SPLU 3730  Writing Violence: Peru 1980-2000  (C. Vich)
In this course we will study the different representations of violence in Peruvian narrative, poetry, and film whose main subject was the armed conflict during the 1980’s and 1990’s between the Peruvian state and subversive groups like the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Although the majority of readings willbe literary, the course has a strong interdisciplinary nature since a thorough study of historical, sociological, and anthropological texts related to this period of Peruvian history and culture will be included.

WSLP 3010  Feminist Theories in Intercultural Perspective  (A. Hoffman)
An examination of contemporary feminist theories, with attention to the construction of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and age. Students will analyze Western and non-Western writings from an interdisciplinary perspective.


Spring 2008 - Rose Hill

CORG 1250  Traditions of Storytelling  (C. GoGwilt)
This course offers a comparative study of traditions of storytelling, placing questions of narrative form within global cultural and historical coordinates. Selections from ancient forms of storytelling will be considered alongside modern examples from European and American literature, and with a comparative emphasis on twentieth century work from Africa, Indonesia, and China.

CORU 3112  Italian Neorealist Cinema  (F. Parmeggiani)
In this course we will study the development of a realist language in Italian cinema from the Fascist period to the years of the so-called “economic miracle.” We will discuss the different narrative styles and themes, which are usually collected under the umbrella definition of “Italian Neorealism,” in relation to the socio-economic and political situation of Italy in the 1940s and 1950s. We will also address questions of representation, gender, and national identity. Among our primary texts will be classics of Italian cinema such as Roberto Rossellini’s “War Trilogy” (Open City– Paisà–Germany Year Zero), Giuseppe De Santis’ Bitter Rice, Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Miracle in Milan and Umberto D., Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, The Earth Trembles and Rocco and His Brothers, Federico Fellini’s La strada and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone. The course is taught in English. Weekly screenings will be tentatively on Monday afternoons at 5:30. All films are in Italian with English subtitles.

CORU 3451  The City in Literature  (M. Caldwell)
A study of urban life through the close reading of fiction, poetry and drama, focusing mainly on New York, but also London, Paris, and Cairo. Discussion of films and photographs will also play a part in the course.

CORU 3692  Anglophone African Literatures: "America in Africa"  (M. Andindilile)
This course offers students an opportunity to learn about Africa and how America and Americans are represented by authors of the African continent writing in English. Using a range of texts in which America and/or American characters are represented, the course will encourage students to ask and answer questions such as: how is/are America/Americans represented abroad? And why? Simultaneously, they will learn about other places, peoples, cultures, and beliefs. For example, in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Ikem one of the protagonists notes: “The English have, for all practical purposes, ceased to menace the world. The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America.” Why does Ikem make this statement? Or what prompts him to do so? For answers we will close-read this novel and other works that offer a different take on America and Americans. These works include J.P. Clark’s America, Their America (1964), a chronicle of the author’s experiences and impressions of American society; Legson Kayila’s I Will Try (1966), a goodwill odyssey of an African Horatio Alger who literally walks to the “land of Lincoln”; Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho (2003), a novel that plays off the title of Brett Easton Ellis’s all-American bad boy novel, American Psycho; and Nuruddin Farah’s Links (2005), a narrative of the Somali civil strife that centers on America’s involvement that inspired the making of the much acclaimed Black Hawk Down movie in 2001. We also throw in Michaela Wrong’s non-fiction In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (2001), a story of Joseph Mobutu, a US Cold War ally and dictator, who embodies the dark side of Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz.

Cross-Listed Courses

ENRU 3045  Theory for English Majors  (M. Farland)
Ordinarily to be taken during the junior year, this course introduces the student to debates in literary and critical theory. The goal of this course is to reflect on reading strategies, textual practices, and language itself. Students will engage with a range of critical, theoretical, and social issues shaping the field of literary studies today. English and Comparative Literature major/minor only. May be substituted for CO 3000 - Theories of Comparative Literature.

ENRP 3629  20th-Century African American Literature  (Y. Christiansë)
We consider the aesthetics of African American literary traditions, and dominant themes and concerns that have marked the Twentieth Century. Our starting point is that foment of cultural production known as the Harlem Renaissance in which African American writers, musicians, visual artists and political leaders sought new ways of engaging their social, political and cultural relationship with the larger America. Our reading will bring us up to the work of contemporary African-American writers. Our readings range across analysis of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. We will also view films/film clips and other forms of visual art.

ENRP 3856  Jazz and Literature  (A. Furer)
In this course, we will examine the influence of jazz music—often described as America’s only indigenous art form—on American literature. Since the early days of jazz in the 1920s, American writers from Carl Sandburg to Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison have incorporated jazz as subject, themeand form into their short stories, poetry, novels and essays. Among the questions we may consider are: why writers have been so drawn to jazz as a metaphor for the American experience; why writers would wish to imitate jazz improvisation in a radically different medium; how transformations in the literary significance and uses of jazz are related to changes in the music from the 1920s through the late 20th century, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat Generation and the Black Arts Movement; and how cultural constructions of race influence jazz and jazz literature. We may also investigate the significance for American culture of jazz’s dual and fluctuating roles as entertainment and art. The best jazz musicians tell compelling stories through their solos; here we will also see how American writers make “jazz.” The two most significant elements of jazz, improvisation and the development of an individual sound or voice, can be viewed as crucial to written expression (both critical and creative), as well, since both writing and jazz aim to bring something individual and meaningful out of a mass of inchoate material, to create a voice and a stance where there was none before. Furthermore, both jazz and writing evolve out of a tension between a relatively fixed structure (chord progressions, certain rhythms; syntax; plot; stanza forms, etc.), and the need for individual expression (musical voice; literary voice). Our investigations will show us among other things, that the division between music and language is not a strict one, and that jazz, in particular, in its extreme expressivity, is a kind of language. Writers covered will include Cummings, Hughes, Toomer, Saroyan, Welty, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ellison, Kaufman, Baraka, Baldwin, Angelou and Morrison. Our listening will include the works of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Count Basie, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and others. We will also view a range of jazz-related films from the 1930s-1990s.

FRRU 3640  Postcolonial Representations  (L. Schreier)
This course examines the cultural production of the colonial age and its influence on post-colonial aesthetics and rhetoric. We will devote particular attention to colonial culture’s complex systems of representation and ask how the heirs of colonialism must continually re-negotiate it. In addition to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, plays, movies, paintings and photographs, we will consider products of consumer culture such as plates, toys, commercials and postcards.

ITRU 3530  The Stage and Society Since 1700  (J. Perricone)
This course focuses on the semiotic reading of dramatic works taking into consideration the symbolic meaning of non-verbal language such as stage props, gesturing and body language, and intonation, which are encoded by the author in the verbal language of the written text (De Marinis, Fernando de Toro, and others). Students are also required to read each play or drama as a literary text, thus paying attention to its stylistic codes including figures of speech, similes, metaphors, and so on. As the title of the course suggests, the works studied are placed in their social and historical contexts through readings which provide an understanding of the political, social and economic conditions informing the text at the time of its production (Pullini, Segre, Tessari, and others). The evolution of the genre over the centuries (both comic and tragic, to the modern tragicomic developments) is also a significant component of the course.  Authors may include Goldoni, Gozzi, Maffei, Alfieri, Foscolo, Manzoni, Verga, Capuana, Bracco, Giacosa, Chiarelli, Rosso di San Secondo, Bontempelli, Eduardo De Filippo, Pirandello, Fabbri, Betti, and Maraini.