CPLT BC 3001x Introduction to Comparative Literature

Introduction to the study of literature from a comparative and cross-disciplinary perspective. Readings will be selected to promote reflection on such topics as the relation of literature to the other arts; nationalism and literature; international literary movements; post-colonial literature; gender and literature; and issues of authorship, influence, originality, and intertextuality.

CPLT BC 3110x Introduction to Translation Studies

Introduction to the major theories and methods of translation in the Western tradition, along with practical work in translating. Topics include translation in the context of postcolonialism, globalization and immigration, the role of translators in war and zones of conflict, gender and translation, the importance of translation to contemporary writers.

CRLS V 3119x The Novel in the US & USSR, 1925-1940: Literature Confronts Crisis

Using Novels as our primary sources, we will examine the massive social upheavals experienced in the US and USSR during the onslaught of the Great Depression and the rise of High Stalinism. The syllabus includes texts by F. Scott Fitsgerald, Yuri Olesha, William Faulkner, Abdrei Platonov, John Dos Passos, Valentine Kataev, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Richard Wright, as well as supplementary readings in history and literary theory. All readings in English.

CPLS BC 3120x or y Poetics of the Mouth

Explores the imagery of eating, drinking, spitting, choking, sucking (and other unmentionables) in relation to insults and excessive behaviors. Readings from Greek poetry (e.g., Homer, Aristophones) to modern theory (e.g., Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World), including modern novels and films.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

CPLS 3121y A Kind of Wild Justice: Revenge and Retribution

Examines the various motives that move our nature to turn to revenge: Orestes, compelled to murder by duty; Ferdinand, pathologically obsessed with his family honor and his sister's body; Heathcliff, driven to frustration and unfocused rage; the Continental Op, just taking care of a job. Organized into four broad categories, we will move through Archaic and Classical Greek poetry, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, the Victorian Novel and finish our study in American film noir. Readings will include: Archilochus, Shakespeare, John Webster, Emily Bronte, and Richard Stark.

CPLS BC 3122y Big Brother: Poetics of Power

Explores the representation of institutional power and personal authority in world literature and international cinema through the lens of contemporary theory and with an emphasis on the fantasies of "Big Brother". Readings and screenings include Orwell, Nabokov, Kafka, Lucan, Winterson as well as Coppola, Hitchcock, Chaplin and Godard.

CPLS BC 3123x or y Poetics and Politics of Friendship: Modern Literature and the Experience of Bonding

With an emphasis on equality and social justice, this course examines and compares significant 19th c./20th c. literary approaches to friendship as intermediary between individualism and communal life. Discussion of culturally formed concepts and attitudes in modern or postcolonial setting. Reading of Dickens, Hesse, Woolf, Ocampo, Puig, Fugard, Emerson, Derrida, Rawls.
Prerequisites: CPLS BC3001 Intro to Comp. Lit.; completion of intermediate language courses. Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

CLEN BC 3125y (Section 1) Opera and Literature/Opera as Literature

What is an operatic text and how do we "read" it? An examination of the changing relationship between text and music in opera; operatic transformations of literature; opera's representation in literature; critical readings of opera (psychoanalytic, feminist, queer). Works by Monteverdi, Gluck, Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Debussy, and Britten.

CPLS BC 3140y Europe Imagined: Images of the New Europe in 20th-Century Literature

Compares the diverse images of Europe in 20th-century literature, with an emphasis on the forces of integration and division that shape cultural identity in the areas of travel writings and transculturation/cosmopolitanism; mnemonic narratives and constructions of the past; borderland stories and the cultural politics of translation. Readings include M. Kundera, S. Rushdie, H. Boell, C. Toibin and others.

CPLS BC 3141y Fascism and Resistance: An Examination of Power in Italy and Germany

Explores the cultural forces that defined the rise and fall of Italian fascism as well as the rise of Nazism, with a particular focus on the relationship between Germany and Italy and the similarities and differences between the two dictatorships. Readings addressing the question of literary representation and its political message will include "official" newspaper stories, trials, and propaganda films in addition to personal narratives such as diaries and autobiographies.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

CPLS BC 3142y The Spanish Civil War in Literature and the Visual Arts

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which culminated with the beginning of Francisco Franco's long dictatorship, foreshadowed the WWII European conflict. It generated unprecedented foreign involvement, as well texts and images by artists from both within and outside Spain - from film (documentary and fictional), through painting (Picasso), to narrative and nonfiction.

CPLS BC 3149x Urchins, Adulteresses, and Orphans: The Specter of the Other in Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois Literature

Exploration of the 19th-century bourgeois fascination--as evidenced in narrative texts produced and consumed by that class--with marginalized figures from the fringes of acceptable society. Texts consist mainly of novel/short stories featuring protagonists from the poor urban massess, transgressive females such as the adulteress and the prostitute, and the lineage-less figure so popular in the 19th-century narrative, the orphan outcast.

CPLS BC 3155y Epic Travel: Text to Road Movie

Examines how heroes in literature and film 'come into being' through the journeys they make. Readings by Virgil, Chrétien de Troies, Luiz Vaz de Camões, Aphra Behn, Voltaire and others; films by Jean-Luc Godard, Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott and others.

CPLS BC 3156y Figures in a Landscape: Literary Topographies from Homer to H.D.

Exploration of how and why landscape imagery is deployed in the western literary tradition as a map of cultural values, aesthetic ambitions, ideological critique, and /or artistic authority. Readings will include Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Phaedrus, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Proust's Under the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, and H.D.'s poems. These will be supplemented with images from different periods of landscape painting. Secondary readings will take advantage of the recent explosion of interest in landscape and topographical imagery in many fields, including cultural geography and landscape architecture.

CPLS BC 3162x The Novella from Cervantes to Kafka

The novella, older than the novel, painstakingly crafted, links the worlds of ideas and fiction. The readings present the novella as a genre, tracing its progress from the 17th century to the 20th. Each text read in the comparative milieu, grants the reader access to the intellectual concerns of an era.

CPLS V 3190x Aesthetics of the Grotesque

Examination of the grotesque in different cultural contexts from late Renaissance to the postmodern period comparing modes of transgression and excess in Western literature and film. Particular emphasis on exaggeration in style and on fantastic representations of the body, from the ornate and corpulent to the laconic and anorexic. Readings in Rabelais, Swift, Richardson, Poe, Gogol, Kafka, Meyrink, Pirandello, Greenaway, and M. Python.

CPLS BC 3200x The Visual and Verbal Arts

Analysis and discussion of the relation of literature to painting, photography, and film. Emphasis on artistic and literary concepts concerning the visual dimension of narrative and poetic texts from Homer to Burroughs. Explores the role of description, illustration, and montage in realist and modern literature.

CPLS V 3235x or y Imagining the Self

Examines the literary construction of the self by comparing autobiographical and fictional texts from antiquity to the present. Focus on how the narrating self is masked, illusory, ventriloquized, or otherwise problematic. Works include Homer, Virgil, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and theoretical texts.
General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

CPLS V 3280y Contemplation and Experimental Knowledge in Modern Literature and Art

Origin of the concept of contemplation in Plato and Neoplatonists; contemplation as a form of spiritual practice in the 16th century; the place of contemplation in the industrialized world, with emphasis on its role in literature and the visual arts. Selections from Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Ignatius, Weber, Proust, Weil, Heidegger; Beckett, Arendt; films by Eisenstein, Marker, and others; and various art works.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

CLIA V 3660y Mafia Movies: From Sicily to The Sopranos

Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings includes novels, historical studies, and film criticism.
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points

CPLS V 3675x Mad Love

The history of irrational love as embodied in literary and non-literary texts throughout the Western tradition. Readings include the Bible, Greek, Roman, Medieval, and modern texts.

CPLS V 3680y Freud

Origins and major concepts of psychoanalysis through close analysis of Freud's writings. Topics include: the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality, hysteria, neurosis, psychosis, parapraxes, the theory of dreams, and fetishism. Readings include The Interpretation of Dreams, the case histories (Anna O., Dora, Rat Man, Wolf Man, Schreber), and a number of metapsychological papers.

CPLS V 3950y Colloquium in Literary Theory

Examination of concepts and assumptions present in contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning and interpretation (hermeneutics); questions of genre (with discussion of representative examples); a critical analysis of formalist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, and feminist approaches to literature.

CPLS BC 3997y Senior Seminar
Designed for students writing a senior thesis and doing advanced research on two central literary fields in the student's major. The course of study and reading material will be determined by the instructor(s) in consultation with students(s). - E. Grimm
4 points

CPLS BC 3999x and y Independent Research

Independent research, primarily for the senior essay, directed by a chosen faculty adviser and with the chair's permission. The senior seminar for majors writing senior essays will be taught in the Spring term.
4 points

CLEN W 4011x Dostoevysky, Tolstoy, and the Enlgish NOvel

Close reading of works by Dostoevsky, (Netochka Nezvanova; The Idiot, "A Gentle Creature") and Tolstoy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; "Family Happiness", Anna Karenina; "The Kreutzer Sonata") in conjunction with related English novels (Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway).

No knowledge of Russian is required; all works read in English.

CLEN W 4012x or y Russian, French and American Novels of Adultery

Adultery is a driving concern of the works read. Authors include Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov; Lafayette, Flaubert; Hawthorne, Chopin. As we study the nineteenth-century novels that define the novel of adultery as a literary category, as well as some precursors and later offshoots, we articulate a morphology of the novel of adultery. We also focus on the narrative techniques used to represent the consciousness of the protagonists, in an effort to determine how the subject matter and the poetics of the novel of adultery interact.

No knowledge of Russian is required; all works read in English.