Cross-listed with Spanish 280:4

This course is an exploration of the ways in which modern Latin American writers have borrowed from James Joyce in order to construct narratives about colonialism, identity, and the crisis of cosmopolitanism and the avant-garde in the 20th century.

This course will explore the theory and practice of literary translation from the classical period to post-structuralism. We will focus, however, on the politics of translation from Romanticism through the modernism of Pound, Benjamin and Buber-Rosenzweig and the post-colonialist and feminist approaches of contemporary literary translators. The course will also include opportunities for students to “workshop” their own translations.

This course will investigate the theoretical debates concerning the concept of mimesis (imitation) in the Western tradition. We will focus on three periods: classical Greece, early modern Europe, and the twentieth century. We will also consider the relevance of mimesis to plagiarism, legal cases on the right of personality, and The Americans with Disability Act.

Cross-listed with Italian 215

The course will begin with an introduction to the troubadours, including instruction in their language, Medieval Occitan. After reading a representative selection of troubadour poems, the class will move to consideration of major lyric traditions that take their inspiration from, or are cognate with, the troubadours: the trouvères, Minnesang, the Sicilian School, the Dolce Stil Nuovo, the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amor, and strophic poetry in Arabic depending on the interests of the students.

Although our subject is “The Modernist Masterpiece as a Genre and a Goal,” I will not be concentrating solely upon the relationships of the works we are reading to any single over-arching motif, nor to various more traditional literary-philosophical taxonomies.  Instead, I want to explore a set of works whose specific family resemblance will only emerge as our discussion itself unfolds. Close attention will be paid to the ways in which each of these writers experimented with the technical issues of form and structure as well as with their innovative use of new thematic materials.

The art of inserting stories within stories is typical of certain Oriental literatures, and was widely cultivated in Arabic. Via Spain, the Arabs transmitted this form of writing to medieval Europe. A masterpiece such as the Spanish Libro de buen amor, which stands as a unique work, with nothing else to which it may be compared within the context of Spanish literature, nevertheless bears comparison with certain Arabic works that preceded it.

Additional Required Discussion Section (see schedule of classes) Cross-listed with UGIS and Women’s Studies 145 & Classics 161

In this course we will study in depth the text of the Thousand and One Nights. After discussing the origins of the text and the various ways of approaching it, we will examine its reception by the West and its profound influence on Western literature. In addition, we will pay close attention to the role the Nights had in shaping Western notions of the Oriental “other.” This will be particularly evident in a number of feature films that manipulate material originally provided by these tales.

The disaster, which concluded the war in Asia Minor in 1922, the collapse of the irredentist dreams, which ended with the forced exchanges of populations and poured over one million refugees into the Greek cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, changed radically the character of Greek society and intellectual life.  The division into Left and Right that defined the main political waves of the developed world in the 20th century became clearly reflected in Greek politics as well as in Greek society.