [Solomon]
Fall C hour
For Undergraduates and Graduates
COLT 1210 INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF LITERATURE
An historical introduction to problems of literary theory from the classical to the postmodern. Issues to be examined include mimesis, rhetoric, hermeneutics, history, psychoanalysis, formalisms and ideological criticism (questions of race, gender, sexuality, postcolonialism). Primarily for advanced undergraduates. Lectures, discussions; several short papers. [Bernstein & Sng]
Fall F hour
COLT 1310 LITERATURE AND ITS HISTORY
COLT 1310A The Classical Arabic Literary Tradition
Introduces the classical Arabic literary tradition, from the poetic masterpieces of pre-Islamic Arabia to the courtly romances and story collections of the medieval period. Topics include: literature and the Qur’an; poetic and prose genres; aesthetics and the divine; Hellenistic influences; popular literature; the medieval “novel”; and the intersections of literature and law, medicine, and historiography. We will also assess different critical approaches to the study of classical Arabic literature, including structuralism, folkloristics, and narratology. [Muhanna]
Spring C hour
COLT 1410 STUDIES IN DRAMA
COLT 1410U Shakespeare in Perspective
We study Shakespeare together with selections from other writers or thinkers, including those who have written about Shakespeare (e.g. Nietzsche, Emerson, Coleridge), and those who can illuminate interpretive problems in Shakespeare (e.g. Plato, Melville). [Saval]
Fall E hour
COLT 1420 STUDIES IN NARRATIVE
COLT 1420A The Tale of Genji and its Legacy
The Tale of Genji (circa 1000 CE), authored by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman of the Heian court, has been canonized over the centuries as the greatest work of Japanese literature. No work in the Japanese tradition has exerted as much literary influence as this mammoth work of prose fiction detailing the private lives of Genji, the brilliant son of the emperor, those with whom he consorts, and his descendents. We will read Genji in its entirety, along with antecedent works, other texts of the period, works influenced by Murasaki's opus, other historical materials, and secondary commentary. There are no prerequisites for this course and it is open to all undergraduates. [Viswanathan]
Spring G hour
COLT 1421Q Word and Image: Ekphrasis, the Iconic Narrative, and the Graphic Novel
An examination of the tradition of illustrated narratives from the pre-modern to the modern periods: the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana, the early eleventh-century Japanese Genji Monogatari, the medieval English Canterbury Tales, the late eighteenth century Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as well as the contemporary graphic novel Persepolis and examples of Japanese manga. Discussion will focus on the nature of iconography and symbolism; the historical privileging of text over image; the significance of parallel visual and verbal representation and its implications for culturally-specific theories of reading. Instructor permission required. [Viswanathan]
Spring E hour
COLT 1421T Mediterranean Fictions
Sun-drenched, seductive, and bewildering, the Mediterranean has always been a focal point of contact, interaction, and conflict. And more than that: a cradle of civilizations; a timeless repository of memories and aspirations; a porous, protean world; a sea of many horizons, histories, and identities. We will embark on an intensive exploration of some of the basic aspects of Mediterranean culture by means of discussing a wide range of texts on Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. Writers include Seferis, Kazantzakis, Papadiamantis, Galanaki, Camus, Gide, Pirandello, Lampedusa, and Pamuk. All readings in English translation. [Panou]
Fall K hour
COLT 1430 STUDIES IN POETRY
COLT 1430H Poetry, Art, and Beauty
What does it mean to be beautiful in poetry and art? How is beauty defined from Plato to the blog? What is aesthetics in relation to beautiful practice? A workshop in the reading of lyric poetry and visual art from cave painting to modernism. The three written exercises on text, image, and aesthetics, with creative practice in translation. No final examination. Texts include Sappho, Plato, Aristotle, Catullus, Horace, Petrarch, Goethe, Kant, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Rilke, Benjamin, Stevens, Derrida, and Danto. LILE [Foley]
Spring F hour
COLT 1430V Comparative Modernisms
An introduction to modernist poetry and poetics in comparative perspective. Though modernism is often considered a uniquely European and American phenomenon, we will read poetry and theoretical texts from Mexico City, Beirut, Buenos Aires, and Beijing. Among the questions we will ask are these: Where are modernism’s geographical and historical limits? What is the relation of modernism to politics? What is the role of translation in modernism’s origins and development? Readings by Baudelaire, Pound, H.D., Borges, Perse, Paz, Adonis, Berman, and others. [Creswell]
Fall H hour
COLT 1430W Inventions of Farewell
The elegy, a poem of mourning, is one of the oldest and most widespread genres of literature. It is found in classical Greek and Latin poetry as well the verse of pre-Islamic Arabia. It is also a vital contemporary genre. How do these very different poetries respond to the common fact of death? How are loss and absence converted into verbal presence, a text for reading? We will read a range of verse, from disparate periods and cultures, including poems by Virgil, al-Khansa’, Milton, Lorca, Ann Carson, and Breyten Breytenbach. Critical texts include readings by Freud, Sacks, and Ramazani. [Creswell]
Spring I hour
COLT 1440 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND MEDIA
COLT 1440A Storytelling in The Wire
The Wire has received attention from fields like sociology and urban studies, which tend to read the work as a fictionalization of their observations about cities. It has not received as much attention from departments of literature, although it should. In our course, traditional categories of literary study (including character, storytelling, fiction, and tragedy) will be wedded to the investigation of contemporary problems that emerge from the work (including class, race, neoliberalism, the disappearance of work, and the death and life of American cities). [Saval]
Spring K hour
COLT 1440B Killer Love: Passion and Crime in Fiction and Film
Discusses textual and cinematic representations of criminal passion and its ambiguous relationship to religious, moral, and social norms. We will focus on extreme forms of intimacy both as a thematic choice of cultural production and as a symbolic medium of communication. Why is it that art so often explores unsanctioned emotions and deviant behaviors? What is at stake when narratives capitalize on violent manifestations of desire? In what ways is the semantics of excessive love related to conceptions of subjectivity, sociability, and sexuality? What role does it play in the creative process itself? [Panou]
Fall L hour
COLT 1810 STUDIES IN THE LITERATURE OF IDEAS
COLT 1810P Literature and Medicine
The purpose of this course is to examine a number of central issues in medicine-disease, pain, trauma, madness, the image of the physician-- from the distinct perspectives of the sciences and the arts. Literary texts will be drawn from authors such as Sophocles, Hawthorne, Buchner, Strinberg, Gilman, Tolstoy, Kafka, Anderson, Hemingway, Ionesco, and K. Harrison; theorists will include Foucault, Sontag, Scarry and others. Senior seminar. Reserved for: Seniors. Preference given to concentrators in Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture and Media. Instructor permission required. [Weinstein]
Spring J hour
COLT 1812Z The City and the Arts
Examines selected representations of urban life from 18th century to our time, by consulting the testimony of literature, painting, architecture and film. Writers and artists include Defoe, Hogarth, Balzac, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hopper, Brecht, F.L. Wright, Le Corbusier, Calvino and Auster; films include “Metropolis,” “Man with a Movie Camera,” “Alphaville”, “Midnight Cowboy,” “Chinatown” and others. [Weinstein]
Fall I hour
COLT 1813A What Went Wrong? Narratives of Decline in Arabic Literature
The concept of civilizational decline is a central theme of classical and modern Arabic literature. From the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 to rise of European and American hegemony in the Middle East, Arabs have spent centuries lamenting, debating, and reflecting upon their perceived fall from grace and the rise of other world powers to take their place. In this course, we will trace the question of decline through several centuries of literary and intellectual history. Readings include Ibn Khaldun, Ilyas al-Mawsili, Ibn Battuta, al-Shidyaq, Gibran, Munif, Salih, Said, Lewis, Hourani, and others. [Muhanna]
Fall G hour
Primarily for Graduate Students
COLT 2650 THEORY OF LITERATURE
COLT 2650J Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and After
Genealogy was one of the most fruitful twentieth-century critical methods. We will begin our investigation by reading Nietzsche’s ‘Use and Abuse of History for Life’ and The Genealogy of Morals, with attention to the contexts and traditions in which Nietzsche was working. The central part of the class will be devoted Foucault’s large oeuvre, who at different stages of his career developed very different versions of genealogy. We will then consider Alasdair MacIntrye, Bernard Williams, and Raymond Geuss on genealogical forms of moral inquiry, and we will conclude with recent work in science studies. [Haynes]
Fall Q hour
COLT 2820 SPECIAL TOPICS IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
COLT 2820Y Shakespeare and Justice: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure
We will read The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure with patience and attention. Thematic concerns that emerge from the work (including problems of justice, violence, and the law) will be wedded to slow, detailed examination of the primary texts. [Saval]
Fall N hour
COLT 2820Z The Encyclopedic Imagination from Pliny to Google Books
This course will consider the history of encyclopedic activity in various classical, medieval, and modern contexts. We will explore issues of encyclopedic epistemology, book history, the classification of knowledge, and the obsession to collect, compile, and document everything knowable and unknowable in both real and fictional encyclopedias. Readings will include selections from Pliny, Isidore de Seville, Vincent de Beauvais, the Ikhwan al-Safa’, al-Jahiz, Avicenna, Rabelais, Diderot, Flaubert, Calvino, Borges, Foucault, and others. [Muhanna]
Spring M hour
COLT 2821B Memory/Commemoration/Testimony
An investigation of the mnemonic functions of poetry from the elegy to historical witnessing in the Romantic and post-romantic period. We will study the creative and performative function of memory as well as processes of repetition, recollection, trauma and canon-formation. Theoretical and poetic texts will be studied together. Authors will include: Rousseau, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Dickinson, H.D., Rilke, Celan, Reznikoff; Heidegger, Freud, Arendt, Adorno, Derrida, de Man, Ronell. [Bernstein]
Spring N hour
rev. 04/20/12