| |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2008-09 Course Descriptions
Fall Term |
Lower Division |
COLT 101 |
Introduction to Comparative Literature |
4 credits |
|
|
This course will concentrate on the practice of description--the production of a verbal or graphic likeness of an object or action—in literature, the visual arts and film. While the primary focus will be the Western tradition, examples from East Asia will be used to offset the essentially Western practice of effacing all traces of the artist’s hand. The technique of trompe l’oeil, prominent in both the Ancient world and Early Modernity, exemplifies a “realist” bias that favors “nature” over “work.” One of the foundational critical texts in the field of comparative literature, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, shares in this bias, charting a development that culminates in the 19 th-century French novel. Selections from Auerbach’s monumental book will help guide discussions beginning with Homer, Theocritus and Virgil and extending through Early Modernity (Shakespeare, Holbein). We will continue with a Realist novel (Balzác’s Old Goriot) and conclude with Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. [Fall] |
|
COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature: Eastern Traditions/Post-Colonial Novels |
4 credits |
Blair Orfall
|
|
Postcolonial novels are often described as "writing back to the empire," or responding to western colonization and the legacy of the western canon. In this course, however, we will examine postcolonial texts through a specifically eastern lens. We'll read (and view) selections from The Mahabharata, an Indian epic that continues to shape ideas about India's history and future. We'll then examine how the epics are re-worked in English by authors who strive to write "The Great Indian Novel" of India's history and its engagement with globalization. At the end of the term, we will discuss the intersection of the Indian epic, the postcolonial novel and Bollywood.
Required Texts available at the UO bookstore:
The Mahabharta: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic R.K. Narayan The Great Indian Novel, Shashi Tharoor
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
Additional materials provided on Blackboard:
The Jungle Book excerpt, Rudyard Kipling
Orientalism except, Edward Said
The Empire Writes Back excerpt, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin
The Mahabharata materials: comic book images, children's stories, Sanskrit text, etc.
"After Midnight: The Novel in the 1980s and 1990s" by Jon Mee in History of Indian Literature in English.
"The Perforated Sheet," excerpt from Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
"Introduction" by Amit Chaudhuri in The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature"Translater's Preface" to Maps, Gayatri Spivak
"Draupadi" in Breast Stories by Mahasweta Devi, trans. Gayatri Spivak
Postcolonial Aura excerpt, Arif Dirlik
"Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory," Timothy Brennan
Showbusiness excerpt, Shashi Tharoor
"Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema," Vijay Mishra
Films to viewed outside of class include: “The Mahabharta,” “Mother India” and “Kal Ho Na Ho.”
Grading:Participation 10%; Paper 1 (5 pages) 20%; In-Class Midterm 20%; In-Class Final 20%; Paper 2 (7 pages) 30% [Fall] |
|
COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature: Caribbean Performances |
4 credits |
|
|
In describing his own work, the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau has explained that “literature in a place that breathes must be taken in alive.” The Caribbean may be said to live and breathe through its rich variety of performance traditions which have been created, transmitted, and continually transformed by the region’s artists—calypso singers, carnival masqueraders, storytellers, and dub poets, to name a few. In this course we consider Caribbean writers whose work is informed by performance and ask how the writers attempt to “take it in alive” as they translate oral, embodied performance into written text. Readings include Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent, Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Erna Brodber's Myal, and Derek Walcott's Pantomime.[Fall] |
|
COLT 211 (((CRN 16057)
|
Comparative World Literature:
Storytelling in Short Stories and Films |
4 credits |
Moshe Rachmuth
|
|
In this course we will compare the film and the short story as media of storytelling. More specifically, we will see how directors and writers use the motif of a secret to develop plot, create mood, and reveal character. The film, being a form of visual art, challenges the notion “what you see is what you get.” Do we really get what we see? Can we see if somebody is lying by looking at the person’s eyes? Can we get to the truth?
In all the films and stories discussed in the course we will have heroes who lie and hide. Some have a secret from the past, some have a double life and some lie about their plans for the future. At times, we, the spectators or readers, have the perspective of the liar, in other times we learn about the truth only later, if we learn of it at all. In the course, we will analyze the spectators’ point of view using Boggs and Petrie’s “The Art of Watching Films” and using the literary gap-filling theory. [Fall] |
|
COLT 211 (((CRN 16058) |
Comparative World Literature: Rebels |
4 credits |
Moshe Rachmuth
|
|
In this course we will explore the image of the rebel in prose, drama, film, and popular music. We will start with rebels of the Ancient world – first, King Oedipus, second, Absalom, the son of King David, and third, the charismatic Chinese rebel, Xiang Yu. With the aid of Xiang Yu, Absalom and Oedipus, we will leap to early twentieth century, when Freud suggested in an ever controversial essay that the basis of human society is the attempt of the sons to kill their father. We will read and watch some pieces that accept or challenge Freud’s provocative claims. Alongside Freud, we will become familiar with the French writer Camus who advocated for rebellion as a state of mind. We will read Camus’ disturbing short novel, The Stranger, and in connection with it we will watch “Blade Runner,” and we will read the oldest book in the world – Gilgamesh. [Fall] |
|
COLT 212 |
Comparative World Cinema: Zombies |
4 credits |
Jeong Chang
|
|
This course will focus on representations of zombies in cinema in such movies as Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later,Shaun of the Dead, and Pet Sematary. Starting with the question, "Why do we find zombies so scary?" we will analyze these representations and focus on issues of race, gender, disability, and the anxiety over large global migrations depicted through the fear of infection and the spread of disease. Over the course of the term, we will also analyze zombies occurring in other national cinemas and study the consistencies and differences of these mindless undead. [Fall]
|
|
Upper Division |
COLT 301 |
Approaches to Comparative Literature |
4 credits |
|
|
COLT 301 offers an introduction to literary theory, with an emphasis on comparative study. Students learn the fundamental theories and methods of Comparative Literature, reading selections from a wide variety of theoretical schools including psychoanalysis, linguistics, French feminism, poststructuralism and postcolonial studies. In addition, students investigate the relevance of such literary theory for the analysis of written and visual materials. Coursework typically culminates in a student project involving one artifact chosen by the student (text, painting, film, digital artwork, graphic novel, etc.) to be analyzed within the critical framework of the course. COLT 301 satisfies the University's Arts and Letters requirement. [Fall] |
|
COLT 360 |
Gender and Identity in Literature: Women and Empire |
4 credits |
Laura Selph
|
|
While the business of building and managing Europe’s empire has been understood as solidly within the masculine domain, the textual work of anti-colonial critique has often focused on the figure of the woman in the colonies. In this course we will look at the intersecting questions of gender and colonialism, considering the ways in which women’s ambivalent position within the masculine quest narrative of empire has offered a productive space for reading the power relations encoded in that narrative. Canonical novels of the British empire will be paired with twentieth century responses. Readings will include Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe along with J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Bronte’s Jane Eyre with Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and M. Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone. [Fall] |
|
SCAN 407 |
Space and Place in Literature |
4 credits |
|
|
In this course we will explore what J. Hillis Miller calls "the writing of a place." Together we will investigate how elements such as landscape, cityscape, and interior function as more than just "background," and examine what representations, constructions, or simulacra of certain types of spaces and/or places can tell us about particular historical moments and cultures. We will read theoretical discussions of space and/or place by thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Edward S. Casey, and Franco Moretti. Alongside the theoretical texts we will read a select corpus of prose works in which various topographies play an unusually important role. [Fall] |
|
COLT 415 |
Capstone Seminar |
4 credits |
|
|
Fall 2008 topic: "Religion and Literature"
** Required for new Majors. Strongly urged for current majors. **
COLT 415 is designed to give students advanced, one-on-one mentorship in literary analysis and research. In addition to the course professor, two advanced GTFs will be assigned to the course and will meet individually with each student on a weekly basis. Students considering graduate school will be given additional mentorship in the graduate application process; students writing senior theses will be tutored through the initial stages of thesis development, including the drafting of a thesis prospectus. Non-honors track students will receive mentorship as they draft a substantial (12-15 pp.) research paper. All students will have a chance to see their writing, research and analytical skills take quantum leaps forward. We have designed this course to offer educational opportunities available nowhere else on the UO campus.
In addition to ongoing mentorship, class time will explore a provocative research topic chosen by the professor. (Assigned weekly readings will be kept to a minimum, in order to enable time for individual mentorship and research.) This year's theme is "Religion and Literature." We literary critics usually consider our textual work to be quite distinct from -- and often at odds with -- traditional religious views of language. We often imagine our modes of reading to be secular and thus open to multiple interpretations and manifold perspectives. But is secularism as "free" as we imagine? This class will investigate our assumptions about literary criticism by focusing on three different literary texts and three associated religious/literary encounters. Shakespeare - Kerouac - Rushdie.... Our first unit, "Theology vs. Race," will look at Shakespeare's 1596 play, The Merchant of Venice and address post-Holocaust struggles with the play's apparent anti-Semitism. The second unit, "Beat Zen, Square Zen," will examine Jack Kerouac's influential 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, and will consider the adaptation of Buddhism to American counter-culture. The third unit, "Blasphemy," will focus on the question of Islamic fundamentalism, and will center around Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
**To be taken in Fall of one's final year of college; may be taken earlier with Instructor approval. Available to non-Majors with Instructor approval.** [Fall] |
|
WGS 415/515 |
Travel Writing and Tourism |
4 credits |
|
|
This 400-500 level class will focus on travel writing and contemporary tourism asking how people have learned about cultures and places far from home, what and how they have seen and categorized others, and what difference travel makes politically, economically, and environmentally. What are the persevering tropes by which westerners have imagined Arabs, Africans, Asians and Native Americans and have these been challenged or sustained by contemporary travel writing or tourist sites? Many of the writers we will read ask complex psychological and ethical questions about what is involved in leaving home or “hosting” others (perhaps reluctantly) who have chosen to come to your home. The activities of travel and tourism have usually been conducted within relationships of inequality and they have often perpetuated such inequality either materially (e.g. the use of people and resources for the profit of corporations) or philosophically (e.g. the travel documents that posit racial or cultural hierarchies favoring the traveler’s home culture). In this class we will begin by examining the writings of explorers, colonialists, pilgrims, adventurers, artists, pleasure seekers, and those consciously searching for their own heritages or identities. After this introduction, we will focus on women travelers from the 18th century until the present and on issues of tourism that particularly affect women on various sides of the tourist equation.
Some of the questions we will ask are: What are some of the formal aspects of travel writing? How is travel/tourism sold and to whom? How do gender, race, and sexuality influence the commodification of travel? What are the experiences (activities, aesthetics, relationships) we consider essential for successful travel? What are the assumptions in travel ads, travel magazines, postcards? Are there ways of disrupting these assumptions? What difference can travel make? [Fall] |
|
Graduate |
|
SCAN 507 |
Space and Place in Literature |
4 credits |
|
|
In this course we will explore what J. Hillis Miller calls "the writing of a place." Together we will investigate how elements such as landscape, cityscape, and interior function as more than just "background," and examine what representations, constructions, or simulacra of certain types of spaces and/or places can tell us about particular historical moments and cultures. We will read theoretical discussions of space and/or place by thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Edward S. Casey, and Franco Moretti. Alongside the theoretical texts we will read a select corpus of prose works in which various topographies play an unusually important role. [Fall] |
|
WGS 601 |
Dissertation Writing |
1-16 credits |
|
|
COLT 613 |
Translation Pedagogy |
4-5 credits |
|
|
Courses designed with a broad-enough comparative focus inevitably encounter the problem of translation, because one can never assume that all students will share exactly the same foreign language expertise. And so, inevitably, one teaches texts in translation. But just what, precisely, is lost in translation? -- Such a question is inescapable within the pedagogy of Comparative Literature, but it is a question that is becoming increasingly important in other disciplines as well, since the drive to increase enrollments and improve accessibility has led to more and more literature-in-translation courses across campus. COLT 613 is designed to address this trend toward lit-in-translation. The seminar provides the training necessary to approach the pedagogy of lit.-in-translation responsibly. The course will deploy both practical and theoretical approaches. We will study theories of language, trope and translation, and will track the rise of a new discipline: "translation studies." We will also work collaboratively on issues arising in the classroom. We will learn how to devise and evaluate exercises designed to increase undergraduates' philological awareness. Finally, each member of the class will be responsible for constructing their own world lit syllabus, and will defend his/her choices to the rest of the class. In addition to the final syllabus project, students wishing to take the course for 5 credits will develop an individual research project and write a 12-15 pp final essay. [Fall] |
| |
|
|
|
