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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This class provides an introduction to the philosophical texts and practices of Rome's classical period (1st century BC and 2nd century AD). Readings are in Egnlish translation and include works by Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, Vergil, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and others.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of the Czech, German, and German-Jewish literary cultures of Prague from 1910 to 1920. Special attention to Hašek, Capek, Kafka, Werfel, and Rilke. Parallel reading lists available in English and in the original.
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3.00 Credits
The course explores the unique period in Czech film and literature during the 1960s that emerged as a reaction to the imposed socialist realism. The new generation of writers (Kundera, Skvorecky, Havel, Hrabal) in turn had an influence on young emerging film makers, all of whom were part of the Czech new wave.
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3.00 Credits
Introduction to the major paradigms of contemporary literary and cultural theory and methods for understanding and analyzing East Asian literature and culture within comparative frameworks. The course covers wide-ranging topics including text and context, genre, writing and orality, narrative theory, media and visual culture, cultural translation, feminism, social and national identity, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory.
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3.00 Credits
Reading selections from Lacan's Seminar XIV: The Logic of Phantasy 1966-7; Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-3; Seminar XXIV The unknown that knows the unconscious/or blunder takes wings at playing love/death game 1976-7 together with selected novels, short stories, and poems. Emphasis on Lacan's elaboration of the phantasy, the four discourses, jouissance, the formulas of sexuation, and his redefinition of our notions of the imagination, the body, language, and the function of the arts. Consideration of the relevance of his thought to literature, aesthetics, and culture.
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructors. (Seminar). The phrase "the art of the novel," a reminder that the ascension of the genre to the status of "high art" rather than merely popular entertainment is still relatively recent, comes from Henry James, himself both a novelist and an influential critic of the novel. The premise of this co-taught seminar is that it is intellectually productive to bring together the perspectives of the novelist and the critic, looking both at their differences and at their common questions and concerns. In addition to fiction and criticism by Orhan Pamuk, students will read novels by Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. When available, an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm.
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course focuses on the tumultuous 1930s, which witnessed the growth of anticolonial movements, the coming to power of totalitarian and fascist regimes, and calls for internationalism and a new world vision, among other major developments. Even as fascism laid down its roots in parts of Europe, the struggle for independence from European colonial rule accelerated in Asia and Africa, and former subjects engaged with ideas and images about the shape of their new nations, in essays, fiction, poetry, and theater. Supporters and critics of nationalism existed on both sides of the metropole-colony divide, as calls for internationalism sought to stem the rising tide of ethnocentric thinking and racial particularism in parts of Europe as well as the colonies. We will read works from both the metropole and the colonies to track the crisscrossing of ideas, beginning with writers who anticipated the convulsive events of the 1930s and beyond (E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, Tagore, Gandhi), then moving on to writers who published some of their greatest work in the 1930s (Huxley, Woolf, C.L.R. James, Mulk Raj Anand), and finally concluding with authors who reassessed the events of the 1930s from a later perspective (George Lamming). When available, an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm.
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4.00 Credits
We will read works by writers responding to decolonization as an invitation to rethink the shape of their societies. Ostensibly a gesture of resistance against imperial control, anti-colonialism also sparked debates about re-visioning gender relations, the place of minorities in the nation, religious difference and secularism, internationalism and models of world unity, among other issues. The course will explore, through fiction and historical accounts produced at the time of decolonization, the challenges of imagining a post-imperial society without reproducing the structures and subjectivities of the colonial state. : E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) by April 11th with the subject heading "Decolonizing Fictions seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.Application instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Decolonizing Fictions seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Recent theories of "World Literature" have revived the figure of a "literary marketplace" to explain the workings of a global literary system-a system that favors some authors, genres, styles, themes, plots, settings, etc. to the disadvantage of others. These neoliberal models of "World Literature" tend to treat the economic idea of literary production as simply a metaphor for free-marketauthorial and aesthetic competition; and yet, there are real material implications: according to the UN Development Programme, more than 97% of the world's intellectual property is held by the (post-)industrialized countries of the Global North. This course takes the problem of a "literary market" literally-looking at the history of the idea and thefunctions of literature as a commodity. Most of the literary texts we'll read come from the postcolonial or Third World, where questions about the development of culture have consistently been intertwined with questions about the development of human and natural resources-and where problems with the ownership of ideas have been acutely inflected by the historical forces of the slave trade, colonialism, neoimperialism, and globalization. Thus, we'll also look at the underside of a global cultural and economic system by examining the place of plagiarism, parody, piracy, fraud, trafficking and other illicit textual activities in the creation and circulation of world literature. In addition to novels in which property issues are at stake(at the levels of both form and theme), we will read theories of property and commodities, the public good and the intellectual commons. Among other things, we will examine the relations between literature and other commodities and resources; and we will study how forms of literary expression are commodified as intellectual and cultural property-in terms of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and corporate secrets as well as in terms ofheritage, patrimony, and "minority culture." Likely literary authors include: Chris Abani (Nigeria/U.S.), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Caryl Phillips (England-St. Kitts), Salman Rushdie (India), Yambo Ouologuem (Mali), Alice Randall (U.S.), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), B. Wongar (Australia), Kathy Acker (U.S.), Zakes Mda (South Africa), Yann Martell (Canada), Tahar ben Jelloun (Morocco-France), Bessie Head (Botswana-South Africa), Spider Robinson (U.S.-Canada). E-mail Professor Slaughter (jrs272@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading, "World Literature seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.
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3.00 Credits
How does narrative help us to imagine an international order based on human dignity, rights, and equality? We will read classic literary texts and contemporary writing (both literary and non-literary) and view a number of films and other multimedia projects to think about the relationships between story forms and human rights problematics and practices. Likely literary authors: Roberto Bolaño, Miguel de Cervantes, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Slavenka Drakulic, Nuruddin Farah, Janette Turner Hospital, Franz Kafka, Sahar Kalifeh, Sindiwe Magona, Maniza Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Alicia Partnoy, Ousmane Sembène, Mark Twain . . . . We will also read theoretical and historical pieces by authors such as Agamben, An-Na'im, Appiah, Arendt, Balibar, Bloch, Chakrabarty, Derrida, Douzinas, Habermas, Harlow, Ignatieff, Laclau and Mouffe, Levinas, Lyotard, Marx, Mutua, Nussbaum, Rorty, Said, Scarry, Soyinka, Spivak, Williams.
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