Fall 2019 Undergraduate Courses

Please check ALBERT for accurate course locations and meeting patterns.

Instructor: Professor Paul

This course focuses on modernist fiction written in French, English, and German. We will have the opportunity to consider canonical figures (Conrad, Joyce, Gide, Proust, Woolf, Kafka), as well as theories and critical debates about the period and category of modernism (from Auerbach to Rancière).

Instructor: Professor Iampolski

Modernity is a product of Enlightenment that dramatically changed the face of the Western culture by proclaiming the autonomy and supremacy of human Reason. This new attitude allowed an unprecedented development of science and became a basis for  many fundamental achievements of the Western civilization. However the same attitude has created a lot of contradictions that define modernity. The course is designed to analyze the antinomies of the culture of modernity. We will start with a founding document of European rationalism  - philosophical statements by Descartes and will see how the cult of Reason and the great western political principles (equality of rights, the rule of law) related to the dominance of Reason are paradoxically responsible for new kinds of violence and social exclusion.

Instructor: Professor Garcia

This seminar considers the emergence of Black Studies as an arena of inquiry in the second half of the twentieth century. Texts include works by writers and theorists within Black Studies and writings from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century activated within the field. A major theme throughout will be the relation of Black Studies to Postcolonial Studies. Readings will include writings by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Sylvia Wynter, Richard Wright, C. L. R. James, and recent work by Gayatri Spivak and Achille Mbembe, among others.

Instructor: Professor Bianchi

This seminar, limited to senior Comparative Literature majors engaged in writing a Senior Honors Thesis, is designed to be a writing workshop. Students will articulate a thesis topic, research it, write, read, and critique their own (and each other's) work-in-progress. One chapter of the thesis (20-25 pages) and a detailed outline of the remaining work are due at the end of the semester. Permission of the DUGS is required to enroll in the course.  Recommended Reading: This class requires that you put together your own bibliography in consultation with your peers and faculty advisors. The articles mentioned below are recommended reading that should help you at particular points in the writing process (for example, when you are pondering your methodology). The following book could be useful if consulted in the beginning of the class and then weekly: Wendy Laura Belcher: Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks.

Instructor: Professor Foley

What is Chinese literature, and what is world literature? Is Chinese literature world literature? Are these questions even worth asking? Through a combination of literary texts and theoretical readings, this course will approach these basic questions from a number of different angles. Our attempts to interrogate the slippery categories of “Chinese literature” and “world literature” will take us through a variety of modern and contemporary Chinese works by a diverse group of writers. At the same time as we engage in a close literary analysis of these texts, we will examine the many ways the categories of “Chinese” and “world” literature can become complicated, including through issues of translation, genre, politics, culture, nation, and literary assessment. By the end of the course, we hope to have developed a productive critical perspective on the notions of “national literature” and “world literature” by working through the particular set of problems Chinese literature presents these categories.

Note: these courses do not count as core courses toward the Major or Minor

Dante's Divine Comedy

Professor Cornish

COLIT-UA.270.001

ITAL-UA 270

11:00am-12:15am, Tuesdays & Thursdays

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Auditorium

This course is dedicated to a one-semester guided reading of the Divine Comedy in its entirety. The text will be read in facing-page translation for the benefit of those who know some Italian and those who do not. Lectures and discussion are in English. Students will learn about the historical, philosophical, and literary context of the poem as well as how to make sense of  it in modern terms. Evaluation will be by means of bluebook midterm and final, testing knowledge of key terms, concepts, and passages, two short papers, and active participation in lectures and discussion.

Sponsored by the Dept. of Italian Studies (Contact: Elisa Fox)

French Fashion, Taste, and Style

Professor Freed-Thall

COLIT-UA.550.001

FREN-UA.802.001

MW 3:30pm - 4:45pm

Clothing is a text to be read in modernity, and authors and artists from Baudelaire to RuPaul mobilize sartorial performativity in powerful ways. Fashion functions, for example, as a semiotic or communicative system, as a mnemonic device, as an erotic signifier, as a tool for bourgeois self-fashioning, and as a force of anti-normative subversion. In this course, students will gain a critical vocabulary for discussing literary and cinematic style. We will pay special attention to the implications of sartorial style for the production, reproduction, and rescripting of gender norms, and to the centrality of irony in both the fashion system and in queer theory. Among our concerns: early modern vs. modern self-fashioning; clothing as the materialization of memory; commodity fetishism; the subcultural force of decadence, primitivism, and punk; the invention of the “dandy”; androgyny and gender performativity; design and the proliferation of vernacular aesthetic categories (glamour, kitsch, coolness, cuteness, etc.); and the relation between literary, cinematic, and sartorial styles.

Sponsored by the Dept. of French (Contact: Indigo Rancourt)

Sounds of Italy 1910-1970

Professor Cipani

COLIT-UA.852.001

ITAL-UA 310

Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:00-12:15

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

This course will acquaint students with a variety of sound artifacts and sound related texts, grouped around topics significant for Italy’s auditory culture between WWI and the 70s — between the early noise machines of the Futurists and the experiments of maverick singer Demetrio Stratos. Yet the focus will not be exclusively on music proper: we will examine sound in a range of manifestations and contexts — propaganda, magic-religious rituals, oral poetry, folklore, commercial sound design, prison songs, soundtracks, etc. Accordingly, supporting critical readings will give students the opportunity to compare approaches on sound from different fields — sound studies, oral history, (ethno)musicology, cultural and media studies. The course will touch upon issues such as the relationship between music and other arts; the development of Italian media; Fascist sound politics; the discussion on technology for sound production/ consumption in Italian cultural circles; the survival of (largely non-textual) oral-aural art forms. One of the larger goals of this course is to show how sound as a common sensory framework can impact the construction of shared social experiences.The course is in English, no Italian required. English transcripts will be provided for sound files in Italian. each lesson will include a listening part with sound samples and a class discussion based on required listenings/readings.

Sponsored by the Dept. of Italian Studies (Contact: Elisa Fox)