COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 210
CLASSICAL STUDIES
Classical Myth for Post-Classicists
Professor Page duBois
This course will consider theory of myth, especially Bruce Lincoln's work
on myth as narrativized ideology; we will read Oedipus Rex, the Aeneid,
and Ovid's Metamorphoses, all crucial texts for the early modern return to
antiquity. We might then read Lynn Enterline on Petrarch and later
metamorphic texts, Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," Derek Walcot's
Omeros and Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim, which uses the myth of the
family of Oedipus to argue for new queer ideas of family and psyche.
Students will be required to do the reading, participate in discussion,
and write a short paper connecting their ongoing work with that of the
seminar.
CULTURAL STUDIES 210
HISTORY AND CULTURE
Slavery and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865
Professor Sara Johnson
This course examines the importance of the transatlantic slave trade and
the consequent rise and fall of the plantation complex in the extended
Americas to the development of modern capitalism. Focusing on the Age of
Revolution, the course considers seminal authors including Alexis de
Tocqueville (The Old Regime and the French Revolution), Olaudah
Equiano (Interesting Narrative), Moreau de Saint-Méry (Description..
) and Thomas Jefferson (Notes on Virginia) alongside
newspapers, political decrees and visual images of the time. Historical
texts are complemented by fictional material by late eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century authors including Leonora Sansay (Secret History: or
The Horrors of Santo Domingo), Herman Melville (Benito Cereno),
Martin Delaney, (Blake; or the Huts of America) and contemporary
musings concerning the legacy of the Enlightenment, including the work of
Alejo Carpentier (Explosion in the Cathedral), Edouard Glissant (The
Fourth Century), and Caryl Philips (Higher Ground). Twentieth
century historical and economic analyses including the scholarship of
C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins), Eric Williams (Capitalism and
Slavery) and Robin Blackburn (The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery)
provide secondary readings.
CULTURAL STUDIES 260
NATIONAL CULTURES
Literary and Cultural Criticism in Modern China
Professor Yingjin Zhang
Merely a century ago, Chinese intellectuals were preoccupied with a
self-appointed task of defining or constructing a national culture in the
wake of a series of China’s humiliating defeats by Western and Japanese
imperialist powers. Drastically different versions of Chinese national
culture emerged and competed with each other over the century, from
humanist and cosmopolitan to leftist and Maoist and back to revisionist
and deconstructionist. Since the early 1990s, the national—together with
notions of China and Chineseness—has become increasingly suspect, as
scholars have quickly moved to embrace critical theory and discourses of
postmodernism, postcolonialism, and transnationalism in response to the
fundamental transformation of China from a socialist party-state to a
consumer society. In order to survey the rapidly changing critical
terrain and to implement a historical perspective, this seminar aims (1)
to differentiate critical positions in various schools and/or theories of
literature in modern China, (2) to trace out the intellectual influences
(from both Western and Chinese traditions) in the formation of those
positions, and (3) to study the divergence and convergence of literary and
cultural trends in the twentieth century. While the reading material is
structured chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the
present, the focus is placed on critical interventions in mainland China
and the West after the early 1990s. Weekly topics include late Qing
literary theories; discourses of May-Fourth enlightenment; literary
revolution and its discontents; humanization versus politicization;
paradigm shifts from Mao to post-Mao; Chineseness, ethnicity, and
postcoloniality; from modernism to postmodernism?; mapping postsocialism
and postmodernity; as well as globalization, everydayness, and
intellectual politics.
All students interested in Chinese literary criticism, cultural politics, and current debates on ethnicity, postcoloniality, postmodernity, globalization, and transnationalism are welcome. No knowledge of Chinese is necessary, as all required reading is assigned in English, although those who read Chinese are encouraged to pursue the original material.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 222
ELIZABETHAN STUDIES
Professor Louis Montrose
Please see the Literature Graduate Office, room 3139 for a copy of the course description for this course.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 252
STUDIES IN MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Teaching USAmerican Literature, 1865-1910
Professor
Nicole Tonkovich
This seminar has two aims: to acquaint you with the principal literary
texts written in the United States between 1865 and 1910, and to prepare
you to teach courses in this period at both the undergraduate and graduate
level. To accomplish those aims we will read and discuss common readings
relating to theory, pedagogy, and academic politics, as well as those that
offer insights into the literary history of this period. In addition, each
student will pursue individual readings in primary literary texts written
in the period.
Students enrolled in the course will determine their own reading lists for
primary sources. This will allow them to choose to read texts that they
may not have had a chance to read to this point in their careers. As well,
it will allow them to plan their reading to account for other pressures in
their academic schedules. For example, when we discuss Twain, one student
may be reading Huckleberry Finn, while others may be reading Tom
Sawyer or Pudd'n'head Wilson, or several short stories or essays by
Twain.
Seminar discussions will focus less on the intricacies of a given text and
more on an overview of the literary oeuvre of specific writers or groups
of writers, the historical/political context of their writings, the
literary periodization and generic classifications traditionally
associated with this period, and the politics and practicalities of
teaching these primary texts in specific contexts.
I envision this course as being intensively collaborative and will ask
students to share their work with others enrolled in the seminar. For
example, each week students will prepare and distribute classmates a short
summary of their primary reading (no longer than a single page), a
recommendation about its possible use as a text for undergraduate or
graduate teaching, and a list of several of the best secondary sources
relating to that text, with a one- to two-sentence summary of each.
Rather than write a final seminar or conference paper as a final project,
students will produce two syllabi and distribute them to all seminar
members: one for an upper-division thematic course or upper-division
survey, and one for a graduate seminar in the period. Students will also
write a short (5-page) theoretically based rationale/justification
explaining the framing and structure of each syllabus.
Students may expect, at the end of the course, to have significantly
expanded their reading repertoire in the late nineteenth-century period;
to have gathered summaries and bibliographic materials about texts they
have not yet read; to have thought about pedagogical issues, methods and
approaches related to this material; to have prepared syllabi that can be
included in a teaching portfolio and used in job interviews; and to have
gathered syllabi from colleagues that will suggest to them a range of
other approaches to the teaching of this material.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 272
CULTURAL TRADITIONS IN ENGLISH
South African Literature During and After Apartheid
Professor Robert Cancel
We will begin with Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, a sincere
and heartfelt novel about the sad socio-cultural situation, that was
embraced by readers world wide. By the early 1950s, young, urban, literate
black South Africans would find disturbing images and assumptions in
Paton's portrayal of their society. We will examine this reaction in the
writings of the so-called "Drum Generation," mostly composed of
reporters/journalists working for what became the most popular
newspaper/periodical in all of anglophone Africa, Drum Magazine, and its
related daily, The Golden City Post. An important secondary text in our
study will be Rob Nixon's Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood," a set of
cultural studies-based essays on South African culture during and after
apartheid. We will also use critical essays by writers of that same
period, such as Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane.
The period after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, would be a particularly
repressive and disheartening time, with many activists and writers
choosing or being forced into exile, an exile that, for those who survived
the intervening years, did not end until the imminent fall of apartheid in
1990. In the 1960s, Nelson Mandela and other activists would be tried and
given life sentences for their anti-apartheid efforts, and artists and
activists in exile would begin protracted struggles to bring apartheid to
world attention and instigate boycotts and embargoes designed to isolate
South Africa from the rest of the world. At this time, most of the
literary messages reaching inside and outside the country were coming from
white writers, in English and in Afrikaans. We will consider texts by
Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, and others to understand the ways they
portrayed the horrors of their country and managed to, for the most part,
escape the official retaliation of a police state. We will also look at
some of the writing of South Africans outside the country: As'kia
(Ezekiel) Mphahlele, Dennis Brutus, etc.
After the 1976 Soweto Rising, several literary/artistic currents would
come together. First, the earlier influences of Steven Biko's "Black
Consciousness" philosophy would inspire writers inside and outside the
country in their choices of themes and images. Second, the mass outrage
that followed events in Soweto would create a new generation of young
people who dedicate their lives to bringing down apartheid. Even as
government repression increased, writers and a growing number of
filmmakers were determined to use their art as a political weapon. At the
same time, writers such as Gordimer, Fugard, Andre
Brink and J.M. Coetzee were adapting
their efforts to meet conditions symbolically and head-on. By the 1980s,
cultural production inside South Africa had taken on a decidedly different
slant and emphasis than that being produced outside the country, in part
mirroring the growing differences between activism inside versus outside
anti-apartheid struggles. We will consider aspects of the cultural
boycott that stirred both anger and ambivalence over Paul Simon's
recording and performing of the music in his
Graceland
album. Similarly, feature films about South Africa, addressing, albeit in
constrained "liberal" frames, apartheid emerged from Hollywood in the
mid-1980s.
Finally, the euphoria following Mandela's release, the reinstatement of opposition parties, and the 1994 election victory for the ANC, would paradoxically spur a different kind of socio-cultural upheaval. What would the "New South Africa" be? And what would be the role of cultural production in the evolving "Rainbow Nation"? Emerging from this period will be a combination of new artists examining heretofore rarely seen themes of gender and the nature of newly won political power. More established writers would also have to wrestle with new expectations and search for new themes. We will look at texts by Zakes Mda, Sindiwe Magona, Coetzee, Lauretta Ngcobo, and Gordimer.
Depending on the size of the seminar, I will assign readings, particularly a variety of secondary sources, to individuals or small groups so that they can report on their findings/reactions to the rest of the class. I also require a ten-page paper at the end of the quarter, based mostly on a text or texts selected by each student.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 272
CULTURAL STUDIES IN ENGLISH
New Directions in Asian American Cultural Studies
Professor Lisa Yoneyama
An Amerasia issue on “Asians in the Americas” (ed. Shirley Hune)
and a special issue of positions, "New Formations, New Questions: Asian
American Studies” (ed. Lisa Lowe) each introduced a number of analytical
perspectives and research concerns that were then emergent in Asian
American studies. Though varyingly, they were part of a movement to shift
Asian American Studies from a U.S.-centered, linear,
immigration-assimilation-model paradigm to one that brings into scope the
workings of global capitalism, the history of U.S. imperialism,
militarism, and the transnational formation of citizenship, publicity and
public spheres. During the last two years or so, a substantial number of
anthologies and monographs have appeared that further this line of
investigation and pursue research questions that highlight the
transnational, diasporic dimensions of Asian American intellectual,
literary and other cultural activities. Through examining this particular
cluster of recent works, the course explores the paradigmatic shifts in
Asian American cultural studies to consider their implications within the
larger context of the human sciences. At the same time, the course will
offer a survey of exemplary works that have been integral to the new
knowledge formation concerning Asia and America.
Tentatively, our reading list includes the following: Anne Anlin Cheng,
The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief
(Oxford University Press, 2001); Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On
Asian Americanist Critique (Duke University Press, 2003); David L.
Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke
University Press, 2002); Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects:
Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Duke University Press, 2002); Martin
F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora
(Duke University Press, 2003); Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The
Asian American Body Onstage (Duke University Press, 2002) and more.
LITERATURES IN GERMAN 272
GENRES, TRENDS, AND FORMS
Modern Masculinities
Professor Todd Kontje
Defining German masculinity around 1900 involved thinking about women and
the first feminist movement, of course, but it also entailed reflections
of a broad range of social, political, and historical phenomena that were
coded as feminine or effeminate as well, including modern mass culture,
emerging homosexual subcultures, socialism, anarchism, communism, and
Jews. Reflections on masculinity were central to evolving notions of
Germany identity, coloring understandings of relations between local
provinces and the recently unified nation-state, between Germany and its
European allies and rivals, and between Germany and the larger world of
European empires and colonized peoples. Thinking about contemporary
politics and social issues prompted reflections on the meaning of history
writ large, as modern thinkers transformed optimistic eighteenth-century
narratives of universal history into what Fritz Stern has called “the
politics of cultural despair.”
In this seminar we will examine works that fall into three broad
categories: 1) literary works by Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks, Death in
Venice, Dr. Faustus), Hermann Hesse (Demian), Ernst Jünger (In
Storms of Steel), and Günter Grass (The Flounder). 2)
Non-fictional texts by Bachofen (Matriarchy), Weininger (Sex and
Character), Freud (Totem and Taboo), and Spengler (Decline
of the West). 3) Contemporary theory, including Mosse, The Image of
Man, LeRider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, Sedgewick,
Between Men, and Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Texts will be
ordered in English, but those with a reading knowledge of German are
encouraged to read the works in the original. Students are strongly
encouraged to purchase and read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (trans.
John Woods) over the summer; it will serve as the basis for discussion in
our first meeting in late September.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 224
GOLDEN AGE STUDIES
Professor George Mariscal
Un estudio del concepto "esclavitud/libertad" en la primera modernidad
española (siglos 16 y 17). La formación de la nueva nación llamada "España"
en el siglo 15 coincide con el crecimiento del tráfico en seres humanos y
la llegada de los primeros grupos de esclavos africanos a la península
ibérica en 1444 en adelante. Ya en el siglo 16 el mercado de esclavos en
Sevilla era el mayor punto de distribución para todos los países europeos.
En el seminario nos interesa leer los tratados sobre la esclavitud, las
representaciones literarias que tratan la idea de “libertad” y los textos
filosóficos que exploran la relación entre la política, la libertad y la
ética personal. Las lecturas incluyen textos por Cervantes, Lope de Vega,
Huarte de San Juan, Las Casas, Spinoza y otros.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Novel and Politics
Professor Jaime Concha
A study of literature (narrative, poetry and essay) and political context
at the turn of the century (c. 1980-...).
The Seminar will focus mainly on Colombian, Chilean and Argentinean texts.
LITERATURE THEORY 200A
TEXT / CULTURE / CRITICAL PRACTICE
Professor Nina Zhiri
In this first course of the theory sequence we will study some of the key
texts that have been crucial for current scholarship in fields of literary
and cultural analysis. Readings will include Terry Eagleton’s Literary
Theory (2nd ed.), Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, David Macey’s
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Theory, Michel Foucault’s An
Archeology of Knowledge, as well as a reader.
LITERATURE THEORY 201
CONTEMPORARY THEORETICAL DEBATES AND CRITICAL
DISCOURSES
Professor Don
Wayne
Please see the Literature Graduate Office, room 3139 for a copy of the course
description for this course.