Current Undergraduate Courses
COM 206/HUM 206Masterworks of European Literature(LA)The subtitle of this course might be `Rethinking the Classics' or `Literature and the Idea of the Human'. The focus will be firmly on the close reading of particular texts but discussions will also range freely over large questions, especially relating to the ways in which great works, over time, have explored the edges or limits of what we mean by the word `human': through madness, war, crime, politics and martyrdom, to name only a few of the more startling options.
HUM 220/COM 221Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western(LA)This is a sequel to Hum 216-219 in which the literature, philosophy, and arts of the 20th century are examined. Works by Freud, Picasso, Warhol, Joyce, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Schoenberg, Akhmatova, Brecht and many others will be studied.
HUM 234/COM 234/EAS 234East Asian Humanities II(EM)This is the second half of a sequence introducing the humanities in East Asia. The course takes up in the fourteenth century, but includes significant material from more modern periods as well, including the 20th century. Lectures are given by specialists in the departments of East Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, Art and Archaeology and Religious Studies. Lectures and classes are complemented by museum visits, performances and films. The course is organized thematically rather than chronologically, and topics range from the medieval to the post-modern in the disciplines of literature, visual arts, music, philosophy and religion.
COM 303Comparative History of Literary Theory(LA)A historical introduction to literary theory in the Western tradition from Plato to the present. In our readings of philosophers, critics and creative writers, we will consider issues such as mimesis, imagination, religious belief, sexuality and ethics. Past terms and current problems are related to an inquiry into the nature-and the power-of literature through the centuries. Critical works from Plato and Aristotle, through Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Benjamin, Derrida and Achebe will be read. Also poetry and plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Eliot and Brecht.
CWR 306/COM 356Advanced Creative Writing (Literary Tran(LA)Practice in the translation of literary works from another language into English supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Criticism by professionals and talented peers encourages the student's growth as both creator and reader of literature.
PHI 306/COM 393Nietzsche(EM)An examination of Nietzsche's central views, including the role of tragedy, the place of science, the eternal recurrence, the will to power, and the primacy of the individual. We will also examine Nietzsche's ambiguous attitude toward philosophy and his influence on literature and criticism.
COM 312Violence and Moving ImagesWhy has violence in moving images become so prevalent and graphic since the 1960's and why do we watch it even though most of us find such violence repugnant in real life? Looking at a variety of genres (action, horror, serial killer films, Westerns, war films, etc.) we will consider the social and political meanings of these films and their aesthetic effects. Questions considered will include: How has violence been used to critically figure the risks, excesses, and alienation of modern culture? How has film violence been represented to elicit terror, excitement, curiosity? And why has film violence become so widespread globally.
AAS 314/COM 396Model Memoirs(LA)Explores the life-writing of American, African, and Asian women in the fashion industry as a launching point for thinking about race, gender, and class. How do ethnicity and femininity intersect? How are authenticity and difference commodified? How do women construct identities through narrative and negotiate their relationships to their bodies, families, and nations? This course will include guest lectures by fashion editors and models; discussions of contemporary television programs, global fashion, and cultural studies; and student self-narratives about their relationships with cultural standards of beauty, whether vexed or not.
GER 324/COM 317Topics in Germanic Literatures(LA)This course instoduces students to the literature of German and European Romanticism. Emphasis on understanding the literature and philosophy of this period in its intellectual and cultural context. Readings include both literary works and a number of theoretical, political, and scientific texts from Rousseau to Kleist that relect the extraordinary developments in Western thought in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
ECS 330/COM 321Communication and the Arts(LA)This course examines the multiple connections of European journalism and the novel. Our particular focus will be the cultural impact and political influence of contemporary print media and volatile images, including photographs and cartoons. Special attention will also be paid to the self-appointed reporters' or pundit's displacement of the heroic journalist within the ambit of the novel.
VIS 342/COM 361Cinema from World War II until Present(LA)The history of sound, and color film produced since World War II. Emphasis on Italian neorealism, American avant-garde, and the accomplishments of such major film makers as Bergman, Hitchcock, Bresson, and Antonioni. Modernism in film will be a central consideration.
EAS 344/COM 344Postwar Japanese Lit: Modern-Postmodern(LA)This course examines postwar Japanese experience through major literary, cinematic, and intellectual achievements. The objective is first to analyze a multitude of struggles in the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, and then to inquire into the nature of post-industrial prosperity in capitalist consumerism and the emergence of postmodernism. The course will cover representative postwar figures such as, Oe Kenzaburo, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, as well as contemporary writers such as Murakami Haruki. Topics include the rise of democratic ideas, unsolved issues of war memories, and the tension between serious and "popular" fiction writing.
COM 372/ENG 303The Gothic Tradition(LA)The purpose of this seminar is to analyze and understand the cultural meanings of the Gothic mode through a study of its characteristic elements, its origins in eighteenth-century English and German culture and thought, its development across Western national traditions, and its persistence in contemporary culture, including film, electronic media, clothing, social behavior, and belief systems, as well as literature. Films, artifacts, web sites and electronic publications will supplement readings.
ENG 377/COM 313Topics in Literature and Ethics(EM)This course examines how contemporary writers engage with the most challenging moral issues of our time, including the problem of freedom in an age of terror, social suffering, and the ethics of identity. What rights do individuals have in an age of terrorism? How do the constraints of justice affect the nature and meaning of freedom? How do individuals maintain personal relationships across religious, racial, or national boundaries? The course will focus on how major world writers confront both the questions raised by the politics of terror and more enduring issues of authenticity, sincerity, truthfulness, and forgiveness.
COM 395/ECS 395/MED 414Representing Power in the Middle Ages(HA)A study of the relationship between politics and language in the late Middle Ages. Close readings and comparative analyses of selected moral and political works produced in Abbasid Persia, Byzantium, and Western Europe from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. Special attention will be given to the theoretical elaboration of monarchical power in relation to virtue, divinity, law, and social welfare. Questions of political theory, literary criticism, and cultural history will be treated with view to understanding the processes of symbolic construction and rhetorical consolidation of supreme authority and charismatic leadership.
COM 395/ECS 395/MED 414Representing Power in the Middle Ages(HA)A study of the relationship between politics and language in the late Middle Ages. Close readings and comparative analyses of selected moral and political works produced in Abbasid Persia, Byzantium, and Western Europe from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. Special attention will be given to the theoretical elaboration of monarchical power in relation to virtue, divinity, law, and social welfare. Questions of political theory, literary criticism, and cultural history will be treated with view to understanding the processes of symbolic construction and rhetorical consolidation of supreme authority and charismatic leadership.
COM 397Modern South Asian Literature(LA)Key works of Modern South Asian literature from the 1850s to the present. This year we focus on the topics of writing, secrets, and gender in 19th and 20th century fiction. We look at women's secret writings, representations of forbidden relationships, transgression, and intersections of the personal, the sexual, and the political. Writers from "British India," the present-day states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as from the South Asian diaspora. All works studied in English translation or English original. There will be some discussion of translation in class, as well as selected readings of literary criticism and history.
COM 398Coming of Age in Minor CulturesThe cultures of Central-Eastern Europe, living in the shadow of hegemonic powers, tend to conceptualize themselves as subaltern, underdeveloped, victimized, immature, minor, un-enlightened or even backward. Often, this self-understanding is expressed in art through the analogy of childhood or adolescence; the relation of a minor culture to a great culture is that of a child to a parental figure. We will closely examine Polish, Czech, Yugoslavian, Bosnian and Hungarian works of literature and cinema that explore how -- if at all -- the development of character is informed by unfavorable geopolitical and historical determinations.
COM 399Men in Tights: 18th-C. Fiction in Film18th-century literature may now be less widely read than that of any other period--yet current film and fiction almost obsessively revisits it. What does that say about the present--and about how we understand the 18th century? Why the popularity of such "costume drama"? How does film, that quintessentially modern medium, reinterpret or translate the 18th-century novel, and why so often? We'll read several important 18th-century European novels, some of which have received more than one film treatment, and examine the films as "translations" of those novels, and the cultures that produced them, into 20th and 21st-century visual terms.
LAS 403/COM 420/SPA 407Latin American Studies Seminar(LA)This seminar will offer an updated view of the Latin American literary field with particular attention to recent developments in novel and short story writing. Subjects analyzed will include the impact of globalization and post modernity on Latin American literature; publishing sector changes; the rise of a new generation of writers; and the outstanding international reputation of Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). The study of the works of Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa (b. 1958), Cuban Antonio José Ponte (b.1964) and Mexican Álvaro Enrigue (b. 1969) will give us a more precise understanding of the present literary scene in Latin America.
NES 408/COM 365/JDS 408The Hebrew Poetry of Medieval Spain(LA)Covers the rise of the golden age of Hebrew poetry in Muslim Spain; the Arabic literary background; lyrical, liturgical, and contemplative verse by great poets of the 11th and 13th centuries (Shmuel ha-Nagid, Ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, Todros Abulafia, etc.); and narratives in rhymed prose. Two weeks will be devoted to developments outside Spain: the 12th and 13th century martyrdom poems from France and the Rhineland, and, in conclusion, the adoption of Romance forms, especially the sonnet, in the Hebrew poetry of Italy.
COM 419Conceptions of the SensoryIn-depth discussion and analysis of conceptions of the sensory in writings by philosophers, poets, art critics and theorists, and artists, from the early modern to contemporary periods. We will investigate the ways in which the sensory is understood as the necessary basis for conceptual thinking of diverse kinds, including systematic and dialectical modes, philosophies, imaginative and figural writing, and theory and practice of the plastic arts.
