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, cultural, psychoanalytical, and historical perspectives. Reading some exemplary works of comparative and cultural studies, we will approach comparative literature in a way that addresses the concerns of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, cultural translation, and history writing.

There will be a practical exercise done 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 M.L.A. style. There will be an in-class oral report, a midterm and a final exam.
 

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

One model of the interrelations between history and literature runs like this: The traumatic experiences of the French Revolution created the modern European sense of history, which had among its earliest manifestations Sir Walter Scott's invention of the historical novel. Scott's example was subsequently decisive in the creation of realist fiction by Balzac and Stendhal, who adapted Scott's method for representing the past to their own project of describing the present. In turn, the realist vision of the world deeply influenced Marxism (in Engel's words, he and Marx learned more from Balzac than from all the economists and historians who had ever lived), and Marxism then became a dominant model for socially conscious fiction to accept or challenge.

This course will seek to evaluate that model through classic works of nineteenth-century fiction (Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, some of Balzac's shorter works, Zola's Germinal) and through one of Marx's most effective adaptations of literary techniques, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Discussion of those works will incorporate classic views of history and literature formulated by Alessandro Manzoni, Eric Auerbach, and Georg Lukács among others. We will then move to different forms of historical fiction developed in our own day and read works like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kazuo Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World, and Art Spiegelman's Maus. These works will be approached in conjunction with recent critical discussions of history and literature, such as those confronting Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon. Throughout the course, contemporary debates on performative identity will influence our approach to fictional representation of historical identity.
 

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

 
This course will investigate the differences and identities of philosophy and literature, specifically with regard to the way in which each functions as a discourse on ethics or moral life. After a brief review of Socrates' "old quarrel" with the poets, we will analyze three historical texts that define literature in terms of a moral itinerary: Aristotle's analysis of tragedy as a kind of moral therapy, Kant's account of beauty as "symbol of morality," and Hegel's definition of art as the "embodiment of the spirit of a free people." Then, we will turn to two contemporary theorists who assign literature a moral vocation: Martha Nussbaurn, who argues that philosophical ethics requires the supplementation of literature to achieve its aims, and Elaine Scarry, who analyses beauty as an access to justice. In the second half of the course, we will look specifically at the genre of mystery and detective fiction, focusing on the way in which it challenges these efforts to attach literature to philosophical ethics. This genre, as we shall see, advances subversive concepts of action, decision, and justice, not easily assimilated within a philosophical tradition founded on concepts of autonomy, contract, and right. Rather than serving as a resource to advance traditional ethics, this genre both reconfigures the ethical dilemma and offers a new account of moral agency. Thus, it suggests that literature, rather than merely serving philosophy's aims, actually calls for a rearticulation of those aims. Writing assignments will be determined by individual contract.
 

Wednesday 3:30-6:30 p.m. Old Chemistry 105C

In this seminar, we will read postcolonial theories and study visual materials---film, photography, TV, art--in order to develop a taxonomy of colonial and postcolonial models and practices of transcultural encounter. Examples will be taken from art and popular culture made in Australia, Britain, the USA, and Canada. Intercultural encounters with difference, their collective traumatic impact, and historical contexts will be analyzed, along with intra-cultural conflicts resulting from colonialism. Study of indigenous/ethnic tensions will shift the discussion from the usual focus on whiteness and difference. Permission of instructor required.
 
 
Tuesday 1:00-4:00 p.m. Humanities Institute Room E 4340

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

ARH 549 Topics in American Visual Culture: "The World Trade Center, Memorials, and Memory"

Michele H. Bogart

The September 11, 2001 attacks upon the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on United Airlines Flight 93 have impelled citizens of communities worldwide to seek to commemorate the atrocities, their victims and implications; they have also been driven, paradoxically, to reflect upon the destruction of a straightforward, "secure" conception of the contemporary city. As I write this statement in early spring 2002, numerous temporary memorials have been developed, both material and virtual. In New York City, the process of developing a permanent memorial has barely begun, yet is already fraught with complications. No one, not least the State-mandated Lower Manhattan Development Corporation charged with revitalizing downtown, has determined the purpose, scope, scale, location, funding, producers, funding, meanings of and publics for a "World Trade Center"/September 11 memorial. Many more questions and problems are sure to arise, and it is unlikely that any of these questions will be fully resolved by September 11, 2002. It is crucial to document and analyze this process, for there is no certainty whether anything will actually come out of it.

This seminar seeks to ruminate upon these events through retrospection and cultural-sociological analysis. The class will examine the histories of commemorative enterprises in the United States, primarily through sculptural memorials, as a vehicle for analyzing the memorial processes and representations of the "events of September 11" (to use a current euphemism).

The first third of the course will offer an overview of circumstances, issues, and themes arising from production of select memorials in the United States, and, where pertinent, abroad. The second portion of the class will consider the history and significance of the World Trade Center, and the actors, constituencies, exigencies, negotiations, dilemmas, representations, and events involved with redevelopment of the WTC site and the [possible] creation of a memorial for downtown Manhattan. The primary focus will be on the New York metropolitan area, although we will study Oklahoma City for comparative purposes; student reports-which will take up the last portion of the course, may certainly explore developments in Washington, D.C., Somerset County, Pennsylvania, or anywhere else.

Please note: a field trip to the New-York Historical Society--whose director Jan Seidler Ramirez will discuss the challenges faced by her museum (and others) attempting to commemorate 9-11-02--is scheduled for Friday November 8, 2002.

Tuesday 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. Staller

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EGL 606.01 "Victorian Fiction: Building Nation/Building Empire"

Helen Cooper

This course is for those students who have an interest in nineteenth century British fiction, and also for those who intend to work in the area of postcolonial theory and literatures. Postcolonial writers who work in English were educated in colonial or colonial style schools in the colonies and ex-colonies and were required to read nineteenth century British fiction.

Historians have long talked about the "scramble for Affica" and about how the "sun never set on the British empire." Yet recent books such as Ann McClintock's Imperial Leather, Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, Deirdre David's Rule Britannia, Robert Young's Colonial Desire, Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness, and Jennifer DeVere Brody's Impossible Purities focus instead on how the empire challenged notions of "white England," as trade introduced products from England's colonies into the metropolis, and travelers, colonial administrators and civil servants, and people from the colonies returned or visited England, introducing new habits, patterns of living, ways and races to the country. We will examine through a variety of fictional genres and periods the way in which fiction paradoxically represents both the building of the nation and its critique, and also the expansion of empire and its problematic complexities. We will read: C. Brontë, Villette; Seacole, Wonderful Adventures; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Dickens, Great Expectations; Collins, The Moonstone; Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm; Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and "The Beach at Falesd"; Kipling, Kim; and Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Short readings from Carlyle, MW, Robert Knox, Engels, and Mayhew will provide us with necessary contemporary cultural information. Our theoretical framework will be provided by selections from Michael McKeon's Theory of the Novel. We will also read selections from the works cited above and from Antoinette Burden's Reader, Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain and Deidre David's edited The Victorian Novel. Thematically the course will proceed from works of fiction which reveal "fissures in the nation" to those alerting us to "g/rumblings in the empire."

I would like you to enjoy Austen's Mansfield Park, C.Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Thackeray's Vanity Fair over the summer, so that you will have them as points of reference for our work, although we will not be discussing them in detail.

Monday  1:004:00 p.m.

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WST 510 "Fashion and Culture"

Adrienne Munich

How does fashion shape notions about reality and about a person's identity? What does it have to do with ethnicity? With race? Is it a concept that applies more to women than to men? To people more than things? Is it an "institution"? This course on twentieth-century American culture focuses on clothes to suggest answers to these questions. Through the study of films, magazines, novels, exhibits, and fashion theories, we become aware of fashion's pleasures and powers. The course will require class presentations, short response papers, and one course project, most typically a written paper.

Opened to Undergraduates with a 3.0 average as well as Graduate students.

Wednesday 1:00-4:00 p.m. NYC location- 28th St. & Park Avenue South