Fall 2018 Undergraduate Courses

Please check ALBERT for accurate course locations and meeting patterns.

Instructor: Prof. Xudong Zhang

This class has as its focus the essay as a mode of literary production; a form of intellectual and cultural self-consciousness; and a platform of social-political intervention all at once.  Primary texts range from The Analects and Records of the Grand Historian to Montaigne, and from Emerson to Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro

 

Instructor: Prof. Porter

This course studies the interdependence of energy and cultural production from the 19th century to the present. From the steam engine to the hydraulic fracture—from Anna Karenina to Jurassic World—the harnessing of unprecedented amounts of heat, light, and labor has enabled the proliferation of modern imaginative forms. How did the newly discovered laws of thermodynamics shape the late nineteenth-century novel? How does the aesthetic of the oil spill differ from that of the nuclear disaster? And how might different kinds of energy make it possible to perpetrate, recognize, or combat particular forms of social injustice? These and other questions will guide our discussions of major works of literature and visual art from the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The class will also take field trips to New York’s American Museum of Natural History and Kykuit (The Rockefeller Estate) in Westchester County.

 

Instructor: Prof. Gabriela Basterra

On Subjectivity    
We like to think of ourselves as free. We like to consider ourselves autonomous subjects with initiative and the ability to act in the world. But isn’t subjectivity constituted in relationship to what is other?  The subject of vision in painting, the one who sees, emerges in relation to the object being seen; the voice speaking in a poem and calling itself “I” becomes a subject in the act of addressing a “you”; the self-conscious subject has always already been affected by others before it can become aware of itself; the ethical subject is addressed and called. Even the freedom we take as our most intimate source of self-mastery is a foreignness in ourselves. Focusing on philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary and artistic texts, this seminar explores subjectivity in its counterintuitive relationships to others and to freedom. It first focuses on sections of Immanuel Kant’s first and second Critique in conversation with texts by René Descartes, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy.  Then it addresses various philosophical and poetic ways of envisioning or questioning subjectivity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Instructor: Prof. Todd Foley

In the West, the relationship between human and animal has long proven a productive point of philosophical inquiry. How has this relationship been articulated in China? This course aims to examine this question through literature, both classical and modern. The course will begin with a brief overview of animality as it was conceived in classical culture, which will help us interrogate the notion of “the animal” as a category while providing an important literary and philosophical background for our modern investigations. Shifting to the twentieth century, we will then examine several works from the New Culture movement that arose after the fall of the Qing dynasty. How did animals figure in the literary reconstruction of human life and society in a new, modern world? The majority of the course, however will focus on the post-Mao era, during which time many writers have drawn upon a paradigm of human-animal to explore a variety of questions. Are animals merely a foil for representations of the human, or can the relationship between human and animal in literature illuminate something about what it means to be human in a postsocialist society? To what extent, furthermore, might animality in literature interrogate anthropocentric worldviews and allow for a fundamental reconceptualization of life in contemporary China? Our examination of literature will also be supplemented by a variety of both secondary scholarship and theoretical writings. These are meant to encourage us to push the boundaries of our interpretations to hopefully arrive at new and creative understandings of what, if anything, representations of humanity and animality can signify in a Chinese cultural context.)

 

Instructor: Prof. Jay Garcia

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.

 

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

 

Prof. Zakir Paul

CORE-UA 400.010: Autobiography: Versions of the Self

MW 9:30-10:45am

Check CORE Website

This course examines autobiographical writing from a range of cultural and historical contexts. Unlike the classic genres of the tragic, epic and comic– texts that imagine and invent a people’s sense of a shared past and a culture – autobiography is often a belated attempt to capture a singular life. We will explore, among other issues, how the self is constructed through reading and writing, the relationship between memory and identity, the claims of authenticity, the oscillation between inner and public life, and the peculiarities of individual voice. Authors studied may include Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, Nabokov, Soyinka, Said, Satrapi, and Hejinian.

 

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

 

Professor Densky

COLIT-UA.180

GERM-UA.297

Topics in 19th Century Literature: Humans, Animals, Hybrids

MW 2:00-3:15pm

Sponsored by German

 

Prof. Chadwick Smith

COLIT-UA 249

GERM-UA 249

Introduction to Theory - German Media Theory: On Films, Filters, and Fascism

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45am

Sponsored by German

 

Prof Cornish

COLIT-UA.270.001

ITAL-UA 270

Dante’s Divine Comedy

Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-1:45pm

Sponsored by Italian

 

Prof. Hodges

COLIT-UA 729

EAST-UA 729

DRLIT-UA 244

Traditional Drama of China & Japan

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45pm

Sponsored by East Asian Studies

 

Professor Geroulanos

COLIT-UA.801.001

HIST-UA 629

The Normal and the Abnormal: Intellectual History of Sex, Power, Gender and the Psyche, 1900-2000

MW 11am-12:15pm

Sponsored by History

 

Prof. Nouis

COLIT-UA.866

FREN-UA 866

ENGL-UA 59.005

Philosophical Animals in Enlightenment France

MW 9.30-10.45am

Sponsored by French

 

Prof Jeong Oh & Shimabuku

COLIT-UA.951.001

EAST-UA 532

Empire & Imperialism in East Asia

W 2:00-4:45

Sponsored by EAS

 

Prof Huber

COLIT-UA.955.001

IDSEM-UG 1714

What is Critique?

Tues 3:30-6:10pm

Sponsored by Gallatin