201 - 210 of 246 results for: Literary history

How do historical events manifest themselves in literary works? Can literature offer an alternative way of remembering the past? What are the boundaries between history-writing and literary representations? Can literature allow a more nuanced and rich attachment to the past, and subsequently a different horizon for the future? This course will examine twentieth- and twenty-first century works of fiction, memoir, and historiography on the question of literature and representations of the past, considering thematic as well as theoretical aspects. Our focus will be the interplay between literature and history, with special attention to historical events and their various literary depictions, at times reading a literary work focused on an event alongside an historical account of that event. Four contexts - the Holocaust, the African American experience, postcolonialism, and the conflict in Israel-Palestine - will serve as cases in point. Readings will include selections from Hayden White, Reinhard Koselleck, Jamaica Kincaid, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Rothberg, Saidiya Hartman, Tomer Gardi, Elias Khouri, Roberto Bolano, A. B. Yehoshua, Cynthia Ozick, Judith Butler, Hartmut Rosa, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Nicole Krauss, Philip Roth, and others.

Designed along the lines of the PBS series, "In the Actor's Workshop," students will meet weekly with some of the leading literary biographers writing today. Included this spring will be "New Yorker" staff writer Judith Thurman -- whose biography of Isak Dinesen was made into the film "Out of Africa" -- as well as Shirley Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, now at work on a book about Anne Frank. Professor Zipperstein will share with the class drafts of the biography of Philip Roth that he is now writing. Critics questioning the value of biography as an historical and literary tool will also be invited to meetings with the class.

Clarice Lispector and William Faulkner are often described as impossible to read: too elliptical, fragmented, or interior. Yet while Faulkner was canonized by American New Critics as a paradigmatic case for close reading, the Jewish Brazilian Lispector was dismissed by Brazil's nova critica for eluding formalist analysis. This course explores the challenges these authors pose to reading itself: how have they been read, misread, or left unread? And what models of reading do they themselves embed or theorize in their fiction? Pairing their works with key texts in the history of literary criticism, we will ask what close reading makes possible - and what it cannot grasp - when confronted with radically experimental prose.

Human history is one of diasporas collective and individual, and representations of exile both literary and theoretical are as various as the phenomenon of exile itself: statelessness, homelessness, as well as a state of mind Edward Said called metaphorical exile and Georg Lukacs called transcendental homelessness. In this course, we will examine novelistic, autobiographical and theoretical accounts of the experience of exile.

This course will cover the major shifts and themes of Korean literary history. It begins with the major works on literary history (such as Im Hwa and Kim Yunsik), but it includes recent works on literary history by scholars such as Son Yukyong, Kwon Bodurae, Chon Chonghwan. The purpose of the class is to provide graduate students with a foundation in Korean literary history. Together we will explore how the emergence of modern literature has been framed, which writers have been canonized and why, what pivot points have been significant in the last century. The course readings will be in Korean; students are expected to read around 350 pages per week.

This course will cover the major shifts and themes of Korean literary history. It begins with the major works on literary history (such as Im Hwa and Kim Yunsik), but it includes recent works on literary history by scholars such as Son Yukyong, Kwon Bodurae, Chon Chonghwan. The purpose of the class is to provide graduate students with a foundation in Korean literary history. Together we will explore how the emergence of modern literature has been framed, which writers have been canonized and why, what pivot points have been significant in the last century. The course readings will be in Korean; students are expected to read around 350 pages per week.

What does it feel like to live on the edge, facing an expanse between you and the next place? Who has lived on the Western fringes of Britain and America? Who has named, formed, and been inspired by that land? Whose voices are silenced in the (re)making of a place? Shaping the landscape through the words we use or the features we build and imagine is as old as recorded time. In this course, we'll investigate how the land is conceived, defined, settled, and delimited through history and literature, with particular reference to Wales and California. We'll focus on specific elements in the landscape, Water, Hill, Tree, Stone, and Border, looking at a sequence of locations through historical, archaeological, placename, literary, and artistic analyses. Students will produce close readings of literary descriptions of landscape, and will read indigenous writers' work alongside those of settlers and colonisers. Among the authors studied will be John Muir, John Steinbeck, Beth Piatote, Linda Noel, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Gwyneth Lewis.

This seminar aims to introduce students to the complexities of the primary source in its broadest sense, focusing principally on the written word, on images, and on material remains from 1000CE to the present day. We shall investigate how meaning is formed by text in its various physical and historical contexts. Among the major themes that we shall analyse is textual mouvance or variance (how texts change over time at the hands of successive users, whether annotators, readers, performers, editors, translators, or copyists); how paratextual features, such as illustration, typography, codicology and layout both affect and effect our interpretation; and the ways in which meaning can be said to derive from combinations of textual production, reception, and ideological or performative interactions. This course will involve hands-on experience with original sources, and will examine key scholarly approaches to material history.

This course has three goals: to read in detail some texts from the Greek and Latin prose fiction or 'romance' genre; to gain insight into the ancient Mediterranean world(s) that produced them; and to think critically about the literary critical approaches by which we might read such texts. Our reading combines two of the 'famous five' Greek novels, namely Chariton's Callirhoe and Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, with the two main Latin novels, Petronius' Satyrica and Apuleius' Metamorphoses (a.k.a. Golden Ass). We'll end with Lucian's True History (a.k.a. True Story), antiquity's own critique of storytelling techniques; and the Alexander Romance, a fanciful but widely read prose account of Alexander the Great's expedition, which challenges many assumptions we might have about the nature of prose texts and how to read them. These six primary readings will be supplemented by others that support the second and third goals of our class.