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.
Last offered: Spring 2009
| 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: Spr
| 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 morality and wisdom about the cultural place of the past is found in the enduring genre of the ghost story. Memory and regret, mourning and forgetting, past deeds and future actions are depicted in classical literature to popular film. Classic short story authors such as Henry James, P.G. Wodehouse, Eudora Welty, and Ray Bradbury, and novelists Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Ann Siddens and Jonathan Carroll, ghost films and fieldtrips to haunting at Stanford and the Bay Area.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
COMPLIT 32SI:
International Graffiti and Street Art
A geographical, chronological, and thematic examination of international graffiti and street art. Their aesthetics and history in terms of social and political functions (broken windows theory, graffiti as political campaigning, street art as marketing). Images, movies, and texts from the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia
Terms: Aut
| Units: 1
COMPLIT 41N:
Borderlands of Literature and Culture
In this seminar we will focus on the transnational themes of memory, identity, and US-Mexico border thinking and writing. We will explore the transnational poetry, autoethnographies, short stores, novels, and rock en español musics/videos by Americo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carlos Fuentes, Elly Guerra, and Cafe Tacuba, among others.
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
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 50Q:
Is God Dead? (GERLIT 120Q)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
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: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
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
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: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 123:
The Novel, The World
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: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 124:
Fait Divers and the Development of Modernist Writing
Felix Fénéon¿s novels in three lines from 1906 turned a journalistic stop-gap into a literary genre highly influential for modernist writing. The history of the fait divers and its literary precursors and variations (Kleist, Hebel; its influence on authors such as Mallarmé, Kafka, and Kraus. Reading knowledge of German helpful, but not required.
| Units: 3-5
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: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 133:
Salome, Modernity, and the Aesthetics of Transgression
The Salome theme in Europe and the U.S.: from the 1880s to the present, in literature, opera, dance, and film. Topics include representations of sexual and aesthetic excess, ecstasy, and transgression in the context of modernity. Historically associated with metaphysical crisis, evil femininity, and discourses of perversity, the popularity of the Salome theme invites comparative treatments in fin de siècle and modernist studies, feminist studies, as well as queer theory. All readings in English.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 134:
The Poetry of History in the Americas
Major long poems of the 20th century by: U.S. poets such as Williams and Olson; Latin America poets such as Neruda and Cardenal; and Caribbean poets such as Brathwaite and Walcott. The literary history of the long poem in the hemisphere sustaining a transamerican viewpoint. Topics include: claims for the autonomy of culture in the Americas after WW II; redefinitions of the role of poets under conditions of U.S. hegemony and the Cold War; and the legacies of modernism.
| Units: 3-5
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: Aut
| 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 144:
Gender and Modernism
Gender and sexuality in trans-Atlantic culture from the 1880s-1930s. The 19th-century culture wars and the figures of the dandy and the new woman. Sexuality and the modernist critique of Enlightenment rationality. The impact of WW I on gender roles. The rise of modern consumer culture, fashion, and design. The modernist metropolis and gender/sexuality. The avant garde and gender. Literary first-wave feminism. Radclyffe Hall's obscenity trial. Homoerotic modernism. Attention to contemporary intellectual history and recent theorists of gender and sexuality including Foucault, Felski, Jardine, and Sedgwick.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 146:
Asian American Culture and Community (ASNAMST 146S, CSRE 146S)
An examination of the history of Asians in America via one case history: the International Hotel in San Francisco. Background history of Asians in America, and the specifics of the I Hotel case as involving the convergence of global and local economies, urban redevelopment, and housing issues for minorities. Focus on the convergence of community and cultural production. Service learning component involving community work at the Manilatown Heritage Foundation in San Francisco.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
COMPLIT 147:
Culture Wars in Epic Poetry (CLASSGEN 147)
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Melville's Moby Dick, and Walcott's Omeros are epics that feature the clash of civilizations. Topics include cultural values and social relations including race, class, ethnicity, and gender in Homeric Greece, the early Roman Empire, 19th-century America, and modern-day St. Lucia a Caribbean island colonized by European empires and populated with African slave. The literary aspects of epic and how each epic imitates and transforms earlier epics.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 149:
The Laboring of Diaspora & Border Literary Cultures
Focus is given to emergent theories of culture and on comparative literary and cultural studies. How do we treat culture as a social force? How do we go about reading the presence of social contexts within cultural texts? How do ethno-racial writers re-imagine the nation as a site with many "cognitive maps" in which the nation-state is not congruent with cultural identity? How do diaspora and border narratives/texts strive for comparative theoretical scope while remaining rooted in specific local histories.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 151:
Bodies and the Modern Uncanny
Theories of the uncanny through various critical traditions (e.g. psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction) and their account of how modern authors engage with the problem of self-alienation, reimagined in response to questions of self, other, and identity; the body as a site of identity, confrontation, vulnerability, or power as a persistent image in uncanny literature. Critical texts include Freud, Todorov, Johnson, Derrida; authors include Hoffman, Kafka, Maupassant, Blanchot, Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Coetzee. Readings in original or translation; discussion in English.
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 153:
Literature and Religion in Modernity
Literature that takes a skeptical view of religious belief while criticizing the cultural, social, and political conditions of the religious imagination in post-Enlightenment modernity. Readings from authors such as Blake, Goethe, Büchner, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Mew, Eliot, Brecht, Bataille, Sartre, Beckett, Ionesco, Celan, Winterson. Sources include visual artworks and philosophical and critical writings. Literary, ethical, and religious positions concerning central human questions: what is humanity; what is God; how does one avoid evil and adhere to good; how does one live after the death of God? Readings in English.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
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: 4-5
| 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
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);
Moretti, F. (PI);
Mudimbe-Boyi, E. (PI);
Nightingale, A. (PI);
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI);
Parker, P. (PI);
Saldivar, R. (PI);
Wang, B. (PI)
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 217:
Hölderlin's Poetry (GERLIT 217)
A discussion of key poems by Friedrich Hölderlin with regard to themes including the utopian fatherland as mythological landscape; the idea of the Greek gods; the concept of poetry as event; and the emphatic "now". The seminar also explores the relationship between the philosophy of history and poetic metaphor.
Terms: Spr
| 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 223:
Literary Diaries of Classic Modernity (GERLIT 223)
Focus is on self-analysis in works of key modern writers. Since Montaigne's Essais and Rousseau's Confessions, analysis of the self has been a central topic for modern literature. Texts include Baudelaire's Intimate Journals, Kafka's Diaries, Gide's Journals, Woolf's Moments of Being, Benjamin's Berlin Childhood, and Pavese's Diaries. Analysis of the self as polarizing between the imagination of a utopian childhood and self-deprivation.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 226:
Narrative and Ethics (GERLIT 242)
Major terms of narratology; how different literary, cinematic, and popular culture narratives raise ethical issues, stir public debates and contribute to understanding human values. Readings include Biblical texts, Antigone, Kleist, Kafka, Coetzee, V for Vendetta, South Park, Kant, Arendt, Nussbaum, Rorty, and Levinas.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-EthicReas
COMPLIT 230A:
The Novel in Europe: The Age of Compromise, 1800-1848 (ENGLISH 230A)
The novel after the French revolution and the industrial take-off. Novelistic form and historical processes ¿ nation-building and the marriage market, political conservatism and the advent of fashion, aristocracy and bourgeoisie and proletariat... ¿ focusing on how stylistic choices and plot structures offer imaginary resolutions to social and ideological conflicts. Authors will include Austen, Scott, Shelley, Stendhal, Puskin, Balzac, Bronte.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 234:
Conservative Revolution (GERGEN 201)
An examination of conservative critiques of modernity in the early 20th century, including topics such as German nationalism, the war experience, responses to democracy, anti-liberalism, cultural pessimism in the decline of the West, crises of authority, technology, geopolitics, existentialism, and tradition. Readings from authors such as Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Borchardt, Karl Haushofer, Konrad Weiss. Readings in either English or German.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT 242:
The Global South - Faulkner, García Márquez, Morrison, and Cisneros
A detailed study of Faulkner, García Márquez, Morrison, and Cisneros's major imaginative writings in the aesthetic and geopolitical contexts of the South and the Global South. What does it mean to read South by South? South by North? We will be considering the idea of the South as a real and imaginary territory, a rich ideological geography, and a geo-culture, where regional mythology, ethnic and racial formations and divisions, national and transnational contestations, and the new imperialism together produce extraordinary narratives.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 247:
Modernism and the Jewish Voice in Europe (GERGEN 221A, SLAVGEN 221)
Some of the most haunting literary voices of the 20th century emerged from the Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe. The Jewishness of the modernists is thematized, asking whether it contributed to shared attitudes toward text, history, or identity. Their works are situated in specific linguistic traditions: Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, or German. Primary readings from Ansky, Bialik, Mandelstam, Babel, Schulz, Kafka, Celan; secondary readings in history, E. European literature, and theory, including Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Arendt.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-4
| 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 249D:
Women in Modern Iranian Literature
A discussion of modern Iranian literature, by women and about women, in the last century. Modern literary theories, including discussion of archetypes, will be used to analyze texts of poetry and fiction by women writers.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
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: Spr
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 322A:
Theories of the Novel (FRENGEN 356)
The novel as the literary genre most closely identified with the development of cultural modernity by literary historians and theorists. Critical models for defining the novel's poetics and cultural work. Critical readings such as texts by Lukacs, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Barthes, Armstrong, Gallagher, Bourdieu, Macherey, Jameson, Said and Spivak. Tutor texts such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 332:
The Transatlantic Renaissance (ENGLISH 310)
The emergence of early modern transatlantic culture, emphasizing how canonical works of the Renaissance may be reimagined in a colonial context and how the productions of the colonial Americas make sense as Renaissance works. Topics: mestizaje and creole identity, gender and sexuality, law, religion and the church, mining, commerce, and government. European and American authors: Thomas More, Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge, William Shakespeare, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and lesser known figures.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 345:
Modern Hebrew Literature Reading Circle
Discussion of literary texts written in Hebrew in a group of faculty, graduate students and visiting scholars. Advanced reading knowledge of Hebrew is required. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 2
| Repeatable
for credit
COMPLIT 358:
Reading, Otherness, Language
Empathy is considered useful as a key element in fostering moral sentiment and social equilibrium. The opposite is true with regard to literature, when dissimilarity rather than similarity becomes privileged and established as a key way of regarding fiction and its social and ethical role. Texts include: Badiou, Ethics; Cavarero, Relating Narratives; Miller, Others; Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text; James, The Jolly Corner; Shammas, Arabesques; Coetzee, Foe; Gordimer, My Son's Story; Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler...
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 364:
Style (ENGLISH 364)
The return of a term that was central in 20th-century criticism, and has all but disappeared in recent decades. Focus ison looking at concepts of style from various branches of linguistic and literary theory, and examination of some revealing examples in novels and films. Team taught with D.A. Miller from U.C. Berkeley.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
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 371:
Seminar in Chinese Literary Criticism (CHINLIT 371)
How aesthetics and politics intertwine and break apart in Western and Eastern traditions. Aesthetics for understanding culture, morality, and power in crosscultural contexts. Readings include Hegel, Kant, Marcuse, Lukacs, and Adorno; and Chinese thinkers Wang Guowei, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, and Mao. Prerequisite: CHINLIT 127/207 or consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2-5
| Repeatable
for credit
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. 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 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
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
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 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.
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 222:
Time-Travel Literature
A study of narratives whose heroes travel physically from one historical period to another. Utopian and dystopian travel to the past and the future in works from the French, Spanish, British, American, German, Russian, Arabic, and Persian traditions. The appearance of time-travel literature in the 1770s, the development of such conventions as the time machine, and the depiction of past and future societies in writing and film. The relationship between temporality and historical imagination in Enlightenment, modern, postmodern, and postcolonial contexts. Supplemental session for those who can read the texts in Arabic.
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 227:
Literature and Metamorphoses
Narratives of metamorphoses in relation to subjectivity and socialization; physical and psychological transformation, and the border between animal and human identity. Examples from antiquity to the present to explore the durability and transformation of metamorphosis accounts. Examples from the visual arts. Scientific, philosophical, and social implications. Metamorphosis in relation to intertextuality and narratology. Texts by authors such Ovid, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Stevenson, Wilde, Kafka, and Hughes.
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 233:
Baroque and Neobaroque (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.
| 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 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
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.
| Units: 5
COMPLIT 311:
Shakespeare, Islam, and Others
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.
| 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.
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
for credit
