11 - 20 of 176 results for: COMPLIT

Rather than try to examine the whole of such an extensive body of work by artists of Mexican descent living in Mexico and the United States, the focus will be on the transnational themes of border thinking, memory, and identity (both personal and collective). Looking at the foundational poetry, auto-ethnographies, and narratives by Américo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldúa and how their literary and ethnographic work laid the groundwork for subsequent imaginings in the narratives, poetry, and theory of border thinking and writing. We will explore the trans-frontier cultural conditions under which imaginative literary texts are produced, disseminated, and received. We will consider not only the historical transnational experiences that inform these borderlands texts but the potential futures of Mexico and the United States they imagine.

Preference to sophomores. What is meant by ethnic literature? How is ethnic writing different from non-ethnic writing, or is there such a thing as either? How does ethnicity as an analytic perspective affect the way literature is read by ethnic peoples? Articles and works of fiction; films on ethnic literature and cultural politics. How ethnic literature represents the nexus of social, historical, political, and personal issues.

It is a given that today's world is increasingly "networked": we are connected to a wider spectrum of people and places than ever before, in multiple ways. Our economic, political, technological, financial, cultural, ecological worlds seem blended into one. And yet amidst all that we seem to have in common, we also have sometimes very different ways of understanding those connections, both as individuals and as members of different national communities. In this course, we will learn how great works of literature help us not only imagine those connections between people and between nations as they have been produced historically and as they exist today, but also to see how literature helps us imagine the future. We will read novels from various locales, explore the cultures and histories from which they emerged, and link them together in a conversation. Works include: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide; Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah; Ondatjee, The English Patient; Ibrahim Al-Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone.

A consideration of Nietzsche's claim that God is dead in relation to other texts of German literature and philosophy. The status of religious faith in relation to modernity and secularization; religion and science; culture and faith. Readings in German include selections from sacred and liturgical texts; fictional depictions of religious experience; religion in poetry; German theories of religion. Authors to be studied include Rilke, Hesse, Weiss, Schöder, Buber, Sachs, Haecker, Weber, Taubes, Ratzinger.

We may "know" "who" we "are," but we are, after all, social creatures. How does our sense of self interact with those around us? How does literature provide a particular medium for not only self expression, but also for meditations on what goes into the construction of "the Self"? After all, don't we tell stories in response to the question, "who are you"? Besides a list of nouns and names and attributes, we give our lives flesh and blood in telling how we process the world. Our course focuses in particular on this question--Does this universal issue ("who am I") become skewed differently when we add a qualifier before it, like "ethnic"? Satisfies PWR2.

Preference to freshmen. The personal and social functions of literary narrative. How do works of literature serve as ways for people to communicate with each other? Are fiction readers part of a broad, transhistorical community of readers? How does that membership shape the way authors write their own life stories? Writers include: Ruth Ozeki, Ondaatje, Calvino, and Gordimer.

How critics and authors from different eras and different parts of the globe have considered how literature, as a traditional cultural form, can or cannot, help to sustain societies faced with concrete historical crises such as war, revolution, and colonization. How the aesthetic work of verbal art has been seen to offer the possibility of continuity in the face of change. What, if anything, can be continued? How does art perhaps aid in accommodating change?

Introduction to the comparative literary study of important gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender writers and their changing social, political, and cultural contexts from the 1890s to today: Wilde, Gide, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Radclyffe Hall, E.M. Forster, Thomas Mann, Georges Bataille, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters, Audre Lorde, discussed in the context of 20th-century feminist and queer literary and social theories of gender and sexuality (Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Julia Serano, and others).

When one asks: what is a classic? one expects the title of a "big" novel as the response. This course argues the case for the classical Chinese poetry of the author who has the rightful claim of the greatest poet in Chinese history, Du Fu (712-770). We will look at how poetry focuses on the chemistry of language - the ways words can be put together just so to create specific catalytic "conversations" of meaning; the engineering of language - the ways specific structures build on and create certain distributions of energy and mass. We will learn to appreciate Du Fu's wit, compassion, learnedness and critical powers and to appreciate as well how poetry can illustrate the evocative and expressive power of language.