Emory | Comp Lit | Undergraduate Program

Comparative Literature Undergraduate Course Offerings Spring 2008

CPLT 110 Sick Literature: Literature and the Discourses of Illness and Disease

Joshua Backer
Max 16
MWF 10:40-11:30

Content: This course is designed to introduce students to the relationship between literature and the broad subjects of illness and disease. The class will study disease as a theme in literature in the guises of physical illness, ‘moral corruption’, madness, and the forms of the virus and parasite as metaphors, etc., but also look at the infectious or curative properties of literature itself or, conversely, literature as a ‘symptom’ of an illness. This course will begin with two texts foundational in the history of literature that reference cures and disease: Aristotle’s Poetics where the specifically therapeutic effect of tragedy is described as a “purgation of pity and fear” and Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex, which begins with the plague stricken city of Thebes. The course will then take a series of detours towards the contemporary period through literary, philosophical, and even scientific texts which pose questions such as: How is the ill body represented in literature? What is the relationship between literature and madness? Can literature itself be read as an illness or a cure? And, how is death and dying inscribed the very practice of writing?

Texts: Selected works by Aristotle, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Nerval, Ibsen, Freud, Camus, Foucault, Krafft-Ebing, Sontag, and others (NOTE: List is subject to change).

Particulars: Short response papers for selected readings and two 7-10 page papers. In-class participation, preparation for each meeting, and attendance are integral to your performance in this course.

CPLT 110 Twentieth-Century Pieces

John Steen
Max 16
TTh 8:30-9:45

Content: No matter how recent it seems, any attempt to understand the twentieth century through its texts will be incomplete for at least two reasons: we can't read everything, and not everything survives. We can only approach the twentieth century—the history and experience of its technology, its wars, and its legacy--"in pieces." The poems, stories, essays and films we will analyze in this course are broken, truncated, fragmented or abbreviated parts of a world that cannot be known in full, but they sometimes use this status to teach us how better to read, think, write and (maybe even) live. Although poetry will dominate our readings, the course will incorporate literature in other genres as well as theoretical and philosophical material.

Texts: W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Federico García Lorca, H.D., Sappho, Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan, A.R. Ammons, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, Tadeusz Borowski, Joan Didion, Chuck Klosterman, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-François Lyotard.

Particulars: In-class discussion, informal response papers, and two critical essays.

CPLT 110 The Fall of Eve: Women In Literature

Sarah Stein
Max 16
TTh 11:30-12:45

Content: Content: In the Garden of Eden, God expels both Adam and Eve because of Eve’s mistake. She has eaten the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and fed it to Adam. This story, the foundation of a Biblical history of the world, puts the blame for the fall of mankind on womankind. And this mark of blame has remained as a mark upon the texts of the Western tradition. In this class we will begin with a look at the characters of Eve in the Garden of Eden, Ophelia in Hamlet, Madame Bovary in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Carmen in the work of both Prosper Mérimée and Georges Bizet, and others as we trace the theme of “the fallen woman.” We will then turn to feminist rewritings of this theme in the work of Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath and in the film Volver. We will question the roles that women have played in literature as characters, writers, and critical readers. How and why does the theme of the fallen woman return again and again? How has this tradition been questioned and in what ways does it remain a theme in the literature of today? We will consider not only these literary texts but also films, music, and paintings that relate to The Fall of Eve.

Texts: Readings may include The Bible, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Mérimée’s and Bizet’s Carmen, writings of Marge Piercy and Sylvia Plath, Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, critical texts by Shoshana Felman, Hélène Cixous, Laura Mulvey and others, as well as various paintings, music, and advertisements.

Particulars: 2 short papers (4-5 pgs.), 1 final paper (7-8 pgs.), weekly short responses to readings, attendance and class participation.

CPLT 202WR The World of the Novel

Jacob Hovind
Max 20
MWF 9:35-10:25

Content: The novel has been the preeminent literary form of the modern world in the West, the form through which modernity has represented its world and has imagined itself. In this course, we will look not only at the relationship between the novel and the world it represents, but also at the world immanent to the novel itself, a world that bears resemblance to the empirical one, but which remains distinct in its own self-coherent mode of existence. We will consider not only the novel’s intrinsic formal laws and structures, but also the qualities that make it a world very much like our own, its characters, its places, and its things. Some of the questions we will ask are: How does the novel refer to the reality outside of its pages? What are the particular means by which the novel distinguishes itself from that reality? What is the relationship between the figuration of novelistic characters and subjectivity? What defines the novel in relation to other forms of narrative writing? And how can any novel be said to be about its own “novelness”?

Texts: Readings may include Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe;Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo; Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim; Henry James, The Ambassadors; Franz Kafka, The Castle; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter; Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein; Samuel Beckett, Company; as well as critical texts by Viktor Shklovsky, Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Ian Watt, Maurice Blanchot, and Emile Benveniste.

Particulars: Short writing exercises; one short midterm paper (5-7 pp); one longer final paper (8-12 pp); class participation and attendance.

CPLT 202WR The Alchemy of Melancholy: From “American Renaissance” to the Beginnings of Literary Modernity and Beyond

Seth Wood
Max 20
TTh 1-2:15

Content: Compared to the rest of the world’s literatures, American literature is quite young, dating its beginnings well after what is traditionally termed the Renaissance. Perhaps in part to compensate for this fact, literary critics have often spoken of an “American Renaissance,” situated in the decade or so leading up to the Civil War. One aim of this course will be to interrogate how we define this historical turn of the “American Renaissance,” beginning with readings from the early 19th century (particularly, works of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe) through the years of the Civil War (with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass).
Another aim of this course is to trace the influence of the beginnings of American literature in our broader conceptions of literary modernity. The great impact of Poe’s work on the famous French poet and writer of modern life Charles Baudelaire will be of particular interest in this respect. The second half of this course will be comprised of readings in literature, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural criticism from the late 19th century to the outbreak of World War I and beyond. Throughout the semester, specific attention will be paid to how these discourses were informed by transformations in the cultural, political and economic landscape, from emerging technologies of printing and war (including photography and WMDs) to the shifting demands of capitalism and urban life (e.g. in the American “Gold Rush”).

Texts: Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables and selected tales; Edgar Allan Poe, selected poetry and prose; Walt Whitman, selections from Leaves of Grass; Alexis de Tocqueville, selections from Democracy in America; Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” selected poetry from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris; Rainer Maria Rilke, selected poetry; Sigmund Freud, selected psychoanalytic works; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (La chambre claire); and others.

Particulars: Periodic short response papers, mid-term essay, final paper, regular attendance and participation.

CPLT 202WR Opened Mail and Closed Networks: Literary Transmissions from the 18th to the 21st century

Alex Weil
Max 20
TTh 10-11:15

Content: In this class we will be looking at modern literature through the lens of letter writing and telecommunication. Reading epistolary novels and literary works that figure communications systems, along with writers’ letters and theoretical texts, we will consider the materiality of communication, look at publicity and privacy, explore the limits of collapsing time and space in modernity, and ask: Who is an addressee? Who is an editor? Who is an author? Where do voices come from? What is a writing machine?

Texts: Literary texts may include Persian Letters (Montesquieu), Dangerous Liaisons (Laclos), The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), In the Cage (James), The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon), In an Antique Land (Ghosh), Pattern Recognition (Gibson); stories by Hoffman, Poe, and Borges; writings by Hawthorne, Dickinson, Crane, and Kafka; Samuel Beckett’s play “Krapp’s Last Tape”. Theoretical texts might include pieces by Bakhtin, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, and Kittler.

CPLT 203RWR Poetic Resistance: The Death and Voice of the Outsider

Ariel Ross
Max 20
TTh 10-11:15

Content: In her 1937 essay “My Pushkin,” Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote: “…my whole infancy, childhood, and youth, I have divided the world into the poet—and all of them, and I have chosen—the poet, have chosen the poet to be among those I defend: to defend the poet—from all of them, however they are garbed, however they are named.” Though she is referring explicitly here to the death (resulting from a duel over his wife’s honor) of that patriarch of Russian poetry, Aleksandr Pushkin, Tsvetaeva includes implicitly in her ominous “them” the Stalinist Soviet regime which was responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of many of the great Russian poets of that age. Only a year later Osip Mandelstam, a fellow poet and former lover of Tsvetaeva, died in a Soviet prison camp. Having foreseen the manner of his death, Mandelstam is reported to have said, “Poetry is respected only in this country—people are killed for it. There’s no place where more people are killed for it.” In this course we will attempt to respect poetry enough to understand why people might be killed for it. We will investigate how the figure of “the poet” has come to be associated with exile and estrangement from society, and how the position of exile might become a source of power for the poetic voice. And we will ask how it is possible, in poetry, to pose a resistance to “them”—the ominous, nameless and faceless “dark mass” which threatens death to freedom, to beauty, and to poetry. In the first third of the course we will read Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in its entirety, paying special attention to the poem’s historical context and content. For the second third of the course we will turn to the poetry of Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and several other Soviet-era poets, also reading some of their prose works concerning poetry and the place of the poet in society. Finally, we will turn our attention to the American folk music revival of the 1960’s, particularly to the music of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan.

Texts: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy; Marina Tsvetaeva, “My Pushkin,” selected poems; Osip Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante, selected poems; Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, selected poems; Anthology of American Folk Music; songs of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan.

Films: David Lean, Doctor Zhivago; D.A. Pennebaker, Don’t Look Back;Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home.

CPLT 203RWR Vision and Imagination: Eye or the Mind’s Eye?

Maya Kesrouany
Max 20
MWF 10:40-11:30

Content: In this class, we will trace the opposition between vision and imagination as we map out the historical development of the novel. In its very form, the novel has always carried a tension between “truth” as it is encountered in the world and fantasy, the realm of the out-of-this-world. It is difficult to define “imagination” as such but we will try to read the development of the term historically, as well as in relation to the novel specifically. We will be looking particularly at the rise and fall of the Romance genre, and its subsequent resurgence in the form of the gothic novel in the early 19th century. This will force us to ask questions about the historical desire to reconnect, as though, with the imaginary and, by extension, with the holy. In this historical mapping of the novel, we will also examine the relationship between painting and writing, and what they might reveal about the overlapping of vision and imagination. We will wonder what happens to the enchanted world of the Romance novel in the modern world, asking if, perhaps, the “magic” of the modern world lies in its disenchantment, in the blind reconciliation of reality and fantasy. Some of our guiding questions will be: How can we tell the difference between what we see and what we imagine to have seen? How does a novel establish its status as a witness to “real” historical events or as an imaginary narrative about made-up events? Where has the “magic” gone?

Texts: Virginia Woolf To The Lighthouse, Henry James Portrait of a Lady, Plato Selections from Republic, Victor Hugo Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (Last Days of a Condemned Man), Flaubert Madame Bovary, Balzac Preface on naturalism, Mary Shelley Frankenstein,Hawthorne “Introduction” to The House of the Seven Gables, Aristotle Selections from Poetics, Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Zola’s Salon Letters, George Eliot’s essays on the novel.

CPLT 203RWR Vision and Imagination: Eye or the Mind’s Eye?

Maya Kesrouany
Max 20
MWF 12:50-1:40

CPLT 302 Literary Theory

C. Caruth
Max 12
W 1-4
[Cross-listed with ENG 384(5) and IDS 385(3)]

Content: An introduction to literary theoretical thinking, focusing on twentieth century structuralism, post-structuralism and contemporary theory. We will examine the ways in which "language" is conceived and reconceived by major theoretical writers and the implications of this rethinking for our notions of literature, history, politics, ideology, sexuality, trauma, etc. We will also examine the ways in which these texts not only theorize literary language but are also, themselves, subject to its surprises.

Texts: Authors include Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Shoshana Felman, Thomas Keenan, Cixous, among others.

Particulars: Active class participation, ungraded but required weekly responses (on major theoretical terms), and two short papers.

CPLT 389WR Renaissance Literature:1603-1660

R. Rambuss
Max 5
TTh 1-2:15
[Cross-listed with ENG 315WR(20)]

Content: This course examines in depth five poets—John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw—from one of the richest and most daringly experimental periods of English poetry. We will also consider poetic works by other significant seventeenth-century authors, including John Suckling, Thomas Carew, the Earl of Rochester, and Aphra Behn.

Our discussions will place these poets in a range of pertinent early modern literary and cultural contexts. Since much of the period’s lyric poetry is love poetry, the course will be particularly concerned with expressions of erotic desire, as well as with literary figurations of the self, the body, and the passions. Among the other topics that we will address are: Renaissance notions of authorship and the literary career; the staging of literary authority in relation to other kinds of authority; the post-Petrarchan love lyric; libertinism; ecstatic experience; the affective cross-affiliations between amorous and religious devotion in the period; and the “metaphysical conceit,” both in the age of Donne and in our own.

Particulars: Attendance at all classes; approximately twenty pages of formal writing, ranging from short essays to a few medium length ones; a final exam.

CPLT 389 Plato and the Platonic Tradition

P. Wakefield/K. Corrigan
Max 3
TTH 10-11:15
[Cross-listed with IDS 385(5) and PHIL 480(3)]

Content: This course, team taught by Kevin Corrigan and Peter Wakefield, both of the ILA, will give students a thorough grounding in core dialogues of the vast Platonic corpus, situating the discussion of the Platonic philosophic and literary achievement in the broader context of Greek and ancient Mediterranean literature, culture, and history. Special focus will be given to literary antecedents and influences on Plato’s thought and to the Platonic tradition after Plato, especially Plotinus and early Christian writers.

CPLT 389S The Spanish Comedia: Race, Gender, and Performance

M. Carrión
Max 3
TTh 10-11:15
[Cross-listed with SPAN 430(9) and WS 385(3)]

Content: This course explores the representation of race, gender, and performance in theater and society in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, and its reception (both in theory and practice) in twentieth-century Spain and Latin America. The class will consider the Comedia—or professional theater of Spain between the 1550s and the 1680s—as discourse and industry, highlighting its double dimension of being a product of the culture of this society, and of being one of the most culturally productive phenomena in Spain’s Early Modern history. Discussions will revolve around questions of how the following were represented on- and offstage: race, lineage, limpieza de sangre, exclusion, reproduction, gender, costume, movement, voice; and how such representation had (or not) and impact on the professionalization of theater, the running of shows and theaters, the debates about the (un)lawfulness of theatrical theories and practices, and the scrutiny and closing of theaters. Taught In Spanish

Texts: Boal, Teatro del oprimido, Ejercicios para actores y no-actores; Cervantes, Entremés de El juez de los divorcios; Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, La dama boba; Tirso de Molina, Don Gil de las calzas verdes; Calderón, El médico de su honra, El gran teatro del mundo, La vida es sueño; Caro, El Conde Partinuplés; Zayas, La traición en la amistad. Articles and reviews about stagings of these and other plays in Almagro, the Teatro de la Comedia, the Chamizal Festival, la Teatrela, Intar, and the Hubert de Blanc, among other theaters.

Particulars: Attendance and class participation (40%), a midterm (35%), and one 10-page paper (25%).

CPLT 389WR History and Theory of Hispanics Narrative

R. Gutierrez-Mouat
Max 3
TTh 11:30-12:45
[Cross-listed with SPAN 311WR(9)]

Content: What are the stories that we tell—about ourselves and others—as individuals, families, groups, and nations? This course will provide a critical and theoretical introduction to narrative in Hispanic contexts. Using a broad definition of narrative as story-telling, we will look at the various uses of narrative in culture. We will examine the ways in which story-telling cuts across boundaries of genre and discipline, and challenges the traditional divide between fictional and non-fictional discourse. In doing so, we will read and discuss a broad array of narrative writing: diaries, testimonio and autobiographies; novels and short stories; cybernarratives; ethnographies; legal and judicial documents; graphic novels; and story-telling in journalism and the social sciences. This course will provide students with the theoretical concepts and vocabulary to better understand the narrative form, and to do advanced (400-level) work in Hispanic narrative. Taught in Spanish.

Texts: Primary readings may include the following: Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo; Ernesto Guevara, Diarios en motocicleta (Notas de Viaje); Eduardo Mendicutti, Una noche mala la tiene cualquiera; Rigoberta Menchu, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu y así me nació la conciencia; José Martí; Manuel Puig, Boquitas pintadas; Edgar Clément, Operación Bolívar (graphic novel). Secondary readings will include Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"; Teresa de Lauretis, "Desire in Narrative"; and selections from Christopher Nash, Narrative in Culture: the Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature; Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling; James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, Understanding Narrative.

Particular: Final grade will be based on the following criteria:

Preparation and class participation 10%
Short writing/narrative exercises, online postings, etc. 15%
Major essays, 4-5 pg., 5 @ 15% each 75%

PREREQUISITE: SPAN 300. By permission.

CPLT 389S Americas North and South

José Quiroga
Max 3
TTH 1-2:15
[Cross-listed with SPAN 460S]

Content: This course will examine the way in which one side of the continent has seen its other half. Both in terms of Latin Americans looking North, as well as how North Americans have “looked South.” The course will be conducted in Spanish, but readings will be both in Spanish and English.

Texts: Sample readings include Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Martí, Joan Didion, Octavio Paz, Pedro Pietri, Junot Díaz, Jack Kerouac, and others...

Particulars: Three short (6-7pp) papers, midterm, and oral reports.

CPLT 389S Melodrama

José Quiroga
Max 3
TTH 2:30-3:45
[Cross-listed with SPAN 460S]

CONTENT: From the ridiculous to the sublime, melodrama has had a long and interesting history in Hispanic cultures—one could argue that melodrama is the bind that has glued the difficult process of Latin American identity, culture, and nation formation since the Nineteenth Century. Although this course is not considered an overview of the rich varieties of Hispanic melodrama available, we will study the word and its implications, as well as some recent versions in literature, cinema, and popular culture. From the syrupy and romantic musical genre of the boleros, to the present-day telenovelas, and on to the films of Almodóvar, we will try to figure out what is it that has fascinated mass audiences, and whether there is any possibility of understanding melodrama as something other than a campy gesture.

Texts: Sample texts include Manuel Puig, Corín Tellado, Pedro Lemebel, Carlos Monsiváis, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and others.

Particulars: Three short (6-7pp) papers, midterm, and oral reports.

CPLT 490S Comparative Literature Major Seminar

Robbins
Max 10
TTh 1:00-2:15

Content: A seminar devoted to the intensive close reading of literary and other texts.

Texts: Exact texts will be individual by section.

Particulars: Please see www.comparativelit.emory.edu for more information

CPLT 495R 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).