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.

Wedsday 4:00 - 7:00 p.m. Library E 4305

An introduction to deconstruction and related theories, in particular with respect to cultural theory. The seminar will focus on two texts by each of the following: Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The first develops the theoretical position in detail, the second is applied to a specific area of cultural theory. Texts will include: Derrida: OF GRAMMATOLOGY (John Hopkins) and SPECTERS OF MARX (ROUTLEDGE); Kristeva: REVOLUTION OF POETIC LANGUAGE (Columbia) and STRANGERS TO OURSELVES (Columbia); and Lyotard: THE POSTMODERN CONDITION (Minnesota) with TOWARD THE POSTMODERN (Humanities) and THE INHUMAN (Stanford). Recommended: Silverman: TEXTUALITIES: BETWEEN HERMENEUTICS AND DECONSTRUCTION (Routledge).

Monday 7:00-10:00 p.m. Library E 4305

Many of the issues in the epistemologies which claim to move beyond modernism may be focally located in the role of imaging. Postmodernist theorizing in the humanities has explored the implications of dramatic changes in the relationships between texts and humans as new technologies (television, the computer, virtual reality, internet) alter modernist concepts of aesthetics, illusionism, and representation developed in relation to literature, photography, radio and film. The course will analyze major postmodern theories in literature, media and philosophy from 1960's to the present as we seek to sort out links among modernism, postmodernism and the millennium as a possible new episteme. The seminar will include a series of sessions on imaging in both scientific and communications contexts with a concern for the relationships between constructionism and referentiality. In other sessions, we aim to discuss the impact of new visual regimes on how we experience the world, the body and the machine. Concrete presentations of imaging processes will be included.

Texts to be studied may include selections from Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Teresa Brennan, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Don Ihde, E. Ann Kaplan, Timothy Druckery, Sherri Turkle, Peter and Will Brooker, Arthur and Marie Louise Kroker, Emily Martin, Jordanova, and others.

Taught by two of us from differing philosophical and theoretical perspectives, we believe the seminar will provoke interesting and productive debate, dialogue and discussion.

Tuesday 1:00-4:00 p.m. 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, Aphuleius, 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 or a romance by Chretien de Troyes). 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 Western literature 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.

Monday 4:00-7:00 p.m. Library E 4305

CLT 520 Problems in Translation

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

This course will look at Latino and Latina literature, culture, and theory. It will include a historical perspective of how the Latino groups were formed in the United States and how migration waves and language have played a part in their negotiation of a plural sense of being that is different from melting pot concepts of assimilation. From there the course will move to the manifestation of Latino literature in the United States as a corpus largely written in English but with a Latino cultural reference point. The course will also look at the advent of Latina women's theory in its contribution to postcolonial constructions. Other aspects to be discussed will be: Border Cultures, Latino performative artists, key films, and other topics such as the globalization of "salsa" music resulting from the growing shifts in the Latino population during the eighties and nineties due to increased migration from many other Latin American and Caribbean countries.

This course will be taught in English. Readings will include the following authors and titles. A final list will be provided prior to the class:

Junot Diaz, Drown
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Rites and Witnesses
J. David Saldívar, Dialectics of Our America
Juan Flores, Divided Borders
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands
Richard Rodríguez, Days of Obligation
Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen
Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accent
Pedro Pietri, "Puerto Rican Obituary"
Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban
Celeste Olarquiaga, Megalopolis
Oscar Hijuelos, Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love
Zoot Suit
El Norte
Guillermo Gómez Peña, selections
Coco Fusco, selections

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