Comparative Literature Courses

Comparative Literature | Courses | Faculty

(All courses carry 3 credits unless otherwise noted.)

101C Ghosts and Apparitions (AL)

Examines the history of apparitions beginning with the Phantoms, Shades and Erinyes of antiquity, continuing to ghosts of the middle ages and on to modernity, addressing the reappearance of apparitions, unexpected in the wake of the scientific revolution, in the transformed guise of `ghosts in the machine'.

121 International Short Story (AL) (both sem)

Russian, Czech, German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, American, and Latin-American stories from Romanticism to the present. Fantastic tales, character sketches, surprise endings; main types of the short story.

122 Spiritual Autobiography (ALG)

Exploration of the individual psyche, growth of self-consciousness; the dark night of the soul and the role of suffering in personal growth. Reading from a variety of spiritual diaries, autobiographies, from East and West, written by women and men, believers and heretics. Ancient and modern examples.

131 Brave New Worlds (AL)

Utopian and dystopian novels. The ability of literature to generate social critique. Readings include works by Huxley, Orwell, Kafka, Atwood, Burgess, Gibson, Piercy, Gilman, Dick, and others.

141 Good and Evil, East and West (AL)

The imaginative representation of good and evil in Western and Eastern classics, folktales, children's stories, and 20th-century literature. Cross-cultural comparison of ethical approaches to moral problems such as the suffering of the innocent, the existence of evil, the development of a moral consciousness and social responsibility, and the role of faith in a broken world. Contemporary issues of nuclear war, holocaust, AIDS, abortion, marginal persons, anawim, unwanted children.

151 Fiction East and West (ALG)

Introduction to traditional and modern Chinese, Indian, and Japanese fiction. The encounter between Asian cultures and the "West" in 20th-century fiction. Cross-cultural views of self and society East and West, and of writers who work between Asian and Western worlds.

152 Modern Japanese Literature

See JAPAN 144, under Asian Languages and Literatures.

153 Chinese Literature: Poetry

See CHINSE 153, under Asian Languages and Literatures.

154 Chinese Literature: Tale, Story, Novel

See CHINSE 154, under Asian Languages and Literatures.

190C Introduction to Science Fiction (AL)

Socially critical writers on the margin of the 20th-century literary establishment, including Bester, Sturgeon, Shepard, Zelazny, Russ, Butler, Varley, and Gibson.

204 Woman, Man, and Myth (AL)

The heroic tradition in European literature from ancient Sumeria to the Medieval period. Emphasis on the myths of masculine and feminineómale and female divinities, male and female heroesóand the problem of war and peace.

233 Fantasy and World Literature (AL)

Fantasies as escape into strange realms where time and space are not our own. Exploration of fantastic voyages to learn about human desires and dreams, and the reality they grow out of. Interdisciplinary approach; psychological theories of dreams and individual fantasies related to the structure and effects of fantasy literature. Honors section available, with greater attention to theoretical material and historical background.

234 Myth, Folk Tale, and Children's Literature (AL)

Reading and analysis of selected traditional European and African folk narratives and of contemporary stories for children from picturebooks to chapter books. Addresses questions of personal and social identity, of narrative presentation and response, of power and authority in changing environments focused on the child.

236 Digital Culture (I)

An introduction to digital culture, including study of actual works of art in their new digital forms and the implications of "hypertext" for creative writing, theory, and criticism. Potential for academic research on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and electronic libraries.

331 Contemplative Literature: East and West (ALG)

A critical reading of contemplative literature from Buddhist, Taoist, Jewish, and Christian traditions. The imaginative presentation of emptiness, self and salvation in selected Eastern and Western texts. How contemplatives and contemporary seekers from different traditions perceive ultimate reality, and how writers evoke the absolute through language and literature.

356 American Literature in the European Context

American fiction and essays, mostly of the 19th century, in light of European literary and social developments. The supernatural tale pioneered by E.T.A. Hoffmann and adapted by Poe and Hawthorne; English Gothic novels as background for major American works of fiction; Massachusetts Transcendentalism as an outgrowth of German Idealist philosophy.

381 Self-Reflective Avant-Garde Film (AT)

Modern origins of experimentation in film and literature in avant-garde schools such as Expressionism and Surrealism, with contemporary results of this heritage. Whether film is the most modern of the media, the results of two obsessive concerns: 1) the poetic, dreamlike, and fantastic, 2) the factual, realistic, and socially critical or anarchic.

382 Cinema and Psyche (AT)

Exploration of contemporary international cinema through film history and psychoanalytic theory. Focus on comparative representations of nationality, childhood, and social dislocation. Topics addressed: inscriptions of the autobiographical; trans-cultural readings of visual texts; cinematic constructions of gender and subjectivity; dreams, fantasy, and memory; the "family romance."

383 Narrative Avant-Garde Film (AT)

Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative.

384 Vietnam: Literature and Film (AL)

Focus on "images" of the war as presented in poetry, fiction, and film , often comparing the same image as it has been "rewritten" in literature and film. How images are manipulated by (re)writers to reinforce or subvert powerful cultural and political institutions.

387 Myths of the Feminine

Myths about women and the life cycle from many cultures: ancient near east, classical antiquity, Old Europe, India, Asia, the Islamic world. Women writers from those same cultures, showing the interplay between the cultural construction of the feminine and personal voices.

391 Seminars

Literary Criticism (2nd sem)

A survey of the basic questions philosophers and poets have posed about the nature of literature: What literature is, what it imitates, how it can be studied, its function in human community. Major texts in the history of literary criticism East and West, in the classical and medieval periods.

Modern Novel

A reading of selected texts. Attention to the balance between realism and symbolism, myth, fantasy, humor, exaggeration. Reading knowledge of French or Spanish helpful.

Reading Poetry

Addresses the problem among literature majors of those who are unable to read poetry happily. Begins with soliloquies and dramatic monologues, made accessible by their relationships to drama and fiction. Review of progressively more difficult and abstract types of poetic narrative.

Rock and Roll

Rock and roll as a cultural complex, its origins and early form, and its musical character. Rock's commercial growth and development (Money, Rock, Race, Records and Radio), its pretensions to radical cultural critique, its relationships to the "sexual revolution," and to "drug culture" and revolutionary politics.

Introduction to Freudian Thought: Lay Analysis

A background in ideas which have become part of American culture and of everyday language and symptoms: e.g., Oedipus complex, anxiety, compulsion, defense, denial, fixation, inhibition, narcissism, neurosis, obsession, projection. The usefulness of Freudian concepts for literary and cultural analysis. The history, development and dissemination of psychoanalysis.

Local Literature: The Sense of Place

Readings of short novels, stories, poems and plays from around the world that emphasize local settings to examine how the sense of place is evoked, how it influences themes, characterization and plot, and how it contributes to the work's significance in a larger context. Authors include Ronsard, Balzac, Austen, Faulkner, Narayan, Chekhov, Mann, Senghor, Lessing.

Medieval Celtic Literature

All the major genres of Celtic literatureóstories of the old gods, tales of the great heroes, bardic poetry, tales of kinds, voyages to the otherworld, and nature poetry. Comparisons of literary traditions from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany, and a historical/cultural background.

The Literary Double

Representations of doubles (look-alikes, would-be look-alikes, or life-usurpers) in fiction, beginning with E.T.A. Hoffman, then tracing the use of such devices to Poe, Hawthorne, Balzac, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Examination of some relevant psychoanalytic work on schizophrenia and multiple personalities.

In Sickness and Health

An examination of literary responses to issues of illness and health. Illness as metaphor, mode of enlightenment. Diseases of language. Healing texts. Texts about healing. Readings include selected novels, poems, and essays from Western and non-Western traditions, works by poets, novelists, and scientists, by the sick and the well.

393 Theory and Practice of Translation

A theoretical foundation for the study and practice of literary translation. Emphasis on the role translation plays in shaping literary systems, the connections between translation and women's writing, post-colonial translation practices and needs, and the relationship between translation and political power.

394 Seminar: Decadent Literature

Certain 19th- and 20th-century texts that celebrate and promote what would appear to be a diseased and exhausted condition of civilization. Historical approach: aestheticist and apocalyptic sensibilities, with attention to psychological and sociological issues, as well as a concern for formal obsessions.

396W Special Problems

397B Junior Year Writing

491 Seminar: Surrealism

The Surrealist "revolution of the mind" in 20th-century literature and art. Central themes of liberty, anti-rationality, dreams and the unconscious, "mad love," the role of women, creative imagination and the "marvelous," the problem of active political commitment for "pure" revolutionaries. Major texts in prose, poetry, visual arts, film.

513 Autobiography and Gender

The literary nature of autobiography and the psychology of its composition and reading, based on works by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Sigmund Freud. Selected films and videos screened in conjunction with readings.

514 Modern Poetry and Poetics

Selected major authors and movements in poetic modernism, considering backgrounds in European and American intellectual and literary history; modernistic experiments in poetic form; the interrelationship of politics and poetry.

527 Romanticism

Romanticism as an international movement in literature and the other arts. The assimilation by the arts of the newly discovered Individualism of French and German philosophy. Rejection of mimesisÝfor an idea of art as a synthetic, original power which gains universality through the genius of the individual creator.

529 Symbolist Movement

The literature of England and France in the middle and late 19th century. The concept of the imagination, and concurrent aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical questions traced primarily through poetry, but also through drama and the novel.

531 Cross-Cultural Theory and Text: The New Novel

The applicability of European literary theory to Third World literature. The work of several major European theorists within the Marxist/sociological tradition (Goldmann, Lukacs, Leenhardt, and Eagleton); usefulness of their theories with respect to the Latin American boom; comparison to several theories of the novel which have developed within Latin America.

590A Narrative Technique

Study of controversial recent theorists of reading and writing; testing this understanding on fiction.

590B Literature and Myth

Narrative patterns of myth and folk tale in relation to the patterns of literary narratives. Emphasis on theory of myth as it sheds light on "the order of events" and on character-relationships in both mythical and literary narratives. Sumerian, Greek, and African myths; selections from theory and fiction from 1850 to present.

591 Seminar: Comparative Directors

The cinematic culture of contemporary Eastern Europe; emphasis on feature filmmakers from the former Soviet Union, and from Eastern Europe. The ideological, historical, and artistic tendencies characteristic of these national cinemas as they inform the practice of directors.

592 Seminar: Medieval Women Writers and Feminist Theory

The writings of selected medieval and Renaissance women writers from the point of view of current feminist theory. Critical approaches include French feminism, feminist theologians, Marxist critiques, and object-relations theory. Focus on the themes of love and desire in women's writings, and how recent theory offers a way to understand those themes.

595 Seminar: International Film Noir

Film noir from its American heyday (1944-1958) to the European cinema of the sixties and seventies. How filmic texts explore the relationship between the representation of "reality" and the technical imperatives of cinema as an artistic medium. Film noir's displacement of social mores and their constitution of reality in the light of formalist, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory.

Comparative Literature | Courses | Faculty