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Courses
Comparative Literature offers courses under the Comparative Literature subject heading (COLI), and cross-lists several electives offered by other departments and interdisciplinary programs such asAfrican and African American Studies,Classical Languages and Civilization, Communication and Media Studies, English, History, Latin American and Latino Studies, Medieval Studies, Modern Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Political Science, Visual Arts, and Women's Studies.
Course Highlights
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COEU 4412-L01 Representing Art in Literature
Art and its literary representation in 17th- and 18th- century France and England. In this course we will examine the literary representation of portraits in novels. What is the status of these representations? In what ways does this status change from the 17th to the end of the 18th centuries? In order to analyze the import of visual representation in literary texts, we will also read a number of works of early art criticism in both England and France as well as contemporary criticism and theory on visual culture, portraiture, and representation. As such, we will try to determine the interrelation between the history of visual culture and literary culture in the early modern period. This course is looking at what appears to be a crisis in representation that arises around the portrait (painted not literary) and its verbal representation in French and English literature. We will be particularly interested in why novels are thinking about visual portraits and using them to advance their narratives, why they seem to be suspicious of them as signifying objects, and how they seem to be using them to teach us about reading. Texts can be read in the original language if desired and must be read in the original language if you wish to receive credit for this course as a French course. Capstone seminar for Comparative Literature majors. (4 credits).
COLI 3450-L01 The City in Literature and Art
The structures, spaces, people, and life patterns of cities in the imagination of writers and visual artists from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. We will focus on Berlin, Paris, and New York, using the work of Walter Benjamin as a stimulus to thinking about our own relationship to the urban environment.
COLI 3100-R01 World Cinema Masterpieces
World Cinema Masterpieces provides a close analysis of style, narrative structure and visual texture in selected masterworks of major European, Asian and American directors. Directors under consideration include: Renoir, Carne, Lang, Welles, Ophuls, Hitchcock, Bresson, Kurosawa, Ray, Bergman, Rossellini, Fellini, Truffaut, Tarkovksy, Kieslowski, Fassbinder and Altman. (4 credits) [ADV]
COLI 3471-R01 Luigi Pirandello in Context: the Subject and Its Masks (New Course)
A study of the narrative, theatre and theoretical essays of Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936; Nobel Prize 1934) in the context of the literary, cultural, and social developments in early 20th-century Italy and Europe. |
COLI 2000 L01 Texts and Contexts: Women and Independence in Africa
An introduction to the literary analysis of texts and the cultural and historical contexts within which they are produced and read. Significant class time will be devoted to critical writing and to speaking about literature. An examination of African women’s literature, film and writing, regimes of gender, and the statuses of African Women as well as their place/role in processes of liberation, decolonization, and national independence on the continent. (EP2) (3 credits)
COLI 4412 C01 Literature, Film, and Development
We will study Development and its discourse as it has emerged since the eighteenth century within humanist frameworks of philosophy/science, (the animal-human divide) literature (stories/narrative as colonial inscription), and technology (as techne and prostheses manifest in photography, film and video), to explore the ways it inflects our perceptions and ways we read our own and other worlds. In particular, we will focus on how Development/development has constructed and shaped the many significations of “the human” from the early modern to contemporary times. (Comparative Literature Capstone Seminar; Interdisciplinary Capstone; EP3; Globalism) (4 credits)
COLI 2000 R01 Texts & Contexts: Old/New Worlds
Designed to situate modern texts within comparative global and historical contexts, the course aims to strengthen students’ critical reading and writing practices by studying the way contemporary works re-read and re-write earlier forms of writing and culture. Modern literature from Africa, America, India, and Indonesia will be studied in relation to excerpts from ancient Hindu, Greek, and Hebrew literature (The Odyssey, The Mahabharata, and the Bible). (EP2/Globalism) (3 credits)
COLI 3000 R01 Theories of Comparative Literature
A review of theories and methods of comparative literary studies, using literary theory and criticism as primary readings in conjunction with primary works of literature, drawing from a range of literary traditions. (4 credits)
COLI 4124 R01 Seminar: Kieslowski’s Decalogue
The seminar is devoted to the extensive exploration of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-part work, The Decalogue, a series of films set in Warsaw in the early 1980s but inspired by and structured upon the Ten Commandments. The course will examine these multi-layered films both as individual meditations and as inter-connected narratives, analyzing their visual composition, probing their moral, psychological and religious implications, and confronting their abundant ambiguities. As we consider Kieslowski’s masterpiece in various contexts, we will draw upon ancillary readings in philosophy, literary theory, and aesthetics. (4 credits)
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