printer friendly pageCOMPLIT 220: Renaissance Africa (AFRICAST 220E, ILAC 220E, ILAC 320E)
Literature and Portuguese expansion into Africa during the sixteenth century. Emphasis on forms of exchange between Portuguese and Africans in Morocco, Angola/Congo, South Africa, the Swahili Coast, and Ethiopia. Readings in Portuguese and English. Taught in English.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 222A: Myth and Modernity (GERMAN 222, GERMAN 322, JEWISHST 242G, JEWISHST 342)
Masters of German 20th- and 21st-Century literature and philosophy as they present aesthetic innovation and confront the challenges of modern technology, social alienation, manmade catastrophes, and imagine the future. Readings include Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke, Musil, Brecht, Kafka, Doeblin, Benjamin, Juenger, Arendt, Musil, Mann, Adorno, Celan, Grass, Bachmann, Bernhardt, Wolf, and Kluge. Taught in English. Note for German Studies grad students:
GERMAN 322 will fulfill the grad core requirement since
GERMAN 332 is not being offered this year. NOTE: Enrollment requires Professor Eshel's consent. Please contact him directly at eshel@stanford.edu and answer these 2 questions: "Why do you want to take this course?" and "What do you think you can add to the discussion?" Applications will be considered in the order in which they were received. Enrollment is limited to 20 students.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
COMPLIT 225: Word and Image (ARTHIST 265A, ARTHIST 465A, ITALIAN 265, ITALIAN 365)
What impact do images have on our reading of a text? How do words influence our understanding of images or our reading of pictures? What makes a visual interpretation of written words or a verbal rendering of an image successful? These questions will guide our investigation of the manifold connections between words and images in this course on intermediality and the relations and interrelations between writing and art from classical antiquity to the present. Readings and discussions will include such topics as the life and afterlife in word and image of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," Dante's "Divine Comedy," Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and John Milton's "Paradise Lost;" the writings and creative production of poet-artists Michelangelo Buonarroti, William Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; innovations in and correspondences between literature and art in the modern period, from symbolism in the nineteenth century through the flourishing of European avant-garde movements in the twentieth century.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Prodan, S. (PI)
COMPLIT 228: Critical Translation Studies (JAPAN 123, JAPAN 223)
Seminal works of translation theory and scholarship from a wide array of disciplinary, regional, linguistic, and historical perspectives. Readings are in English, but students must have at least two years of training or the equivalent in another language, or permission from the instructor. (Important note: Students who wish to count this course toward requirements in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures must have permission from their EALC advisor.)
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
COMPLIT 229B: Camus (CSRE 129, FRENCH 129, HISTORY 235F)
"The admirable conjunction of a man, of an action, and of a work" for Sartre, "the ideal husband of contemporary letters" for Susan Sontag, reading "Camus's fiction as an element in France's methodically constructed political geography of Algeria" for Edward Said, Camus embodies the very French figure of the "intellectuel engagé," or public intellectual. From his birth in 1913 into a poor European family in Algeria to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, from the Mediterranean world to Paris, Camus engaged in the great ethical and political battles of his time, often embracing controversial positions. Through readings and films, we will explore his multiple legacies. Readings from Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Assia Djebar, Kamel Daoud, Mouloud Feraoun, Alice Kaplan, Edward Said, Edwidge Danticat. Students will work on their production of written French, in addition to speaking French and reading comprehension. Taught in French. Students are highly encouraged to complete
FRENLANG 124 or to successfully test above this level through the Language Center. This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Ulloa, M. (PI)
COMPLIT 231B: Cultural Hybridity in Central-Eastern Europe (SLAVIC 160, SLAVIC 360)
Historically shaped by shifting borders and mixing of various cultures and languages, identities in-between have been in abundance in Central-Eastern Europe. This course offers a comprehensive study of the oeuvre of several major Central-European authors of modernity: the Ukrainian-Russian Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), the Czech-German-Jewish Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the Austrian-Galician-Jewish Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), the Ukrainian-Galician Olha Kobylyans¿ka (1863-1942), the Russian-German Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), the Jewish-Polish-Galician Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), and the Polish-Argentinean Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969). Performing their selves in two or more cultures, these writers were engaged in identity games and produced hybrid texts with which they intervened into the major culture as others. In the course, we will apply post-structuralist and post-colonial concepts such as minor language, heterotopia, in-betweenness, mimicry, indeterminacy, exile, displacement, and transnationalism to the study of the writers oeuvres. We will also master the sociolinguistic analysis of such multi-lingual phenomena as self-translation, code-switching, and calquing and examine various versions of the same text to uncover the palimpsest of hybrid identities.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Ilchuk, Y. (PI)
COMPLIT 233A: Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean (AFRICAAM 133, AFRICAST 132, COMPLIT 133A, CSRE 133E, FRENCH 133, JEWISHST 143)
This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connections between the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa by reading course materials, completing writing assignments, participating in class activities, listening to contextualizing lectures, and conducting student-led presentations. This course will help students improve their ability to speak and write in French by introducing students to new academic registers, vocabulary, and syntax. While analyzing novels and films, students will be exposed to a diverse number of intersectional topics such as national and cultural identity, race and class, gender and sexuality, orality and textuality, transnationalism and migration, colonialism and decolonization, history and memory, and the politics of language. Readings include the works of writers and filmmakers such as Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Dani Laferrière, Djibril Tamsir Niane, Fatou Diome, Leïla Sebbar, Léopold Senghor, Mariama Bâ, Maryse Condé, and Ousmane Sembène. Taught in French. Students are encouraged to complete
FRENLANG 124 or to successfully test above this level through the Language Center.
Terms: Aut, Sum
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 234: Classics of Persian Literature (COMPLIT 134A)
Why do poems that were written hundreds of years ago still capture the imagination? How is love configured in the texts of a distant culture? Who sings the tales and who are the heroes? This course offers an introduction to the central works of Persian literature, from the 10th century to the present, across the genres of epic, romance, lyric, and novel. As we become acquainted with texts from a millennium of literary history, we will touch upon questions of performance (music and dance), storytelling, profane and divine love, the nature of spiritual quests, the development of narrative and poetic form, the formal and ethical aspects of translation, and, finally, the meaning of modernity in a non-Western context. Readings include: the Book of Kings by Ferdowsi (d.1020); Layla and Majnun by Nezami (d.1209); The Conference of the Birds by Attar (d.1221); selections from the Masnavi and Divan of Rumi (d.1273); the Rose Garden by Sa`di (d.1292), selections from the Divan of Hafez (d.1390); The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (d.1951); and selected modern poems. Taught in English.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Huber, M. (PI)
;
Shuchmacher Endebo, N. (TA)
COMPLIT 236: Literature and Transgression (FEMGEN 236)
Close reading and analysis of erotic-sexual and aesthetic-stylistic transgression in selected works by such authors as Baudelaire, Wilde, Flaubert, Rachilde, Schnitzler, Kafka, Joyce, Barnes, Eliot, Bataille, Burroughs, Thomas Mann, Kathy Acker, as well as in recent digital literature and online communities. Along with understanding the changing cultural, social, and political contexts of what constitutes "transgression" or censorship, students will gain knowledge of influential theories of transgression and conceptual limits by Foucault, Blanchot, and contemporary queer and feminist writers.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
COMPLIT 236A: Casablanca - Algiers - Tunis : Cities on the Edge (AFRICAAM 236B, CSRE 140S, FRENCH 236, FRENCH 336, HISTORY 245C, URBANST 140F)
Casablanca, Algiers and Tunis embody three territories, real and imaginary, which never cease to challenge the preconceptions of travelers setting sight on their shores. In this class, we will explore the myriad ways in which these cities of North Africa, on the edge of Europe and of Africa, have been narrated in literature, cinema, and popular culture. Home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, they are an ebullient laboratory of social, political, religious, and cultural issues, global and local, between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. We will look at mass images of these cities, from films to maps, novels to photographs, sketching a new vision of these magnets as places where power, social rituals, legacies of the Ottoman and French colonial pasts, and the influence of the global economy collude and collide. Special focus on class, gender, and race.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Ulloa, M. (PI)
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