Comparative Literature Courses Spring 2011
2020 History of European Literature II
Gordon Braden
TuTh 12:30PM–1:45 PM Physics Bldg 204
CPLT 3559 /GETR 3559/ (3) Spiritual Journeys in Young Adult Fiction
Dorothe Bach and John Alexander
2:00-3:15 WF Cabell 241
This comparative inquiry into young adult fiction invites you to explore the topic of the spiritual journey both academically and personally. Different disciplinary perspectives such as religious studies, gender studies, history, psychology, and literary studies will help us shed light on our private reading experiences and deepen our exploration of such themes as: religiosity vs. spirituality, experiencing divine presence and absence, becoming a hero, confronting evil, being different, achieving autonomy, faith and doubt, and the magical and the miraculous. Our hope is that, over the course of the semester, you will develop a nuanced vocabulary with which you can express your thoughts on spiritual journeys in young adult fiction as well as articulate the relationships between your own quest and your academic pursuits.
This discussion based, reading-intensive seminar is cross-listed in the Comparative Literature and German departments and most texts come from the Western tradition. The sessions will be held in English. German majors are encouraged to read German texts in the original and to write in German. We encourage all students to participate actively in discussion, to engage the readings and each other critically and compassionately, to develop a regular reflective writing practice, and to work collaboratively in small learning teams. We warmly invite students from a variety of academic backgrounds and with diverse interests in the topic to apply. To find out how get into the course, please follow the links on the course page.
Readings may include works such as: Grimm's Fairy Tales; Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time; Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves; Chaim Potok, The Chosen; and Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials. Films may include works such as: Pan’s Labyrinth; Paper Clips; and Bridge to Terabithia. Secondary works may include works such as: Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment; Robert Coles, The Moral Life of Children; and Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse.
By Instructor Permission Only.
This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.
CPLT 3590/ GETR 3590 (3) On Pain (and Literature)
Renate Voris
12:30-1:45 T New Cabell Hall 225
(section 1)
An inquiry into modes of representation of pain and suffering in literature (i.e. the theatrical arts, including opera, as well as prose fiction and poetry). Virginia Woolf, in her 1926 essay ON BEING ILL, argues that illness is a subject WITHOUT literature, that literature does its best to maintain its concern with the mind and not also with the body in pain (physical, mental, emotional). Our seminar defines itself as a companion to Woolf's (nearly forgotten essay) by taking possession of literary, psychoanalytic, and medical discourses, as well as of the tradition of rhetorical criticism derived from Aristotle (in THE RHETORIC), and then pose the question of the relation OF LANGUAGE TO PAIN.
No prerequisites, except for a love of reading.
CPLT 3590/ GETR 3590 Insanity
Benjamin Bennett
11:00-11:50 MWF Rouss Hall 410
Readings for the course will include some more or less technical writings on the nature and history of insanity, especially selections from Foucault and Shoshana Felman. These will be coupled with literary depictions of insanity, including works of Shakespeare and Büchner and Dürrenmatt, and a number of texts by writers who either feel themselves on the brink of insanity (Strindberg, Rimbaud) or else were actually soon to become insane (Hölderlin, Nietzsche). At least two films will be viewed and discussed, perhaps a third if Mondo pazzo is easily available. Toward the end of the course, the topic of totalitarianism will be discussed, and with it the question of whether, under certain political or social circumstances, sanity is always a morally acceptable condition. Some room will be left in the reading list for texts suggested by students in the course. Students who intend to register for the course are welcome to send suggestions to the instructor at any time. There will be two rigorous examinations on the course reading, and a final term paper.
GETR 3710/ (3) Kafka and His Doubles
CPLT 3710 11:00-12:15 TR Pavilion VIII room 103
Lorna Martens
The course will introduce the enigmatic work of Franz Kafka: stories including "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," "A Country Doctor," "A Report to an Academy," "A Hunger Artist," "The Burrow," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"; one of his three unpublished novels (The Trial); the Letter to His Father; and some short parables. But we will also look at Kafka's "doubles": the literary tradition he works with and the way in which he, in turn, forms literary tradition. Thus: Kafka: Cervantes, Kafka: Bible, Kafka: Aesop, Kafka: Dostoevsky, Kafka: Melville; Kafka: O'Connor, Kafka: Singer; Kafka: Calvino, Kafka: Borges. Readings will center on four principal themes: conflicts with others and the self (and Kafka's psychological vision); the double; the play with paradox and infinity; and artists and animals. A seminar limited to 20 participants.
Requirements include a short midterm paper (5-7 pages) and a longer final paper (10-12 pages).
CPLT 4990 Seminar for Majors
Randolph Pope
Mo 3:30–6:00 Place TBA
This seminar is open to all students. Majors of Comparative Literature will have preference in any waiting list.
The topic in Spring ’11 will be “How a Classic is Born: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.”
How and why do some very few novels transcend their national boundaries, their language and situation, and receive public and critical acclaim in different societies? We will consider primarily the case of Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), whose novel 2666 won posthumously the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2008. The reception of this novel in Latin America and Europe has been equally celebratory. How did this happen? What does the novel do that may merit such acclaim? As comparisons, we will also consider Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, as well as Stieg Larsson's very popular The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo.
Requirements are active class participation, and three short papers around the same topic but in reference to each of the three novels we will read.
CPLT 8002 Comparative and Transnational Studies
Randolph Pope
We 6:30–9:00 PM
New Cabell Hall 319
This course offers an overview of key arguments and debates within the field of comparative literature, transnational studies, and recent theories of world literature. Topics to be discussed include the benefits and dangers of thinking comparatively; critiques of nationalist and nativist theories of culture; the relations between comparative literature and postcolonial theory; questions of canonicity and aesthetic value; multiple modernities; theories of translation; the pedagogy of teaching courses in world literature, the differences between world literature and comparative literature. We will also read various examples of comparative criticism.
In short, we will consider these questions: Who is comparing? What are we comparing? And, What are our questions, approaches, methods, and specific issues?
Recommended Courses:
ENMC 3800 Concepts of the Modern
Jessica Feldman
T R 12:30-13:45
In order to understand the notion of modernity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we’ll study the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who wrote in literary ways—dramatic, poetic, fictional. We’ll also read works by Franz Kafka, William Butler Yeats, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov, considering them in light of Nietzsche’s methods and ideas. Nietzsche and these writers wondered about such questions as: What is an ethical life? How does religion function? How do we know what we know? How do people communicate with one another? In a world filled with what we might summarize as "bad behavior," what are the roles of art and beauty? This is a lecture and discussion course, and there will be a take-home midterm and take-home final, along with a paper.
FREN 5812 - New World Literature / 8581 - Seminar in Francophone Literature
"From Exile to Ex-isle in Francophone Caribbean Literature"
Stéphanie Bérard
>From displacement and uprooting to wandering and settling, this course examines the various forms of exile and migration in the Francophone Caribbean. Through the study of literary and philosophical texts (Césaire, Condé, Fanon, Glissant, Pineau) related to the history of slavery and to migration movements of Caribbean people towards the French metropole, we will analyse the causes and consequences, both material and psychological, of displacement in terms of hospitality, rejection, integration, assimilation and alienation.
FREN4581: "The Rewriting of History through Words and Images in Francophone Caribbean and African Literature and Cinema"
Stéphanie Bérard
This course examines how contemporary Francophone Caribbean and African writers and filmmakers attempt to reevaluate the history written on slavery and colonialism by “official” historians from the Western world. Analysis of works by poets, novelists, essayists, and filmmakers from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Algeria and Senegal.
GETR 3420 / GERM 7420German Intellectual History II
Volker Kaiser M 3:30-6:00 New Cabell Hall 320
This course addresses both undergraduate and graduate students who work in the humanities, in particular students in language and literature departments, but also students in philosophy, history, religious studies, politics and the social sciences. The seminar will give an overview and also take a closer look at the impressive legacy of German intellectual history, starting with readings from Hegel and Marx, continuing with Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Freud, Lukacs, Marcuse, Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Elias, the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin), ending with contemporary scholars like Habermas and Sloterdijk. The texts and essays under investigation will not only introduce students to these influential writers of the German intellectual tradition, but also to significant contributions of this tradition to our contemporary fields of textual analysis, cultural studies and literary criticism. Hence the focus of the seminar is the question: How do these thinkers and their writings enable us to understand and interpret the various texts and contexts of the culture(s) in which we live?
Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions; one short presentation in class (this can also be performed by groups of students); one term paper (12-15 pages for undergraduates; 20-25 pages for graduates).
There are no prerequisites for this course. It fulfills both the Second Writing Requirement and the Historical Studies Requirement. All texts are available in English translation. Essays will be made available on the collab-site for this course. Books can be purchased via the UVa-Bookstore.
GETR 3590 Death of God
Wellmon
2:00-3:15 MW Cabell 345
This course considers the complex history of secularization in order to discern when and how God died. Was it a long and painful death, a slow act of forgetting, the atrophy of a metaphysical desire, a turn to science, or a modern effort to redefine the place of religion? After reading contemporary reports of this death from Hitchens and Dawkins, and twentieth century classics such as Russell, we will consider the long history of secularity and ‘the secular’ from Erasmus and Hobbes to Habermas and Ratzinger. Readings will include Luther, Montainge, Pascal, Locke, Diderot, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Feuerbach, Marx, Hegel, Freud, Comte, Durkheim, Kafka, Nietzsche, Weber, Marilynn Robinson. We will consider the meaning of the death of God for philosophy, religion, literature and sociology. Secondary sources will include: Taylor, Asad, Mahmood, Connolly, Berlinerblau, Bonhoeffer, and Altizer. Assignments include: a course Wiki, weekly reading assignments, and two essay exams.