Course Offerings
Comparative literature courses explore a range of times, places and media. But they usually focus on one central issue: the ways poems mean, what sides have been taken in the debate over women, what makes a text anti-Semitic, how settled peoples imagine and depict foreigners, how travelers see new worlds.
Smith College reserves the right to make changes to all announcements and course listings online, including changes in its course offerings, instructors, requirements for the majors and minors, and degree requirements.
Introductory Courses: Fall 2011
FYS 165 Childhood in African Literature
FYS 175 Love Stories
FYS 186 Israel: Texts and Contexts
CLT 202/ENG 202 Western Classics in Translation, from Homer to Dante
Introductory Courses: Spring 2012
CLT 100 Introduction to Comparative Literature: The Pleasures of Reading: The Adventure Novel: No Place for a Woman
Margaret Bruzelius: MW 2:40-4:00 p.m.
We explore the link between plot, landscape and gender in adventure fictions. Beginning with essays on cartography and the organization of geographical space by Denis Wood, we will read classic 19th-century boys' and girls' books (Verne, Stevenson, Hodgson, Burnett, Ingalls Wilder) and ask ourselves how the adventure landscape differs for boys and for girls. Who lives where within it? What boundaries mark safe and unsafe places? We will then explore modern rewritings of these fictions in novels and films such as Forster's A Room with a View, Le Guin's Tehanu and del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth in order to explore the ways in which this genre has embraced and resisted the female hero. Strudents will form groups to present a novel or film of their own choosing to the class.
CLT 150 Politics and Poetics of Translation
Dawn Fulton: M 7:00-9:00 p.m.
We hear and read translations all the time: on television news, in radio interviews, in movie subtitles, in international bestsellers. But translations don't shift texts transparently from one language to another. Rather, they revise, censor and rewrite original works, to challenge the past and to speak to new readers. We'll explore translation by hearing talks by translators and experts in the history and theory of translation. Students will look at translations from around the world and experiment with translating themselves. Knowledge of a foreign language useful but not required.
CLT/ENG 203 Western Classics in Translation, from Chrétien de Troyes to Tolstoy
Elizabeth Harries: M W 1:10-2:30 pm
Maria Banerjee: T Th 10:30-11:50 am
Intermediate Courses: Fall 2011
Some classes are open to students at all levels. Others are open to first-year students by permission of the instructor.
CLT 205 20th-Century Literatures of Africa
CLT 220 Colloquium: Imagining Language
CLT 274 The Garden: Paradise and Battlefield
Intermediate Courses: Spring 2012
Some classes are open to students at all levels. Others are open to first-year students by permission of the instructor.
CLT 208 Dreams, Magic and the Sublime in Modern European Literature
George Katsaros: M W 2:40-4:00 pm
Starting in the late 18th-century, avant-garde artists began to explore the claim that logic and rationality cannot account for all of human experience; they were fascinated by madness, dreams, the irrational and the sublime. We will be investigating this phenomenon from a literary, artistic and philosophical point of view, from the time of the Enlightenment philosophers to the 20th century. We will be reading stories by Nerval, Tolstoy and Kafka; Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Rilke, as well as philosophical essays. The class will incorporate artwork from the Romantic and symbolist eras and Surrealist films. To be offered only once.
CLT 230 "Unnatural" Women: Mothers Who Kill Their Children
Thalia Pandiri: M W 2:40-4:00 pm
Some cultures give the murdering mother a central place in myth and literature while others treat the subject as taboo. How is such a woman depcited -- as monster, lunatic, victim, savior? What do the motives attributed to her reveal about a society's assumptions and values? What difference does it make if the author is a woman? Authors to be studied include Euripides, Seneca, Ovid, Anouilh, Papadiamantis, Atwood, Walker, and Morrison.
CLT 235 Fairy Tales and Gender
Elizabeth Harries: T Th 1:00-2:50 pm
A study of the literary fairy tale in Europe from the 1690s to the 1990s, with emphasis on the ways women have written, rewritten, and transformed them. Some attention to oral storytelling and to related stories in other cultures. Writers will include d'Aulnoy, Perrault, le Prince de Beaumont, the Grimms, Andersen, Christina Rossetti, Angela Carter, Sexton, and Broumas.
CLT 266 South African Literature and Film
Katwiwa Mule: T Th 1:00-2:50 pm
A study of South African literature and film since 1948 in their historical, social and political contexts. How do writers and filmmakers of different racial and political backgrounds remember and represent the past? How do race, class, gender and ethnicity shape the ways in which they use literature and cinema to confront and resist the racist apartheid state? How do literature, film, and others texts, such as testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, function as complex cultural and political sites for understanding the interconnections among apartheid taxonomies, various forms of nationalisms and the often hollow postapartheid discourse of nonracial "new South Africa"?
CLT 277 Modern Jewish Fiction
Justin Cammy: T Th 9:00-10:20 am
Explores relationships between language and identity, the homeless imagination and imagined homecomings, modernist experiementation and the crisis of the modern, the particularity of national experience and the universality of the Jew. Readings from modern masters of the novel and short story, including folktales by Hadistic mystics (Hebrew and Yiddish); Kafka's narratives of alienation (German); Isaac Babel's modernist stories of Revolution (Russian); Bashevis Singer's demons and sexual transgressors (Yiddish); and the magic realism of Bruno Schulz (Polish) and Novel laureate Agnon (Hebrew). Can we really speak of a modern Jewish canon, given that it lacks the central markers that have distinguished other national literatures?
Advanced Courses: Fall 2011
Pre-requisite: A 200-level course in literature or permission of the instructor.
CLT 305 Studies in the Novel
CLT 367 Imagined Homes: Literary Interpretations of the National Question
Advanced Courses: Spring 2012
Pre-requisite: A 200-level course in literature or permission of the instructor.
Critical Theory & Method
CLT 300 Foundations of Contemporary Literary Theory (Fall 2011)
CLT 301 Contemporary Theory in French (Fall 2011)
CLT 340 Problems in Literary Theory (Spring 2012)
Janie Vanpee: T 3:00-4:50pm
A final seminar required of senior majors, designed to explore one broad issue (e.g., the body, memory and writing; exile; art about art) defined at the end of the fall semester by the students themselves. Prerequisites:CLT 300, or permission of the instructor.
