Spring 2019 Undergraduate Courses

Please check ALBERT for accurate course locations and meeting patterns.

Instructor: Prof. Sanders

In her book Death of a Discipline—the discipline being Comparative Literature—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak exhorts us to imagine “the open-ended possibility of studying all literatures, with linguistic rigor and historical savvy. A level playing field, so to speak.” There has always been this ambition in Comparative Literature, and various attempts have been made to realize it.  The all-encompassing positivism of nineteenth-century American comparative philology was one endeavor to include all of the literatures of the world, as far as those scholars were able, given their knowledge. In its metropolitan form, however, Comp Lit has remained stubbornly Eurocentric. In Death of a Discipline, the ambition of studying all literatures is given a more specific direction, as Spivak advocates for an alliance between Comp Lit and Area Studies, which have, in the U.S. academy, set high standards for the learning of the languages of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. At the same time, Comp Lit has been influenced, at a theoretical level, by theories about the ethics of reading inspired by Derrida and Levinas—which, emphasizing otherness, have inspired a crossing of borders and languages beyond the historical confines of Comp Lit. Beginning with some of the founding “myths” of Comp Lit and their critiques (Auerbach, Apter, Spivak, Melas), we move on to resonating world-historical projects of the political imagination in W.E.B. du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and to authors whose works probe the limits of any single language and assert the difficult necessity of translation/ self-translation: Patrick Chamoiseau, J.M. Coetzee, Antjie Krog, Samuel Beckett, and others. Theories of otherness and the literary will be explored through the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the challenge of feminist theory to literary comparison will be a key topic.  Crossing media, through image, film, and drama, we will analyze works by Bertolt Brecht, Ruy Guerra, and others. We will attempt, practically, to critically engage the limits of US/ Europe-centered comparative study, by addressing the challenges of reading, for example, South African Zulu praise poetry and allied genres

Instructor: Professor Alani Hicks

Complaint Literature has not been granted the critical attention it deserves despite its fundamental role in the Medieval and Early Modern literatures of Western Europe. Indeed, although it is vibrant, poignant, acerbic, and often full of salacious or amusing details that are frequently presented as political and personal critiques, or couched in the rhetorics of empire, religion, war, or propaganda, Complaint Literature is often disregarded in literary and historical analyses of the time period. In this course, we will consider seminal texts in the literatures of England, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain to examine how complaints and criticism help shape the cosmovision of the traditions in question, focusing, in particular, on how different forms of lament and harangue dovetail with commentary on political strife, imperial strength, power differentials, moral and spiritual rectitude, and perceptions of gender difference. We will survey the commonalities and differences in religious, political, linguistic, and courtly concerns by studying classical elegies, the invective tradition, gendered diatribes, discussions of loss—from laments such as the planctus Mariae, the planh of troubadours, and the love complaint more generally—along with conduct manuals and works of protest and counsel found in specula principes. We will also closely examine how accusations, jeremiads, and the voicing of invectives also stands as testament to the often ingenious representational and narratological strategies used by the authors of these texts as they evaluate their society and position themselves both in and against the literary canon and literary history. This approach will allow us to understand an essential aspect of authorial self-fashioning and reveal the historical, cultural, and perspectival shifts as the Medieval Period becomes the Early Modern in epic, lyric, romance, and narrative texts.

Instructor: Professor Gadberry

What is a state, how does it exercise power, and what it does have to do with the subjects or citizens who live within it? How, where, and why does a state begin or end? This semester’s junior theory seminar examines these questions and theories of the state and state power through an interdisciplinary examination of the state’s limits that brings together a range of literary, political theoretical, and philosophical texts. We begin with introductory readings to theories of power and of state before turning to the question of the state’s temporal, physical, and even personal limits as they appear in revolution, theories of territory and borders, and in the often life-or-death matters of recognition and exclusion.

Instructor: Professor Vatulescu

What do we mean by document, documentary, and fiction? How have these concepts and their relationships changed through time? This course starts by considering the beginnings of documentary in literature, film, and the visual arts, from the controversial coining of the term in 1926. We will explore representative works from foundational moments in the evolution of documentary—the beginnings of the newsreel, Soviet and Nazi propaganda, American depression era documentary books, the cinéma-vérité movement, and the rise of autobiographical/personal documentary films. How has the emergence of this new term and its development affected our other key concepts—document and fiction? What is the relationship between documentary modes and particular media and technologies—print, photography, cinema, video, and digital? Other topics include the role of the artist, indexicality and representation, literature as historical document, “fiction in the archives,” false documents and forgery, collage, illustration, and other uses of the document in twentieth century art.  This semester’s special topics are 1) word/image relations and 2) the archive. Theoretical forays around and into the archive will be complemented by hands-on research in the Tamiment archive or in an archive of your choice.

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 Paul

This course examines a series of political, philosophical, and literary texts in order to imagine the possible relations between power, writing, and resistance. Rather than using literature as a key to politics, or imposing political themes on literary works, we will attend to how literature—taken as a coded form of linguistic and aesthetic practice—and politics—understood both as the exercise of power and strategies of resistance—might be related. The goal of this course is thus to offer insights into how literary works represent and negotiate political questions in writing, inviting you to read and think politically. Readings will be largely focused on the modern period, i.e. from the French Revolution to WWII.

Instructor: Professor Porter

This course investigates the surprising ordinariness of dystopian vision. From the socialist totalitarianism of Evgeny Zamyatin’s We to the misogynist tyranny of MGM’s The Handmaid’s Tale, oppression and resistance take shape in the minutiae of everyday life. Clothing and furniture are policed and traded as contraband; the flick of a light switch or a trip to the grocery store can become an act of profound submission or subversion. How are we to understand the striking focus on domestic routine in works concerned with grand-scale exploitation and catastrophe? Might the dystopian tradition as a whole represent a particular strain of modern thinking about everyday life? And if so, how does this tradition fuse together the mundane experiences of such seemingly different economic orders as socialism and capitalism? These and other questions will guide our discussions of major dystopian novels and films from Russia and the United States.

 

Note: these courses do count as core courses toward the Major or Minor

 

Professor Halim

Originating in MEIS

 

Professor Iampolski

CORE-UA

Image: between nature and culture

M/W 9:30am -10:45am

Course description: A broad anthropological introduction to the emergence and use of images in human culture

 

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

 

Case Studies: Law in Literature
Professor Doreen Densky

COLIT-UA.141

GERM-UA298

(conducted in English)

Sponsored by German

 

Love & War in Renaissance Italy
Professor Virginia Cox

COLIT-UA.173

ITAL-UA.145

Sponsored by Italian Studies

 

Asian American Literature
Professor Parikh

COLIT-UA.301

SCA-UA.306

Sponsored by the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis

 

Socrates and his Critics
Professor Renzi

COLIT-UA.701

CLASS-UA.701

Sponsored by Classics

 

The Passions of Elena Ferrante
Professor Falkoff

COLIT-UA.723

ITAL-UA.300

Sponsored by Italian Studies

 

Historical Epics of China and Japan
Adjunct

COLIT-UA 726

EAST-UA 726

Sponsored by EAS

 

Modern American Jewish Literature and Culture
Professor Asscher

COLIT-UA.779

HBRJD-UA.779

Sponsored by Hebrew & Judaic Studies

 

Tpcs Mod Arab Cultures
Professor Uthman

COLIT-UA.798

MEIS-UA.720

Sponsored by the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

 

Dante & His World
Professor Maria Luisa Aridzzone

COLIT-UA.801

ITAL-UA.161

12:30-1:45, Monday/Wednesdays
Casa Library, Room 203

Sponsored by Italian Studies

 

Gender and Sexualities in French Literature
Prof André

COLIT-UA.852

FREN-UA.868

Sponsored by French

 

Theatre in the French Tradition: Immigration and Representation
Prof J. Miller

COLIT-UA.866

FREN-UA.829

Sponsored by French

 

East Asia and the Nobel Prize in Literature
Prof Foley

COLIT-UA.950

EAST-UA.950

Sponsored by EAS

 

Introduction to African Literature
Professor Quayson

Sponsored by English