Spring 2021 Course Schedule
Spring 2021 course Schedule
*The Spring 2021 course schedule is subject to change. Please consult CAESAR for up to date course information, including day/times, course descriptions, and modes of instruction.
Spring 2021 course descriptions
*The Spring 2021 course descriptions will be available before registration. Please visit the Course Catalog for general descriptions of the courses.
Spring 2021
COMP_LIT 202-0: Oral Poertry from Homer to Hip Hop
What do Homer, Vyasa, and Kendrick Lamar have in common? All three practiced “oral poetry” – poetry that is improvised or composed extemporaneously before an audience. In this course, we will explore a variety of poetic traditions, beginning with the Homeric epics and weaving our way through the spaces, times, and traditions of Indian epic poets, West African djelis, Slavic bards, and contemporary hip-hop. Along the way, we will study the contents of these poetic traditions, but we will also investigate the modes and moments of poetic creation, and consider the effects of transcribing, and thus rendering immutable, that which was once spontaneous and ever-shifting.
COMP_LIT 205-0: Gender, Politics and Philosophy
This class introduces students to a variety of philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. Together, we'll read classic and contemporary texts that examine questions such as: what is gender -- and how, if it all, does it relate to or differ from sex? What does it really mean to be a woman or a man -- and are these categories we're born into or categories that we become or inhabit through living in a particular way under specific conditions? Human history all the way up to the present seems to be rife with asymmetrical relations of power that relegate those marked out as women to a subordinate position -- what explains this? What would it mean to overturn this state of affairs -- and which strategies are most likely to accomplish this task? And to what extent is it possible to grapple with all of the above questions -- questions of gender, sex, and sexuality -- without also, at the very same time, thinking about how they relate to questions of class and race? Readings will include selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler, Talia Bettcher, and others.
COMP_LIT 211-0: The Bible as Literature
This course is intended to familiarize students of literature with the most influential text in Western culture. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres and strategies in the Bible; the historical situation of its writers; the representation of God as a literary character; recurrent images and themes; the Bible as a Hebrew national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the “Old Testament” (or Hebrew Bible); and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since time will not permit a complete reading, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, Amos, Jonah, Second Isaiah, and Daniel; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms, and the Song of Songs, along with the saga of King David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John and the book of Revelation.
COMP_LIT 301-0 Comedy and Culture Wars in Antiquity
Every culture, it would seem, has its wars. In this course, we will examine how the medium of comedy – both on the stage and on the page – has been used as a means to move the needle in these wars, and to force members of their cultures to reflect on the disputes and the debates that raged. Along the way, we will read comic plays by Aristophanes and Plautus, satire from ancient Rome, and many others.
COMP_LIT 302-0 Literature to Opera to Film
This cross-listed, interdisciplinary course will feature operas from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which were based on pre-existing literary or theatrical works, and which, in turn, inspired cinematic or televised works in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. In each case, we will study the literary or theatrical inspiration in its own right (those who can are encouraged to read these classic works in their original languages), become familiar with the opera, and proceed to some famous films and other video adaptations of each opera. We will end the course with a popular film that is not directly based on a literary work or an opera, but which relies strongly on conventions from both and which features a performance of one of our featured operas. Students who read French, German, Italian, and/or Spanish will have an opportunity to use these languages, and others may be important for individual projects.
COMP_LIT 306-0-1 Politics of Exclusion: Caste and Race in India and the United States
In this course we will explore the historical, political, intellectual, and aesthetic connections between caste in India and race in the United States. We will use the occasion of the recent publication of Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which has brought increased public attention to the shared structures and political philosophies that underwrite both U.S. racial segregation and Hindu/Indian caste hierarchies as particular kinds of political systems that mobilize social hierarchies through color and colorism. We'll seek to contextualize Wilkerson's evocative analogy through a focused reading of the works of scholars of race, caste, postcolonialism, religion, history, ethnic and area studies who have traced this relationship in more specific contexts. We will also pay special attention to the genre of memoir, reading several recent examples from both Dalit and Black American writers.
COMP_LIT 312-0 READING ELENA FERRANTE: THE REINVENTION OF FRIENDSHIP AND LOVE
In 2016, Time magazine included the Italian novelist who works under the pseudonym “Elena Ferrante” on its list of the year’s hundred most influential people. We will explore some of the most celebrated novels of this mysterious writer, who is beloved not only in Italy but also in the US and around the world. Critics in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and numerous other publications have given ecstatic reviews to her writings, typically describing their effect as “mesmerizing,” “stunning,” and “brutally honest.” Indeed, Ferrante’s fearless, cliché-annihilating explorations of friendship, loneliness, troubling loves, sexuality, violence, and maternity suggest a creative and disruptive refashioning of traditional feminist concerns on an epic scale. We begin our consideration of her work with The Days of Abandonment, which revises the trope of the abandoned woman in new and startling ways. We will also discuss the cinematic adaptation. We will then read The Lost Daughter, the novelist’s sophisticated and uncanny investigation of the agonized ambivalence of love and motherhood. Finally, the course concludes with My Brilliant Friend, the first volume of her bestselling series of Neapolitan novels. In particular, we will focus on how this text redefines the contested territory of women’s friendship. Throughout, we will address Ferrante’s decision to keep her true identity secret, thus setting in motion the media’s frenzy to unmask her. Taught in English, seminar style.
COMP_LIT 412-0 French Film
This course will consider developments in French and Francophone cinema since the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on the works of directors associated or in dialogue with the "New Wave." We will examine the reinvention of cinematic form by these filmmakers, but we will also explore how such formal innovations may be understood as attempts to respond to the historical events and social processes that transformed French culture in that period, most notably the traumas of the Second World War, the emergence of consumer culture, and the processes of decolonization and globalization. Among the directors whose works will be discussed are Jean Renoir, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Djibril Diop Mambéty.
COMP_LIT 481-0 Russian Formal Theory and Practice
RUSSIAN FORMALISM. This seminar will examine the school and theory of Russian Formalism, which influenced and informed many developments in the 20th century literary and art theory, from Prague Linguistic Circle through Structuralism and Semiotics. Along with the detailed study of the critical and theoretical essays by such adherents of Formalism as Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, et al., we will be exploring the major works of Russian modernism and avant-garde in literature and film through the methodological approach of Formalist theory. Special focus on the issues of Formalism and Marxism, Formalism and History, and the interconnections between culture and politics of the time. Discussion and presentations in English.
COMP_LIT 481-0-2: How to Read
“Reading” has a history. The aim of this course is to examine the past and present of literary interpretation and reception, in order to better understand the changing relationship of art to commentary and, from there, to critically reflect on our own practices and habits of analysis. Questions that will be addressed are: What is the ethics and the politics of reading? How does the reading of literature exist in a symbiotic relationship with the literary text? What is the place of “theory” in literature? What is the import of forms of interpretation vis-à-vis the choice of subject matter being interpreted? What does it mean to read professionally? This seminar will such questions through an overview of approaches to the question of interpretation, with a particular emphasis on contemporary theoretical paradigms and debates. In parallel to the course readings and discussions, students will get training in skills necessary to graduate- and professional-level academic work, culminating in the workshopping and preparation of a publication-ready article.
COMP_LIT 487-0 Russian Modernism, Avant-Garde, and Elena Guro
ELENA GURO: A WOMAN IN THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE.
This course will be focused on Russian Modernism, and early Avant-Garde, reflecting on the works of the first futurist woman poet and artists, Elena Guro (1877-1913) in the context of major issues visual and literary Modernism and Avant-garde carries within: 'life-building' (zhiznetvorchestvo), and mythologization; search for new cultural, national, and personal identity; gender politics; word/image interrelationship; new aesthetic ideology. Poetry and visual works by Bely, Briusov, Gippius, Khlebnikov,Kruchenykh, Malevich, Goncharova et al.
No language prerequisite.
COMP_LIT 488-0 The Letter in Latin America
This course has two goals. First, it seeks to familiarize students with Latin American intellectual traditions in the modern period. In order to do so, it surveys a representative selection of pivotal figures in three different, and crucial, historical moments: the post-revolutionary 19th century and its responses both to Independence and an emerging neocolonial order; the frenetic 1920s and 30s and the articulations of a properly Latin American identity and culture; and the late 20th century, which has witnessed an attempt to reckon with the repercussions of the revolutionary projects of the mid-century. Second, within and across these historical constellations, the course will analyze prominent conceptual paradigms that have defined intellectual discourse in the region, such as mestizaje, hybridity, and heterogeneity, focusing particularly on their evolution and metamorphoses. As we consider the advent and waning of elite, lettered production's influence and power to shape national and regional conceptualizations, we will pay special attention to how alterity and coloniality inflect the region's intellectual production. Readings will be derived from a list of primary texts with optional supplements from other sources.