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2008-09 Course Descriptions
Winter Term |
COLT 102 |
Introduction to Comparative Literature II |
4 credits |
Laura Selph
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May be taken independently from Comparative Literature 101
This course introduces students to the study of Comparative Literature through the perspective of cultural studies, the study of literature as a socio-cultural institution. Within this context, we will be focusing on the issue of globalization. In recent years the increasing exchange of people and cultural influences across national boundaries has problematized the traditional categories of literary studies organized along national lines. Reading texts from India, the Caribbean diaspora, and the U.S. Southwest, we will consider how they revise our understanding of the relationship between people, place, and culture as they imagine new forms of transnational identity. In keeping with the course’s focus on social and political contexts, we will also pay particular attention to the ways in which the texts interrogate the relationships between economics, politics, and cultural identity as they are being reworked through the contemporary processes of globalization. No prerequisite for this course. [Winter] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature
“Postcolonial Roots/Routes” |
4 credits |
Laura Selph
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In this course we will consider indigenous and diasporic responses to the history of colonialism and the current pressures of globalization, reading narratives that emphasize the importance of a community’s relationship to place alongside narratives that focus on the experiences of displacement and hybridity. Beginning with an exemplary instance of each, we will consider the historical and political contexts that shape these different expressions of collective identity, as well as the ethical claims implicit in their formulation. We will then focus on writers whose work blurs the boundaries of these seemingly distinct paradigms, putting alternate conceptual maps into dialogue in order to consider how they interrogate and supplement one another. Readings may include Patricia Grace’s Potiki, Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River, Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Gisèle Pineau’s Exile According to Julia, and J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. [Winter] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature:
“Comparative Totalitarianisms: Russia and Latin America” |
4 credits |
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Although located on opposite sides of the planet and separated by traditions, Russia and parts of Latin America in the 20th century share a history of dictatorship. Under similar pressure, but independently of each other, both developed a turn to the fantastic in response to political, social and artistic oppression. In Spanish, the term “magic realism” would be used to describe this turn to the fantastic beginning in the late 40s, while Andrei Sinyavksy would refer to the need for “fantastic realism” in the late 50s. This class will discuss dissident and fantastic literature in the Soviet Union as well as “la novella del dictador” and magic realism in Latin America. Readings will likely include works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavksy, Varlam Shalamov, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and August Roa Bastos. [Winter] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature:
“Nabokov, Beckett, Kundera” |
4 credits |
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In this class we will compare three authors who also have the distinction (quite rare in world literature) of each having written great works in two languages and national traditions: Nabokov in Russian and English, Beckett in English and French, Kundera in Czech and French. The course will examine the social and cultural forces that drove these authors to write in multiple languages, and the implications for a global literature. Examining texts from all of these traditions, we will discuss issues of tradition, exile, self-translation, style and language. Texts will include Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame and Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Slowness. [Winter] |
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COLT 212 |
Comparative World Cinema: “Literature into Film Adaptations” |
4 credits |
Blair Orfall
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What is literature’s relationship to film and vice versa? In this introductory course we will probe this question through shifts in book and film genres in the adaptation process. We will explore how five literary genres adapt into film genres including: drama (Shakespeare’s Macbeth adapted through British, Japanese, and Indian lenses), the novel (That Obscure Object of Desire adapted into a surrealist film), the novella (Double Indemnity adapted as the classic film noir), the short story (Julio Cortazar’s “Las Babas del Diablo” adapted as Antonioni’s Blow Up), and a poem adapted as animated film (Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” adapted as a Simpson episode). Required texts:Macbeth by William Shakespeare; La Femme et le Pantin by Pierre Louys (Available on Reserve in English translation) Double Indemnity by James M. Cain “Las Babas del Diablo” Julio Cortazar (in English translation); Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven;” Additional required short theoretical reading about literature to film adaptation will be available on Blackboard.
Required film viewing outside of class:Macbeth (Polanski, 1971, US); Maqbool (Bharadwaj, 2003, India)Kumonosu Jo or Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957, Japan) That Obscure Object of Desire(Luis Bunuel, 1977, Spain); Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944, France) Blow Up (Antonioni, 1966, Italy) The Man Who Copied (Jorge Furtado, 2003, Brazil) Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002, US) [Winter ] |
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Upper Division |
COLT 304 |
Theories of Drama |
4 credits |
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“Play-wright, I loath to haue thy manners knowne
In my chast booke: professe them in thine owne.” —Ben Johnson
Drama—both in its textual and embodied production—presents theoretical challenges to both the category of literature and the practice of literary criticism. By many accounts, a merely literary approach to dramatic texts is insufficient. Rarely are play texts written simply to be read. More often, a play text is a blueprint. Having been written (presuming it has) the text passes through the co-creative hands of directors, actors, and designers who interpret, build on and often restructure it in preparation for its audience: only in performance does the play text become a play. How, then, are we to understand authorship in a collaborative process? What is the relationship between the playwright, his or her text, the moment of performance, and the audience’s reception?
This course will offer a broad survey of the theater, focusing on the ways in which generic shifts, historically contextualized, also reflect changes in conceptions of the playwright’s function and, crucially for literary scholars, complicate our understanding of what is meant by “authorship.” [Winter] |
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COLT 360 |
Gender & Identity in Literature: “Caribbean Sexualities ” |
4 credits |
Emily Meyers
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Representations of sexuality in the Caribbean (and of the Caribbean) have historically served the interests of those in power, whether it be a colonial power or a patriarchal power or both. Men and women are depicted as hypersexualized beings in order to “sell” the Caribbean in tourism discourse. In this course, we will examine an emergent body of Caribbean literature that articulates Caribbean sexualities in relation to race, gender, class, and colonialism. Through selected critical readings in postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory, we will consider what is at stake politically in these representations of sex and sexuality. Readings to include: Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid (1991), Antes que anochezca [Before Night Falls] by Reinaldo Arenas (1992), In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand (1996), Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo (1998), Sirena Selena vestida de pena [Sirena Selena] by Mayra Santos-Febres (2000), Tide Running by Oonya Kempadoo (2001) and Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles edited by Thomas Glave (2008). [Winter] |
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COLT 360 |
Gender & Identity in Literature: “Figures of Death and Desire” |
4 credits |
Elena Villa
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Eros and thanatos are nearly inseparable in the popular imagination where they often take the form of unsettling figures that haunt the troubled borders of personal and cultural identity. Witches, vampires, courtesans, phantoms, freaks and fiends: in literature and film these figures fascinate and repulse, becoming symbols of what people both fear and desire. The frequent repetition of particular gendered tropes and scenarios (e.g. “the witch” and “the death of the beautiful woman”) also send powerful messages about a culture’s values, norms, and obsessions. In this course we will explore the many ways in which these haunting figures help cement or contest repressive cultural norms and values, paying attention to what they tell us about social relations rooted in power and privilege, gender, race, and class. Our primary texts will include the following 19th- and 20th-century literature and film from Europe, Great Britain, North and South America: Marcel Camus’ Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), Carlos Saura’s El Amor brujo (Love the Magician), Tony Scott’s The Hunger, Franco Zeferelli’s film of Verdi’s opera La Traviata, Aura, by Carlos Fuentes, “Le rideau cramoisi” (The Crimson Curtain), by Barbey d’Aurevilly, La Dame aux Camélias, by Alexandre Dumas fils, excerpts from La sorcière (The Sorceress), by Jules Michelet, selections from Seven Gothic Tales and Last Tales by Isak Dinesen, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, and Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Our theoretical and critical readings will cover a range of topics from feminist critiques of representation to object relations and performance theories. Week 1: Introduction to materials and course themes Week 2: Frankenstein Week 3: Beloved Week 4: Orfeu Negro (in-class viewing) Week 5: El Amor brujo (in-class viewing) Week 6: La Dame aux Camélias / La Traviata (view on your own or come to screening) Week 7: “Le rideau cramoisi” / Aura Week 8: excerpts from La sorcière / selections from Seven Gothic Tales and Last Tales Week 9: The Hunger (in-class viewing) Week 10: Nights at the Circus. [Winter] |
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COLT 440
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Studies in Genre: “The Epistolary Novel” |
4 credits |
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Letter: a written message addressed to an addressee.
This course examines the fictional world of written messages miss-sent, intercepted, publicized, gone astray, dictated, forged, misread, deleted, or shredded – through the genre of the epistolary novel. Using the exchange of letters to create fictional texts has resulted in some of the most "novel" of novels. The genre has appealed to writers across the ages and from widely different national-linguistic backgrounds as authors explore the form's potential for intrigue, resistance, or self-definition. Long a staple of the Western literary tradition, the epistolary novel has emerged as an innovative and up-to-date approach in postcolonial novels and the Digital Epistolary Novel written as e-mail.
This course will examine multiple manifestations of the epistolary genre, emphasizing theoretical approaches to the novels. We will begin with Lacan’s famous claim that a letter always reaches its destination in his essay on “The Purloined Letter,” and later consider Derrida’s opposite assertion in The Postcard. On the way, most novels will bring a theoretical reading or critical text, including Peter Brooks, Judith Butler, and Franco Moretti. The comparative approach to these texts will help us develop a theoretical framework for thinking about genre, the novel and written communication.
The epistolary form tends to focus authors on the question of female subjectivity, given women’s supposed affinity to the private world of letter-writing, emphasizing intimacy, immediacy, and the confessional form. Correspondingly, many of the novels in this course explore women’s writing and subjectivity. We will begin with Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman “translated” by the heroine from Peruvian knot communication, or quipus, followed by short extracts from Richardson’s Clarissa. We will read Choderlos de Laclos’ tale of seduction, Dangerous Liaisons, and Bram Stoker’s modernizing of the epistolary form in Dracula. Postcolonial novels that develop or interrogate the epistolary form include Helen Parente Cunha’s Woman Between Mirrors, Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, and Ruth Prawer Jhabala’s Heat and Dust. We will finish with Intimacies, a DEN. The occasional real letter and postcard will punctuate class discussion. [Winter]
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RL 407/507 |
Petrarchisms in the Early Modern World |
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This course focuses on Petrarch and Petrarchisms, the poetry written in Petrarch's style in different languages and periods including Italian, French, Spanish and English; it features guest lecturers from renowned Petrarch’s scholars and takes advantage of the Petrarch Digital Project being developed at the University of Oregon (https://language.uoregon.edu/petrarch/). The different seminars show the importance of Petrarchan sonnet not only as a vehicle of erotic discourse but also as a site for early modern expressions of national sentiment in Italy, France, England, Spain and Latin America. We will study how Petrarch's poetic model helped define political power and national identity in mid-sixteenth-century Europe and Latin America. The course begins with a survey of Petrarch's poetry and its canonization in Italy as a supreme exemplar of poetic style. Then it shows Petrarch massive influence on lyric poetry in French, Spanish, English and Latin America. Moreover it presents Petrarch's influence on early modern music and visual arts as well. Finally, the course discusses the different translations of Petrarch's works available in English. [Winter] |
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Graduate |
COLT 540 |
Studies in Genre: “The Epistolary Novel” |
4 credits |
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Letter: a written message addressed to an addressee. E-mail: the exchange of computer-stored messages by telecommunication. This course takes the written message as its subject and examines how messages become a particular genre of fiction – the “epistolary” novel. We will ask, with Lacan, “to whom does a letter belong?” as we investigate the fictional world of senders, addressees, miss-sent communication, and reading (prying into?) others’ supposedly private messages. We will read epistolary novels central to the Western literary tradition, postcolonial novels that take up the genre, and the DEN - the digital epistolary novel written as e-mail. This course will raise questions about signification, the body, desire, postcolonial subjectivity, authenticity, modernity, postmodernity, etc. Texts include: Lacan’s essay on “The Purloined Letter”, Françoise de Graffigny, Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloïse (selection), Bram Stoker, Dracula, Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter, Ruth Prawer Jhabala Heat and Dust, and Intimacies, a DEN. [Winter] |
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COLT 614 |
Introduction to Comparative Literature |
5 credits |
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This course is intended as an introduction to the discipline of comparative literature extending from the founding of the discipline to the present state of the field. Readings and discussions will focus on pivotal moments in the development of comparative literature and will pay particular attention to recent challenges to and changes in the discipline. Requirements for the course will include regular participation in seminar discussions, several brief presentations, and a final paper. [Winter] |
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GER 623 |
Theories of Tragedy |
5 credits |
Kenneth Calhoon
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This seminar will attempt a fairly thorough consideration of some of the canonical theories of tragedy, from Aristotle’s Poetics to Hegel’s Aesthetics and Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama. In addition to reading certain representative primary sources (Euripides, Shakespeare, Gryphius, Lessing and Kleist), we will discuss a number of key critical writings (Auerbach, Girard, Agamben, Moretti, Segal and Burkert). [Winter] |
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