ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
African American Art
Professor Holloway
TTh, 3:30 - 4:50

This course examines the fine arts tradition of people of African descent in the United States. Major paintings, sculpture, graphic arts and photographs created by African American artists from the late eighteenth century to the present will be studied in chronological order. Artists covered will include: Joshua Johnston, Robert Duncanson, Edmonia Lewis, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Sargent Johnson, Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Adrian Piper, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Faith Ringgold. How have Americans of African descent participated in artistic practice? How have they confronted issues of identity and racism? What is the market for and reception of their art? How have American art institutions received this work? We will consider the history and culture of a historically oppressed group within the United States, which will challenge and enhance students’ knowledge about the nation’s history. Students will discover how the study of art can augment their understanding of culture and society. The required texts for this class will be assembled in a Course Reader that will be available for purchase, and the books containing these texts will be available on Course Reserve at the Architecture and Fine Art [AFA] Library in Watt Hall. Recommended reading includes John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans; Samella Lewis, African American Art and Artists; and Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Ancient Novel
Professor Gilhuly
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50

This course is intended to serve as a general introduction to the ancient novel. We will begin by reviewing the development of prose fiction in antiquity, reading the texts that were most influential on the genre. Ancient novels have recently become a focus of scholarly attention especially insofar as they represent changing conceptions of eros, gender, class, death, and identity. We will consider these issues as they are elaborated within the genre with a view toward understanding the ideological forces that inform these representations. The ancient romance emerged in a period of cultural interaction, a time when people of various backgrounds -- Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, and others -- crossed cultural boundaries relatively easily, while they lived under Roman rule, and we will try to locate the texts within the specific historical situations in which they were written. The reading list includes The Odyssey of Homer, Plato's Symposium, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Chariton's Chaereas and Challirhoe, Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story, Xenophon's Ephesian Tale, Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, The Golden Ass, Apuleius, and The Satyricon.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Art and Society in the Ancient World
Professor Pollini
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

This course will examine specific works of art and architecture of the ancient world in a historical and cultural context. This is not a course about art appreciation or connoisseurship. Instead, the focus will be on those monuments of art and architecture that best represent the religious beliefs, interests, concerns, and aspirations of the society that produced them. Attention will be given to modern misperceptions of the ancient world, as a result of much of our information about it having been filtered in the past through a biased Judeo-Christian tradition. Other topics of consideration include the nature of the visual evidence, how fragmentary monuments of art and architecture can be reconstructed, how materials and techniques might have imposed restrictions on the artist/architect, and the limitations of art in reconstructing the past. The texts for the course will include: Marilyn Stokstad, Art History; Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing about Art; and a course manual.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Biography and the Renaissance Artist
Professor Howe
MW, 3:30 - 4:50

This course will encourage students to explore the relationship between text and image by interrogating the work of art from the perspective of the maker/creator as well as the perspective of the viewer, whether Renaissance or modern. By text, I intend quite literally to discuss the biographies of the artists, sculptors and architects who created specific works. And by image, I mean the analysis -- both formal and iconographic -- of the works themselves. The main focus will be on primary sources relating the lives of the artists, namely biographies and autobiographies. Secondary sources will offer alternative views of the lives of the artists (psychobiography, myth, documentation) and specific readings of the works of art. Students will be expected to produce critical biographies of the artists as well as personal interpretations of selected works. 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
Border and Spirit, Land and Nation: The "Heart" Land in Literature and Film
Professor McKeena
MWF, 12:00 - 12:50

This course is designed to draw the student’s attention to the underlying structures of signification that both structure texts and produce them. By using the metaphor of the border to indicate the encounter between cultures, races and genders, the student will come to understand the complexities of representation and production of cultural forms. The Border, as Gloria Anzaldua has famously indicated, is not a comfortable place, it is "a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition." (Borderlands/la frontera, p.3) The United States has been created out of struggles between nations and peoples, for land and for control over self-determination. The connections between real and metaphoric borders and identity, between land and spirit are central to uncovering the impulse to establish place and nation, as well as to produce lasting reminders of these struggles in art. Students will read a selection of literary texts and will view several films in which these issues are key. They will also read supporting critical essays to guide them in their critical reading and viewing. The course bibliography includes Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres; Helen Marie Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Willa Cather, O Pioneers; Katerine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas; Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima; Tomas Rivera, Y no se lo trago la tierra, And the Earth did not Devour Him; N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn; Ana Castillo, So Far From God; Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart; Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time; Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don; Louise Erdrich, Tracks; and Toni Morrison, Sula. The films include Lone Star (John Sayles), The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (Moctesuma Esparaza) and Tierra (Paul Espinosa).

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Chinese Imagination: Culture in Fiction
Professor Hayden
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

This course will introduce examples and problems of Chinese moral culture through sixty-one short stories and one novel. These works of traditional fiction are the original versions as translated into English, with the exception of the novel Three Kingdoms, the translation of which is abridged. No prior knowledge of Chinese culture or language is assumed. The course will examine the actions of fictional characters in the context of the three ethical systems of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. What are the norms and how are they followed or violated? Topics include human and celestial justice and the role of individual ambition in the cycle of history. The texts will include Traditional Chinese Stories, Themes and Variations and Three Kingdoms, China’s Epic Drama.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
City of Myth
Professor Seifrid
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50

This course will explore St. Petersburg as an extraordinary cultural phenomenon: not just the social and economic phenomenon that is a city, but a "text" in its own right. It served (or one should again say "serves") as a text in two respects. Unlike other Russian cities that had arisen more or less organically in the middle ages, it was the willful creation of Peter I, his "window opening onto Europe" which was also intended in its function and design to mirror that Europe. But the representation of Peter’s city in Russian culture (primarily literature but other arts as well) contributed to the creation of a "myth of St. Petersburg" that was in turn projected onto and influenced the city’s "reality," if it can be called that. As Dostoevsky’s narrator put it in Notes from Underground, this was "the most abstract and premeditated city in the world." In pursuit of St. Petersburg’s cultural identity this course will examine several major works of Russian fiction, but in doing so it will also illustrate those works’ close connection with their urban setting, with Russian political power (the presence of the tsar’s court), and with Russian geopolitics (the city was a window on Europe, but also a paradoxical capital poised at the edge of its empire). The reading list includes Pushkin, "The Bronze Horseman" and Eugene Onegin; Gogol, "Nevsky Avenue," "The Nose," and "The Overcoat"; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Bely, Petersburg; Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, and Brodsky, "A Guide to a Renamed City."

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Classics And Contemporary Fairy Tales
Professor Bender
TTh, 12:30 - 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 of Greek Philosophy and Literature
Professor Robb
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

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 Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cleanthes.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Cross Cultural Rhetoric
Professor Green
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

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
Culture, Conformity and Revolt
Professor Rollo
MWF, 1:00 - 1:50

The course will consider the themes of revolt and conformity in literary works written between the Middle Ages and the present and in late twentieth-century popular culture. We shall ask certain fundamental questions: what social or political forces lead people to rebel? When is rebellion simply a type of conformism or a pretext for personal gain, glory and glamour? During which particular periods of history have significant social changes taken place? What rebellious role is played by clothes, accessories, cosmetics and shoes? The ambiguous revolutions under analysis may be sensual (Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Mme. de LaFayette, The Princess of Cleves), sexual (Honoré de Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, André Gide, The Immoralist), political (Marguerite de Navarre, excerpts from The Heptameron, Geoffrey Chaucer, excerpts from The Canterberry Tales), educational (The Quest of the Holy Grail) or philosophic (Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head, Albert Camus, The Stranger). Some attention will also be devoted to the manipulation of revolt in the pursuit of money and self-glorification (products by Madonna, music and film featuring The Sex Pistols and Doris Day).

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Girlhood: Twentieth Century Perspectives
Professor Gambrell
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50
MWF, 11:00 - 11:50

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
How El Norte Became the Southwest
Professor Lint-Sagarena
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

This Arts and Letters course offers a survey of literary and visual representations of the transformation of region in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Themes and issues covered will include: Mexican conceptions of frontier, constructions of identity by Tejanos, Californios, and Hispanos, depictions of the Mexican American War, ethnicity and the western Gold Rushes, the literature of dispossession, boosterism, cultural and religious changes. The course will center on close readings of texts such as: Ruiz Burton's The Squatter and the Don, Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, versions of The Life and Times of Juaquin Murrieta, and the screenplay of the movie Lone Star.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Human Reason: Its Scope and Limits
Professor Levin
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

Human beings have often conceived themselves as unique among animals in exhibiting rationality. But what is it to be rational, and just how rational do we turn out to be? This course explores the development of the Western conception of rationality in thought and action, and attempts to determine, by examining classical and modern philosophical texts, whether we are primarily creatures of reason or rather of instinct and passion. Books for the course include: Plato, The Protagoras; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy; Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Nietszche, The Genealogy of Morals.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Imagination and Revolution in Modern Russian Literature
Professor Presto
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

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
Landscape and Poetry
Professor 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
Liars, Promise-Breakers and Freeloaders
Professor Yaffe
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50

In this course, we will discuss the following old and enduring questions: What is the relationship between morality and self-interest? Is morality simply enlightened self-interest? Or, if not, why ought we ever act morally when morality demands that we act contrary to self-interest? We will examine these questions by considering the ethics of everyday life: Why should we tell the truth? Why should we keep our promises? And, why should we, for instance, pay for public television when we know full well that others will pay enough to make it available to us? That is, why shouldn’t we be freeloaders? The course will address these questions through examination of the writings of philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries (including Hobbes, Hume and Kant), through the writings of contemporary philosophers who respond to and develop answers proposed by these 17th and 18th century figures (including John Rawls, Sissela Bok, Elizabeth Anscombe, Barbara Herman, Thomas Scanlon and David Gauthier), and through works of film and literature that dramatize the questions being discussed. Throughout, the emphasis will be on the close reading of difficult texts that reward the time they are given. In the case of each of these topics of the course, we will start by first looking at a work of fiction that raises and examines the particular ethical questions under discussion. We will then move on to consider the views of those who think that the particular obligation in question is just a form of enlightened self-interest; we ought not to lie, for instance, on views of this sort, because, in the long run, our own interests are not served by doing so. Then we will move on to consider alternative ways of understanding the relevant obligation. In each case, we will look at broadly Humean and broadly Kantian accounts of the source of the obligation under discussion.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature and the Choosing Self
Professor 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 & 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 Jonah, Shakespeare's Othello, Willa Cather's The Professor's House,
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace, E.M. Forster's
Howard's End, and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. 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 Farenga
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

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 of Resistance
Professor Weisman
MW, 2:00 - 3:20

How does a culture react to oppression? What literary and artistic products are created in the process? Can literature be an act of resistance? What modes of overcoming oppression are suggested in such literature? The course will explore these issues in a variety of societies and groups that experience(d) oppression deriving from their cultural, religious, gender, and national affiliations. Students will analyze and discuss diverse genres of spiritual, political, military and cultural resistance to subjugation and oppressions, from antiquity to modernity. The various genres will include, but will not be limited to, texts such as biblical narratives, fiction, poetry, sermons, diaries, historical documents and political manifestos, films, and other modes of artistic expression created by authors such as Atwood, Bradbury, Camus, the Dalai Lama, Dylan, Ginsberg, M.L. King Jr., Marx, Orwell, Wolf, and many others. While some lectures will provide the theoretical context for class discussions, most of the critical and analytical work will happen in class as a product of the students' contributions and participation.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Literature, Science and Science Fiction
Professor Dilligan
MWF, 10:00 - 10:50

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, 12:30 - 1:50

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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Eros, the god of love, was a powerful character in the minds of the ancient Greeks, one whom they often struggled to understand, and sometimes to escape. This course examines the Greek understandings of love and desire, through texts which present philosophical discussions, personifications of Eros, and people under his influence. Also central to the course will be the representations of desiring and desired persons found in Greek art. Combining these visual and written texts, we will explore the workings of desire in various social contexts, from private parties to religious festivals, and as experienced by such different "characters" as teen-agers, married women, and the gods. We will also discuss why certain types of desire might have been seen as dangerous and examine the efforts of society to control them. Primary texts will include: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Euripides’ Medea, and selections from Sappho, among other poets.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Masterpieces of the Short Story
Professor Zholkovsky
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

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
Medieval Art and Christian Liturgy
Professor Malone
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

This introductory course examines the Christian liturgical year in relation to medieval art and architecture of Western Europe. Beginning with Advent and Christmas, the successive feast days of the year and the important role that visual culture played in their celebration will be examined. Primary readings from the Bible, sermons, and monastic customs as well as secondary sources concerning particular feasts and their depiction from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries will be assigned for discussion. Comparisons of artistic imagery and sermons will help to define the devotional significance of each feast. In particular, visual imagery (posted in advance on the web) will be decoded to show how these signs of spiritual life emphasized theological ideas. Liturgical practice and innovations will also be correlated with imagery (manuscripts, mosaics, sculpture) and with architectural function to help reveal changes in devotion.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Modern Russian Art
Professor Bowlt
TTh, 8:00 - 9:20

The course begins with the 18th century and ends with the Putin period, but concentration is on the later 19th century and the years just before and after the October Revolution. Major paintings, some sculptures, architectural monuments, and applied designs form the visual material essential to this course and they will be examined in chronological sequence. These artifacts will be described and analyzed for their own sake and also as symbols and manifestations of social, political, and philosophical developments in Russian history. The student will gain an insight into the esthetic and cultural concerns of Russia/Soviet Union that will supplement and enhance his or her knowledge of the more familiar chronologies of modern art history. The texts for the course are Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1663-1992 and John E. Bowlt, The Russian Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism. Students will also be asked to consult relevant publications held in the Art Library on campus, for example, James Billington, The Icon and the Axe; Alan Bird, A History of Russian Painting; John E. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Silver Age; George Heard Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia; Beverley Kean, All the Empty Palaces; Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism; and Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Modernity and the City
Professor Norindr
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

The city occupies a privileged place in the imaginary of writers, poets, philosophers, architects, filmmakers, and urban planners. It is an archetype of the imaginary which manifests itself in different guises (the ancient city, the forbidden city, the city of man/woman, the modern city, and so on). If the city is a test, as many writers and critics have claimed, how are we to read it, to interpret it, to make sense of it? What are the poetic, political and ideological stakes? The city will be seen as the focal point not only for a comparative analysis of the dynamics of technological society and its effects on artistic production, but also as the emblematic site for the production of a modern, postmodern, or postcolonial spatial imaginary from which new metropolitan forms have emerged. Primary readings will include texts by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Andr Breton, Albert Camus, Italo Calvino, Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Marguerite Duras, Thomas Mann, and Toni Morrison.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Music and Society in the Renaissance, 1400 - 1610
Professor Ongaro
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

The period between 1440 and 1610 is a time of exciting changes in the intellectual, social, political, scientific and religious life of Western Europe. Music had a prominent place in this society, not only as entertainment, but also as a religious and political statement. In this course we will explore how musicians of the period--the contemporaries, among others, of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Martin Luther, Christopher Columbus, Queen Elizabeth I--reacted to their environment in producing and marketing their music. No prior knowledge of music is required; important musical concepts and musical examples will be studied and illustrated in class, as needed. The readings will include excerpts from the writings of Renaissance authors, as well as from modern studies of the period.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Music and the Modern Imagination
Professor Simms
MW, 2:00 - 3:20

This class will be devoted to a close study of music from the 20th century that expresses important characteristics of the modern imagination--including social and scientific phenomena, political and racial ideologies, and ideas from the other fine arts and letters of the century. To learn how music intersects the modern world, we will read critical essays, scientific writings, polemics, and works of literature and assess in detail their influence upon selected musical compositions and the outlook of major composers. No reading knowledge of music is necessary, although repeated listening to the assigned music is required. The class sessions will contain lectures, student presentations, and guided discussions. All of the assigned listening is found on cassette tapes on reserve for this class in the Music Library, and the assigned reading is collected in an anthology that may be purchased at the bookstore.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Novels and Anti-Novels
Professor Levitt
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

In this course we will try to understand the peculiar literary and cultural phenomenon of the "Russian novel" during its nineteenth century golden age, when it became a major vehicle of Russian cultural self-expression. This period, from Pushkin to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, was an era of bold artistic and intellectual experimentation and Russia’s discovery of its cultural identity. The course will examine the "Russianness" of the Russian novel, which evolved through a dialogue with and deviation from European forms, to the point of consistently producing specimens of its own "anti-genre." We will see how questions of literary form and genre are themselves basic carriers of meaning and will explore the ways in which Russian novels sought new expressive means to convey new cultural realities and aesthetic values. The focus will be on reading texts in their own cultural terms and examining their social-critical and philosophical stances, gender problematic, response to modernity, interrogation of genre, narrative, and language. In this way, the students will also become aware of modern critical approaches to literature and the novel. The problem of translation will also be addressed, as we will pay attention to the mis- and re-interpretations involved in the transmission of the texts from one language (Russian) into another (English). The reading list includes: Pushkin, Eugene Onegin; Lermontov, A Hero of Our Times; Gogol, Dead Souls; Goncharov, Oblomov; Turgenev, Fathers and Sons; Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground or Crime and Punishment; and Tolstoy, "The Kreuzer Sonata".

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The One Act Play in World Drama
Professor Lazar
MF, 8:30 - 9:50

The objective of this course is to acquaint the student with a series of short plays, representing a great variety of genres, dramatic styles and techniques, and a broad range of historical periods and cultures. The plays and authors are discussed in their historical and ideological contexts. The analysis of the plays in the classroom will be applied by the students in their essays on a comparative topic. The readings will include Rutebeuf, The Miracle of Theophilus; Anonymous, Everyman; H. Sachs, The Wandering Scholar; Beolco, Ruzzante Returns from Wars; Molière, The Flying Doctor; Strindberg, Miss Julie: The Stronger; O’Neill, Before Breakfast; Ghelderode, Escurial; Hasenclever, Humanity; Goll, Methusalem; Cocteau, Wedding at the Eiffel Tower; O’Casey, Bedtime Story; Thornton Wilder, The Long Christmas Dinner; Brecht, The Jewish Wife; Arrabal, Picnic on the Battlefield; Ionesco, The Bald Soprano; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Pinter, The Dumb Waiter; and Albee, Zoo Story.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Outsider in Modern German Literature and Film
Professor Clausing
MW, 12:00 - 2:00

This course will analyze the predicament of the outsider, the individual who challenges or ignores social norms, the individual who may be excluded from the mainstream, as presented in twentieth-century German literature and film. Beginning with the aftermath of World War I, this thematic approach will examine the impact on the individual of the economic, social, and political conditions that gave rise to Nazi Germany and the holocaust, the subdivision of the country, and the democratic and reunited multicultural modern state, the Federal Republic of Germany. Emphasis will be on the development of analytical skills applied to depictions of the individual’s coping with ever-changing conditions. Literary works to be studied include The Trial (Kafka), The Threepenny Opera (Brecht), The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy (Duerrenmatt), The Tin Drum (Grass), The White Rose (Scholl), The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Boell), How German Is It? (Abish). Films to be analyzed will include Kuhle Wampe, The Blue Angel, The Threepenny Opera, M, The Trial, Jud Suess, Triumph of the Will, The White Rose, The Visit, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Christiane F., Sugarbaby, The Promise, Maybe … Maybe Not, Beyond Silence, and others.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Pain and Suffering in Literature and Philosophy
Professor Meeker
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

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: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the Book of Job, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies, Montaigne’s Essays, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Rousseau’s Confessions, selections from Seneca’s Dialogues, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Virginia Woolf’s "On Being Ill."

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Post Cards from the Past: Travel Writing in Pre-Modern Europe
Professor Frisch
MW, 2:00 - 3:20

This course will introduce you to European travel writers of the 13th-16th centuries, and to the maps and visual images they both consulted and produced. Some of the authors will be familiar to you, if only in name, such as Marco Polo, Cristoforo Colombo and Amerigo Vespucci; others, no less prominent in their own time, play a less vivid role in our current cultural imagination (e.g. Bartolome de Las Casas and Michel de Montaigne). One of the major goals of the course is in fact to try to understand how and why certain of these travelers have been remembered (be it as heroic explorers or as the agents of mass murder)while others have faded from the cultural landscape. Several types of questions will help us move toward this goal: How do these travelers represent themselves and their motivations for travel in their writings? How were they represented by other writers in their own time, and how are they represented in ours? How do they represent the lands and people that they encounter? How were these tales of travel interpreted by their first readers? What are some of the cultural and technological factors that helped shape ideas about non-European, non-Christian civilizations in the 13th-16th centuries? Moving closer to our own day, will look at how pre-modern European travel accounts have shaped the modern Western image of Africa, America, Europe and Asia.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Race, Religion and Rhetoric in America
Professor Iwamura
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

In this course, we will explore the complex intersections of race and religion in contemporary America through the rhetorical analysis of written texts and films. In the ongoing formation of a national religious identity, two competing models have emerged: America as "one nation under God," and America as a land of religious freedom and tolerance. We will examine how these ideological frameworks complicate and are complicated by religious position and racial-ethnic identity. We will also investigate the concept of a unified national religious identity by critically analyzing popular constructions of the religious "other" on which this identity relies. Primary materials include: Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial; James Cone, Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968-1998; Leslie Maron Silko, Ceremony; Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza; David Henry Hwang, Golden Child; Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century; and a course reader. Films include: The Believers, Little Buddha, Sankofa, and A Grave Matter.

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

An introduction to Renaissance Drama with special attention to the methods of interpretation--language, history, character and imagination--ways to understand and enjoy dramatic literature created for the Renaissance stage. We shall consider plays by Shakespeare and at least two of his contemporaries (Marlowe and Webster) to see how social, political, and religious concerns are defined and challenged by the action and poetry on the Renaissance stage. The class will read six or seven plays, consider historical information, discuss interpretations, possibly direct and/or act a few scenes, and explore ways to respond with short essays and exams. The reading list includes: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, and The Tempest; Marlowe, Dr. Faustus; and Webster, The White Devil.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Representing Modern Art
Professor Meyer
MW, 2:00 - 3:20

How have modern art and artists been portrayed in painting, photography, and film? This class considers the representation of individual artists, from Vincent Van Gogh to Robert Mapplethorpe, in both popular and elite culture. It traces how the idea of art as an avant-garde experience has been constructed in various media. And it looks at how visual artists have represented film and other forms of popular culture in their work. The class will include mandatory film and video screenings.

Films
Basquiat (dir. Julian Schnabel), 1996
Dirty Pictures (dir. Frank Pierson) 2000
Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen), 1957
High Art (dir. Lisa Cholodenko), 1998
Lust for Life (dir. Vincente Minelli), 1956.
Painters Painting (dir. Emile de Antonio), 1972.
Pollock (dir. Ed Harris), 2000.
The Public Eye (dir. Howard Franklin), 1992

Books
Barth, Miles, Weegee’s New York (Bulfinch Press, 2000).
De Salvo, Donna, Ray Johnson: Correspondences (Flammarion: 2000).
De Leeuw, Ronald, ed., The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (New York: Penguin USA, 1998).
Ferguson, Russell, ed., Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, exhibition catalogue (Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996).
Hauptman, Jodi, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999).
Morris, Catherine, Essential Cindy Sherman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001).
Warhol, Andy, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
(New York: Harvest Books, 1998).

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Representing the Holocaust: History, Memory and National Identity
Professor Gillerman
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

The act of remembering is related to the repository of images and ideals that constitute the societies in which we live. Memory has not only to do with the past, but with those who do the remembering. Far from being merely an individual experience, memory also constitutes a social act. We will explore the distinctive and often conflicting memories of the Holocaust produced in post- World War II America, Germany, and France. How did the French evolve the myth of the Resistance to appease their conscience and restore self-esteem? Why is Anne Frank the world's most famous Holocaust victim? How is an historical event like the Holocaust interpreted through a distinctively American lens? What happens when the Holocaust and Hollywood meet? Applying a multi-disciplinary approach to texts, this course will focus on questions of cultural and national identity as well as contemporary debates over historical methodology.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Right, Wrong and Tragedy in Literature
Professor Adler
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

Beginning with the Hebrew Bible and the Gospel of Mark, (both in Oxford translations) this course lays out some of the ancient Judeo-Christian definitions of goodness and evil. As a transition to the modern period, we shall examine Shakespeare’s Hamlet for its perspective on good and evil, and its treatment of the young person in turmoil about that polarity. Among modern authors who will be read are: Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, J.D. Salinger and Rebecca Goldstein. Students will be expected to develop a sense of the differences between the text as a self-contained cosmos and the text as referring to some condition in the lived world. Readings will include some critical theory on representation and gender perspective.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The Sexual Revolution
Professor Grant
MW, 3:30 - 4:50

The so-called "sexual revolution" occured in the U.S. in the 1960's. Its ethic, "if it feels good, do it," led to a relatively wide array of sexual experimentation and tolerance. The sexual revolution represents a unique moment of libertinism in the U.S., standing in stark contrast to the facade of sexual Puritanism in the 1950's and the moralism and fear of the post-AIDS 1980's. This course will trace its development and demise from the 1950's to the present.

Required Books:
Grace Metalious, Peyton Place
Jacqueline Susanne, Valley of the Dolls
Phillip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On
Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought
Linda Grant, Sexing the Millennium
Robert Rimmer, The Harrad Experiment

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Tolstoy and His Contemporaries
Professor Toulmin
MW, 3:30 - 4:50

Tolstoy – Count Leo Tolstoy to his fellows – was not just a "novelist" in the sense we understand today. He was also one of the most important moral thinkers on the European and the world scene of his time. (He had a deep influence, for example, on Gandhi, whose arguments for non-violence were inspired by his reading of Tolstoy.) At the same time, he questioned any claims that any ethical belief needs to be given an intellectual foundation: he was thus always a teacher, rather than a theorist. In this course, we shall read several of Tolstoy’s best-known stories--concentrating on his great novel, Anna Karenina – and contrast them with those of his contemporaries, in Russia and elsewhere. Our goal will be to throw light on the ways in which we can understand the moral problems that arise in the course of our lives, and the practical ways in which we deal with them. Readings will include other stories by Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich, early tales about the Caucasus, plus selected parts of War and Peace. Also Turgeniev's Uncle Vanya, Dostoievsky's The Idiot, etc. All students are not expected to read all of the stories--an impossible demand-- but each will read Anna Karenina, plus one or two others of their own choice.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Utopia and Anti-Utopia
Professor Alkon
MWF, 1:00 - 1:50

This course will consider the development, imaginative appeal, and significance of utopian fiction from its origins during the Renaissance to its uses in the twentieth century. The starting point will be Saint Thomas More's Utopia. Close analysis of it will serve to define the genre while also introducing methods of interpreting and judging this and related modes of literature. Other readings will include landmark works that illustrate how the classical utopian model inaugurated by More has been varied and applied: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Aruthur’s Court; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; and William Gibson, Neuromancer.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Visualing China
Professor Tseng
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

This course approaches ancient China through its art and archaeology, exploring the relationship of contemporary texts to archeological finds. It not only examines a selection of the most unique visual products in China, such as terra-cotta warriors, bronze mirrors and jade suits, but also their connection with ancient Chinese cosmology, mythology and political thought. There will be discussion of approaches to visual culture from a modern viewpoint, using texts such as Wu Hung’s Wu Liang Shrine and Lothar Ledderose’s Ten Thousand Things. To contextualize the art objects, the class also introduces contemporary Chinese texts (in English translation) as supplements to archaeological finds. Readings include The Art of War, Records of the Grand Historian and Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn Annals. Among the cases to be studied are the First Emperor's Mausoleum, Prince Liu Sheng's tomb, Wang Mang's ritual hall and Wu Liang's funerary shrines.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
War and Memory in Korean Literature
Professor Kim
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20

This course will examine autobiographical and fictional accounts depicting wars in the twentieth century, with special reference to Korea. We will examine works written during and after the Second World War and the Korean War. We will explore the special links between collective and individual experiences, and the centrality of memories as a means to construct the past.

Students will also investigate the historical and political realities at the root of imperialism and aggression. Works by Korean authors (Ahn, Cho, and Pak) will be closely examined along with recent publications by Korean-American writers (Nora Keller, Richard Kim, and Therese Park). Students will be encouraged to think about the complex interactions between human lives and the social, political, and economic conditions in which they emerge, especially during times of conflict and war. The required texts include: Ahn, Silver Stallion; Cho, Playing With Fire; Pak, "Winter Outing"; Nora Keller, Comfort Woman; and Kim, Lost Names. All readings are in English. No knowledge of Korean language, literature, or culture is required.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
War and the Literature of Trauma
Professor McCabe
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50

This class will focus primarily upon literature responding to World Wars I and II. We will explore the impact of modern technology on warfare and its consequences upon experience and identity. As we explore the horrors and inhumanity of war, we will investigate how gender influences the specific traumas of the front as well as those which permeate civilian life. We will also examine the way various writers construct "post-traumatic stress syndrome" in the aftermath of war. In addition, we will examine the representation of patriotism as well as pacifism, and how these representations craft the "other" as enemy as well as concepts of national identity. We will study fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose and films. Readings include Dos Passos, Three Soldiers; Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Shaw, Major Barbara; Stein, Wars I Have Seen; Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Three Guineas; and a selection of poetry. Films include Hitchcock, Saboteur and Wyler, Best Years of Our Lives.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Women in Ancient Literature
Professor Eskenazi
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

As heroes or helpmates, prophets or sages, victims or warriors, women make striking appearances in the Bible and other ancient Jewish literature. This course will examine these female representations, as well as their interpretations in later traditions. In addition to discovering the wide variety of women in the Bible and other ancient writings, our purpose will be to cultivate critical skills in assessing meanings derived from such texts. We will ask: What can we learn about beliefs concerning women? What do these reveal about the lives of actual women? What influence did these stories have on subsequent perceptions of gender issues? How do these stories find expression in today's world? We will concentrate on several critical approaches, including literary and historical. The books for the course include The Oxford Study Bible; Bellis, Helpmates; Harlots, Heroes: Women's Stories in the Hebrew Bible; Darr, Far More Precious than Jewels: Perspectives on Biblical Women; Meyer, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Woman in Context; Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality; and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
The World of the Red Chamber Dream
Professor Furth
TTh, 12:30 - 1:50

Hong lou meng, sometimes translated as A Dream of Red Mansions or The Story of the Stone, is probably the greatest masterpiece of fiction ever produced in China, and a work that has enchanted generations since it was first written in the mid eighteenth century. Composed over many years by Cao Xueqin, an idle scholar living in genteel poverty in Beijing, its l20 chapters are at once a mystical allegory, a tragic romance, a social novel of manners, and an encyclopedia of a great civilization's culture. This class will take the five volumes of A Dream as its core, using the elegant translation of David Hawkes, published by Penguin. Supporting readings will be from classical works of philosophy, poetry, fiction and drama that shaped the outlook and sensibilities of the author and audience of this work, and/or that are presented as significant in the lives of the novel's characters. These will include the Confucian Four Books (Analects of Confucius, Mencius, The Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean), the philosophical Daoist classic Zhuangzi, Tang Xianzu's sweeping 16th century dramatic opera Peony Pavillion (Mudan ting ), selections from the Qing anthology of Three Hundred Tang poems, and classic short stories including "The Yellow Millet Dream" and "The Story of Yingying." Thematically we will be concerned to use these readings as an introduction to Chinese civilization in its last century of security and prosperity before the coming of the West. We will be exploring how one enters the social and moral world of another culture through its works of art,and the boundaries between literature and history. Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century by Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski (Yale 1987) will serve as a historical reference and guide.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Writing Revolutions: New Fiction in Latin America
Professor Diaz
TTh, 2:00 - 3:20

In this course we will take up the phenomenon called "the new Latin American narrative," which includes works by authors such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Juan Rulfo, Luisa Valenzuela, and Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, the most significant forerunner of this major development in twentieth-century literature. We will frame the reading of these authors by addressing literary and historical factors, such as the Cuban Revolution and the internationalization of literary culture in Latin America, which coincided during the 1960s when this phenomenon was recognized inside and outside Latin America. Through close reading and formal analysis of novels and short fictions, we will see how these writers raise questions about political change, social transformation, and literary and cultural value. We will also explore how the new Latin American fiction interrogates the critical vocabulary and concepts usually employed for reading and interpreting works of narrative.

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