Introduction to Comparative Literature

How do literary and filmic texts disclose and simultaneously keep their secrets? This course examines the role of secrets in producing and blocking narrative movement, and in releasing and withholding meaning. Particular attention is given to secrets such as the gay closet or racial passing, that, like Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” hide “in plain sight.” In comparing tragedies, films, case histories, novels, and short stories, we discuss the role of narrative and confessional acts in the construction, circulation and concealment of public and private identities, marked and unmarked by gender, sexual identity, race, or class. We also critically examine the implied analogies between interpretation and detective work, and between reading and religious election. What distinguishes interpretive “insight” from naïve reading? What kinds of ironic relationships obtain between “blind” characters and “perceptive” readers?

Texts:

Cortazar, “The Devil’s Spit”
Barthes, S/Z
Freud, Dora: Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
James, What Maisie Knew
Kleist, “The Marquise of O—”
Lafayette, The Princesse of Clèves
Larsen, Passing
Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Tales
The Purloined Poe
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

Films:

Antonioni, Blow-Up
Coppola, The Conversation
Hitchcock, Vertigo
Ophuls, The Earrings of Madame d’…