It has been recently emphasized by critics (Constantinidis: Modern Greek Theater a Quest for Hellenism, 2001) that Modern Greek Drama does not enjoy, certainly, the respect or the recognition from foreign audiences and critics that the Ancient Drama does but also that its position in Modern Greek literary histories is equally marginalized.

How do novelists come to make technical choices regarding genre, point-of-view, representations of psychological states, inner thoughts, motivations, and so on?  What different kinds of meaning are carried by their technical choices?  Are writers always able to control the meaning and significance of the techniques they select, or are there ways in which the techniques selected impose kinds of meaning on the authors?

Seminar-lecture mix.  Close reading–lots and lots of it–of the formal aesthetic dynamics and ethical/sociopolitical engagements of the poetry of the major “Beats,” including Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure,  Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others.  While the course will spend much more time on poems than on documentary and contextual materials, we will pay significant attention to political and cultural pressures and movements–inside and outside the U.S.– that the poetry encountered,  was at least partially shaped by, and in some cases helped

We will study the relation between blood sacrifice and theater in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, England, France, Holland, and Mexico; to give ourselves some literary historical and generic contexts, we will also devote some attention to the theatrical cultures of ancient Greece and Medieval Europe and to early modern non-dramatic poetry and prose.  We will attend closely to the various kinds of religious work that theater has often done—disseminating doctrine, staging exemplary religious narratives—but our largest concerns will be the proposition that theatrical experience repla

No prerequisites, course is taught in English

This is an investigation of some of the main dynamics that informed Greece’s idea of itself as a modern nation emerging from the Ottoman Empire, while still contending with the legacy of its Classical and Byzantine traditions. The course will bring to light and place into a historical context the relationship among the elements that have defined Greece’s identity and modernity: language, literature and culture.

There is no prerequisite.No knowledge of Modern Greek is necessary.

This Course examines forms of writing (prose, poetry, drama) in Modern Greek and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisite: 112A, or consent of the instructor

This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

Text:  A Manual of Modern Greek by Anne Farmakides,

Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-30003019-8

In this course we will consider a variety of written and cinematic texts, most of them produced in the twentieth century, in order to explore how ideas, plots, aesthetic and philosophical concerns, as well as narrative strategies and other formal elements travel across national and cultural boundaries and acquire new meanings, possibilities and interpretations in the process of being rewritten and re-contextualized.

While characters usually occupy center-stage in our experience of narrative, it is only through the action of narrators that characters come into being and offer themselves as objects of our interest and curiosity.  Strictly speaking, narrators exist neither in the characters’ world nor in the readers’ but form the bridge between these two realms.  In this class we will read a variety of narratives that will help us to understand better the functioning of narrators and their relation to characters, as well as the role that narrators play in readers’ experience of narrative.  The primary rea

This course takes as its object of reflection a question Cuban American scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat nearly two decades ago posed:  Do the Americas share a common literature? That is, do the two Americas, both North and South, peninsular and mainland, equatorial and polar, share—if not geographic—common textual ground? If so, what common literary strategies and similar historical concerns might such an ensemble of texts bring to the fore? In the process, how do those very strategies and concerns recast the idea of the Americas in a new light?