Literature and Arts A-18. Fairy Tales, Children’s Literature, and the Culture of Childhood
Catalog Number: 7478
Maria Tatar
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 5
Analyzes cultural production for children in the larger context of childrearing practices and educational theories. Addresses issues such as the folkloristic and literary representation of the child, the relationship between teller/author and audience, and functional changes in fairy tales and children’s books. The varying historical constructions of childhood, the role of parental and institutional interventions, and the disciplinary edge to children’s literature are also examined. Authors include Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, John Locke, Rousseau, Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, Henry James, William Golding, and others.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts A-20. Classics in Christian Literature
Catalog Number: 1177
Robert Kiely
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 14
An examination of selected literary forms and thematic preoccupations of post-Biblical texts in the Christian tradition. Focuses on personal representations of religious experience—the search for faith, narratives of conversion, testimonies of belief, and confessions of doubt. Explores the relationships between aesthetic form (genre, style, voice) and a variety of individual efforts to interpret and reconfigure the claims of the gospels. Authors include Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Juliana of Norwich, Martin Luther, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and T.S. Eliot.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts A-22. Poems, Poets, Poetry]
Catalog Number: 5808
Helen Vendler
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 5
A study of poetry as the history and science of feeling: readings in major lyric poems of England and America. Emphasis on problems of invention and execution, and on the poet’s choice of genre, stance, context, and structure. Other topics to be raised include the process of composition, the situating of a poem in its historical and poetic contexts, the notion of a poet’s development, the lyric as dramatic speech, and the experimental lyric of the 20th century.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
Literature and Arts A-26. Dante’s Divine Comedy and Its World
Catalog Number: 6090
Lino Pertile
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 12
Studies Dante’s Divine Comedy as an enduring work of poetry, a major text of the European literary tradition, and the most comprehensive synthesis of medieval culture. Largely based on textual analysis, the course looks at how literature works in relation to, on the one hand, the language and rhetorical tradition in which it is expressed and, on the other, the culture which it expresses and interprets. Particular attention is paid to the poem’s central philosophical concerns, from the role of the individual in history and society to the relationship between progress and happiness, and between politics and morality.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts A-35. Tragic Drama and Human Conflict
Catalog Number: 0172
Bennett Simon (Medical School)
Half course (fall term). M., W., F., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
Introduces the student to the use of psychoanalytic perspectives in enhancing the understanding and appreciation of tragic drama. Focuses on tragedy as a study of the family, emphasizing the problem of how the family at war with itself can procreate and continue. Also discusses the form of tragic drama, particularly with regard to dialogue and storytelling within the plays. Readings include ancient, Shakespearean, and modern tragedies, as well as secondary sources that assist in understanding psychoanalytic concepts. Films and live performances supplement the readings.
Literature and Arts A-40. Shakespeare, The Early Plays
Catalog Number: 0176
Marjorie Garber
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 4
The early comedies, tragedies, and histories, considered in the context of the origins of the English stage and the conventions of Elizabethan drama. Particular attention paid to Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist, and to poetic expression, thematic design, stagecraft, and character portrayal in plays.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts A-41. Shakespeare, The Later Plays]
Catalog Number: 1624
Marjorie Garber
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 11, and a weekly section to be aranged. EXAM GROUP: 4
The late comedies, tragedies, and romances, with some attention to the prevailing literary traditions of the Jacobean period. Particular attention paid to Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist, and to poetic expression, thematic design, stagecraft, and character portrayal in the plays.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts A-48. The Modern Jewish Experience in Literature
Catalog Number: 1250
Ruth R. Wisse
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 13
Studies works in different languages and genres that variously interpret the experience of Jews in this century. Explores such issues as what information literature can provide, the relation of language and historical context to artistic strategy, and personal and national perspectives in narrative. Authors include Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Primo Levi, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts A-58. Ethnicity, Modernity, and Modernism in 20th-Century Literature, Art, and Culture]
Catalog Number: 0287
Werner Sollors
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
Is the stress on ethnic diversity a form of resistance to, or a feature of modernity? How has aesthetic production been affected by the horrors of modernity, by violence and genocide? What is the relationship of modernism to democracy, fascism, and communism? These questions, complemented by ethnic theory, inform discussions of such texts as The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans and such authors as Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Eugene O’Neill, Henry Roth, William Faulkner, Hisaye Yamamoto, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, and Gerald Vizenor.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts A-60. Aspects and Forms of Narrative
Catalog Number: 1093
William Mills Todd III
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
An introduction to the analysis of narrative and examination of narrative forms and explanations. Topics include defining narrative, aspects of narrative, and types of narrative (e.g., literary, historical, psychoanalytic, legal). Readings feature narratives and theoretical essays.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts A-64. American Literature and the American Environment
Catalog Number: 4783
Lawrence Buell
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 9, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 2
A study of selected traditions in American writing that have been formed by perceptions of the American environment. Topics include the cult of wilderness; white images of the American Indian and vice versa; the pastoral, agrarian, and natural history traditions in American prose; and literary responses to urbanization and environmental endangerment. Readings range from 17th-century Puritan texts to contemporary works, with primary emphasis on narrative and nonfictional prose, but some works of poetry are included as well.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts A-66. The Myth of America]
Catalog Number: 3545
Sacvan Bercovitch
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 1, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 6
Inquires into the mythic, aesthetic, and historical meanings of “America,” as represented in major literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries. Examines how these works embody, envision, revise, and respond to such central concepts and tropes of national purpose and identity as individualism, nature, progress, and the American dream; and how these concepts and tropes are affected in turn by historical developments and cultural conflicts.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts A-68. Poets and Poetry in the Celtic Literary Tradition]
Catalog Number: 3957
Patrick K. Ford
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
Examines the role of poets (i.e., “seers, prophets, satirists, singers of praise”) in the development of the Celtic literary tradition from antiquity to recent times. The focus is on the social function of literature, broadly defined, in the Celtic world, and the ways in which poets used their powers of praise and satire in the maintenance of social and political power. Of especial importance is the mythology of poetry, those narratives that tell how wisdom and poetry were first acquired and those that promulgate the magical powers of praise and satire.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts A-70. The Book of Job and the Joban Tradition]
Catalog Number: 7991
Peter Machinist
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 14
An examination of the biblical book of Job along with related texts, ancient, medieval, and modern, that allow us to establish the literary and philosophical traditions in which Job was composed and the literary and philosophical legacy it has left. Particular focus on the ways the texts play off one another in literary form and expression and in their treatment of such themes as divine justice, human piety, and the nature of the divine-human encounter.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts A-72. The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self
Catalog Number: 7800
Leo Damrosch
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 12
A study of major 18th-century autobiographical, fictional, and poetic texts that explore the paradoxes of the modern self at a time when traditional religious and philosophical explanations were breaking down. Writers to be read include Mme. de Lafayette, Boswell, Voltaire, Gibbon, Diderot, Rousseau, Laclos, Goethe, Wollstonecraft, and Blake.
Literature and Arts A-76. Five Japanese Portraits
Catalog Number: 8909
Jay Rubin
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 4
Exploring a broad variety of modern novels and stories in addition to plays, poems and chronicles from earlier ages, the course will present five archetypal “portraits” developed in the medieval No theater — god, man, woman, lunatic, and demon — and trace their variations in texts and films treating themes of celebration, war, memory, madness, and awe.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts B-21. The Images of Alexander the Great
Catalog Number: 2267
David Gordon Mitten
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 5
The images of Alexander the Great are examined within various cultural contexts ranging from 4th-century B.C.E. Greece to 20th-century America. Various art forms (including sculpture, coins, and paintings) illuminate Alexander’s personality and career and the development of his legend. Course explores how images reveal the complex relationship between a strong individual personality and artistic conventions. Special attention is paid to the importance of political imagery and how the images of Alexander reflect changing ideas of rulership. Where, if anywhere, is the “truth” in these images? Original objects in the Sackler collection and Boston Museum of Fine Arts are emphasized.
[Literature and Arts B-27. Majesty and Mythology in African Art]
Catalog Number: 5822
Suzanne P. Blier
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 13
Examines the royal arts of Africa, at once providing an overview of key themes in royal African art and discussing what these arts reveal about the nature of kingship generally. The diverse ways that African rulers have employed art and architecture to define individual and state identity are considered in the context of key traditions from West, Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. Among the topics to be discussed are palace architecture, royal regalia, status prerogatives, women of the court, divine kingship, state cosmology, royal burial, enthronement ceremonies, dynastic history, and the importance of art in diplomacy and war.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
[Literature and Arts B-31. The Portrait]
Catalog Number: 4240
Henri Zerner
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 13
The most famous of all works of art is a portrait. Sculptors and painters have made likenesses of individuals since the ancient Kingdom of Egypt. The portrait gives visual form to changing conceptions of individual existence, and its history can make us more conscious of how time bound, how culturally determined is our own sense of self. The course examines how artistic conventions are established to give visual and tangible form to intuitions, feelings, and thoughts. Examples taken from a variety of periods with greater emphasis on the Western tradition from the Renaissance to the present.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts B-35. The Age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent: Art, Architecture, and Ceremonial at the Ottoman Court
Catalog Number: 1678
Gülru Necipoglu-Kafadar
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 13
“Golden Age” of Ottoman-Islamic visual culture in the 16th century, with focus on architecture, miniature painting, and the decorative arts. The urban transformation of Byzantine Constantinople into Ottoman Istanbul, the formation of an imperial architectural style, and artistic contacts with contemporary European and Islamic courts are stressed. Art and architecture of Safavid Iran and Mughal India are considered as a comparative backdrop. Themes include the role of centralized court ateliers in propagating canons of taste, the emphasis on decorative arts in a culture that rejected monumental sculpture and painting, and representations of the East by European artists in the Orientalist mode.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts B-39. Michelangelo
Catalog Number: 0351
John Shearman
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 5
The thread is the career of the man by whom Western artistic genius is largely defined, but the course deals with him in many roles, as sculptor, painter, architect, draftsman, poet, military engineer, and politician, and many of his works lead discussion into broad contexts of culture and history. The course is much concerned with the issue of artistic quality, and the role in it of imagination, technical skill, complexity, sensitivity, and conviction; and the bases of knowledge and understanding in the arts may be approached through exceptionally rich documentation, much of it from Michelangelo’s own files.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts B-44. The Architecture of Capital and Court in Western Europe, 1600–1800]
Catalog Number: 3767
Alice G. Jarrard
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 13
Examines architectural works in dialogue with the social, cultural, political, and technological forces that shape them. Rather than simply surveying the works of architects including Bernini, Borromini, Guarini, Juvarra, Piranesi, Le Vau, Mansart, Ledoux, Hawksmoor, and Wren, we will approach their buildings and projects by studying selective historical moments in Italy, France, England, and Spain. Themes considered: the creation of the capital city; dialectics between urban and pastoral modes; innovation and the interpretation of the past; printmaking and architectural publication; and the audiences and ritual uses of architecture.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts B-51. First Nights: Five Performance Premieres
Catalog Number: 0144
Thomas Forrest Kelly
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 12
A study of five famous pieces of music, both as timeless works of art and as moments of cultural history. Close attention is given to techniques of musical listening, and to the details of the first performance of each work, with a consideration of the problems involved in assembling such a picture. Works studied are Beethoven, Symphony no. 9; Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique; Stravinsky, Le sacre du printemps; Handel, Messiah; Monteverdi, Orfeo. The course concludes with the first performance of a new work especially commissioned for this course.
[Literature and Arts B-54. Chamber Music from Mozart to Ravel]
Catalog Number: 1487
Robert D. Levin
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 1, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 6
Examines selected masterworks of chamber music from the 1770s, when the distinctive timbres of Baroque instruments shaped composers’ imaginations, to the beginning of the 20th century. Follows parallel developments in the technology of instrument making and growing performer virtuosity. Style and rhetoric are central concerns, and attention is given to the evolution in interpretative style through listening to historic, as well as recent, recordings. Selections from the assigned works are demonstrated in live performances.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts B-55. Opera: Perspectives on Music and Drama
Catalog Number: 4956
Lewis Lockwood
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 4
An introduction to opera as an art form, exploring some of the ways in which it conveys dramatic action through musical form and expression. Examples drawn chiefly but not exclusively from works by Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner.
Literature and Arts B-65. Music in Fin-de-siècle Vienna: The Origins of Modernism
Catalog Number: 7260
Reinhold Brinkmann
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 12
As a means to understand (through guided listening and its reflection) basic principles and major artistic ideas of 20th-century music in general, this course will offer a demonstration and discussion of a “new music” that originated in Vienna after 1900: music-historical place, aesthetics, genres, composers, and single works of the so-called Second Viennese School. Representative compositions by Mahler, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, but also by Johann Strauss, Jr., will be studied in some detail. Special attention: historical background, sociocultural conditions, and interdisciplinary context (visual arts, literature, criticism, philosophy, science).
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts B-78. Soundscapes: World Music at Home and Abroad
Catalog Number: 2093
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
Many musical traditions at the turn of the 21st century cross geographic boundaries. Nowhere are world music traditions more prominently represented in public performance and maintained in private practice than in North America, where centuries of immigration and an increasingly multiethnic population have given rise to a complex musical environment. Through case studies focusing primarily on musics from selected American ethnic traditions, “Soundscapes” explores the different musical styles that coexist and interact in today’s society, examining their relationship to their historical homelands and to their present-day settings.
Literature and Arts B-80. The Swing Era
Catalog Number: 1899
Robert D. Levin
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 1, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 6
Examines American jazz from the early 1930s — by which time the migration of leading musicians from New Orleans and Kansas City to Chicago, New York and other metropolitan centers precipitated an evolution from the earlier Dixieland style — to the mid 1940s and the emergence of bebop. The essence of this period was swing — an elusive synthesis of foot-tapping rhythmic vitality with rhapsodic, soaring melodic invention. Investigates the relationship between arrangements and improvisation by comparing selected alternate takes. Considers sociological issues and the relationship of swing era jazz to classical music and popular song, to place swing’s achievements into a broader historical and musical perspective.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts C-18. Hindu Myth, Image, and Pilgrimage
Catalog Number: 7384
Diana L. Eck
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 12
An exploration of Hindu myths, images, and pilgrimages in the context of classical and modern Hindu culture. Studies the stories of the gods of India: Vishnu, Krishna, Shiva, and Devi; the heroes and heroines of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; the temples and visual images of the gods and heroes in the classical and folk traditions; and the pilgrimages that link this mythological and artistic complex to the mountains, rivers, and cities of India.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01. For students under the Core requirement, counts as either Literature and Arts C or Foreign Cultures, but not both.
Literature and Arts C-20. The Hero of Irish Myth and Saga
Catalog Number: 7817
Tomás Ó Cathasaigh
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 5
A study of the ways in which the hero is represented in early Irish sources, especially in the saga literature. The texts reflect the ideology and concerns of a society which had been converted to Christianity, but continued to draw on its Indo-European and Celtic heritage. The biographies of the Ulster hero, Cú Chulainn, of his divine father, Lug, and of certain king-heroes are studied in depth. The wisdom literature, and archaeological and historical evidence will be taken into account.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
Literature and Arts C-22. European Culture in the Latin Middle Ages
Catalog Number: 2020
Jan Ziolkowski
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 1, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 15
Studies the culture—literary, artistic, musical—produced and disseminated in the Middle Ages as the classical educational system fused with the scriptures and liturgy of Christianity. Examines major texts in which this culture took shape and expressed itself (Augustine’s Confessions, Benedict’s Rule, The Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes, Tristan, and Dante’s Inferno). Relates texts to the manuscript codex, the main medium in which this fusion was conveyed throughout Europe. Considerable attention to visual materials, especially manuscript illumination. All lectures illustrated with slides.
[Literature and Arts C-25. The Medieval Stage]
Catalog Number: 5114
Eckehard Simon
Half course (spring term). M., W., F., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
A study of major plays from medieval Europe (mainly France and England) and how they were staged in their original settings (churches, marketplaces, streets). Examines theater as worship and revelry in monasteries and cathedrals, as an expression of emerging town culture, and as a mass medium of religious instruction. Explores the architecture of theater spaces, different stage types, the “theater” of medieval art, and the role of music. Illustrated lectures. If there is interest in sufficient number, students will do research on and stage a medieval play.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts C-28. Icon—Ritual—Text: Reading the Culture of Medieval Rus’]
Catalog Number: 2798
Michael S. Flier
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 4
An introduction to the culture of the medieval East Slavs, precursors of the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Exemplars of icon and fresco painting, architecture, ritual, music, folklore, and literature are analyzed in historical and social context for clues to the evolution of an apocalyptic worldview, extending from the Christianization of Rus’ in the 10th century to the advent of Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01. All readings in English.
[Literature and Arts C-30. How and What Russia Learned to Read: The Rise of Russian Literary Culture]
Catalog Number: 7952
William Mills Todd III
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
An exploration in the Russian imperial period (18th-19th centuries) of the development of a secular literary tradition. Focus on institutions of literature, issues of literature and ideology, and the refraction of cultural problems in literary form. Reading of novels by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy in social and historical context.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01. No knowledge of Russian required.
[Literature and Arts C-37. The Bible and Its Interpreters]
Catalog Number: 1255
James L. Kugel
Half course (spring term). M., W., F., at 1, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 6
Seeks to acquaint students with the principal parts of the Hebrew Bible and to provide some exposure to the different ways in which the Bible has been read and interpreted in various periods, from late antiquity to modern times. To achieve this the course concentrates on a group of central biblical figures whose stories are examined in the context of ancient Israelite history and society, and then compared with later, often fanciful, elaborations of these same biblical tales by Jewish and Christian interpreters.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts C-40. The Chinese Literati]
Catalog Number: 5226
Peter K. Bol
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
Examines from literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives the creation in later imperial China of an enduring national culture, which flourished despite dynastic change and foreign conquest. Particular attention is given to the role of the literati and their work as poets, essayists, novelists, painters, moral philosophers, and political thinkers. Themes include the relation of culture to political authority, the search for grounds for individual autonomy, the literary and artistic representation of the self, growing ambivalence toward political service, and the rise of individualism. Introduces Chinese approaches to interpreting literary, artistic, and philosophical works.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01. For students under the Core requirement, counts as either Literature and Arts C or Foreign Cultures, but not both.
Literature and Arts C-42. Constructing the Samurai
Catalog Number: 3743
Harold Bolitho
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
Examines the rise and fall of Japan’s warrior class, and of the bushido ethos. Concentrates on two interrelated themes: the historical reality, and the construction of a mythology - both positive and negative - in Japanese popular culture and the Western imagination. Themes will include warfare, training, religion, values, art, literature, and family life. Visual materials will be used extensively.
[Literature and Arts C-43. The Medieval Court]
Catalog Number: 5794
Eckehard Simon
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 10, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 12
In the High Middle Ages (1100–1250), the European aristocracy created a court culture that became a permanent part of the Western heritage. We study this civilization by reading its greatest literature: the Roland epic, lyrics of the troubadours and minnesingers, the tales of Marie de France, the Arthurian and grail-quest romances of Chrétien and Wolfram, Gottfried’s Tristan. To probe the complex interrelationship between literature and life, we look, in slide lectures, at the historical context: feudal society, castles and castle life, women and marriage, “courtly love,” knights and chivalry, court art, major courts, notable lives.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts C-47. Language, Literature, and Power in the Early Modern Hispanic World (1492–1700)]
Catalog Number: 2205
Mary Gaylord
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 13
A study of the complex relations between imaginative literature, historiography, and imperial politics in the age of Spanish expansion. Examines writing as program and tool for conquest and as script for the encounter with an American “Other.” Considers the new context as challenge to heroic fictions of identity and as source of new voices. Explores issues of representation raised by the task of writing about an unknown world, as well as “wars of words” over the legitimacy of European domination. Authors include Columbus, Cortés, Las Casas, Bernal Díaz, Cabeza de Vaca, Inca Garcilaso, Cervantes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01. Readings in translation.
[Literature and Arts C-49. Cultural China in Contemporary Perspectives]
Catalog Number: 0122
Leo Ou-Fan Lee
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 13
An exploration of new forms of cultural creativity in the rapidly changing contexts of Chinese-speaking territories of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese-American communities during the second half of the 20th century. Primary sources are drawn largely from the novels, poetry, and films produced recently. The course is not a narrative history of 20th-century China, but a critical investigation of some crucial issues facing the Chinese as represented by intellectuals, writers, and artists. An interdisciplinary approach by design, the course includes elements of intellectual history, social change, and the popular media.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01. Readings in translation. For students under the Core requirement, counts as either Literature and Arts C or Foreign Cultures, but not both.
Literature and Arts C-51. Revolution and Reaction: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Avant-Garde
Catalog Number: 6984
John E. Malmstad
Half course (spring term). M., W., F., at 11, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 4
An introduction to the radical transformations of Russian culture between 1890–1930, with particular attention to the “isms,” avant-garde and otherwise, that shaped society and the arts during a period of rapid modernization and experimentation: Symbolism, Futurism, CuboFuturism, Suprematism, Constructivism. Focuses on developments in literature, art, music, ballet, and film, their interaction and relation to the historical context.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01. All readings in English. For students under the Core requirement, counts as either Literature and Arts C or Foreign Cultures, but not both.
[Literature and Arts C-55. Surrealism: Avant-Garde Art and Politics between the Wars]
Catalog Number: 7818
Susan R. Suleiman
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 5
An overview of Surrealism in the context of European culture and politics of this century. Focus on major works of writers, artists, and filmmakers associated with the Surrealist movement, chiefly in the period between the two world wars; some attention also paid to earlier works and movements, and to the influence of and reactions to Surrealism after 1945. Discussion of works by Breton, Aragon, Tzara, Lautréamont, Artaud, Eluard, Carrington, Bunuel and Dali, Dulac, Magritte, Tanning, Ernst, Man Ray, Bellmer, and others.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
Literature and Arts C-61. The Rome of Augustus
Catalog Number: 1101
R. J. Tarrant
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 14
Roman culture and society in a period of radical transformation, the lifetime of the first emperor, Augustus (63 B.C.E.–14 C.E.). Focuses on the interplay between a new set of political realities and developments in literature, the visual arts, and the organization of private and social life. Readings (all in translation) from Catullus, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Propertius, Ovid, and Tacitus, with special attention to the two great masterworks of the period, Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Most lectures illustrated with slides.
Note: Expected to be omitted in 2000–01.
[Literature and Arts C-65. Repression and Expression: Literature and Art in Fin-de-siècle Germany and Austria]
Catalog Number: 4312
Peter J. Burgard
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 12, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 5
Examines German and Austrian literature and art of the period 1880–1920 in terms of gender, sexuality, and language. Begins with readings of Nietzsche and Freud that establish the thematic parameters of investigation and that enable an understanding of the extent to which this period in cultural history is grounded in their ideas. Discussions of individual texts and paintings focus on how problems of gender, sexuality, and language both intersect and reflect one another in the literature and art of the age. Readings include Nietzsche, Freud, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Mann, Musil, Kafka. Artists include Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Kirchner, Marc, Kandinsky.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02. No knowledge of German required.
[Literature and Arts C-67. The German Colonial Imagination]
Catalog Number: 9369
Judith Ryan
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Representations of German colonialism in fiction and film. Consideration of the following topics: Bismarck’s colonial policies; late 19th-century critiques of colonialism; controversies about the notion of the noble colonist; turn-of-the-century legal debates; National Socialism and its attempts to revive the idea of German colonialism; recent critiques of German colonialism.
Note: Expected to be given in 2000–01.