COMPLIT 10N:
Shakespeare and Performance in a Global Context
Preference to freshmen. The problem of performance including the performance of gender through the plays of Shakespeare. In-class performances by students of scenes from plays. The history of theatrical performance. Sources include filmed versions of plays, and readings on the history of gender, gender performance, and transvestite theater.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II
COMPLIT 11Q:
Shakespeare, Playing, Gender
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. Topics: transvestism inside and outside the theater, medical and other discussions of sex changes from female to male, hermaphrodites, and fascination with the monstrous.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II
COMPLIT 12SC:
Ghost Stories: Why the Dead Return and What They Want From Us
Anxiety about mortality and wisdom about the cultural place of the past in the enduring genre of the ghost story from classical literature to popular film. Memory and regret, mourning and forgetting. Classic authors such as Hoffmann, Poe, James, Joyce, and Ibsen, and more recent authors such Paul Auster, Marie Darrieussecq, Catherine Lim, and Toni Morrison.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
COMPLIT 21N:
First Person Singular
Preference to freshmen. How first person narrative has been used across Western literature from antiquity to the present, in works including nonfictional autobiography, records of travel and testimonial, novels, and lyric poetry. Nonfictional readings may include Augustine, Rousseau, Cook, Equiano, and Freud; novels by Montesquieu, Mary Shelley, Conrad, and Levi; and poems by Rimbaud and Rilke. The use of the first-person in online media.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 41Q:
Ethnicity and Literature
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul
COMPLIT 49:
What is Nobel Literature? Reading, Assessing, and Interpreting the Nobel Novels on the World Stage
Recent Nobel laureates in literature: Gabriel García Márquez, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Kenzaburo Oe, and V.S. Naipaul. These writers come from different locations, yet each participates in a global conversation about the human condition. The impact of their identities upon their thought and writing. How the Nobel prize is awarded. The role of literature in the world, and analytical skills for reading literary texts.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 54N:
Reading in Common
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 61Q:
Culture and Conflict in Contemporary Europe (GERGEN 61Q)
Preference to sophomores. Transformation of European culture and identity in the wake of the Cold War, European unification, and the post 9/11 environment. Pressures on transatlantic relationships; anti-Americanism; tensions around national cultural identity due to regional integration and globalization; immigration and the European experience of multiculturalism; and flashpoints of conflict concerning religion, secularization, and antisemitism.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 101:
What is Literature?
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?
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
COMPLIT 115:
Nabokov in the Transnational Context (COMPLIT 215, SLAVGEN 156, SLAVGEN 256)
Nabakov's techniques of migration and camouflage as he inhabits the literary and historical contexts of St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, America, and Switzerland. His early and late stories, last Russian novel The Gift, Lolita (the novel and screenplay), and Pale Fire. Readings in English.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 119:
Dostoevsky and His Times (COMPLIT 219, SLAVGEN 151, SLAVGEN 251)
Open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Major works in English translation with reference to related developments in Russian and European culture, literary criticism, and intellectual history.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 121:
Poems, Poetry, Worlds: An Introductory Course
What is poetry? How does it speak in many voices to questions of history, society, and personal experience? Why does it matter? The reading and interpretation of poetry in crosscultural comparison as experience, invention, form, sound, knowledge, and part of the world. Readings include: medieval to modern poetry of western Europe and the Americas; contemporary poetry of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the U.S.; and present-day experimental digital, sound, and visual poetry.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 122:
Literature as Performance (FRENGEN 122)
Theater as performance and as literature. The historical tension between performance and sexuality in the Western tradition since Greek antiquity. Non-European forms and conventions of performance and theatricality. The modern competition between theater and other forms of performance and media such as sports, film, and television. Sources include: classical Japanese theater; ancient Greek tragedy and comedy; medieval theater in interaction with Christian rituals and its countercultural horizons; the classical age of European theater including Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Molière.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 123:
The Novel, The World (ENGLISH 184)
Combining perspectives of the novels of the world as anthropological force with the sense of reality, and as protean form that has reshaped the literary universe. Readings from: ancient Greece; medieval Japan and Britain; and early modern Spain, China, and Britain; romantic theories of the novel; 19th-century realism and popular fiction; modernist experiments; and postmodern pastiches.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 125A:
The Gothic Novel (ENGLISH 125A)
The Gothic novel and its relatives from its invention by Walpole in The Castle of Otranto of 1764. Readings include: Northanger Abbey, The Italian, The Monk, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and Dracula. What defines the Gothic as it evolves from one specific novel to a mode that makes its way into a range of fictional types?
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 127A:
Short Stories from the Arab World
Comparative analysis of short stories from the Arab world, especially N. Africa. The depiction of the fantastic, political satire, language hybridism, and genre fusion; Arab prose between European translation and anticolonial nationalism. Critical accounts of the Arab nahda (renaissance) and its importance for literary renovation, the impact of pan-Arab sentiment on literary production, and the status of the French language in N. Africa. Readings in French and Arabic original or in English translation.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 141:
Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean (FRENLIT 133)
Major African and Caribbean writers. Issues raised in literary works which reflect changing aspects of the societies and cultures of Francophone Africa and the French Caribbean. Topics include colonization and change, quest for identity, tradition and modernity, and new roles and status for women. Readings in fiction and poetry. Authors include Laye Camara, Mariama Ba, and Joseph Zobel. In French. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 126 or consent of instructor.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom
COMPLIT 142:
The Literature of the Americas (ENGLISH 172E)
The intellectual and aesthetic problems of inter-American literature conceived as an entirety. Emphasis is on continuities and crises relevant to N., Central, and S. American literatures. Issues such as the encounters between world views, the emergence of creole and racially mixed populations, slavery, the New World voice, myths of America as paradise or utopia, the coming of modernism, 20th-century avant gardes, and distinctive modern episodes such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, magical realism, and Noigandres in comparative perspective.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
COMPLIT 146:
The Literature of Worldliness
Literary texts concerned with the mastery of social forms and codes of conduct. The cultural institution of le monde as it develops in modern France and England. Focus is on novels whose predominant subject matter is the initiation of individuals into the techniques and practices necessary to enhance their social position. The literature of worldliness is the literature of being together, a tradition which explores the constitutive role of others in the formation of the self. Authors include Saint-Simon, Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Stendhal, and Proust.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 148:
Introduction to Asian American Cultures
Preference to Asian American Studies and CSRE majors. Asian American cultural production (film, drama, poetry, fiction, music) in sociohistorical context. Topics include ethnicity, race, class, and gender, and the political economy of ethnic culture in the U.S.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul
COMPLIT 181:
Philosophy and Literature (CLASSGEN 81, ENGLISH 81, FRENGEN 181, GERGEN 181, HUMNTIES 181, ITALGEN 181, PHIL 81, SLAVGEN 181)
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. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
COMPLIT 189A:
Honors Research
Senior honors students enroll for 5 units in Winter while writing the honors thesis, and may enroll in 189B for 2 units in Spring while revising the thesis. Prerequisite: DLCL 189.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Berman, R. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Eshel, A. (PI);
Frank, J. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greenleaf, M. (PI);
Gumbrecht, H. (PI);
Landy, J. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Mudimbe-Boyi, E. (PI);
Nightingale, A. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Ruffinelli, J. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schnapp, J. (PI);
Wang, B. (PI);
White, H. (PI)
COMPLIT 189B:
Honors Research
Open to juniors with consent of adviser while drafting honors proposal. Open to senior honors students while revising honors thesis. Prerequisites for seniors: 189A, DLCL 189.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 2
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Berman, R. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Eshel, A. (PI);
Frank, J. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greenleaf, M. (PI);
Gumbrecht, H. (PI);
Landy, J. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Mudimbe-Boyi, E. (PI);
Nightingale, A. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Ruffinelli, J. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schnapp, J. (PI);
Wang, B. (PI);
White, H. (PI)
COMPLIT 194:
Independent Research
(Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
1 times
COMPLIT 199:
Senior Seminar: Pleasures of Reading
Required of Comparative Literature seniors; others by consent of instructor. Different paradigms for the kind of enjoyment readers get from literature: entertainment, instruction; ideological comfort, critical distance; inspiration and incitation to their own creativity. Works read may include Aristotle, Hegel, and Brecht on tragedy; Longinus and Burke on the sublime; Roland Barthes S/Z; sonnets by Mallarmé and Eliot's Wasteland; Cixous on écriture féminine; Bakthin's book on Rabelais and carnival, and Rabelais and the French fabliaux; Adorno on kitsch and literature of entertainment; Benjamin's essay on The Storyteller; Janice Radway's Reading the Romance.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-ER
COMPLIT 211:
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre: French Existentialism in the Post-World War II Period (FRENGEN 211)
Philosophical and literary works of two of the most widely read and canonized authors of the mid-20th century. The texts and times of French existentialism, and changing relationships to this tradition. Prerequisite: reading knowledge of French.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 215:
Nabokov in the Transnational Context (COMPLIT 115, SLAVGEN 156, SLAVGEN 256)
Nabakov's techniques of migration and camouflage as he inhabits the literary and historical contexts of St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, America, and Switzerland. His early and late stories, last Russian novel The Gift, Lolita (the novel and screenplay), and Pale Fire. Readings in English.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-4
COMPLIT 215A:
Gottfried Benn and Francis Ponge: Mid-20th-Century European Poetry and the Problem of the Referent (FRENGEN 215, GERLIT 215)
Comparative readings of the two poets in their respective national contexts, with attention to biographical and poetological frameworks. Canonic status and scholarly reception histories. Renewed interest in their work with regard to their distinctive practices of connecting prosodic form and extra textual referents. Prerequisite: reading knowledge of German or French.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 219:
Dostoevsky and His Times (COMPLIT 119, SLAVGEN 151, SLAVGEN 251)
Open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Major works in English translation with reference to related developments in Russian and European culture, literary criticism, and intellectual history.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
COMPLIT 221:
Memory, History, and the Contemporary Novel (GERLIT 246)
How the watershed events of the 20th century, the philosophic linguistic turn, and the debate regarding the end of history left their mark on the novel. How does the contemporary novel engage with the past? How does its interest in memory and history relate to late- or postmodern culture of time or to political and ethical concerns? Novels by Toni Morrison, W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and A. B. Yehoshua; theoretical works by Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Paul Ricoeur Awishai Margalit, and Walter Benn Michaels.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 232A:
Time of Latency: Western Cultures in the Decade After 1945 (FRENGEN 232, ITALGEN 232)
Retrospective accounts and contemporary experience converge in the description of the decade following 1945 as a period of quietude that seemed to repress an unknown trauma. Goal is to reconstruct the mood of this historical moment and its relationship to the early 21st century. Sources include canonical texts and everyday documents from different national and cultural contexts. Advanced undergrads require consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 233:
Baroque and Neobaroque (ENGLISH 233, SPANLIT 293E)
The literary, cultural, and political implications of the 17th-century phenomenon formed in response to the conditions of the 16th century including humanism, absolutism, and early capitalism, and dispersed through Europe, the Americas, and Asia. If the Baroque is a universal code of this period, how do its vehicles, such as tragic drama, Ciceronian prose, and metaphysical poetry, converse with one another? The neobaroque as a complex reaction to the remains of the baroque in Latin American cultures, with attention to the mode in recent Brazilian literary theory and Mexican poetry.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 242A:
China and the World: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Literature (CHINLIT 251)
How 20th-century Chinese thinkers and writers envisioned themselves as citizens of the world and critiqued traditional culture. How intellectuals infused new life into traditional thought and sensibility and made contributions to global culture. The matrix of aesthetics, ethics, and literature. Texts from the Western aesthetic and cosmopolitan tradition.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
COMPLIT 243D:
Weber, Schmitt, Arendt (GERGEN 243D)
Accounts of political power and cultural values in the context of crisis. Rethinking community and sovereignty between WW I and the Nazi era; the post-WWII legacy. Enlightenment legacy and existential philosophy as frameworks for discourses on executive authority, democracy, decisionism, the state of exception, and totalitarianism. Readings in English include selections from Weber's political writings, Schmitt (Nomos and other texts), and Arendt (including her Origins of Totalitarianism).
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 247A:
Borderland Identities and Cultural Hybridity between Europe and America
A comparison of texts by Afro-German, Turkish-German, and Austrian women of color with texts by U.S. Latina and African American writers in light of critical paradigms from Chicana theory. Themes include home, identity, community, and nation. The international dialogue of women of color and the cultural specificities of Europeans of color.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 248:
Afghanistan: Literature and History
Sources include poetry, short stories, novels, film, and secondary sources.
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 250:
Literature, History, and Representation (FRENLIT 248)
Literary works as historical narratives; texts which envision ways of reconstructing or representing an ancient or immediate past through collective or individual narratives. Narration and narrator; relation between individual and collective history; historical events and how they have shaped the narratives; master narratives; and alternative histories. Reading include Glissant, Césaire, Dadié, Cixous, Pérec, Le Clézio, Mokkedem, Benjamin, de Certeau, and White.
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 303D:
Thinking in Fiction (ENGLISH 303D)
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 311:
Shakespeare, Islam, and Others (ENGLISH 373D)
Shakespeare and other early modern writers in relation to new work on Islam and the Ottoman Turk in early modern studies. Othello, Twelfth Night, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and other Shakespeare plays. Kyd's Solyman and Perseda, Daborne's A Christian Turned Turk, Massinger's The Renegado, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and literary and historical materials.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 320A:
Epic and Empire (ENGLISH 314)
Focus is on Virgil's Aeneid and its influence, tracing the European epic tradition (Ariosto, Tasso, Camoes, Spenser, and Milton) to New World discovery and mercantile expansion in the early modern period.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 324:
Landscapes of the Sublime
The modern notion of the sublime in philosophy, literature, and art, emphasizing its connection to space and landscape. Topics include: how global exploration contributed to the sublime in the late 17th and 18th centuries; the romantic interiorization of the sublime; and the sublime's connection to mimesis, power, work, and technology. Writers may include Milton, Burke, Kant, Deleuze and Guattari, Freud, the Shelleys, Coleridge, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud; artists may include Gericault, Turner, Delacroix, and Friedrich.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 327:
Genres of the Novel
Literary genres in 18th and 19th century novels include picaresque and adventure fiction, domestic fiction, realist fiction, historical fiction, Gothic fiction, sentimental fiction, science fiction, and the novel of ideas. Works may include Lazarillo de Tormes, Robinson Crusoe, The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Sorrows of Werher, Claire d'Albe, Ivanhoe, Indiana, Madame Bovary, Voyage to the Center of the Earth. Theoretical models for genre.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 358:
Psychoanalytic Hermeneutics: Soma, Psyche, and Self in Modernist Discourse
Pseudoscience psychoanalysis considered as a symptom of the cultural disaggregation of the western European humanist idea of selfhood. Freud's formulation of the psychoanalytical project in Interpretation of Dreams and his revisions of the project in works such as Totem and Taboo, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Ego and Id, Instincts, and Moses. Post-Freudian revisions as represented by figures such as Klein, Abraham, Lacan, and LaPlanche.Postmodernist adaptations of the project by Lear, Ronnen, Bloom, and Derrida. Recommended: ability to read German and French.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 359A:
Philosophical Reading Group (FRENGEN 395, ITALGEN 395)
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.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
for credit
COMPLIT 369:
Introduction to Graduate Studies: Criticism as Profession (FRENGEN 369, GERLIT 369, ITALGEN 369)
Major texts of modern literary criticism in the context of professional scholarship today. Readings of critics such as Lukács, Auerbach, Frye, Ong, Benjamin, Adorno, Szondi, de Man, Abrams, Bourdieu, Vendler, and Said. Contemporary professional issues including scholarly associations, journals, national and comparative literatures, university structures, and career paths.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 395:
Research
(Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-15
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Berman, R. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Eshel, A. (PI);
Fellner, A. (PI);
Frank, J. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greenleaf, M. (PI);
Gumbrecht, H. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Mudimbe-Boyi, E. (PI);
Nightingale, A. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schnapp, J. (PI);
Surwillo, L. (PI);
Wang, B. (PI);
White, H. (PI)
COMPLIT 396L:
Pedagogy Seminar I (ENGLISH 396L)
Required for first-year Ph.D students in English, Modern Thought and Literature, and Comparative Literature (except for Comparative Literature students teaching in a foreign language). Preparation for surviving as teaching assistants in undergraduate literature courses. Focus is on leading discussions and grading papers.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
COMPLIT 399:
Dissertation
(Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-15
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Berman, R. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Eshel, A. (PI);
Frank, J. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greenleaf, M. (PI);
Gumbrecht, H. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Mudimbe-Boyi, E. (PI);
Nightingale, A. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schnapp, J. (PI);
Surwillo, L. (PI);
Wang, B. (PI);
White, H. (PI)
COMPLIT 802:
TGR Dissertation
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bender, J. (PI);
Berman, R. (PI);
Cohen, M. (PI);
Eshel, A. (PI);
Frank, J. (PI);
Greene, R. (PI);
Greenleaf, M. (PI);
Gumbrecht, H. (PI);
Lerer, S. (PI);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Mudimbe-Boyi, E. (PI);
Nightingale, A. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Schnapp, J. (PI);
Surwillo, L. (PI);
Wang, B. (PI);
White, H. (PI)
COMPLIT 128A:
Death in 20th-Century and Contemporary French and American Literature
How does art engage the topos of death? Symbolic, rhetorical, and moral functions of death in narrative, particularly as represented in 20th-century and contemporary literature, art, philosophy, and popular culture. Challenges, responsibilities, and potential for insight that follow from the fact of mortality. Focus is on French and American sources, including: Proust, Faulkner, Camus, Vonnegut, Perec, Marilynn Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Six Feet Under. French texts can be read in the original or in translation.
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 129A:
Contemporary Persian Poetry: Encounter of a Thousand-Year-Old Classical Tradition with Modernity
The primacy of poetic expression in Persian culture in the transition from tradition to modernity. Major 20th-century poets in relation to historical events and social change. Authors include: Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamloo, Sohrab Sepehri, Mehdi Akhavan Sales, Forough Farrokhzad, Nader Naderpour, Fereydoun Moshiri, Esma'il Kho'i, and Afghan and Tajik poets.
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 151:
Theories of Poetic Life
The Western tradition of the poetic life and the notion that it is a realm of its own beyond the oppositions of the individual and the political, the exemplar and the species, the sensual and the spiritual. Intermittently described as vitality, eros, inspiration, or power, it cannot be reduced to any of those, but is articulated at their intersections. Authors such as Plato, Ovid, Petrarch, Kleist, Nietzsche, and Benjamin.
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 198:
Digital Humanities Workshop (HUMNTIES 198W)
Post-print models of research and scholarship in humanities fields. Toolkits being employed in such work from wikis to interactive media to virtual worlds; and theories and practices in the digital humanities field. Focus is on student projects.
| Units: 4
COMPLIT 216:
Petrarch and Petrarchism (ITALGEN 264E)
The works of Petrarch (1304-1374), acknowledged as the founder of Renaissance humanism, and a bibliophile, collector of manuscripts, and devotee of erudition. How he dedicated his life to harmonizing the Christian faith with classical learning. Sources include his Latin moral works, epistles, epics, and treatises on illustrious men, and the Triumphs and Canzoniere .
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 223:
Courtly Love in Classical Persian Poetry
Classical Persian poems addressing secular and religious journeys in search of truth, happiness, and the heroic life. Texts include Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, Rumi's Masnavi, Attar's Conference of the Birds, and Gorgani's Vis and Ramin. All texts in English translation.
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 235:
Staging Knowledge
Exhibition practices and curatorship in the interdisciplinary humanities through the design of an experimental exhibition space concerning the actuality of late 18th-century individualism. 18th-century politics, music, fine arts, philosophy, technology, medicine, and diplomacy in relation to methodological inquiry into display and multiple media. Attention to opera as particular stagings of knowledge: Mozart, da Ponte, Slileri, Casti, Gluck, and Haydn. Theoretical sources include Adorno, Bachelard, Batailles, Freud, Musil, and Warburg.
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 238:
Futurisms (ARTHIST 248, ITALGEN 238)
From its foundation in 1909 through WW II, futurism developed into the first truly international cultural-political avant garde. Its aim was the revolutionary transformation of all spheres of life. The movement's manifestations in Italy, Russia, France, Spain, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Topics: machines and culture; visual poetics and war; futurism's complex ties to bolshevism and fascism. Media: poetry, performance, music, painting, photography, radio, and film. Writers include: Marinetti, Mayakovsky. Visual artists include: Boccioni, Bragaglia, Russolo, Malevich, Lissitzky.
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 245A:
Fin de Siècle Vienna
Implosive avant gardism in Vienna around 1900: artistic and intellectual anti-traditionalism in the face of forceful resistance by conservative culture. Viennese modernism in architecture and design, theory, literature, and cultural critique. The emergence of Viennese internationalism. Texts by Freud, Kraus, Wagner, Loos and Hoffmann, Mach and the Wiener Kreis, early Wittgenstein, Schiele, Kokoschka, Zemlinsky, early Schönberg, Weber, and Berg. Viennese modernism as a hypercritic self-construction of individualism as an inspiring decadence.
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 246A:
Literature and Film of Modern Iran
Iran's social structures, political system, cultural tendencies, and modern artistic culture.
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 248A:
CSI Vienna: American Culture in Austria since 1980
The cultural transfer of American popular culture including recent work on globalization, cultural history, cultural studies, visual culture theory, and the performative turn in cultural theory. Focus is on American cultural impact on Austria, including the transfer of musical idioms such as the blues and Bob Dylan, television shows such as CSI, road movies, and consumer goods as symbols of American everyday life.
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 248B:
Afghanistan: War and Literature
History, culture, and literature of modern Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora. Readings in English include novels, poetry, memoirs, secondary sources, and film (English or with subtitles). Topics include lyric poetry and politics, the struggle for pluralism and democracy, modernity and religious fundamentalism, and the relationship between ethnic diversity and cultural transformation.
| Units: 3-5
