CURRICULUM OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Fall 2009
CMPL 120 Epic and Lyric Traditions MW 9-9:50 Koelb, C.
GL 101
This course focuses on the development of epic and lyric genres, and on dramatic forms drawing on both, from ancient Greece through the seventeenth century. Students will learn about changing conceptions of poetic genre and literary decorum as well as about the interaction between poetic forms and the broader cultural contexts in which they are embedded. For the fall of 2009, the focus of the course will be on the interaction between "home" and "wilderness," that is, between those environments that are controlled as fully as possible by human beings and those that are not. Among the texts to be considered are Homer's Odyssey, Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris, Virgil's Aeneid, Boccaccio's Decameron, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Milton's Paradise Lost, and a selection of classical, medieval, and early modern lyric poems.
Fulfills LA, WB & NA requirements
CMPL 121 Romancing the World TR 9:30-10:45 Collins, M.
DE 313
Explores the diverse and complex literary mode of romance, how that mode has served in various ways to examine and interrogate the experiences of travel and cross-cultural contact and exchange from classical antiquity to the present. Students will trace ways in which the history of romance as a literary mode is bound up with changing representations of the "exotic" or the "foreign" in both European and non-European literature. Fulfills LA, WB & NA requirements.
CMPL 132 Performance and Cultural Identity in the African Diaspora: African, Afro-American, and Caribbean Linkages
TR 9-9:50 Fisher, R. GL 431
An interdisciplinary examination of the history and representation of the self in the African Diaspora. We will examine how certain authors make use of the structure of text and the composition of image and sound in their efforts to convey the effect and sense of subjectivity. Authors will include Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Miriama Bâ, Jamaica Kincaid, Édouard Glissant, and Edwidge Danticat. Music, film, and art from African America, the Caribbean, and West Africa will also be featured.
Fulfills LA & GL requirements.
CMPL 250 Approaches to Comparative Literature TR 11-12:15
Brodey, I.
HN 112
This course will introduce students to central methods and issues in the comparative study of literature. Rather than develop any one single approach, the hope is that students will gain an appreciation of the rich literary opportunities available within the discipline, and master many of the tools necessary for the comparative study of literature. With the help of a Graduate Research Consultant (GRC), students will have the opportunity to develop a topic from the class into a Comparative Literature research project, using methods appropriate to the discipline.
In Part One of this course, readings of Plato, Aristotle and Horace alongside Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex will give the students a chance to understand the foundational role of Classical Poetics in the Western tradition of literary criticism. We will also study the intertwining (and often conflicting) roles of literature and philosophy in Plato’s writing in particular, with an eye toward understanding the difficulty of determining exactly “what is literature.”
Part Two will introduce students to various forms of literary theory, using contemporary theoretical approaches and short work of poetry and fiction. Students will have the opportunity to study how these approaches differ and to apply them to poetry and film of their own choosing.
Part Three will explore issues in cross-cultural interpretation and inter-textuality, including the problems of translation across languages and transformation between verbal and visual media. It will use traditional writings on Chinese and Japanese aesthetics to contrast with readings in Part One.
Part Four will give students time to delve further in the revision of one paper. Students will learn research techniques that are specific to the field of Comparative Literature. In addition, they will learn about the ways in which comparatists justify projects that often draw on diverse disciplines, historical contexts, and cultures.
Part Five will allow each student to select and pursue one interdisciplinary approach to literature, involving visual art, music, or architecture. Possibilities include a comparison of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with the music of Bach and Mozart; an architectural approach to Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling; a comparison of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse–Five with the architecture of the Holocaust Museum; or the role of visual art in concrete poetry.
This course fulfills the Writing Intensive requirement in the new curriculum. ( LA, NA & CI )
*New Course!
CMPL 255 The Feast in Film, Fiction, and Philosophy TR 3:30-4:45
Brodey, I.
DE 313
While its individual form and content may differ greatly, the feast or banquet functions as a strong symbol in most global communities. Food and feasting often defines community by establishing a connection between those who eat, what they eat and how they eat: as such it shapes national and cultural identities. As it is portrayed in Western philosophy from the seminal banquet in the pages of Plato's Symposium, the feast is simultaneously erotic and philosophical. It has the potential to descend into gluttony or to rise to the level of the sublime. Feasting can represent communion or transgression, just as eating "the flesh" may symbolize one of Christianity's most central rites or one of Western society's central taboos. In Asia, the influence of Buddhist reincarnation has instilled additional meanings and taboos upon the consumption of food. The multiple purposes and nuances of food make it a rich theme in literature, film, and the visual arts. The food and banquet film has recently become a genre unto itself, and the outpouring of films are helpful in understanding cross-cultural differences in the social and philosophical understandings of what it is to be human. In addition to readings in philosophy, theology, and literature, we will study food films, and invite guest speakers.
Fulfills VP requirement.
*New Course Number! (from CMPL 373)
CMPL 374 Modern Women Writers(WMST 373) MWF 12-12:50 Leonard, D.
DE 313
an exploration of texts by an international selection of 20th-century women writers, examining their development of experimental narrative techniques and their contributions to the evolution of a women's tradition in literature and film.
Readings and videos are in English, including works by Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Christa Wolf, Isak Dinesen, Toni Morrison, Clarice Lispector, Maria Luisa Bombal, Hélène Cixous.
Fulfills LA & NA requirements.
CMPL 390 Special Topics: Don Quijote TR 2-3:15 Collins, M.
DE 313
“IMAGINATION is derived from Latin imaginatio, which was a late substitute for phantasia (a simple transliteration of the Greek from which fancy is derived). The two terms, with their derivatives, long appeared as synonyms designating the image-receiving or image-forming faculty or process.” From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
“imagination—the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality” From Webster’s Dictionary
“Don Quijote—a novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra” From The Reader’s Encyclopedia
*****
The generalized, bare-bones definitions above set the stage for our study of Cervantes’ Don Quijote as the first modern novel, as a landmark work in the Western literary tradition, and as a book of pivotal importance in the development of our current concept of the imagination in the West. By the end of this semester, after reading and analyzing Don Quijote, after exploring Cervantes’ engagement with imaginative fiction in the context of his sociohistorical moment, and after studying reception of Cervantes’ masterpiece through the ages and in relationship to the development of the concept of the imagination, you will better understand and appreciate the legacy of this work for modern literature and the modern notion of the imagination. You will be able to answer the question, why does every novel since Don Quijote establish a dialogue with Cervantes’ novel?
During this semester, you will also be learning about Comparative Literature, and various ways in which comparatists approach the analysis of literary texts.
*New Faculty!!!
CMPL 452 The Middle Ages MWF 2-2:50 Legassie, S.
DE 313
European writers of the twelfth century are credited with "rediscovering" eros as a major topic of literary concern. In this course, we will briefly consider medieval European writers' debt to the erotic literature of the classical world and then trace the development of several themes across a variety of medieval genres from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.
These themes include courtship, marriage, adultery, homoeroticism, domestic violence, mystical visions, and prostitution. Among the authors we may read are Ovid, Virgil, Chrétien de Troyes, Abelard and Heloise, Marie de France, Juan Ruiz, Dante, Boccaccio, Margery Kempe, Catherine of Siena, Fernando de Rojas.
Fulfills LA, NA & WB requirements.
CMPL 466 Modernism MWF 1-1:50 Leonard, D.
DE 313
an investigation of the period concept of modernism across several literary genres, with some
attention to parallel developments in film and the visual arts. explores ways in which various arts
have represented the ambiguities of human consciousness within its setting of space and time.
includes such artists as kafka, camus, borges, proust, woolf, pound, eliot, rilke, pasternak, brecht,
beckett, pirandello, cézanne, malevich, picasso, bunuel, duras, benjamin and movements such as
cubism, futurism, dada, surrealism, and the harlem renaissance.
Fulfills LA & NA requirements.
*New Course!
CMPL 471 Classical Rhetoric and Modern Theory TR 12:30-1:45 Koelb, J.
DE 313
This version of the course explores how the theory and practice of ancient, medieval, and early modern allegory continue to challenge and stimulate the contemporary theory and practice of literary interpretation. Texts include Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Dante’s Purgatorio, and More’s Utopia; short selections from Homer, Porphyry, Genesis, Philo, Quintilian, Gospels of Mark and John, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Coleridge, Kafka and Borges; twentieth-century essays by Auerbach, C. S. Lewis, Kermode, de Man, Gadamer, Jameson, Piehler, J. Sharpe, and others. All theoretical readings are integrated with close-paced reading of literary texts.
The approach is comparative and historical. Topics include: notions of figurative language and levels of meaning; communities of allegorical readers, past and present; allegory as a medieval literary genre; allegories of love and illumination, empire and modernity; the Romantic devaluation and twentieth-century rehabilitation of allegory.
Fulfills requirements for Literary Arts (LA), North Atlantic World (NA), and World Before 1750 (WB).