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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 7:12 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 140. First-Year Literary Seminar.Section 001 – The Horror! The Horror!!Instructor(s): Chris LuebbePrerequisites & Distribution: Only first-year students, including those with sophomore standing, may pre-register for First-Year Seminars. All others need permission of instructor. (3). (HU). May be repeated for a total of six credits. First-Year Seminar Credits: (3). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. When the Furies first appeared on stage during the performance of Aeschylus' The Eumenides, certain female members of the audience were so terrified that they went into labor. At initial screenings of The Exorcist audience members fainted, and some theatres took the precaution of having paramedics on hand. What terrifies you? The unnatural, supernatural, or Nature itself? Are you more afraid of the Devil, the Undead, the Alien, or the Term-paper? In this course we will examine the spine-tingling, hair-raising phenomenon of horror, a reaction at once profoundly psychological and physical. What objects, figures, ideas and situations have provoked this reaction in different cultures and historical periods? What do these horrific things tell us about the cultures in which we find them and about the people who flee or stand paralyzed before them? Perhaps the things we fear are intimately connected to the very things we desire (not a veiled allusion to "The Wishmaster".. Perhaps the thing that we (should) fear most is having our fear explained to us. Through discussions of novels (Dracula, Pet Sematary), short stories (by H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker) and films (The Exorcist, Jacob's Ladder, Angel Heart) that have struck terror into the hearts of men and women, we will work towards an understanding of what lies beneath the phenomenon of horror.
COMPLIT 241. Topics in Comparative Literature.Section 001 – Whose Greece? Whose Rome? Classicism Throughout the AgesInstructor(s): James Porter (jport@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Comp. Lit. 240 recommended. (3). (HU). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jport/courses/cl/Whosegreece.html This course will pose the following problem about the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Given that the ancients had no clearly marked category for "classical" or "classicism," is their past rightly labeled "classical"? Subsequent (post classical) attempts to grasp the meaning of "classicism" down to this day rarely agree with one another. The course will set out to trace the emergence and history of this fascinating problem through a wide sampling of literature, readings, and visual art. TEXTS: To Buy (available at Shaman Drum):
COMPLIT 350. The Text and Its Cultural Context.Section 001 – Emotions, Enjoyment and Desire in the Postmodern WorldInstructor(s): Carrie WoodPrerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits. Credits: (3). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. What is postmodernism? Whether we view it as an artistic style, a cultural theory, or simply the name of the current historical moment, one common assumption about postmodernism seems to be the idea of all-encompassing change: things used to be different, and we're now living in "something else," as the theorist Fredric Jameson expresses it. We'll explore this "something else" as having to do with our most basic feelings and desires. We'll look at the possibility that post-modernism has far-reaching effects on our emotions and on the very nature of desire itself. What is the impact of instant gratification, ubiquitous images of emotion and sexuality on TV, the Internet, and in advertising (Hallmark cards and sit-coms), the marketing of intimate feelings (those "best sex ever" articles on the covers of magazines in the grocery line)? Have certain emotions come to be associated with postmodernity? Novels by Milan Kundera, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Franz Kafka, and Italo Calvino, and films such as "Brazil" and "Pulp Fiction," will help us to arrive at an understanding of the state of our emotions and desire and their implications for what and/or how things have meaning for us in this (post?)postmodern age.
COMPLIT 350. The Text and Its Cultural Context.Section 002 – Fact/Fiction in Serial NovelsInstructor(s): Margaret Wheeler (mtwheel@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits. Credits: (3). Course Homepage: https://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2001/winter/complit/350/002.nsf The news. It offers stories of murders, faraway places, outrageous characters and – sometimes even more outrageous – politics. It often reads like the stuff of novels. We could even say it is the stuff of novels...from the very first, after all, novels have appeared in newspapers. Often, serialized novels mirror the concerns of the day, intervene in political debates, or retell recent events. At other times, serialized novels copy the style of the theater reviews, travelogues, or gossip columns that appear in the newspaper. In short, serialized novels often exist in ongoing tension with the news stories amongst which they appear. This tension helps to blur the borders of fact and fiction. In this class, we will read a selection of newspaper novels, some now considered sensational adventure tales, some considered classics. We will look at the way in which newspaper novels engage with questions of modernity, the rise of the nation-state, the tensions between urban and rural cultures and between the metropole and the periphery. Throughout, we will try to understand the way in which serialized novels problematize the truth claims – so central to the news – of narrative depictions of reality. Possible texts include Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte-Cristo, George Sand's The Miller of Angibault, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons, Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, Karel Capek's War with the Newts, and Tomás Eloy Martínez' The Perón Novel. We will end by reading Caleb Carr's Killing Time, serialized this past year in Time magazine. Course requirements include three papers and one class presentation.
COMPLIT 410. Major Authors.Section 001 – Early Modern Literature of Travel. Meets with English 417.002Instructor(s): David L Porter (dporter@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Junior standing. (3). (HU). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
Credits: (3). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.
COMPLIT 424. Literature and Other Disciplines.Section 001 – Literature for Psychologists. Meets with Psychology 401.007.Instructor(s): Silke-Maria WeineckPrerequisites & Distribution: Upperclass standing and one course in literary studies. (3). (HU). 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 490. Comparative Cultural Studies.Section 001 – Colonial Critiques of Modernity. Meets with AAPTIS 491.001Instructor(s): Yaseen Noorani (ynoorani@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Junior standing. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits. Credits: (3). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. See Arabic, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and Islamic Studies 491.001.
COMPLIT 492. Comparative Literary Theory.Section 001 – Space, Vision, Literary RepresentationInstructor(s): Yaseen Noorani (ynoorani@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Junior standing. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits. Credits: (3). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. One of the fundamental things that literary works do is to offer us ways of perceiving and orienting ourselves in the spaces in which we live. Literary genres and forms have characteristic ways of representing the spatial and visual which seem to have their own particular logic. Nevertheless, we find that literary forms with new ways of representing space emerge in the context of transformations in social life. The Realist novel and Surrealist poetry are good examples. The same may be said of painting and cinema, which take the visual as their primary realm of representation. How then should we understand the relationship between artistic visualizations of space and those of everyday lived experience? Are some types of representation closer to "real" life and perception than others? Have the various forms of spatial and visual representation that have appeared in the past had any connection with how people actually perceived their environments in those historical periods? Do artistic representations have any influence over us as we alter the spaces in which we live? In this course, we consider these and related questions by looking at different approaches to the linkages between the visual, spatial and literary. Bakhtin's conception of the literary chronotope will help to frame discussion of the spatial features and motifs of literary genres. We will consider the concept of the "scopic regime," forwarded by a number of theorists as a means to associate particular ways of seeing with historical periods. We will think about the connections between the social experience of space and literature by reading from such works as The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre, The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau, and the work of some contemporary geographers, such as David Harvey. Finally, we will look at work which attempts to theorize the relationship between literary and lived space, including that of Frederic Jameson and Gaston Bachelard.
COMPLIT 496. Honors Thesis.Prerequisites & Distribution: Comp. Lit. 495 and Honors concentration in comparative literature. (3). (Excl). (INDEPENDENT). Credits: (3). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. In the Honors Thesis course the Honors student typically develops the seminar work done in Comparative Literature 495 (Senior Seminar) into a longer, more thorough study under the auspices of a faculty thesis director. Students who need help in arranging for a thesis director should contact the Comparative Literature office, 2015 Tisch Hall, 763-2361
COMPLIT 498. Directed Reading.Prerequisites & Distribution: Permission of instructor. (1-4). (Excl). (INDEPENDENT). Credits: (1-4). Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted. This course is intended for Comparative Literature concentrators. It offers a student the opportunity to work closely with a faculty member associated with Comparative Literature on a comparative topic chosen by the student in consultation with the professor. Together they will develop a reading list; establish goals, meeting times, and credit hours (within the range); and plan papers and projects which the student will execute with the tutorial assistance of the instructor. The student will be required to submit a written proposal of his or her course to the Program office. For further information, contact the Program in Comparative Literature, 2015 Tisch.
Graduate Course Listings for COMPLIT.This page was created at 7:12 PM on Mon, Jan 29, 2001.
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