|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
3.00 Credits
Patel. This course introduces studnets to the extraordinary quality of literary production during the past four millenia of South Asian civilization. Selecting for discussion only a few representative works in translation from pre-modern India [(rangingfrom the earlist Sanskrit and Tamil texts, through to the mediaval literatures of South Asia's regional Languages -(Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, MArathi, Telegu, Panjabi,Malayalam, Oriya etc)] and up to the Hindavi romance traditions of the 16th century),the course will also broadly investigate the processes of masterpiece - making in South Asia, both through the lens of indegenous aesthetic formulations as well as from diverse contemporary perspectives of literary analysis. In doing so, the goal will be to come to some understanding of the immensely rich and complicated networks of language, literary form and the cultural life that have historically informed and continues to inform the production of literature of South Asia. Our semester covers seminal genres that also serve as the organizing principles for the course: the hymn, the lyric, the epic, the gnomic, the dramatic, the political, the prosaic, the tragic and the comedic. No background in South Asia studies or South Asian languages is requiredl.
-
3.00 Credits
Staff. This is a topics course. This course introduces students to four hundred years of English literary culture, from approximately 1100 to 1500. This period was marked by major transformations, not only with respect to government, law, religious practice, intellectural life, England's relation to the Continent (during the 100 Years War), the organization of society (especially after the Black Death), the circulation of literary texts, and the status of authors. Topics may include medieval women writers, manuscript production, literatures of revoltd, courtly culture, Crusades, cross-Channel influences, and religious controversy.
-
3.00 Credits
Staff. During the nineteenth century the novel became the dominant literary form of its day, supplanting poetry and drama on both sides of the Atlantic. In this introduction to the novelists of the period, we will read the writers who secured the novel's cultural respectability and economic prominence. Likely authors will include Austen, the Brontes, Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thackeray, Scott, and Stowe. The course will explore the themes, techniques, and styles of the nineteeth-century novel. It will focus not only on the large structural and thematic patterns and problems within each novel but also on the act of reading as a historically specific cultural ritual in itself.
-
3.00 Credits
May be counted as a General Requirement Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Stern. The study of four paradigmatic classic Jewish texts so as to introduce students to the literature of classic Judaism. Each text will be studied historically--"excavated" for its sources and roots--and holistically, as a canonical document in Jewish tradition. While each text will inevitably raise its own set of issues, we will deal throughout the semester with two basic questions: What makes a "Jewish" text And how do these texts represent different aspects of Jewish identity All readings will be in translation.
-
3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Staff. This class explores the international emergence of modernism, typically from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. We will examine the links between modernity, the avant-garde, and various national modernisms that emerged alongside them. Resolutely transatlantic and open to French, Spanish, Italian, German, or Russian influences, this course assumes the very concept of Modernism to necessitate an international perspective focusing on the new in literature and the arts -- including film, the theatre, music, and the visual arts. The philosophies of modernism will also be surveyed and concise introductions provided to important thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, Sorel, Bergson, Freud, and Benjamin.
-
3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Bernstein. From abstraction to beat, from socialism to negritude, from expressionism to ecopoetry, from surrealism to visual poetry, from collage to digital poetry, the poetry of the twentieth century has been characterized by both the varieties of its forms and the range of its practitioners. This course will offer a broad overview of many of the major trends and a few minor eddies in the immensely rich, wonderfully varied, ideologically and aesthetically charged field. The course will cover many of the radical poetry movements and individual innovations, along with the more conventional and idiosyncratic work, and will provide examples of political, social, ethnic, and national poetries, both in the Americas and Europe, and beyond to the rest of the world. While most of the poetry covered will be in English, works in translation, and indeed the art of translation, will be an essential component the course.
-
3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Barnard. This course traces the development of the novel across the twentieth-century. The course will consider the formal innovations of the modern novel (challenges to realism, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, etc.) in relation to major historical shifts in the period. Authors treated might include: Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Forster, Woolf, Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, Achebe, Greene, Rhys, Baldwin, Naipaul, Pynchon, Rushdie, and Morrison.
-
3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Loomba. Since the sixteenth century English has been, among other things, an imperial language, and ideas about empire and imperialism have shaped not only many of English literature's central texts but also the development of English literary study as a discipline. This course is an introduction to the way imperial contact and changing ideas about empire and decolonization have shaped literature in English from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. We will consider historical and cultural materials to offer contexts for literary production of texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. The course also will serve as a comprehensive introduction to the way literary and cultural representations of Europe have been influenced by changing ideas about empire and imperialism. Different versions of the course will vary in the historical and cultural material they cover as they offer a context for literary production.
-
3.00 Credits
Arts & Letters Sector. All Classes. Kirkham. The course will consist of a broad and varied sampling of classic Italian films from WWII to the present. We will consider the works which typify directors and major trends through five decades of filmmaking and will trace a certain stylistic and thematic development from WWII on, pointing out both the continuity of the tradition, and exceptions to it, in an attempt to define the art of Italian film. Units will include "Neorealism: The Cinematic Revolution,"Self-Reflexivity and Meta-cinema," "Fascism and War Revisite and "Postmodernism, or the Death of the Cinema." One of the aims of the course will be to make us aware of the expectations that Hollywood has implanted in us:that films be action-packed wish-fulfillment fantasies. Italian cinema will challenge us to re-examine and revise the very narrow conception that Americans have of the cinematic medium. Classes will include close visual analysis of films using video clips and slides. Students will be required to attend weekly screenings of the films. The films will be in Italian with English subtitles. There will be 12 in all, including works by Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, Rossellini, Scola, and Benigni.
-
3.00 Credits
Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Barnard. This is a topics course. If the topic is "Gender, Sexualitiy, and Literature," the following description applies. This course will focus on questions of gender difference and of sexual desire in a range of literary works, paying special attention to works by women and treatments of same-sex desire. More fundamentally, the course will introduce students to questions about the relation between identity and representation. We will attend in particular to intersections between gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation, and will choose from a rich vein of authors: Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, the Brontes, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Radclyffe Hall, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Rhys, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Bessie Head, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Cherr_e Moraga, Toni Morrison, Michael Cunningham, Dorothy Allison, Jeanette Winterson, and Leslie Feinberg.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|