1 - 10 of 121 results for: COMPLIT

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.

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.

Ghost stories haunt our imagination. When the dead return they may scare us or warn us, they may pursue us with violence or burden us with sorrow. They shock us with the "boo" of surprise, just as they frustrate us by their elusiveness. Bloodchilling stories terrify us, but they also provide entertainment. The ghost story is one of the most enduring genres, from classical literature to popular film. Yet behind the door of the story lurk both anxiety and wisdom: anxiety about our own mortality and wisdom about the cultural place of the past, between memory and regret, mourning and forgetting. The undead point to what we have not accomplished, just as they direct us--since the ghost of Hamlet's father--toward deeds. In this seminar, we will explore some of these ghostly ambitions.nDuring the summer, in preparation for the seminar, students will read selected stories and novels and post comments to the course website. When we convene in September, we will discuss the summer findings and proceed to examine a selection of novels that explore ghosts and hauntings. Texts will include Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Peter Straub's Ghost Story, and others. We will also spend some dark and stormy nights with ghost films and even follow the trail to some hauntings at Stanford and in the Bay Area. Students are expected to participate regularly in the CourseWork discussion forum and work in small groups with other course members to discuss and present readings.

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.

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"?

This course will have three interactive components. The first will be a set of readings on the history and ethos of modern human rights. These readings will come from philosophy, history, political theory. The second component will consist of readings from various global locations that involve human rights in various ways, predominantly as they interface with environmental issues. Finally, this course will involve students in creating and populating a website that will be not only the archive of our work in class but also build a set of resources to be shared with others (at the time of this writing I am finding partners at different locations that may be able to speak to us online from their locations). Students will thus come away from this class with a good introduction to human rights history and philosophy; a set of insights into a variety of imaginative workings-out of human rights and environmental justice issues from different global locations, and a rich web resource.

Introduction to theories about reading and theories about thinking. How should we best read novels, plays, short stories, poetry, and a variety of other forms of literary expression? Which ideas get taken across borders by literature, and which ideas do not? What role has literature played in human societies in different times and places? Fulfills the Writing-in-the-Major requirement. Gateway to the Comparative Literature Major.

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).

This class will address major works by Franz Kafka and consider Kafka as a modernist writer whose work reflects on modernity. We will also examine the role of Kafka's themes and poetics in the work of contemporary writers. (Meets Writing-in-the-Major requirement)