This course will introduce students to the major issues basic to Comparative Literature and literary studies in a cross-cultural context. We will begin with a review of how the discipline has defined itself in the past and how it is meeting the intellectual and institutional challenges of the present. Next we will study two classic topics -- genre and canon -- from aesthetic, cultgural, psychoanalytical, and historical perspectives. Reading some exemplary works of comparative and cultural studies, we will approachcomparative literature in a way that addresses the concerns of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, cultural transformation, and history writing.

There will ba a practical exercise don in groups during Week 10 of the semester. An exercise in bibliographical research on a topic of the student's choice will be conducted over the course of the semester and will result in an annotated bibliography in MLA style. There will be an in-class oral report, a midterm, and a final exam.

Monday 3:30 - 6:30 p.m. Library E 4305
 

The focus of this course is on the ways in which racist (or at least racialist) beliefs are implicated in cultural institutions that became significant around the turn of the last century, such as copyright and intellectual property, the fine art cinema, history as a narrative art, psychoanalysis, aqnd motherhood. The seminar will read documents of the period that address questions of race explicitly as well as those that represent themselves as beyond such interests. Readings/screenings may include Tolerance, The Jazz Singer, Gone with the Wind, Imitation of Life; literary texts by Nella Larsen, Henry James, Willa Catherm Ann Petry and Toni Morrison. These will be read in relation to cultural critics such as Thorstein Veblen, Anthony Appiah, Sander Gilman, Frantz Fanon, Hazel Carby, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, and bell hooks. Although the focus of the first part of the course will be on the United States, the latter part of the course may include a case study of a European cultural institution and/or an Asian cultural institution depending on the interests of the seminar members.

Tuesday 6:30- 9:30 p.m. Library E 4305
 

This course will explore the transition from realism to modernism through detailed analysis of several texts with imposing credentials in one or the other area, including Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, Joyce's Ulysses, Mann's Magic Mountain, and Proust's Swann's Way. We will pay special attention to the impact of narrative techniques on psychological delineation and generic identity and to the critical debates around that cluster of supercharged topics. Requirements will include a classroom presentation and a formal term paper.

Wednesday 3:30-6:30 p.m. Library E 4305
 

CLT 597 Directed Readings, M.A.
CLT 599 Independent Study
CLT 690 Thesis Research
CLT 698 Practicum in Teaching
CLT 699 Directed Readings: Ph.D. Candidacy
 

SPN 512 Medieval Literature

Louise O. Vasvari

This course will be a graduate-level introduction to medieval Spanich literature, with all readings of primary texts in their original version (i.e., not in the modernized version). We will begin with the origins of lyric genres in the vernacular, which we will also situate within the context of pan-European lyric tradition. We will study the epic, with particular attention to the Poema del Mio Cid, which will also serve as a corpus for analyzing the phonological and morphological structure of Old Spanish. Other major texts we will read inlcude (but will not be limited to) the Milagros de Nuestra Senora, El conde Lucanor, and El libro de buen amor. We will pay particular attention to the interaction between these examples of canonized literary discourse and other subliterary and paraliterary discourses, such as folk hagiography, proverbs, riddles, and jokes. Other related theoretical issues we will discuss include the interplay of orality and textuality in a residually oral society, the cultural and social roots of literary, medieval diglossia and bilingualism, the process of textualization and subliterary genres into "literature," the role of visual narratives in a verbal society, the "alterity" of medieval literature, the Christian Middle Ages as a histoiciographical problem, and the concept of "carnivalesque" folk culture.

The course will include a three-quarter term exam (probably in take-home format), oral class presentations, short written abstracts, and a 10-15 page final paper.

Monday 3:30-6:30pm