European cultures of the 16th and 17th centuries have been obsessed with the power of images and imagination, of figures and figuration. Poetic practices of mirroring, linking, and folding are at the center of this culture of the imagination that in recent years has often been compared to forms in which images and texts are used in cyberspace. The seminar will deal with this topic from different angles. First, we will discuss rhetorical theories of the power of images and some theoretical approaches to baroque literature.

This course examines the role of the child’s voice in Modern Greek fictional narratives, novellas and novels, in which the common thematic thread is the impact of historical events on Modern Greek life, society and family.  In these narratives, the ever silent children, passing undetected through the pages of canonical history, are given a voice, whether as narrators or characters, a voice used to establish a different view and perspective on Modern Greek history. It is a view that veers away from traditional gender roles, such as the male heroic, or the female suffering and forbearing.

Enrollment in this seminar is limited exclusively to Comparative Literature students who will be writing an Honors Thesis during the 2011-2012 academic year. Although this seminar is optional rather than required for Comparative Literature Honors Thesis students (i.e., students who will be taking Comparative Literature CL H195  in 2011-2012, in which they will write an Honors Thesis under the direction of a faculty advisor), the seminar is nonetheless designed to help provide students with a strong background and training in what their Honors Thesis will entail.

This is a course that addresses the questions: What can literature do to expose social injustice? What can literature do to help us come to terms with the horrors of human rights violations, torture, censorship, and disappearance? How does the creative text engage the illegality of regimes that resist the rule of reason? In this course, we will move toward the representational dynamics of human rights that are played out in literary texts and the visual arts.

The Hungarian Marxist thinker Georg Lukács argues in his influential The Theory of the Novel (1920) that the outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. That is, the novel explores a problem symbolized by the story of a character’s life.  Ian Watt, a thinker of a very different political and aesthetic temperament than Lukács, says in his equally seminal The Rise of the Novel (1957) that novels are obligated to convince their readers of the individuality of their characters.

The course will present a survey of major works of medieval literature from some of the principal literary traditions of the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on epic and on Arthurian romance.  The epics that will be examined are the assonanced Oxford version of the Song of Roland (with an extract from the rhymed Châteauroux/Venice 7 version) and Beowulf, as well as the Old Irish saga of the Táin; the romances are those of Chrétien de Troyes, along with Gottfied von Strassburg’s Tristan, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet, and the Middle English S

Modern Greek is unique among languages in that it is the only modern language directly descended from Ancient Greek. In this course, the student studies reading, writing, pronunciation and use of contemporary spoken idiom, all within the historical and cultural context of the language. By the end of the course, the student should have a strong grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today. (No Prerequisite)

In this course we will consider a variety of written and cinematic texts, largely produced in the last decades of the twentieth century, all of which foreground the movement of individuals or communities across national borders.  Over the course of the semester, we will discuss a number of interrelated questions: how do contemporary immigrant writers attempt to come to terms with the profound historical ruptures and geographic displacements brought about by the experience of transnational movement?  How do they seek to render into language and narrative the confusion of conflicting cultural

What is a hero? What are the origins of the hero as a cultural and literary construct? Originating in myth, the folktale and religious cult-worship, the hero is also present in most literary genres as a central protagonist who acts or is acted upon, and around whom the plot generally revolves. Literary genres determine the kind of heroes that arise, their internal traits and their mode of being in and acting upon the world.

In this course we will examine the development of “the West” as a historical and literary concept. We will investigate its role in the creation of American identities and as a space in which those identities may be contested and refigured.  We will begin with Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis.” The emptiness of the western frontier, argued Turner, was responsible for fostering the sense of individual responsibility that is at the core of American democracy.