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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 274
GENRE STUDIES
Arthurian Romance
Instructor: Lisa Lampert-Weissig
Arthurian Romance and the Apocalypse: Medieval Texts and their
Contemporary Uses
The strong apocalyptic strain present in medieval culture clearly
inflects Arthurian romance, creating what critic Valerie Lagorio has
called romance’s “apocalyptic mode.” This course will examine the role
of this mode in Arthurian romance and also use this element to locate
romance within medieval literature more broadly. We will begin by
reading key biblical texts, including selections from the Hebrew Bible
and The Book of Revelation, as well as some patristic and early medieval
understanding of the Apocalypse. We will then use these texts as a basis
for readings of portions of the Lancelot-Grail cycle and Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s “Prophecies of Merlin.” We will also look at a variety of
medieval apocalyptic texts from other genres, including drama and dream
vision.
The final few weeks of course will be spent examining the legacy of this
apocalypticism and the role of the figure of the Anti-Christ today,
including examples such as The Late Great Planet Earth, the “Left
Behind” Series, and contemporary U.S. political discourse.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 274
GENRE STUDIES
Literary and Cultural Translation
Instructor: Wai-lim Yip
Translation is a “pass.port” between two cultures in which they face
each other and through which they pass from one state to the other. It
involves confrontation, negotiation and modification of cultural codes
and systems. It requires a “double consciousness” which includes the
state of mind of the original author (Source Horizon) as it was
constituted by “the power of tradition, of centuries of race
consciousness, of agreement, of association” and that of the expressive
potentials of the target language (Target Horizon) which has it own
“power of tradition, of centuries of race consciousness, of agreement,
of association.” In this seminar, we will expose the pitfalls of the
myth of faithful translation by examining the various treacherous modes
of representation in the hermeneutical/ interpretive act, both
aesthetically and culturally. The examination will include political
maneuvers in the act of translation to forge conceptual frameworks by
which certain cultural changes are propelled. This often involves, both
in the aesthetic and in the political acts, letting the Target Horizon
mask and master as well as change the Source Horizon. In this seminar,
through the discussion of practices and theories of translation, we want
to promote an interreflection between cultural systems leading to a
truly open dialogue.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 282
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY
French Theory
Instructor: Alain J.-J. Cohen
French theory during the last part of the XXth century has come to be defined as a second Renaissance or a second Enlightenment. What is “French theory” aside from the mention of the renowned Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze/Guattari, Greimas, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard – not to mention references as well to Althusser, Bourdieu, Damisch, Marin, Metz, Kristeva, et al.,? Is it a unified field? Key texts by these authors will help focus upon issues in structuralism and deconstruction, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic cultural critiques, narratology and text semiotics, culturology, context, de-context, and re-context, modernism and post-modernism, art theory and film theory, and cutting-edge theories about simulation and hypertext. At the end of this seminar, students will learn to focus upon and to problematise:
- The various systems (or lack thereof) conveyed by “language-models”, “micropolitics of power”, “technologies of the self”, “deconstruction”, “simulacra theory”, “the Unconscious is the discourse of the Øther”, et al., proposed therein, with their cohorts of vibrant questions, polemics and topics, and their brilliant advocates. This will be examined in seminar-style so as to go beyond “everything you wanted to know about…” impressions;
- The intermesh of such “French theory” with its prehistory and genealogy, from futurism and surrealism to phenomenology and existentialism (Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir, et al.), and with the Frankfurt school (in particular Benjamin and Marcuse), leading to 1960s linguistics and later language-based models;
- The intermesh of such “French theory” within sex and gender studies, identity politics, multicultural studies and tech/global/virtual studies as “French theory” morphed in synergy with its reception, interpretation and transposition in the UK and in the US;
- The avatars of French theory today, specifically in the field of art theory (Damisch), and hypertext (cf. Landow’s Hypertext 2.0).
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Gender and the Media
Instructor: Winifred Woodhull
This seminar is an introduction to the ways gender and sexuality are
represented and refashioned in and through various contemporary media,
including film, television, alternative video, advertising, music,
e-mail, and the internet. Because gender and sexuality are entwined with
other aspects of identity such as race, ethnicity, social class,
culture, and geopolitical location, we will look at those aspects of
media representations as well.
We will consider the political economy of the media, that is, the
concentration of corporate ownership and its political effects of
reinforcing social and economic inequalities the world over, including
many that are gender-related. When a few large corporate entities in a
small part of the world (the US, Europe, Japan) largely control the
content and dissemination of information and entertainment, democracy is
not well served.
However, in this seminar we will emphasize the ways the restrictive
power of dominant media industries is continually challenged by certain
cultural texts (such as movies, television shows, and alternative video)
as well as by audiences' critical and playful responses to both dominant
and alternative representations. We will also see how individuals and
marginalized groups in various parts of the world may turn the media to
their own purposes, using it in new ways and altering its effects and
significance. Our concern throughout will be to see how gender and
sexuality are expressed and transformed, and to understand why these
expressions and transformations matter.
Each student will do a presentation and write a 12-page research paper.
Students may earn French credit for this seminar. Note that the course
material will NOT focus on the francophone world; it will address a
range of cultures. However, students opting for French credit may write
a paper that deals with the media in a francophone society, drawing on
relevant French-language research. The research project could therefore
address gender and the media in Belgium, Switzerland, Romania, or France
(including the Caribbean overseas departments of Guadeloupe and
Martinique, or the overseas territories of Tahiti and New Caledonia); in
any francophone African country (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mali,
Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Togo, Senegal); or in
Lebanon, Quebec, etc. (I don't believe that Vietnam still qualifies as
francophone; English has become the lingua franca there, apart from
Vietnamese languages.)
CULTURAL STUDIES 256
CULTURAL STUDIES OF TECHNOSCIENCE
Instructor: Roddey Reid
This course will review some of the most influential engaged work in
interdisciplinary and cultural studies of science, technology, and
medicine of the last fifteen years. It will explore work in the cultural
studies, science studies, feminist studies, and queer theory of
scientific practices as they make and unmake “nature,” “society,” and
“culture.” Topics may include the HIV/AIDS pandemic, genetic research,
electronic communities, reproductive technologies, psychiatry, and
“postcolonial” science, and materials will range from visual culture to
scholarly publications, science fiction to high theory. One particular
focus will be what is meant by “interdisciplinarity,” especially in
relation to the humanities and social sciences and their commitments to
textual analysis, archival research, and fieldwork.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 245
NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN STUDIES
Cultures of Sentiment and Sensation: Race, Class, and Sexuality in the
Long 19th Century
Instructor: Shelley Streeby
Sentiment and sensation were keywords in the United States in the nineteenth century. In this seminar, we will read a variety of texts that will help us to think about sentimentalism and sensationalism as two converging yet distinct, affect-driven modes for representing bodies. We will construct genealogies of the cultures of sentiment and sensation that will allow us to investigate their 18th century antecedents as well as their persistence, in different forms, in the 20th century and today. Most of the required reading will consist of key literary, historical, and theoretical texts on sentiment and sensation. We will read parts of Peter Brooks’ The Melodramatic Imagination and Linda Williams’ Playing the Race Card in order to understand sentimentalism and sensationalism as forms of melodrama. Next, we will consider influential work on the gender and race politics of sentimentalism, including the Jane Tompkins-Ann Douglas debate, the influential anthologies The Culture of Sentiment and Sentimental Men, and work by Saidiya Hartman, Eve Sedgwick, and Lauren Berlant. Then we will turn to critics such as Michael Denning, Eric Lott, and Neil Harris as we examine the culture of sensation, including sensational newspapers, story papers, pamphlet novelettes, and dime novels as well as other sensational cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy and P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. Finally, we will think about the significance of sentiment and sensation in the visual cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by reading some of Laura Wexler’s book on photography, Tender Violence, as well as work by Amy Kaplan, Susan Gilman, Jane Gaines, Jackie Stewart, and Tom Gunning on class, race, empire, gender and sexuality, and early cinema. Our goal will be to understand sentiment and sensation as keywords in nineteenth-century US literary studies as well as in allied fields such as theater and film studies, labor history, ethnic and cultural studies, and sexuality and gender studies. Students will also be asked to do additional readings of primary, canonical and non-canonical sentimental and sensational texts to be selected from a list that I will provide
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 281
PRACTICUM IN LITERARY RESEARCH AND CRITICISM
Early Modern Studies
Instructor: Louis A. Montrose
This practicum is designed and intended for doctoral students working in
early modern studies who are currently writing their dissertations or
qualifying exam papers. Although our focus will be on framing,
organizing, and drafting these writing projects, with each participant
presenting work-in-progress for detailed group analysis and critique, we
will also analyze issues of method, style, and argument in
representative critical essays in the field; explore bibliographical and
research resources; and discuss issues related to scholarly publication
and the academic profession.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH 258
SPANISH-AMERICAN PROSE
La transculturación narrativa y el Boom
Instructor: Milos Kokotovic
En este seminario vamos a leer varias novelas representativas de dos
tendencias literarias de mediados del siglo XX: lo que Ángel Rama llamó
la transculturación narrativa, y la nueva novela latinoamericana del
Boom de los años 60. Todas estas novelas tratan, en parte, la
modernización y sus consecuencias durante la época desarrollista en
América Latina (1940-1970). También jugaron un papel importante en la
renovación de la narrativa latinoamericana en los años 50 y 60. Pero sus
innovaciones formales provienen de diferentes fuentes: en el caso de la
transculturación narrativa, las tradiciones culturales autóctonas de los
grupos indígenas y campesinos marginados por la modernización, y en el
caso del Boom, la literatura modernista europea y norteamericana.
Analizaremos cómo estas novelas utilizan sus respectivas fuentes para
representar los conflictos sociales provocados por la modernización en
sociedades fuertemente divididas. Los ríos profundos (1958) y
El zorro de arriba y el zorro de debajo (1970) de José María
Arguedas nos servirán de ejemplos de la transculturación narrativa. En
cuanto al Boom, vamos a leer La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) de
Carlos Fuentes, La casa verde (1966) de Mario Vargas Llosa y
Cien años de soledad (1967) de Gabriel García Márquez.
LITERATURE THEORY 200B
PROBLEMS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY
Instructor: Fatima El-Tayeb
In this class, we will explore the ways in which universalist notions of
text, author and audience were progressively challenged and complicated
throughout the 20th Century. While our main focus is feminism, in order
to fully appreciate the genesis of feminist perspectives on these issues
and their relevance to subjects beyond immediate questions of gender, we
will look at a number of related intellectual movements (such as queer
theory, diaspora and postcolonial studies) sharing a similar position on
the margins of dominant discourses and a similar interest in challenging
the master narrative(s). This will remind us that feminist theory is
neither a monolithic unity nor separable from larger questions of
identity, representation, and agency - in art, society, and academia.
Textbooks available at Groundwork Books
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, New York: Harvest Books 1989
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, New York: Random House 1993
- Elisabeth Bronfen/Misha Kavka, Feminist Consequences. Theory for the
New Century, New York: Columbia University Press 2001
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