COMPARATIVE LITERATURE PROGRAM

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

Spring 1998

CMLT 488G (ENGL 449) Screen Writing I

Tu 3:30-6:30 pm (Sec. 0101) (SQH 1111)

Th 3:30-6:30 pm (Sec. 0201) (SQH 1111)

Lifton, M.

This is a course which will introduce the beginning student to the conventions, problems, and possibilities of the screenwriting form. It will be useful--but not necessary--that students enrolling in the class have some writing experience of whatever kind. Using a close reading of both the screenplay and the cinematic text of Dennis Potters The Singing Detective, the course will proceed by analyzing both texts from the perspective of the dramatic and cinematic problems inherent in them, and discussing how such problems have been solved --to the degree that they have--in the screenplay and in the film. Some of these solutions--and failures--will then suggest similar strategies for students to use in their individual writing assignments. One-on-one interaction with the instructor--known in the profession as story conferences--will form a significant part of the course.

CMLT 498C (ENGL 479F) Documentary Film: A History

Tu 1:00-4:00 pm (SQH 1120)

Fuegi, J.

The class will be based on Erik Barouw’s now classic book; Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. We will view and intensely analyze a variety of documentary films from a number of eras. After building a firm base in the history of the classic documentary form, we will then look at examples of the documentary form of more recent years including “Shoah” and sections of “The Civil War.”

CMLT 498G (ARTT 489) “Digital Strategies: Narrative on Screen”

TuTh 9:30-10:45 a.m. (CSS 1410)

Lifton, M.

It’s sometimes hard to tell if we are all drowning in information, or simply awash in claims and

counter‑claims about the alleged Information Age. The whole concept of the so‑called Information Age of course pivots around digitized information: the popular contention is that digitization is what makes this alleged wealth of information available.

While one cannot vouch for the general cultural effect or even veracity of all this yet‑‑it is simply too soon to tell‑‑one thing is certain: digital strategies will become‑‑indeed, have already become‑‑increasingly significant in the structuring of on‑screen narratives.

This course will explore, in a hands‑on fashion, the various emerging strategies for creating narrative digitally. At the end of the semester, students can expect to have constructed a sample of their original work using digital work stations exclusively. Accordingly, students enrolling should be computer literate and preferably be conversant with programs such as QuickTime, Adobe Premiere, Infini‑D and/or Strata, Poser and so on.

Please note that though the course will of necessity consider theoretical and methodological issues,

the main emphasis will be on creative rather than critical work.

CMLT 498L Media, Culture and Celebrity

MW 9:30-10:45 am (SQH 1120)

Robinson, E.

Celebrity has become a much sought-after commodity in world culture. It is a phenomenon that bridges languages, cultures, generations and all steps up and down the economic ladder. What is it? Can you buy it. Where does it take to be one? This course will examine these questions and the role of the media in adding to the myths and the changing definitions of celebrityhood from one culture to the next. It will explore the economics of celebrity in terms of capital investment, outlay and the global marketplace. It will also examine the commodification of celebrity and the relationships between celebrity and social structure and values. The role of mass media technology in establishing and maintaining the preconditions for celebrity and the production of surplus will be studied for trends in the development of new celebrities to replace the old. The role of MTV in the postmodern world and the importance of image in the postmodern worldview will be investigated as part of an ideological text that could impact culture into the 21st century and beyond.

CMLT 498N Gypsy Culture

MW 1:00- 2:15 pm (JMZ 1122)

Robinson, E.

The word “gypsy” has come to characterize a people, attire, taxis, sinister characters, behavior, the list is long. Few people have ever examined the origins of the word, and those who have made the effort, have quickly discovered that the word was derived from “Egyptians.” The reason for this is that the people called gypsies were thought to have come from Egypt. Over a long period of time the label has become both a perjorative and a romantic realization in popular fiction and the world cinema. The Rom, which is the preferred designation, have begun attracting attention as another significant group subjected to discrimination and persecution throughout the world. This course will trace the Rom from their origins in India to their migrations throughout the world. It will pay particular attention to the representations in the mass media with emphasis on cinematic representations as they have added to the perceptions and misperceptions of the Rom. Portrayals of Rom and Rom life will be examined and comparisons made between how the Rom see themselves and how the gadje (the Rom word for non-Rom) have depicted them. These representations will be examined to determine how the Romany have added to and been exploited by national cultures and how the Rom have managed to survive in the diaspora and maintain their cultural identity.

CMLT498U (FREN 478) Gay Issues in European Literature (in translation)

TuTh 11:00-12:15 pm (JMZ 3120)

MacBain, W.

This course, given in English and using texts in English translation, will examine the issue of same-sex relationships, in a number of French and other European literature works. Texts will be chosen from both “gay” and “straight” authors, both male and female, reflecting both positive and negative attitudes toward the subject in question. Authors to be studied will include Balzac, Proust, Gide, Yourcenar, Collard, Thomas Mann, Korolt and others yet to be determined. For a complete list of texts, see Dr. MacBain.

CMLT 601 Problem in Comparative Studies:

Th 3:30-6:00 pm (SQH 1103)

Harrison, R.

Extending “comparative” theory and practice from literary studies to a more interdisciplinary framework, this course will address key issues, problems, and methodologies for the comparative study of cultures and texts. We begin by studying various conceptions of “comparative literature” and attempt to understand the assumptions, investments, and contexts that have constructed the field to the present day. Later we take up the challenges posed to comparative studies in the late twentieth century when social, political, and cultural changes as well as academic changes have shifted the grounds of “comparison.”

The theoretical investigation explores key concepts and practices in the definition of comparative /cross-cultural/transnational inquiry; at the same time, of course, we examine our own diverse assumptions and methods. Designed as an introduction to the discipline of Comparative Literature, this course also provides a forum for our CMLT faculty to discuss their on-going projects in video, film, advertising, and cultural studies. Readings address practical issues of teaching international perspectives on gay and lesbian studies as well as global film and literatures; the “culture” of higher education, and the role of graduate students in the University, is examined.

CMLT 649 (ENGL 738A )Seminar in 19th Century Literature. Romanticism and Revolution:

Tue. 6:30-9:00 pm (SQH 1103)

Neil Fraistat and Susan Lanser

1789‑1807. The late eighteenth‑century was a time of exceptional turbulence‑‑of radical vision and reactionary backlash. Decades of "Enlightenment" thought spurred revolutions‑‑in places as far apart as Ireland, Poland, Haiti, North America, and especially France‑‑that irrevocably changed the world. In England too this was a time of passionate dissent about questions that still preoccupy us: civil rights, colonialism, religion, sexuality, political power and practice, work, aesthetics, and the values and practices of daily life. This course is designed as an intensive, interdisciplinary exploration of such subjects as they manifest themselves in both well‑known and lesser‑known writings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While our emphasis will be on English letters, we will attend to the texts and contexts of a larger political‑ cultural geography and give special weight to the French Revolution as the determining event of the period. The course will focus on the period from 1789 to 1807 that encompasses the French Revolution and the beginnings of the Napoleonic Empire. Framing our inquiry through the theoretical considerations of modern scholars of "romanticism" and "revolution" and problematizing both of these terms and their interrelationship, we will read authors as diverse as Jean‑Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, Hannah More, Isabelle de Charrière, Charlotte Smith, Olaudah Equiano, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Germaine de Stael. Our “primary” texts will range from poetry and novels to philosophical treatises and political cartoons, paintings, letters, and travel writing. Supplementary readings exploring such subjects as architecture, law, science, fashion, literacy, class relations, and domestic life will further assist our project of understanding the "alternative traditions" that construct late‑eighteenth‑century English literature and life. Throughout this course, the seminar members will be engaged in deeply collaborative research and revision designed to foster each participant's intellectual and professional development. Students will be able to pursue an unusual variety of individual and group projects that will be made accessible electronically and linked to the seminar's web page.

CMLT 679B (ENGL 759B) Caribbean Poetry and Performance

Th 6:30-9:00 pm (SQH 2120)

Collins, M.

This seminar-format course on Caribbean poetry will focus on this poetry in all its variety, enrichened as it is by styles and techniques developed in and outside of the region, influenced variously by the regional experience and by the historical experiences associated with Africa, Asia and Europe. The poets to be studied are both those normally associated with techniques deemed performative (on stage and/or in print) and those who are not. More than specifically performance, the course is concerned with the variety of Caribbean poetic expression. Hence the title Poetry AND performance and not Performance Poetry. Two of the poets whose work will be studied, Mervyn Morris and Jean Binta Breeze, will be guest writers for events organised by the Creative Writing program during the (Spring) semester, so seminar participants will have the opportunity to study their work in both print and presentation. Also on the syllabus are selections from the poetry of Louise Bennett, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Martin Carter, Mahadai Das, Lorna Goodison, Meiling Jin, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols and Derek Walcott. It is hoped that, while the semester clearly could not provide an opportunity for in-depth study of all of these poets, the course will serve as a forum for discussion of the variety of techniques and influences which contribute to the development of Caribbean poetry. Seminar participants who have an interest beyond the anglophone Caribbean, which will be the focus of the course, may introduce their specific areas of interest, for comparative purposes, for example and/or make presentations on poets from the Spanish, Dutch or French Caribbean.

CMLT 679C (ENGL 759A/WMST 698C) Women of Power: Examination of Biography in Film and other Forms

Mon. 6:30-9:00 pm (SQH 1101)

Fuegi, J.

The class will examine the opportunities for presenting biographies of women both in film and in traditional print form. Background readings will include Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, Carol Gilligan’s In A Different Voice, and some of the recent work of Deborah Tanner. Each class member will be required to investigate the possibilities of doing a full-scale biography (either in film or in print), on a major figure. Among the persons who will be examined in the course will be: 1) Virginia Woolf (both as novelist and as political thinker), 2) Ada, Countess Lovelace ( first computer programmer in the 1840's), 3) Lillian Hellman (playwright and auto-biographer), 4) Alice Guy (first maker of sound film--1970 -- and head of production for Gaumont), 5) Lise Meitner (co-discoverer of the splitting of the atom in 1938), 6) Elisabeth Hauptmann (primary author of The Threepenny Opera and numerous other plays formerly attributed to Brecht), 7) Hildegard von Bingen (twelfth century composer, mystic, physician), and 8) Rigoberta Menchu (Nobel Peace Prize Winner and activist).

CMLT 679E (ENGL 638) Readings in Film as Text and Cultural Form

Wed. 12:45-3:15 pm (SQH 4116)

Kolker, R.

A study of various theoretical approaches to the film text that include studies of form, gender, culture, reception, ideological formations, historical contextualisations, and the problematics of representation.

CMLT 679G (SPAN 409) Art and Politics of Cuban Cinema

Wed. 3:30-6:00 pm (SQH 2122) #09619

Hess, J.

Immediately after the success of the Cuban Revolution (Jan 1, 1959), a group of young filmmakers, most of whom had no training or experience, set about developing a national cinema in a country with essentially no filmmaking, but with a huge film audience, served mostly by Hollywood. Within a decade they had produced some of the finest modern day films, including LUCIA (Humberto Solas, 1968), MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, 1968), and the experimental documentaries of Santiago Alvarez. Cuban filmmaking has had to deal with contradictions between formal experimentation and using melodrama to appeal to a mass audience, between their need for artistic freedom and the distrust of cultural bureaucrats, between individual creative desires and collective needs.

By examining Cuban cinema from the '60s to the present and reading key theoretical works (e.g., "For an Imperfect Cinema" by Julio Garcia Espinosa and "The Viewer's Dialectic" by Tomas Gutierrez Alea) we will unpack these contradictions with a view to understanding the relationship between this socialist revolution and its art. To ground this study of Cuban cinema we will set it in the context of Cuban politics and the other arts.

CMLT 679J (ENGL 769A) Women, Nation, Novel

Tu 3:30-6:00 pm (SQH 2122)

Peterson, C.

This course seeks to understand the ways in which women writers of different countries entered into the novelistic tradition at its "originary" movement in order to participate in the debate over what constitutes the "nation" and what might be the place of woman in it. Traditional theories of the novel have conceptualized the genre as a masculine one and have asserted that women writers enter the tradition only belatedly, producing specifically sentimental and domestic fiction. This course seeks to revise such male-oriented theories, first by analyzing the rules by which genre theory is produced and a fictional narrative becomes a "novel," then by reevaluating the role of women writers in the formation of the "novel" in several cultures--French, English, American, African-American, and Caribbean. It looks at how these early women writers were in fact vitally concerned with such issues as the development of national social institutions, the regulation of family life, and the political interests of the nation; and in the process it examines the relationship of social ideology to narrative genre.

CMLT 679U (FREN 619) The Medieval Lyric

Tue. 2:00-4:30 pm (JMZ 2125)

MacBain, W.

This seminar proposes to deal with the earliest medieval lyrics in the vernacular (the cansos of the Provencal troubadours), the poetry of the early northern French trouveres, with excursions into some Middle High German lyrics of the early 13th century, a nod to Dante and later Petrarch, Chaucer and Gower, before returning to France of the 5th century and Francois Villon.

It is intended that all texts will be dealt with in the original language but with English translations on the side. Discussion will be in English. It is hoped that graduate students specializing in various national literatures will participate. Class presentations and term papers will be welcome on all aspects of the medieval lyric, regardless of national language.

CMLT679W (FREN 679) Utopia and Science Fiction

Wed. 4:00-6:30 pm (JMZ 3120)

Fink, B.

It’s an old story: When reality proves unsatisfactory, man travels to fantasyland via his imagination. Conversely, he may wish to face imperfect reality squarely and attempt to improve upon it by articulating an ideal social system to be used as a model or pedagogic device. Utopia’s double function (escape/guidance) corresponds to a double meaning (never-never land/land where all are happy). Too often, the world’s literary origin is neglected. The modern offshoot, science fiction, has similar parameters.

The present seminar aims at analyzing utopian constructs in a literary as well as philosophical perspective. Readings include whose works as well as specific isolated constructs. Different periods are covered to allow for variation in subject matter and student interest. More’s Utopia will be used as a framework. All course work will be in French, with the following exceptions: 1. Certain texts will be in English.

2. Students from outside departments may do their oral and written work in English

CMLT 702 (AMST 628N) Cultures of Theory

Tu 4:00-6:40 pm (TLF 2137)

Lounsbury, M.

This semester we will focus on recent cultural theory as it is practised in the aftermath of the 1980s debates over academic jargon, political correctness and cultural literacy. Emphasizing how cultural theory seeks to negotiate the contemporary shift from “media culture” to “cyberculture,” we will begin our investigation with New York University, its “hip” Director of American Studies Andrew Ross vs. such colleagues as Neil Postman and Richard Sennett, who bemoan the decline of community and communication in the late-twentieth century. We will then address three academic sites where the role of the intellectual-as-technointellectual is being defined in the context of distinctive local surroundings: 1) the University of Texas, Austin (Douglas Kellner’s critique of American films and television, and of the cyberculture essays of Allucquere Stone) and the city of Austin as portrayed in Richard Linklater’s Slacker; 2) the University of California, Irvin (Rey Chow’s reflections on feminist and Oriental identity in a media-conscious American academy and Mark Poster’s explications of our “second media age”) and the Disneyesque theme parks and “postsuburban California” of Orange County; 3) MIT (Henry Jenkins’s study of tv fans as “textual poachers” and Sherry Turkle’s diagnosis of the impact of the Internet on human identity) and the lived environment of the MIT Media Lab and the proposed “electronic agora” imagined by the Dean of Architecture, William J. Mitchell. Periodically, we will focus on Arthur Kroker (Concordia College, Montreal), whose work, ranging from printed texts to CDS and the extensive use of the World Wide Web, may anticipate the future of the public intellectual. We will conclude with a re-evaluation of the hip Andrew Ross by juxtaposing his vision of American Studies with the observations of such colleagues as the media sociologist Todd Gitlin, skeptical of postmodern fads, and Scott Bukatman, advocate of cyberspace and science fiction, within the context of NYU and New York City.

CMLT 798 Critical Theory Colloquium (1 credit)

Fri 3:00pm - 5:30pm (index # 09716)

Wang, O.

Meeting five times a semester, this one credit colloquium offers graduate students pariticipating in the theory certificate program and interested faculty from departments across the university an opportunity to discuss key texts that probe the cultural and theoretical foundations of their disciplines. In order to satisfy critical theory certificate requirements, students must accumulate three credits of CMLT 798. For more information contact Orrin Wang (OW5@UMAIL.UMD.EDU)

Rev. 11/24/97

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