Literature
100-Level Courses
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Contemporary Spanish American Short
Stories |
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Professor:
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John Burns |
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Course
Number: |
LIT 116 |
CRN Number: |
90272 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 1:30 PM
- 2:50 PM Hegeman 308 |
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Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
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20th and 21st century Spanish American short stories embody
cultural traditions and literary currents unique to the American continent
and encapsulate important philosophical discussions that resonate in contexts
far beyond the region. This course explores the major themes and styles of
short stories by key Spanish American writers in English translation. These
authors include Jorge Luis Borges, María Luisa Bombal, Juan Rulfo, Elena
Garro, Gabriel García Márquez, Luisa Valenzuela, Roberto Bolaño, Mayra
Santos-Febres, and Samanta Schweblin, among others. We will examine detective
fiction, fantastic literature, and examples of magical realism, as well as
writing that explores politics, the effects of colonial history on the
present, and representations of desire and gender relationships. This is part
of the World Literature Course offering. |
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French Existentialism in Fiction |
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Professor:
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Eric Trudel |
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Course
Number: |
LIT 120 |
CRN Number: |
90273 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 1:30 PM
- 2:50 PM Olin 202 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
French Studies |
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Reporting in 1946 for The Nation on this “new movement,”
one that had taken Paris, its cafés and nightclubs by storm, Hannah Arendt
observed in slight disbelief: “a lecture on philosophy provokes a riot, with
hundreds crowding in and thousands turned away. Books on philosophical
problems preaching no cheap creed and offering no panacea [...] sell like
detective stories. Plays, in which the action is a matter of words, not of
plot, [...] run for months.” This course offers an introduction to the
literary output of French Existentialism, one of the most important philosophical
movements in the 20th century and a defining revolutionary force that shaped
the cultural, literary and political landscapes of postwar France. We will
focus first and foremost on a few novels, short stories and plays by
Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Boris
Vian, among others, to outline the ideas and questions central to
Existentialism. Our discussion will be supplemented by excerpts from key
philosophical essays by Sartre and Camus, and films by Jean-Luc Godard and
Agnès Varda. Taught in English. |
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Introduction to Chinese Poetry |
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Professor:
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Ao Wang |
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Course
Number: |
LIT 124 |
CRN Number: |
90274 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 11:50 AM
- 1:10 PM Olin 202 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
Asian Studies |
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This course is an exploration of various styles of
traditional and modern Chinese poetry from the archaic period to the 21st
century, with an emphasis on the wide range of ways poetry has been used in
political and cultural movements in China over the last three millennia.
Topics include Book of Songs, “Nineteen Ancient Poems,” the “Music Bureau”
Ballads, Six Dynasties Poetry, the great Tang masters, the Song lyrics,
famous women poets, “The Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei,” contemporary
migrant workers’ poetry, and poems responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. In
this course, students will learn to recite Chinese poetry in the classical
manner of exchange, echo, and call-and-response and to use poetic skills
inspired by Chinese poetry in their daily lives. They will also learn how
Chinese poetry has intersected with religious practice, calligraphy,
painting, history, fiction, and modern media. All readings are in English
translation, and no previous knowledge of Chinese is required. This course is
part of the World Literature offering. |
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Women and Leadership |
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Course Number: LIT/PS 131 |
CRN Number: 90817 |
Class cap: 20 |
Credits: 2 |
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Professor: |
Deirdre d’Albertis, Erin Cannan and Michelle
Murray |
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Schedule/Location: |
Fri 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Chapel |
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Distributional Area: |
D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists |
Gender and Sexuality Studies |
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It is 2024. Why aren't there
more women in leadership positions? According to a 2018 Pew Research Center
report, the majority of American men and women acknowledge the capacity of
women to lead. Yet in certain domains--most notably electoral politics and
business-- continue to be under-represented at the top and the
American public remains skeptical that gender parity can be
achieved. Recent elections have galvanized the electorate around
constructions of gender in particularly dramatic ways. If we are
living in a post-feminist society (as some claim), why do these questions and
conflicts continue to arise? Identity is an urgent conversation in
21st-century politics and everyday life, and this includes awareness of how
intersectionality shapes gendered experiences. What are the stories that we
tell ourselves and each other about equality, representation, privilege,
freedom, authority, and success? How do these inflect real-world outcomes for
individuals and societies? In this two-credit course we will
explore some of the stories that circulate in our culture around women and
power, both from an academic and from a practical, real-world perspective.
What does it mean to lead? How do we use a language of empowerment? Why has
the United States embraced certain narratives of gender equity and success as
opposed to those being created in other countries and cultures? We will focus
on learning from women who are committed to making a difference in the world
through their personal and professional choices, hearing their stories, and
reading texts that have been particularly important to them in their lives
and work. So too, we will engage with stories from the past (archival
research), from across disciplines (government, politics, the
military, higher education, STEM, the arts, tech, media) and from a wide
range of perspectives. As an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences
course, this seminar will provide students with the unique opportunity to
bring theory and practice together in a very immediate sense: by the end of
the term you will have identified a story only you can tell, whether it is
based in political activism, community engagement, or work experience.
Drawing on the rich resources here in Annandale as well as through Bard's
other campuses we will reach out to groups and organizations with a shared
focus on gender. Network building is something we will explicitly
address. This course is open to all first-year
students. Upper College students may also participate if selected to
serve as course fellows (register in May if interested). |
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The Art of Small Forms |
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Professor:
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Thomas Wild |
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Course
Number: |
LIT 165 |
CRN Number: |
90585 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Mon Wed 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Albee 106 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
German Studies |
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Small forms of writing tend to appeal and to challenge:
Kafka’s short story might end so abruptly that we’re left with many more
questions than answers. Nietzsche’s dream account might provide us with
poetic wisdom, whose ambiguity haunts us. The sound of Gertrude Stein’s prose
poem might be as clear as its content opaque. In dialog with these and other
literary voices, we will explore this art of small
forms:
how to be concise and incomplete, to generate critical imagination, to
transfer agency and creativity to the reader. We will close-read novellas,
fairy tales, anecdotes, diaries, letters and post cards by further eminent
writers such as Joyce, Baudelaire, Freud, Rilke, Benjamin, Wolf, Barnes,
Baldwin, Burroughs, Carver, Carson, Lauterbach, Moten. The stardust of
literary fragments and lists will get our attention as much as the stardom of
comic strips, miniature sculptures, and video clips. We’ll discuss the
theoretical and political stakes through notions like “humor”, “collage”, and
“minor literatures”. Last but not least, we will study this fascinating art
form also by doing, that is by experimenting in class with a variety of small
forms of writings. |
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201 Narrative/Poetics/Representation
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Narrative/Poetics/Representation |
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Professor:
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Stephen Graham
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Course
Number: |
LIT 201 A |
CRN Number: |
90276 |
Class cap: |
16 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Mon Wed 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Olin 101 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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What does it mean to study literature today? How,
precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from
other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small,
unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and
everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and
aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to
reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in
the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing
students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this
course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of
literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social
identities. This course is a pre-moderation requirement for all prospective
Literature and Written Arts majors. |
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Narrative/Poetics/Representation |
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Professor:
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Alex Benson |
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Course
Number: |
LIT 201 B |
CRN Number: |
90277 |
Class cap: |
16 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 11:50 AM
- 1:10 PM Olin 310 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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What does it mean to study literature today? How,
precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from
other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small,
unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and
everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and
aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to
reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in
the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing
students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this
course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of
literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social
identities. This course is a pre-moderation requirement for all prospective
Literature and Written Arts majors. |
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200-Level Courses
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After Chinua Achebe: Reading contemporary African Literature |
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Professor: |
John Ryle |
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Course Number: |
LIT 2023 |
CRN Number: |
91095 |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location: |
Tue Thurs
3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 302 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
Africana Studies; Anthropology; Human Rights; Written Arts |
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Chinua Achebe, who taught at Bard for two decades, is among
the greatest of post-colonial African writers. The seminar will open with a
discussion of Things Fall Apart, his first and most celebrated work, a
historical novel set in the Igbo culture of Nigeria on the eve of European
colonization. Next, a consideration of Heart of Darkness, set in Congo and
written in the colonial era by the Polish-born British writer Joseph Conrad –
a controversial text that Achebe frequently criticized, but that some other post-colonial
African writers have defended. Over the course of the term we will explore
the work of a range of post-colonial African writers, their representations
of the cultural wealth of the continent and their engagement with the
languages and genres of European literature. The seminar will cover issues of
history and post-coloniality, nationhood, gender and representation, cultural
relativism, oral literature, and the challenge of translation. Class members
will write short weekly responses and a term essay on the work of one of the
writer discussed. We will be joined for discussions by other Bard faculty
and/or by the writers themselves. Texts to be discussed will be selected from
the work of the following: Amos Tutuola (Nigeria), Tayeb Salih (Sudan), Ngũgĩ
wa Thiong’o (Kenya), J.M.Coetzee (South Africa), Ousmane Sembene (Senegal),
Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), Mohamed Choukri (Morocco), Chimamanda Adichie
(Nigeria), Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania), Leila Abulela (Sudan), Okot p’Bitek
(Uganda), NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) and Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya). |
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Religion and the Secular in Literary
Modernism |
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Professor:
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Matthew Mutter
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Course
Number: |
LIT 2035 |
CRN Number: |
90290 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 11:50 AM
- 1:10 PM Olin 205 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
American & Indigenous Studies; Study of Religions |
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One theorist calls the modern novel “the epic of a world
that has been abandoned by God”; another critic says of modernism: “no
literature has ever been so intensely spiritual as ours.” This course seeks
to make sense of these divergent views by exploring the religious and secular
frameworks – both tacit and explicit – that inform twentieth-century
Anglo-American and European literature. We will plot the existential,
political, and aesthetic coordinates of modern secularity even as we
challenge binary views of “religion” and “secularism.” On the one hand, our
concerns will include modernism’s relation to paganism and the occult, to
ascetic renunciation and self-erasure, and to mystical accounts of language;
on the other, we will trace the import of secular commitments to immanence,
self-creation, and the body. Authors may include James Baldwin, Willa Cather,
Paul Celan, Hilda Doolittle, J.M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, Zora-Neale Hurston,
Salman Rushdie, Jean Toomer, Simone Weil and Virginia Woolf. |
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Divisions, Partitions, and Frontiers:
Literatures from Asian Borderlands |
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Professor:
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Miya
Qiong Xie |
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Course
Number: |
LIT 205 |
CRN Number: |
90279 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Mon Wed 10:10 AM
- 11:30 AM Olin 306 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
Asian Studies |
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Borderlands are where the space of modern nation-states is
defined. They tell us a lot about the scopes and limits of different
cultures. Many sites of borders in Asia, such as the Division of Korea and
the Partition between India and Pakistan, have had a profound impact on
regional relations and are sources of lasting trauma for the people who live
there. Borderlands are also places where people learn about themselves and
their geographical neighbors during the process of transcultural negotiation.
Writers and artists from borderland regions have articulated the
extraordinarily rich experience of borderland subjects through language,
literature, film and arts. These creative and critical voices and images
bespeak the pain and power of in-between-ness, which resonate with modern
subjects beyond geographical borderlands. In this interdisciplinary and
transregional course, you will study literary and artistic works about six
Asian borderlands: Okinawa in Japan, Manchuria in mainland China, the
Partition of India and Pakistan, the division of the two Koreas, Taiwan, and
the highlands connecting East and South Asia, commonly referred to as Zomia.
The disciplinary perspectives involved in this course range from literature,
film, and art to history, anthropology, and linguistics. Enrollment is open,
and there are no prerequisites. You do not need to know any Asian language to
take the course. This course is part of the World Literature offering. |
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Modernity and Modernism in the Arabic
Literature |
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Professor:
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Ziad Dallal |
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Course
Number: |
LIT 2071 |
CRN Number: |
90291 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Mon Wed 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Olin 205 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: |
Africana Studies; Middle Eastern Studies |
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This course introduces students to the major revolutions of
Arabic literature from the nineteenth century onwards. Our readings will be
anchored in the two key terms, modernity and modernism, in order to
understand how social and material changes precipitate cultural
transformation, and in turn, how literary movements emerge as galvanized
critiques of a world marked by (de)colonization, national independence
movements, and (civil) war. Thus, one of the objectives of this course would
be to define and distinguish modernity and modernism. To do so, we will read
manifestos and essays on literary theory, as well as new scholarship that
situates literary movements within their global contexts. The second
objective of this course will be to familiarize students with the rich
material of modern literary production from the Arab world. We will read
widely from this bountiful material, including hybrid literary forms from the
19th century, the travel literature of the early 20th century, the modernist
poetry of the mid-20th century, the response in prose to that latter
movement, and postcolonial prison literature. Authors may include Butrus
al-Bustani, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Zaynab Fawwaz, Etel Adnan, Tayeb Salih,
Adonis, Nazik al-Maka’ika, Mahmoud Darwish, Anton Shammas, Emile Habibi,
Saadallah Wannous, Sonallah Ibarhim, Latifa al-Zayyat, Ibrahim el-Salahi,
Ibrahim Aslan, and Edwar al-Kharrat. The course is designated as Difference
and Justice because it will tackle issues of globalization, nationalism,
gender and sexuality, and citizenship and refugees as central concerns of
Modern Arabic Literature. This course is part of the World Literature Course
offering. |
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Translation, in Theory |
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Professor:
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Elizabeth Holt
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Course
Number: |
LIT 210 |
CRN Number: |
90286 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 1:30 PM
- 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 118 |
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Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
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Crosslists: |
Written Arts |
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This course introduces students to theories and practices
of translation. We will read from a
range of theorists, to include Lydia Lu, Walter Benjamin, Walter Ong, Emily
Apter, Michel Foucault, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Abdelfattah Kilito, Lawrence
Venuti, and Gayatri Spivak; as well as the work of literary critics and
intellectual historians as they deploy theories of translation in textual
analysis. We will also study
contemporary translation practices, from machine translation, to translation
by correspondence, to the appearance of new translations of classic works such
as the Arabian Nights. There are no pre-requisites.
This course is part of the World Literature offering. |
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Traditions of African American
Literature |
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Professor:
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Peter L'Official
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Course
Number: |
LIT 2134 |
CRN Number: |
90292 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 10:10 AM
- 11:30 AM Olin 303 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
Africana Studies; American & Indigenous Studies |
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What did Toni Morrison mean when she said that she wanted
to write literature that was “irrevocably, indisputably Black?” This course
will answer that question by introducing students to the African American
literary tradition, both within and against the shape of social and cultural
history. We will explore a range of African American literary practices
alongside the development of related cultural, aesthetic, and vernacular
forms and movements while remaining mindful of broad historical shifts in
American life from the 18th century to the present. In tracing these emergent
and lasting voices, modes, and styles, we will examine how authors have
created, defined, and complicated the traditions of literature within which
they participate. Readings will include novels, essays, autobiography,
poetry, and drama; writers will likely include Baldwin, Baraka, Douglass, Du
Bois, Dumas, Ellison, Hurston, Jacobs, Lorde, Morrison, and Toomer. This
course is open both to intended Literature majors and to others interested in
developing skills in close-reading and critical analysis. Issues of race,
gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic difference are discussed at length in
this course. |
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Medieval Ireland |
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Professor:
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Karen Sullivan
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Course
Number: |
LIT 2175 |
CRN Number: |
90293 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 1:30 PM
- 2:50 PM Olin 201 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
Irish and Celtic Studies; Medieval Studies |
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As the fabled Land of Saints and Scholars, Ireland is said
to have saved civilization at a time when the rest of Europe had entered into
its darkest period. During the pre-Christian era, Ireland developed the most
extensive mythology of all Celtic countries, with its tales of Cúchulainn
(the Irish national hero), Conchobar, Deirdre, Fergus, and Mebd. After its
conversion in the fifth century, it developed a distinctive Celtic
Christianity, whose monks traveled throughout the British Isles and
continental Europe founding monasteries and spreading their spirituality. Though
this early history of Ireland was largely neglected during the Protestant
Ascendancy, it would be recalled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by
the nationalist movement that fought for Irish independence and by the Celtic
Revival, which looked to this history for a model of a distinctively Irish
identity upon which the new state could be based. Throughout the course, we
will be considering what, if anything, is “Irish” and how the medieval past
has defined and continues to define the present. We will be reading
representative works from the Historical Cycle (The Frenzy of Sweeney), the
Mythological Cycle (The Book of Invasions, The Wooing of Etain, The Dream of
Oengus), the Ulster Cycle (The Cattle Raid of Cooley, Bricriu's Feast), and
the Fenian Cycle (Tales of the Elders of Ireland, The Pursuit of Diarmuid and
Grainne), as well as Christian writings (lives of St. Patrick and St.
Bridget, Adomnán of Iona’s Life of St. Columba, The Voyage of St. Brendan,
and The Treatise on the Purgatory of St. Patrick) and the poetry and prose of
W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. |
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Modern Korean Literature in Global
Context |
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Professor:
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Miya
Qiong Xie |
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Course
Number: |
LIT 220 |
CRN Number: |
90280 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 10:10 AM
- 11:30 AM Olin 202 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
Asian Studies |
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Under Japanese colonization before 1945 and at the
forefront of the Global Cold War after, modern Korea had to find its space of
development through constant and difficult transnational negotiation. With
our understanding of Korea and Korean literature increasingly reaching beyond
the confines of the peninsula, this course explores modern Korean literatures
both from the Korean peninsula and in diaspora. It will introduce
participants to canonical works in modern Korean literature, different media
forms of the Korean Wave, and well-known works from Korean diaspora
communities in Japan, the US, and China, as well as to the critical
discussions surrounding them. We will closely examine how each work, with its
particular content and form, engages with the historical development and
contemporary dynamics of modern Korea and Korean diaspora communities. From
literary and cultural perspectives, this course addresses and problematizes
some of the most difficult issues that modern Korea has been working hard to
deal with, including colonial modernity, the US occupation and the division,
overseas Koreans, gender and sexuality, and so on. Enrollment is open, and
there are no prerequisites. You do not need to know the Korean language to
take the course. This course is part of the World Literature offering. |
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Transpacific Japan: Literature,
Migration, and Empire |
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Professor:
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Nathan Shockey
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Course
Number: |
LIT 222 |
CRN Number: |
90281 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 11:50 AM
- 1:10 PM Olin 204 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
Asian Studies |
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This course examines the movements of people, stories, and
politics across the ocean, well beyond the borders of “Japan,” to consider
questions of migration, empire, and diasporic identity. Through this oceanic
lens, images and reimaginations of Japan and Japanese literature and culture
emerge and transform in places ranging from small Pacific islands to the high
deserts of California to littoral Latin America. At the same time, we will
see how events, actions, and texts in far-flung places circuit back to change
and restructure Japan’s so-called “home islands.” Topics include the role of
Japanese migrants in Hawaiian plantation society; the wages of Japan’s
imperial project in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific; the American
occupation of Okinawa, postwar struggles against U.S. military bases, and
camptown culture; internment, writing, and art in American concentration
camps during World War 2; fantasies of exoticized Japan in Cold War culture;
Japanese American fiction and film; literature written in Japanese in the
Western Hemisphere; Nikkei literature and culture in Peru and Brazil, and
more. We will follow these texts and traces back and forth across both the
Pacific and the semester, outlining the ways in which Japan informs and
intersects with global currents of capitalism, colonialism, and power. This
course is part of the World Literature offering. |
|||||||||||
|
Bad Behavior |
||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Francine Prose
|
||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 223 |
CRN Number: |
90282 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Thurs 1:30 PM
- 3:50 PM Olin 308 |
||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
||||||||
|
In this class we will study novels and stories in which
characters behave” badly,” eccentrically or in ways that we might consider
extreme. We will look at social norms and conventions, at moral decisions, at
questions of politeness, at race and gender, at the influence of history, at
spoken and unspoken (and evolving) rules, and at the influence of conscience
and culture. Among the text we’ll read are: Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights;
Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters; Turgenev, First Love; Chekhov, In the Ravine;
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues; Tatyana Tolstaya, Heavenly Flame; Molly Keane,
Good Behavior; Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies; Kevin Barry, Night Boat To
Tangier. James Alan McPherson, Gold Coast; Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on
Earth. Students will submit a 300-word response paper in advance of every
class. Students wishing to enroll should email me at [email protected],
explaining why they want to take the class.This course is part of the World
Literature offering. |
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|
St. Petersburg: City, Monument, Text |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Olga Voronina
|
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 2311 |
CRN Number: |
90294 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Tue Thurs 11:50 PM
- 1:10 PM Olin 308 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental Studies; Russian and
Eurasian Studies |
|||||||||
|
Emperors, serfs, merchants, and soldiers built St.
Petersburg, but it was the writers who put it on the cultural map of the
world. Founded on the outskirts of the empire, the city served as a missing
link between “enlightened” Europe and “barbaric” Asia, between the turbulent
past of the Western civilization and its uncertain future. Considered to be
too cold, too formal, too imperial on the outside, St. Petersburg harbored
revolutionary ideas and terrorist movements that threatened to explode from
within. While its granite quays were erected to withstand the assault of the
floods, some of its most famous monuments, including literary works, resisted
the onset of new, radical ideologies.
In this course, we will study the conflicting nature of the city as reflected
in literature and literary criticism. The poems and novels on our reading
list will provide a sweeping overview of Russia’s literary canon in the 19th
and 20th centuries, from Pushkin to Dostoevsky and from Gogol to Bely and
Nabokov. After exploring Queen of Spades, Crime and Punishment, and Anna
Karenina, we will move on to Petersburg and The Defense, thus undertaking a
journey through Russia’s literary tradition and the urban landscape of the
north with the authors who either reconstructed St. Petersburg in their
memory or re-visited it in their imaginations. |
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|
The Age of Chance: Literature and
Accident in the 19th Century |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Daniel Williams
|
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 233 |
CRN Number: |
90283 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Tue Thurs 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Olin 203 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Victorian Studies |
|||||||||
|
Many in the 19th century came to understand that we live in
a world ruled by chance rather than divine order. On railways and ships, in
factories and mines, the speed of steam-driven capitalism made accidents more
common and forced the law to rethink how to handle accidental injury and
death. The rise of statistics revolutionized the study of society and
revealed the uncanny predictability of apparently unruly phenomena—from
births to deaths, marriages to murders. Chance mades its way into the
sciences, especially in the random variations underpinning the theory of
evolution by natural selection. It inflected ideas about beauty and pattern
in the arts, notably in the new (and chance-marked) art of photography. And
it gave a renewed emphasis to questions of luck, risk, coincidence, and
probability in literary narrative, where topics like gambling and financial
speculation were rife. What Keats called the “magic hand of chance”
everywhere raised and renegotiated fundamental questions about human life,
action, and freedom—about how we think and act in conditions of uncertainty.
As we read about how these topics were addressed in literature and culture of
the 19th and early 20th centuries, we’ll also think about how they inflect
our understanding of chance today. Authors may include Dickens, Thackeray,
Tennyson, Darwin, Brontë, Poe, Melville, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Maupassant,
Dostoevsky, Hardy, Wharton, and Doyle. |
|||||||||||
|
Fantastic Journeys and the Modern World |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Jonathan Brent
|
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 2404 |
CRN Number: |
90558 |
Class cap: |
20 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Fri 3:30 PM
- 5:50 PM Olin 202 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Jewish Studies; Russian and Eurasian Studies |
|||||||||
|
This course will investigate the great historical
transitions and transformations of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries
in Eastern Europe and Russia as these were reflected in and in some ways
prepared for in the avant garde literature—the fantastic literature—of those
lands. As we read about men turning into protoapes and newts; apes turning
into protomen; human beings turning into bugs; spirits of the dead directing
the affairs of the living; and infernal machines reflecting and perhaps
controling human consciousness, we will ask: “What makes this literature
Fantastic, rather than simply science fiction. How and why did this new genre
emerge at this time and in this place—eastern Europe and Russia—and what does
it tell us about the deep moral, political, social, and artistic
transformations of the modern world. These works, like the times in which
they were written, question absolutes, accepted ideas of logic, temporal
sequence, causation, reason, the nature of identity and fundamental questions
of truth and morality, the nature of language, the possibility of
constructing literary narratives as well as narratives of self and society.
Perhaps most tellingly, these works present readers with uncomfortable
pictures and portents of their worlds in their attacks on empire, white male
hierarchies, structures of values, and the logic of daily life. |
|||||||||||
|
Sex, Lies and the Renaissance |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Joseph Luzzi |
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 241 |
CRN Number: |
90287 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Mon Wed 10:10 AM
- 11:30 AM Olin 101 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Historical Studies; Italian Studies |
|||||||||
|
This new course will study how the Renaissance changed the
world we live in today, as we learn how the period was a time of ongoing
cultural experimentation and radical change that was only understood hundreds
of years after it appeared. With topics ranging from Machiavelli's
masterpiece on the relation between deceit and power in the Prince to the new
paradigms for gender and sexuality in leading woman writers and artists
including Vittoria Colonna and Artemisia Gentileschi, we will reconstruct the
Renaissance in all its complexity and groundbreaking influence. Other topics
will include the birth of the modern “artist” through the work of Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Botticelli, and their pioneering biographer Vasari, and the
emergence of new international institutions like the Medici banking empire
and a highly political—and often sinister—papacy. We will also unpack the
idea of “the Renaissance,” or age of “rebirth,” in the brilliant 19th-century
historians, ranging from Burckhardt and Michelet to Pater and Ruskin.
Overall, we will see how the Renaissance was much more than a mere moment in
cultural history; it was and remains a mindset that continues to shape the
way we make art and literature. This is a pre-1800 Literature course
offering. All course work in English. |
|||||||||||
|
A Thousand-Year Old Romance: Reading The
Tale of Genji Across the Ages, Media, and Genres |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Phuong Ngo |
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 2423 |
CRN Number: |
90295 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Mon Wed 11:50 AM
- 1:10 PM Olin 305 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Asian Studies; Medieval Studies |
|||||||||
|
This course presents a synchronous and diachronous
exploration of The Tale of Genji, a masterpiece of Japanese literature.
During the first half of the course, students will read the entire English
translation of the tale, as well as a number of other primary texts from
roughly the same time period in order to gain an understanding of the
sociohistorical and literary context in which the tale came about, while the
second half of the course is devoted to the reception and adaptations of the
tale across various media, genres, and time periods, ranging from
commentaries, noh plays, traditional paintings and even “fan fiction” to
modern novels and manga. The aim of the course is to provide the students
with an understanding of The Tale of Genji’s place within the Japanese
literary tradition, and the impact it has had and continues to exert on all
facets of Japanese culture. This course is a Pre-1800 and a World Literature
Course offering. |
|||||||||||
|
Poetry and Rebellion: Milton's Paradise
Lost |
||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Marisa Libbon
|
||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 246 |
CRN Number: |
90288 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Mon Wed 11:50 AM
- 1:10 PM Olin Language Center 206 |
||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
||||||||
|
When is disobedience justified? And what price are we
willing to pay for disobeying? In this course, we will explore questions of
civil and personal responsibility, freedom of speech, thought, allegiance,
and good and evil through reading closely, and with attention to historical
context, John Milton’s 17th-century epic Paradise Lost and a selection of
Milton’s polemics and shorter poems. Paradise Lost is a strange and
breathtaking work. Beginning when the rebel-angel Lucifer, now Satan, finds
himself lying disoriented in hell after having been “hurled headlong, flaming”
out of heaven, Paradise Lost narrates the story of the creation and fall of
humanity as, in part, a consequence of the angels’ rebellion against God. A
polemicist, minister of government (Secretary for Foreign Tongues), and poet,
Milton was also a radical: an antimonarchist who advocated the overthrow of
England’s king and supported the subsequent kingless Commonwealth. When the
monarchy was restored, Milton was cast out of government and his home, and
was for a time imprisoned. He had long wanted to write a national epic for
England along the lines of Virgil’s Aeneid. He wrote instead an epic “of
man’s first disobedience,” an attempt to “justify the ways of God to men.”
And perhaps to himself. In reading Milton’s work, we will study a range of
poetic forms, devices, and effects, and we will consider, and experiment
with, the ways in which various kinds of writing—from epic to lyric poetry,
from the elegy to the essay—can be used to persuade, tempt, and move the
minds and bodies of writers and readers to action. This is a pre-1800
Literature course offering. |
||||||||||
|
Telling Stories about Rights |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Thomas Bartscherer and Nuruddin Farah |
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 2509 |
CRN Number: |
90296 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Mon Wed 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Olin 305 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Human Rights |
|||||||||
|
(HR core course.) What can fiction tell us about human
rights? And what can we learn about fiction and literature by focusing on
themes of justice and injustice, suffering and struggle, oppression and
resistance? This course will focus on a wide range of fictions, from a
variety of writers and filmmakers with different backgrounds and from
different parts of the world, that tell compelling stories about individual
rights and communal experiences of justice and injustice. We will look at the
ways in which literary forms can present and interrogate universalizing
claims, and how themes such as political oppression, forced migration,
disenfranchisement, racism, poverty, and lack of access to education and
health care can affect the dignity of all humans. Readings may include:
Sophocles’ Antigone; Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars; Otsuka’s When the
Emperor Was Divine; Nottage’s Sweat; Camus’ The Plague; The Island by Fugard,
Kani, and Ntshona; and Mukasonga’s Cockroaches. Film screenings may include
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo), Hotel Rwanda (Terry George), and
This is not a Film (Jafar Panahi). In addition to literary analysis, students
will conduct and present original research on contemporary forms of
storytelling in relation to human rights. This course fulfills the Difference
and Justice distribution requirement because we read texts from a range of
different geographical, cultural, and ethnic contexts that explore, among
other things, themes of citizenship status, class, race, ethnicity, gender, nationality,
and socio-economic background. |
|||||||||||
|
Asian/American Lives |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Hua Hsu |
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 256 |
CRN Number: |
90275 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Tue Wed
3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin
202 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
American & Indigenous Studies; Asian Studies |
|||||||||
|
During this semester-long course, we will conduct a survey
of the literary works produced by Asians in the United States, from poetry
carved on the walls of immigration detention centers and travel reportage to
novels, short stories, graphic novels, experimental zines and memoir.
Throughout this course, we will also pay close attention to how different
generations of Asian Americans have negotiated their own racialization and
navigated questions of difference (e.g., language, race, sex, gender,
sexuality, and nationality) in their quest for community—even those who wrote
before these slippery, inherited categories existed. Possible authors
include: Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn, Chang-rae Lee, Jhumpa
Lahiri, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ocean Vuong. For any questions please contact
[email protected]. |
|||||||||||
|
Health, Wellness and Disability in
Modern Japan |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Chiara Pavone
|
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 281 |
CRN Number: |
90284 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Tue Thurs 1:30 PM
- 2:50 PM Olin 204 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Asian Studies |
|||||||||
|
This course explores representations of disabled bodies in
light of intertwining discourses on ability, wellness and health in Japan,
starting from the beginning of the 20th century up to the present moment. How
do evolving definitions of physical fitness and the more recent influence of
wellness culture shape established tropes such as that of the “magical” or
“super-crip”? And how do bodies deemed ‘unfit’ and practices called
‘unhealthy’ illuminate the disciplinary and homogenizing tendencies of a
society? We will address the questions above through an exploration of modern
and contemporary Japanese literature, film, and manga, accompanied by an
introduction to disability studies, and to local debates on disability,
gender and reproduction spanning the past half a century. This course
fulfills the Difference and Justice requirement through its focus on
disability rights and on systemic processes of ‘otherization’ and
‘pathologization’ of difference. This course is part of the World Literature
offering. |
|||||||||||
|
What Does a Woman Want? Psychoanalysis,
Literature, Female Desire |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Jana Schmidt |
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 286 |
CRN Number: |
90285 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Tue Thurs 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Olin 305 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
FL Foreign Languages and Lit |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
German Studies |
|||||||||
|
“What does a woman want?” asked Sigmund Freud in a letter
to his friend and fellow psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte. Conceding the failure
of his science of psychoanalysis to illuminate this question, the aging Freud
thereby also marked what could be seen as the heart of his theoretical
project in so far as it concerns the relationship between language and
sexuality. Female desire is that mysterious “continent” from which
psychoanalysis emerges, the silence that it seeks to bring into language, and
the absence it talks around. This course will read some classic
psychoanalytic texts alongside contemporary literature to see how two
different modes of linguistic inquiry illuminate the question of female
desire. Beginning from the feminist contention of woman’s exclusion from the
realm of language, we will retrace how psychoanalysis called on the literary
imagination to inaugurate female desire into speech. In particular, the
sexual “aberrations” – sadism, masochism, nymphomania, hysteria – that take
their names and portrayal from literature and mythology will inspire our
joint reading of psychoanalytic theory and its literary mold. Readings may
include Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Arthur Schnitzler, Marquis de Sade,
Elfriede Jelinek, Clarice Lispector, and, on the theory side, Freud, Melanie
Klein, Jean Laplanche, Joan Copjec, and Avgi Saketopoulou. |
|||||||||||
|
The Birth of the Avant-Garde: Futurism,
Metaphysics, Magical Realism |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Franco Baldasso
|
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
LIT 291 |
CRN Number: |
90289 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Mon Wed 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Olin 204 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Italian Studies |
|||||||||
|
In his essays “Traveling
Theory” and “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” Edward Said underscored the
importance of context and geographical dispersal for revolutionary potential
to emerge—or to turn into domestication. In 1909
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian poet stationed in Milan, but
born in Alexandria (Egypt), founded in Paris the modern avant-garde with the
publishing of his first “Futurist Manifesto.” Futurism’s breakthrough claims
of refashioning Western culture from its very foundations rapidly spread all
over the world. Futurism’s inextricable conundrum of art, politics and
performance would then impact not only historical avant-gardes, from Dada to
Surrealism, but also the idea of the intellectual as “arsonist” throughout
the 20th Century. This course approaches Italian Avant-gardes—with a focus
also on Metaphysical Art and Magical Realism—in the transnational circulation
of aesthetics of the early 20th Century, between bombastic nationalist claims
and tragic negotiations with Fascism. Engaging with both
literature and art, the course unravels the intricate, yet fascinating
knot of aesthetics and politics at the core of modernism, by studying the
birth of the avant-garde and its many contradictions between national
anxieties and global movements of ideas. |
|||||||||||
Cross-listed Courses:
|
Landscape Studies: The Hudson Valley |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Jana Mader |
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
ES/EUS 206 |
CRN Number: |
90567 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Tue Thurs 1:30 PM
- 2:50 PM Olin 305 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
MBV Meaning,
Being and Value |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Architecture; Experimental Humanities; Literature |
|||||||||
|
Literatures of Human Rights: Post-1945 |
|||||||||||
|
|
Professor:
|
Ingrid Becker
|
|||||||||
|
|
Course
Number: |
HR 275 |
CRN Number: |
90344 |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
|||
|
|
Schedule/Location:
|
Tue Thurs 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 102 |
|||||||||
|
|
Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice |
|||||||||
|
|
Crosslists: |
Global & International Studies; Literature |
|||||||||