COMPLIT 97: Tutorial - Sophomore Year
Course Information
Harvard College/GSAS: [CCN]Spring 2015-16
Professor Verena A. Conley
Location: Dana Palmer Meeting Room
Meeting Time: Mondays, 3–5pm
Sophomore Tutorial introduces key questions, concepts and tools for the study of literature. Rather than a survey of great books or theoretical approaches, the course proposes a sustained reflection on the practice of reading literature: how and why do we read? How do literary texts represent, reflect on, inflect, or even resist reading? What does it mean to read closely, to read between the lines or against the grain, to read across periods or languages, to “do a reading”? What can be revealed or achieved through critical rereading (or rewriting)? In exploring these questions, we will encounter a succession of scenes of reading: from medieval Japan to nineteenth-century Paris, across fictional libraries and historical archives, from reimagined pasts to visions of the future. Along the way, I hope you will discover a multitude of ways – and reasons – to read literature today.
Readings and discussion for each week are organized around themes indicated in the calendar below. Every week, I will post an introduction to our readings and the corresponding themes on the course blog, providing some elements of context and a number of reading guidelines. These posts will suggest starting points for your own contributions to the blog; they are, however, not restrictive, and you are welcome to start from your own observations.
Requirements
◦ Thoughtful preparation of assigned readings and engaged participation in class discussions.
Attendance is mandatory. You must email me in advance of class if you are unable to attend due
to illness or unavoidable circumstance.
◦ Weekly postings (required, 2-3 paragraphs) to the course blog about the week‟s reading, due by
9pm the day before our class meeting.
◦ First paper: a close reading (3-5 pages), due in class on February 23.
◦ Second paper: a theoretical position paper (5-6 pages), due in class on March 30.
◦ Third paper: a research paper (10-12 pages), due Thursday May 5. (2-page proposal due April 27)
Detailed guidelines will be provided for all three paper assignments.
Grading
First paper 10%
Second paper 20%
Third paper 40%
Participation (incl. postings) 30%
Readings
The following books are available for purchase at the Harvard Coop. If you choose to order them online, make sure to purchase the specified edition.
Please refer to the “course readings” handout for details about where to find shorter readings, and to the course blog for indications of what to read from longer works.
All readings are also available on reserve at Lamont Library.
You are encouraged to read texts in the original whenever possible.
Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. 2nd ed. 2010. ISBN 393-93292-8
The Epic of Gilgamesh. Tr. A. George. Penguin, 2003. 14-044919-8
Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. Random House, 1984. 679-73136-9
Goethe. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Tr. M. Hulse. Penguin, 1989. 14-044503-9
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. 374-52707-5
Montesquieu. Persian Letters. Tr. M. Mauldon. Oxford, 2008. 19-280635-2
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. A.D. Melville. Oxford, 1986. 19-283472-0
Sei Shonagon. The Pillow Book . Tr. M. McKinney. Penguin, 2006. 14-044806-1
Stendhal. The Red and the Black. Tr. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. Norton, 2004. 87140-148-7
Calendar
* Reading assignments marked with an asterisk are recommended;all others are required.
January 26:
Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman‟s Homer” (from Poems, 1817)
introduction Baudelaire, “The Voice” (from The Flowers of Evil)
Adrienne Rich, “Dedications” (from An Atlas of the Difficult World)
* Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading”
February 2:
Borges, “The Library of Babel” Sign / Crisis
Hofmannsthal, A Letter
Mallarmé, “Crisis in Verse”
Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics
* Barbara Johnson, “Writing”
February 9:
Plato, from Phaedrus Speaking / Silence
Augustine, from Confessions
Jacques Derrida, from “Plato‟s Pharmacy”
Hélène Cixous, from “Sorties”
* Jonathan Culler, “Writing and Logocentrism”
* Jesper Svenbro, “The Invention of Silent Reading”
February 16:
Cervantes, from Don Quixote Author / Text
Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”
* Kathy Acker, from Don Quixote
* Mark Rose, from Authors and Owners
February 23:
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther Desire / Image
first paper due Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse
Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus”
* Jacqueline Rose, from Feminine Sexuality
* Reinhard Wittmann, “The „Reading Mania‟”
* Wayne Koestenbaum, “Werther‟s Pourquoi me réveiller?”
March 1 (Tuesday):
The Epic of Gilgamesh World
joint session with (secondary texts TBA)
Prof. Damrosch
March 9:
Sei Shonagon, from The Pillow Book Sense(s)
Proust, from Swann’s Way
Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language”
* Paul de Man, “Reading (Proust)”
* Elaine Scarry, from Dreaming by the Book
March 16 (Spring Break)
March 23:
Stendhal, The Red and the Black Plot / Irony
Peter Brooks, from Reading for the Plot
F. W. Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility”
* Theodor Reik, “Saint Irony”
* Wayne Booth, from A Rhetoric of Irony
March 30:
Freud, “Fräulein Elisabeth von R.” Depth / Surface
second paper due Eve Sedgwick, from Epistemology of the Closet Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious
* Slavoj Zizek, “How did Marx invent the symptom”?
April 5 (Tuesday):
(texts TBA) Lyric / Translation
joint session withProf. Girón-Negrón
April 13:
Montesquieu, from Persian Letters Gaze / Other
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Edward Said, from Orientalism
* Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
April 20:
Ovid, from Metamorphoses Gender / Genre
Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein…”
* S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, from The Madwoman in the Attic
April 27:
Flaubert, “A Simple Heart” Voice / Discourse
last session Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
final proposal due Mikhail Bakhtin, from “Discourse in the Novel”