CL 10, What is Comparative Literature?
Love Stories
Prof. Michelle Warren – 11 hour
Love stories attract two clichéd assessments: “they're all the same;” “no two are alike.” They thus afford an ideal opportunity to explore fundamental issues in comparative study: how do culture, history, and genre affect representation? Do "universals" exist? How does rhetoric (metaphors and other comparative figures) create feeling? What roles does desire play in reading? Readings include treatises, novels, drama, and poetry; Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Shakespeare, Duras, Freud, and others.
CL 35, Topics in Narrative
The Arabian Nights East and West (Id. to Arabic 62)
Prof. Hussein Kadhim – 2
An introduction to Arabo-Islamic culture through its most accessible and popular exponent, The Thousand and One Nights. The course will take this masterpiece of world literature as the focal point for a multidisciplinary literary study. It will cover the genesis of the text from Indian and Mediterranean antecedents, its Arabic recensions, its reception in the West, and its influence on European literature. The course will be taught in English in its entirety.
CL 41, The Comic Tradition
Rabbis, Rogues and Schlemiels: Jewish Humor and its Roots (Id. to HEBR 63/JWST 24.2)
Prof. Lewis Glinert – 2A
What is Jewish humor, what are its roots, and what can it begin to tell us about Jewish society, its values and its self-image? This course mines the long and rich tradition of Hebrew comic and satirical folklore and fine literature, and their relationship to Yiddish, Israeli and Anglo-American Jewish humor. We will also compare the joke, popular song, film and the cartoon, asking how genre impacts on theme. A valuable and unique resource for this course is the new Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive, with its wealth of online recordings.
CL 51, African Literatures
Masterpieces of Literatures from Africa (Id. to AAAS 51)
Prof. Ayo Coly - 10A
This course is designed to provide students with a specific and global view of the diversity of literatures from the African continent. We will read texts written in English or translated from French, Portuguese, Arabic and African languages. Through novels, short stories, poetry, and drama, we will explore such topics as the colonial encounter, the conflict between tradition and modernity, the negotiation of African identities, post-independence disillusion, gender issues, apartheid and post-apartheid. In discussing this variety of literatures from a comparative context, we will assess the similarities and the differences apparent in the cultures and historical contexts from which they emerge. Readings include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley, Calixthe Beyala’s The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me, Camara Laye’s The African Child, and Luandino Vieira’s Luanda.
CL 52, Latin American Literatures
The Borderlands: Latina/o Writers in the United States (Id. to WGST 47.2)
Prof. Silvia Spitta – 10A
In this course we will focus on the writings of US Latina/o writers. We will analyze how writers (Anzaldúa, Alvarez, Cisneros, Castillo and others) negotiate a path between the two cultures (the US and Latin America) and the two languages that inform their literary production and shape their identity. This in-between status translates into an experimentation with genres and a questioning of traditional gender divisions as well as the construction of transcultural icons and objects.
CL 60, Literature and Music
Prof. John Kopper – 2A
An introduction to the major aspects, aesthetic implications, and interpretive methods comparing the two arts. Topics for lectures and discussion will include: musical structures as literary form; verbal music, word music, and program music; word-tone synthesis in the Lied; music and drama in opera; music in fiction; and the writer as music critic. Music-related poetry and prose examples, complemented by musical illustrations and ranging from the German and English Romantics through the French symbolists and the Dadaists to contemporary writing, will be selected from texts by Goethe, Brentano, Hoffmann, DeQuincey, Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Thomas Mann, Joyce, Eliot, Huxley, Shaw, and Pound. No particular musical background or technical knowledge of music required.
CL 63, Literature and Politics
From Dagos to Sopranos: Italian American Culture (Id. to FRIT 33)
Prof. Graziella Parati – 2A
Yo! (from the Sicilian “Guagliò”)What does it mean to be an Italian American? This course looks at the history of Italian migration to the United States, and at novels written by Italian Americans (Pietro di Donato, John Fante, Helen Barolini, Louise De Salvo, Marianna de Marco Torgovnick). A number of films by Coppola, Scorsese, Turturro, Savoca, and Tarantino will be shown. Of course we will also work on the portrayal of ItalianAmericanness in “The Sopranos.” The last week of the course is devoted to the music by Italian Americans such as Sinatra and Madonna.
CL 67 , Literature and Women’s/Gender Studies
Colonial and Postcolonial Masculinities [Id. to AAAS 67 and WGST 52.1]
Prof. Ayo Coly – 2A
In this course, we will develop an understanding of masculinity as a construct which varies in time and space, and is constantly (re)shaped by such factors as race, class, and sexuality. The contexts of the colonial encounter and its postcolonial aftermath will set the stage for our examination of the ways in which social, political, economic, and cultural factors foster the production of specific masculinities. Texts include Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Lafferiere’s How to Make Love to a Negro, and additional writings by Irish, Indian, and Australian authors. Our study will be organized around the questions of the production of hegemonic and subaltern masculinities, the representation of the colonial and postcolonial male body, the militarization of masculinity, and the relation between masculinity and nationalism. Theoretical material on masculinities will frame our readings.
CL 70, Special Topics
Cultural Studies: Resisting Theory?
Profs. Annabel Martín and Klaus Milich – Mondays 3-6
This course introduces students to debates on culture and its different theorizations and addresses the institutionalization of Cultural Studies as a field of inquiry. By exploring the concepts of “culture” and “theory” and their linkage to the contestation of institutions of power, this course examines how Cultural Studies is both a practice and a theorization of what to “do” with high, and popular culture. What kinds of rethinking happens when disciplines lose their “text” to Cultural Studies? Why has Cultural Studies become the theoretical forerunner in the age of globalization? Texts will be architectural, filmic, musical, literary, and theoretical.
