Intro To Comparative Lit

One-credit-hour proseminar in methods of study and research in comparative literature.

Required of first-semester graduate students in comparative literature.

Prerequisite: Graduate standing in comparative literature and consent of the graduate adviser in comparative literature.

Offered on the credit/no credit basis only.

Afro-Brazilian Diaspora

This course focuses on post-abolition Afro-Brazilian life, history, culture, politics, and letters.  It engages a wide range of literary texts, socio-cultural movements, visual arts, and cultural performances, while raising a number of questions that would lead to provocative midterm and final research papers, while simultaneously honing students’ writing skills with a number of response papers that may be expanded into a research paper. Most concepts and issues will be illustrated with multimedia clips or movies to ensure that students gain a richer experience of the Afro-Brazilian diaspora world.

Some of the questions the course will grapple with include the following: (i) What explains the continued exclusion of Afro-Brazilians from political power?; (ii) What is the legacy or impact of slavery within this context?; (iii) How is the concept of Africa (re)imagined, distorted, and manipulated in this regard?; (iv)What are the discourses used to justify social inequalities and racial discrimination in Brazil?; (v) How is the “radical” view on discrimination silenced while the “co-opted” perspective is promoted?; (vi) What are the effects of governmental patronage on cultural producers as they negotiate what Carl Degler calls the “mulatto escape hatch”?; and (vii) What are the limitations of ideology in an era of “globalization” and pragmatism?  These among other issues will form the basis of the course which will additionally analyze the social condition that goes beyond the more apparent “culture game”; and must also be seen as a political game towards visibility, participation, gendered equality, and empowerment.

Objectives:

1. Students will be able to meet writing, global, and cultural diversity flags.
2. Students will be exposed to the dynamics of coping mechanism with social inequalities.
3. Students will not only be exposed to elements of style, they will improve their writing skills by having opportunities to re-write their assignments.
4. Transnational resonances will be invoked for comparative analysis within contexts and texts in order to see the African Diaspora beyond a continental prism.

Required Texts:

1. Johnson, Crook et al. ed. Black Brazil: Culture, Identity, and Social Mobilization
2. Alves, Miriam and C. R. Durham. Finally Us/Enfim Nós
3. Almeida, Bira. Capoeira: A Brazilian Art Form: History, Philosophy, and Practice
4. Guimarães, Geni. The Color of Tenderness
5. Gomes, Dias. Journey to Bahia

E 316N  l  World Literature

Instructor:  Kornhaber, David

Unique #: 34780-34835

Semester:  Fall 2020

Cross-lists:  C L 315

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

Description:  This course presents a survey of world literature through the lens of dramatic literature, examining classic works of drama from around the globe.  Our survey will begin with the classical theatre of Greece, Rome, India, and China and will continue through the religious dramas of the European middle ages, the plays of feudal Japan, early modern drama from England and Spain, and eighteenth-century neoclassical tragedies from France and Germany; we will continue our studies with an examination of the global spread of melodrama in the nineteenth century, the rise of modern drama in Europe and Russia near the turn of the century, and the explosion of theatrical experiments worldwide across the twentieth century, concluding with a selection of modern and contemporary plays from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and the Caribbean as well as the United States.  Throughout, we will examine the shifting characteristics of dramatic literature across time periods and cultures and will pay ongoing attention to the complex relationship between dramatic literature and theatrical performance.  We will also consider the ways in which the study of drama touches on wider issues of history, politics, and philosophy, even raising questions as to the nature of literature itself.  Students can expect to receive a grounding in the history of world drama, training in the core techniques of close reading and literary analysis, and an appreciation for literary and performance cultures worldwide.  All texts will be read in English.

Texts (tentative):  Agammemnon (Aeschylus, Greece); Oedipus Tyrannos (Sophocles, Greece); The Bacchae (Euripides, Greece); Thyestes (Seneca, Rome); Shakuntala (Kalidasa, India); Snow in Midsummer (Guan Hanqing, China); Everyman (Anonymous, England); Atsumori (Zeami Motokiyo, Japan); Hamlet (William Shakespeare, England); Life is a Dream (Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Spain); The Rover (Aphra Behn, England); Phaedra (Jean Racine, France); Faust (Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany); The Octoroon (Dion Boucicault, Ireland); A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen, Norway); The Cherry Orchard (Anton Chekhov, Russia); Mother Courage and Her Children (Bertolt Brecht, Germany); Song of Death (Tawfiq al-Hakim, Egypt); Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett, Ireland/France); The Sea at Dauphin (Derek Walcott, St. Lucia); A Raisin in the Sun (Lorrain Hansberry, US); The Man Who Turned Into a Stick (Kobo Abe, Japan); Death and the King’s Horseman (Wole Soyinka, Nigeria); Angles in America (Tony Kushner, US).

Requirements & Grading:  Attendance and participation in weekly discussion sections: 5%; four in-section quizzes: 20% (5% each); two in-section mini-exams: 30% (15% each); two short papers: 45% (first 20%, second 25%).

E 349D  l  Danticat and Díaz

[previously unnumbered E349S topic]

Instructor:  Wilks, J

Unique #: 34970

Semester:  Fall 2020

Cross-lists:  AFR 330W, C L 323.60

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  In this course we will study the work of two of the most celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the United States: Haitian American Edwidge Danticat and Dominican American Junot Díaz.  Between them Danticat (b. 1969) and Díaz (b. 1968) have won almost all of the major American cultural and literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize; and their work has been consistently published and reviewed in such high profile venues as the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times.  At the same time that their respective works speak to broader questions of American identity, however, Danticat and Díaz also write culturally specific narratives that explore the intricacies of what it means to be Haitian and Dominican, Haitian American and Dominican American, in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.  As a result, in addition to considering the qualities that have resulted in Danticat and Díaz’s elevation to the status of exemplary American authors, we will also examine how issues of gender, migration, history, and race factor into their work.

Texts (subject to change):  

General: C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution; Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History; Michelle Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola.

Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik? Krak! (1995); Brother, I’m Dying (2007); Claire of the Sea Light (2013).

Junot Díaz: Drown (1996); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007); This Is How You Lose Her (2012).

Requirements & Grading:  Two short papers (3-4 pages each), 40%; Final paper (5-7 pages), 35%; Rough draft & substantial revision (4 pages), 10%; Reading journal, 15%.

Course Description:

A child born when the door between the spirit and material world was swinging open, 100 year old vampires who look like little girls, and crack cocaine as a character with a wicked sense of humor: this class will use satirical and slightly off-kilter texts and performances to examine reallife dark forces that plague contemporary black societies across the world. Moving from Southern Africa to black England to African America, this class explores not just the meaning of race, gender and sexuality, but also how those categories of identity can be reimagined given the omnipresent threat that black lives face. We will pay close attention to both issues of context (historical, socio-economic and anthropological) as well as to questions of structure and genre. Specifically we will think through notions of Afrofuturism, addiction, ecological disaster capitalism, thinking through how the ways black people make and embody art inform the content. The class will also include a large number of contemporary cultural texts such as music videos, popular dance trends and music.

Texts:

1. Fledgling by Octavia Butler

2. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

3. Delicious Foods: A Novel by James Hannaham

4. Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

5. The Girl with All the Gifts (Film)

6. Pumzi directed by Wanuri Kahiu (Film)

7. “In their Own Form” (Jan 21-May 16): Christian Green Gallery and Idea Lab

8. The Fits directed by Anna Rose Holmer (Film)

9. Performances by Nelisiwe Xaba, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Nora Chipaumire, Wura Natasha-Ogunji and Faka

Supplemental theoretical material will be provided on various authors in course documents.

OUR GSD  COURSES ARE TAUGHT IN ENGLISH.

Films of Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) was arguably the greatest filmmaker of the twentieth century. His career spanned over sixty years and includes such works as the sophisticated comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), the allegorical Seventh Seal (1957), the avant-garde Persona (1966), the masterful television adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1975), and the television miniseries Fanny and Alexander (1982). He also wrote scripts for many other filmmakers, including Bille August and Liv Ullmann. In 2003, he directed the television film Saraband, and in recent years many of his films have been adapted for the stage both in Sweden and elsewhere.

This course is intended as an introduction both to the films of Ingmar Bergman and to the viewing of films in general. We will look at representative films by this prolific and gifted filmmaker, considering them in the contexts of the director's life, Scandinavian culture, and issues of film theory and aesthetics.

This course carries the Writing Flag. Writing Flag courses are designed to give students experience with writing in an academic discipline. In this class, you can expect to write regularly during the semester, complete substantial writing projects, and receive feedback from your instructor to help you improve your writing. You will also have the opportunity to revise one or more assignments, and to read and discuss your peers' work. You should therefore expect a substantial portion of your grade to come from your written work.

ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADING:

One two-page paper which may be rewritten (5%); one five-page paper which may be rewritten (25%); one storyboard (10%) accompanied by a five-page essay (25%), and five quizzes (25%; you may drop the lowest grade). Class participation will count 10%.

An introduction to Arabic literature from ancient Arabian poetry to modern Palestinian novels. Students will familiarize themselves with the major themes, genres, and writers of literary masterpieces written in Arabic from the 6th century to the late 20th century. Topics include desert poetry, the Qur'an, medieval Muslim court literature, popular literature, Arabic poetics, travel literature, and the emergence of modern Western genres, with a focus on Palestinian literature as a test-case. We will engage first-hand with Imru' al-Qays' Qifa Nabki, al-Jahiz's Books of Misers, Ibn Hazm's theories about love, al-Mutanabbi's famed poetry, Mahmoud Darwish's I Come from There, and Emile Habiby's The Pessoptimist. All readings are in English. No prior knowledge of Islam or Arabic is necessary.

OUR GSD  COURSES ARE TAUGHT IN ENGLISH.

Watch Video: Learning Danish

Descripton

The burgeoning field of comics and graphic novels has received attention in the last few decades where publishers, critics and new readers have engaged enthusiastically with a medium which has historically not been at the pinnacle of cultural good taste. This course provides an introduction to comics and graphic novel with an emphasis on works from Northern Europe as a specific area of comics culture that tends to stand in the shadow of more known comics cultures. The course will go into depth with the mechanics of comics, how images and text work together, as well as how this particular way of telling stories relates to other media. The main readings will delve into the rich material from the Northern European sphere but will situate these comics in the wider world of international comics culture through parallel readings of American, Franco-Belgian and Japanese manga. The main focus will be on comics from the last 30 years, but the course will include a historical element that considers the history of comics globally.

One of the main reasons comics have surfaced as an artistically viable and serious medium in recent years is the diversity of subjects and the quality of writing and drawing of comics artists today. This course discusses style, line, coloring and structure as important aspects of comics and graphic novels story telling but also emphasizes the wide variety of topics that comics portray with great sensibility and complexity. From adventure stories to graphic memoir, from avant-garde experimental comics to newspaper humor strips, this course allows you to read, write, discuss and think critically about comics and graphic novels as well as it provides a greater understanding of the cultures of Northern Europe.

The course meets the Writing Flag and the Global Cultures Flag Criteria

Today's Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy grows out of the tradition of Logical Positivism/Logical Empiricism as it evolved in the circles around Wittgenstein in England after the Second World War, and it positions itself over and against Continental Philosophy.  That positioning, however, obscures how Wittgenstein and the group that Viktor Kraft, the first historian of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivism, took over a much broader cultural project that is echoed in the work of twentieth-century theorists and philosophers from Walter Benjamin through Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.  Just as significant, the Vienna Circle's work parallels today's philosophy of science as practiced by figures like Bruno Latour.

This class will combine perspectives from philosophy and the history of philosophy to undertake a project in "historical epistemology":  it will trace how Logical Empiricism  actually came into being out of a set of methodological arguments about the philosophy of science and hermeneutics that were widespread in the late nineteenth century (and which find their echoes in figures as diverse as Nietzsche and Heidegger).  The new genesis narrative we will trace reverberates with problems of forced migration and emigration, as a generation of theorists and philosophers were forced out of continental Europe and to the US and Great Britain by the Nazis.  And in order to find their feet, these émigrés took up new projects and redefined their work for new audiences, offering a set of cases of culture transfer -- cases where philosophical logics responded directly, if tacitly, to politics and culture.

No background in philosophy is required for this course, and all readings will be available in English on the class blackboard site.    Background reading on the history of science will ground our readings of primary texts, and each student will be responsible for evolving a semester project in writing a specific philosopher or project into a new kind of intercultural history of ideas.

Course Description:

Often called “the most violent century in human history”, the 20th century brought unprecedented forms of war and destruction to the Middle East and Eurasia.  In the 21^st century, too, new generations of young people have “come of age” during international wars, their lives indelibly marked by coercive political force, national and revolutionary struggle, ethnic and racial cleansing, and/or interpersonal and domestic violence.  Yet, this region of the world – known for its rapidly changing borders, political constellations, and cultural norms – has also seen a remarkable explosion of creativity in the arts, literature, science, politics, philosophy, and social organization, as well as extraordinary technological innovation and invention.  Participants in this course will discuss and analyze literary and cinematic depictions of what it means to “come of age” in the modern Middle East and Eurasia. Weekly readings, post-viewing discussions and response papers about the memoirs, novels and films selected will deepen participants’ insight into the socio-cultural dilemmas and political conflicts experienced by the young men and women of this region in the past 100 years, and also heighten their awareness of the artists’ political and aesthetic concerns.  Participants will be expected to complete weekly reading and writing assignments, attend film screenings, participate actively in class discussions, and pursue one thematically organized, independent reading and/or viewing project.  All texts will be read in English translation, and all films will be screened in the original language/s with English subtitles.  No prior knowledge of a Middle Eastern or Eurasian language is necessary; however, students with knowledge of a particular language or country may choose to focus their project on a set of literary or cinematic works related to that language/country.

Prerequisites:  The course has no prerequisites.

Global Cultures Flag:  This course carries the Global Cultures flag. Global Cultures courses are designed to increase your familiarity with cultural groups outside the United States. You should therefore expect a substantial portion of your grade to come from assignments covering the practices, beliefs, and histories of at least one non-U.S. cultural group, past or present.

Course Materials (ie. Required Course Texts):

1. The Bullet Collection by Patricia Sarrafian Ward (Lebanon). Graywolf Press. ISBN: 9781555972998
2. The Gray Earth by Galsan Tschinag (Mongolia/Germany). Milkweed Editions. ISBN: 9781571310651
3. Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar (Israel). Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN: 9780374535568
4. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan/USA, 2003). Riverside Books (Penguin Group). ISBN: 9781594531931
5. Letters from a Kurd by Kae Bahar (Northern Iraq). Yolk Publishing Limited. ISBN:  9781910130025
6. Life is More Beautiful than Paradise: A Jihadist’s Own Story by Khaled Al-Berry (Egypt). The American U. in Cairo Press. ISBN:  9789774162947
7. Shards: A Novel by Ismet Prcic (Bosnia). Black Cat.  ISBN:  9780802170811
8. The White Ship by Chingiz Aitmatov (Kirghizstan). Crown Publishers, Inc. ISBN: 0517500744
9. Young Turk: a Novel by Moris Farhi (Turkey). Arcade Publishing. ISBN: 9781611453034

 Required Course Films:

1. Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), dir. Mai Masri (Palestine)
2. The Kite Runner (2007), dir. Marc Forster (USA)

 Course Objectives:

Upon successful completion of “Youth and Violence in the Middle East and Eurasia”, students will:

• Be familiar with the themes, references, imagery, metaphors and rhetorical style of selected modern Middle Eastern and Eurasian literary and cinematic texts related to the subject of coming of age in an environment of war, physical insecurity, and/or cultural/political revolution.
• Have improved their critical thinking and writing skills, in particular, their ability to
  • Form and support a thesis.
  • Interpret or critique evidence.
  • Synthesize material and identify patterns.
  • Carry out comparative research.
• Have improved their dramatic reading (recitation) and discussion skills, in particular, their ability to
  • Identify and portray character/speaker motivation.
  • Capture the listeners’ attention and/or imagination when reading, reciting or speaking to a group.
  • Listen and respond constructively to classmates’ comments.
  • Disagree agreeably and support oral arguments in a logical, effective manner.
  • Discuss independently, without the constant prodding of the instructor.
• Have gained greater awareness and appreciation of and insight into transcultural nature of literary and cinematic production, distribution, and reception.
• Have gained greater awareness and appreciation of and insight into the varying media (ie. cinema, music, visual arts) in which the selected literary works have found new expression.

Grade Distribution:

Attendance and Participation                                         20%

Reader Response Papers                                                20%

Mid-Term Exam                                                           15%

Independent Project (Presentation)                                 30%

Final Exam                                                                   15%

This graduate-level seminar will introduce students to the craft of literary translation through a wide variety of approaches.  Over the course of the semester, we will read various tracts, articles, and books on the theory and craft of translation from a wide range of Euro-American and South Asian stances and viewpoints.  We will analyze editions of various classics from India that have been translated into English repeatedly, paying particular attention to the political nature of the act and art of translation in its colonial and post-colonial contexts. 

This seminar will also have a practical component, and one hour of our meeting period each week will allos students to present translations-in-progress to their peers for comment and critique. 

Graduate standing required.  Students must have a good working knowledge of at least one South Asian language, classical and/or modern.

Space and Place in Literature

Professor Karen Grumberg

Mon. 2-5, CLA 0.124

Office hours: By appointment

What does the representation of space and place in literature contribute to our understanding of the social and cultural dynamics of the past century? We hear much about territory and airspace, cartography and border, nation and colony. We hear far less about spaces of human existence and experience: places as ordinary as a house, a terrace, or a garden, or as complex as major cities, the poetics of which dominated earlier theoretical scholarship on place. Nor do we hear about how sites such as borders and security zones are themselves spaces of social experience and practice. This course will explore the poetics of social and experiential space as expressed in literature from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, spanning diverse generic and aesthetic affiliations. We will examine these texts from a wide interdisciplinary array of theoretical perspectives on space and place, which consider the meanings of space as a place, as a condition, as a metaphor, and as a practice. All readings will be in English or English translation.

Class Requirements:

Attendance and vigorous participation

Periodic presentations of readings

Presentation of research project to class at end of semester

Research paper on relevant topic of your choosing (15-20 pgs.)  

Assessment is based on participation (50%) and research paper (50%)

Required Texts:

Fiction

Orly Castel-Bloom, Dolly City

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

Non-Fiction

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Course Reader, available at Jenn’s Copies

Women Writers/Intellectuals:  Theories and Fictions

This course will begin with a survey of theories of the intellectual, followed by major works by twentieth-century women writers whose works encompass both fiction and theory and contribute to our understanding of a tradition of writing by women.  

The second part of the course will address the literary and theoretical interests of the students in the course.  Students will propose a research project related to the topic of the course and we will devote a week or more to the consideration of the fictional and theoretical works related to each of these projects.

We will also consider some issues related to academic writing and research:  how to formulate an effective abstract for a conference paper or edited volume; what goes into the research and writing of seminar papers; how to transform a seminar paper into a larger research subject or publishable article.

Assignments and grading:  one statement of theoretical and/or literary interests (5%); one abstract (5%); one five-page paper (20%); one class presentation (10%); one research paper of ten to fifteen pages (50%); class participation (10%)

Required Readings:

Virginia Woolf:  Three Guineas; To the Lighthouse

Simone de Beauvoir:  The Second Sex; The Coming of Age

Hannah Arendt:  The Human Condition/Condition de l’homme moderne; Eichmann in Jerusalem; “Isak Dinesen”; “Walter Benjamin”

Julia Kristeva:  Hannah Arendt:  Life is a Narrative; Les samuraï

Assia Djebar:  L’amour, la fantasia/Fantasia:  An Algerian Cavalcade; Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement/Women of Algiers in Their Apartment

Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen:  “The Blank Page,” “The Roads of Life”; “Sorrow-Acre”; “The Diver”; “Babette’s Feast”; Letters from a Land at War

Critical and theoretical essays, including selections from the following:

Antonio Gramsci:  From The Prison Notebooks

Karl Mannheim:  From Ideology and Utopia

Jacques Le Goff:  Intellectuals in the Middle Ages

Hannah Arendt:  “Truth in Politics”

Pierre Bourdieu:  From The Rules of Art; Masculine Domination; From Science of Science and Reflexivity

Michel Foucault:  “Truth and Power”

George Eliot:  “Silly Novels by Women Novelists”

Virginia Woolf:  A Room of One’s Own

Intellectuelles:  Du genre en histoire des intellectuels.  Ed. Nicole Racine & Michel Trebitsch.  Histoire du temps présent, 2004.

Melba Cuddy-Keane.  Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere.  Cambridge UP, 2003.

Christine Froula.  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-garde:  War, Civilization, Modernity.  Columbia UP, 2005.

Hermione Lee.  Virginia Woolf.  A. A. Knopf, 1997.

Toril Moi.  Simone de Beauvoir:  The Making of an Intellectual Woman.  2^nd ed.  Oxford UP, 2009. 

Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir.  Ed. Margaret Simons.  Pennsylvania State UP, 1995.

Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt.  Ed. Bonnie Honig.  Pennsylvania UP, 1995.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.  Hannah Arendt:  For Love of the World.  Yale UP, 1982.

Paul Ricoeur.  Préface.  Hannah Arendt.  Condition de l’homme modern.  1961.

Paul Ricoeur.  “Power and Violence.”  Theory, Culture, and Society 27:5 (2010):  18-36.

Jane Hiddleston .  Assia Djebar:  Out of Algeria.  Liverpool UP, 2006.

Priscilla Ringrose.  Assia Djebar:  In Dialogue with Feminisms.  Rodopi, 2006.

Irene Ivantcheva-Merjanska.  Écrire dans la langue de l’autre :  Assia Djebar et Julia Kristeva.  L’Harmattan, 2015.

Elaine P. Miller.  Head Cases :  Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times.  Columbia UP, 2014.

Carol Mastrangelo Bové.  Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva :  Literature, Art, Therapy.  State University of New York P, 2006.

Mélanie Gleize.  Julia Kristeva au carrefour du littéraire et du théorique :  modernité, autoréflexivité et hybridité.  L’Harmatan, 2005.

Susan R. Horton.  Difficult Women, Artful Lives:  Olive Schreiner and Isak Dinesen, in and out of Africa.  Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

Judith Thurman.  Isak Dinesen:  The Life of a Storyteller.  St. Martin’s, 1982.

Course Description:

This course involves first reading articles on feminist criticism and gender and queer theory, and then selected texts from Spanish America and to a lesser extent Spain that have especially attracted critics who work on gender. We will read the primary texts together with relevant examples of criticism on those works. The purposes of the course are: to read some important works of theory and of Spanish-language narrative, to examine some of the main currents in feminist and gender studies of literature, and to practice evaluating critical studies, including giving peer feedback to other members of the class.

Required Readings:

The Canvas site will include articles on feminist criticism and gender and queer theory, ranging from such pioneering figures as Joan W. Scott to theorists still active today, as well as critical analyses specifically of the primary works read for the course.

Tentative list of primary works (some of these may need to be replaced if available editions cannot be located):

Bombal, La última niebla

Puig, El beso de la mujer araña 

Ferré, Papeles de Pandora

Santos-Febres,Sirena Selena vestida de pena

Preciado, Testo yonqui

(Texts by Preciado are included in both the theoretical readings and the selection of primary works.)

Required Activities and Grading Criteria:

Each member of the class will write a term paper of approximately 4200 words (17 pages), which will analyze a creative work or works from the Spanish-speaking world from a feminist or gender-studies perspective. While all the works read in common by the students in the course are narrative and/or expository prose, the term papers can focus on cultural production in any genre or creative medium. Term paper topics that go beyond these guidelines are welcome, but before proposing such topics students must consult with the instructor to see how their themes can be part of the course.

Feedback: Considerable importance will be given to peer feedback, and students will present their paper topics to the entire class for commentary before submitting the detailed proposal. There will be a second round of peer feedback before the final version of the term paper is due. The instructor will also provide suggestions after reading drafts of the proposal and term paper.

Detailed proposal for paper, 35%

Final version of term paper, 60%

Attendance and participation, 5%

Description

The Habsburg Empire is remembered today mainly for fin de siècle Vienna, the "gay apocalypse" of 1900. Yet Habsburg culture unified central Europe for a millennium, as rulers of their own lands and the first empire on which "the sun never set" (through their Spanish line, they claimed the Americas), elected heads of the Holy Roman Empire, and as one of the imperial-royal lines that created modern Europe before their demise at the end of the First World War. The House of Habsburg was Catholic and often Germanophone, but its members also ruled and lived in Czech, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian, as well as in French, English, and Balkan Slavic languages. The nexus of culture that they created are less acknowledged and remembered, however, than Britain's and France's empires.

This class will be a workshop in how to understand an imperial culture that was not a single culture or site of cultural production, but rather a transnational political unit that acknowledged and, to a degree, balanced off, issues of development, differentiated local culture, and the cause of creating same-but-different narratives of local cultures. The empire sustained an elite culture, most often Germanophone throughout its existence; especially after the French Revolution, large and small cities emerged as fostering local educated elites who often worked multilingually. 

The class will be broken into sites of cultural production, each implicating German plus at least one other language. Each will be defined historically, so that Central Europe' history is sketched as the background for cultural studies analyses. Then, significant literary, film, philosophical, and/or artistic masterpieces will be adduced to work out how the central Habsburg culture resonated outward throughout Europe and the Globe in ways quite alien to scholars of English and French empires. TO be presented in lecture are its most visible authors (Stifter, Ebner-Eschenbach, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Jelinek, Andrić, Capek, Molnár, Horváth, Hasek, Svevo, Calvino, Esterhazy, Kundera), philosophers (Bolzano, Mach, Freud, Zimmermann, Wittgenstein),filmmakers (Wilder, Kertesz [Curtiz], Haneke) and cultural monuments (the Baroque in Latin America and North Europe). Students will workshop presentations on individual texts, against the background of suggested readings supporting their work (with an emphasis on primary texts).

This class will thus be a laboratory in transnational analysis; I hope to incubate out of it a special issue of the Journal of Austrian Studies about "new approaches to Habsburg Culture" that can incorporate research on any global area impacted by Habsburg culture, networks, and colonialism.

Question Italian Romanticism

The course will focus on the so called three Crowns of Italian Romanticism, in order to show how ambiguous and unreliable these categories are. Not only Romanticism is a difficult category to define, but the Italian version of it is even more arduous as the study of these three writers with their diversity will prove. They will be studied in their own right, but through their diversity we will explore the complex issue of Italian Romanticism in order to try to understand the absence in European and American criticism of a discourse on Italian Romanticism. We will thus touch upon the discourses of national identity, neo-classicism and the construction of the myth of Italy by foreign writers. We will also analyze the differences with poets such as Coleridge and Woodsworth.

We will begin with a brief discussion of the major role played by Madame De Stael’s view of Italy in her famous novel Corinne, some manifestos of Italian Romanticism, and the ideas expressed in F. Schiller's Naive and Sentimental Poetry, in order to understand the long debate between Classicists and Romantics, 'ancients' and 'moderns.'  These discussions will be propaedeutic to the reading of our authors, Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni.  The social aspect of Italian Romanticism will also be discussed in the light of the historical movement Risorgimento. We will watch some of Vincenzo Bellini’s and Giuseppe Verdi’s operas (excerpts) as they contributed to the creation of a patriotic and national idea.  We’ll conclude with a discussion of Visconti’s film Senso and Martone’s Noi credevamo.

Comparative study of major modern critical schools and figures in literary and cultural theory and criticism.

Prerequisite: Graduate standing and consent of instructor and the graduate adviser.

Course number may be repeated for credit when the topics vary.