COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE PROGRAM
COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS
Fall
2002
CMLT488L
Genres: Cinema of Liberation
0101
TuTh
12:30pm-1:45pm
SQH 1120
Index# 12457
Robinson,
E.
The
cinema experience creates the perfect environment for liberation–there is
little or no distraction, the experience is total, isolating and illusory.
This course introduces a new kind of cinema that attempts to liberate the
spectator from the spectacle. The
rationality of daily life is put on hold and the move is toward a more liberated
cinema. At its core is freedom and the examination of forces that
impact subordinated and marginalized individuals.
CMLT498C/ENGL479C/WMST498G
Selected Topics in Comparative Studies: Virginia Woolf in a Comparative
Context
Students should report at the front desk of
the NonPrint Media in Hornbake Library.
0101
Tu
12:30pm-3:00pm
HBK 0125
Index# 12467
Fuegi,
J.
We
will explore examples of Virginia Woolf’s readings in history, psychology,
economics, and in classical Greek literature (particularly drama) as well as her
readings in modern French, German, Russian, American and British literature.
We will read two basic biographies of Virginia Woolf and several of the
major novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, and
at least two volumes of her criticism, particularly Three Guineas and A Room of
One’s Own. We will also examine film versions of Virginia Woolf’s life
as well as the lives of her major contemporaries, particularly Winston
Churchill, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Vita Sackville-West.
The course will provide a comprehensive overview of Virginia Woolf’s
contribution to modern thought, politics, and letters.
CMLT498G/ART
489G Selected Topics in Comparative
Studies: Humanities Computing: The Narrative Component
Students who have taken "Digital
Strategies" or "Digital Narrative" in (CMLT 498G) are not
permitted to take "Humanities Computing: The Narrative Component.
0101
W
3:30pm-6:30pm
CSS 1410
Index# 12477
Ratnapala,
N.
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.
CMLT498L
Selected Topics in Comparative Studies: Sexuality in the Cinema
0101
TuTh
9:30am-10:45am
SQH 1120
Index# 12487
Robinson,
E.
An
examination of how sexuality is exploited by cinema.
The course analyzes the sexual images in popular and non-mainstream
cinema. An investigation of the
sexuality of the so-called “Love Goddess” from the perspective of the
“Masculine gaze.” Will analyze
how cinema deals with sexual politics and explore cinematic discourse in
homosexuality and alternative lifestyles.
CMLT601
Problems in Comparative Studies.
Prerequisite: permission of department.
0101
M
3:30pm- 6:00pm
SQH 2123
Index# 12497
Wang,
O.
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, such as the
nations of empire, diaspora, globalization, and metropole. 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 literature; the
“culture” of higher education, and the role of graduate students in the
University, is examined.
CMLT679B/ENGL749C
Topics in Comparative Studies: Readings In Caribbean Literature:
Caribbean Lit I (19th and Early 20th Century)
0101
Tu
3:30pm- 6:00pm
SQH 2123
Index# 12507
Collins, M.
This
is a Readings course intended to give those interested in Caribbean Literature a
broad introduction to some of the seminal texts of Anglophone Caribbean
literature. This is the first of a
two part series, focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean.
The second (to be taught
another semester) will focus on writing since the mid-twentieth century.
In the long term, the intention is to develop similar courses for the
Hispano-phone and Francophone Caribbean and so provide the basis for informed
comparative perspectives. While the different linguistic areas of the region are
often taught together, this course has a relatively mono-linguistic focus
because the intention is
We
will read early 20th century writers such as A.R.F. Webber, Those That Be in
Bondage: A Tale of Indian
Indentures and Sunlit Western Waters (1917),
Claude McKay , Home to Harlem (1928), Banana Bottom, Jean Rhys, Voyage
in the Dark (1934), Herbert De Lisser, The White Witch of Rosehall.
We will take a look at the 1930s Literature of the Yard coming out of
Trinidad & Tobago and the work of two of its major proponents - C.L.R.
James, Minty Alley, Alfred Mendes, Black Fauns.
We will read Vic Reid's New Day (1949), a text coming out just after the
trade union organization of the 1930s and preparing us, in theme and style, for
the
Towards
the end of the course, we will focus, mainly through video material, on the
theme of post-war migration to Britain, usually characterized by reference
to the ship "Empire Windrush". This
migration will have an impact on the publication and development of Anglophone
Caribbean writing in the second half of the 20th century.
Remember
- it is a Readings course, designed to give you as broad an understanding
as possible of early 20th century (virtual beginnings of) Anglophone Caribbean
writing. If you're interested in
taking the course, you may want to request the list of texts before you leave
for the summer.
CMLT679C/ENGL749F
Topics in Comparative Studies: Before & After Gutenberg, Theory and
Practice
Students should report to MITH in the basement
of McKeldin Library.
0101
M
6:30pm-9:00pm
SQH 2122
Index# 12517
Fuegi,
J.
Before and After Gutenberg (BAG) will explore a great circle theory of culture. Going back to artifacts that preceded Gutenbergian culture (a wide swathe from Sumerian tablets, to the Homeric epos, the Greek play and the Roman play and the Elizabethan play all almost universally enjoyed as non-print artifacts in their own time) and a now beginning with a stream of 19th and 20th century technologies, a now that includes large numbers of cultural objects, often of the highest quality, objects of which words may or may not form a part but where the articulation of words in print, ie Gutenbergian form, has no essential role to play. To what extent, BAG will ask, do we now mainly and essentially cruise a non-Gutenbergian galaxy making only ever less frequent visits to what used to be considered the home planet of academe? Is this good? Is this bad? Does it matter what we think of the phenomenon if it really exists?
CMLT679X
Topics in Comparative Studies: Radicalizing Realism: Ideology & Form in Film
History and Theory
0101
Th
3:30pm-6:00pm
SQH 2123
Index# 12537
Conroy,
M.
Does
the art of film consist in representing reality or creating an alternative to
reality? What moral, political, and
ideological issues result from film’s ability to create a compelling and
believable illusion of reality? Does
realist style make audiences passive and compliant, or does it promote active,
critical viewing? Using a
historical and cross-cultural perspective, this course examines how different
theoretical approaches and various national cinemas have addressed the problem
of the realism of film images. We
will consider such topics as the relation between realist style and mainstream
commercial Hollywood entertainment; neorealism, cultural capital, and the
international art film market; technological innovation and the rise of the
cinema verite; race, class, gender, and the critique of conventional realism;
contemporary alternative realisms and the creation of resisting audiences.
Films to be discussed tentatively include CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles,
1941), OPEN CITY (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), SHADOWS (John Cassavettes, 1959),
NASHVILLE (Robert Altman, 1976), JEANNE DIELMANN . . . (Chantal Akermann, 1977),
HIGH HOPES (Mike Leigh, 1988), THE CELEBRATION (Tomas Vinterberg, 1999), YI YI
(Edward Yang, 2000), BAMBOOZLED (Spike Lee, 2000).
No
prior coursework in film is required, but students should have--or be willing to
develop--a basic working knowledge of film form and terminology.
REQUIRED
TEXTS (tentative):
Post-War
Cinema and Modernity, eds.
Orr and Taxidou
Film
Theory, eds. Mast and Cohen
COURSE
REQUIREMENTS:
Presentations,
short paper, seminar paper
CMLT699
(PermReq) Independent Study
Individual Instruction course: contact CMLT
Office to obtain section number.
CMLT701/ENGL758B
Literary Criticism and Theory: Paradigms
of Theory
Prerequisite: an introductory course in
critical theory.
0101
Tu
6:30p- 9:00pm
SQH 3109
Index# 57634
Grossman,
M.
This
course will attempt to provide an account of contemporary critical theory.
To give an account implies a history; we shall try, therefore, to account
for contemporary critical theory and practice by seeing them as points in a
process of historical development. To
do so we need to attend to two related but distinct versions of history: the
history of ideas, that is, the dialogue between a text and its precedents; and
the history of material contexts, that is, the traces of the pressure of the
world at a given time on the thought of that time.
While it will be necessary in the Paradigms of Theory course to pay some
attention to material contexts, the principle interest of this course will be
the history of ideas. In, Cultures
of Theory, the other course of the Critical Theory Certificate Core, these
emphases will be reversed. The
account of theory to be presented this semester is but one of a number of
possible accounts, but one that I consider to be of comprehensive value, because
it attempts to study the development of theory of the subject in continental
philosophy as it responds to Kant. This
beginning reflects the view that the relation of subject and object described by
Kant, the subject as the locus of an experience of consciousness and the object
as unknowable except as mediated to consciousness, had become established as the
enlightenment subject. In
constructing an account of theory as a response to Kant, we can work empirically
from our knowledge of where theory has gone, of what has been influential, to
retroactively identify the episodes of its historical progress.
Thus we will begin our account with Hegel’s attempt to move beyond Kant
by positing a dialectic that would re-unite subject and object, the knower and
the known. We will then proceed to
Marx’s attempt to reground the Hegelian dialect in the material world of class
struggle and the organization of man’s productive activity; after which we
will attempt to understand Freud’s theory of the unconscious in terms of its
roots in the German philosophy in which Freud had been trained, recognizing the
implicitly dialectical nature of psychoanalytic inquiry and understanding
Freud’s successive psychic topographies as formal structures that hover
between Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s materialism.
Along with and supplementary to each of these core texts, we will read
some influential interventions that will project us forward into structuralist,
post-structuralist and post-Marxist critical theory and the contemporary
discourses of race and gender.
CMLT788A
Practicum in Comparative Studies: Teaching Practicum
0101
Time and room to be arranged
Index# 12586
Harrison,
R.
CMLT798
(PermReq) Critical Theory Colloquium
0101
F
1:00pm-3:30pm
SQH 3109
Index# 12596
Levine,
R.
Meeting
five times a semester, (dates to be announced at a later time) this one credit
colloquium offers graduate students participating 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.
CMLT799
Master's Thesis Research
Individual Instruction course: contact CMLT
office to obtain section number.
CMLT899
Doctoral Dissertation Research
Individual Instruction course: contact CMLT
Office to obtain section number.
4/29/02cdb