Prerequisites & Distribution: Junior standing. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
Credits: (3).
Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.
The verb “read” is used in a weak sense (as in “It’s too dark to read”) and a strong sense. This strong sense, in which reading involves an understanding or interpretive grasp of texts, is what the course is about. In this latter sense, reading is a real life skill as well as a literary prerequisite; it’s an important social requirement and an essential survival technique. Yet college education tends to encourage the belief that it is enough to read a text only once, which is like saying it’s enough to survey the text, without addressing the ways in which it resists easy reading, that is, its opacities and reticences; its otherness. Rereading is a way of going beyond what one recognizes first off in a text, so as to grapple with its otherness. This is an experimental course, and it will not have a detailed syllabus because much of what happens will be determined by our group interactions as we go about teaching one another the skills of rereading. I will ask you, though, – to nominate two substantial texts that you want to reread, and to reread them in the course of the term, reporting to the group on your experience; – to read and then reread a small number of texts (fiction, non-fiction, films) that we will discuss and rediscuss in class; – to read one of the above texts a third time, and to write about it in a final essay. We will start by considering together the “lessons” (readings) about reading that we can derive from Michel Deville’s film La Lectrice (The Reader) and Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary. The emphasis throughout will be on slow, careful reading (for which you will need to reserve plenty of time). It is also a writing and rewriting course. There will be three essay assignments (3-5 pp.; 7-8 pp.; and 10-12 pp./respectively), each of which will be preceded by a careful draft (not a “rough draft”). You’ll be encouraged to get feedback on your drafts from other students as well as from me. Novels to buy: Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Mann, Death in Venice; Baker, The Mezzanine. We will also read poetry, non-fiction, and films.
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Prerequisites & Distribution: Senior standing and concentration in Comp. Lit. (3). (Excl).
Credits: (3).
Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.
What do these two disciplines have in common? How did the new concept of the "primitive" Other that emerged at the turn of the 19th century influence Western ways of representation and expression? Did the development of anthropology help Europeans better understand other cultures, as well as their own? Or was this emerging discipline a mere symptom of the Europeans' own colonialist malaise? These are some of the general questions that we will explore in this course, by focusing in particular on the developments of Western anthropology in the first half of this century, and on the influence that the "discovery" of non-western cultural forms had on Western art and literature belonging to Modernism. Readings will include essays by Leo Frobenius, Marcel Griaule, Marcel Mauss, Claude Levi-Strauss, and by contemporary anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Michael Taussig, as well as theoretical texts by postcolonial critics, such as E. Said and Homi Bhabha. Literary illustrations will be drawn from French and Francophone writers (Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, A. Bataille, M. Leiris, R. Caillois, A. Artaud, Aime Cesaire). Examples from other linguistic and cultural areas (including Latin-American literature) are welcome for discussion.
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This page was created at 11:34 AM on Wed, Sep 29, 1999.