Spring 1998 Undergraduate Course Descriptions

Instructor: Masato Nishimura

This is a survey of early Chinese fiction through translation, discussing classical and vernacular stories and plays of the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties.

Instructor: Lisa Yoneyama

In contrast to the pervasive "myth of homogeneity," many textual accounts attest to the differences, diversities and heterogeneities in Japanese culture and society. In this course, we will read novels, short stories, ethnographies, historical narratives, and other writings to explore questions concerning racial and ethnic differences in modern and contemporary Japan.
Some of the questions we shall address include the following. How has Japan's "mainstream" national culture been produced in relationship to its "others"? What are the interplays between the normalizing force of the dominant national culture and the racially and ethnically minoritized cultures? What kinds of positions have the Okinawans, the Ainu, and Koreans occupied in Japan's history of colonialism and multiethnic empire? What kinds of literary and other cultural practices have they exercised? How has "whiteness" been constructed as both object of consumption and site of privilege? And how do the differences of race and ethnicity intersect with gender, class, regional and other differences?
The course explores these questions regarding race relations in Japan, but especially through a global and comparative perspective.

LITERATURES IN ENGLISH

Instructor: Ann duCille

A lecture discussion course that examines a major topic or theme in African American literature as it is developed over time and across the literary genres of fiction, poetry, and belles lettres. A particular emphasis of the course is how African American writers have adhered to or departed from conventional definitions of genre.

LTEN 23

An introduction to literatures written in English in Britain, Ireland and the former British empire from 1832-Present. Readings will include Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, V.S. Naipaul's Mimic Men and Pat Barker's Regeneration.

LTEN 24

Please see the Literature Undergraduate Office for a copy of the course description for this course.

LTEN 50

This course is a basic introduction to the plays of Shakespeare. It is designed for students--especially-non-English-literature majors--who would like to develop a larger understanding of the works of this universal author. It will selectively survey various plays highlighting Shakespeare's development as a dramatist. It will entail a reading of representative histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. The plays will be studied in the light of their dramatic concerns in the context of larger political, social, and artistic interests. A technique or method of examining systematically all dramatic presentations--plays or movies--will be presented. A film of a Shakespearean play and scenes from selected plays will be analyzed using this method. Among plays to be considered will be Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice, Richard II, MacBeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. Emphasis will be upon dramatic interpretation and performance. Lecture/Discussion/Film-presentation format.

LTEN 107

CHAUCER (a)

Instructor: David Crowne

The first of Chaucer's works we shall address is The Parliament of Fowls. We shall begin at a slow pace, with emphasis upon the literal understanding of each and every word, and with a good deal of reading aloud. The pace will accelerate gradually, sensitively attuned (I promise) to students' growing ability to cope with the apparent strangeness of late Fourteenth Century Middle English, so that by the end of the second week of the quarter (that is, in six class sessions), we shall have read to the end of this 699-line poem.
Then, beginning on the Monday of the third week (or thereabouts), we shall commence reading Troilus and Criseyde. This long poem will occupy us for five weeks. The last three weeks of the quarter will be devoted to reading as much of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as we can conveniently manage. At a bare minimum, we shall work our way through Fragment I ("General Prologue", "Knight's Tale ", "Miller's Tale", "Reeve's Tale", and the truncated "Cook's Tale"). It would, of course, be edifying to do more, but we shall see what's possible.
The main focus of this course is upon discovering interpretive strategies for the appropriate understanding of texts that are remote in time, distant in cultural orientation, and somewhat unfamiliar in language. That focus can best be realized through the transactions that take place between me, the instructor, and the class of students. Hence, I should like to emphasize that regular and reasonably alert attendance is essential if the course is to be for students the success that I keenly hope it will be. One five-page paper, one ten-page paper, and a final examination will be required. Text: Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn. (Houghton-Mifflen: Boston, 1987).

LTEN 113

Instructor: Louis Montrose

A lecture/discussion course exploring the development of Shakespeare's dramatic powers in comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy. Matters of form, theme, and style will be studied in the context of Shakespeare's theatre and his society. Two critical papers will be required.

LTEN 120D

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF SENSIBILITY (b)
BLAKE'S POETRY AND DESIGNS

Instructor: Marsanne Brammer

In this course we explore how William Blake's poetry and designs develop a radical poetics of the Imagination in response to the growing power of classical science and orthodox religious and political discourses of knowledge in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century culture. Blake was involved and interested in various subversive subcultures active in London during this period: millenarians, mystics, revolutionaries, Swedenborgians, mesmerists, prophets, writers, and artists met to envision and implement revolutionary forms of art, religion, and politics. Blake saw the visionary imagination as a powerful artistic tool for stripping away the mental constraints of tyrannical scientific, political, or religious institutions, and expanding the human perception to perceive a different reality, a more liberating and humane way of life. To encourage this conjunction of liberating art, visionary imagination, and practical social reform, he produced a series of hand-painted illuminated books in which art and poetry could intertwine to evoke a conceptual revolution in the reader akin to the national millennial revolution he was hoping for at the end of the century. In this class we'll make ample use of slides to explore these illuminated books, studying how Blake reworks elements of popular cultural discourses of the period (particularly mystical or prophetic discourse) to challenge political institutions, scientific laws of nature, and conventional forms of knowledge or religion. We'll look at how Blake creates and genders a new mythology and cosmos, and how he problematized the boundary between madness and prophetic vision by challenging contemporary assumptions about the nature of reality. Finally, we'll talk about how Blake's work raises questions that are still at the forefront of contemporary debate not only in literary and critical studies, but in the sciences as well.

LTEN 132

MODERN IRISH LITERATURE (c)
SAMUEL BECKETT

Instructor: Michael Davidson

This course will survey the work of Samuel Beckett, one of Ireland's greatest writers, recipient of the Nobel Prize and genealogist of modern alienation. His work explores the phrase, "I can't go on; I'll go on," and to some extent all of our readings will attempt to unravel this conundrum in his work. We will survey his contributions to modern fiction by reading Molloy, Watt, Stories and Texts for Nothing and Fizzles, and we will study his contributions to modern drama by reading Endgame, Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape and some of his short (very short) plays. Where possible, we will see videos of his theatrical productions and discuss the implications for staging his works. And since Beckett wrote many of his later works in French, translating them subsequently into English, he represents a famous example of the writer as self-translator. Thus students interested in modern French literature or translation theory may want to consider Beckett's contributions to these areas. Students wishing to read him in the original French may do so, but papers must be written in English.
Evaluation for this class will be based on three short papers and weekly responses to the reading.

LTEN 146

WOMEN AND ENGLISH/AMERICAN LITERATURE (c)
JANE AUSTEN

Please Contact Department for Course Description Information.

LTEN 147

METAMORPHOSES OF THE SYMBOL (d)
THE NATION'S HOUSES

Instructor: Nicole Tonkovich

Houses and homes have always been central to the U.S. national imaginary, but perhaps never in so sustained a manner as between the years 1838 and 1876. Consider:

• In 1838, members of the Cherokee nation, which had adapted itself to the requirements of U.S. citizenship, were removed by the U.S. Army from their ancestral homelands in the southeast to unincorporated territories in Oklahoma.
• In 1839, Edgar Allan Poe published his "Fall of the House of Usher," and Caroline Kirkland published a guide to settling in the West, entitled A New Home, Who'll Follow?
• In the U.S. presidential campaign of 1840, parades included log cabins mounted on wheels, attesting to William Henry Harrison's moral and political viability.
• In 1843, Catharine Beecher published her best-selling Treatise on Domestic Economy, which was reissued annually until 1869, when she collaborated with her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to repackage the book as American Woman's Home. Sales soared.
• By 1850, the home had become central not only to the practical and political imaginary, but figured prominently in fictional considerations of inheritance, genealogy, racial "purity," class entitlement, and appropriate gender roles in books such as Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Thoreau's Walden (1854), Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Melville's Pierre (1852), and William Wells Brown's Clotel, or, the President's Daughter (1853).
• As Civil War threatened, various women's groups united to purchase Washington's home, Mt. Vernon, and convert it to a national monument that would unite the warring factions. The move was doomed, however, since the grounds of Mr. Vernon also included slave cabins. Throughout the period, controversy erupted over the decoration of buildings centrally identified with the nation itself--namely, the U.S. Capitol and its surrounding grounds. Not surprisingly, this debate took its founding assumptions and rhetoric from more localized discussions of housekeeping and interior decoration promulgated in conduct books and manuals of domestic advice.
• Would-be Senator Abraham Lincoln warned the nation in 1858 that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Two years later, his presidential campaign fixed the image of the log cabin permanently in the political vocabulary as the index of honor, self-sufficiency, and homely values.
• By 1876, the year of the U.S. Centennial, the trope had become avowedly nostalgic, as seen in the publication of a collection of reminiscences entitled The Bark Covered House, or Back in the Woods Again.
• In this course we will read (in full or in part) several canonical works of fiction, seeking to trace how the house assumed such a central place in the national imaginary. As well, we will read excerpts from nonfiction, including architectural pattern books and conduct. And we will consider how less well-known texts-notably, Native American oratory and household advice books--challenge the centrality of the suburban, heterosexual, patriarchal, and single-family detached dwelling.

Course work will include quizzes and/or journal writing, an essay exam, and a research paper.

LTEN 149

THEMES IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE (d)
IMAGINING EMPIRE: NATIVE AMERICANS IN LITERATURE, 1620-1830

Instructor: Jennifer Tuttle

From the first moments of colonization to the present day, American identities have been formed in relation to this land's native peoples. Focusing on what is now the United States, this course traces the development of colonial and national narratives as they grapple with the presence of indigenous peoples in North America and simultaneously attempt to claim "native" status themselves. We will analyze the ways in which concerns about race, gender, and ethnicity become entwined with constructions of "America," looking in particular at the ways literature and myth function as both colonizing institutions and media for resistance. Writers and topics will include: representations of Pocahontas, from John Smith's Generall Historie to the Disney film; the appropriation, demonization, or erasure of Native bodies and culture by early colonists like William Bradford, Cotton Mather, and Thomas Morton as well as revolutionaries like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; empire and eroticism in captivity narratives, such as those by Mary Rowlandson and Mary Jemison, as well as in depictions of captivity in the visual arts; the journals of Lewis and Clark, focusing on the symbolization of Sacagawea and the Corps of Discovery's interactions with other indigenous peoples; fictional engagements with the "Indian Problem" in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, written in the shadow of Andrew Jackson's aggressive policy of Indian Removal; and writings by Native Americans Samson Occum, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and William Apess, among others.

LTEN 155

INTERACTIONS BETWEEN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS
AMERICA AND GEORGIA O'KEEFFE (e)

Instructor: Bram Dijkstra

We tend to think of Georgia O'Keeffe's painting as having been shaped by her assimilation of European modernism in the wake of Alfred Stieglitz's encouragement. But in fact O'Keeffe's visual imagination had, by this time already largely been shaped by indigenous American impulses in art and thought, and these, in turn, had been influenced by the unique role of women in shaping the concerns of nineteenth century American culture. With the coming of modernism these influences came to be dismissed as clearly "inferior sources of inspiration." The American humanist concerns which form the basis of O'Keeffe's art have therefore since remained virtually unexamined as elements in the formation of her work. This course will attempt to reestablish the literary and artistic antecedents of O'Keeffe's American sensibility. We shall also examine her still almost entirely neglected links to the radical political and militantly feminist writers and artists of the periodical The Masses.

LTEN 172

AMERICAN POETRY II: WHITMAN THROUGH THE MODERNISTS (e)

Instructor: Michael Davidson

As the subtitle for this course indicates this will be a survey of American poetry that begins with Walt Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) and continues through the generation of Eliot and Pound. Our focus for this class will be the theme of modernization--the cult of the "new," the idea of progress, the emergence of mass culture, the growth of urbanization and mechanization. Modernist poetry has been seen as both the site where such themes were articulated as well as a refuge from them through various formal and structural experimentation. We will study various poets' responses to these challenges, beginning with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the late nineteenth-century and continuing through Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Langston Hughes. Evaluation for this course will be based on weekly short responses and three papers.

LTEN 176

MAJOR AMERICAN WRITERS (e)

Instructor: Shelley Streeby

Please see the Literature Graduate Office for a copy of the course description for this course.

LTEN 176

MAJOR AMERICAN WRITERS (e)
POE AND THE VISUAL ARTS

Instructor: Bram Dijkstra

We tend to think of Poe as a writer of horror stories. But Poe clearly regarded himself as a philosopher and an aesthete, and he used his tales to instruct his readers and to demonstrate to them what was likely to go wrong in the lives of those who failed to understand the human imagination's creative coherence. He believed that the mind could alter the conditions of reality--that anything one could imagine could also be made real. The painters of the romantic era inspired his dreams of an ideal future. In this course we shall examine the principles underlying Poe's belief in the transformative power of the creative imagination. In addition we shall take a close look at the paintings that inspired him. We shall also examine the deformation of Poe's ideas in the art, movies and comic books that have helped establish our current perception of Poe as a writer of gruesome fiction.

LTEN 180

CHICANO LITERATURE IN ENGLISH (e)

Instructor: Gina Valdes

This course will focus on Chicana fiction published in the last three decades. The class will consist of lectures and discussions on outstanding themes of this fiction, and the literary analysis of short stories written by several Chicana writers.

LTEN 183 - Course Cancelled

AFRICAN AMERICAN PROSE (d)

READINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS
Nouvelles et Francophonie

Instructor: T.A.s supervised by Catherine Ploye

Second-year course designed to be taken after LIFR 1C/1CX. We undertake a thorough review of grammar while continuing to develop language skills (oral and written) by studying short stories, cartoons, and a movie from various French-speaking countries. The course is taught entirely in French, and may be applied toward a major or minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Prerequisite: LIFR 1C/1CX or equivalent or consent of coordinator or or a score of 3 on the AP French Language exam.

LTFR 2B

READINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS
Théâtre et Cinéma

Instructor: T.A.s supervised by Catherine Ploye

We continue the review of grammar begun in LTFR 2A and read plays by Beckett, Rostand, and Schwartz-Bart. The movie version of Cyrano de Bergerac is discussed in conjunction with the analysis of the play. The course is taught entirely in French, and may be applied toward a major or minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Prerequisite: LTFR 2A or equivalent or consent of coordinator or a score of 4 on the AP French Language exam.

LTFR 2C

COMPOSITION, CONVERSATION AND CULTURE

Instructor: T.A.s supervised by Catherine Ploye

LTFR 2C is designed for students who wish to improve writing and conversational skills. This course aims to develop written expression in terms of organization of ideas, structure, vocabulary. We also review major grammatical difficulties. Oral skills are practiced through presentations and discussions of a contemporary novel and film. The course is taught entirely in French, and may be applied toward a major or minor in French literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Prerequisite: LTFR 2B or equivalent or consent of instructor or a score of 5 on the AP French Language exam. (Registering simultaneously in 2B and 2C is accepted.)

LTFR 31

DEBATING LITERATURE AND CULTURE I
DISCUTONS!

Instructor: Catherine Ploye

A one-unit, one-meeting-a-week course, designed to develop and maintain oral skills at an advanced level by discussing current cultural issues of the Francophone world. This course may be taken more than once and in combination with any other literature course. Prerequisite: 1C/CX or consent of instructor.

LTFR 50

READINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS
POÉSIE ET ROMAN

Instructor: T.A. supervised by Catherine Ploye

This course emphasizes the development of language skills and the practice of textual analysis. Discussions are based on the reading of poets as well as on a novel and a film by Marguerite Duras. The course is taught entirely in French, and may be applied toward a major or minor in French Literature or towards fulfilling the secondary literature requirement. Prerequisite: LTFR 2B or equivalent or consent of coordinator or a score of 5 on the AP French Language exam.

LTFR 116

THEMES IN FRENCH INTELLECTUAL & LITERARY HISTORY
BECOMING A WRITER

Instructor: Oumelbanine Zhiri

Comment et pourquoi devient-on écrivain? En étudiant la littérature française des XIXème et XXème siècle, nous essaierons d'apporter des réponses à cette question en nous intéressant surtout à des textes littéraires et autobiographiques où est décrit l'apprentissage d'un écrivain.

LTFR 144

LITERATURE AND IDEAS
SAVAGES AND PHILOSOPHERS

Instructor: Oumelbanine Zhiri

Dans ce cours, nous lirons des textes écrits entre le XVIème et le XXème siècle, qui décrivent et analysent les sociétés dites primitives. Nous étudierons de quelle manière les auteurs français ont considère ces peuples, et la place qu'ils leur accordent dans leur conception du monde. Ce cours donne des crédits pour le XVIème, le XVIIème, le XVIIème et le XXème siècle.

LTFR 145

CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT
PROUST ET LA CRITIQUE CONTEMPORAINE

Instructor: Marcel Hénaff

Ecrire, dit Proust, c'est traduire un livre que la vie écrit en nous. Nous verrons comment cela est montré dans *A la Recherche du temps perdu* en lisant son début, c'est-à-dire *Du côté de chez Swann*. En même temps nous verrons comment la critique contemporaine (comme celle de Beckett, Barthes, Genette, Deleuze, etc.) a renouvelé la lecture de Proust.

GENERAL LITERATURE

FICTION AND FILM OF TWENTIETH CENTURY ITALY
THERE'S A WESTERN IN MY SPAGHETTI: NEOREALISM AND ITS TWISTS AND TURNS

Instructor: Pasquale Verdicchio

The overwhelming popular success of the 1990 film Cinema Paradiso represented both a nostalgic look at what Italian film and society had been in a supposedly more "innocent" era, the promising period of neo-realism and post World War II reconstruction, and a hint that Italian cinema was finally coming out of a slump with a new generation of directors who looked to the past with an eye on the future. In this course we will attempt to follow the course of Italian film since neo-realism through the optic of nostalgia and regeneration that Cinema Paradiso proposes. Our analysis will concentrate on the subtitle of the course by which the term "neo-realism" moves through a variety of transformations leading to contemporary re-considerations of it. And, since neo-realist influence seems to re-emerge every five to ten years, and appears to be closely tied to social and political movements in the country, we will also follow developments at that level to provide a contextualized reading of each filmic representation. Films will include: Cinema Paradiso, Bicycle Thieves, and La Scorta.

LTGN 19C

THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD

Instructor: Charles Chamberlain

We will read works written in Latin from about 200 B.C. to 100 A.D. I will try to fill in the historical, social, and philosophical background. There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final.

LTGN 90

Instructor: Robert Cancel

This course would detail resources for students to work, travel, or study in Africa. Would also include cultural-interaction background and a few quest speakers, such as students who've already been to Africa. We will also spend a lot of time on practical matters of travel options, expense, health and moving between and over borders.
Seminar meetings: Mondays & Wednesdays, April 13, 15, 20, 22, 27, 29, May 4, 6

LTGN 90

UNDERGRADUATE SEMINAR
SHORT FICTION/LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN

Instructor: Marta Sánchez

We will discuss 5 short stories by different Latin American women. The authors are the Argentinian marta Lynch ("Latin Lover"), the Brazilian Clarice Lipsector ("The Imitation of the Rose"), and the Mexican Ines Arredondo ("The Shunammite"), Elena Poniatowska ("The Night Visitor"), and Elena Garro ("It's the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecas"). One book anthology is required and is available at Groundworks Bookstore. Enrollment limit of 15.
Seminar meetings: Tuesdays, March 31, April 7, 14, 21, 28, May 5.

LTGN 100

CLASSICAL TRADITION
EPIC

Instructor: Eliot Wirshbo

A mild exposure to the epic strain, in the hope of strengthening students and imbuing them with a lifelong ability to tolerate and thrive amid the various forms of the genre. Our emphasis will vary as appropriate: e.g. with Homer, an inquiry into the heroic world-view, its historicity and alleged oddness; with Vergil, a consideration of the possibilities for originality and greatness in a work so intentionally parasitic; with Milton, a focus on the attempted wedding of the Hellenic and the Hebraeo-Christian and the host of oxymora which that sportive marriage begets. Throughout, there will be exposition of the artistic and verbal design of the works, with some class time devoted to ruminations on the fate of genres as they evolve. 4,000 words must be written by you for this course, final exam; maybe a mid-term.

LTGN 120 YIDDISH LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

MUSIC IN LITERATURE: FROM KLEZMER TO CLASSICAL, HOW IT SOUNDS AND HOW IT PLAYS IN EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWISH POPULAR FICTION

Instructor: Ronald Robboy

Certainly music played an essential role in the Eastern European Jewish experience. But transcending the physical reality of musical performance, it was the idea of music that came to carry an emblematic importance for the Yiddish narrative imagination, identifying itself as a source of power -- artistic, political, and sexual -- and standing for the ability of a stateless people to navigate the shoals of an often hostile world.
What is Yiddish? It is the language and culture that developed as those stateless Jews carried a Medieval Germanic language across Eastern Europe, absorbing elements of the Slavic tongues with which they came in contact over the course of centuries. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did a full-fledged Modern Yiddish literature emerge that could take a place alongside the major European narrative traditions. After an introduction to some of the historical and social conditions that gave rise to this modern literature, the course will survey a variety of Yiddish literary genres produced by an astonishing two or three generations of writers working in Europe and the Americas between the 1880s and the outbreak of the Second World War. Included will be classic fiction of Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz; turn-of-the-century musical theater; printed sheet music from New York's Lower East Side; film; and politically engaged journalismacross an ideological spectrum.
Seeing how this literature turned time and again to the musical metaphor, above all to that of the violin, we will compare that vision with recordings of the music itself. From traditional klezmer bands to the vaunted Russian-Jewish virtuoso tradition to the Yiddish vaudeville circuit and Hollywood, we will listen to and discuss the various artists and read their music back into the literature and its readership.
No knowledge of Yiddish is necessary, and students who might be pursuing an interest in Yiddish culture or literature for the first time are most welcome.

LTGN 136

LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
BRAZILIAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

Proposed Instructor: Jorge Moreira

Introduction to the critical reading and interpretation of Brazilian cultural narratives: literature, popular music, cinema. This course will provide a general historical background as well as analytical strategies for the study of cultural discourses and major authors whose work has had an impact on thought, literature, or social problems of Brazil from the late nineteenth century to the present. The course will especially focus on the intersection of the critical social categories of nation, class, race and gender in the formulation and analysis of these cultural narratives. This course may include Jose de Alencar, Machado de Assis, es Rosa, Antonio Callado, Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra, Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Taught in English.

LTGN 140A

CLASSICAL CHINESE FICTION IN TRANSLATION
READINGS IN CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY
(Cross-listed with LTCH 140A)

Instructor: Masato Nishimura

This is a survey of early Chinese fiction through translation, discussing classical and vernacular stories and plays of the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties.

LTGN 143C

LATER JAPANESE LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION: PROSE FICTION
MODERN JAPANESE WOMEN

Instructor: Masao Miyoshi

Women in Japan are now gaining power and influence, but the history of their struggle is considerably different from its American counterpart. We will examine representations of Japanese women's everyday life as they are positioned in society and history, within family and outside, alongside other women and men, and by themselves.
There is no good monograph on the condition of Japanese women as of now either in Japanese or English, although there are now many new studies being published.

LTGN 145 - Course Cancelled

JAPANESE LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
A-BOMB LITERATURE

Instructor: Lisa Yoneyama

LTGN 157

TOPICS IN BIBLICAL NARRATIVE

Instructor: Ziony Zevit

This course explores two major genres of literary expression in ancient Isreal: the short story and cultic poetry. During the semester we will read and study examples of each in translation, paying attention to their aesthetic, structural, and dramatic features, the ways in which they describe the world, and how they create meaning. We will examine them in their original historical, social, and religious contexts and consider how reading them out of these contexts influences their "meaning(s)."

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN JEWRY

Instructor: Steven Cassedy

Traces the cultural history of American Jews from the beginnings in the seventeenth century to the present day. Emphasis is on the period of mass emigration that began in the 1880s from Russia and Poland. For this period we study Jewish culture in the Old Countries, Yiddish literature, the Jewish labor movement in America, and the establishment of a peculiar Jewish-American culture in the twentieth century. We look into such diverse topics as personal attire, music, and the architectural styles of synagogues. Examines the ethnic and cultural heritage of the vast majority of American Jews. Readings are drawn from history, literature, memoirs, and the periodical press. Lectures, slide presentations, music, etc.

LTGN 169

EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE
PAUL AND THE INVENTION OF CHRISTIANITY

Instructor: Arthur Droge

The apostle Paul continues to be one of the most influential and controversial figures in Western religious history. He has been credited with - and accused of - being the chief architect in the founding of Christianity. Through a careful reading of Paul's own letters, together with the writings of his admirers and adversaries, this course will attempt to locate Paul's religion in relation to other forms of Judaism and Christianity in the first two centuries. In particular, the course will seek to describe the contour and feel of the "worlds" Paul inhabited: both the wider world of antiquity and the world as Paul imagined it, and to which he gave form and meaning through his symbols, rituals, and language.

LTGN 171

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
MYTH, MAGIC, AND MIND

Instructor: Stephen Potts

Children's literature is deeply rooted in the ancient oral tradition, which includes folk tales, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes--few originally intended for children. Thus, for most of its modern history children's literature has in fact been tied to some of the oldest and deepest paradigms of myth and human thought. Even as we mature--and as children's literature as a genre has matured over the 19th and 20th centuries--the stories we think of as children's stories resonate with mythic paradigms and psychological material of continuing relevance. They also form the basis of much of our popular culture. Beginning with the mythic roots of the genre in the folk or "fairy" tale, we will examine children's literature up to the present, noting the enduring motifs as well as the increasing realism of the form.

LTGN 180F

VISUAL ARTS, FILM STUDIES, AND LITERATURE: FILMIC TEXT
DECONSTRUCTING WOODY ALLEN

Instructor: Alain J.-J. Cohen

One of the most creative contemporary American directors, Woody has created a vast and distinct body of work of about thirty films which are manifestly intertwined with the history of cinema, literature, philosophy and psychotherapy.
The art in his filmmaking and in his comic dialogue will be studied in four or five of his films, among which Manhattan, Zelig, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Mighty Aphrodite, and Deconstructing Harry (if the latter film is available on tape) and clips from a few others. Special attention will be paid to Woody Allen's place in the history of comic films and comic actors (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, W.C. Field, J. Lewis, et al.) and the gamut from wit and humor to slapstick. The focus of this course will be upon his double self-referential stylistic trademark: a) playful reference to the history of cinema (Casablanca, The Lady from Shanghai, etc. - and the ever present work of I. Bergman); b) playful and deliberate confusion between his director persona and his actor persona.
How did Woody Allen succeed in proposing his particular version of "New York", "neurotic", "Jewish", "intellectual", into a compelling universality abroad as well as in the USA? Is there not, however, a reticence and a resistance in and about his films, his aesthetics and his philosophy, which warrants the scrutiny of the film analysis that this course will offer?

LTGN 185

LITERATURE AND IDEAS
U.S. IN FRENCH IMAGINATION

Instructor: Roddey Reid

This course will focus on the myth of "America" in francophone culture especially the myth of the United States in metropolitan France. Throughout French cultural history the "American myth" ("le mythe americain") has enjoyed a prominent place in the French imagination since the beginning of settlement colonies in North America down to the present day. Students returning from their junior year in France will have encountered many of them while abroad. Using novels, essays, comic strips, films and video, the class will study various aspects of this myth (the U.S. as the New World, untamed Nature, and immature democracy, the Wild West, Modernity, land of violence, Melting Pot, savage capitalism, World Power, land of pleasure, postmodern society, etc.). We will look at writings and films by writers and artists including Montaigne, Tocqueville, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Baudrillard, Demy, Godard, Beneix, Mangolte, Ackerman, and others.

LTGN 187

WOMEN AND LITERATURE
IMAGES OF NORTH AFRICAN WOMEN IN LITERATURE

Proposed Instructor: Sonia Ghattas-Soliman

An analysis of the position and the status of the North African woman of today as she struggles to rise above the restrictions placed upon her. A critical study of issues and questions raised about women in contemporary North African literature through the analysis of themes, language and literary approaches in selected works. The course will offer various perspectives on the North African woman's struggle within the social and cultural contexts that shape her status. Authors will include among others, Leila Sebbar, Fettouma Touati, Nawal as-Saadawi. Attention will be given to the novel, although some poetry and short stories will be included.

Instructor: Lisa Yoneyama

How did the country of the Geisha, Madame Butterfly, and the so-called "picture brides" produce a woman Socialist Party leader? How did "the year of the woman" come several years earlier in Japan than in the U.S.? What lies behind the overall prominence of women writers? How did such historical instances as the war and the atom bomb impact women's experiences? How have modernity, nationalism and feminism shaped each other? How did western colonialism shape discourses on Japanese women's liberation? Are Japanese sisters following the same evolutionary path of emancipation as western women? What are the class, generational, ethnic and regional differences among Japanese women? The course explores the above questions through reading literary works, ethnographies, and oral histories.

NOTE: To Literature students, Also see:

VIS 128CN

Instructor: Jerry Rothenberg

May be used to fulfill Literature elective where applicable to major or minor requirements.

ADVANCED READINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS

Instructor: T.A. supervised by Elizabeth Bredeck This course is the second half of a two-part Intermediate German sequence, which uses a four-skills approach (reading, writing, speaking, and listening comprehension) and is taught entirely in German. We cover the second half of two books (Rückblick, and A Practical Review of German Grammar), and continue working with Internet resources and video, including episodes from the popular television series Lindenstrasse. Prerequisite: LTGM 2A or equivalent (transfer students).

LTGM 2C

COMPOSITION AND CONVERSATION

Instructor: Elizabeth Bredeck The course is designed as a bridge from the 2A-2B sequence to more advanced coursework in German. We will work on developing the critical tools for reading, discussing and writing about different kinds of texts--some Sachtexte, some literary, including poetry and a one-act play. This genre-based approach extends to the video portion of the course, which will include different types of TV news reports and advertising. Especially recommended for students planning to attend the EAP program in Goettingen. All work done in German.

LTGM 53

READINGS IN GERMAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
20^th CENTURY LITERATURE: POSTWAR GERMAN THEATER

Instructor: Wendy Arons

Postwar Germany has produced some of the most provocative and stimulating dramatic literature of the twentieth century. In this class we will look at some of the most influential dramatists writing in German. The plays we'll read are absurd, grotesque, tragic, schizophrenic, at times baffling, and at others quite comical - in other words, incisive theatrical reflections on and constructions of "Germanness" in the second half of the twentieth century. Syllabus may include plays by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Max Frisch, Peter Handke, Gunther Grass, Peter Weiss, Elfriede Jelinek, Botho Strauss, Heiner Muüller, and George Tabori. Prerequisite: LTGM 2C or equivalent.

LTGM 126

20^TH CENTURY GERMAN LITERATURE NAZI CINEMA: THE ENTERTAINMENT FILMS

Instructor: Cynthia Walk

Beyond the overt propaganda of newsreels and documentaries, Germany produced a steady stream of entertainment films during the Nazi period. This seminar will focus on the submerged political content of the entertainment film by studying popular genres like the Heimatfilm, melodrama, comedy, musical and the bio-pic. We will compare them with Hollywood features of the same period to examine the historical specificity of Nazi cinema as well as its continuities with American film culture.

LTGM 130

GERMAN LITERARY PROSE KAFKA

Instructor: Elizabeth Bredeck

What does it mean to be "Kafkaesque"? Find out in this seminar as we explore the world of Kafka's prose: a world of vengeful fathers and guilt-ridden sons, a place where an ape can speak and a traveling salesman can become a wretched bug. Readings will include short prose works ranging from Kafka's early breakthrough story, "The Judgment," to later works such as "A Hunger Artist." Readings and discussion in German.

GREEK LITERATURE

INTERMEDIATE GREEK II READING HOMER'S ODYSSEY

Instructor: Leslie Edwards

Having mastered (most of) the morphology of Ancient Greek, we'll turn this quarter to the reading of Homer's Odyssey. Besides translating passages from the poem, we'll discuss and review forms and constructions as they appear in our reading. Midterm, final, some quizzes. Prerequisite: Greek 2 or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.

LTGK 133

PROSE LONGUS' DAPHNIS AND CHLOE

Instructor: William Fitzgerald

We will be reading Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, a pastoral love story written around 200 C.E. Prerequisite: Greek 3 or equivalent.

ITALIAN LITERATURE

LANGUAGE OF ITALIAN FILM AND LITERATURE
NO BETTER WAY TO LEARN ITALIAN!
FELLINI, SCOLA, CALVINO

Instructor: Stephanie Jed

An introduction to the elements of Italian conversation, syntax, and style through the study of screenplays and fairytales. We will study Fellini's La Strada, and Calvino's Fiabe.
This course is designed for students who are interested in Italian; or who love Italian film and culture and want to understand films and literature in the original; or who want to develop their own dramatic flair in life through the imitation and study of Italian language and style. Prerequisites: LTIT 12A-B, LIIT 1A-B or consent of instructor. Concurrent enrollment in LTGN 4D recommended (but not required).

LTIT 50

ADVANCED ITALIAN

Instructor: Adriana de Marchi Gherini

This course provides an introduction to Italian literature and culture. Students will read 20th-century short stories and newspaper articles. Close reading, written assignments, and conversation will prepare them for upper-division literature courses. Prerequisite: LTIT 2B or permission of instructor.

LTIT 161

ADVANCED STYLISTICS AND CONVERSATION
COME PARLIAMO, COME SCRIVIAMO

Instructor: Adriana De Marchi Gherini

Lo scopo di questo corso è di imparare a scriver bene e ad apprezzare testi scritti di vari livelli e intenzioni. Si parlerà di stilistica, metrica, retorica e letteratura e si analizzeranno diversi tipi di linguaggi letterari (letteratura dell' infanzia, testi di canzoni, giornalismo, propaganda politica, pubblicità, ecc.). L'enfasi sulla conversazione si tradurrà in presentazioni orali. Midterm in classe, esame final a casa (un saggio di circa 5 pagine).

FIRST-YEAR KOREAN FUNDAMENTALS OF KOREAN

Instructor: Sunny Jung

First-year Korean 1C aims to introduce the fundamentals of standard modern Korean in four skill areas: listening, speaking, reading and writing (including cultural understanding). By the end of the course, you will be able to understand the basic structure of Korean and to read and write in Hangul (Korean).

INTERMEDIATE LATIN II

Instructor: Eliot Wirshbo

Completion of elementary text, with some famous morsels from Cicero spicing things up along the way. Same day-to-day routine as before: grammar and philology rule the day.

LTLA 3

INTERMEDIATE LATIN I

Instructor: Charles Chamberlain

We will continue studying Latin grammar and forms from A Latin Course for Colleges by Argetsinger. If you have not taken LTLA 1 and 2 from this book, start reviewing from it as soon as possible.

LTLA 131

PROSE CICERO: TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS

Instructor: Eliot Wirshbo

Cicero's Tusculan Disputations makes a good text for our main object in this course: to practice and get better at reading Latin. The TD is a derivative stew with ingredients from various philosophical kitchens: a dialogic structure reminiscent of Plato, a dash of Pythagorean mysticism, a healthy measure of Roman Stoicism, a respectful smidgeon of Epicureanism -- all dished up in an Eclectic presentation. There will be daily plodding through the assigned passages in Latin, with a mid-term and final testing your translating acumen. In addition, a ten-page paper on one of a choice of topics philosophical, rhetorical, or biographical.

PORTUGUESE FOR SPANISH SPEAKERS
BRAZILIAN LITERATURE FOR SPANISH SPEAKERS

Instructor: Jorge Moreira

This course incorporates the learning of the Brazilian Portuguese language with the study of Brazilian culture, literature, film, and music. Directed to students with a knowledge of the Spanish language, we will systematically refer to and compare Portuguese grammatical structures and vocabulary with those of Spanish in order to build on students' previous knowledge of the workings of the languages and to speed the learning process. At the same time, the course will serve as an introduction to Brazilian cultural production, thus preparing students for further studies in the area.

FIRST-YEAR RUSSIAN

Instructor: Rebecca Wells

Continue exploring the mechanics and mystery of Russian language, culture, and people. We will journey forth into all forms of communication--reading, writing, speaking, and listening. We will continue acquiring basic vocabulary and grammar skills and attempt to apply them both mechanically and creatively. Original Russian materials will supplement the basic text and language lab tapes. This course meets three days per week for grammar lectures and two days per week for conversation. Every effort will be made to integrate material on Russian culture into the language curriculum.

LTRU 2C

SECOND-YEAR RUSSIAN

Instructor: Rebecca Wells

Continuing expansion of previous language acquisitions and introduction to new, unexplored territories. While systematically reviewing grammar, we will begin focusing on the language for more creative purposes in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Language lab videos and readings texts will supplement the basic text. This course meets three days a week for grammar lectures and two days per week for conversation. Every effort will be made to integrate material on Russian culture into the language curriculum.

LTRU 104C

ADVANCED PRACTICUM IN RUSSIAN

Instructor: Rebecca Wells

This course is an advanced practicum for all students with at least two years of Russian. The course will be based on oral and written texts from Russian literature, films, newspapers, and areas of particular interest to the class. Within the context of these texts we will develop vocabulary, review grammar, and hone your practical language skills. Every effort will be made to address the individual needs of students with respect to both linguistic abilities and areas of interest. We will strive to integrate cultural content as much as possible into the language instruction. Students will meet once per week with a T.A. for discussion at a time to be arranged later. Students will develop term projects based on their own areas of interest. Native speakers and advanced students are encouraged to enroll.

READINGS AND COMPOSITION

Instructor: T.A.s supervised by Beatrice Pita

This 5-unit intermediate course meets four days per week and is taught entirely in Spanish. LTSP 2A emphasizes the development of reading ability, listening comprehension, and writing skills. It includes grammar review, short readings, lab work, class discussions, and working with Spanish-language materials available on the Internet. This course is designed to prepare students for LTSP 2B and LTSP 2C. A diagnostic test will be administered on the first day. Prerequisites: Completion of LISP 1C/1CX, or the equivalent. Note: The final exam for LTSP 2A is scheduled for Monday, June 8th.

LTSP 2B

READINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS

Instructor: T.A.s supervised by Beatrice Pita

This intermediate course is designed for students who wish to improve their ability to speak, read, and write Spanish. It is a continuation of LTSP 2A with special emphasis on problems in writing and interpretation. Students meet with the instructor four days per week. Work for this 5-unit course includes grammar review, lab and writing assignments, class discussions on the readings, and accessing Spanish-language materials on the Internet. A diagnostic test will be administered on the first day. Prerequisite: Completion of LTSP 2A, or the equivalent. Note: The final exam for LTSP 2B is scheduled for Monday, June 8th.

LTSP 2C

CULTURAL READINGS AND COMPOSITION

Instructor: T.A.s supervised by Beatrice Pita

This intermediate course is a continuation of the LTSP second-year sequence with special emphasis on problems in writing and translation. It includes class discussions of cultural topics as well as grammar review and composition assignments. The course will further develop the ability to read articles, essays, and longer pieces of fictional and non-fictional texts as well as to access Spanish-language materials on the Internet. A diagnostic test will be administered on the first day. Prerequisite: LTSP 2B, or its equivalent. This course satisfies the third course requirement of the College-required language sequence. Note: The final exam for LTSP 2C is scheduled for Monday, June 8th.

LTSP 2D

ADVANCED READINGS AND COMPOSITION:
SPANISH FOR NATIVE SPEAKERS

Instructor: T.A.s supervised by Beatrice Pita

Designed for bilingual students seeking to become biliterate. Reading and writing skills will be stressed with special emphasis on improvement of written expression, vocabulary development, and problems of grammar and orthography. Prepares native speakers with little or no formal training in Spanish for more advanced courses. A diagnostic test will be administered on the first day. Prerequisite: Native speaking ability and/or recommendation of instructor. Notes: The final exam for LTSP 2D is scheduled for Monday, June 8th. Enrollment for LTSP 2D requires department approval.

LTSP 41

SPANISH ORTHOGRAPHY

Instructor: TAs supervised by Beatrice Pita

The one-unit workshop format of this course will allow students to attain a stronger command of skills in matters of conversation, pronunciation, spelling, punctuation and accent rules. Focus will be on vocabulary development, use of idiomatic expressions and advancing oral and written proficiency in Spanish. Pre-requisites: LI/SP 1C/CX or consent of the instructor. Notes: This conversation/discussion class meets once a week. May be taken as an adjunct to lower and upper division LT/SP courses. Recommended for students planning to study abroad. May be taken 3 times for credit as topics vary. May be taken P/NP or for a letter grade.

LTSP 50C

READINGS IN LATIN AMERICAN TOPICS

Instructor: TAs supervised by Beatrice Pita

This course introduces students to literary analysis through the close textual reading of a selection of Latin American texts including novels, plays, short fiction, and poetry. Coursework includes reading of texts, participation in class discussions, and written assignments. LTSP 50C prepares Literature majors and minors for upper-division work. LTSP 50A and either 50B or 50C are required for Spanish Literature majors. Prerequisites: Completion of LTSP 2B or 2C or 2 years of college level Spanish. Notes: The Final Exam for LTSP 50B is scheduled for Monday, June 8th. Enrollment for LTSP 50C requires department approval.

LTSP 120

MAJOR WORKS IN THE MODERN PERIOD

Proposed Instructor: Anthony Geist

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) is unique in this century as a particularly privileged point of intersection between politics and poetics, ethics and aesthetics. Writers, artists and intellectuals throughout the world and in overwhelming numbers turned their energies and their art to the defense of the Spanish Republic, under attack by Franco's fascist forces, themselves aided by Hitler and Mussolini. ("We have neither airplanes,/nor tanks, nor cannons,/ay, Carmela!"). The lament expressed in this song, popular with the Republican troops and the International Brigades, bespeaks a fundamental truth of the war: vastly outgunned by Franco, the Loyalists turned art into weapons to a degree unparalleled before or since. Music, poetry and the visual arts, in Spain and abroad, were put at the service of defending the Republic.
In this course we will study a number of different artistic responses to the war, as an unusual moment of convergence in the history of culture and political history. We will work with the Southworth Collection's posters, as well as "The Aura of the Cause," a traveling exhibit of photographs from the war. Films and guest lecturers. All course work, lectures, class discussion, papers and exams in Spanish.

LTSP 129

TWENTIETH-CENTURY PROSE
DE LA DICTADURA A LA POSMODERNIDAD: NOVELA ESPANOLA DE 1940-1995

Proposed Instructor: Anthony Geist

The Spanish Civil War is the defining event of 20th century Spanish history and culture, its structuring trauma. We will see the ways that the war shapes literary expression both under Franco and since the return of democracy in 1975, from the tremendismo of the immediate postwar, through social realism of the 50s and 60s, to postmodern "historiographic metafiction" of the 80s and 90s. All coursework, readings, class discussion, papers and exams in Spanish.

LTSP 130B

DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE
INTRODUCTION TO LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE: 1500-1930

Instructor: Milos Kokotovic

In this course we will read 1) selections from Spanish as well as indigenous chronicles of the Conquest and early colonial period; 2) essays, poetry, and short stories from the Independence period and the process of national consolidation which followed it; and 3) a novel (and possibly a movie) about civilization, barbarism, and gender in early 20^th century processes of economic modernization and urbanization. We will examine these texts in their historical context, looking at how they express and intervene in social and cultural conflicts, with particular attention to the role of and changes in literary form. Readings will include works by Cristóbal Colón, Bartolomé de las Casas, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Esteban Echeverría, Juana Manuela Gorriti, José Martí, and Teresa de la Parra.

LTSP 142

SPANISH AMERICAN SHORT STORY LAS MUJERES

Instructor: Marta Sánchez

Readings and analyses of short fiction by Latin American women. We will begin with a sampling of stories by women of different countries (for example, Chile's María Luisa Bombal, Argentina's Marta Lynch) and then move on to the primary concentration of Mexican and Puerto Rican women (Angeles Mastretta, Inés Arredondo, Ana Lydia Vega, Carmen Lugo Filippi, and Rosario Ferré). Books at Ground Works and Course Reader are required.

LTSP 171

STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
REGION & NATION IN MEXICAN LITERATURE

Instructor: Max Parra

In this course we will explore the conflicting relationship between regional and national memory in Mexico's historical fiction. Readings will include works by Nellie Campobello, Antonio Estrada Muñoz and others.

INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY

Instructor: Don Wayne

An introduction to a number of major twentieth-century intellectual movements in which literature and culture are studied from various theoretical perspectives. The aim of the course is to give the student a foothold in some of the basic categories and terminologies of contemporary theoretical discourse, and to examine critically some of the points of contention among different theoretical models. This is intended as a foundation for further work, especially for undergraduates with plans for graduate work in literature and cultural studies. Critical movements studied will include the (now old) "new criticism", structuralism and poststructuralism, feminist criticism, marxist criticism, new historicism, and postcolonial criticism. Selected readings from various sources (to be announced). Requirements will include a midterm exam and a final paper.

THE CRAFT OF WRITING
FICTION

Instructor: Melvyn Freilicher

This course is a rigorous introduction to the basic elements of fiction: characterization, dialog, setting, point-of-view, and narrative structure. Students will practice working with these elements in many individual writing exercises. These are preparatory to completing a short story, which will be done in drafts. TAs will not conduct sections, but instead will be utilized as tutors, to discuss 1st drafts of stories and the revision process individually with students (who will also be writing peer critiques for one another). Lectures, class discussions, and analytic writing exercises on these readings will help prepare students for the midterm. Readings include short fiction by Kafka, Chekhov, Zora Neale Hurston, Grace Paley, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Yukio Mishima, Sandra Cisneros, Gogol, James Baldwin and many others.

LTWR 8C

CRAFT OF WRITING: NON-FICTION
WRITING AND ARGUING ABOUT GENDER: RHETORIC, LAW, ROLES, SEX, SCIENCE

Instructor: Barbara Tomlinson

Argumentative purposes and strategies are central to most kinds of nonfiction writing. Even minor and short forms of writing (personal advertisements, movie reviews, advice columns, and so forth) can (arguably) be seen as a kind of argumentation. In this course, arguments about gender serve as a unifying theme to explore a wide range of purposes, genres, personas, and styles.
We will begin by discussing the nature and rhetorical structure of various genres (in writing, film, and music), including very short genres, extending our attention to newspaper and magazine columns, speeches and other fairly short prose. Turning to longer texts, we will examine a variety of potentially controversial and inflammatory arguments about gender, to ascertain how writers chose to approach, connect to, and "persuade" their audiences, and to evaluate how readers respond to such arguments. We will look at ways that textual vehemence -- anger, irony, ridicule -- can accentuate certain kinds of arguments in nonfiction prose, and consider how rhetorical strategies come together to create the effect of a specific writer's personality (the [Old] Codger, the Tough Baby, the Man Who Faces Facts, the Innocent Victim).
We will pay particular attention to methods of analyzing and imitating nonfiction prose, looking to the forms, evidence, and underlying assumptions of texts as well as exploring craft processes to develop our own arguments in a variety of genres of nonfiction prose.
This class will require tons of reading and writing, both in and out of class, as well as some workshopping. Grades will be based on attendance (crucial), in-class behavior (exemplary), completion of all assignments (imitations, analyses, and genre writings), and interim and final projects. Class attendance is vital; students who fail to attend the first day will be dropped unless they make prior arrangements with the instructor.

LTWR 100

SHORT FICTION
WRITING FOR CHILDREN

Instructor: Fanny Howe

This is a class in writing for children ages 6-9, emphasizing stories that can be read aloud. There will be weekly writing and reading assignments, and students will be expected to produce two little books with illustrations at the end.

LTWR 100

SHORT FICTION

Instructor: Sarah Schulman

We will read great writers and try to learn craft from their example. Weekly writing exercises and occasional workshopping of longer pieces will be required as well as weekly critical writing on the assigned texts. Readings include work by Delmore Schwartz, Ralph Ellison, Nawal El Saadawi, Jim Thompson, Zora Neal Hurston, Kathy Acker, Fydor Dostoyevsky. Pre-requisite: LTWR 8A

Required Books: Woman At Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, The Killer Inside M by Jim Thompson, Notes From Underground by Fydor Dostoyevsky.

LTWR 100

SHORT FICTION
DRAMATIC WRITING

Instructor: John Herschel

A workshop designed to encourage writing of short plays and dramatic monologues. There will be discussion of student work together with analysis and discussion of the finest examples of dramatic writing from the present and previous ages. Students will complete a number of short plays by the end of the term. Pre-requisite: LTWR 8A.

LTWR 102

POETRY

Instructor: Quincy Troupe

A workshop for students who want to read some of the best and most exciting contemporary poets and who want to take their poetic skill to the cutting edge of the art. We will be studying contemporary forms such as American free verse. Poets who will be studied include Amira Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Thylais Moss, Joy Harjo, John Ashberry, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Paul Beatty, Jorie Graham, Arthur Sze, Sharon Olds, and others. There will be intense discussion of student work as well as writing of poems by workshop members. Prerequisite: LTWR 8B.

LTWR 113

INTERCULTURAL WRITING
REREADING 'THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY'

Instructor: John Cayley

By exploring the history, use and characteristics of the Chinese script, this course aims to highlight important aspects of writing more broadly; to ask such questions as, "If we understand the Chinese system of writing to possess such and such qualities and characteristics, then what does this tell us about the potentialities of writing itself (in any language or script)? How can we use what know about the Chinese script to inform our own contemporary writing practices?"
We will reread Ezra Pound's edition of Ernest Fenollosa's famous essay, a transcultural literary manifesto which has projected a European "hallucination of Chinese writing" (Derrida) over identity and into the corpus of Modernism itself. To contextualize our rereading, we will study selected texts on the Chinese script and literature (classical poetry in particular); writing in English which has been formally influenced by (mis)understandings of the script; and relevant texts from contemporary theory which address the problems we will face (especially Derrida's /Of Grammatology/).
This is a course about Writing, but taking its source materials and culture references from the Chinese tradition. You do not need to know anything in advance about Chinese language and literature to take this course (although even sinologists will be welcome). Course work will include one short critical paper and a writing project.

LTWR 115

EXPERIMENTAL WRITING

Instructor: Quincy Troupe

This course will examine experimental writing in prose being written today in North and South America. Writers who will be discussed in class are Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Ishmeal Reed, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and Annie Proulx. Prerequisite: LTWR 8B.

LTWR 115

EXPERIMENTAL WRITING
HYPERTEXT/CYBERTEXT/POETEXT: WRITING IN PROGRAMMABLE AND NETWORKED MEDIA

Instructor: John Cayley

This course offers a practical and theoretical introduction to the vast new working spaces which have been opened up for writing by programmable and networked media. While focusing on the modulations of innovative poetics which these media make potential, we will cover the recognized and emergent topics and genres in the field: hypertext, so-called interactive literature, Web literature, cybertext, multi-user textuality and so on.
Working collaboratively -- while allowing those individuals who so wish to contribute integral pieces -- we will develop a networked writing project. Apart from the concepts and issues (of closure, authorship, etc.) which this networked writing will inevitably introduce, we will also address writing as "pro*gram*ming" or "prior writing", as inscription prior to (literary or post-literary) performances which are then realized through (electronic) publication.
In short, the course will offer an introduction to: how computer systems have been used to change the way we read and write; work being done in this field in a variety of forms; theoretical issues involved; specific technologies which we will use to create (post-)literary content.
Students *do not* need to have any extensive prior computing experience to attend this course, although familiarity with word processors/text editors will be assumed. If you want to attend the course and insist on using other media (e.g. paper and pencil) for the exercises/writing experiments, you would be very welcome, so long as you allow your work to be incorporated into the collaborative project. Students will be expected to become familiar with email (if they are not already) and learn some basic HTML, Hypertext Markup Language for the World Wide Web. They will also be encouraged to experiment with scripting languages.
The course will be strongly inclined towards the practice and theory of content production; it will *not* be transfixed by technological forms.

LTWR 120

PERSONAL NARRATIVE
WRITING THE SOCIAL SELF

Instructor: Rae Armantrout

Personal narrative is the border where autobiography meets fiction or poetry. This course will explore the way we construct identity in writing. Students will be asked to draw the material from their own background to create memoirs, travel journals, diaries, etc. There will be regular small group discussion of student writing and rewriting. Assigned readings will include Kerouac, Woolf, Creeley, Nin, Gurston and Shepard. Prerequisite: LTWR 8A.

LTWR 121

REPORTAGE

Instructor: Robert Dorn

This workshop assumes that American journalists are captives of a political economy and that fresh, daring fact-based writing will inevitably find publication.

LTWR 127

GENERAL NON-FICTION PROSE WORKSHOP

Proposed Instructor: Sarah Schulman

We will read and analyze non-fiction work that challenges our imaginations and value systems and write essays in response. Critical annotations of assigned texts will be required as well as weekly essays by students on related topics. Readings include work by Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, bell hooks. Pre-requisite: LTWR 8C.

LTWR 144

THE TEACHING OF WRITING

Instructor: Melvyn Freilicher

This class intends to be a solid introduction to teaching both writing and editing. To train students to edit and help develop the work of other college students in fiction and non-fiction prose writing courses, we will work on editing techniques using student exercises from LTWR 8A and 8D. Students will also design new exercises and syllabi for these courses, some of which will be tried out and evaluated by members of the class as part of our ongoing discussions about connecting practice to theory. In particular, we'll be looking at the ideas of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Elisabeth Ellsworth, and others who deal with issues of multiculturalism and feminism and critique traditional pedagogical theory. LTWR 144 is the prerequisite for LTWR majors (having completed the entire 8 sequence) who want to go on to apply to work as tutors in 8A, C or D next year, under the category of LTWR 195 (Apprentice Teaching). Prerequisite: LTWR 8A, B, and C or D.

*NOTE: to Literature/Writing students

VIS 130

PERSONAL NARRATIVE

Instructor: Eleanor Antin

Literature/Writing students may apply credit from this course toward their LTWR major or minor.