ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The African American Literary Legacy
Professor Robert Grant
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50

This course will analyze the nature and history of Black American “writerly” strategies, from slavery (Douglass, Jacobs, Washington), through turn-of-the-century and Harlem Renaissance eras (Chesnutt, Dunsbar, DuBois, Hughes, Hurston), to mid-century and contemporary periods (Ellison, Baldwin, Hansberry, Morrison). The course will have a firm “aesthetics” base as well as a politico-cultural orientation.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The American Gothic
Professor Judith Jackson-Fossett
MWF, 9:00 - 9:50

This course proposes to interrogate the place of the ghost story/supernatural tale in the larger American literary tradition. Beginning with the first gothic text, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, published in 18th-century England, we will return to the American landscape and consider a range of novels and short stories in which issues of haunting, repression, and human transfiguration are central. While set in the purported security of the American home, these gothic texts utterly trouble any simplistic notions readers may have about the “safety” of domestic space and the “stability” of family members. As gothic settings are at once ostensibly sources of protection that also consistently produce threats of chaos, destruction and death, these texts offer a rich opportunity to define, discuss and analyze the “home” and its primacy in our national literary tradition. In concert with our focus on the gothic setting, we will also consider how race, gender, sexuality, and even region--rubrics already structuring domestic space--are at work in the construction of the gothic genre. A list of primary texts for this course may include the following: Horace Walpole, Castle of Otranto; Washington Irving, selected short stories; Edgar Allan Poe, selected short stories; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”; Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Tales; Stephen Crane, “The Monster”; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; and Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Art and Text in Imperial Rome
Professor Anthony J. Boyle
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

A detailed critical and analytic study of selected works of literature and of visual art (architecture, sculpture, painting) from early imperial Rome. The focus will be on intense reading and intellectual analysis of the works themselves, of their relationship to each other and to the culture(s) which produced them. The course will focus on two periods: the Rome of Augustus (27 BCE-14 CE) and that of Nero (54-68 CE). The art for the course includes the following: Augustan Period: Augustan monuments, esp. the Forum Augusti; official sculpture, esp. the Altar of Peace and the Prima Porta; and Roman imperial painting, esp. the “ornamental style” and sacro-idyllic; and Neronian Period: Architecture, esp. the Palaces; Sperlonga sculptures and the Laocoon; Roman imperial painting, esp. the “theatrical style.” The texts for the course will include: Augustus, Res Gestae (“Achievementi”) Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Fasti; Petronius, Satyricon; Seneca, Troades (“Trojan Women”); and Tacitus, Annals.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Asian American Identity in Literature and Film
Professor Jane N. Iwamura
MW, 2:00 - 3:20

The late 20th century, and especially the last two decades, has been an explosion of literary works by Asian American writers. One testament to the popularity of such works is the adaptation of Asian American novels and plays into popular film. By closely examining this particular nexus of literary and visual texts, the course plans to tackle several questions: How is Asian American identity crafted according to the medium? What types of different portrayals are allowed and not allowed? How does authenticity get defined in each case? What novels and plays are selected for visual retelling and why? And what are the politics of representation that inform the translation of Asian American identity from page to screen? Students will not only gain an introduction into the genres of Asian American literature and film, but also develop the skills to be critical interpretative readers of both written and visual texts through comparative study. The couse will include the following literary works, as well as their film adaptations: Jeanne Wakatsuki, Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment; Nora Lam, China Cry; Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea; Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club; Philip Kan Gotanda, The Wash; David Henry Hwang, M Butterfly; Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace and Child of War, Woman of Peace; Evelyn Lau, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid; Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. A reader of selected literary and film theory will also be required.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Biblical Protagonists Through an Ancient Lens
Professor Adriane Leveen
TTh, 3:30 - 4:50

When reading ancient literature, one encounters the daring acts, obstacles, deceptions, tricks and/or successes of complex and remarkable characters--divine or human. This course examines a variety of such female and male characters, both divine and human, to determine what acts define them as heroes/heroines, how other characters perceive them, how to gauge their influence over the course of events, and finally, how we, as close readers of their stories, react to them. We will also analyze to what extent these texts can serve as entry points into the ancient cultures in which they are embedded. We will primarily focus on the protagonists found in the Hebrew Bible and how they fit a larger heroic persona. To better understand ancient notions of that persona, we will place these stories in the context of the ancient New East on one end and the classical world on the other. The required texts include: The Oxford Study Bible: New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha; Susan Ackerman, Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel; Robert Alter, David’s Story; Moses Hadas, Greek Drama; James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Biography and the Renaissance Artist
Professor Eunice Howe
TTH, 2:00 - 3:20

This course examines the biography of the Renaissance artist from various perspectives, establishing the role that it plays in our understanding of artistic creativity. We quite often assume that the life-experiences of famous Renaissance artists are imbedded in their works. While it is natural to seek connections between the artistic vision of the creator and the artistic product, this approach is based on certain assumptions and, occasionally, glaring contradictions. As we look at the literary and cultural sources of artistic biography, we may even begin to question the relevance of artistic biography to the interpretation of a work of art. Does insight into an artist’s life-experiences illuminate or complicate our understanding of the work of art? The course thus relics on primary sources, name the biographies and autobiographies of selected Renaissance masters, including “exceptional” women artists. Reading assignments also include secondary sources on artistic biography that propose alternative views informed by psychoanalysis, literary criticism and post-modern theory. Class discussion will focus on what evidence (if any) we might trust in seeking the connection between works of art and the lives of the artists, as well as on the larger implications of Renaissance biography. Primary readings include: Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography; Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo; Lorenzo Ghiberti, The Commentaries; Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man and Other Works; Pliny the Elder, The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art; Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; and Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists (English translation by Gaston Du C. de Vere, reprinted 1979).

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
City of Myth
Professor Thomas Seifrid
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

From the moment of its founding in 1703, St. Petersburg, Russian has provoked widely disparate reactions. To Tsar Peter the Great who decreed its creation, it was to be paradise on earth, a rival to the imperial capitals of Rome and Byzantium and the wealthy entrepôts of Amsterdam and Venice. It was also to be Russia’s “window to Europe,” the port from which a newly created Russian navy would confidently project Russian military power. But even as the city arose on the banks of the Neva river others began to view it in a contrary light: as a capital ludicrously marginal to the country it ruled, erected on a frozen northern swamp—even as a haunted or demonic place, a sham rather than reality, destined ultimately to perish (as Dostoevsky’s narrator puts it in Notes from the Underground, it came to be viewed by some as “the most abstract and premeditated city in the world”). Perhaps because of these tensions, the city was also the birthplace of modern Russian literature. By reading some of the best of this literature, this course will explore the rich body of ideas associated with St. Petersburg’s reputation in Russian culture of the past 300 years(and the city, which was briefly called Petrograd and then for several decades Leningrad, is St Petersburg once more is preparing to celebrate its tricentennial). Readings include Pushkin’s "The Bronze Horseman" and “The Queen of Spades,” Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Ginzburg’s, Blockade Diary, and Bitov’s Puskin House.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics and Contemporary Fairy Tales
Professor Aimee Bender
MWF, 1:00 - 1:50

This course will explore the powerful pull of fairy tales. As a base, we will read some of the classic Western fairy tales, and then turn to the present and examine various contemporary interpretations of these stories. Because the archetypal tales are so cleanly told, their modern interpretations are often highly experimental and structurally inventive. Part of this course will involve making the bridge between these fairy tale classics and their contemporary counterparts. What happens to plot in the modern interpretations? To character? To language? The course will include novels by Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Jeannette Winterson, short stories by Angela Carter, William Maxwell, and Oscar Wilde, poetry by Anne Sexton, as well as a solid dose of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen. We will also read selections from an auxiliary psychoanalytical text by Bruno Betelheim as one lens into why these stories last.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics in Modern Philosophy
Professor Zlatan Damnjanovic
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50

A close reading of several important works in seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy. Emphasis on the cultural context of these works as well as on their philosophical content. The reading include Decartes, Meditations on First Philosophy; Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding (selections); Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Principles of Nature and Grace; Berkeley, Principles on Human Knowledge; Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics of Greek Philosophy and Literature
Professor Kevin Robb
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50

This course introduces the student to a selection of the best of Greek literature and philosophy with an emphasis on reading a text as very much a product of a place, time and society, but also one with enduring interest for thoughtful persons for the present time. The intent is to keep to acknowledged “classics,” the best works of a literature already selected in antiquity as a canon and the best philosophical writing, but which also have proven interest for modern readers. Readings from such authors as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cleanthes.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Cross Cultural Rhetoric
Professor Lawrence Green
MWF, 2:00 - 2:50

Rhetoric is a seemingly universal phenomenon, both as a set of communicative practices and as a self-conscious effort to regularize a society's modes of effective expression. We will look first at the prevalence of rhetoric in our own western tradition, and then expand our inquiry into the pervasiveness of rhetoric in ancient literate societies (Near Eastern, Chinese, and Indian), in non-literate traditional societies, in the psychology of animal societies, and in the dynamics of human language development. The texts include: Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition; Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric; and Bizzell and Hertzberg, Rhetoric Reader.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Girlhood: Twentieth Century Perspectives
Professor Alice Gambrell
TTH, 2:00 - 3:20

When the word “girl” faded from polite usage thirty years ago, widespread cultural interest in the vicissitudes of girlhood seemed to disappear along with it. Since the early nineties, however, a range of literary writers, sociologists, filmmakers, psychologists, and cultural critics have once again turned their attention, this time with some urgency, toward the phases of female childhood and adolescence. In this course, we will examine the contemporary resurgence of interest in the figure of the “girl,” emphasizing the difficulty of locating suitable literary forms through which to articulate the complexities of girlhood. We will begin by examining a series of older depictions of female children, ranging from the classic (Alcott’s Little Women) to the highly controversial (Freud’s Dora). We will then turn to the contemporary moment, paying special attention to the innovations of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a book that served as inspiration and point of departure for dozens of depictions of girlhood published in the years since. After observing work by artists and scholars from a range of disciplines and media, we will conclude by examining recent writings by young feminists who are currently working to reclaim the importance and to redefine the significance of the “girl.” Requirements include extensive reading and analytical writing, daily written responses, a midterm, a final, and in-class presentation.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Imagination and Revolution in Modern Russian Literature
Professor Jenifer Presto
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50

In this course, we will examine the fascinating period in Russian literature beginning with the Revolution of 1917 and ending with the fall of the Soviet empire. This period was met by radical transformations in the political, social, and economic spheres which had a profound impact on the cultural scene. The literature produced in this period was not only charged with political ideas, but was also extremely innovative and experimental. In this course, we will devote ourselves to an analysis of the forms that the literary imagination took: we will read works that reflected the dreams and ideals of the Soviet state, as well as texts that expressed disillusionment with the regime, paying particular attention to the relationship between political and revolutionary ideas and artistic form in these works. One of the goals of the course will be to destroy the perception common among students that literature written in Russia after 1917 pales in comparison to the literature of the pre-revolutionary period. The reading list for this course includes Akhmatova, Requiem; Babel, Collected Stories; Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog and Master and Margarita; Chukovskaya, Sophia Petrovna; Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Life; Gladkov, Cement; Mayakovsky, The Bedbug; Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Terts, The Trial Begins; and Zamiatin, We.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Literature
Professor Adam Rubin
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

This course will introduce the student to the image of Jerusalem as a holy city in Jewish, Christian and Muslim literature. The literature of the three religious communities played a central role in transmitting the image of Jerusalem as birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, and holy city for Islam as well. Goal of pilgrimage and cause of Crusade, themes such as “Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem,” and “Jerusalem as the Center of the World” infused many aspects of Western Culture, far beyond the borders of the Land of Israel. Assigned readings from biblical and later non-biblical texts will be examined from a critical perspective to provide the student with humanistic, scholarly, and intellectual tools to understand the background of the tensions between the image and the reality of life in Jerusalem from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Modern Period. The texts for the course will include: Peters, Jerusalem: the Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times; The Oxford Study Bible; Josephus, The Jewish Wars; Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane; Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament Period; Purvis, Jerusalem, the Holy City: a Bibliography; and Rosovsky, City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Landscape and Poetry
Professor Lynn Matteson
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

This course considers the role of "Nature" in the arts of the West from about 1450 to the middle of the 20th century. The primary vehicle is landscape painting, especially that of England in the 19th century (Constable, Turner) and its relationship with nature poetry (Wordsworth) and the rise of the landscape garden. We will, however, explore other countries and arts, specifically music, where we will listen to the works of Vivaldi, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, and Delius, as well as the art of the Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh and Gauguin).

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Lensens on Society: Literature and Sociology
Professor Bruce Phillips
MW, 2:00 - 3:20

Literature is art, and yet there are novels that have changed the way we understand our society. Sociology sees itself as a science, but there have been sociological works so compelling argued that they had a readership well beyong the discipline. This course pairs novels of social commentary with excerpts from contemporary works of sociology on the same or similar theme. For each novel, students will consider three questions: (1) How do literature and sociology approach the same topic? (2) What insights are unique to each and to what extent to the two genres compliment or contradict each other? (3) Are these works dated by their social criticism, or do they manage to transcend their social context? The works include: Lynd and Lynch, Middletown; Thornstein Veblin, The Theory of the Leisure Class; Sinclair Lewis, Babbit; David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd; Howard Becker, The Outsiders; Jack Kerouac, On the Road; Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart; Brett Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; Kate Milet, Sexual Politics; and Janice Galloway, The Trick to Keep Breathing.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature and the Choosing Self
Professor Susan Laemmle
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

This course explores the ways in which great literature enlarges the boundaries of our moral imagination and helps us refine a personal identity. The works selected for the syllabus feature characters at turning points in their lives, struggling to be themselves and do the right thing. In the class, we will ask: what alternatives do they confront? What resources do they draw upon? How are they affected by others and by the larger environment in which they live? This course assumes that posing such questions to great literary works contributes to human reflectiveness and broadens the range of possibilities available to us as we figure out who we are and go about conducting our own lives. The course also aims to strengthen students' capacity to read carefully, understand how literary works are put together, and convey that understanding both orally and in writing. We will pay careful attention to the ways in which great authors craft their work, as well as the vocabulary and modes of analysis that experienced readers use to think and talk about literature. While this is not a course on different literary forms per se, "Literature and the Choosing Self" does cover the three major literary genres--poetry, fiction, and drama. Requirements include an oral presentation, active participation in class discussion, an in-class midterm, and a take-home final, as well as five papers of increasing length--which constitute the largest component of each participant's grade for the course. Standards for written work are demanding with regard to both content and form. The course reading list includes the following longer works: the biblical Book of Ruth, Shakespeare's King Lear, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, E.M. Forster's Passage to India, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It also includes poems by Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, Theodore Roethke, and T.S. Eliot.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature and the Politics of Recognition
Professor Vincent Farenga
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

What does it mean for us to achieve recognition from others of our worth as individuals? What does it mean to achieve recognition for the social groups we belong to by gender, race, class, religion, etc.? What does it mean to be a "person"? Using autobiography, memoir and fiction, this class will explore the need for both personal and social recognition, and it will help you develop a better understanding of "personhood" in the modern world. A few additional readings from moral philosophers and theorists of the self will help establish the philosophical, political and psychological dimensions behind the struggle individuals from different cultures have waged for recognition. At the heart of our inquiry are first-person accounts about individuals seeking their identity by storytelling, by searching for it in foreign lands and in the past, and by responding to ways others deny them recognition. We'll read a classic autobiography (Rousseau's Confessions) slave narrative (Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl), and fictive accounts of recognition denied (Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground; Flaubert's A Simple Heart). But much of our reading will be 20th century narratives from around the world, including Maryse Conde (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem), Saul Friedlander (When Memory Comes), Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban), and Tahar Ben Jelloun (The Sand Child). For critical concepts and perspectives on the literary texts, we'll use essays by philosophers like Charles Taylor ("The Politics of Recognition" and "The Concept of a Person") and by writers Amin Maalouf ("In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong"), Nadine Gordimer, and others.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature, Science and Science Fiction
Professor Robert Dilligan
TTh, 8:00 - 9:20
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

This is a multidisciplinary class that explores the interactions between literature and science. Course material will deal with some of the major developments in Physics and Biology during this century. The primary texts for the course include scientist’s accounts of scientific discovery, such as James Watson’s The Double Helix; biographies of scientists such as William Poundstone’s biography of John von Neumann, Prisoner’s Dilemma; works that address the ethical and cultural dimensions of scientific discovery, such as Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth; novels by and about science, such as Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; and science fiction novels, such as Benford’s Timescape; Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven; LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Shelley, Frankenstein; Snow, The Two Cultures; Stoker, Dracula; Stirling, The Stone Dogs; Turner, Brain Child; and Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five. The course will make extensive use of the World Wide Web, e-mail and computer multimedia.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature, Songs and Opera
Professor Schnauber
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

Many of the world’s most famous operas, song cycles, oratorios and symphonic works are based on works of known literature. This course gives an introduction into literary works of German and other European authors which have been used most often for music or have inspired some of the most well- known musical masterpieces. It will include Goethe’s Werther, Egmont and Faust, Schiller’s Don Carlos and William Tell, Shakespeare’s Othello, Wild’s Salome, tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, plays and stories by French authors and poems by Goethe, Heine and other Romantic German poets which have been used for some of the greatest songs and song cycles. In this course students will also learn how to analyze the content and style of the chosen literary works and will be introduced into how these works were put to music in different styles by different composers from different countries, such as German composers Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, Humperdinck, Strauss, Austrian composers Mozart (Salzburg), Schubert, Wolf, Mahler, French composers Berlioz, Bizet, Gounod, Massenet, Italian composers Rossini, Verdi, Busoni, Russian composers Mussorsky, Tschaikovsky, German-French composer Offenbach, Hungarian-Austrian-German composer Liszt, and British composer Britten. In the case of opera and songs, students will also analyze how musical phrasing and intonation relate to spoken intonation and prosodics of written text. While the focus of the course will remain on the literary text, the introduction into musical style will be equally important.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Los Angeles: The Fiction
Professor Thomas Gustafson
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

Los Angeles has always been a place full of hype. Let me add some to it. No city in the United States has a more significant fiction and popular culture associated with it since the 1930s than Hollywood and Los Angeles. As much of the political posturing in the 1990s about sex and violence in films reminds us, throughout the twentieth century Los Angeles/Hollywood has been a primary staging ground--or projection screen--for our political and cultural conflicts, particularly for our debate about the place and influence of popular culture and for our concerns arising from confronting one of America's fundamental contradictions. Opposed to the stories (or songs) of California and the West as a free and open space for escape, renewal and an easy attainment of the good life is the fact of the West as a territory of conquest and oppression. Indeed, the West in general and Los Angeles in particular is not the place where we have escaped from each other. It is where we--Native Americans, Latinos, Blacks, Anglos, Asians, Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerners, immigrants from all over the globe, Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, Protestants, etc.--all met, and will continue to meet. This course offers an opportunity to study Los Angeles and Southern California as a political and cultural borderland: a space of collaboration, friction, conflict and fusion among peoples of various cultures and regions.

Any study of Los Angeles must include Hollywood, and this course will give attention to the Hollywood novel, a genre of literature that was, in the words of one critic, "the great literary invention of the Thirties." But along with using fiction to draw aside the curtain for an inside look at Hollywood, the course hopes to provide students, whether they be natives or newcomers to L.A., with a deeper, richer sense of place. Authors to be read include Joan Didion, Budd Schulberg, Nathanael West, James Cain, Yxta Maya Murray, Luis Valdez, Anna Deavere Smith, Sandra Loh, Karen Yamashita, and Chester Himes.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Love and Sex in the Ancient World
Professor Lynn Swartz Dodd
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

The sexual revolution didn't happen only during the Sixties. Sixty centuries ago its first stirrings were recorded in tales of love, passion, desire, infidelity, divine union, marriage, adultery, divorce and women scorned. This course is a chance to delve into humanity's first recorded attempts to harness, control, and enhance sexuality and love; inside and outside marriage; in both the human and divine realms. Centuries before Alexander the Great built his empire ancient authors and artists depicted normal and deviant behavior in love poems, literary texts, myths, letters, laws, paintings and sculpture. This course explores views of sex, love, marriage, pleasure, same sex relationships, the status of women, and the fate of children in the periods pre-dating the biblical traditions through the cultural perspectives of the Ancient Near East including Egypt, Babylonia, Canaan, and the Hittite and Assyrian empires. We'll explore the times and lives of people whose experience is captured in texts such as Egyptian Love Poems, Hittite Birth Rituals; Gilgamesh; Wisdom and Witchcraft Literature from ancient Babylon; Law Codes, and Potency Incantations. And from the perspective of our time -- when America has ambivalent "class" distinctions and Disney animators are airbrushing women's breasts out of their classic cartoons before video release -- we'll evaluate the roles class and gender played in ancient personal life and see how differently men, women, and their varied relationships were imagined and portrayed - both seriously and humorously.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Masterpieces of the Short Story
Professor Alexander Zholkovsky
MW, 8:00 - 9:20

This course is intended to be an introduction to Russian literature by way of its best short fiction, during which students will also be introduced to the basic principles of textual interpretation. Students will read, mostly in chronological order, and analyze some of the best short stories written by Russian authors over the two-hundred year existence of modern Russian prose, from Karamzin to the present day. Key emphases will fall on historical background (the reading list provides a cross-section of an entire culture and the changes it has undergone in the modern era); narrative structure (of which students are usually ignorant, but a critical awareness of which will prepare them for more advanced literary, and other kinds of, analysis); and intertextuality (the lively dialog that turns out to be taking place among these texts and often enough between them and non-Russian works). Among other topics that will be addressed are, on the historical side, the civic tenor of Russian literature and its role as surrogate opposition in Russian society, including the peculiar pressures of the Soviet era; and on the literary side, the ways in which these texts often simultaneously adopt and subvert the exemplars that precede them. The reading list includes the following: Karamzin, “Poor Liza”; Pushkin, “Station Master”, “The Shot”; Gogol, “The Overcoat”, “The Nose”; Lermontov, “Taman”; Dostoevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”, “The Gentle Spirit”; Leskov, “The Sentry”; Tolstoy, “After the Ball”; Chekhov, “The Darling”, “Anna on the Neck”; Bunin, “Light Breathing”; Kuprin, “The Garnet Bracelet”; Gorky, “Twenty Six and a Girl”; Babel, “Guy de Maupassant”, “Answer to Inquiry”; Romanov, “Without Cherry Blossom”; Zoshchenko, “Aristocrat”, “Receipt”, “An Evening of Culture”; Nabokov, “Spring in Fialta”; Platonov, “Fro”; Iskander, “On a Summer Day”; Aksenov, “Victory”; Solzhenitsyn, “An Incident at Krechetovka”; and Siniavsky, “Pkhentz.”

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Nation and Its Others in American Literature and Film
Professor Viet Nguyen
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50

This course examines the development of American national identity. We will start historically at the origins of American society, in the nexus of cultural confrontation between the English settlers, native Americans, and African slaves. Although these initial confrontations seem to be explicitly about race, we will also see the complex interplay between class, gender, sexuality and cultural self-imagination. This complex interplay has shaped the early foundation of American identity and exclusion from that identity. We will continue to explore the legacy of this early identity as it has evolved into the 19th and 20th centuries, and we will examine how our contemporary notions of cultural difference concerning other issues besides race--feminism, homosexuality, foreigners (legal and undocumented), and the poor--find some of their origins in this legacy. Ultimately we will make inquiries about the present state of American national identity: is it singular and unified or multiple and in negotiation? The tensions between different groups, resulting from struggles for cultural and economic dominance, have long been a primary concern for American artists. It is through the work of writers and filmmakers that we will explore these tensions, both as the content with which they are concerned, and as the formal limits of their work that they wrestle with. Ultimately, what we are concerned with is the function of literature and film as part of America's cultural self-expression; literature and film both expose and embody the tensions and contradictions of American character. Film screenings outside of class, from 5-7 PM on at least a half-dozen evenings, are mandatory. Students should also expect to deal with controversial issues that may be construed as "offensive" or "difficult." Texts may include: Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave; Erdrich, Love Medicine; Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!; Franklin, Autobiography; Melville, Benito Cereno; Morrison, Beloved; Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn. Films may include: Ford, The Searchers; Griffith, The Birth of a Nation; Scorsese, Taxi Driver; Welles, Citizen Kane; and lesser known independent films.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
On Beauty
Professor Daniel Tiffany
MW, 2:00 - 3:20

Beauty is a touchy subject these days--in part, some would say, because beauty has disappeared, or been pushed, from the horizon of serious discussion. Just to talk about beauty as an idea today, we usually have to historicize it (relegate it to the past), or approach it ironically (to speak as if something were beautiful). What would it mean, however, to take seriously the pleasures, the anxieties, and the power we associate with beauty? Would it be necessary to recover a sense of the relation between philosophy and beauty, or between art and beauty? To begin to answer these many questions about beauty, we will read widely in the history of aesthetics (the philosophy of art), but also analyze essays of art and literary criticism, by authors ranging from Edmund Burke to Arthur Danto to Roland Barthes. We will consider the enormous impact of popular culture on contemporary notions of beauty, moving from Vogue magazine to fractal diagrams to hip hop. In addition, to complicate our sense of beauty--and to discover its partial nature--we will read back and forth between poetry and philosophy, as if we might fashion, through dialogue, a kaleidoscopic sense of beauty. These imaginary conversations between (for example) Plato and Baudelaire, Lessing and Emily Dickinson, or Plotinus and John Ashbery, will form the backbone of our analytic project, and they will also supply us with a conceptual and imaginative vocabulary adequate to probing the mystery of beauty.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Pain and Suffering in Literature and Philosophy
Professor Natania Meeker
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

Critic and essayist Elaine Scarry has claimed that “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” On the one hand, we might agree with Scarry that pain can never be completely or truly expressed in words. On the other, we might also understand the act of writing as involving or producing moments of pain and suffering. Not only can writing be painful, but the desire to write in the first place can often be linked to an experience of pain or to an episode of suffering. In this course, we will examine the ways in which an eclectic series of writers--novelists, poets, philosophers, and playwrights--have represented pain in their works. In addition, we will investigate the role played by pain and suffering in generating written texts. We will look at the idea of pain as both an inspiration for works of literature and as the basis for philosophical systems, and in doing so we will pose some of the following questions: how do we represent pain? how does it define our experience(s)? how do we escape it? is there a connection between the experience of pain and the act of thinking? is writing necessarily a form of suffering? We will try to understand how pain and suffering provide not only a starting point for reflection on human existence but a kind of limit to language itself--a boundary made visible in the moment when words don’t seem to be able to express what exactly makes pain so painful. We will also look closely at the writings of some philosophers who themselves were intimately acquainted with the experience of pain (often as a result of illness) in order to decipher what place this knowledge of suffering might have occupied in their works. Finally, we will attempt to think about the practice of writing as an effort to mitigate or assuage different forms of suffering. Readings will include: Jim Crace, Being Dead; the Book of Job; Sigmund Freud, Dora; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Montaigne, Essays; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Rousseau, Confessions; selections from Seneca’s Letters; Shakespeare, King Lear.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Philosophy in Fiction
Professor Arnold Heidsieck
MW, 3:30 - 4:50

This course offers discussions of selected early twentieth-century novels--and how philosophical theories from the German tradition might help to interpret them. Topics include: a young person's struggle between political propriety and his conscience; satirical-ironic perversions of natural law and criminal justice; the proposition of a morally right or wrong rule for action as right or wrong for each and every person in like cases alike; values and conscience as expressions of people’s resentment and “will to power”; the sexual or aggressive origin of consciousness, culture, and neurosis. Readings from Conrad, Kafka, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Plato and His Contemporaries
Professor Frank Lewis
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

Plato is one of the towering figures of Greek philosophy and literature. He is also our major source for the life and work of Socrates, who died in 399 B.C., when Plato was in his late twenties. Plato and Socrates alike stood in opposition to the methods and doctrines of the Greek Sophists, Protagoras, Gorgias, and others. The lives and thought of the Sophists are reflected not only in their own writings, but also in a variety of other contemporary documents, including the work of the comic playwright, Aristophanes, and the contemporary historian, Thucydides. Most important of all, the complex relations among Socrates, the Sophists, and Plato, are portrayed in the early dialogues of Plato, where the figure of Socrates is at centre stage (Socrates himself wrote nothing). These various ingredients are only part of the mix that makes up Plato’s mature thinking in the middle and later dialogues. Our chief focus will be the writings of Plato himself, which combine great literature and great philosophy in a single package. Other readings will include: the Sophists, Protagoras, Gorgias, and Antiphon; the comic playwright, Aristophanes; and the historian, Thucydides.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Poetry, Evidence, and Methods of Reading
Professor Joseph Dane
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50
CANCELLED: 5/24/02

How do we read poetry? What constitutes evidence about poetry? How do we go about establishing some method for reading particular poems or groups of poems? Readings will consist of four different types of verse collections from four different periods: the collected poetry of Wallace Stevens, Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, the cavalier poets of the 17th century, and the sonnets of Shakespeare. We will read these poems chronologically, primarily as a means to study the vocabulary and conventions from earlier poets used by later ones. We will not be concerned primarily with the aesthetic aspect of poetry, nor with imaginative readings and interpretations of individual poems. We will look at individual poems and poetry collections as problems to be solved, and solved particularly by literary-historical methods.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Political Violence in Russian Culture
Professor Marcus Levitt
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50

In the search for truth and justice, Russians have often been torn between doctrines of love and coercion. To frame this as a question: To what extent is violence—justified as a means toward just ends, and imposed in a variety of forms and degrees—an inevitable part of our own moral and political culture? Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece of 1969, Andrei Rublev, may serve as a framing device and introduction for the course. This film offers a dramatic picture of violence in medieval Russia, and centers on the theological debate over whether human evil can be overcome. The next section of the course examines some primary documents of the Judeo-Christian tradition—selections from Exodus and the Gospels. These will be also discussed with reference to Martin Scorcese’s film, The Last Temptation of Christ. The course then moves into the nineteenth century—first, the revolutionary tradition and then two responses—Dostoevsky’s “ideological novels” (meant as a direct response to the Revolutionaries’ theories) and Tolstoy’s Non-Violence. At many moments in Russian history, the state openly advocated “progress through coercion,” political violence from above. It was largely in reaction to this that the revolutionary tradition embraced violence—paradoxically, as a means to put an end to it. This contradiction left a profound mark on the Soviet regime, and the singularly violent twentieth century, which will form the last section of this course.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Prescriptions for Faith: Jews and Christians of the First Centuries
Professor Yaffe Weisman
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

The two centuries before the birth of Jesus and the two centuries that followed his crucifixion witnessed the evolution of two faiths, their religious practices and institutional paradigms, that significantly influenced Western culture. During these centuries, Jewish and early Christian literatures such as the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Christian Scriptures helped inform and shape people's diverse faiths in a challenging historical context. This course examines, through reading and interpreting the literature of the time, the historical and theological developments in Judaism during the Greco-Roman period, the emergence of Christianity, and the dynamics between the two traditions during those years. The texts read in the class will reflect the competing ideas and responses to the different sects to the particular historical crises, the variety of messianic expectations and other hopes for the future, the circumstances that account for the separation of Judaism and Christianity, and the key concepts and assumptions of these traditions that continue to influence Western culture.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Religion and Community in the Ancient World
Professor Clifford Ando
MWF, 12:00 - 12:50

As late twentieth-century Americans we often assume that we can separate the religious from the secular, but this assumption stands in contradiction to the beliefs that obtained throughout the ancient world. Yet acknowledging that religious concerns shaped all forms of artistic endeavor does not provide an interpretive key with which to unlock the secrets of ancient texts. On the contrary, it prompts a series of difficult questions. How does literature stand in relation to religion? How have some texts been privileged (or dismissed) as mere literature or mere Scripture? What role do texts have in shaping religious communities and assigning individuals a place in the various communities to which they belong? How do texts mediate the demands of family, church and state? Could readers then, and should readers now, read these texts without engaging their religious dimensions? We will draw the literature of Judaism, Greece, Rome and Christianity over a period of a thousand years, from early in the first millenium B.C.E. to the fourth century of this era. The readings include both well-known and little-read texts from many different genres, including tragedy, autobiography, prose fiction, history, elegiac poetry and martyr acts. Possible readings include: Genesis; Aeschylus, Oresteia; Sophocles, Antigone; Euripides, The Bacchae and Hippolytus; Joseph and Aseneth; Josephus, Autobiography; The Gospel of John; The Acts of Paul and Thecla; Revelation; Ovid, Fasti; Livy, History of Rome, Book 1; Symmachus, Relatio 3; Libanius, "For the temples"; The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas; Jerome, Letter to Eustochium.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Religious Experience and the Making of Western Culture
Professor Sheila Briggs
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50

This course looks at how the cultural identity and attitudes of modern Westerners have been shaped by a distinctive religious past. We will concentrate on those texts that modern Westerners have designated as religious classics. We will also be looking at religious music and art, especially at the ways in which these have interacted with written traditions. The reading list includes The Epic of Gilgamesh; Euripides, Bacchae; Apuleius, The Golden Ass; Augustine, Confessions; The Rule of Benedict; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love; John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; Friedrich Schleiermacher, Speeches on Religion; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; selections which look at the construction of "minority" religious experiences in modernity (Jewish writers such as Martin Buber, African-American spirituals); and "Fall and Redemption Narratives" (selections from Genesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost, J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the TV series Babylon 5). Music sources will include selections from Gregorian Chant, J.S. Bach and other composers/compositions which illustrate the broader socio-cultural context of musical production. Visual material will include published sources (e.g., the architecture and sculpture of Chartes Cathedral) as well as visits to the Getty and Norton Simon museums. I may also show short video clips beyond the selection from Babylon 5.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Shakespeare and Our Contemporaries
Professor Rebecca Lemon
MW, 4:30 - 5:50

This course explores some of Shakespeare's major tragedies both as literary texts and as Renaissance stage productions. We will pay particular attention to the issue of Shakespearean tragedy and its adaptations: how was Shakespeare himself a rewriter, taking sixteenth-century literary texts and adapting them for the stage? How have Shakespeare's plays been adapted by twentieth-century writers and directors? In each unit, we will start with Shakespeare's adaptation of a literary text for the stage, examining how he revised his Renaissance source material such as Holinshed's Chronicles, More's History of Richard III, or Cinthio's Hecatommithi. Having examined Shakespeare's play, each unit will then end by studying twentieth-century adaptations of the play, including novels, films, or stage productions that offer bold, modern rewritings of Shakespeare's text.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Tales of Witches, Rogues, and Madmen in Early Modern Spain
Professor Bruce R. Burningham
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50

Between 1492 and 1681, two crucial events occurred in Spain which helped to define “modern” civilization: 1) the creation of the world’s first modern, bureaucratic state, designed to ensure the smooth functioning of a global empire larger, wealthier and more internationally entangled than had ever before existed; and 2) the rise of the “novel” as the preeminent literary genre of the last four hundred years. Through a close reading of several works of fiction whose main characters are witches, rogues, and madmen--and who thus operate largely on the margins of this imperial society--this course will examine the following issues (among others); the representation of “deviancy” and its role in undermining many of the social, cultural, and religious foundations of the Hapsburg empire; the representation of an “urban” environment in which deviant behavior is often portrayed (not un-problematically) as an asset rather than a detriment to social ascendancy; the development of an abrasive, “picaresque” aesthetic in stark contrast to the more idyllic literary forms of the period; the creation of an anti-heroic protagonist who stands in opposition to the archetypal hero of earlier literary genres; and the playful fabrication of implied “narrators,” ”documents,” and “readers” in the evolution of our “modern” approach to literature. Readings will include Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (1499); the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554); Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler (1626); two of Miguel de Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories, “Rinconete and Cortadillo” and “The Dogs Colloquy” (1613); and Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605;1615).

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Virgin of Guadalupe: Devotion and Nationalism
Professor Roberto Lint-Sagarena
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

This course offers a historical study of both religious and social devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The geographic and temporal focus of the class ranges widely from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to contemporary Los Angeles. The issues considered range thematically from colonialism, cultural change and constructions of gender to migration, politics and religion. And, the central focus of the class--the cult and image of the Virgin of Guadalupe--is intended to bring all of these elements into conversation. The tension between breadth and topical focus is intended to foster critical analytic skills; it allows students to study a single topic from multiple historical vantage points and employ interpretative strategies from various disciplines: namely Religious Studies, History, Art History and Anthropology. The required texts include: The Conquest of New Spain, Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Reina de las Américas: Pieza de arte del museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe (bilingual edition), Two Guadalupes: Hispanic Legends and Magic Tales from Northern New Mexico, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery 1880-1910, Bless Me, Ultima, Signs From the Heart: California Chicano Murals, Poems, Protest, and a Dream (selected writings), The Broken Spears, The Codex Borgia, The Codex Chimalpahin, The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago De Compostela, The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Lazo de la Vega’s Huei Tlamahuicoltica of 1649, and other selections in a course reader.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Literature and Film
Professor Tania Modleski
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

This course will look at how women have been portrayed in poems, stories, novels and films. After a general survey of images of women in literature and film, we will focus on the question of how women have functioned in the culture's most popular kind of stories (such as love stories, war stories, and Westerns) and how they have modified and transformed these stories by putting themselves at the center. The course will address fundamental issues in the study of film and literary criticism and interpretation. These include: What are the mechanisms used in literature and film that shape interpretation? Are there specifically feminine modes of storytelling? Does interpretation have anything to do with the gender of the reader or viewer? To what extent do other variables besides gender such as age, ethnicity, race, and sexuality inform the practices of writing and reading? What is the relation of film and literature? Readings include short works by such authors as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan Glaspell, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, May Sarton, Tillie Olsen, Bharati Mukherjee, Doris Lessing, Gloria E. Anzaldua, Max Apple, George Lefferts, Heinrich Heine, Nicholasa Mohr, Jade Snow Wong, and many others. Novels include: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country; Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire. Selections will be made from the following list of films: Born on the Fourth of July; Dogfight; Ride the High Country; The Ballad of Little Jo; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Thelma and Louise.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Literature and Art
Professor Gloria Orenstein
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

This course is intended to present and examine the issues and feminist analyses surrounding discussions about women and creativity, both in literature and the visual arts in the western tradition. It should serve as an introduction to the feminist paradigms and problematics involved in a gendered analysis of creation in other arts, as well. In order to enlarge the scope of our understanding of the patriarchal and feminist diversities, we will also consider an alternative creative system -- that of the pre-patriarchal era and of the Goddess civilization. The readings will include books from the following list: Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women; Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet; Judy Chicago, Through the Flower; The Power of Feminist Art Ed. by Broude and Garrard; The Guerilla Girls Bedside Companion of Art History; Art and Sexual Politics, Ed. T. Hess, essay by Linda Nochlin; Alias Olympia, by Eunice Lipton; and Les Guerrillères by Monique Wittig.

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Category I

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Category VI