This course will offer a survey of the Ukrainian authors from the 1920s through the present. We will examine the writings from the times of the “executed renaissance,” underground literature, and postmodernism. We will focus specifically on works that, in one way or another, challenge the set paradigm of socialist realism, either ethically or aesthetically, by discussing forbidden subjects (famine, religion, Gulag), or even simply accentuating the themes that are not considered “major” (personal life). Book excerpts and articles will supplement literary works, to enable better understanding of the historical context.

Grading:

• Exams (2): 30% (15 each)
• Short papers (2): 20% (10 each)
• Participation: 10%
• Term (final) paper prospectus: 5%
• Term (final) paper: 25%
• Presentation: 10 %

E 316N  l  World Literature-WB

Instructor:  Richmond-Garza, E

Unique #:  35960-36035

Semester:  Spring 2021

Cross-lists:  C L 315, 34380-34455

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 (via medieval Europe and Japan) to postcolonial Africa and Latin America, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of artists and authors from across the globe and the centuries both to phrase and to answer this question.  Expected names from the western canon, like Euripides, Goethe, Baudelaire and Woolf will keep company with Japan’s Bashō, Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves 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 demands 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 extremes of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from French philosophy to long walks through the Japanese countryside, from a Parisian’s insomnia in 1900 to the magical realism of modern Mexico, from compulsive gambling to feminist poetry, from encounters with Romantic devils 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 voyage often and importantly through resources from other arts like painting, sculpture, music, and film so as to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a spring in which we shall interrogate our own new century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century.

Texts:  Many texts will be from The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (Expanded Edition in One Volume, 1997).  The readings will include: Gilgamesh; Euripides, Medea; selections from Chuang Chou; Kālidāsa, Sakuntala; selections from The Thousand and One Nights; Montaigne, “Of Cannibals;” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, selected prose and poetry; Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior; Goethe, Faust; Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil; Proust, selection from Remembrances of Things Past; Woolf, “An Unwritten Novel”; Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; Achebe, Things Fall Apart; García Márquez, selected stories.

Requirements & Grading:  The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active participation in lectures and in the required discussion sections.  Attendance will be based on participation in Zoom Chat and Canvas Instapoll.  Lectures will be recorded and students who cannot attend synchronously will view the recording and follow up with their TA within a week to excuse the absence.  Additionally, each student will be allowed three unexcused absences in the course of the semester with no penalty.  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+).

2-page essay (20%); video prospectus (5%); video assignment (30%); travel log journal (10%+10%); final comparative essay (15%). Attendance and participation in class polling and discussion (10%).

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

The principal focus of this course will be to analyze contemporary Scandinavian literature, film and comics and examine how the arts reflect a Scandinavian reality that is under transformation. The main focus will be Scandinavian stories from the last 25 years.

Scandinavian fiction has reached international audiences lately, gaining new followers with the concept of “Nordic Noir” which expands on the previous success of Scandinavian crime fiction as a form of fiction explicitly concerned with social critique in TV-series, novels and films. The Scandinavian comics scene is experiencing a diverse and creative growth mirroring the international development in the field and visual culture plays an important role in discussions of sustainability, immigration, equality and democracy in the North. In our discussions, we will compare similarities and differences between the various materials and look at how they each tackle historical and contemporary themes including how these artistic forms negotiate Scandinavian identity and interact with an increasingly global and interconnected world. We will examine what makes Scandinavian stories Scandinavian and discuss, in what ways the individual countries in the region might differ from each other in their political discussions as well as their creative output.

Grading:

• Essays: 30%
• Final essay: 20%
• Quizzes: 20%
• Midterm: 10%
• Participation: 20%

Spring 2021 Focus: Chinese Science-Fiction

The focus of this course is on contemporary Chinese science-fiction, a genre that has emerged as a major 21^st c. global phenomenon.  This course will introduce students to contemporary Chinese sci-fi and its antecedents. The antecedents to sci-fi in Chinese cultural memory can be found in the “Genre of the Strange.”  For historical and social contexts, students will learn about well-known genres of fiction, known as the “strange and deviant” (zhi guai 志怪 and chuan qi 傳奇). The “Genre of the Strange” holds a significant place in Chinese cultural memory, and moving forward, Chinese sci-fi is making its mark on cultural memory. A common denominator is the “social messaging” in the “Genre of the Strange” and Chinese sci-fi. Course objectives in lectures and discussion will focus on, but not limited to, “proposals” for society presented in these works. Geopolitical dynamics and identity formation are prevalent themes to be discussed in this course.

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 real life 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.

What does it mean to be a Scandinavian in the last decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first century? To what extent does film reflect or even construct a sense of national or transnational identity?

This course will begin with two detective films which tie these issues to the presence of new groups of people within the borders of Scandinavia and to the links between contemporary Scandinavian culture and society and the European past. We will then turn back to Ingmar Bergman’s After the Rehearsal, which marked the end of one phase of the prolific filmmaker’s production, before moving on to films by younger filmmakers in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Some, such s Lasse Hallström’s My Life as a Dog, Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror, Liv Ullmann’s Sofie, and Lukas Moodysson’s Together, turn back to the past, at times reverently, at others critically. Others, such as Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, turn a scathing eye on contemporary Scandinavian culture. Still others, such as Per Fly’s The Inheritance and Susanne Bier’s Open Hearts respond to economic and political crises of recent years. 

ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADING:  One two-page paper (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%.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Tytti Soila et al.:  Nordic National Cinemas

Bordwell and Thompson:  Film Art

FILMS:

August:  Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Oplev:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Bergman:  After the Rehearsal

Hallström:  My Life as a Dog

August:  Pelle the Conqueror

Ullmann:  Sofie

Vinterberg:  The Celebration

Moodysson:  Together

Scherfig:  Italian for Beginners

Bier:  Open Hearts

Dagur Kári:  Noí albínói

Fly:  The Inheritance

Trier:  Dogville

Kaurismäki:  The Man without a Past

Bier:  In a Better World

It happened in music, it happened in arts, and it happened in literature – the transition to modernity asked for completely new expressions in order to interpret the revolutions that happened in the society and in the human relationships. In this course we will read a variety of texts from the golden age of Scandinavian literature - 1890-1910 - and we will at the end of the course be able to understand why and what happened in that period, and that will increase our understanding of a world of thoughts and ideas which laid the foundation for the emancipated lives we are all living.

The transition to modernity in Scandinavia created namely an artistic outburst never seen before or since. The amount of eternal classics written in that period is astounding. Nobel prize-winning authors like Knut Hamsun, Selma Lagerlöf, Johannes V. Jensen, Sigrid Undset and Henrik Pontoppidan all wrote masterpieces in that period as did August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.

This course is enhancing the students’ analytical skills in reading texts, but as we can’t understand these texts if they are not read according to the historical and social context in which they were written, we will also take a closer look at the many societal changes. It means that the students will be acquainted with the most important social reforms of the day, and they will be able to analyze historical events and their significance for the individual person.

Reading:

August Strindberg: Miss Julie and other plays, Knut Hamsun: Hunger, Selma Lagerlöf: Saga of Gosta Berling, Henrik Ibsen: Four major plays, Johannes V. Jensen: Fall of the king, Hjalmar Soderberg: Doctor Glas, Sigrid Undset: Gunnar’s daughter

Grading:

Essays: 30%

Quizzes: 20%

Midterm: 10%

Participation: 20%

Final essay: 20%

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Spring, 2019

C L 385 (34015): Foundation of Literary Theory and Criticism

Course Title (ALT):  Building Comparative Literature in Theory: From Eden to Arcadia

Comparative Literature (CL) has, from its modern origins as a field in the 20th century, defined itself vis-à-vis its visions of various "theory projects": models of how literature, texts, writers and readers exist, work, circulate, and intervene in their environments.  To study CL's canon of theory, then, means to study the ideological interventions by means of which the discipline has defined itself and to recover its strategies for constructing and legitimating its core ideologies through canonical discussions and textual sources. 

This course will trace the projects that CL has used to define itself and its work with literature and culture; it will take up the "epochs" of theory as historical reconstructions that must be understood in terms of their original historical contexts, not just and the contemporary uses to which they have been put.  Literary scholars in general and CL ones in particular have expropriated  "theory texts" from historical disciplinary forms, including rhetoric, philosophical exegesis/hermeneutics, poetics, ethics, and philosophical ontology/epistemology, then repurposed them as canonical texts supporting their own activities in the service of various ideologies of art, nation, identity, culture, and society. The source eras to be studied include, in rough outline:

• The Classical Era (Plato, Aristotle, Greek and Roman discussions of rhetorical and dramatic literature):  literature, modalities of communication as performatives;  its function as public understandingfor the audience and the polis
• Medieval Era (including Middle Eastern commentary traditions):  the question of textual authority, exegesis, the "arts of reading," and the status of texts as revelation
• Renaissance:  the historicity of texts and the science of reading; art and taste
• Early Modern era (late 18th to late 19th centuries):  the correlations of textuality with aesthetics, and the philosophy of art and the genius (focus on the reader and on education of the mind)
• The Dawn of Modern Theory (late 19th century to end of WW I):  From Philology to the Science of Literature (a study of the ethics of scholarship). 

Post-World War II CL theory emerged out of a brew of these sources, whose urgency often gets lost as the background to today's debates about culture, literature, and the privileges that had grown up around them.  As acts of reading and interpretation were embedded by CL scholars into the universities as a master theory discipline, and as CL now moves into its third or fourth generation, it is time to recover these models for cultural and literary knowledge production that often refute the naturalizing claims made about them.  Class discussion will focus on the disciplinary frameworks that CL codified as its historical canon and legitimation, and on what assumptions about texts, writers, readers, and cultural processed have to be recovered.

By the end of the semester, students will be able to:

• identify, define, and exemplify major arguments / issues / debates that have been hallmarks of CL theory, both as used in the modern discipline and at their origins
• use particular theories to construct interpretations of texts (both as a précis and in essay form)
• understand and exemplify how the theory project is used in their own area(s) of specialization (and in terms of language use in that specialization)-- how an essentially Eurocentric reconstruction of aesthetic-critical thought could itself be coopted for new ideologies of understanding texts and cultures.

 READINGS (all available on CANVAS):

• Wellek and Warren, A Theory of Literature (various)
• Hazard Adams' Critical Theory Since Plato (3rd ed), and small parts of Critical Theory since 1965
• Supplemental materials:
• Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction,  Susan Bassnett (1993)
• First edition of Critical Theory since Plato

 ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADING:

• 2 (depending on size of class, might end up being group projects) 5-minute introductions to assigned theory readings (oral presentation and 1-page summative handout); strict time limits will be imposed, because these are intended to start class discussions (5% each)
• 3 analytic précis (1 page / 5 % each), aimed at uncovering the epistemological premises of chosen theory texts
• 2 short (5 page) systematic interpretations of a short story or poem guided by a particular interpretive optic (parallel to those required in the CL QE; 15% each)
• Final class project, done in stages (total 45% of the grade, allowing individual students to track how the CL canon has affected, is or is not parallel to the theory use and issues foregrounded within their own disciplinary/national contexts: annotated bibliography with prose commentaries as reflecting the ideologies of the US university literature-culture projects. The final section will be a short essay (ca. 1000 words) on how these texts cause or relieve problems of Eurocentrism or the evaluation of other regional cultural interpretive projects, marginalization, essentialization, reification, (dis)empowerment of interpretive communities, and manipulations of cultural power reified in institutions -- an individual stock-taking of the relevance of the CL history project for today's literary and cultural studies.

This seminar explores the relationship between fiction, history, and the archive in contemporary literature from Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Readings will range from novels by world-renowned authors, such as Orhan Pamuk, Dubravka Ugrešić, Daša Drndić, W.G. Sebald and Georgi Gospodinov, to more theoretical articulations of the archive in the writings of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Alaide Assmann and Wolfgang Ernst. Special attention will be paid to imperial and multinational legacies (Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Third Reich, Soviet Union etc.) in these historically polyglot regions as well as to affective modalities of writing and archiving traumatic history and memory, such as nostalgia, melancholia, outrage, and hope. The seminar is structured around weekly readings and discussions, as well as visits to the special collections at the university museums and libraries. Students from all disciplines and levels of regional expertise are welcome. All readings are in English. 

In this course we will consider eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels about women and their twentieth-century interpretations as films.  Focusing on questions of gender, representation, genre, translation, and narrative form, we will examine these various texts through a variety of critical filters, including history (social, political, literary, filmic), contemporary documents (i.e., Diderot’s essay on “La Femme,” transcripts of the Madame Bovary obscenity trial, etc), and critical theory from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reading knowledge of French is required; discussions will be held in English.  May be cross listed with WGS as well.

Required Texts

Balzac, Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu and Sarrasine

Dumas, La Dame aux camélias

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Maupassant, La Maison Tellier. Partie de campagne

Zola, La Bête humaine

Mirbeau, Journal d’une femme de chambre

Maroh, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude

Monaco, How to Read a Film

Required Films

Carné, Les Enfants du paradis

Rivette, La Belle Noiseuse

Cukor, Camille

Zeffirelli, La Traviata

Chabrol, Madame Bovary

Minelli, Madame Bovary

Renoir, Une Partie de campagne

Ophuls, Le Plaisir

Renoir, La Bête humaine

Buñuel, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre

Kechiche, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude

Grading:

Participation:             20%

In-Class Presentation: 20%

Short paper:            20%

Final paper:            40%