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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will debate the nature of literary meaning and explore the engagement of literature, theory, and culture. In thefirst half of the course we will explore such questions as, What determines the meaning of a text? Can an interpretation of a literary work be deemed true or false? In the second half of the course, we will read works by such authors as Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butlerand as we investigate therole of art in the construction and transformation of political subjectivities. The emphasis will be on exploring anddefending arguments on the issues in productive discussion and frequent short papers.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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3.00 Credits
Focusing on first-person accounts of LGBTQ sexualities, this course examines how changing social and political realities have affected sexual desires and identities, and how individuals represent their experiences of these historical and conceptual shifts. How do these representations of sexuality challenge prevailing ideas about desire and identity? How do they navigate the gender limitations imposed by our language? How do other social identifications, such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, shape these experiences of sexuality? We will read memoirs, autobiographies, and personal essays that reflect a range of LGBTQ identities and experiences, including works by Martin Duberman, Audre Lorde, Leslie Feinberg, Alison Bechdel, Reinaldo Arenas, Kate Bornstein, Gloria Anzaldua, Samuel Delany, David Wojnarowicz, and Michelle Tea. These narratives will be accompanied by a variety of queer and feminist theories of sexuality, some of which interrogate the historical and conceptual limitations of "experience" and "identity." This course fulfills the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it investigates institutions of power and privilege as they have impacted LGBTQ communities, emphasizes empathetic understanding of gender and sexual diversity, and focuses on critical theorization of intersecting differences and identities.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the cinematic portrayal of revolution, civil war, and nationalist struggles in the Middle East. We will look at how Arab directors have interpreted liberation struggles and nationalist revolutions to include broader cinematic discourses on culture, gender, social conflict, and national identity. In addition, we will consider whether Arab films wrestling with recent history may be viewed as harbingers of the upheaval and optimism brought on by the Arab Spring. In covering such rich ground, this course seeks to provide students with a critical introduction to the language of film while presenting a social and historical context to the major conflicts in the region in the past half-century. We will cover feature film production, documentaries, short films, and digital media. While students will view films from across the region, special emphasis will be given to films pertaining to the Egyptian Revolution. Filmmakers include Yousry Nasrallah, Ibrahim El Batout (Egypt); Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia); Ziad Douerie and Nadine Labaki (Lebanon); Elia Sulieman and Michel Khaleifi (Palestine). The course will highlight many of the amateur digital videos that have been instrumental in exposing both the brutalities of the repressive regimes and the triumphs of the mass mobilizations against them. Class will be conducted in English.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of major trends in playwriting and performance practice from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. We will read major playwrights from a variety of national traditions, always considering their works in the context of evolutionary and revolutionary transformations of theatre practice. Artists and movements may include Realism and Naturalism (Stanislavsky, Antoine, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw), the Epic Theatre (Brecht, Piscator), The Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud), the "Absurd," (Beckett, Genet, Pinter) the collectivist avant-garde (Grotowski, Living Theatre, Open Theatre), and more recent playwriting.
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3.00 Credits
In this tutorial, we will read four novels written between 1850 and 1900, all of which focus on the figure of the adulteress: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873-77), Leopoldo Alas y Ure?a's La Regenta (1884-85), and Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1894). For each week of class, students will read one of these primary texts, as well as a selection of secondary literature that will allow us to understand, over the course of the semester, how and why the adulteress played a key role in the cultural imagination of Europe during this time. All works will be read in English translation.
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3.00 Credits
One of the two most consequential texts in human history, the Qur'an is more conscious of itself as text and the work of interpretation that is part of the life of a text. Because it is God's most important sign (and also because it is relatively short) millions have memorized it and the art of Qur'anic recitation is one of the supreme Islamic performing arts. Nevertheless it is primarily as a text that the Qur'an exists in itself and in the minds of Muslims. The text of the Qur'an will thus be the focus of this course, reading it extensively, intensively and repeatedly throughout the semester. We will attend to the structure and variety of styles and topics in the text and to the Qur'an's understanding of itself in relation to other forms of literary expression. We will place the form and content in the context of seventh century c.e. Arab society and attend to the life of the Prophet (PBUH) that provides one crucial framework to the text. Through the lens of tafsir, Qur'anic commentary, we will also use the text to give an initial survey of some of the main theological, philosophical, mystical and legal developments in the Islamic tradition. Finally we will explore some of the aspects of the place of the text in the life of Muslims, including the development of calligraphy and recitation.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
From the endemic warfare of the medieval era to the atomic bombing and the violent explosion of technology in the last century, the end of the world is an idea which has occupied a central place in almost every generation of Japanese literature. Paradoxically, the spectacle of destruction has given birth to some of the most beautiful, most moving, and most powerfully thrilling literature in the Japanese tradition. Texts may be drawn from medieval war narratives like The Tale of the Heike; World War II fiction and films by Ibuse Masuji, Imamura Shohei, and Ichikawa Kon; fantasy and science fiction novels by Abe Kobo, Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu; and apocalyptic comics and animation by Oshii Mamoru, Otomo Katsuhiro, and others. The class and the readings are in English; no familiarity with Japanese language or culture is required.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the fluidity of genres by focusing on tragedy and comedy. Each began as a grafted thing, a hybrid, a fusion of poetic, musical and dance genres previously developed for a variety of occasions outside the Theater of Dionysus. Fusion continued to energize both genres, and we will attend to its effects as we read several tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and comedies by Aristophanes from fifth-century Athens; a comedy by Menander from the early post-Alexandrian Greek world; comedies by Plautus and Terence from republican Rome; and a tragedy by Seneca from the imperial Rome of Nero. We will also read short selections from (or read about) the genres out of which tragedy and comedy were created and re-created, and into which they sometimes made their own incursions (e.g., heroic epic, women's laments, choral and solo lyric poetry, wisdom poetry, oratory, philosophical texts, histories, mime, farce, various kinds of dance, music and visual arts). We will especially attend to the ways tragedy and comedy inflected one another. Critical readings, along with modern productions of ancient tragedies and comedies, will guide us as we consider all these generic exchanges in light of changing conditions and occasions of theatrical performance, other public spectacles shaping the expectations of theater audiences, and the development of writing and reading as modes of performance.
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3.00 Credits
"When we are missing ourselves, we are missing everything." So spoke young Werther in Johann Wolfgang Goethe's groundbreaking novel from 1774. The Sorrows of Young Werther exploded into high Enlightenment Germany, with its emphasis on rationality, on universal human values and on optimism about the future, a bestseller that instead exposed the volatile inner world of an extraordinary individual. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany and Austria, profound interiority surfaced frequently to challenge--and even threaten--what was touted as the triumph of objective, scientific thought. At the same time, the writers and thinkers who explored the deepest recesses of the mind were beset by alienation and despair as they were drawn into inevitable conflict with dominant paradigms. This course will examine literature and thought at the moments when the tectonic plates of reason and supposed unreason converge and collide most forcefully: around 1800 (Goethe, Kleist, and the Romantics), around 1900 (Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Hofmannsthal), the mid-twentieth century with its disastrous consequences (Hitler, Boll, Bachmann) and the end of the millennium (Roth, Jelinek). Some theoretical work (psychoanalytic theory, Adorno, Benjamin) will aid in the process of understanding the literature and philosophy we read. All readings and discussion will be in English translation.
Prerequisite:
One college-level literature course
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3.00 Credits
The aim of this course is to understand literature as a medium intimately related to other media. We shall study contemporary theories of media and intermediality in order to better understand general questions about all art forms and media--but also to be able to specify the medium specific aspects of literature. Theories of intermediality will be the backbone of the course, and a wide variety of examples will be discussed and analyzed. We will begin with the introductory scene of Shrek (Adamson 2001) and move through a handful of example clusters: concrete "visual" poetry, high modernist musical description (short fiction by Mann, Proust, Joyce, Woolf), literary descriptions of visual art (ekphrasis); and Lieder/chansons/rock-lyrics from Schubert to Bob Dylan. We shall also analyze the widespread phenomenon of novel-to-film adaption, exemplified by way of the Beat-poem Howl and the recent film based on the poem and the trial against Allen Ginsberg (Epstein and Friedman 2010).
Prerequisite:
All readings will be done in English but students with knowledge of French, Portuguese, Spanish or German may optionally read portions of the reading in the original languages
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