A comparative course exploring the intersections of literature, psychoanalysis, queer studies, and environmental studies.

In this seminar we will be pursuing those aspects of meaning that occur not “in” texts but in between them – meaning that is to be found in the uses that  texts make of other texts, and that readers make of texts, in the histories that accumulate around texts and their different uses, in the histories also of their transmission and circulation.

SEMINAR IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Also listed as German 205

This seminar will focus on lyrical poetry produced in the margins – or outside of — the modern Anglo-European canon in order to call into question static typological theories of genre, as well as what may be a majoritarian, heteronormative or Eurocentric set of biases behind contemporary attacks on the lyric as solipsistic, apolitical “personal expression.” Participants will draw on their own cultural and linguistic specialties to compile a multi-lingual course Reader of modern lyrical poetry marginalized by gender, sexuality, class, race, place or language.

This course will examine a selection of travel narratives within the context of contemporary postcolonial theory and “mobility studies.”  Throughout the course, we will be acquainting ourselves with recent theoretical work on travel, Orientalism, and tourism.  Readings of primary texts will begin with a glance backward to Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account of his travels to the East and Columbus’s account of what he thought was his voyage to the East, as well the early modern accounts of the voyages of discovery by Bartolome de Las Casas and Jean de Léry.

[Note: Students enrolling in this seminar will be assumed to have experience with the close reading and analysis of poetic form, content, and context, and to be at least somewhat familiar with  the main lines or moments in American poetry’s 19th-20thC. development, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, through the modernism  of  Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Hughes, Brooks, et al, the postmodernism of the Plath, Lowell, Sexton, the Beats, etc. ]

This course examines certain aspects of the relationship between fascism and Greek fiction. From the 1930’s to the 1970’s, Greece experienced three different repressive fascist regimes: The dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, the (Nazi) Occupation, and the military dictatorship of 1967. Fiction writers, dealing with that period, use prose fiction, particularly the novel, in order to make sense of the violent historical events and changes in political and social thought during those years.

The representation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas is one of the central issues of the literature of the hemisphere. From the need to justify and rationalize the genocide and displacement of native peoples, to the persistence of an ambivalent fascination with Indians, to the aesthetic experimentation with native epistemologies, and, finally, to the contemporary reassessment of Native social and literary history, the broad geographic and historical distribution of the contested representations of indigeneity is crucial for understanding the literature of the Americas.

Also listed as Italian Studies 117 (4 units)