Instructor:  Richmond-Garza, E

Unique #: 35355-35440

Semester:  Spring 2019

Cross-lists:  C L 315

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction: No

Prerequisites: One of the following: E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Description: Global Literature and Culture -- 

What is a “self,” an individual? Is it a single entity or is it always entangled with others?  Is it something created by history, by politics, by art, by culture or by the divine?  Or does it fashion itself?  Does it change over time and across space?  At some level, art is always concerned with making and unmaking the individual and with freeing or chaining this being.  Tracking texts from Classical Greece, Iraq and India to medieval Europe and Japan, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of ancient and early modern artists and authors both to phrase and to answer this question.  Expected names from the western canon, like Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe and Baudelaire will keep company with Japan’s Bashô, Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves only to the western canon but will look at points of crisis where, whether because of gender, race, ideology or class, an individual’s voyage of discovery will demand answers and action.  We shall trace a drama of self-actualization, more than two thousand years old, one that is still being enacted.  From the extremities of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from ideal Platonic love to its witty and non-dialectical Asian counterparts, from a Parisian’s insomnia in 1900 to the painful experience of post-colonial Africa, from compulsive gambling to uncanny hauntings, from the dark voyages of Romantic self-discovery to imagined journeys through magical lands, we shall explore the limits of this question’s answers.

While the basis of the course will be the literary texts, we shall pillage often and importantly the resources of the other arts of painting, sculpture and film especially to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a spring in which we shall interrogate our own century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century experiment.

Texts: All selections will be from The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces(Expanded Edition in One Volume, 1997), and will include: Gilgamesh;Euripides, Medea;selections from Chuang Chou; Kalidasa, Sakuntala;selections from The Thousand and One Nights;Montaigne, “Of Cannibals;” Shakespeare, Hamlet;Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior; Goethe, Faust; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil;Pushkin, The Queen of Spades;Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths;Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Requirements & Grading: The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active discussion in class and in the discussion section.  Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class.  Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences in the course of the semester.  Any further absences will lower the student's grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+).

Three midterm examinations (25% each); Reading journal to be turned in periodically (15%); Attendance and class discussion (10%).

In order to pass the course all four assignments must be completed.  Failure to complete any one of the assignments will constitute failing the course.

Instructor:  Kornhaber, David

Unique #:  35442

Semester:  Spring 2019

Cross-lists:  C L 315

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction: No

Prerequisites: One of the following:E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Description: This course offers an introduction to select works of literature drawn from across the globe, ranging in time from the dawn of literature to the end of the twentieth century.  Key topics to be considered include: the relationship between literature, culture, and society; formal relationships and divergences across the genres of epic poetry, lyric poetry, fiction, and drama; and the intersections of literature and literary production with history and politics.  Through this course of study, students can expect to achieve a grounding in some of the major authors and texts of the world literary tradition and an introduction to the core techniques of close reading and literary analysis.  All texts will be read in English.

Texts(tentative): The Iliad (Homer, Greece; selections);The Mahabharata(India; selections); The Classic of Poetry (China; selections);Atsumori (Zeami Motokiyo, Japan); Hamlet(William Shakespeare, England); Faust (Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany; selections);A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen, Norway); Poems (Emily Dickinson, United States of America; selections);Requiem (Anna Akhamatova, Russia); “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia); Death and the King’s Horseman(Wole Soyinka, Nigeria); Omeros(Derek Walcott, Saint Lucia; selections)

Requirements & Grading: (1) Participation, 10%, (2) Reading Quizzes, 10%, (3) two short essays (3-5 pages each), 25%+25%, (4) one long essay (5-7 pages), 30%

• 2019 Novel:  The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng, or Dream of the Red Chamber)

The focus of this course is on the masterpiece 18^th c. Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), with the alternate title of The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji).  Lectures and seminar-style discussion will examine the metaphors and mythology from Chinese cultural memory that are present in this classic novel.  Lectures will provide literary and socio-historical contexts for the novel. A selection of primary and secondary source readings will introduce a cross-section of influential works from classical literature and the major founding schools of Chinese thought. Complementary study will include the viewing of modern-day visual and dramatic representations of this novel. 

The core of the seminar will be the intensive reading and study of The Story of the Stone.  Our reading of the novel in this course is modeled after the original serial nature of the work, where segments of the story were serially released, and read and discussed with great fervor in both public and private spheres.  The attendant commentary and reimagining of the story belonged to the reading public.  One could argue that this was one of the earliest prominent works to spawn “fan fiction,” especially in the context of Chinese artistic ownership, or lack thereof.  We will consider the novel in this light of pop culture, and address the work as a stellar example of how a lowbrow cultural practice has evolved into a highbrow dynamic. 

REQUIRED:

CAO Xueqin, translated by David Hawkes, The Story of the Stone, Vols. I, II, III

(Penguin, 1973, 1977, 1980) [aka Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber)]

CAO Xueqin and Gao E, translated by John Minford, The Story of the Stone, Vols. IV, V

(Penguin, 1982, 1986)

Richard J. Smith, The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) [QDTCC]

Other Required Readings on Canvas Course Site