Subjects Taught by Semester

Introductory

World Literatures: East Asian Literature as World Literature

9:30-11:00a

2-103

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Topics: Improves Close Reading, Includes Critical Theory, Involves Creative Writing, Is Writing-Intensive, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media

Today we have the luxury of reading more literatures in more languages than ever before in world history. In this course we ask: what can we learn from the great diversity of literatures? In what ways does “literature” look different when viewed through a different lens (such as through the literary heritage of China, Japan, or Korea)? What does poetry written in Chinese characters accomplish that alphabetic poetry cannot? How does Buddhist reincarnation change the way you tell stories and devise novels? Why is Japan the world’s only major literature where female authors dominated certain literary genres as early as the 11th century?

Our selective journey through world literature will take us through some of Asia’s most seminal and thought-provoking texts, including philosophical masters such as Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi; Tang poetry; China’s classical novels Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West; Japan’s female-authored tales and diaries, such as The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book; Korea’s classical novel The Nine Cloud Dream, and the pansori play Song of Ch’unhyang. To enhance your ability to appreciate these rich texts and to speak and write about how they matter to us today, we will also draw in films, venture into creative exercises, and work on a translation project.

Intermediate

21L.435	Literature and Film: End of the World: Apocalypse in Film and Literature CMS.840	Caitlyn Doyle	MW	3:30-5:00p	56-191
Prereq: One subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies 3-3-6 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Includes Critical Theory, Involves Creative Writing, Is Writing-Intensive, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media The world is ending, or has it already ended? This course examines films and novels that grapple with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios threatening humankind—scenarios that appear particularly prescient in the wake of a global pandemic and in the midst of an ongoing climate crisis. Comparing the different capacities of film and literature in representing such cataclysms, we will further consider the extent to which artworks can challenge our understanding of our own historical moment and the future it promises. Whether the end of the world takes the form of nuclear disaster, climate crisis, plague, or invasion, these works offer insight into the social, commercial, environmental, and civic structures of society as well as the forces that threaten them. Closely examining films such as Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Melancholia (2011), and Blood Quantum (2019) and novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Parable of the Sower (1993), and The Marrow Thieves (2017), we will examine the apocalypse from different cultural and historical perspectives, focusing on the dystopic and utopic possibilities in a world that is suddenly forced to change dramatically.
21L.449	The Wilds of Literature: American Landscapes, American Selves: Studies in the Ecological Imagination	Stephen Tapscott	M	7:00-10:00p	2-103
Prereq: none 3-0-9 HASS-H Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Involves Creative Writing, Is Writing-Intensive, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Archives, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media For most North Americans, “Nature” is a place. And a system, a dynamic of interlocking systems in a space. And a “trace”: we need a historical sense in order address what is “natural” to us. Nature is a grounding material reality and a field of questioning. It is what our senses register: a body of forms we invent; a program of metaphors and projections; and a process of making metaphors and futures. It is both an autobiographical condition [where we come from] and an “end” outside ourselves. Especially in American traditions, “nature” is a grounding-place and a promise: a frontier, a sublimation, a map, a battleground, a home, a resource, an Emerald Necklace, an Oversoul, and a back-yard. American literary texts often question the “nature” of nature: landscape is a defining element of the formation of American identities in several American traditions of verbal and visual arts. In this intermediate subject, we consider verbal and visual texts in which the physical world is a participating element in our histories and social formations and even in our individual and social selves. We read “creation-myths” [from Hopi and Wampanoag and Hebrew traditions], works by 19th century Transcendentalist writers [R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, Black Hawk], by writers of the early 20th century [Zora Neale Hurston, Sara Orne Jewett, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck] and of the later 20th century [Elizabeth Bishop, Lauren Savoy, Heid Erdrich, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sherman Alexie, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Camille Dunghy]. We’ll consider several ideological patterns of an “American ecological” aesthetic, in cultural theory [F. J. Turner, Leo Marx, Laurence Buell, Annette Kolodny], in painting and photos [the Hudson River School, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Eakins, Sally Mann]. We’ll wonder whether “Nature” is a Eurocentric or anthropocentric formulation, and what such a characterization might mean; and consider the continuities [and discontinuities] among “Nature poetry,” “ecopoetics,” and the texts of a “Ecological Justice” commitment… and we’ll question what “home” means in these contexts.

Seminars

21L.702	Studies in Fiction: The Neuro-Novel	Lianne Habinek	TR	9:30-11:00a	2-103
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Includes Hands-on Projects or Making, Involves Creative Writing, Is Writing-Intensive, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media A literary genre has materialized in the past fifteen years that, as Marco Roth (with some notoriety) puts it, is marked by “the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel — the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind.” This category of narrative documents the workings and misfirings of the mind alongside emerging ideas of a new means of accessing and dramatizing interiority. Works marked as neuro-novels include novels by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Haddon, Richard Powers, Rivka Galchen, Haruki Murakami, and John Wray. We will also consider the picture of a currently unmapped but potentially fully knowable brain; what would such a model of the mind do to ideas of agency, selfhood, and even free will? This course will use the aforementioned texts and others alongside films such as Je T’aime, Je T’aime; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and Inside Out, to explore how fiction considers what is problematic about a direct identification between mind and brain.
21L.704	Studies in Poetry: Walt Whitman Goes Global	Stephen Tapscott	T	7:00-10:00p	14N-112
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit Topics: Improves Close Reading, Improves Oral Communication, Involves Creative Writing, Studies Adaptations or Translations, Thinks about Gender or Sexuality, Thinks about Popular Culture, Thinks about Race or Class, Thinks about Science, Technology, Environment, Thinks about Social Justice Issues, Works with Archives, Works with Visual Materials/Film/Media Late in his middle age, unmarried and childless, Walt Whitman was dismayed to hear that rumors were circulating about his sexuality. In response, he encouraged his friends to spread a counter-rumor: the reason he wasn’t interested in women was that he was still grieving for a lost love from decades earlier. She had been mulatto; they had met in New Orleans, where during the 1840s he had lived for six months. During that time they had had six children together before, tragically, they had been forced to separate. He’d never returned to New Orleans… In this seminar we won’t spend a lot of time discussing the plausibility of this story of Whitman’s “children.” [Even though it is an interesting exercise in literary reputation-formation in “influence” and in the limitations of biographical-criticism…] The irony is, though, that Whitman did, ultimately, have a lot of progeny: writers and theorists and artists who define themselves as overtly in the “line of Whitman.” [Some eagerly claim continuity, some consciously act out Oedipal or cultural or poetic resistance.Some ideologically reflect on what it means to be influenced by 19th century America’s most famous poet.] Throughout the term, we’ll read through the major works of Whitman’s own long career, stage by stage [his idealistic poems before the Civil War; his compensatory work while he served as a nurse during the War; his conflicted love poems; his later celebrations of 19th-century American expansionism and industrialization.] At each stage we’ll also read work by writers, across several continents and centuries, who admired [or resisted] his model. Novelists [including Thomas Mann, D H Lawrence, Maxine Hong Kingston]; poets [Ezra Pound, W C Williams, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg]; Gender-theorists and provocateurs [Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Mark Doty] Post colonialist writers and theorists of Negritude [Aimee Cesaire, Langston Hughes]; Epic/lyric writers [Pablo Neruda, J L Borges, Gabriela Mistral, Guo Moruo]; Contemporary writers of collective narratives [Vladimir Mayakovsky, Grace Paley].