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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In this course we will examine contemporary cultural production in Latin America --with a focus on literature and film-- through the lenses of urban life. The Latin America city -- which Angel Rama once described as “la ciudad letrada”, or “lettered city”-- is a scenario where key aspects of local identities have been staged, shaped and debated --as the “war between civilization and barbarism”, the struggle between colonial legacies and modernizing projects, the ambivalent relation between core/peripheral modernities, etc. In the 1990s, a period marked by cultural globalization, economic neoliberalism and the weakening of democratic institutions, the city once again stages the crisis of social and political bonds, as well as new voices, narratives and figures traditionally excluded from the normative ideals of national identities. Through the analysis of the representations of urban life we will be able to approach the new social and cultural configurations emerging from the ruins --in the economic and the cultural sense-- of the Latin American nation-state. Readings include texts by Angel Rama (The Lettered City), Fernando Vallejo (Our Lady of the Assasins), Ricardo Piglia (Money to Burn), Pedro Lemebel (My Tender Matador), among others. We will also watch and discuss films by Gonzales Iñárritu (Amores Perros), Alejandro Agresti (Buenos Aires viceversa), María Novaro (Garden of Eden), Walter Salles (Central Station), Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles (City of God), and Fabián Bielinski (Nine queens ).

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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 will be from such authors as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cleanthes.

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In the melting pot of these United States, the experience of “difference” might be said to be the hallmark of modern American life. As an art form, comedy reveals the fault lines of American society as nothing else can; and no group has contributed to American comedic art more than the Jews. Traversing the borders between foreign and native-born, upper and lower class, high and low culture, and insider and outsider status, the American Jew has developed an acute eye for the distinctions and contradictions of American life. Not surprisingly, therefore, Jewish humor takes up many of the central themes of the American experience such as identity, war, love, religion, and politics. Through close readings of several classic works and assorted writings, we will explore such major cultural themes—all premised upon the divisions and diversity so characteristic of America—and all described so incisively and subversively by Jewish humor. Readings include: novels and memoirs by Groucho Marx, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Lenny Bruce; and short pieces by Jewish comedians and humorists such as Woody Allen, and Sandra Bernhard. In addition, assigned readings will be supplemented by excerpts from film and television, presented and discussed in class.

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Most people think humor is just fun -- it makes you laugh, it must be a good thing. The behaviorist Konrad Lorenz said, "Barking dogs may occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot." But Mark Twain said, "The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven." Which one is right? What are jokes for, and how do they really work? This course will survey major works of ancient Greek and Roman comedy -- plays by Aristophanes and Plautus, novels by Petronius and Apuleius. In addition, we will read two much less well-known works: the comic biography of Aesop, the legendary slave who wrote the Fables; and a collection of jokes that dates to late antiquity. With these works we will view current comic films that demonstrate the continuity of comic forms and themes in Western culture, and read a range of theories of humor, starting with Freud's great Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. We will also look at feminist film theory, gender theory, cultural anthropology, sociology, theater and media history and theory, African-American literary theory, Bakhtinian literary theory, and behavioral psychology. A visit from standup comic Emily Levine is planned, and probably a field trip to a comedy club. Readings include: Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves (FSG); Aristophanes, Acharnians, trans. Jeffrey Henderson (Focus); Aristophanes, Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women, trans. Jeffrey Henderson (Routledge); Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana); Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Norton); Petronius Satyricon, trans. J. P. Sullivan; Plautus, Rome and the Mysterious Orient, trans. Amy Richlin (Berkeley); and selections from the Hansen Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature (Indiana).

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Explorers and Nonconformists in Contemporary American Poetry
Mark Irwin
TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Section: 47509

Significant advancements in the arts, such as Virginia Woolf's interior monologues, Stravinksy's polytonal music, and Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism, often occur through the exaggeration or destruction of previous forms and ideas. In what ways does non-conformity lead to original and enduring art? How do cultural, scientific, and political ideas influence change? Which contemporary American poets have contributed most significantly to new directions in poetry? Beginning with introductory poems by Eliot, Williams, and Stevens, this course will explore the nonconformist work of poets from John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, and W.S. Merwin to that of Jorie Graham, Alice Notley, and many other less known poets. In addition, this course will reference many contemporary visual artists whose work has influenced poetry. Readings will include: Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy; Jorie Graham, Selected Poems and W.S. Merwin, The Second Four Books of Poems.

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ARTS AND LETTERS 100g
Fantastic Tales
Kirill Postoutenko
TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section 47455

This course will examine the question of genre in the works of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), particularly as that question focuses the issue of how a writer as a whole, as a cultural phenomenon, is received and read. Though Gogol emerged from the culture of Romanticism, he was quickly reinterpreted by Russian journalists as a “realist” critic of the Russian social order. Only at the end of the nineteenth century was the generally more accurate, but diametrically opposed, reading of Gogol as a writer of the fantastic and the absurd revived. The course will examine Gogol’s works in the intersecting light of these two critical traditions, with somewhat more emphasis placed on the genre of the fantastic. That emphasis will include selected works of English, French, and German “fantastic” literature. In addition to gaining some sense of the overall shape of a major writer’s oeuvre (the reading will span Gogol’s career from his early “Ukrainian” tales to his novel Dead Souls) students will become aware of how and why (to what ends) that oeuvre can come to be understood in radically different ways as it meets the demands of its culture. The reading list includes Gogol, “The Terrible Vengeance,” “The Portrait,” “Nevsky Avenue,” “The Nose,” “The Overcoat,” and Dead Souls; DeQuincy, Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Hoffmann, one or two selected tales; de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin; Belinsky, “A Survey of Russian Literature in 1847”; Gippius, “Gogol and the Devil”; Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made”; and Setchkarev, Gogol: His Life and Works.

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There is a long tradition, at least in the history of western thought, of thinking of persons as very different from all other creatures. The difference is supposed to consist in the fact that, whereas the behavior of any other animal is causally determined by factors outside the animal’s control, our actions are the product of our free will and we are responsible for what we do. Our criminal justice system is based on this belief; unless a special defense (e.g. insanity) is established, the law assumes that the defendant acted freely and is responsible for what she did. But is this belief justified? The rise of modern science, and, in particular, the rise of the various sciences of human behavior, has put increasing pressure on this traditional conception of ourselves. Many scientists and philosophers now believe that everything we do can, in principle at least, be given a causal explanation that traces back to factors outside our control. The philosophical problem of free will and determinism is the problem of understanding how, if at all, we can reconcile what science tells us about our place in nature with our belief that we are, in some sense, free and responsible. This course will provide an introduction to this philosophical problem. The reading list may include: Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will; Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Oliver Sacks, Awakenings; William S. Burroughs, Junky; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Quentin Smith and Nathan Oaklander, Time, Change and Freedom; and Susan Wolf, Freedom within Reason.

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In the multicultural society of the United States, people have multiple allegiances. Racial, ethnic, and immigrant groups construct their identities partly through distinct ways of speaking English. In this class, we will explore the connection between language and identity through novels, short stories, poetry, essays, film, and music. Several questions will drive the class: How is non-standard language used in various cultural media? How do minority groups use language to express both their American-ness and their distinctiveness? How does a group’s history and current distinctive situation affect its language? How have writers used linguistic variation to shape characters, identify class and cultural group conflicts, and create a world we recognize in imaginative work? In addition, we will explore the relationships between language and other social dimensions, such as race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and religion. Minority groups included on the syllabus are African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, Native Americans, and Hawaiians. Important goals of this class are to sharpen your ability to read, watch, and listen analytically, think critically, and express your thoughts well, both orally and in writing.

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This course will study how we create what it is we detest and disavow, how and why we make monsters, freaks, and deviants. More centrally, we will study how we construct ourselves by constructing the "outside." We will test the notion that we define ourselves (define what is normal, decent, and reasonable) by constructing and using the abnormal, the indecent, and the unreasonable. Our culture, at its most hysterical and repressive, creates images and stories of excess and repulsion and then enacts those stories through us. The result is that we define our world and our being by way of these presumably outrageous figures on the margins: the inside is there only because it forces an outside. Thus we will study both literary and non-literary texts, great works of literature about the monstrous, along with the daily papers, movies, and television. Much of the latter material will be drawn from whatever is current, whatever comes up during the course. Though we will be concerned about the construction of scapegoats, the course will try to go beyond this into a study of the cultural work done by our monster-making in defining the centers by which we live and view the world. The reading list includes: a short xeroxed packet of literary/cultural theory; Camus, The Stranger; Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides; Dickey, Deliverance; Bing, Do or Die (on L.A. gangs); Abbot, In the Belly of the Beast (on prison experience); Buford, Among the Thugs (British soccer thugs); Harris, The Silence of the Lambs; Gillman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Didion, Play It as It Lays; Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted; "Boys Don’t Cry"(film); Schmitz, Darkest Desire; Nabokov, Lolita; The Trials of Oscar Wilde; and Welsh, Trainspotting.

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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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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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This course will examine some of the remarkable works of literature produced in Russia during the 19th century--the golden age of the Russian novel. Russia in this age produced an uncommonly rich body of fiction, in which the characters’ daily lives unfold as if in immediate connection with issues of good versus evil, and as if the destiny of Russia hung in their balance. Some background information on the novels’ historical context will be provided in lectures, but our principal focus will be on close readings of the works themselves. We will use the novels to examine Russian insights into human nature and human experience, as well as the more specific ways in which these authors explore their Russian identity and their country’s complex relation with the rest of the world. We will also consider what “novels” are, and the ways in which these writers adapt the genre of the novel to their particular concerns. The reading list includes such works as Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, Gogol, Dead Souls; Turgenev, Fathers and Sons; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; and Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.

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In Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the author’s great beauties, Remedios the Beauty, though young and healthy, mysteriously ascends to her death. The form of death, the luminous nature of the young girl herself, leaves an indelible memory in readers of the novel. It leads readers to wonder about the historical realities shaping the novel. In fact, García Márquez’s fiction, full of such memorable characters and events, has been referred to as “magical realism.” So, too, has the work of many twentieth century Latin American writers. The term frankly suggests that the histories upon which these writers have somehow based their work differ from histories experienced elsewhere. The sense that those histories and the people who have created those pasts are somehow more colorful, flamboyant, passionate, violent and tragic than those experienced elsewhere emerges in these novels in many ways. In this class we will explore some of these literary worlds, their characters, and the histories and techniques used in creating these worlds. Specifically, we will examine fictional worlds created by García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Isabel Allende. We will consider how these writers have created these worlds. How can these worlds be understood as magical? As real? What roles has history played? What are the meanings of this work? Through a series of exercises including analysis, improvisation, debate, re-creation, and a series of intensive writing exercises, we will think about and analyze these texts. Texts for this class will include the following: Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Strange Pilgrims; Isabel Allende, The House of Spirits; Juan Rulfo, The Plain in Flames; Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature; and Eduardo Posada-Carbó, “Fiction as History: The bananeras in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

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TTh, 9:30 - 10:50
Section 47456

TTh, 11:00 - 12:20
Section 47471

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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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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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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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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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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