Women Artists and Collective Art Labor: Producing/Performing Diversity

The notion of ‘mystical’ experience of the Divine, of Nature, or of Beauty plays an important role in the history of many cultures. In this course we will discuss the basic ideas of mystical theology from the so-called Western traditions. We will read and discuss key texts, analyze the ways in which they talk about about the Divine and about the possibilities to “see” or “experience” it. Based on this, we will look into traditions of art and literature where these notions of “seeing” or “experiencing” the Divine are reflected.

This is a course in beginning Modern Greek, involving speaking, reading and writing.

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 grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today.  In this course, there is also an emphasis and practice of oral language skills.

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works.  The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored.

In this course we will self-reflexively explore the genre of the academic or campus novel in its historical development and contemporary permutations. How have campus novels evolved and what can they tell us about our own anxieties and desires for academic experience? What would it mean to imagine our own lives as part of a fictitious universe? We will read novels that focus on the experience of students and/or teachers on American college or university campuses, with detours into texts that deal with student life in Ireland, Russia and France.

NOTE:  This is a writing intensive course.  No musical knowledge is required.  Only the willingness to listen and write.

"Music before everything. . .the rest is just literature," said the poet Paul Verlaine.

What about music seems to set it "before" the language arts?  Does it have to do with how difficult it is to write about sound?  Does music "mean" as literature does, or does literature always strive vainly to become a kind of music?

This course will examine three instances of dislocation of populations living in homelands from which they had to be forcibly separated for the sake of homogeneity: ethnic, political, cultural. The material will focus on the dynamics of traumatic ruptures, and on how the selected fiction and poetry reflect the emotional impact of such divisions and dislocations. These instances of forced mobilizations include the 1923 formal exchanges of population of the Greek minority from the newly dismantled Ottoman Empire and of the Turkish minority from Greece.

The Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) is one of international modernism’s greatest and—at least posthumously—most influential poets, known for twinned radical commitments: to artistic-aesthetic experimentation with lyric form; and to progressive and Left politics (a political commitment that eventuated in Vallejo’s intense, complex involvement with marxian theory and activism).

We will read a selection of  nineteenth-century French, British, and American novels, short stories, and poems (and one novel from the early twentieth century), along with a range of critical writings as we examine questions that were pressing then, and remain so now: what does it mean to think of people as equal? how do we imagine democracy? what does it mean to belong to a social world and to try to reform it? how are these questions built into literary works?

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