Introduction to Comparative Literature

This course will examine the relation between narrative and desire in a selection of works from various historical periods, national traditions, and genres.  Questions to be considered include:How do desires generate narratives? How do narratives produce desiring subjects? How might desire interrupt narrative?  Does desire have a gender? What is the relation between epistemological desire and sexual desire?  How might we understand the relation between self-knowledge and the desire for narrative?    We will also look at a selection of critical essays that offer models of desire, of narrative, or of their relation.

Required texts:

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories (“The Wolf-Man”)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler