Spring 2020 Expanded Course Descriptions

 

Comparative Literature Expanded Course Descriptions Spring 2020

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 001:  Major Works of the Ancient World
Lecturer Linda Matheson

This course surveys a selection of foundational “classics” from the ancient world. We read works representative of different genres of sacred and secular literature and explore the way each communicates ideas and cultural practices such as love, war, heroism, hospitality, patriarchy, and gender relations. This course might be called “Pathways through the Ancient Epics” as you will be required to track a theme, motif, image, or relationship of your choice through each work, recognizing its role within the literary structure and the society.  As this is a comparative literature course you will be comparing and contrasting your pathways in the different texts that you read. Thus, we will engage these texts as each culture’s contribution to a discourse that reaches across thousands of miles and years. Thinking, discussing and writing reflectively and critically about the material will be the basis of your success in the class. Because this course satisfies the lower division writing requirement, importance is placed on the conventions of academic writing and on recognizing the ability of academic writing to improve our ability to think critically.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Readings:

  • The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Vol A, 4th ed. Including Gilgamesh, Plato’s Symposium, selections from Genesis, The Odyssey, Confucius, and The Ramayana
  • Atwood, The Penelopiad
  • MacLaine, Athena Becomes a Swallow

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 002:  Major Works of the Medieval and Early Modern World

Associate Instructor Sean Sell

This class will examine stories that present and perhaps helped shape collective cultures and cosmologies in various parts of the world. While the COM 2 course is framed chronologically by the European terms “Fall of Rome” and “Enlightenment,” the study of world literature must include the world beyond Europe and the so-called “West.” Trade and travel were expanding during this time, with the concomitant and inevitable trade in stories and ideas. We will examine narratives that express important values of different cultures, narratives which may also raise questions and concerns about the cultures they come from. Of particular interest will be beliefs about life, death, and what may come after. Because this course satisfies the lower division writing requirement, importance is placed on the conventions of academic writing and on recognizing the ability of academic writing to improve our ability to think critically.
 

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Textbooks:

  • Readings will be available on Canvas – students will not have to purchase anything.

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 002:  Major Works of the Medieval and Early Modern World
Associate Instructor Young Hui
This course will examine the literary output emerging from centuries of the interaction between the West and the East starting from the medieval period, from the 6th century to the beginning of the 17th century, from the imprint of Arab culture (The Arabian Nights), conquest and trade upon southern Europe (Othello); the impetus towards missionizing (The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck), describing and imagining the East that culminated in routes to the New World (The Book of Marvels and Travels); and the “others” from the imagination of the Far East (Monkey: Folk Novel of China). Along the way, our aim will be not only to examine a defined body of critical literature, but also to read and discuss some classics of the literary tradition. Because this course satisfies the lower division writing requirement, importance is placed on the conventions of academic writing and on recognizing the ability of academic writing to improve our ability to think critically.
 

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Textbooks:

  • The Book of Marvels and Travels 
  • The Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition)
  • Monkey: Folk Novel of China
  • The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1235-1255 (Hackett Classics)

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 003:  Major Works of the Modern World:  Rites of Passage
Associate Instructor Patrick Cabell

This course surveys contemporary literature from around the world, covering developments in narrative, poetry, consciousness and cultural expression from roughly the 20th century to the present.  Skills cultivated include group work, written and verbal expression, interpretation of texts (including film), and, especially, critical thinking. Course will emphasize the political nature of literature and the important role played by the Humanities in transforming society. Because this course satisfies the lower division writing requirement, importance is placed on the conventions of academic writing and on recognizing the ability of academic writing to improve our ability to think critically.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 003:  Major Works of the Modern World: The Modern Crisis
Associate Instructor Timothy Cannon

Course Description Forthcoming

Because this course satisfies the lower division writing requirement, importance is placed on the conventions of academic writing and on recognizing the ability of academic writing to improve our ability to think critically.
 

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 004:  Major Works of the Contemporary World
Associate Instructor Amy Riddle

This class will examine animals in cultural production.  We will be focusing on works from the Global South and how animals are used in the narrative to depict social problems.  Specific topics of interest will be the depiction of social relations, work, nature, money and racialization. Because this course satisfies the lower division writing requirement, importance is placed on the conventions of academic writing and on recognizing the ability of academic writing to improve our ability to think critically.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Textbooks:

  • Beukes, Zoo City 
  • Munif, Endings 
  • Nganang, Dog Days
  • Ghosh, The Hungry Tide

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 004:  Major Works of the Contemporary World: Literature and Crisis in the Americas 1973-2020
Associate Instructor Ross Hernandez
This course will focus on the literature emerging from crises in contemporary history including, but not limited to: natural disasters and their social responses, the emergence of fascist regimes in Latin America, and the crisis of migration in Central America and Southern Mexico. Because of the sensitive nature of the historical events from which our course content emerges, many of these texts will have violent, traumatic, and disturbing themes. We will be reading, watching and analyzing many forms of meaning-making from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. We will be thinking through these crises by reading and analyzing many genres: testimony, poetry, documentaries, and novels as forms that represent our past and suggest alternative and possible futures. Because this course satisfies the lower division writing requirement, importance is placed on the conventions of academic writing and on recognizing the ability of academic writing to improve our ability to think critically.
 

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 004:  Major Works of the Contemporary World: Queer Worldviews
Lecturer Christopher Wallis

In this course, we will examine literary and extra-literary representations of LGBTQ+ people, as well as of their families and allies. Over the quarter, we will consider perspectives representing diverse geographic, racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds that speak to the complexity of LGBTQ+ experiences. Special attention will be given to how writers communicate their stories not only through techniques of genre (short story, poetry, drama, novel, memoir, personal letter, journal/diary entry, editorial, performance art, photography, and film), but also by breaking and/or mixing genre conventions. We will also use our inquiry to analyze two pervasive (and often pernicious) forms of exceptionalist logic: 1) that non-Western LGBTQ+ folk need to be liberated from their oppressive situations via Western intervention; and 2) that the present understanding of LBGTQ+ people and their concerns is always/already more enlightened than in the past. Indeed, the multiple perspectives we will encounter indicate how—much like with genre—the boundaries of geography and time are porous, changeable, tenuous, indefinite, queer.

Because this course satisfies the lower division writing requirement, importance is placed on the conventions of academic writing and on recognizing the ability of academic writing to improve our ability to think critically.

Prerequisite: Completion of Entry-Level Writing (formerly Subject A) Requirement.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Selected Texts:

  • Chay Yew, A Language of their Own
  • Shyam Selvaduri, “Pigs Can’t Fly”
  • Mariam Bazeed, Peace Camp Org
  • Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees
  • Lakshminarayana Tripathi, Me Hijra, Me Laxmi
  • Jackie Kay, Trumpet

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 007:  Literature of Fantasy and the Supernatural
Professor Michael Subialka
Lecture: Tuesdays and Thursdays 6:10pm-7:30pm (please see schedule for affiliated discussion sections and their corresponding CRNs)

Wizard dreamers, monsters of imagination, parallel worlds (inverted, crossing, and upside-down)… the literature of fantasy has long been a place for our mind to unravel its most unusual thoughts. This course delves into categories of literature that trouble or disturb our everyday reality. Many authors have constructed elaborate fantasy worlds that run parallel to, underneath, outside of, or even crisscross with our world. Others have written works of imagination meant to challenge our ability to distinguish the two. Yet others have focused on the supernatural as a monstrous extension of human imagination, a dimension we will probe reading stories of spirits, vampires, and other creatures that walk between worlds. This class will examine literary texts in conjunction with their reverberations across media, including in films, visual art, television, and beyond. Looking across cultures, time periods, and media, we will ask how fantasy and the supernatural mirror, distort, and reconfigure our perception of the world.

Prerequisite: None.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 011:  Travel and the Modern World
Professor Chunjie Zhang
Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:30am-11:50am

This course explores travel as a quintessential human activity and experience of global modernity and cross-cultural encounters. Materials include travel writings by Christopher Columbus, George Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin ranging from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We will explore themes such as Oceania and Science, America and Discovery, Africa and Slavery, Asia and Global Trade, and Europe and Migration. We also explore travel and the era of European colonialism and imperialism in Heinrich von Kleist’s Betrothal in Santo Domingo, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Franz Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared and Werner Herzog’s epic film Fitzcarraldo. W. G. Sebald’s story "The Emigrants," Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada’s essays on her trans-siberian journey, the African-Bulgarian-German writer Ilija Trojanow’s novel about ecotourism to the Antarctic, and the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Babel help us reflect on transnational travel, climate change, and human communication in the era of social media.

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 022: Literature of the Abnormal Psyche
Professor Michael Subialka
Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:30am-11:50am

This course takes a comparative approach to understanding how authors from across cultures, traditions, and diverse historical contexts have used literature to investigate the most complex and troublesome aspects of the human mind, particularly by imagining its limit cases in abnormal psychology. We will tackle questions including: in what ways does literary imagination give us access to elements of conscious experience that might otherwise prove difficult to articulate or understand? Does this allow us to think differently about the nature of identity and selfhood or self-perception? How does the literary exploration of abnormal psychology help shape popular ideas about the mind? And how might reflection on the inner workings of the mind in turn reshape literary form? In addition to major literary works by authors like Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, and Sadegh Hedayat we will also examine other media, including the visual arts and film, as well as psychological theory focused on abnormal cases, such as Sigmund Freud’s case studies and Carl Jung's writings on the shadow. Texts will explore themes such as: madness and selfhood; repressed desire and the hidden self; obsession, compulsion, and repetition; addiction; criminality; self-fragmentation and multiplicity; nightmares, altered states, and self-identity. In these investigations, we will pay particular attention to the types of assumptions made about the abnormal mind and how these relate to artistic form.

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 168B: Realism and Naturalism
Professor Gail Finney
Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:10pm-1:30pm

Novels and plays by Dickens, Zola, Flaubert, K. Chopin, Ibsen, and Strindberg investigate marriage and adultery, the hardships of industrialization, the war between the sexes, the influence of environment and heredity, the New Woman, and other themes of special interest to the nineteenth century. The primary intention of the course is to familiarize students with the thematic and stylistic features of realism and naturalism, two modes dominant in the nineteenth century.

Textbooks:

  • Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
  • Émile Zola, Germinal (1885)
  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)
  • Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
  • Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler (1890)
  • August Strindberg, Miss Julie (1888)

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 172 / MSA 121C / ARABIC 140: A Story for a Life: The Arabian Nights
Professor Jocelyn Sharlet
Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:30am-11:50am

This course is an in-depth investigation of The Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights and the frame tale. All readings and course work will be in English. We will explore the stories that Shahrazad, the minister’s daughter, tells to her traumatized and tyrannical king to save her life and the lives of the women in her kingdom: stories of businessmen and women, husbands and wives, lovers, people who work in trades, demons, mystics, slaves, doctors, caliphs, soldiers, sailors, elders, children, and advisers. Students will examine the historical context of the book’s role in Arabic and world literature and new approaches to it. We will also consider The Nights in comparison to short selections from other frame tales from Persian and Italian literature. 

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Textbooks:

  • Husain Haddawy, tr., The Arabian Nights (stories from the earliest version ed. by Muhsin Mahdi)
  • Husain Haddawy, tr., Sindbad: And Other Stories from The Arabian Nights

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 195: Senior Seminar:  Twins, Doubles and Dead Ringers
Professor Cheri Ross
Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:40pm-3:00pm

The birth of twins calls forth a variety of responses: celebration at nature’s unexpected largesse; horror at the uncanny paradox of two-in-one; scientific curiosity at the possibility of the ultimate human experiment. This course will focus on various representations of twins in written texts and films with the purpose of teasing out the complexities and contradictions of doubles. Written texts will include myths from the ancient Near East and Pacific First Nations; novels by Dostoevsky, Stevenson, and Wilde; and a play by Shakespeare. The films will include some classics and some more recent films, including Vertigo (dir. Hitchcock), Kagemusha (dir. Kurosawa), The Prestige (dir. Nolan), and Black Swan (dir. Aronofsky). Each session of the class will focus on a written work or film that features some intriguing angle on the question of twins:  for example, sibling love and rivalry, split selves, evil twins, clones. The course will be conducted primarily through discussion, with introductory and framing lectures offered by the instructor.    

General Credit(s): Arts and Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

 

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 210 (same as GER 297):  What is Enlightenment
Professor Chunjie Zhang
Tuesdays 2:10pm-5:00pm

This seminar aims to survey the debates on Enlightenment and its global repercussions from theoretical and historical perspectives. We will read eighteenth-century thinkers such as Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, and Herder as well as contemporary scholars including Adorno/Horkheimer, Foucault, Jonathan Israel, and Martin Mulsow. This course also endeavors to cover an important part of the German PhD reading list of the eighteenth century to help student prepare for exams. Knowledge of German is helpful but not required.