Fall 2022 Course Schedule
fall 2022 Course Schedule
*The Fall 2022 course schedule is subject to change. Please check CAESAR for all up to date course information, including day/times, course descriptions, and mode of instruction.
fall 2022 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2022
COMP_LIT 201-0-20: Reading World Literature
Introduction to a diverse range of important works of world literature and central debates and questions about the idea of world literature. Content varies. May be repeated for credit with different topic.
COMP_LIT 202-0-20: Theme of Faust
“To sell one’s soul,” “to strike a bargain with the devil,” or even “to beat the devil at his own game”—these expressions and similar ones continue to enjoy undiminished popularity. For more than five-hundred years the legend of Faust has served as means to express the daring and danger of pursuing an aspiration even if it comes at the cost of one’s “soul.” The specter of a “Faustian bargain” often appears when narratives identify individuals whose inordinate achievements are both destructive and self-destructive. The theme of Faust provides a perspective in which one must thus reflect on the highest and lowest values.
Dr. Faustus has undergone many mutations since he first appeared in central Europe around the early sixteenth century. This class will begin with a question at the foundation of the Faust legend: what is a “soul,” and what is worth? While examining these and kindred questions about the nature of the self, the class will continually reflect on what we are doing when we evaluate a work of art in relation to the culture of its “time” or “period.” In addition to listening to some musical compositions and reading some shorter texts, we will examine the earliest versions of Faust, which derives from the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation and then proceed to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s great drama of cosmic knowledge and sexual seduction, Faust I, followed by selections from its strange sequel Faust II, in which Faust invents paper money and then becomes a real-estate developer or social-engineer who wants to reorganize the very nature of our planet. We will ask what Goethe, near the end of his life, gave to “world literature” (a term of his own invention) when he presented his final version of Faust as a man committed to a total terrestrial transformation that inadvertently destroys innocent lives. As a conclusion to our analysis of Goethe’s Faust, we will read two very different kinds of poetic responses, Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” and Carol Ann Duffy’s “Mrs. Faust.” And in the final two weeks of the class we will view three versions of the Faust legend for our times, beginning with the story of the bluesman Robert Johnson, as represented in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl?, followed by Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls and concluding with Danny Boyle’s Yesterday.
COMP_LIT 202-0-21: Icons, Legends, and Myths in Brazil
Representations in graphic materials, documentaries, film, theater, folklore, narrative fiction, and popular music of historical, literary, and popular figures in the national imagination. May include English or Portuguese discussion sections. Prerequisite for Portuguese section: PORT 201-0, PORT 202-0, or sufficient score on placement exam. Prerequisite for English section: none.
COMP_LIT 202-0-22: Discovering Jewish Latin America
“Jewish Latin America”: An oxymoron? Well, yes and no. Aren’t Latin American countries, in fact, Catholic? Well, yes and no. If the region is Catholic, what can possibly be “Jewish” about Latin America? Well, that’s what we’re going to “discover” in this course. Indeed, as it turns out, Latin America--and especially Argentina and Brazil (our focus), but also somewhat Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba, for example--is much more heterogeneous than you might have thought. The story of the Jewish presence in Latin America is a surprising--and yet surprisingly familiar--story that begins with Jewish emigration/immigration in the late 19th -early 20th centuries and beyond (e.g., after the Holocaust), and continues to unfold to the present day. In reading some parts of that story in works of narrative fiction and film, and in reading about that story in secondary sources, we’ll also be pushed to think about--and interrogate--topics such as identity and difference, memory and history, testimony and truth, immigration and assimilation, and so on.
COMP_LIT 211-0-20: Taiwanese New Wave Cinema
"New wave" is a ubiquitous but imprecise term that has been applied to various trends in cinema that emerged around the world beginning in the mid-1950s. As an historical term it is used to delineate shared styles, themes, and techniques that define certain national and international film movements. As a kind of descriptive shorthand, it has been applied more broadly to movements that abandoned conventional narrative techniques in favor of experimentation with the cinematic medium, while also confronting social and political problems specific to the context of production. Thus, the inaugural French New Wave has lent its title to film trends in Britain, Iran, Japan, Hong Kong, and many other locations around the world. This course offers a critical and historical introduction to one of these latter-day new waves, the "New Taiwan Cinema," which emerged in the early 1980s as a reaction against contemporaneous commercial cinema. Through a careful investigation of the work of the three most important representatives of this "new" cinema—Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, Tsai Ming-Liang 蔡明亮, and Edward Yang 楊德昌—this course will consider not only the experimental form and social consciousness of the Taiwanese New Wave but also the specific economic, social, and institutional structures—national and transnational—that shaped it. We will also study critical and theoretical writings on this cinema to better understand both the Taiwanese cultural milieu that produced it, and the broader global film culture of which it has become such an important part. Whenever possible, we will place individual Taiwanese films in dialogue with the Asian and European film cultures that influenced them as well as the films and filmmakers that they have influenced. There are no prerequisites for this class and no previous knowledge of Chinese or Taiwanese literature, culture, language, or history is assumed.
COMP_LIT 211-0-21: Introduction to Poetry
The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. Theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process.
COMP_LIT 301-0-20: Studies in World Literature: African Cities
Africa is usually seen in terms of rural settlements as depicted in such canonical works as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Okot p’Bitek’s Song Lawino, and Ngugi’s The River Between. Reading the work of such writers as Marjorie O. Macgoye, Buchi Emecheta, Meja Mwangi, Phaswane Mpe, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Teju Cole, the course will discuss urban settlements and planning in Africa. Topics will include indigenous languages and urbanization; African popular culture; African modernities; precolonial African cities; disillusionment; and sexualities of the city. We’ll also read theoretical and historical work by Ngugi, Kenda Mutongi, Fanon, and Achille Mbembe.
COMP_LIT 302-0-20: Abstraction [Modernism in the Time of Decolonization (based on Block exhibition)]
This course takes as its premise that, in the decolonizing world across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, formulations of modern art and literature took primary place in debates about emerging national cultures, attempts to assert anti-colonial solidarity, and, similarly, efforts to define and contour notions of new subjectivities and personhoods outside of colonial paradigms, western epistemologies, normative historiographies, and power dynamics. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the Block Museum's Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, we will meet as a small group in the museum to tether our study of modernism to the primary objects (artworks, journals, posters, ephemera, and films) in that exhibition and in the Herskovits Collection in the Northwestern Library. Using these on-site primary sources alongside critical essays and literary texts, we will attempt to answer a central question: why, during the 1960s and 1970s when the importance of documenting the realities of colonial rule and anti-colonial struggle was acknowledged as paramount, did artists and writers turn to various non-realist techniques (allegory, mysticism, visual poetry, metapoesis, eg) as formal strategies? Or do we propose a false binary when we situate—as one might in US-European visual and literary cultures—abstraction and realism in opposition? How does the abstract relate to the real and to art and literary histories in other regions, and what might its political purchase be? In what ways do gender or religion intersect with modernist strategy during this period and in this context? Sessions will be discussion based, and we will take advantage of programming around the exhibition—including artist's talks and visiting speakers—to help expand the historical reach of our study. Students will work towards a conference paper to be presented at a professional symposium at the end of the quarter. Readings will be made available as online pdfs but students might consider purchasing the exhibition catalog from the Block.
COMP_LIT 305-0-20: Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture
Andrei Tarkovsky's Aesthetics and World Cinema- The course is dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker. Students will watch all major films by Tarkovsky and also by the other world filmmakers who had an impact on him, such as Fellini, Pasolini, Kurosawa, Bergman, Bunuel, et al.
COMP_LIT 307-0-20: Studies in Gender, Sexuality & Representation: Romantic Comedies, Old & New
This course maps the literary and cinematic DNA of the contemporary "rom com," from William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and the screwball comedies of 1930s Classical Hollywood to the 1990s blockbusters and the Netflix revolution. Along the way we may ask: What do the comedic conventions of Western classical drama, the medieval genre of "romance," or the political aesthetics of Romanticism have to do with the romantic comedy as it exists today? The anarchic space of the "comedy" genre is usually understood to include a subversive potential, using absurdism or satire to reimagine power dynamics or to question social norms governing gender, sexuality, race, and family. One question we will ask in this course is: Does the romantic comedy threaten to tame that subversive potential? Or does it promise to release its chaotic energies in ever renewed ways? Students will regularly be asked to watch two movies in a single week. Evaluations are based on participation and preparation; writing several analytic papers for the course; and presenting on an episode, scene, or clip from a recent TV show that helps us understood the genre and its history.
COMP_LIT 390-0-20: Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Images of the Shtetl
In focusing upon the shtetl students will become acquainted with the lifestyle, languages folklore and elite culture of the Jews in Eastern Europe. This course also serves as an introduction to Yiddish literature. Attention will also be paid to honing students' skills in reading and commenting critically upon literary texts. No previous knowledge of Jews and Judaism is required, nor of Hebrew or Yiddish language. By the end of the course, students will have become acquainted with a lexicon of key Hebrew/Yiddish terms of Jewish cultural practice.
COMP_LIT 410-0-20: Theories of Literature: The Politics of Comparison
This seminar considers methods of comparison and interdisciplinarity in relation to the field of Comparative Literature. It offers a brief history of that field and some of its influential texts as a starting point for thinking through alternative methods of "doing" comparative and relational literary and cultural studies today. Of particular concern is the challenge of working within (or between) Eurocentric fields that struggle to make equal space for different traditions and the methods, questions, and theories best suited to them. What does it mean to work in a field that doesn't necessarily understand the work you're doing and why you're doing it? Of equal importance is the challenge of working across fields that are epistemologically and institutionally isolated from one another. How, for example, do you bring insights from other fields (in which you are not formally trained) to bear on your own research, particularly when both home and "outside" fields are not in conversation with one another? What does scholarly rigor look like when it comes to interdisciplinary work? We will approach these challenges and questions by looking at recent comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship in several broad fields, including the environmental humanities.
COMP_LIT 481-0-1: Studies in Literary Theory: History of Aesthetics
This course provides an introduction to foundational texts in the history of modern western (primarily German) theoretical aesthetics. Starting from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s emphatic appropriation the term “aesthetics” to designate the study of beauty and good taste, the course will move chronologically through major texts of aesthetic theory from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. The course will both examine the specific problems and questions raised by the various texts and consider the texts as history, looking at the ways in which these works both respond to one another and to the political and cultural tensions of their respective eras. We will also consider the ways in which these texts cross disciplinary boundaries or indeed are always already transdisciplinary, constantly moving from the comparatively narrow fields of artistic and literary criticism to fundamental issues of ethics, epistemology, politics, and psychology, and back and forth all over again, always asking ourselves the questions: What are the historical conditions of the ways in which we make and/or think about works of art, broadly conceived, and how does this, in turn, shape the world that art is said to reflect?
COMP_LIT 487-0-20: Abstraction [Modernism in the Time of Decolonization (based on Block exhibition)]
This course takes as its premise that, in the decolonizing world across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, formulations of modern art and literature took primary place in debates about emerging national cultures, attempts to assert anti-colonial solidarity, and, similarly, efforts to define and contour notions of new subjectivities and personhoods outside of colonial paradigms, western epistemologies, normative historiographies, and power dynamics. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the Block Museum's Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, we will meet as a small group in the museum to tether our study of modernism to the primary objects (artworks, journals, posters, ephemera, and films) in that exhibition and in the Herskovits Collection in the Northwestern Library. Using these on-site primary sources alongside critical essays and literary texts, we will attempt to answer a central question: why, during the 1960s and 1970s when the importance of documenting the realities of colonial rule and anti-colonial struggle was acknowledged as paramount, did artists and writers turn to various non-realist techniques (allegory, mysticism, visual poetry, metapoesis, eg) as formal strategies? Or do we propose a false binary when we situate—as one might in US-European visual and literary cultures—abstraction and realism in opposition? How does the abstract relate to the real and to art and literary histories in other regions, and what might its political purchase be? In what ways do gender or religion intersect with modernist strategy during this period and in this context? Sessions will be discussion based, and we will take advantage of programming around the exhibition—including artist's talks and visiting speakers—to help expand the historical reach of our study. Students will work towards a conference paper to be presented at a professional symposium at the end of the quarter. Readings will be made available as online pdfs but students might consider purchasing the exhibition catalog from the Block.