Results for COMPLIT

Preference to sophomores. Focus is on several of the best and lesser known plays of Shakespeare, on theatrical and other kinds of playing, and on ambiguities of both gender and playing gender.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged as a political movement to establish a national homeland for the Jews, eventually leading to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. This seminar uses novels to explore the changes in Zionism, the roots of the conflict in the Middle East, and the potentials for the future. We will take a close look at novels by Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, in order to understand multiple perspectives, and we will also consider works by authors from the North America and from Europe.

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"?

Preference to freshmen.This course considers a variety of animal characters in Chinese and Western literatures as potent symbols of cultural values and dynamic sites of ethical reasoning. What does pervasive animal imagery tell us about how we relate to the world and our neighbors? How do animals define the frontiers of humanity and mediate notions of civilization and culture? How do culture, institutions, and political economy shape concepts of human rights and animal welfare? And, above all, what does it mean to be human in the pluralistic and planetary 21st century?

This course takes students on a trip to eight capital cities, at different moments in time: Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, Colonial Mexico City, Enlightenment and Romantic Paris, Existential and Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Roaring Berlin, Modernist Vienna, and bustling Buenos Aires. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, , and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation); authors we will read include Boccaccio, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana, Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Irmgard Keun, Freud, and Borges.

Introduction to the discipline of comparative literature and to the theory and practice of interpretation. How should we best read novels, plays, short stories, poetry, and a variety of other forms of literary expression? What role has literature played in human societies in different times and places? Primary works (a novel, several poems, and a play) represent different national literatures that gain from a comparative perspective. Fulfills the Writing-in-the-Major requirement. Gateway to the Comparative Literature Major.

The recent elections in the United States, the BREXIT vote, and the rightward movement in many European nation states all may be taken as indexes to the ways race plays a central role in politics. Race and ethnicity show up in policies over immigration, refugees, citizenship, policing, incarceration, and other topics and issues. This all puts tremendous pressure on human rights discourse.nThe foundational document of modern human rights is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted at a time when the newly-established United Nations recognized the need for rights for a new post-war, and increasingly post-colonial world. Our course will study the basis of human rights historically and philosophically with particular attention to the relation between human rights and anti-racist work. What are the possibilities and challenges?nA unique and exciting part of the course is that it is an international collaboration with classes at the University of Wurzberg, Germany, and the University of California at Merced. Using the Stanford-based TeachingHumanRights.org website, we will create a three-campus project that puts students and instructors together as an international community of scholar-activists.

Theater as performance and as literature. Historical tension between text and spectacle, thought and embodiment in western and other traditions since Greek antiquity. Dramas read in tandem with theory, live performances, and audiovisuals.

Translation lies at the heart of all intercultural exchange. This course introduces students to the specific ways in which translation has shaped the image of Japan in the West, the image of the West in Japan, and Japan's self-image in the modern period. What texts and concepts were translated by each side, how, and to what effect? No prior knowledge of Japanese language necessary.

How literary works outside the realm of Western culture struggle with questions such as identity, minority, and the issue of the Other. How the Arab is viewed in Hebrew literature, film and music and how the Jew is viewed in Palestinian works in Hebrew or Arabic (in translation to English). Historical, political, and sociological forces that have contributed to the shaping of these writers' views.nnGuest lectures about the Jew in Palestinian literature and music.

This course explores the central place Africa holds in prose writing emerging during early and modern periods of globalization across the Atlantic, including the middle passage, exploration and colonialism, black internationalism, decolonization, immigration, and diasporic return. We will begin with Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789), a touchstone for the Atlantic prose tradition, and study how writers crossing the Atlantic have continued to depict Africa in later centuries: to dramatize scenes of departure and arrival in stories of self-making or new citizenship, to evoke histories of racial unity or examine psychic and social fragmentation, to imagine new national communities or question their norms and borders. Our readings will be selected from English, French, Portuguese and Spanish-language traditions. And we will pay close attention to genres of prose fiction (Conrad, Condé, Olinto), epic and prose poetry (Césaire, Walcott), theoretical reflection (Gilroy, Glissant, Mudimbe, Benitez-Rojo), and literary autobiography (Barack Obama, Saidiya Hartman).

A double reflection about a) the historical emergence of concepts and discourses referring to aesthetic sensibility, creativity and judgment in early Western Modernity, and b) the potential and the limits of this philosophical endeavor.

Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track. Majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature, with particular focus on the question of value: what, if anything, does engagement with literary works do for our lives? Issues include aesthetic self-fashioning, the paradox of tragedy, the paradox of caring, the truth-value of fiction, metaphor, authorship, irony, make-believe, expression, edification, clarification, and training. Readings are drawn from literature and film, philosophical theories of art, and stylistically interesting works of philosophy. Authors may include Sophocles, Chaucer, Dickinson, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Beckett, Kundera, Charlie Kaufman; Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas; Plato, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Taught in English.

(Staff)

How different disciplines approach topics and issues central to the study of ethnic and race relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Lectures by senior faculty affiliated with CSRE. Discussions led by CSRE teaching fellows. Includes an optional Haas Center for Public Service certified Community Engaged Learning section.

What is criticism? When we interpret literature today, are we fulfilling the critical vocation? What are the alternatives? We consider the origins of the idea of the critic in nineteenth-century culture, its development in the twentieth century, and its current exponents, revisionists, and dissenters. Senior seminar for Comparative Literature Senior majors only.

This course examines the ways writers in literature and medicine have used the narrative form to explore the ethics of care in what has been called the developing world. We will begin with a call made by the editor-in-chief of The Lancet for a literature of global health, namely fiction modeled on the social reform novels of the nineteenth century, understood to have helped readers develop a conscience for public health as the field emerged as a modern medical specialty. We will then spend the quarter understanding how colonial, postcolonial, and world literatures have answered and complicated this call. Readings will include prose fiction by Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Amitav Ghosh, Susan Sontag as well as physician memoirs featuring Frantz Fanon, Albert Schweitzer, Abraham Verghese, Paul Farmer. And each literary reading will be paired with medical, philosophical, and policy writings that deeply inform the field of global health.

How can we study computer code as literature? What can poetry teach us about programming and vice versa? These types of questions drive this course, which has two different tracks: one for computer science students and one for literature students. The focus is on the development of a shared conceptual middle ground at which these two tracks can meet. Topics include critical code studies, code poetry, and cognition. Authors include Elizabeth Bishop, Ada Lovelace, Hayden Carruth, and Donald Knuth.

This course will explore the changing images of love in pivotal works of modern Persian and Turkish literature. Classes will include close readings and discussions of poems, short stories, and plays with particular attention to the constellation of lover/beloved, the theme of romantic love, and the cultural and historical background of these elements. Our starting point will be the adoption of the novel as a form in the late 19th century. From there, we will explore different figurations of love in key texts of the 20th century up to the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978) and the coup d'état in Turkey (1980). Themes will include the end of empire and the demise of the concubine, the portrayal of the homeland as lover, secularization and the lifting of the veil, the figure of the female pioneer, the conflict of western and eastern morals, the prostitute as a new paradigm, the emergence of female writers, and avantgarde conceptions of love. Open to undergraduate and graduate students. All readings and discussions will be in English.

This course is the continuation of COMPLIT 248A Reading Turkish I, which served as an introduction to the structures of the Turkish language necessary for reading. It is designed to develop reading competence in Turkish for graduate students. Undergraduates should consult the instructor before enrolling for the course. Essential grammar, syntax points, vocabulary, and reading skills will be emphasized. This is not a traditional language course that takes an integrated four-skill approach; it focuses only on reading, and as a result we will be able to cover advanced material in a short amount of time. This course is conducted in English, but students will be exposed to the sounds of Turkish, and will have the opportunity to practice pronunciation in class.nnCOMPLIT 248B is followed by COMPLIT 248C Advanced Turkish for Research in the Spring.

pite enormous obstacles, immigrant Iranian filmmakers, within a few decades (after the Iranian Revolution), have created a slow but steady stream of films outside Iran. They were originally started by individual spontaneous attempts from different corners of the world and by now we can identify common lines of interest amongst them. There are also major differences between them. These films have never been allowed to be screened inside Iran, and without any support from the global system of production and distribution, as independent and individual attempts, they have enjoyed little attention. Despite all this, Iranian cinema in exile is in no sense any less important than Iranian cinema inside Iran. In this course we will view one such film, made outside Iran, in each class meeting and expect to reach a common consensus in identifying the general patterns within these works and this movement. Questions such as the ones listed below will be addressed in our meetings each week: What changes in aesthetics and point of view of the filmmaker are caused by the change in his or her work environment? Though unwantedly these films are made outside Iran, how related are they to the known (recognized) cinema within Iran? And in fact, to what extent do these films express things that are left unsaid by the cinema within Iran?

A double reflection about a) the historical emergence of concepts and discourses referring to aesthetic sensibility, creativity and judgment in early Western Modernity, and b) the potential and the limits of this philosophical endeavor.

Focus is on major works by French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and their import for literary studies. Aim is to discuss and evaluate Levinas's (often latent) aesthetics through a close reading of his work in phenomenology, ethics, and Jewish philosophy. If poetry has come to seem barbaric (or at least useless) in a world so deeply shaped by genocide, forced migration, and climate change, Levinas offers a clear and deeply engaged path forward. If you love literature but still haven't figured out what on earth it might be good for, this course is for you. Readings and discussion in English.

This course will probe the thought of nothingness in various European writers and thinkers. The main authors include Giacomo Leopardi, Nietszsche, Michelstader, Heidegger, Beckett, and Emile Cioran.

Narrative and cognition in 18th-century fictional, philosophical, scientific, and cultural texts. Probable readings: Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Swift, Defoe, Hume, Lennox, Sterne, Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft, and Bentham.

Both an introduction into the complexities of medieval Western culture (from a perspective of "presence"-philosophy) and an introduction into Presence-Philosophy (through the lens of medieval Western culture).

This course explores the central place Africa holds in prose writing emerging during early and modern periods of globalization across the Atlantic, including the middle passage, exploration and colonialism, black internationalism, decolonization, immigration, and diasporic return. We will begin with Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789), a touchstone for the Atlantic prose tradition, and study how writers crossing the Atlantic have continued to depict Africa in later centuries: to dramatize scenes of departure and arrival in stories of self-making or new citizenship, to evoke histories of racial unity or examine psychic and social fragmentation, to imagine new national communities or question their norms and borders. Our readings will be selected from English, French, Portuguese and Spanish-language traditions. And we will pay close attention to genres of prose fiction (Conrad, Condé, Olinto), epic and prose poetry (Césaire, Walcott), theoretical reflection (Gilroy, Glissant, Mudimbe, Benitez-Rojo), and literary autobiography (Barack Obama, Saidiya Hartman).

A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome, crossed, and cursed; motivates bodies to climb over walls; and threatens physical harm. This graduate seminar places into comparative dialogue a variety of perspectives from Chicana/o and Mexican/Latin American literary studies. Our seminar will examine fiction and cultural productions that range widely, from celebrated Mexican and Chicano/a authors such as Carlos Fuentes (La frontera de cristal), Yuri Herrera (Señales que precederan al fin del mundo), Willivaldo Delgaldillo (La Virgen del Barrio Árabe), Américo Paredes (George Washington Gómez: A Mexico-Texan Novel), Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza), and Sandra Cisneros (Carmelo: Puro Cuento), among others, to musicians whose contributions to border thinking and culture have not yet been fully appreciated such as Herb Albert, Ely Guerra, Los Tigres del Norte, and Café Tacvba. Last but not least, we will screen and analyze Orson Welles' iconic border films Touch of Evil and Rodrigo Dorfman's Los Sueños de Angélica.nnProposing a diverse and geographically expansive view of the US-Mexico border literary and cultural studies, this seminar links the work of these authors and musicians to struggles for land and border-crossing rights, anti-imperialist forms of trans-nationalism, and to the decolonial turn in border thinking or pensamineto fronterizo. It forces us to take into account the ways in which shifts in the nature of global relations affect literary production and negative aesthetics especially in our age of (late) post-industrial capitalism.

Discussion of one contemporary or historical text from the Western philosophical tradition per quarter in a group of faculty and graduate students. For admission of new participants, a conversation with H. U. Gumbrecht is required. May be repeated for credit. Taught in English.

This course will probe the thought of nothingness in various European writers and thinkers. The main authors include Giacomo Leopardi, Nietszsche, Michelstader, Heidegger, Beckett, and Emile Cioran.

Gathering and analyzing data, constructing hypotheses and designing experiments to test them, writing programs [if needed], preparing visuals and texts for articles or conferences. Requires a year-long participation in the activities of the Lab.