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2008-09 Course Descriptions
Spring Term |
Lower Division |
COLT 103 |
Introduction to Comparative Literature III: Visual Cultures |
4 credits |
Laura Selph
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May be taken independently from COLT 101 and COLT 102 This course introduces students to the study of Comparative Literature by considering visual culture from across the world. We will survey a variety of forms of visual images—from museum displays to documentary photography and film to graphic narrative to performance art—in order to consider what visual documentation entails, why the visual image is commonly understood to have a privileged relationship to lived experience, and what the possible impulses to documentation might be. While documentary images are often read as an authentic representation of lived experience, they also operate within systems of production, distribution, and consumption that structure their meaning. Visual images can offer a form of access to others’ experience, memorializing the past, providing a witness to experiences of human suffering and injustice, and possibly creating a catalyst for social action. They can also operate as a form of surveillance and spectacle, and they can serve to objectify and exoticize those who are displayed. With this in mind, we will be particularly interested in images, texts, and performances that self-reflexively interrogate the power relations that they themselves inhabit in the processes of display and spectatorship. [Spring] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature: The Orient and Empire |
4 credits |
Blair Orfall
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What is Orientalism? And how does Orientalism, or representations of the "East" as both exotic and a distorted mirror of "the West," relate to past and present ideas of Empire? We will address these questions beginning with Edward Said's Orientalism before moving to fictional representations of colonization. We'll examine Orientalism's influence in European architecture, music, dance, paintings, photography and collections which later became our contemporary museums. Finally, we will see if Orientalism is an applicable term for the representation of current events in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Texts To Be Read either in Full or PartSaid, Edward. OrientalismThe Arabian Nights. H. Haddawy (tr.)Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. R. Latham (tr.)Haggard, Rider. King Solomon's MinesConrad, Joseph. Heart of DarknessForster, E.M. A Passage to IndiaDuras, Marguerite. The LoverSalih, Tayeb A Season of Migration to the North
Films or clips may include: Lawrence of Arabia, The Jewel in the Crown, Madame Butterfly, A Passage to India, A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Osama.[Spring] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature: Postcolonial Women Writers |
4 credits |
Laura Selph
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Reading women writers from India, Africa, and the Caribbean, we will consider how they engage some of the central issues of postcolonial studies—history and memory, language and representation, national and diasporic identities, modernity and development—with a particular focus on how questions of gender inflect their engagement with these issues. Readings may include texts from Sara Suleri, Anita Desai, Erna Brodber, Dionne Brand, Yvonne Vera, and Bessie Head. [Spring] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature: Zombies and Power |
4 credits |
Emily Meyers
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This course will examine how the figure of the zombie emerges as a global literary phenomenon in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The zombie, virtually unknown outside of Haiti until the beginning of the twentieth century, enters North American consciousness with the invasion of Haiti by U.S. forces in 1915. This course will investigate the figure of the zombie in Haitian and U.S. novels, short stories, comics, and graphic novels in order to understand how the zombie comes to represent something other than itself: sl avery, invasion, disease, apocalypse, and critiques of dictators, colonialism, and global capitalism. Readings to include selections from The Magic Island by William Seabrook (1929), The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis (1986), Mât de cocagne [The Festival of the Greasy Pole] by René Depestre (1976), Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat (1996), The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman (2003), Zombieworld: Champion Of The Worms by Michael Mignola (1998), and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (2006). [Spring] |
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COLT 212 |
Comparative World Cinema: Love, Intimacy & Melodrama |
4 credits |
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This course will focus on films from around the world that illuminate various academic discussions of love, intimacy, and melodrama. In particular, we will examine how globalization, the revolution in information technology, and the digital age have contributed to formal and thematic changes in the representation of love and intimacy in films. It is important to note that we will not be focusing solely on conceptions of romantic love, but also ideas of familial love, platonic love, and the rules that govern such relationships and its representations. At the same time, these films also contribute to discussions of the state of love and intimacy through the use of melodrama, genres such as the romantic comedy, and the role of love and intimacy in motivating film narrative. Therefore, the goal of the course will be to analyze films from around the world to better understand what we mean by love and intimacy, and how film helps us understand and question what we mean when we say, “I love you.” [Spring] |
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Upper Division |
COLT 305 |
Cultural Studies |
4 credits |
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COLT 305 introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of cultural discourses and practices known as "cultural studies." Cultural studies has increasingly become a central field within the discipline of comparative literature, thanks to its capacity to address a huge variety of cultural artifacts across an array of national contexts. In COLT 305, students are introduced to the defining concept of cultural studies: namely that culture can be understood as a meaningful system of signs, capable of analysis and interpretation. In addition, students learn to address the historical and socio-political contexts of culture, paying special attention to the ways in which cultural forms help delineate power relations, typically in terms of categories like gender, race and class. COLT 305 teaches students how to interpret and critique the many levels of cultural discourse that surround us, and further helps students position such discourse within a global context. [Spring] |
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COLT 350 |
Comparative Literature: Madness and Creativity |
4 credits |
George Moore
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When is madness a cry for independence, a revelation of alienated creativity, an invitation to the frontiers of human experience and when is it a retreat into repetition, nihilism and silence? At what point do we confuse the authentic suffering of the mind with genius or originality? Can creation mean that one risks madness to become what Rimbaud called a seer or visionary or might this play into a dangerously conventional myth? Our project is to venture into the universe of the imagination to separate the myth of madness from the freedom of creation. We will select psychological and philosophic works from Kant, Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault as well as explore the literature of Shakespeare, Nerval, Gogol, Holderlin, Trakl, Rimbaud, and Plath. [Spring] |
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COLT 360 |
Comparative Literature:
"Orientalism and Beyond" |
4 credits |
Elena Villa
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More an imaginary terrain than an actual place, the shifting geography and image repertoire of “the Orient” has nevertheless taken its contours from real historical relationships and cross-cultural encounters. This course will focus initially on western representation of North Africa and the Middle East. We will locate western orientalist fantasies, and figures of orientalist discourse, such as the dancer, the odalisque, the veiled woman, and the terrorist, within a framework of colonial and imperial politics. We will also look extensively at the reactions they have elicited from Arab and Muslim writers and filmmakers. Visual media will include orientalist painting and photography, music videos, colonial and Hollywood cinema, and contemporary North African film. Written texts may include: excerpts from National Geographic articles, travel writing by Colette, Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Edward Lane, Guy de Maupassant, Lawrence Morgan, and Edith Wharton, “Hérodias” by Flaubert, The Immoralist, by André Gide, Sherazade, by Leila Sebhar, Sheherazade Goes West, by Fatima Mernissi, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, by Assia Djebar, and Crescent, by Diana Abu-Jaber. Critical readings will draw from the work of Leila Ahmed, Mohja Kahf, Kelly Oliver, Edward Said, Jack Shaheen, Ella Shohat, Linda Steet, and Meyda Yegenoglu. [Spring] |
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GER 410 |
Experimental Course: “The Singing Socrates" |
4 credits |
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Søren Kierkegaard’s dissertation, Begrebet Ironi med Stadigt Hensyn til Socrates (The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates), opens with a list of 15 theses. The first reads: “The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity.” This paradox of being alike and not alike in the same moment becomes clearer when we think about Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony as the "way to truth” but not the truth itself. It seems that Socrates represents a movement towards and a distance to religious experience in the same figure of thought. Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music) criticizes what he understood as the imposition of Socratic rationality on tragic culture. Nietzsche castigated the “lust for knowledge” of the Socratic, theoretical man, and pointed out that Socrates had wanted to learn to compose music himself. What we need, Nietzsche argued, was a music-making Socrates, a philosopher who understands the value of aesthetic and tragic knowledge. As his career progresses, Nietzsche takes aim at Plato, whose portrait of Socrates endures as the most common image of the man and his thought. Nietzsche ties Plato to his critique of Christianity, which he calls “Platonism for the people.” As it emerges from these aspects of thought, this course will address both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s understanding of Socrates as an attempt to make sense of the relationship between aesthetics, religion, and nihilism in the modern world. This course will be taught in English, although students who have the ability are encouraged to read the texts in the original Danish or German. [Spring]
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COLT 430 |
Literary Movements: Enlightenment |
4 credits |
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When Freud wrote (in Civilization and Its Discontents) that our capacity for happiness was restricted by our constitutions, he re-animated a tension that, over a century earlier, had led the Enlightenment to predicate happiness (and with it liberty, virtue, progress and perfection) on the possibility of self-fashioning, i.e., of finding cultural substitutes for natural gifts. A trajectory of reading that includes later thinkers such as Freud and Nietzsche will help focus our attention on those moments in the literature and institutions of the Enlightenment in which the civilizing process was rendered suspect. Readings will include Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm and selected fables; Rousseau, Confessions; Locke, An Essay On Human Understanding; Herder, On the Origin of Language; Diderot, Letter on the Blind and Letter on the Deaf and Dumb; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Adorno and Horkheimer; Dialectic of Enlightenment; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, and Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise.[Spring] |
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COLT 440 |
Comparative Studies in Cinema: Neo-Neo Realisms |
4 credits |
Richard Herskowitz
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The course will focus on one strain within independent filmmaking practice since the Fifties—films inspired by the innovations of Italian neo-realism. Independent filmmakers have practiced artistic realisms (including Italian Neo-Realism) in order to challenge the “seamless realism” of mainstream films. Beginning with Vittorio DeSica's The Bicycle Thief ( Italy), we will trace the influence of the neo-realist movement on filmmakers from Denmark, England, Iran, France, Latin America, the U.S., and other countries. .[Spring] |
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Graduate |
GER 510 |
Experimental Course: “The Singing Socrates" |
4 credits |
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Søren Kierkegaard’s dissertation, Begrebet Ironi med Stadigt Hensyn til Socrates (The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates), opens with a list of 15 theses. The first reads: “The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity.” This paradox of being alike and not alike in the same moment becomes clearer when we think about Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony as the "way to truth” but not the truth itself. It seems that Socrates represents a movement towards and a distance to religious experience in the same figure of thought. Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music) criticizes what he understood as the imposition of Socratic rationality on tragic culture. Nietzsche castigated the “lust for knowledge” of the Socratic, theoretical man, and pointed out that Socrates had wanted to learn to compose music himself. What we need, Nietzsche argued, was a music-making Socrates, a philosopher who understands the value of aesthetic and tragic knowledge. As his career progresses, Nietzsche takes aim at Plato, whose portrait of Socrates endures as the most common image of the man and his thought. Nietzsche ties Plato to his critique of Christianity, which he calls “Platonism for the people.” As it emerges from these aspects of thought, this course will address both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s understanding of Socrates as an attempt to make sense of the relationship between aesthetics, religion, and nihilism in the modern world. This course will be taught in English, although students who have the ability are encouraged to read the texts in the original Danish or German. [Spring] |
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COLT 530 |
Literary Movements: Enlightenment |
4 credits |
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When Freud wrote (in Civilization and Its Discontents) that our capacity for happiness was restricted by our constitutions, he re-animated a tension that, over a century earlier, had led the Enlightenment to predicate happiness (and with it liberty, virtue, progress and perfection) on the possibility of self-fashioning, i.e., of finding cultural substitutes for natural gifts. A trajectory of reading that includes later thinkers such as Freud and Nietzsche will help focus our attention on those moments in the literature and institutions of the Enlightenment in which the civilizing process was rendered suspect. Readings will include Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm and selected fables; Rousseau, Confessions; Locke, An Essay On Human Understanding; Herder, On the Origin of Language; Diderot, Letter on the Blind and Letter on the Deaf and Dumb; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Adorno and Horkheimer; Dialectic of Enlightenment; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, and Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise.[Spring] |
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COLT 540 |
Comparative Studies in Cinema: Neo-Neo Realisms |
4 credits |
Richard Herskowitz
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The course will focus on one strain within independent filmmaking practice since the Fifties—films inspired by the innovations of Italian neo-realism. Independent filmmakers have practiced artistic realisms (including Italian Neo-Realism) in order to challenge the “seamless realism” of mainstream films. Beginning with Vittorio DeSica's The Bicycle Thief ( Italy), we will trace the influence of the neo-realist movement on filmmakers from Denmark, England, Iran, France, Latin America, the U.S., and other countries. .[Spring] |
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