Emory | Comp Lit | Undergraduate Program

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Course Offerings Fall 2008

CPLT 110 The Apocalypse and Beyond

Patrick Blanchfield
Max 16
MWF 8:30-9:20

Content:“Some say the world will end in fire / some say in ice.” Robert Frost’s vision of the end of the world recalls the age-old idea that Earth is moving towards "apocalypse"—that is, towards its annihilation. Literary works addressing the apocalypse draw on a millenia-long tradition, and apocalyptic themes have inflected politics and religion since time immemorial. But what does it mean for the world to end? How can the human mind fathom and represent the end of “everything”? This course will offer an introduction into the Apocalyptic as a literary genre and set of themes, and will provide context for discussion and analysis of apocalyptic visions that involve elements ranging from messianism to political revolution to environmental disaster to thermonuclear war to zombies. How does the Apocalypse rework our notions of time and of knowledge, and how does it relate to the enigma of our own, inevitable, deaths? And, ‘finally’, what does it mean to talk of a ‘Post-Apocalyptic’ world?

Texts:We will read excerpts from sources ranging from Summerian Battle Myths to the Book of Daniel and Revelation alongside the work of early-modern, Romantic, and contemporary authors and poets, including Blake, Shelley, Yeats, Lovecraft, Lawrence, Kermode, Houellebecq, and McCarthy. Films including The Time of the Wolf, Mad Max, and The Day After will also be screened.

Particulars: 3 short papers (4-5 pgs.), 1 final paper (8-10 pgs.). To fulfill the Intensive Writing Requirement, papers after the first will be work-shopped, outlines collected, and meetings with instructor scheduled. As in any course, preparation, attendance, and in-class participation are essential.

CPLT 110 The Literary Animal

Armando Mastrogiovanni
Max 16
TTh 10-11:15

Content: Literature is obsessed with animals. They howl and lurch through the history of literary art: creatures with clawed wings; faces that breathe fire; whales that smash ships and men who turn into insects, wolves, bats. We will explore this obsession by focusing on two scenes at the origin of the western tradition: Adam giving names to the creatures assembled in the Garden of Eden, and Aristotle declaring that the real difference between “man and other animals” is that man alone possesses language. Setting out with an examination of the literary representation of animals, we will soon take our cue from Emerson’s mysterious statement that “every word was once an animal,” and consider how some works of literature ask to be read as animals—unpredictable, strangely animate, and uneasily familiar.

Texts: In addition to the Bible and short selections from Aristotle, our readings may be drawn from Aesop’s Fables, Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, Ursula Le Guin, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Particulars: This is a writing intensive course that will include short weekly papers (2-3 pages), and three longer papers (6-7 pages). Regular attendance and class participation will also be required.

CPLT 110 Power and Resistance in Tragedy

Lucas Donahue
Max 16
MWF 9:35-10:25

Content: Why is it that whenever the characters in Greek tragedy try to escape the forces of fate, they end up trapped by precisely the fate they tried to escape? We will begin this course by analyzing how the attempt to avoid tragedy inevitably turns out tragically and the attempt to escape repetition itself becomes repetitive. After studying the Greeks we will try to understand the ways in which their representation of fate informs modern theories about the workings of power and ideology. We will pay particular attention to the types of metaphors used to describe inexorable power—metaphors of stains, nets, and traps, but also more abstract metaphors such as spatial metaphors of top and bottom, inside and outside and temporal metaphors of before and after. At the end of the course, we will return to the question of whether it is possible to escape the forces of power and control—be they political, linguistic, psychological, or historical—or whether we need to define resistance along lines other than escape.

Texts: Readings may include works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Müller, Sartre, Foucault, and Althusser, among others.

Particulars: This is a writing intensive course that will include three 4-6 page papers and one 6-9 page final paper. Class attendance, participation, and sustained engagement with the texts will be crucial for success in this course.

CPLT 110 Figuring the Body

Asher Haig
Max 16
TTh 11:30-12:45

Content: Today is the age of the cyborg: a new age for understanding "the human". Bionic eyes, ears, and arms are supplemented with neural computer interfaces; how far are we from science fiction dreams of the future? If we can only know our bodies in terms of perception—and if perception is only possible because we have bodies—what does it mean to say we “have” “our” bodies?
This class will investigate the limits of bodily thought and perception; the "shape" of the body; altered states of perception (body modification, drugs, synesthesia and extra-sensory perception); the stretchable, unbreakable "toon" body; sexuality, (re)production, and the organization of the body; bodily destruction and decay.

Texts: Literature to be drawn from texts including... Kafka, The Trial and selected aphorisms; Haruki Murakami, Hard Boiled Universe and the End of the World; Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat; Dick, Martian Time Slip, We Can Build You, Dr. Bloodmoney; DeLillo, The Body Artist; Stephenson, Snow Crash, and others. Theory excerpts to be drawn from texts including... Foucault, Descartes, Deleuze and Guattari, benn Michaels, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Zizek. Art from Takeshi Murakami, Maxim Kantor, and others. Film clips from movies including... The Animatrix, The Matrix trilogy, eXistenz, A Scanner Darkly, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
and 2nd Gig; Battlestar Galactica, and others.

Particulars: 3 Short papers (4-6 pages); 1 Final paper (9-10 pages), based on earlier paper (particulars to be discussed on an individual basis); Preparation and participation, including brief weekly written reflections on relationship between current and previous readings.

CPLT 110 Horror Stories

Benjamin Hilb
Max 16
TTh 8:30-9:45

Content: Fear is a big business. From Hollywood cinema to diet pills, billions of dollars are made every year on human fear. This course will examine fear as a literary attraction. What is it about horror stories that we like so much? We’ll look to the history of what might broadly be termed “horror fiction” in order to examine the ways in which fear stimulates and organizes desire. Simply put, we’ll seek a sophisticated answer to the question: what are you so afraid of, and why?

Texts: May include works by Anne Radcliffe, Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, Stephen King.

Particulars: Four five-page papers, bi-weekly reading responses, attendance, class-participation.

CPLT 110 Reading Poetry

Colleen Dunne
Max 16
MWF 9:35-10:25

Content: This course is about poetry, about why poems are the odd linguistic mongrels they are. To tackle that hallmark of curiosity, "Why?" we will need to start an an analytical level, investigating the "How?" of poetry -- how to read it, how to think about it, how to write about it. I will teach you some methods I've developed for thinking about poems, why they don't work for every poem, and I will encourage you too look for and discover poeticisms that we haven't discussed in class.

The first part of the course will focus on how to describe poems and their poetic features. The second part of the course will more fully investigate the wys and wherefores of poems -- how they construct notions of identity, community, history -- by applying (with flexibility and creativity) the analytical skills we developed in the first part of the course.

Texts: We will read works of many different poets including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Jean Follain, and Tomas Transtromer.

Particulars: Fifty percent of the grade is based on essays. The other fifty percent is based on active (written and oral) course participation.

CPLT 190 Good Worlds, Bad Worlds: Utopian and Dystopian Visions

Bammer
Max 6
TTh 1-2:15
[Cross-listed with IDS 190]

Content: This course examines some of the ways in which people in the modern (post-Enlightenment) world have imagined alternative futures. These possible futures are often cast in the form of “other” worlds, which are projected as either “good” or “bad” alternatives to the world we currently live in. Implicit in these utopian or dystopian visions are both a critique of current social conditions and a blueprint for a different social order. We will examine some of these blueprints to see what kinds of alternative worlds people have envisioned and assess how they are better or worse than what we already have. Drawing on philosophical concepts that propose ways of assessing whether a social order is good or bad, we will study examples of “good” and “bad” worlds proposed by contemporary writers, thinkers, artists, and film-makers. Among other things, we will ask what makes the bad worlds so much more compelling to write and think about than the good worlds that seem boring by comparison. Finally, we will compare the alternative worlds imagined in these creative works to the real worlds envisioned by political treaties and national constitutions.

Texts: Course materials will be selected from among the following: selections from philosophers and critical thinkers such as Plato, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Rousseau, Karl Marx, Jürgen Habermas, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Giorgio Agamben; fictional texts by writers such as Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Ursula LeGuin, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman; films such as Metropolis, Gattaca, Children of Men, The Matrix and architectural designs; documents like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the United States Bill of Rights, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and excerpts from the new Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.

Particulars: Graded course requirements include weekly written responses to course materials (c. 2 pp.). A collaboratively-designed and incrementally-executed semester project: blueprint for a utopia.

CPLT 201 Lethal Language: Tragedy in Ancient Greece

Matthew Roberts
Max 20
MWF 9:35-10:25

Content: Whether encountering the blood stained faces of the Furies or the words of Agave as she mourns the death of her son whose body she has just dismembered, the tragedies of Ancient Greece continue to resonate as monumental works of art, poetry, and theater. Given the aesthetic specificity and importance of Greek Tragedy, we will begin the course with a careful reading of Aristotle’s Poetics. Next, we will focus our attention on major works by the three great tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. While concerned with the aesthetic dimension of Greek Tragedy, the texts open a number of different and important themes and issues worthy of thoughtful attention. Closely reading each text, our critical attention will turn toward issues such as justice and fate, gender and sexuality, and the lethal violence of tragic language.

Texts: Aeschylus, The Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides); Sophocles, The Theban Plays (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone); Euripides, The Bacchae, Hippolytus; Aristotle, The Poetics. Supplementary materials may include selections from: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings; Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman; Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth
and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.

Particulars: Close Reading Response Papers for each play (3 pages); Final Paper (10 pages).

CPLT 201 Myth and Ideology

Robert Vork
Max 20
MWF 10:40-11:30

Content: The word “myth” is often used rather pejoratively, and associated with a superstitious and uncivilized past in which such stories were invented in order to explain the incomprehensible and terrifying world. Yet every society tells stories about itself. Even today—especially today—we appreciate mythic-scale tales in which our own heroes and anti-heroes struggle amidst conflicts of love, morality, and power. From the books we read, to the films we watch, to the news we hear, to the commercials we see, cultural myths emerge as the underlying relationships that define us and order our lives. They teach us who we are, where we have been, and where we are going. But for this reason, these stories are never simply neutral descriptions of life. On the contrary, they provide some of the strongest and most unassailable foundations of ideology, and through them we determine our most basic beliefs regarding sexuality, gender, race, class, law, and power. Though we are often little more than passive recipients of these stories, by learning to read them and by recognizing how they work on our beliefs and self-identities, we can perhaps also learn to challenge them both in society and in ourselves. With that in mind, this course will raise broad questions of knowledge, power, and ideology through the exploration of myth in ancient texts, modern
visual culture, and contemporary literary criticism. The underlying
questions of the course will be: What is myth? How does myth work?
How can it be read in and through a variety of texts? And finally, how does it operate on us concretely in our daily lives?

Texts: Readings will include Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Beowulf; as well as critical texts by Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and Claude Levi-Strauss.

Particulars: Attendance and participation, one short mid-term paper, one final paper, short in-class presentation.

CPLT 201 War Is the Father of All Things: Antagonism, Sovereignty, and Justice in Classical Greece

Andrew Ryder
Max 20
TTh 10-11:15

Content: What does it mean to be sovereign? That is, who is truly autonomous -- the king or the outlaw? Is an unrecognized king anything else but an outlaw? This class concerns the emergence of justice from vengeance, law from custom, civil duty from family allegiance, and rationality from passion. However, it also explores the way that civilization fails to fully escape from its origins; the remnants of vengeance and passion that remain in law and reason. We begin with the philosopher-poet Heraclitus, who declared that everything is ruled by war and fire, and proceed to bloody tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles that treat family civil wars. From here, we will have a light interlude with Aristophanes’ comic and erotic play Lysistrata, which deals with war between the sexes in a ribald tone. In conclusion, we will discuss Plato and Aristotle as codifiers of rationalist ethics, and contrast them to their most impassioned challengers.
The course will include discussions of the Peloponnesian War and classical Greek culture; the conventions of ancient theater; and the beginnings of philosophy. Contemporary viewpoints from Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Judith Butler will also be introduced.

Texts: Heraclitus, Fragments; Aeschylus, The Oresteia;Sophocles, Antigone and Oedipus the King; Aristophanes, Lysistrata; Plato, Gorgias and The Republic, book I; and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.

Particulars: Three papers, and regular attendance and participation are required.

CPLT 201 The Bible

Seth Wood
Max 20
TTh 11:30-12:45

Content: The most widely circulated book on the planet, translated (at least in part) into nearly 2,500 different languages, The Bible is one of the most influential and most frequently cited written works in history. In this course we will read The Bible, only The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Class discussions and periodic lectures will address The Bible’s status as Scripture, the foundational text for diverse religious doctrines, while also considering the many ways in which The Bible may be appreciated for its complex narrative style, its status as literature.

Particulars: The writing component of the course will comprise three short essays and a final paper.

CPLT 203R Literary Autopsies: Dying Romantic to Modern

Scott Branson
Max 20
TTh 2:30-3:45

Content: Before his execution, Socrates famously says that philosophy is a pursuit of death and dying. Similarly, we may ask, what is the relationship of literature to death? One thinks of the cliché that literature somehow holds the meaning of life (and here again, it encroaches on philosophy’s terrain), but can it tell us the meaning of death? Is there a literary meaning of death? In this class, I would like to explore this conjunction of literature and philosophy through the literary representation of death and dying. How does the dead or dying body resemble a text? Can we read death or the dead body as we read a text? We will track an historical trajectory (starting with Plato) through Romantic encounters with death and ending with Modernist accounts of death. Alongside our literary texts, we will take a look at critical and philosophical engagements with the relation of death to literature and philosophy. I would also like us to think about the relationship of our critical interpretation to its literary object: are we performing autopsies on these texts?

Texts: Plato, Phaedo; Shelley, Frankenstein; Balzac, Colonel Chabert; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; selections by Gautier; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Joyce, “The Dead,” Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Duras, La Maladie de la Mort; with critical works by Barthes, Benjamin, Blanchot, Girard, etc.

Particulars: Attendance and participation; weekly response papers; midterm paper (6-8 pages) and final paper (10-12 pages)

CPLT 203R The Postage Stamp and the Doorstop

John Steen
Max 20
MWF 10:40-11:30

Content: What new possibilities of reading do we open on to by juxtaposing very short works of literature with those that, for one reason or another, seem endless? Is anything really "there" in a poem of only six words (A.R. Ammons' "Their Sex Life")? Can anyone justify seven volumes (over 1.5 million words) for one novel (Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time")? The poems, short stories, novels and films we will discuss in this course attempt to answer these questions by attending to the problems and possibilities of form in literary works that are often considered too short or too long to be taught.

Texts: May include works by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, the Marquis de Sade, Marcel Proust, A.R. Ammons, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Les Murray, and Joshua Beckman.

Particulars: Class participation, weekly responses and two papers

CPLT 301S 00P Hamlet in Theory: Page, Stage, Screen, Criticism

Rambuss
Max 12
TTh 2:30-3:45
[crosslisted with ENG 389S and FILM 373S]

Content: This seminar affords the opportunity for intensive study of Hamlet—an enduringly significant Renaissance cultural artifact, yet also one of Shakespeare’s most difficult, enigmatic plays—on page, stage, and screen. Rather than merely alighting upon the play’s many dramatic highlights, the format of this single-text class will allow us to linger over Hamlet, scene by scene. In conjunction with our close reading of Shakespeare’s play, the seminar will engage a variety of critical approaches—including psychoanalytic theory, deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, and queer theory—which we will then ply as interpretive tools for forging different ways of reading Hamlet.

The seminar will also consider three very different cinematic renderings of the play: Laurence Olivier’s 1948 expressionist Hamlet; Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 action-hero Hamlet (starring Mel Gibson); and Michael Almereyda’s 1990 technoculture Hamlet (starring Ethan Hawke). And we will glance at the re-citation of Hamlet—its characters, set pieces, adages, and literary and philosophical tropes—in some disparate non-Hamlet movies: Last Action Hero, Clueless, and A Nightmare on Elm St. Our juxtaposition of lowbrow, popular cinematic forms (the action movie, the teen comedy, and the horror film) with the “classic Shakespeare film” will thus set the stage for a consideration of Shakespeare’s cultural status, both in his time and ours, as well as the shifting relations between high culture and popular culture more generally.

Texts: Hamlet; an anthology or two of critical essays.

Particulars: Attendance at all classes; a short paper; a longer seminar paper; a group seminar presentation.

CPLT 389WR Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

Goodstein
TTH 2:30-3:45
Max 4
[crosslisted with IDS 385, PHIL, HIST 385]

Content: Dubbed "the masters of suspicion," Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud each contributed in a unique way to the skeptical culture of modernity. Marx exposed the relation between ideas and their material origins; Nietzsche called the very idea of truth into question; and Freud suggested that human existence itself rests on dark and unexamined foundations. The founders, both consciously and unwittingly, of movements that attempted to use their insights to transform politics and culture, these intellectual revolutionaries changed the landscape of modern life. In this course, we will focus both on understanding their ideas and methods and on learning how to use them ourselves.

As critical thinkers committed to extending the power of self-reflection into new regions, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud were the inheritors and extenders of the enlightenment. But all three were also highly aware of the power of the irrational to shape human existence. The tension between rationality and irrationality is at the heart of the distinctive new ways of thinking associated with their names. This course will closely examine the ideas of each of these "masters" of argument: we will study each on his own terms, engaging in careful and critical readings of major works. We will also practice using the paradigms they developed by reading Heinrich Kleist's "The Earthquake in Chile" from Marxian, Nietzschean, and Freudian perspectives. Throughout the course, we will also be concerned to think about the methods of each thinker in relation to the others.

This course is particularly recommended for IDS majors and others planning senior projects that require a theoretical foundation. It fulfills the post-freshmen writing requirement, so in addition to careful reading, you will also be doing extensive writing, both analytical and interpretive. We will approach writing as a continuous process of revision and experiment, focusing on helping you to understand and manage that process in a way that works best for you as an individual.

CPLT 389 Deception, War and the Image

Caruth
TTH 10-11:15
Max 10
[crosslisted with ENG 389 and ILA 385]

Content: Why is war-making so deeply bound up with deception? And how are politics and history affected by the centrality of war in the political realm? Starting from the questions, this course will examine 20th century literature, film and (political and literary) theory in order to consider the relation between war and image, lying and politics, the production of history and its denial.

CPLT 389SWR Ghosts of the Plantation

Loichot
Max 9
TTh 1:00-2:15
[Cross-listed with FREN 361SWR and LAS 385]

Content: Martinican writer Édouard Glissant identifies the slave Plantation as "one of the bellies of the world." This course explores how the Plantation machine produced repeating cultural and literary patterns in the Caribbean and in the rest of the Americas. The class will explore the question of race and examine how the present is still haunted by the “ghosts of slavery.” We will focus specifically on literary texts and cultural and legal documents from Martinique Guadeloupe, and Haiti. The course will also include a comparative component that will highlight historical links between the French Caribbean and the US South, and most specifically, with the history of Georgia, Atlanta, and Emory University.

Texts: Readings by Marie-Célie Agnant, Mark Auslander, Maryse Condé, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, among others.

Particulars: Active class participation, 1 oral presentation, 2 short papers (5-6 pages), 1 research paper (10-12 pages), 2 field trips to local sites of memory. The course is taught in English but all the original French texts will also be available. The course if part of the Emory “Transforming Community Project,” http://transform.emory.edu/

CPLT 389WR Literature in Early and Imperial China

Kurtz
Max 3
TTh 10:15-11:15
[crosslisted with CHN 272WR, EAS 272WR and ASIA 375WR]

Content: An introduction to Chinese literature from its beginnings through the end of the imperial era in 1911. Focusing on close readings of selected pieces in their literary and historical contexts, we will analyze representative works of various eras, writers, and genres. The aim of the course is to illustrate the beauty and diversity of classical Chinese literary voices and poetic sensibilities, and enable students to come to adequate terms with literary texts that were produced in a cultural environment often portrayed as being Œworlds apart¹ from our own. All texts will be studied in English translation. Satisfies G.E.R. post-freshman writing requirement IV.A (Humanities, Textual).

Texts: Owen, Stephen. An Anthology of Chinese Literature. Beginnings to 1911. New York: W. W. Norton 1996.
Mair, Victor H. (ed.). The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press 1994.
Further readings will be made available on online reserve.

Particulars: No knowledge of Chinese required. Evaluation based on class participation, written assignments, research paper, midterm and final.

CPLT 389WR Dostoevsky in English Translation

Epstein
Max 4
TTh 5:45-7:00
[Cross-listed with RUSS 360WR]

Content: Of all Russian writers Dostoevsky had the most serious impact on the world culture. He widened horizons of artistic imagination and human thought. In this class four major works of fiction by Dostoevsky will be discussed. Dostoevsky will be approached as a creator of a genre of polyphonic novel and a predecessor of modern intellectual trends such as Jungian theory of psychological archetypes and existentialism. Interpretations of Dostoevsky's work by Berdiaev, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Bakhtin will amplify reading experience and outline topic for discussion.

Particulars: The course will be taught in English. Final paper.

CPLT 389S Screening China

Cai
Max 2
TTh 1:00-2:15
[Cross-listed with CHN 394S, ASIA 375S, FILM 394S]

***Mandatory film screenings on Monday evenings at 6 p.m.

Content: The course explores the history and development of Chinese cinema since the early twentieth century. It discusses "film in China" and "China in film" by focusing on the function of cinema and the continual reconfigurations of time, space, gender, and history in Chinese films under different historical conditions in the past hundred years.

Texts: TBA

Particulars: Several one-page film response papers; two presentations; and a final paper (8-10 pages) of film analysis and discussion of a representative feature of Chinese cinema (research required). Attendance and active participation will count in determining final grades.

CPLT 389WR Introduction to Media Theory and Media Fiction

Croxall
Max 5
TTH 10:00-11:15
[Cross-listed with ENG 389RWR]

Content:In the age of Google, iPhones, and the World of Warcraft, it may seem self-evident that, as Friedrich Kittler claims, “media determine our situation.” But it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that media began to be considered as important as the messages they conveyed. With this realization and the continued development of the computer came more thinking about the importance of media in our lives. How do media proliferate and become interconnected? How do media affect our perception of political and cultural events? How can we best represent our experiences within different media? To what extent does digital computing affect the media ecology in which we find ourselves today? About these and related questions, a body of media theory has arisen. This course will introduce you to some of the important texts in this field. At the same time we will consider both print and electronic literature—including novels about the Internet, virtual reality, and gaming—that engage these questions. We will consider how literature is determined by and at the same time extends the theories of media. Along the way, you and I will do our own share of writing—both print and digital.

Texts: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Rudy Rucker, The Hacker and the Ants; Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; Jeanette Winterson, The.PowerBook; Charles Stross, Halting State; Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden; Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves; Marshall McLuhan, The Essential McLuhan; Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Happen; Paul Virilio, Desert Screen; N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines; and various essays on course reserve.

Particulars: Regular attendance and participation in class discussion; regular, short response papers; two essays; and an annotated bibliography. In addition, there will be several multi-media assignments incorporating tools such as del.icio.us, Twitter, and PMOG.

CPLT 490S Dialogism in Dostoevsky

Robbins
Max 10
TTH 1:00-2:15
[Cross-listed with REL 472S]

Content: In this seminar we will read closely Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, following out the themes of alienation, family conflict, parricide and the eclipse of God. We will attend especially to Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the radical dialogism or “polyphony” at the heart of Dostoesky’s novelistic work and we will explore this dialogism both as a formal principle of composition and as an ethical theme of the self’s recognition of otherness.

CPLT 495RWR 00P Honors Thesis

Faculty

By Permission Only. For more information and registration for this course, please contact the Comparative Literature Program Office (N101 Callaway Center).

CPLT 497R 00P Supervised Reading

Faculty

By Permission Only. For more information and registration for this course, please contact the Comparative Literature Program Office (N101 Callaway Center).