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2009-10 Course Descriptions
Winter Term |
COLT 102 |
Introduction to Comparative Literature II |
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Kenneth Calhoon
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May be taken independently from Comparative Literature 101
With an emphasis on the social components of literature and its institutions, this course will pay particular attention to the role played by language in the formation of social, ethnic and national identities. An introductory analysis of two poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Ballad of Rudolph Reed" and "We Real Cool," will serve to introduce the concept of the vernacular as it relates to distinctions of race and class. This will help lay the groundwork for a discussion of the common tongue as a marker between inside and out, between "high" and "low." Following a brief discussion of Aristotle’s association of comedy with the lower classes, we will move through a series of moments in which the "low" is sometimes stigmatized, sometimes mined as a source of creative vitality. These include: Dante’s choice of vernacular Italian for his Divine Comedy; Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into vernacular German; the ghetto in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; the aristocracy’s ridicule of the ascendant merchant class in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman; class and sexuality in Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry written in the dialects of both African- and German-Americans; the materiality of language in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Prague’s Yiddish theater; wealth and assimilation in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. No prerequisite for this course. No prerequisite for this course. [Winter] [4 credits] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature
“Monstrous Other ” |
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Roger Adkins
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This course will critically engage with literary representations of the ‘monstrous Other,’ including such examples as the undead, the fantastic (for example, trolls), and the proper monster. We will consider works in such diverse genres as epic poetry, drama, science fiction, film, and metafiction. We will approach the notion of the ‘monstrous’ from a critical perspective informed by an understanding of historical, cultural, and political forces that contribute to the ‘monsterization’ of the Other. We will also interrogate the concepts of the ‘monstrous’ and the ‘Other’ in relation to each other, examining from psychoanalytic, feminist, queer-theoretical, and other perspectives, the human need for monsters that lurk around the edges of our world. [Winter] [4 credits] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature:
"The Tempest" in a Global Context |
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Emily Taylor Meyers
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“You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!”—Caliban, The Tempest
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, first performed in 1611, has been subject to intense critical and creative scrutiny almost since its appearance. It is Shakespeare’s most radically reworked and rewritten play, staging as it does complex questions concerning nature, culture, language, and power. It is also widely interpreted as an allegorical account of the European colonial encounter with the New World. In this regard, it has been the source text for a number of writers and scholars in the Americas that seek to reimagine the colonial encounter not from the perspective of the colonizers but rather from the perspective of the colonized. This course will consider Shakespeare’s original play as well as a selection of these postcolonial texts from the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Readings will draw from a variety of literary genres, including plays, poems, short stories, essays, and novels. [Winter] [4 credits] |
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COLT 211 |
Comparative World Literature:
TBA |
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George Moore
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[Winter] [4 credits] |
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COLT 212 |
Comparative World Cinema: "Apocalypse" |
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Max Rayneard
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For something that is perpetually projected into the future, the apocalypse has a long history. From the biblical Revelations to zombie films, the End of the World (or the world that we know) is a concept that has been used as a backdrop for explorations of humanity’s fragility, its baser natures, and its triumphs. More than mere metaphors, however, various fictional and filmic apocalypses have spoken to particular historical, cultural or political contexts: whether they reflect fears born of literal annihilation (Godzilla decimates Tokyo as atomic bombs did Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove as an artifact of Cold War fears), the West’s fear of the Other (King Kong), or the fear of technology (The Terminator). This course will examine Apocalypse as a critical lens, a way of understanding the world through the means by which its undoing is represented. [Winter ] [4 credits] |
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COLT 212 |
Comparative World Cinema: "Love and Sex " |
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Jeong Chang
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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. course [Winter ] [4 credits] |
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COLT 302 |
Theories of Poetry |
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What, exactly, is a poem? Where does it come from? What are its forms? How does it mean; and how does it mean differently from prose? Most importantly, perhaps, what do poem *do*? What do they do to their individual readers, to their immediate social and cultural context, to history? These are the questions we will address throughout the term in the form of a sustained introduction to the study of poetry and poetic form from a world perspective. And most importantly these are questions that we will ask through the close and careful reading of the poems themselves.
This course is open to all interested students and requires no specific foreign language expertise. It satisfies the "genre theory" requirement for COLT majors, and is recommended for students in their sophomore or junior year. Students will read a wide range of lyric poems and a significant sampling of poetic theory in this course, drawing from a variety of national and cultural traditions, from Plato and Sappho to the present. [Winter] [4 credits] |
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COLT 360 |
Gender & Identity in Literature: “Technologies of Gender & Sexuality ” |
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Katherine Brundan
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This course examines how technology affects the way human beings construct gender and sexuality through cultural and fictional output. From the nineteenth-century department store to vampiric typewriters, cyborgs, avatars, and web discussion boards, our fictional and cinematic texts navigate gendered subjects through periods of rapid technological change. We will consider the changing (liberating?) ideologies of gender in response to new technologies and artistic media, as well colonial appropriation of and resistance to indigenous technologies. This course will help students think critically about the interface between technology, creative expression, and lived experience in a global context. Feminist critical readings will help situate arguments about gender construction, performativity, consumerism, and colonialism.
Readings include: Emile Zola’s Ladies’ Paradise, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Maryse Condé I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, “Metropolis” (both 1927 Fritz Lang and 2001 anime versions), Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook and Japanese multimedia phenomenon Train Man. [Winter] [4 credits] |
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COLT 450 |
Comparative Studies in Cinema: Contemporary Independent Film and the Neo-Realist Tradition |
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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COLT
470/570
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Studies in Identity: “Multiculturalism: Representation and Recognition” |
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Michael Allan
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Of what value is multiculturalism? In what ways are its values articulated, embodied and enforced—and with what future in mind? What categories make us different? Do these categories pertain across different traditions, places and histories? Can multiculturalism tolerate intolerance? Who or what is deemed intolerant? With what force should tolerance be enforced—and where? Our class will draw from law, poetry, film, essays, theater and novels to explore multiculturalism as the interaction between representation and recognition. Who or what determines what it means to be represented properly? How is recognition integral to identity formation? The first half of the course will look closely at the importance of stories, testimonials and narratives in the construction of identity, the liberal self and the national community. The second half will examine American secularism and the rhetoric of religious tolerance both in the United States as well as in its foreign policy. Readings include works by Charles Taylor, Toni Morrison, DW Griffith, Joan Scott, Judith Butler and Malcolm X. [Winter] [4 credits] |
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COLT 490/590
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Literature and Philosophy: “Levinas and Shakespeare ” |
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"It sometimes seems to me," Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) has written, "that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation on Shakespeare" (Time and the Other). How does Shakespeare figure in the writing of Emmanuel Levinas, arguably the 20th-century's greatest philosopher of ethics? We'll begin by reading the essays "Reality and its Shadow" and "The Bible and Philosophy"(Chapter 1, Ethics and Infinity). Then we'll read Time and the Other, which meditates on Macbeth and Hamlet, followed by our own reading of these plays. We'll then read Levinas's magnum opus, itself a formidable literary work, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, which is full of literary allusions, including allusions to Shakespeare. We'll conclude with King Lear read in the light of Levinas's radical rethinking of the nature of subjectivity in Otherwise than Being. [Winter] [4 credits] |
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COLT 615 |
Comparative Literary Theory: "What's in a Wor(l)d? Transnationalism and Literary Theory" |
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Our class will consider contemporary discussions in literary theory and trace scholarly methods for the transnational analysis of texts. Possible readings include works by Sartre, Fanon, Apter, Moretti, Glissant, Hofmeyr, Thiong’o, Spivak, Casanova, Liu, Said, Asad, Butler, Damrosch, Chakravarty, Hirschkind and Mahmood. [Winter] [5 credits] |
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