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ENG 549
LONGENBACH J
M
14:00 - 16:40
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At the center of this seminar will be a long, detailed reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, the most difficult and beautiful work of what we've come to call literary modernism. Leading up to our experience of Ulysses, we will read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (to introduce ourselves to the world of Joyce) and a selection of Yeats's poems (to introduce us to the world of Anglo-Irish culture); following our experience of Ulysses, we will read two works marked deeply by Joyce's influence: Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Eliot's The Waste Land.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 403
OFFERED: Fall
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| Monday and Wednesday |
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AH 454
WILLIS S
MW
15:25 - 16:40
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This course will explore developments in world cinema—industrial, social, and political—from 1959 to 1989. It will explore film aesthetics, technologies, and circulation questions, considering questions like the following: What’s new about the French New Wave? What do we mean by Third Cinema? How do different national cinemas influence each other? In what ways have various national cinemas responded critically to Hollywood’s commercial dominance and to its conventions? How do popular and “art” cinemas speak to each other. How does cinema respond to the pressures and provocations of other media at the inception of the digital age? Weekly screenings and film journals required.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504
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AH 561
WILLIS S
MW
12:30 - 13:45
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This course examines the philosophical, aesthetic, and social issues that are central to classical film theory. It traces the historical development of film theory from 1900 to the 1950s. We will begin with on thinkers in the period of early cinema, including Germaine Dulac, Jean and Marie Epstein, and then we will examine the development of film theory in the work of later theorists, such as Jean Mitry, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Andre Bazin and Christian Metz. Weekly screenings of historically contemporary films will allow us to examine the ongoing dialogue between the evolving medium and the developing theoretical discussion.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504
PREREQUISITES: FMS 132 - Intro to Art of Film OR FMS 131 - Intro to Media Studies
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ANT 457
OSBURG J
MW
10:25 - 11:40
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This course adopts an anthropological approach towards understanding the dramatic socio-cultural transformations that have followed in the wake of China’s post-Mao economic reforms. What happens when a society officially committed to economic and gender equality witnesses the rise of stark social divisions? Beginning with an historical overview of the key features of the Maoist and post-Mao periods, we will move on to examine such issues as the creation of a market economy, the rise of new social classes, rural to urban migration, changing ideologies of gender and sexuality, new attitudes towards education and work, transformations in family life, religious revival and conversion, and the influences of global popular culture and mass consumption, with an eye towards identifying both continuities and departures from the Maoist era. Throughout our discussions we will consider the implications of these changes for China’s political, social, and economic futures.
BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 305
OFFERED: Fall Spring
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CLT 421
KEMEDJIO C
MW
12:30 - 13:45
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Female genital cutting encounters vaginal cosmetic surgeries at the intersection of poverty and wealth, race and class, barbaric practices and the pleasure principle. Bodies of poor, African, and mostly black women and children embody a fateful condition that can be redeemed by technologies of progress and humanitarian discourses. This course invites students to challenge assumptions related to agency, race, class, the representation of the body, and the fragmented transnational sisterhood. The discussion expands to bodies caught in domestic violence, rape, lynching, and skin whitening. Readings and films: Alice Walker's "Warrior's Marks" and "Possessing the Secret of Joy"; "Manya Mabika"; "Fantacola"; "Sarabah"; "Women with Open Eyes"; "Black Sisters, Speak Up"; "The Suns of Independence"; "Desert Flower"; and Maryse Condé's "Who Slashed Célanire Throat?"
BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 441
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CLT 482C
HWANG J
MW
14:00 - 15:15
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The Weimar Republic (1919-33) was a period of great economic and political instability for Germany, as well as immense creativity and experimentation. Some of the most enduring and influential films of Western cinema such as
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Metropolis" were created in this environment. At the same time, there was great debate about this emerging medium and its status as art as well as its potential to further social and political change, questions that continue to be explored in film theory and film studies more generally. This course will look at the paths taken, experiments that were ultimately deemed successful as well as those that were less so but nevertheless compelling, in this search to realize film’s artistic and social potential. All readings and films will be in English.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504
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CLT 482D
–
MW
15:25 - 16:40
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This course will explore the importance of strangers to our understanding of ourselves and others. Some key questions we will examine are: What is a stranger and who decides who is a stranger? How do we use the notion of stranger to define difference, assimilation, individuality and other topics that affect our daily lives? What are the politics and ethics of these definitions? We will look at a wide range of fictional texts, films (both documentary and fictional), and theory. All readings and films will be in English.
BUILDING: | ROOM:
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ENG 406
HIGLEY S
MW
15:25 - 16:40
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Eve let the Devil through the door, and her punishment was terrible pain in childbirth: for the vagina is a crossroad between the external and the internal. Todd Akin’s now infamous remark about female physiology reveals a misconception about conception that goes back to the Middle Ages exposing the patristic need to control female reproduction. This course examines medieval and later texts where the feminine and the monstrous intersect: the female body is porous, secretive, associated with the abject, the messy, and all the more horrifying when it’s not constrained socially and politically. We'll look at the “monstrous feminine” in the evil mother, the temptress, the hag, the witch, the fairy and the shapeshifter in Eve, Medea and Melusine; the vetula, the “loathly lady”; Sheela na Gig, Malleus Maleficarum, De Secretis mulierum, “Duessa” and “Error” in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, “Sin” in Milton’s Paradise Lost, films about monstrous mothers, and articles from Cohen, Kristeva, Miller, Urban and Creed.
BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 182
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 421
RAJAN S
MW
15:25 - 16:40
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This course examines the literature and culture of the Victorian period. The Victorian period was not only an era of rapid modernization, imperialist expansion, and scientific advance, it also bore witness to class tensions, urban poverty, religious doubt, and political upheaval. This turbulent era also saw the rise of numerous great literary figures (e.g. Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Pater). In this course we will explore many of these well-known Victorian poets, novelists, and essayists, examining how the intellectual preoccupations and aesthetic strategies of these writers responded to their historical and cultural moment. Fulfills the post-1800 requirement. No prerequisites.
BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 209
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 423
RAJAN S
MW
11:50 - 13:05
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Opium-induced fantasies. Detectives investigating violent crimes. Prostitutes lurking city streets. These are not the things that immediately come to mind when one thinks of nineteenth-century British literature—a literature more typically associated with poets writing meditative poems about nature or marriage-plot novels expressing conservative attitudes toward gender and sexuality. But nineteenth-century British literature was also deeply interested in representing various types of behavior that British society deemed to be dangerous and transgressive: prostitution, homosexuality, drug addiction, and urban crime. In this course we will read a number of major nineteenth-century authors (e.g. Thomas DeQuincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde) and examine a variety of genres, from poems and essays to detective novels as they explored the underbelly of British society. Fulfills the post-1800 requirement. No prerequisites.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 501
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 425
MICHAEL J
MW
10:25 - 11:40
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We will investigate the peculiar quality of romanticism and the particular achievement of writers during the American Renaissance, which occurred in the United States in the decades before the Civil War. Three capacious topics will organize discussions: nature and art, society and history, and individuals and communities. We will read works by Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Melville, Poe, Douglass, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Of particular interest throughout the term will be the hopes that American romantic artists invested in literature as a crucial part of the nation's life and as an indispensable resource for America's people. We will also consider the ways in which literature reflected upon and responded to the social and political crises that threatened the nation’s existence and changed its character.
BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 163
OFFERED: Fall
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| Tuesday |
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AH 514
LIU L
T
11:05 - 13:45
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This advanced seminar examines the agencies of objects in the processes of cultural contacts with a focus on the Early Modern world. We will especially look at some innovative objects, mediums, and portable monuments circulated around the globe back in time, such as ceramics, glass, mechanical clocks, fountains, and optical devices. We will also consider the transmission of some relevant living beings such as faunae and florae in those contexts of exchange. In addition, the course provides theoretical and methodological discussions about transcultural studies, globalization, and the epistemology and ontology of objects relative to the human communities, manufactural industries, commercial systems, and living environments across time and space. Graduate students and advanced undergraduate students are welcome to enroll, or permission by the instructor.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524
OFFERED: Fall
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AH 523
CHRISTENSEN P
T
16:50 - 19:30
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This seminar will examine theoretical, phenomenological, and technological aspects of materiality in architecture from c. 1800 to the present. Architecture of the modern period was conceived anew largely on the basis of the invention of new materials and the enhanced performance of old ones. The importance of materiality in the making of architecture in the modern period, however, has nevertheless been subsumed under the more fashionable rubrics of form, function, and cultural meaning. This seminar seeks to retrieve the inherent value of materiality in the study of architecture while also stressing broader social and political implications. A broad palette of materials, including wood, glass, iron, steel, concrete, plastic, and tensile fabrics will be studied in depth. Course discussion will revolve around the reading of key primary texts by figures like Viollet-le-Duc, Giedion, Le Corbusier, and Venturi and Scott Brown in tandem with in-depth case studies from across the globe and important secondary texts.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524
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ENG 551
MICHAEL J
T
14:00 - 16:40
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This seminar considers the nature of literature and its place in modern Western society. In particular, we will investigate the long evolution, since the Renaissance, of the discursive category we have come to know as literary and some of the major theoretical statements that have helped define its character. We will trace the shifting relationships of the literary to the real, of creation to representation, of art to politics and ethics, and to belief and skepticism. Texts may include: Montaigne, Sydney, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Kant, the Schlegels, Hegel, Marx, Flaubert, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Arnold, James, Bakhtin, Ransom, Adorno, Sartre, Levinas, Derrida, Sedgwick, Butler, Rancière, and Agamben. We will not arrive at a conclusive answer to the familiar question, what is literature? However, students will learn to ask that question with an increased sense of its historical development and with greater scholarly force and theoretical awareness.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 403
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| Tuesday and Thursday |
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AH 489
TUCKER J
TR
11:05 - 12:20
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Despite being misunderstood as the most infantile of genres, comic books have recently proven themselves capable of astonishing artistic achievements and of infiltrating both Hollywood and academia. This course has three parts: 1) a formal analysis of the art of comics, a combination of text and image used to tell a story; 2) a cultural history of comic books, from their modern origins during the Great Depression to the 21st Century; and 3) close readings of important primary works in the field, including Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Alan Moore & David Gibbons’ Watchmen, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and more. Course requirements include class participation, bi-weekly 1-page reading responses, a mid-term examination, and a final paper.
BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 224
OFFERED: Fall
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CLT 412M
CREECH J
TR
12:30 - 13:45
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This course will explore major developments in the East German cinema, including issues such as coming to terms with the fascist past, popular filmmaking and art cinema, cinema as a pedagogical tool, artistic dissent and state censorship, socialist ideologies of gender, and the politics of documentary. Each film will be explored in relation to its socio-historical context, providing students with an overview of East German film and culture.
BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 413
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CLT 454C
BRIDGES W
TR
12:30 - 13:45
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"A good science fiction story," Frederik Pohl proposes, "should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam." This course considers the "traffic jams"—the far-flung possible worlds imagined in Japanese science fiction—from the 1920s to the present. Genres covered include the short story, short short story, novel, manga, anime, and film. The course emphasizes close readings of literary texts and analysis of the global contexts that prompt Japan's science fictional musings. Japanese science fiction is considered in global perspective: Japanese works are considered alongside pertinent works from other national traditions of science fiction. All readings are done in English translation; all viewing have English subtitling.
BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 401
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CLT 464B
BRIDGES W
TR
15:25 - 16:40
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This course explores major works of Japanese literature written from 1885 to the present. Central to our exploration will be the rises and falls (of authors, literary schools, regimes, tectonic plates, and, perhaps, literature itself) of Japanese literature. The focus of this survey is Japan's rich body of prose narratives. This focus is supplemented by investigations of genres and media such as poetry, film, theater, photography, advertisements, historical nonfiction, anime, and manga. This course is taught in English.
BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 401
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ENG 406
–
TR
9:40 - 10:55
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An intellectual history and critical investigation of the books of god and nature.
BUILDING: | ROOM:
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 410
GROSS K
TR
11:05 - 12:20
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The class will explore the full range of Shakespeare's theater, including examples of history plays, comedy, tragedy, and romance. We’ll be approaching the plays from many angles, looking at their stark and extravagant language, their invention of complex, conflicted human characters, their analyses of the worlds of politics and war, their self-conscious theatricality, as well as their ways that they join together play and seriousness, the tragic and the comic. We’ll discuss the plays’ fascination with madness and delusion, the work of dreams, as well as their interest in ghosts, witchcraft, and magic. We will look at Shakespeare in both his own time and ours, to help think about why the work still speaks to us so powerfully. Plays to be read include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Fulfills pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Applicable clusters: Great Books, Great Authors, and Plays, Playwrights, and Theater.
BUILDING: DEWEY | ROOM: 2110D
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 445
TUCKER J
TR
11:05 - 12:20
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Despite being misunderstood as the most infantile of genres, comic books have recently proven themselves capable of astonishing artistic achievements and of infiltrating both Hollywood and academia. This course has three parts: 1) a formal analysis of the art of comics, a combination of text and image used to tell a story; 2) a cultural history of comic books, from their modern origins during the Great Depression to the 21st Century; and 3) close readings of important primary works in the field, including Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Alan Moore & David Gibbons’ Watchmen, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, and more. Course requirements include class participation, bi-weekly 1-page reading responses, a mid-term examination, and a final paper.
BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 224
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 445
–
TR
18:15 - 19:30
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This course offers an overview of satire from Ancient Greece to the present, focusing on the “Golden Age” satirists of 17th and 18th century Britain (Dryden, Swift, Pope, Austen, and others). We will read and closely analyze some of the most lasting (and funniest) satires ever written. From these sources, our conversations will open onto big questions. What is satire? Is it a genre? A form? A mode? An attitude? What are satire’s historical and psychological roots, and what might these reveal about its past and present functions? How can we account for the close relationship of satire to rhetorical power? To social psychology? To the news? And what is the nature and role of satire in today’s political climate?
BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 203
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 451
HAHN T
TR
15:25 - 16:40
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Our readings and exchanges will address the appeal and impact of outlaws who transgress the ideals and normative standards of a society, and yet reign as celebrities and super-heroes within mainstream media. We will pursue Robin Hood as a media creature, alive first in ballads and songs, throwaway broadsides and chapbooks, woodcuts and tabloid memoirs. We will end with film and video, from silent movies, blockbusters, and animation through network and cable TV, YouTube, and digital formats. We will try to unravel such issues as what drives or even justifies acting against or outside the law? In what ways does official culture generate resistance, and bring the (noble) outlaw into being? Why and how do mainline popular culture and commercial entertainment celebrate defiance of the law? Each student will work with original materials from 18th-20th century popular culture, producing written analyses as well as digital images, reconstructions, and projects for the course website.
BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 163
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 458
BERNARDI J
TR
14:00 - 15:15
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This course offers 1) a comprehensive “grass roots” study of anime as film form and cultural phenomenon; and 2) a more specific and guided investigation of the work of Hayao Miyazaki and the world view and visual sensibilities of his creation, Studio Ghibli. We begin by investigating where anime comes from: historical precedence, significant sources, defining influences and routes of cultural exchange. We then focus on Miyazaki’s work and the Ghibli corpus in order to examine the specifics of animated cinematic construction that distinguish his work (e.g., iconography, visual landscape, character design, narrative tropes, music); methods of adaptation, influence, and genre variation; reception and fan culture; and anime’s potential for providing unique perspectives on race, gender, landscape, identity, and Japan's historical and mythological past. NO AUDITS.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504
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| Wednesday |
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AH 583
HAIDU R
W
9:00 - 11:40
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The Colloquium introduces students in the Visual and Cultural Studies Program to aspects of the histories, theories, and methodologies of our field of study. We proceed in three ways: First, we read and discuss together a series of texts on and in visual and cultural studies. Second, various faculty members in the program conduct sessions in their areas of expertise based on readings that they select for us. And third, each student presents his or her own work to the colloquium. For this final part, it is important that students engage with visual and cultural studies models and provide relevant readings to other members of the colloquium.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524
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ENG 555
BURGES J
W
14:00 - 16:40
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What is contemporary cinema? This seminar will answer this question in two ways. First, we will consider a group of films that embodies some of the technological and aesthetic tendencies of film history from the 1970s to the present. Second, we will consider how cinema functions as a form of contemporary history, with a great deal of emphasis falling precisely on the issue of form. We will therefore delve into how films historicize the present not only through the representation of events central to the contemporary period, but also through narrative structure, visual style, performative qualities, generic choices, and media aesthetics. Focused heavily on the close reading of films, the seminar will also engage with salient scholarship in film and media studies; critical work in time studies, especially its attempt to understand contemporaneity; and relevant historiography regarding the contemporary period.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 403
OFFERED: Fall
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| Thursday |
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AH 440
CRIMP D
R
14:00 - 16:40
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As the most famous artist of the second half of the twenthieth century, Warhol has been the subject of a growing literature that expands upon art history and criticism to encompass queer theory and cultural studies. But the most important shift in Warhols reception has been brought about by the restoration and return to circulation of his prolific film output from the years 1963-69. The films will be the main focus of this course, but we will also consider Warhols early work as a fashion illustrator, his entrepreneurship at the Factory, his voracious collecting, and, of course, his paintings. We will read Warhols writings, including A a Novel. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and Popism; and we will examine new approaches to Warhol and ask how they illuminate not only the art but also such issues as consumption, publicity, visibility, celebrity, sexuality, identity, and selfhood.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524
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AH 585
BERLO J
R
11:05 - 13:45
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Cultural critic Stuart Hall has observed “Heritage is a discursive practice. It is one of the ways in which the nation slowly constructs for itself a sort of collective social memory.” In this upper level seminar, we will look at case studies of how people (through the collectivities of gender, ethnicity, race, or nation) construct visual narratives about the past. Among the topics for consideration are Holocaust memorials, Native American and Polynesian museums and cultural centers, African American quilt histories, and even individual artists’ projects of the last few decades (Judy Chicago, Fred Wilson, Silvia Gruner, José Bedia, and Jolene Rickard, among others). Readings will be drawn principally from the disciplines of history, anthropology, cultural studies, and art criticism.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504
PREREQUISITES: Juniors and Seniors in Art History, Anthropology and History, as well as graduate students, will have preference in registering for this course. Familiarity with the language and theoretical concerns of cultural studies or anthropology would be helpful.
OFFERED: Fall
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ENG 554
MILLER W
R
14:00 - 16:40
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In recent decades, many scholars of literature and other humanists have refocused their attention on a set of connections once consigned to the past: the historical and theoretical links between religion, science, and literary representation. This course introduces several important contexts and critical conversations stemming from these intersections. Areas of focus will include affect theory, post-colonial theory, secularity, and political theology. We will read a number of primary sources, including key texts by Bacon, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza, and Vico, as well as important critical work by Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Charles Taylor, Simone Weil, and others.
BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 403
OFFERED: Fall
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