CLT 510 will examine classic critical texts from Plato through the nineteenth century in conjunction with the canonical texts of imaginative literature that served as the standard references for critical thought. In addition, we will examine texts of the twentieth century with pronounced connections to the other texts read. The syllabus will include the following:
 
 

THEORY Plato, Republic (excerpts) Phaedrus Aristotle, Poetics Horace, On the Art of Poetry Dante, Letter to Can Grande della Scala Shakespeare,  Sidney, Apologie for Poetrie Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare  Hume, "On the Standard of Taste"  Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads Schiller, "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" Kant, Critique of Judgement (excerpts) Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics (selections)

LITERATURE Homer, The Odyssey, The Iliad (excerpts) Sophocles, Oedipus Rex Dante, Inferno (excerpts) King Lear Goethe, Faust, Part One Sophocles, Antigone Mann, Death in Venice Joyce, Ulysses (excerpts)

Thursday 4:00-7:00 p.m. Melville Library E 4305

In this course we will study the major developments in cinematic form beginning with the innovations of Méliès and the Lumière Brothers. Both the films and the writings about the films will be considered within historical, social, and political contexts. Special emphasis will be given to gender and race in cinema, beginning with the films of D.W. Griffith (Broken Blossoms, Birth of a Nation), Sergei Eisenstein (Strike,October), and the German expressionists (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu). We will consider the ideologies of Classical Hollywood (1930 - 1960), especially in film noir and the musical. For more recent cinema, we will look at "Third Cinema" from Africa, China, and South America as well as the AmericanAvant-Garde. Along with the classical film theory of Eisenstein, Bazin, and Arnheim, we will concentrate on psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial theory as well as the role of music in film.

Tuesday 1:00-4:00 p.m. Melville Library E 4340

 
The concept of the modern novel emerged through a gradual process in which it became distinguished from the romance, the epic, the travel narrative, and other discourses, with which it has been defined both in contrast and through claims of continuity. We will study the novel's generic predecessors in the ancient and medieval world and in the renaissance. We will begin with several Greek romances (An Ephesian Tale, Daphnis and Chloe) and with two Latin novels, Apuleius, The Golden Ass, and Petronius, Satyrica. In the second part of the course we will touch on the epic as a predecessor of the novel, read some medieval fabliaux and frame tales (Marie de France, Lais, Boccaccio, Decameron), and a medieval romance of adultery (Tristan and Iseult). We will also study the first picaresque novel (Lazarillo de Tormes) and excerpts from the most famous chivalric romance (Amadis de Gaula), which was a key text for the project of the Spanish Empire as well as one of text parodied in the Quijote.

The last third of the course will be devoted to the Quijote, a work which had profound impact on Westernliterature by defining the novel, and, which, by its disenchanted ironic subjectivity has come to articulate postconquest, late empire Spanish national character. For the literary historical background we will read Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1996), while the primary theoretical framework will be provided by several works by Bakhtin, with emphasis on such seminal notions as the chronotope, heteroglossia, dialogism, and the carnivalesque .

We will also read relevant general theoretical works by Auerbach, Alter, Frye, Lukacs, Watt, McKeon, Ong, Jameson, Radway, Lodge.

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

Informed by philosophical and critical works on the relationship between melancholy and identity, this course will focus on the construction of a melancholy subject built on the loss of a linguistic, sexual, and racial identity. The course will study novels by Latin American women writers and by Latinas as works of mourning and re-membering of an abject maternal body.

We will study the work of Maria Luisa Bombal, Clarice Lispector, Elena Garro, Rosario Ferré, Irene Vilar, and Julia Alvarez among others. We will also read philosophical and critical works by Julia Kristeva, Hélene Cixous, Idelbe Avelar, Alberto Moreira, Hommi Bhabha,and Gloria Anzaldúa.

The readings will include:

Elena Garro Recollections of Things to Come
Rosario Ferré Eccentric Neighborhoods
Julia Alvarez In the Name of Salomé
Irene Vilar Ladie's Gallery
Cristina García The Agüero Sisters

The secondary works will include:

Julia Kristeva "Stabat Mater" in Black Sun
Amy Kaminsky. Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers (Minneapolis/London: U of Minnessota Press 1993)
Sigmund Freud "Mourning and Melancholy"
Hélene Cixous "Castration or Decapitation?" Trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981: 48).
Hommi Bhabha "Post colonial authority and postcolonial guilt" in Cultural Studies ed. Lawrence Grossbeerg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 56-68.
Franz Fanon Dark Skin White Masks
Judith Butler Gender Trouble
María Sarita See in Vestiges of War eds. Angel Shaw and L. Faucia
Alberto Moreira Tercer Espacio: Literatura y Duelo en América Latina Santiago: Lom Ediciones Universidad Arcis.
Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera
Vera León, Antonio. "A Garden of Forking Tounges: Bicultural Subjets and an Ethics of Circulating In and Out of Ethnicities." Postmodern Notes/Apuntes Postmodernos 3.2 (1993): 10-19.Felman, Shoshanna. Chapters from Testimony. Chapter on Celan and on DeMan.
Dominick LaCapra. From Representing the Holocaust and History and Memory after Auschwitz.
Idelber Avelar. From The Untimely Present.
Thursday 4:00-7:00 p.m. Melville Library E 4305

CLT 520 Problems in Translation
CLT 597 Directed Readings, M.A.
CLT 599 Independent Study
CLT 690 Directed Readings
CLT 698 Practicum in Teaching
CLT 699 Directed Readings: Ph.D. Candidacy
 

EGL 603 - Postcolonial Theory and Contemporary British Cultural Practice

Helen Cooper

Within English studies, postcolonial theory normatively applies to works from the English speaking ex-colonies of Britain. However, Britain itself is a postcolonial nation. England's empire is almost stripped away; while this century sees the growing devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Britain is now home to an increasing population of color, the result of "colonizin' in reverse" as Louise Bennett, the Jamaican poet, named the process. Contemporary British culture, therefore, is increasingly multi-ethnic. In this course we will divide our time between a study of postcolonial theory and its manifestations in contemporary British cultural practices, reading works and viewing films selected from British writers and directors

of Afro- & Indo-Caribbean, South Asian, African, Asian, as well as Anglo and Celtic origins. The aim will be to familiarize ourselves with both the history of postcolonial theory and its current debates, as well as with how this theory travels back to Britain and illuminates the contemporary cultural scene there as writers and directors from various perspectives negotiate and represent being "British" today.

Tuesday 1:00-4:00 p.m. Humanities 284

WST 601/PHI 615 -Passing in Film, Literature, and Theory

Kelly Oliver

In this course we will examine the intersections of race, gender, and class as they are discussed or portrayed in theory, literature, and film that deal with the issue of "passing." We will use psychoanalytic theory to analyze the ways that racial, gender, and class passing challenges and/or solidifies notions of identity. We will discuss the implications of these discourses of passing on larger issues of identity and identity politics. We will read texts by Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Rey Chow, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, and Judith Butler, among others. Some of the films that we will analyze include Stahl's "Imitation of Life," Kazan's "Pinky," McGehee & Seigel's "Suture," and Cronenberg's "M Butterfly."

Texts : Films:

Nella Larsen, Passing Kazan's Pinky (1949)
Toni Morrison, "Recitatif" Stahl's Imitation of Life (1936)
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959)
Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism, selections [Werker's Lost Boundaries (1949)]
Abel, et. at., Female Subjects in Black and White, McGehee & Siegel's Suture (1993)
Selections Cronenberg's M Butterfly (1993)
[Jordan's Crying Game (1992)]
[Peirce's Boys Don't Cry (1999)]
Stella Dallas??
Alice Adams??

Monday 2:15-5:15 p.m. Harriman 214