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Note: You must establish a session for Winter Term 2001 on wolverineaccess.umich.edu in order to use the link "Check Times, Location, and Availability". Once your session is established, the links will function. Courses in Comparative LiteratureThis page was created at 9:05 PM on Mon, Jan 29, 2001. Winter Term, 2001 (January 4 – April 26)Open courses in Comparative Literature Wolverine Access Subject listing for COMPLIT Winter Term '01 Time Schedule for Comparative Literature. COMPLIT 424. Literature and Other Disciplines.Section 001 – Literature for Psychologists. Meets with Psychology 401.007.Instructor(s): Silke-Maria WeineckPrerequisites: Upperclass standing and one course in literary studies. (3). May be repeated for a total of nine credits. Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. Literature may well be the most complex expression of human conditions we have, as an eloquent record of interior states, as a richly detailed observation of behavior, motivation, and interpersonal relations, or as sustained self-reflection on the nature of language in construing our images of self and the world. The goal of this course is to acquaint future psychologists (and all others who might be interested) with ways of reading works of literature both as psychological records and as critical reflections on psychology. Its rationale is that much of therapeutic dialogue is in nature hermeneutic, and that the study of literature aids us in analyzing and understanding human utterance in general and important elements of self-representation (like narrative structure, metaphor, symbol) in particular. In addition, this course will look at the literary elements in seminal psychological texts (e.g., Freud, Winnicott). Readings may include: Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare: Hamlet, Flaubert: Mme Bovary, Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground, Kafka: Letter to His Father , Eliot: Four Quartets, Morrison: Beloved, Menaker: The Treatment , Palahniuk: Fight Club. We will also watch two films, Suddenly Last Summer , and The Three Faces of Eve. Requirements: attendance, participation, two 8-pp papers.
COMPLIT 601. Contemporary Theory.Section 001 – HistoryInstructor(s): Timothy H Bahti (timbahti@umich.edu)Prerequisites: Graduate standing and permission of instructor. (3). Credits: (3). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. History is not something that happens, it is made-constructed, written and read. So it is with history within the university, the humanities, the discipline of comparative literature: histories get constituted, and they contribute to the construction of the discipline itself. This seminar shall study four works of history from four decades that have decisively shaped the study of comparative literature; we shall thereby also familiarize ourselves with the very history of the discipline. The works are: Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses): Edward Said, Orientalism. As time allows, we might examine a fifth history chosen by the seminar participants. Students will be evaluated on their regular participation, class presentations, and a final paper.
COMPLIT 698. Directed Reading in Comparative Literature.Prerequisites: Graduate standing. (1-4). (INDEPENDENT). Credits: (1-4). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. No Description Provided Check Times, Location, and Availability COMPLIT 721. Seminar in Translation.Section 001 – Translation.Instructor(s): Anton Shammas (antons@umich.edu)Prerequisites: Graduate Standing. (3). Can be taken up to three times for credit. Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. Writing on the "task of the translator" some eighty years ago, Walter Benjamin posed the question: "Is translation meant for readers who do not understand the original?" Drawing on a variety of theoretical and literary texts, this seminar, while trying to understand Benjamin's question (and, hopefully, to answer it), will closely examine the elusive meaning of the act of translation, within the context of the emerging discipline of Translation Studies. Focusing on the twentieth century, we will start with Ezra Pound's theory of "luminous details," then grapple with Benjamin's argument that translation is meant to liberate the language imprisoned in the text through the recreation of that text, and end up discussing the ideas put recently forward by Lawrence Venuti, about translation being a totalizing, domesticating process, meant to restore or preserve the foreignness of the foreign text (though sometimes, as in the case of the French translation of the Arabian Nights, the translated text cannibalizes the original). In the meanwhile, we will examine the traceable, concealed, manipulated, and invented intertextual connections (and, obviously, disconnections), between source and target, the self and the Other, "rightful" Prospero and "savage" Caliban, against the complex politics of translation. This will be done with the help of – or despite – texts from different disciplines, ranging from the biblical parable on the "confusion of the tongues" (and Derrida's very confused reading of that parable), to the Borgesian "Library of Babel," in search of things lost and found in translation. Besides a substantial, final research paper, students will be required to write three two-page essays, based on (or inspired by) the weekly readings. The essays will be shared with the group in advance (through e-mail), and then presented as a basis for in-class discussion.
COMPLIT 751. Topics in Comparative Literature.Section 001 – Aesthetics of PrimitivismInstructor(s): Alina M Clej (aclej@umich.edu)Prerequisites: Graduate standing. (3). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. In a narrow sense, primitivism is a tendency in modernist art which proposed a return to "simplicity" as a way of achieving greater meaningfulness and spiritual depth. In a wider sense, primitivism represents a reaction to Western civilization and its perceived materialism, superficiality, and rationalist bias. An implicit critique of Western values, primitivist art reveals at the same time the impasse of a civilization caught in its own miscomprehension of itself and the Other. The purpose of this course is to explicate the ideological nature and aesthetic consequences of these misconceptions. We will explore the concepts of the "primitive" produced by the emergent discipline of anthropology at the beginning of the 20th century, and the diffuse impact of these concepts on the creative methods of modernist writers and artists. Readings will include texts by Frazer, Levi-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Leiris, Bataille, and Freud, as well as more recent theoretical essays by Adorno, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Jameson, Hal Foster, James Clifford, and Michael Taussig. Examples (both verbal and visual) will be drawn from European symbolism and fauvism, cubism and Dada, expressionism and surrealism. Examples from other areas of American or Latin-American modernism, or other media (architecture, photography, and music) are welcome. Evaluation will be based on one oral presentation and a final essay.
COMPLIT 761. Seminar in Literature and the Other Arts.Section 001 – Hearing Voices: Music & Lyric in the 19th century. Meets with Musicology 705.001 and Rackham 570.001Instructor(s): Johanna H Prins (yprins@umich.edu) , Naomi Adele Andre (nandre@umich.edu)Prerequisites: Graduate standing. (3). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. This interdisciplinary seminar will analyze the relationship between music and lyric, with special emphasis on the performance of "voice" in nineteenth-century poetry, song cycles, musical theater, and opera. Combining various theoretical and historical perspectives, we will consider the relationship between critical discourses about voice and embodied performances of voice. The seminar will be broadly comparative, ranging across several languages and national traditions (English, German, French, Italian), and including various "high" and "low" musical idioms. We will proceed by means of informal introductory lectures, open discussion, short writing assignments, and presentation of a final seminar paper; there will also be an option for students to respond to the syllabus through their own creative writing or vocal performance. Harmonic analysis will be presented in a form accessible to students without a specialized musical background, and all literary texts will be available in translation. The seminar is designed as a forum for exchange among students who are pursuing historical, theoretical, creative, and performative work in their graduate studies at the University of Michigan. No prerequisites.
COMPLIT 781. Seminar: Studies in Form and Genre.Section 001 – Untimely Interventions.Instructor(s): L Ross ChambersPrerequisites: Graduate standing. (3). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. People who are surviving (not "who have survived") historically traumatic events find themselves the bearers of unwelcome messages; they are sacrificed, I'll propose, to an ideology of civilization which consigns the "barbaric," the "obscene," the "disastrous" to a threshold of culture, called the unspeakable, where it can be largely ignored but from which it also haunts the oblivious. In the academy, for instance, survivor writing, of which vast quantities have been produced (especially in the twentieth century), has been virtually ignored until recently. It seemed to be neither literary nor historical; there was no slot for it. Using texts that relate to trench warfare in 1914-18, the universe of the concentration and extermination camps, and the AIDS epidemic as it has been experienced in the West, I'll propose a rhetorical theory of the untimely. This will entail work in the theory of genre, in the theory of figuration, and a displacement of the concept of author by that of "agencing" and the "agencer" (an elaboration of Deleuze's term, agencement ). For initial theoretical background, I suggest: Lyotard, Le Differend; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. Pour une litterature mineure and Mille plateaux (esp. chap. 4); Deleuze, Critique et clinique; Derrida, Spectres de Marx; Laurent Jenny, La parole singuliere. Only the last of these has not been translated into English, but you'll find it more satisfying, if you can manage it, to read them in French. I'll ask you to give a short presentation in class on a topic of your choice related to the themes of the seminar, and to develop this presentation into a well argued term paper.
COMPLIT 791. Seminar in Literary Theory.Section 001 – Body Theory. Meets with English 881.001Instructor(s): Tobin Anthony Siebers (tobin@umich.edu)Prerequisites: Graduate standing. (3). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~tobin/html/E881.html
COMPLIT 990. Dissertation/Precandidate.Prerequisites: Election for dissertation work by doctoral student not yet admitted as a Candidate. Graduate standing. (1-8). (INDEPENDENT). May be repeated for credit. Credits: (1-8; 1-4 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. Election for dissertation work by doctoral student not yet admitted as a Candidate.
COMPLIT 995. Dissertation/Candidate.Prerequisites: Graduate School authorization for admission as a doctoral Candidate. Graduate standing. (8). (INDEPENDENT). May be repeated for credit. Credits: (8; 4 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. Graduate School authorization for admission as a doctoral Candidate. N.B. The defense of the dissertation (the final oral examination) must be held under a full term Candidacy enrollment period.
Undergraduate Course Listings for COMPLIT.This page was created at 9:05 PM on Mon, Jan 29, 2001. This page maintained by LS&A Academic Information and Publications, 1228 Angell Hall Copyright © 2001 The Regents of the University of Michigan, Trademarks of the University of Michigan may not be electronically or otherwise altered or separated from this document or used for any non-University purpose. |
