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 Fitzgerald, 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. - K Holt
Not offered in 2013-2014.
3 points

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, Aristophanes) to modern theory (e.g., Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World), including modern novels and films.
Not offered in 2013-2014.
3 points

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. - P. Usher
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2013-2014.
3 points

CPLS BC 3123x or y Friend or Foe? World Literature and the Question of Justice

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 settings. Reading of Dickens, Hesse, Woolf, Ocampo, Puig, Fugard, Emerson, Derrida, Rawls. - E. Grimm
Prerequisites: CPLS BC3001 Intro to Comp. Lit.; completion of intermediate language courses.
3 points

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. - E. Grimm
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2013-2014.
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 3148y TRAGEDY TRANSLATED: FROM GREECE TO AFRICA

Explores how the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have been translated and appropriated by playwrights and thinkers in various countries and periods. Follows how stories about characters like Antigone and Oedipus have become relevant to the culture and politics of places as distant as Italy, France, South Africa, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Readings include Greek tragedies, as well as plays and texts by Seneca, Ovid, Garnier, Corneille, Brecht, Anouilh, Soyinka, Fugard, Butler, Žižek, and others. - P. Usher
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2013-2014.
3 points

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. - P. Usher
Not offered in 2013-2014.
3 points

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 BC 3170y (Section 01) Translating Madness: The Sciences and Fictions of Pathology

Examines the discursive exchanges between fictional and scientific accounts of "madness," with an emphasis on how modern literature renders the new diagnostic discourse and how literary portrayals of "madness" were "translated back" into the diagnostic language of psychology. Discussions revolve around the "medical gaze" and its influence on the writers' literary style, motifs and technique; relevant questions concern interdisciplinary issues such as the relationship between genre and case study; hysteria and sexuality; gender construction and psychoanalysis. Readings include texts by Flaubert, Wilde, Daudet, Sacher-Masoch; excerpts from Freud, Charcot, Foucault, Deleuze; and visual documents. - M. Mimran
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

CLEN V 3190x (Section 01) 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. - E. Grimm
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points

CLSP BC 3215y The Colonial Encounter: Conquest, Landscape, and Subject in the Hispanic New World

This course will move across and over the geopolitical landscape of the Tudor and Habsburg Empires in Europe and the New World in order to explore and compare the diverse symbolic and political roles the colonial encounter had in the signification of the relationship between the subject and the landscape. - O. Betancor
Corequisites: Enrollment limited to 15.
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 2013-2014.
3 points

CPLS BC 3510y Advanced Workshop in Translation

A deep immersion in the theory and practice of translation with a focus on translating into English. The first half of the course is devoted to discussing readings in the history of translation theory while translating brief practical exercises; in the second half, translation projects are submitted to the class for critical discussion. The foreign texts for these projects, chosen in consultation with the instructor, will be humanistic, not only literature as conventionally defined (prose fiction and poetry, memoir and travel writing), but also the gamut of text types in the human sciences, including philosophy, history, and ethnography. The aim is not just to translate, but to think deeply about translating, to develop writing practices by drawing on the resources of theory, past and present, and by examining translations written by professionals. Enrollment in this workshop is limited to 12 students. Admission into the class is by permission of the instructor. CPLT BC 3011 "Introduction to Translation Studies" is a recommended prerequisite, plus, normally, two advanced courses beyond the language requirement in the language from which you intend to translate. Preference will be given to seniors and to comparative literature majors. Please submit an application to pconnor@barnard.edu by 30 November 2012 with the following information: your name, year of graduation, and major; a list of courses you have taken in the language from which you intend to translate; any other pertinent courses you have taken; any further relevant information relating to your language ability; a brief (max 300 word) explanation of why you wish to take this workshop. You will be notified of admission by 18 December. N.B. This course cannot be substituted for the required Senior Seminar CPLS BC3997 - P. Connor
Prerequisites: CPLT BC 3110 Introduction to Translation Studies is a recommended prerequisite.
4 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. Limit 25 - N. Moe
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. - A. Mac Adam
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

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. - P. Connor
Not offered in 2013-2014.
3 points

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. - B. O'Keeffe
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 18 students.
4 points

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.
Not offered in 2013-2014.
4 points

CLEN W 4011x Dostoevysky, Tolstoy, and the English 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 (Brontë 's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). No knowledge of Russian is required; all works read in English. - L. Knapp
Not offered in 2013-2014.
3 points

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.

CPLS W 4080y Magic and Modernity

Examines literary treatments of magic produced at five pivotal moments in (mostly) European intellectual history, and inquires: How does the depiction of magic relate to the idea of "modernity" and its attendant anxieties? How do texts produce magical effects? How does magic function as a way of understanding the world? Readings include works by Ovid, Apuleius, Marie de France, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Bulgakov and others, as well as folklore and theoretical texts. - R. Stanton
General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

CRLS W 4190y Race, Ethnicity, and Narrative in the Russian/Soviet Empire

Examines the literary construction of ethnic and cultural identity in texts drawn from the non-Russian literatures of ethnic minorities and non-Slavic nationalities that co-exist within the Russian and Soviet imperial space, with attention to the historical and political context in which literary discourses surrounding racial, ethnic, and cultural particularity develop. Organized around three major regions -- the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Russian Far East -- readings include canonical "classics" by Aitmatov, Iskander, and Rytkheu as well as less-known texts, both "official" and censored. - R. Stanton
3 points