Summer 2017

Summer Session I 2017  [June 26 - August 4, 2017]

Comparative Literature 001. Major Books of Western Culture: The Ancient World (4 units)
Anna Einarsdottir

MTW 2:10-4:25P
105 Olson Hall
CRN 
53675

Course Description: By reading a few of the classics of ancient western literature, this course seeks to provide an introduction to the literature of the ancient western world. Students will be invited to examine the relationship between modern literature and the ancient tradition, paying particular attention to what preconceptions structure the reception of the ancient tradition today. The encounter with the ancient literary tradition will be framed as an inquiry into the worldview that, broadly speaking, foregrounds each text. In this regard, we will examine how the so-called ‘classics’ of world literature have reached us, as contemporary readers. We will explore topics such as the epic, the myth, the hero, origin myths, intertextuality, the oral tradition and its evolvement into a literary tradition, as well as gender roles, economics and religion. Particular emphasis will be placed on the Greek tragedy and how filmmakers have reworked the tradition through the theoretical framework of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. Readings include The Epic of Gilgamesh, selections from Genesis, Plato’s Symposium, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Euripides’s MedeaThe Bacchae, and Orestes, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Excerpts from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Freud’s lectures on sexuality will be read collectively in class and provided as extra readings. In addition, Nichols’s Take Shelter (2011), Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) will be screened in class.

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

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.
(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

Format: Lecture/Discussion.

Textbooks:

  • TBA 
     

Comparative Literature 166. Literatures of the Modern Middle East has been cancelled.


Summer Session II 2017  [August 7 - September 15, 2017]

Comparative Literature 003. Major Books of Western Culture: The Modern Crisis (4 units)
James Straub

MTW 11:00A-1:15P
110 Hunt Hall
CRN 
73985

Course Description: In this course, we will read novels by Goethe, Novalis, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Walser that portray a conflict between a “problematic individual” and the social environment, during which the individual develops his or (in one case) her own personality and learns to function in the world despite its flaws. Tracing the development of these models for successful individuation and social integration will allow us to ask important questions about the way Western European culture conceived of youth, maturity, and social obligation during the long 19th century. Through these texts, we will investigate the impact of capitalist modernity on the individual and the individual’s relationship to society. Short texts by philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and György Lukács will help us deepen our analysis, question what it might mean for us to “successfully” mature and become part of the world we inhabit, and to improve our writing and thinking habits along the way.

Novels:

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Henry von Ofterdingen, Novalis

A Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert

Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf

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

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.
(Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy a college or university composition requirement and GE writing experience simultaneously).

Format: Lecture/Discussion.

Textbooks:

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, translated by Eric A. Blackall  (Princeton University Press, 1995)
  • Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen: A Romance, translated by Ludwig Tieck  (Dover Publications, 2015)
  • Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, translated by Helen Constantine  (Oxford University Press, 2016)
  • Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out [Revised Edition]  (Penguin Classics, 1992)
  • Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten, translated by Christopher Middleton  (New York Review Books Classics, 1997