COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 252
MODERNISM
Taiwanese Modernism in the Japanese Period
Instructor: Ping-hui Liao
The course offers historical and theoretical perspectives on the
development of Taiwanese modernist expressive cultures between the 1930s
and 40s when the island was still under Japanese rule and underwent
coercive imperial subjectification processes. Topics to be considered
include: colonialism and modernity, print culture and art criticism,
detective and science fiction, experimental theater, modernism and
music, documentary films, new literature movement, realism debates,
kominka literature and its re-assessment, tradition and innovation,
travel and identity formation, landscape art and exotic memories, among
others. Reading materials will be in English translation. Operant
knowledge of Chinese and Japanese languages is recommended though not
required.
Grading Criteria: Class participation and discussion 30%; Presentations
30%; Term Paper 40%
Texts to be used
Ping-hui Liao and David Wang, ed., Taiwan under
Japanese Colonial Rule (Columbia, UP, 2006);
Lawrence Rainey, ed., Modernism: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2005);
Plus Xerox materials.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 285
LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS
Modernists as Theorists, Theorists as Modernists
Instructor: Amelia Glaser
In this seminar we will examine the writers of the European avant-garde
and the literary theory they generated. Of the many things that changed
in the immediate aftermath of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution,
perhaps the most important to literature was the individual’s perception
of his own subjectivity. This transformation included the radicalization
of the subject and new perspectives on the function of language,
religion, memory, and nationalism. We will look closely at the cult of
the poetic “I”, the formalist concept of “estrangement,” and the
Modernists’ obsession with time. We will supplement readings of several
avant-garde writers (Shklovsky, Weil, Tzara and Tsvetaeva, among others)
with readings from key figures that influenced their theories of
literature and aesthetics, including Nietzsche, Husserl, Saussure and
Bergson.
CULTURAL STUDIES 225
INTERDISCIPLINARY AND HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF CULTURAL TEXTS
Cinema and Modernity
Instructor: Yingjin Zhang
This seminar is an in-depth examination of the recent theorization of
cinema and modernity, which constitutes one of the most exciting
developments in film theory and film history. The core issues to
explore range from proto- and pre-cinematic experiences, cinema and the
invention of modern life, the cinema of attractions and the aesthetics
of astonishment, spectatorship and the public sphere, melodrama and
modernity, vernacular modernism, cinema as a global vernacular and
collective sensorium (Germany, Japan, Russia/Soviet Union), to
cosmopolitanism and urban culture in Shanghai. Readings cover
selections from Thomas Elsaesser, Ann Friedberg, Tom Gunning, Miriam
Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, Siegfried Kracauer, Leo Lee, Ben Singer,
Vanessa Schwartz, Linda Williams, Zhen Zhang, among many others. Weekly
film screenings consist of works by such artists as Busby Berkeley,
Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi, Charles
Musser, Abram Room, Walther Ruttmann, Shen Xiling, King Vidor, Dziga
Vertov, Josef von Sternberg, Wu Yonggang, Yuan Muzhi, and Zhang Shichuan.
Requirements
10% - Class attendance, active discussion, film screenings
30% - 3 position papers (1 single-space page each) and classroom
presentations (10 minutes each) 10% - midterm annotated bibliographic
project with a topic description (2-3 single-space pages)
10% - a thesis statement and an outline (2-3 single-space pages)
40% - research paper (15 double-space pages)
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Writing About Slavery
Instructor: Page duBois
We will look at various forms of writing about slavery, including
histories, slave narratives, humanitarian appeals, memoirs, historical
novels, and science fiction.
Readings will include selections from ancient historians on Spartacus'
slave revolt, Howard Fast's novel Spartacus, Frederick Douglass'
autobiography, Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship, Lose Your Mother: A
Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, by Saidiya Hartman, Kevin Bales
and Rebecca Cornell's Slavery Today, Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by
Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans, and work by Octavia
Butler and/or Philip K. Dick.
Students' papers may experiment with other forms beyond expository
academic prose in their work on the transhistorical phenomenon of
slavery.
CULTURAL STUDIES 250
TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Instructor: Winifred Woodhull
This seminar will look at literary and critical
texts originally written in English, French, and Spanish (read in
English translation) dealing with the history and the legacies of
slavery, indenture, colonialism, and imperialism in the Caribbean, with
some attention as well to the U.S. South, notably Louisiana. Critical
readings will be extracted from recent scholarly works such as Sibylle
Fisher, Modernity Disavowed, Christopher Miller, The French
Atlantic Triangle, Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks, Brent Hayes
Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, and Joseph Roach, Cities of
the Dead as well as Roach's recent article on Irish laborers in 19th c.
New Orleans. The criticism will be read in tandem with the following
20th c. literary texts: Charles Chesnutt, Paul Marchand, F.M.C.,
Patricia Powell, The Pagoda, André Schwarz-Bart, A Woman Named
Solitude, Aimé Césaire, Notebook for a Return to the Native Land,
Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones, and Junot Dîaz’ recent
bestseller, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The critical
and literary texts deal mainly with Haiti, the Dominican
Republic, Cuba, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Jamaica.
There will be no formal presentations, but regular
attendance (ie at all 10 meetings), thorough preparation, and active
participation will be expected. Each student will be required to write
a 12-15 page research paper, preferably on a topic that dovetails with
other research interests, to be handed in during finals week.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
246
VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Come Hell or Hybridity: Ideology and the Victorian Verse Novel
Instructor:
Margaret A. Loose
In the middle decades of the 19th century, the respectable and
long-established genre of poetry cross-pollinated with the soaring
late-comer to the literary marketplace: the novel, forming a hybrid of
genres that had previously been considered as antagonistic and
competing. Early literary critics founded their profession on policing
the distinction between a high cultural realm for the poetic and what
they saw as the threat of an emerging mass (i.e. narrative) market.
Bakhtin came along and introduced some concepts (heteroglossia,
dialogism, etc.) that legitimated the novel’s challenges to dominant
culture (and are very useful in studying the verse novel), but
simultaneously defined the novelistic against the poetic and totally
omitted the verse novel from his consideration. Arguably, though, as
critics such as Dino Felluga have suggested, the verse novel might be
even more subversive than the novel precisely because of its hybridity,
resisting on one hand the “specialization of the very discipline of
literary criticism and, on the other, both the monological tendencies of
the Romantic lyric and the hegemonic [middle-class, heterosexual,
domestic] ideologies of the bourgeois novel.” In this course, we will
read several examples of Victorian verse novels that center on perverse
or failed domestic relationships, while thinking about how both the
content and the form of each work self-consciously challenge ideological
discourses of gender, genre, nature, marriage, and objective truth.
Included will probably be R. Browning’s The Ring and the Book, E. B.
Browning’s Aurora Leigh, George Meredith’s Modern Love,
and Arthur Clough’s Amours de Voyage (or possibly Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King), and they’ll be available at Groundwork
Books.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
252
STUDIES OF MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE
AND CULTURE
The Ends of American Exceptionalism
Instructor: Lisa Lowe
This course has been cancelled for Fall 2009.
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
259
TRANSNATIONAL LITERARY STUDIES
Transnational Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture, 1886-1929
Instructor: Shelley Streeby
In this seminar, we will survey several different forms and genres of
literature that were connected to transnational movements between 1886
and 1929. Each week, we will raise questions about whether and how the
text we are studying is a form of transnational literature and we will
consider issues of authorship, language, translation, place(s) of
publication, and audience(s) in order to formulate answers. We will also
pay special attention to how writers responded to the violence of this
period, including the police violence at Chicago’s Haymarket Square and
the execution of the anarchists in 1887; colonialism in the Philippines,
Hawaii, and the Belgian Congo; lynching; the revolutions of the era,
especially in Russia and Mexico; and World War I.
We will begin by reading one of José Martí’s newspaper articles about
the execution and funeral of the Chicago anarchists as well as the
“famous speeches” of the anarchists that were compiled and published by
Lucy Parsons. Next, we will consider José Rízal’s novel El
Filibusterismo/Subversion (1891), Lili’uokalani’s narrative
Hawai’i’s Story by Hawai’i’s Queen (1898), and Mark Twain’s
satirical pamphlet King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905) as different
examples of the transnational cultures of anti-imperialism. During the
next two weeks we will read US-Mexico borderlands texts that focus on
the violence directed at Yaqui Indians during the Porfiriato as well as
the violence of the Mexican Revolution, including Jane Holden Kelly’s
Yaqui Women; selections from journalist John Kenneth Turner’s
Barbarous Mexico and from the speeches and writings of Ricardo
Flores Magón, the leader of the revolutionary Partido Liberal Mexicano;
and Leonor Villegas De Magnon’s La Rebelde/The Rebel, an
autobiography that was written in the 1920s but remained unpublished
until 1994. The following unit begins with Ida B. Wells’ travel writing
and journalism about her visit to England to build support for the
anti-lynching movement. Next, we will consider a wide range of
selections from the work of Caribbean migrants, intellectuals, and
organizers such as Hubert H. Harrison, Cyril Briggs, Amy Jacques Garvey,
Marcus Garvey, and Claude McKay, who were affiliated with and helped to
promote a wide range of the transnational movements of the World War I
era. Finally, we will read some of Emma Goldman’s speeches and part of
her autobiography Living My Life in order to trace debates over violence
among participants in transnational movements from the Haymarket era
through the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Throughout, we will also raise questions about representations of
violence in the burgeoning visual culture of this period, including
illustrated newspapers such as Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s;
photography, cartoons, and film. We will also think about the changing
boundaries of gender and sexuality in the transnational movements of the
era and in representations of and responses to violence in visual
culture. Students will be asked to do a presentation on a secondary
source, from a list that I provide, that either places one of the
required texts in the context of contemporary or later debates over
violence and visual culture or that helps us understand scholarly
debates about the texts and movements we are considering. Sources on the
list include work by Jacqueline Goldsby, Michelle Stephens, Julio Ramos,
Joshua Reynolds, Rodrigo Lazo, Benedict Anderson, Amy Kaplan, Kevin
Gaines, Ula Taylor, Shawn Michelle Smith, Kate Baldwin, Brent Hayes
Edwards, Emma Perez, Claire Fox, and others.
LITERATURES IN SPANISH
272
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY STUDIES
Teoría,Política, narrative Situación de América Latina en torno al 2000
Instructor: Jaime Concha
El seminario consistirá en el examen de una serie de propuestas
que se han venido haciendo por parte de críticos y especialistas
latinoamericanos en el último tercio del siglo XX y a comienzos del
actual. Se verán algunas orientaciones metodológicas y algunos aspectos
del fenómeno narrativo en varios países del subcontinente.
LITERATURE THEORY 200A
TEXT/CULTURE/CRITICAL PRACTICE
Instructor: Meg Wesling
In this first course of the theory sequence we will survey recent
interventions in literary and cultural criticism, and study some key
selections from significant scholars in the field. Possible required
books include Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction (second ed., 2000), David Macey, The Penguin
Dictionary of Critical Theory (2000), and Terry Eagleton,
Literary Theory (2nd edition, 1996); a course packet with
selections from Benedict Anderson, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler,
Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud,
Elizabeth Grosz, Stuart Hall, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Georg
Lukacs, Karl Marx, Denise Riley, Edward Said, Hortense Spillers, and
Gayatri Spivak, among others, will be required.
LITERATURES IN THEORY 255
MODERN ART MOVEMENTS AND AESTHETICS
Instructor:
Michael
Davidson
An introduction to modernist aesthetics with a focus on art and literary movements. Particular attention to be placed on relationships between modern literary movements (Realism, Imagism, Surrealism) and their counterparts in visual arts, music, dance, and theater, and the ways in which literary movements are components of or responses to issues of political and social identity.
Pre-authorization is required for students not enrolled in the Literature Department’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Please contact Tania Mayer (MFA Program Coordinator) for more information.