*Literature 97a. Tutorial — Sophomore Year
Catalog Number: 2776
Sandra Naddaff and members of the Committee and Tutorial Board
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Successful completion of one semester of Literature 97a is required of all concentrators in their sophomore year.
*Literature 97b. Tutorial — Sophomore Year
Catalog Number: 4595
Sandra Naddaff and members of the Committee and Tutorial Board
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Successful completion of one semester of Literature 97b is required of all concentrators in their sophomore year.
*Literature 98a. Tutorial — Junior Year
Catalog Number: 3119
Sandra Naddaff and members of the Committee and Tutorial Board
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Successful completion of one semester of Literature 98a is required of all concentrators in their junior year.
*Literature 98b. Tutorial — Junior Year
Catalog Number: 1528
Sandra Naddaff and members of the Committee and Tutorial Board
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Successful completion of one semester of Literature 98b is required of all concentrators in their junior year.
*Literature 99a. Tutorial — Senior Year
Catalog Number: 4857
Sandra Naddaff and members of the Committee and Tutorial Board
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Successful completion of one semester of Literature 99a is required of all concentrators in their senior year.
*Literature 99b. Tutorial — Senior Year
Catalog Number: 1290
Sandra Naddaff and members of the Committee and Tutorial Board
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Successful completion of one semester of Literature 99b is required of all concentrators in their senior year.
[*Literature 118. Benjamin and the Frankfurt School]
Catalog Number: 7966
Beatrice Hanssen
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Examines the aesthetic theory and cultural criticism of the school’s main representatives, with special emphasis on Walter Benjamin. Readings include Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01. Given in alternate years.
[Literature 119. The Holocaust and Problems of Representation]
Catalog Number: 1732 Enrollment: Limited to 20.
Susan R. Suleiman
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Can the story of the Holocaust be told? Is there such a thing as “the story” of the Holocaust? Who is authorized to tell it? In what circumstances? To whom? This course will grapple with these and other questions raised by a wide range or works (oral and written testimonies, novels, essays, comic strips, films, poetry, monuments) produced from 1945 to the present in Europe and the United States, and Israel.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
[*Literature 122. Literature and Music]
Catalog Number: 2360 Enrollment: Limited to 20; preference given to Literature Concentrators.
Sandra Naddaff
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Explores the intersection of literary texts and genres with musical forms and themes in a number of different contexts. Topics include such issues as the adaptation of text into music; the thematization of music in narrative; the Broadway musical; and the musicality of poetry. Works and authors will include Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Peter and the Wolf, Verlaine, Mann, and Proust.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01. Given in alternate years.
[*Literature 124. Transformations of Space in Contemporary Culture]
Catalog Number: 8228 Enrollment: Limited to 20; preference given to Literature Concentrators.
Verena A. Conley
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Focuses on renewed awareness of space and environment in contemporary culture, theory, and film. Examines shifts in the thinking of space in an era of teletechnologies and globalism by means of such notions as anthropological space and non-places, material and immaterial spaces, local and global, invention of space and spatial practices, the global city, and others. Includes texts and films by Chantal Akerman, Marc Augé, Etienne Balibar, Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau, Assia Djébar, Jean-Luc Godard, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Alain Liepitz, Saskia Sassen, Edward Soja, Paul Virilio, Wim Wenders, and others.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
*Literature 125. A Thousand Feminisms
Catalog Number: 5958 Enrollment: Limited to 20; preference given to Literature Concentrators.
Verena A. Conley
Half course (fall term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Focuses on the relations between feminisms and technologies of discourse. Examines by means of text, film and art, how feminisms and constructions of gender evolve under the impact of information networks and interactive media. How are representations of the body altered? How do teletechnologies affect feminist theories of place and space? How does the shift in digital technology from technical system to personal platform reorient feminism? (Readings include Cixous, Turkle, Haraway, Stone, Plant, Kittler, Hayles, Wittig, Zizek and others.)
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
*Literature 128. Performing Texts
Catalog Number: 3404 Enrollment: Limited to 20
Julie A. Buckler
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
What is the relationship between dramatic text and work? How do plays create audiences? What does the ubiquitous dramatic site of "home" (domestic interiors, family estates) contribute to the performance of "authentic" identitites? This course enlists performance theory in the illumination of the dramatic texts and theatrical contexts of Pushkin, Gogol, Scribe, Ostrovsky, Chekhov, Ibsen, Wilde, Bulgakov, Shaw, Kharms, Beckett, Sartre, O’Neill, Williams, Miller, Vampilov, and Petrushevskaya. Particular attention to restagings (19th-Century dramas revisioned by Meyerhold and Stanislavsky), cross-cultural appropriations (Western stagings of Chekhov), theories of drama and culture (Nietzsche, Wagner, Shaw, Brecht, Ivanov, Evreinov).
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
*Literature 129. Reading the 18th Century Through 20th-Century Eyes
Catalog Number: 5600 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Christie McDonald
Half course (spring term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Why do we read texts from the French Enlightenment today and how? Analysis of works from the 18th century as well as novels, plays, media events, and films of the 20th century that revisit key questions: what is the present in its relationship to the past? what constitutes change? what is the relationship of the individual to the family, the state, and society? Topics of discussion will include textual rewritings of novels and confessions; re-publication of works by women and the question of the canon; the controversy around pornography and reproduction; imagining what might have been in rewriting history through literature, the media and opera. Readings include works by 1) Beaumarchais, Charrière, Graffigny, Diderot, Franklin, Kant, Rousseau, Sade; 2) Beauvoir, Blanchot, Boyd, Foucault, Klossowski, Kundera, Shine, Hoffman, Corigliano, Weiss.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
*Literature 130. Reconfiguring the City
Catalog Number: 1034 Enrollment: Limited to 20; preference given to Literature concentrators
Verena A. Conley
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Examines the city as concept, representation and simulation in contemporary culture through literature, film and art. Focuses on the urban metaphor rather than a particular city. How does the "city" become a manifestation of a general urban condition? How is it reconfigured through digital networks? How do notions of "third culture" question limits between cultural fields, undo traditional notions of inside/outside and reconfigure the city as an everchanging artefact? Readings include Augé, Baudrillard, Godard, Perec, Latour, Sassen and others.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
[Literature 132. Introduction to Literary Theory]
Catalog Number: 3527
Barbara E. Johnson
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Readings in some of the texts that have transformed literary studies over the past twenty years. Will pair theorists with the texts they are reading (Derrida and Plato, Kant, Rousseau, Marx; Marx and Derrida on Hegel; Lacan and Morrison on Poe; Barthes and Balzac; Bhabha and Fanon; Miller and Barthes; Althusser with Marx and Lacan; Butler with Larsen, Cather, Austin, Althusser, etc.).
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
*Literature 134. Postmodern Fictions
Catalog Number: 8841 Enrollment: Limited to 20
Margaret Bruzelius
Half course (spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
We will think about pastiche, displacement, parody and the materiality of language in work by Richard Powers, Russell Hoban, Frank Bidart, Ishmael Reed, May Swenson, Manuel Puig, Tom Phillips, Ben Katchor, Roussel, Schwitters, Jameson, Baudrillard, Derrida and others.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
[*Literature 135. Pre-20th Century Theories of Language]
Catalog Number: 9328 Enrollment: Limited to 20
Margaret Bruzelius
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Examines largely pre-20th century theories of the nature and origin of language developed by Plato, Rousseau, Locke, Leibniz, Herder, Condillac and von Humboldt, among others. There will be occasional reference to 20th century literature which addresses or revives the issues raised or resolved by earlier writers.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01. Given in alternate years.
[Literature 140. Colonial and Post-Colonial Spaces: France and North Africa]
Catalog Number: 9366
Verena A. Conley
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
This course will focus on the transformation of colonial to postcolonial spaces in “French” North Africa, that includes Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Special attention will be given to shifting notions of culture, problems of language, tradition, violence, and revolution. Includes texts and films by Frantz Fanon, Assia Djébar, Kateb Yacine, Rachid Boudjedra, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean François Lyotard and others. By means of fiction, film, journalistic essays and street culture (Azouz Begag, Mehdi Charef, Malik Chibane, Mathieu Kassovitz, Alliance Ethnik, MC Solaar etc.), we will also examine the emergence of new cultural spaces in connection with urban immigration.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.