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  • COMP 110: Introduction to Comparative Literature

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Comparative literature involves reading and analyzing literature that represents different times, movements, cultures, and media. In this class, we will study English translations of texts from eras spanning the ancient to the contemporary; literary movements including Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism; national traditions arising in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and media including prose fiction, the graphic novel, and film. Throughout the course, we will consider what it means to think about all these different works as literary texts. To help with this, we will also read selections of literary theory that defines literature and its goal in abstract or philosophical terms. Assignments will focus on close reading of relatively short texts by authors such as Cervantes, Garcia Marquez, Kleist, Tolstoy, Maupassant, Satrapi, Wilde, Shklovsky, Bakhtin, and Foucault. All readings will be in English.
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  • COMP 111: The Nature of Narrative

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this course, we will read first-rate fiction by first-rate writers from a wide variety of traditions and eras in an effort to understand the meaning of narrative. How does narrative technique shape our understanding of a given text? In what ways and for what purposes do authors create different narrators to present a story? Why do we often read and write similar kinds of tales, and what does this repetition do for us? Our readings will include works by Maupassant, Dinesen, Tanizaki, Tolstoy, Premchand, and Cortazar. We will also consider some pertinent theoretical pieces. All readings in English.
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  • COMP 117: Introduction to Cultural Theory

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course has a clear purpose. If you had signed up for a course in biology, you would know that you were about to embark on the systematic study of living organisms. If you were registered for a course on the American Civil War, you would know that there had been an armed conflict between the northern and southern states in the 1860s. But if you decide you want to study "culture," what exactly is it that you are studying? The aim of this course is not to come up with handy and reassuring definitions for this word, but to show you why it is so hard to come up with such definitions. People fight about what the word "culture" means, and our main business will be to get an overview of that conceptual brawl. We will pay special attention to the conflict between those thinkers who see culture as a realm of freedom or equality or independence or critical thought and those thinkers who see culture as a special form of bondage, a prison without walls. The course will be organized around short theoretical readings by authors ranging from Matthew Arnold to Constance Penley, but we will also, in order to put our new ideas to the test, watch several films (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Silence of the Lambs, The Lord of the Rings) and listen to a lot of rock & roll. Why do you think culture matters? Once you stop to pose that question, there's no turning back.
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  • COMP 139: Metafiction

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course will examine ways in which literary works reflect on their status as texts. We'll look at the formal pleasures and puzzles generated by techniques including frame narratives, recursion, and self-reference, in novels, films, and stories by Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Kelly Link, Michel Gondry, Paul Park, and others. Ultimately, we will use the study of metafiction to focus a larger inquiry into the socializing force of language and self-consciousness in human development. Note that students will be required to use, as well as interpret, metafictional techniques in much of their assigned writing.
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  • COMP 156: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Jazz

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Taking its title from the Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which interprets the blackbird in different ways, this course similarly explores a more complex, multi-layered perspective on jazz, from jazz and American democracy to jazz in visual art. Accordingly, the course introduces students to several genres, including historical documents, cultural criticism, music, literature, film, photography and art. The course does not draw on a musicological method but rather a socio-cultural analysis of the concept, music and its effect--so students are not required to have any prior musical knowledge or ability. In this writing intensive course, students will write short close analyses of multiple types of media, ultimately building up to an argumentative essay. This EDI course explores the musical expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of jazz signify on institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to contest it.
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  • COMP 204: Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: From Revolution to Perestroika

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Whether despite or precisely because of the enormous historical and political turbulence in twentieth-century Russia, the intensity of its cultural life was equally unprecedented. Over the period of nearly seventy years, Russian literature went through a number of major stages that defined its poetics and ideology: the Silver Age and its decline; the Revolution, the Civil War and the rise of Socialist Realism as the official literary method; the exodus of Russian writers abroad in the 1920s; the birth of a new proletarian type, worshiped by Soviet authors and mocked by the anti-Soviet ones; the Second World War; the Thaw and de-Stalinization, when the Gulag seemed to have floated to the surface; another wave of tightening of the regime during the "stagnation period," the dissident movement and the Cold War; another mass emigration to Europe, Israel and the U.S.; and finally -- the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the rise of Russian postmodernism. As we discuss these and other topics of twentieth-century Russian culture, we will find ourselves immersed into the mechanisms of literary humor and comicality (e.g., in Mikhail Zoshchenko's short stories and Ilf and Petrov's picaresque novel The Twelve Chairs), the elements of the supernatural (in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita), the ways of how Russian writers portray urban space (e.g., Moscow, in Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow to the End of the Line), and how Soviet history is reinvented when censorship is replaced with market economy (in Viktor Pelevin's Generation P). Literary texts will be supplemented with occasional film screenings. All readings and discussions are in English.
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  • COMP 206: The Book of Job and Joban Literature

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    The Book of Job has often been described as the most philosophical book of the Hebrew Bible. The story of one man's struggle to understand the cause of his suffering and his relationship to God represents the finest flowering of the Near Eastern wisdom literature tradition. Through its exploration of fundamental issues concerning human suffering, fate and divinity, and the nature of philosophical self-examination, Job has served as a touchstone for the entire history of existential literature. At the same time, the sheer poetic force of the story has inspired some of the greatest artistic and literary meditations in the Western tradition. This course will engage in a close reading of the Book of Job in its full cultural, religious, and historical context with special attention to its literary, philosophical, and psychological dimensions. We will then proceed to investigate key modern works in several genres that involve Joban motifs, themes, and text both explicitly and implicitly. These texts will include Franz Kafka's The Trial, Archibald MacLeish's J.B., Robert Frost's "Masque of Reason," Carl Jung's Answer to Job, and William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job. All readings are in translation.
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  • COMP 208: The Culture of Carnival

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Carnival is a regenerative festival as well as a transgressive one. It is a time for upheavals and recreating for one day, a new world order. Men dress as women, women dress as men, the poor become kings; drink and sex and outrageous behavior is sanctioned. We will look at festivals in such places as New Orleans, Venice, and Rio. Central to this course are the cultural and religious lives of these societies, and how these festivals exist politically in a modern world as theatre and adult play. A variety of sources will be used, such as newspaper accounts, films, photography, personal memoirs and essays on the subject.
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  • COMP 210: Latina/o Language Politics: Hybrid Voices

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In this course we will focus on issues of language and identity in the contemporary lived experience of various U.S. Latina/o communities. We will ask: How are cultural values and material conditions expressed through Latina/o linguistic practices? How do Latina/o identities challenge traditional notions of the relationship between language, culture, and nation? In what ways might Latina/o linguistic practices serve as tools for social change? Building on a discussion of issues such as Standard American English, code-switching (popularly known as "Spanglish"), and Latina/o English, we will also examine bilingual education, recent linguistic legislation, and the English Only movement. We will survey texts taken from a variety of (inter)disciplines, including sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, literature, and education. Both directly and/or indirectly, these works address Latina/o language politics, as well as the broader themes of power, community, ethno-racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, and hybridity.
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  • COMP 213: Reading Jesus, Writing Gospels: Christian Origins in Context

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    What were the religious and cultural landscapes in which Christianity emerged? How did inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world speak about the concept and significance of religion? How have scholars of early Christianity answered these questions? What are the implications of their various readings of early Christian history? In the first half of this course, we shall address these questions by examining the formation of Christianity from its origins as a Jewish movement until its legalization, using a comparative socio-historical approach. In the second half of the course, we shall examine the earliest literature produced by the Jesus movement and consider it within a comparative framework developed in the first half of the course. Prerequisite:    Open to all classes
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