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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Introduces students already familiar with the methods of practical criticism to the most important movements in contemporary literary theory. Readings are drawn from structuralism, poststructuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and new historicism.
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4.00 Credits
With the theme of colonialism as the unifying principle, explores and compares the work of a number of African writers of Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone traditions.
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1.00 - 4.00 Credits
For completion of the senior honors thesis by qualified majors.
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1.00 - 4.00 Credits
For special projects, including internships, contributing to the major.
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4.00 Credits
From accents and pronouns to swearing and spelling, how one uses language is never value-free. We examine language use as a social practice and analyze how speakers and their language(s) are evaluated and regulated across a range of contexts and cultures. Starting with how children learn to talk, or don't (for example, feral children), we examine speech and silence across a range of societies. We also look at popular attitudes toward language and the practices by which people regulate its use in the media (for example, political correctness), in legal and educational institutions (such as "English only"), and in multilingual cities (such as Barcelona and Montreal) to understand how ideas about language are often recruited to nonlinguistic concerns, such as who should be included or excluded. In thinking about the cultural nature of language in this way, we critically explore issues of identity and authority.
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4.00 Credits
The past century has witnessed violence the character and scale of which are so unique and unprecedented that we have had to create a new vocabulary to describe it (genocide, terrorism) and the ideologies that underlie it (totalitarianism, fundamentalism). To understand modern violence, we examine the origin of the modern mind in the 17th century, when science, based on universal doubt, ended the Age of Faith, and the traditional sources of moral, legal, and political authority lost credibility. Nietzsche called this the "death of God" (and the Devil); it could also be called the death of Good and Evil, leading to another set of new words (nihilism, agnosticism, anomie, anarchy). We study the origins and implications of these developments by reading Shakespeare and John Donne, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, Beckett and Wittgenstein, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, as well as modern mass murderers from Hitler to bin Laden. Finally, we ask whether modern human sciences can help us understand how to reverse or at least limit this escalation of violence.
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4.00 Credits
We read Proust (in translation) as he should be read: hedonistically-with respect and admiration but also with delectation. A prodigious novel, 4,500 pages long, In Search of Lost Time addresses literature's richest theme: desire-its remembrance, transformation, perversion, defeat, and final resurgence in the form of art. More than 100 years old, often said to be the first modern novel, it remains a dazzling portrait of the French beau monde and, even more, of the power and elegance of its author's sensibility. It is still unparalleled in how it combines self-examination with social history, extraordinary psychological acuity with the study of glamour and decadence, and how it merges an audacious explosion of form with explorations of memory, attachment, deception, lust, jealousy, ambition, disappointment, and ennui. It is also one of the most pleasurable and elating reads. Although Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is usually assumed to be France's greatest novelist, his prose is so layered and brilliant that, unfortunately, many readers begin at the beginning and never move past the first 50 pages, reading the same gorgeous sentences again and again. While In Search of Lost Time's prose style (playing on association, evocation, magnification, punning, rhythm) may have been its most radical contribution to the art of the novel, it cannot be understood until it has been read once in its entirety. In this seminar, we keep moving at a brisk pace through the work, merely glancing at its riches on our way, until we arrive at the uniquely euphoric experience of reading the final volume, Time Regained. Required reading: an average of 350 pages per week.
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4.00 Credits
Considers the last two major wars of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st century. The seminar begins with the history, memory, and subsequent political uses of the Vietnam War. We then move on to examine the Gulf War I (Operation Desert Storm), which was shaped by the way the administration of President George H. W. Bush understood the Vietnam War. The subsequent war in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) can be understood in part in terms of what some policymakers believed to be the unfinished business of Gulf War I. Yet it too was fought in the shadow of Vietnam analogies. Finally, the war in Afghanistan, launched in response to 9/11, in terms of tactics and goals, has been shaped by all three of the preceding wars. We examine these wars through primary documents and secondary sources, as well as the abundance of documentary and fiction film in which they have all been represented. The overarching concern of the seminar is the ongoing haunting of American politics-military and civilian-by a war fought over three decades ago. There are two connected questions: Can history teach? What does it teach?
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4.00 Credits
The emerging field of animal studies has already generated neologisms in various disciplines: "anthrozoology" (culture studies), "zoopolis" (urban social theory), and "zoontology" (philosophy). To these the fields of literature and performance studies propose an addition, "zooësis," to refer to the history of animal representation that stretches, in the Western literary tradition, from Aesop's Fables to Will Self 's Great Apes; in the Western dramatic tradition, from Aristophanes' The Frogs to Albee's The Goat; in film, from Muybridge's "zoogyroscope" to Herzog's Grizzly Man; in popular culture, from Mickey Mouse to Animal Planet; and in popular performance, from gladiatorial contests to Siegfried and Roy. To speak of zooësis is also to acknowledge the manifold performances engendered by cultural animal practices such as dog shows, keeping pets, equitation, rodeo, bullfighting, animal sacrifice, scientific experimentation, taxidermy, hunting, wearing fur, eating meat-each with its own archive and repertory, its own performers and spectators. We study recent films, novels, plays, and cultural events that reveal how our interaction with animals shapes our understanding of the human, our approach to the "Other" (including the racial and ethnic "Other"), and our attitude toward the world.
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4.00 Credits
The past several decades have seen tremendous advances in observational cosmology. As a result, we understand in remarkable detail many aspects of the evolution and contents of the universe. This course focuses on three of the most puzzling facts about the universe: Why was there a slight excess of matter over antimatter after the Big Bang? (Otherwise, after matter-antimatter annihilation was complete, no matter would have been left.) What is dark matter? (Although on average in the universe it is five times more abundant than normal matter, we know that it is something not found on earth or, so far, observed in our laboratories.) What is so-called "dark energy"? (The expansion rate of the universe is actually accelerating, rather than slowing down as was expected, a finding attributed to this new component of the universe.) Students enrolling in the seminar should have taken AP Physics, be enrolled in Physics I (PHYS-UA 91), or have permission of the instructor.
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