12483

LIT 203      The Rhetoric of Conquest and Contact: (De)Colonizing Narratives of Latin America

Nicole Caso

T  Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLINLC 210

FL

Cross-listed: Human Rights; Latin American & Iberian Studies; Spanish Studies

From the first moment of contact between Spain and the Americas, distinct forms of cultural representation have emerged to make sense of new encounters between different ways of knowing and being in the world. This course traces the history of rhetorical strategies and recurrent tropes that continue to repeat in the literature of Latin America as the trauma of the initial contact remains in the consciousness of the region. Notions such as “the tabula rasa,” “the noble savage,” “the marvelous,” and “the ineffable” are central to narratives that contend with unresolvable ontological tensions. Among the topics and texts addressed are the 1550 debate of Valladolid convened to determine whether indigenous people were human and had souls; the connection between legal constructions of religious purity (pureza de sangre) in the Spanish Reconquest against the Moors and later classifications of race in the Spanish colonies; Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s chronicle to the king of Spain using European rhetorical strategies to denounce the violent excesses perpetrated in Perú in his name; indigenous representations cunningly adapted by Spaniards and Ladinos to bring indigenous societies into the Christian fold, and other iconic Western figures that are deployed to resist and subvert cultural assimilation. Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Gloria Anzaldúa, Antonio Cornejo Polar, and María Lugones, among others, will provide the theoretical framework for our readings. This course aims to expose students to some of the fundamental concepts needed to understand Latin American colonial and post-colonial studies in various fields. Conducted in English.  This course is part of the World Literature and Pre-1800 course offering.

Class size: 22

 

12477

LIT 272      The Fantastic in Chinese Literature

Lu Kou

T  Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 310

FL

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

From the famous human/butterfly metamorphosis in the Daoist text Zhuangzito contemporary writer Liu Cixin’s award-winning Three-Body Problem, the “fantastic” has always been part of Chinese literature that pushes the boundary of human imagination. Readers and writers create fantastic beasts (though not always know where to find them), pass down incredible tales, assign meanings to unexplainable phenomena, and reject–sometimes embrace–stories that could potentially subvert their established framework of knowledge. Meanwhile, the “fantastic” is also historically and culturally contingent. What one considers “fantastic” reveals as much about the things gazed upon as about the perceiving subject–his or her values, judgment, anxiety, identity, and cultural burden. Using “fantastic” literature as a critical lens, this course takes a thematic approach to the masterpieces of Chinese literature from the first millennium BCE up until twenty-first century China. We will read texts ranging from Buddhist miracle tales to the avant-garde novel about cannibalism, from medieval ghost stories to the creation of communist superheroes during the Cultural Revolution. The topics that we will explore include shifting human/non-human boundaries, representations of the foreign land (also the “underworld”), the aestheticization of female ghosts, utopia and dystopia, and the fantastic as social criticism and national allegory. All materials and discussions are in English.  This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Class size: 18

 

12481

LIT 292      Arab Future Histories

Dina Ramadan

M  W    1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLIN 205

FL

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

Borrowing its title from Egyptian novelist, Nael el-Toukhy’s concept of “writing future histories,” this course introduces students to contemporary literary and artistic production from across the Arab world. We will examine a growing body of work—including science, speculative, and dystopian fiction—that engages in an exploration of the (not so distant) future. Whether through the complete disappearance of the Palestinians, the reenactment of the Lebanese Rocket Society, or the resurrection of an Iraqi Frankenstein, cultural producers, faced with an uncertain future, invent themselves anew in uncertainty. Together we will trace some of the historic antecedents to these approaches and question their relationship to the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring. We will also consider the role translation (into European languages) plays in creating or accentuating such movements. All readings and screenings will be in English. This course is part of the World Literature offering. 

Class size: 22

 

12489

LIT 294      South African Literature

Daniel Williams

M  W    3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 306

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Africana Studies

This course offers an overview of South Africa’s vibrant literary landscape, from 19th-century colonial literature through 20th-century writing under Apartheid to 21st-century fiction in a new democracy. Alongside novels, plays, short stories, and films, we will encounter a range of sub-genres (travel writing, historical romance, legal statute, political manifesto, and journalism). Topics include the political and ethical responsibilities of literature; the relationship of fiction to history and memory; the stakes of representation and testimony; and the enduring difficulties of racial segregation and class inequality. Readings may include Olive Schreiner, Sol Plaatje, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Alex La Guma, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, Antjie Krog, and Masande Ntshanga, as well as selections from nonfiction and literary criticism. This course is part of the World Literature offering

Class size: 18

 

12493

LIT 295      Hunger in World Literature

Alys Moody

M  W    1:30 pm-2:50 pm

HEG 201

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Human Rights

Hunger is one of the most banal and everyday experiences of human existence, but at its extremes it can take us to the limits of what it is to be human. It is experienced as deeply personal, embodied, and individual, but it makes intensely political claims on how society should be structured and what we owe to the most vulnerable amongst us. How have writers around the world sought to represent this extreme and traumatizing experience? This course examines how hunger has been represented and imagined in world literature. We will consider histories of self-starvation, from medieval ascetics, to twentieth-century mystics like Simone Weil, and from global hunger strikers to contemporary anorexics; and histories of hunger imposed on whole populations, from Malthus's and Jonathan Swift’s writings about poverty and colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, to texts of contemporary world hunger, by writers including Tsitsi Dangarembga, Dambudzo Marechera, and Clarice Lispector. We will ask: how does hunger create and cut through communities? How does it shape individuals and their psychological, religious, and social worlds? What kinds of political claims does it make on us? And what role does literature have to play in the imagination and documentation of hunger? This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Class size: 22

 

12482

LIT 338      Literature, Politics, and the Middle East

Ziad Dallal

T         1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 305

LA

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

 How can we read literature politically and how does literature affect, relate to, and change our understanding of politics? This course will investigate these questions by reading how Arabic literature has engaged with and pushed the limits of political discourse from the 19th century to the present. Our aim will be to read literature not as a repository or index of political discourse, but as formative of this discourse. We will be reading both Arabic novels and plays by authors such as Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, May Ziade, and Sulayman al-Bassam, among others. We will read how the literary output of these novelists pushed the envelope of political discourse by virtue of their literary experimentation. Supplementing these readings will be selections from the work of Samah Selim, Jacques Rancière, Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter, among others. Conducted in English. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Class size: 15

 

12496

LIT 348      Black Skin, White Masks: Decolonization through Fanon

Alys Moody

T         1:30 pm-3:50 pm

RKC 200

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; French Studies; Human Rights

Contemporary political activism often calls on us to “decolonize” our lives, our curricula, and our minds. Where does the concept of decolonization come from? What can we learn by reading the history of decolonial thought as a simultaneously literary, political, and philosophical project? This course approaches these questions through a sustained reading of the work of Frantz Fanon, a Martinican writer, intellectual, psychiatrist, and anti-colonial revolutionary, who became one of the leading thinkers of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. We will read Fanon’s key texts—including Black Skin, White Masks, his analysis of the psychopathologies produced by colonial racism, and The Wretched of the Earth, his controversial defense of anticolonial violence—in their larger literary, philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic contexts. Our goal is to see how Fanon’s distinctively literary writing allows him to make important advances in thought, and to see how he draws on literary and other sources to develop his account of racism and colonization—as well as to see a way beyond them. Placing Fanon into dialogue with poets and novelists like Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright, and Léopold Senghor, philosophers like Hegel and Sartre, psychologists such as Freud and Alfred Adler, and the political discourse and debates of his day, we will ask: how does colonization produce the colonized and the colonizers? What are the psychological and social results of this process? And what would true decolonization require? This course is a junior seminar and will train students in the reading of theory in its historical, literary, and philosophical contexts. Students will work towards a sustained research essay as part of the course. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar and part of the World Literature offering course.

Class size: 15

 

12074

LIT 393      Ten Plays that Shook the World

Justus Rosenberg

T        10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 107

LA

ELIT

 A close reading and textual analysis of plays considered milestones in the history of the theater.  In this course we isolate and examine the artistic, social and psychological components that made these works become part of the literary canon.   Have they lasted because they conjure up fantasies of escape, or make its readers and viewers face dilemmas inherent in certain social conditions or archetypical conflicts?   What was it exactly that made them so shocking when first performed?  The language, theme, style, staging?  We also explore the theatre as a literary genre that goes beyond the writing.  For a meaningful and effective performance, all aspects of the play, directing, acting, staging, lighting will be considered.  This course is part of the World Literature offering. 

Class size: 15