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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.

 

 

Fall 2012

Introductory Courses:

FYS 162 Ambition & Adultery: Individualism in the 19th-Century Novel

Michael Gorra: MW 9:00 AM-10:20 AM

We will use a series of great 19th-century novels to explore a set of questions about the nature of individual freedom, and of the relation of that freedom—transgression, even—to social order and cohesion. The books are paired--two French, two Russian; two that deal with a woman's adultery, and two that focus on a young man's ambition—Balzac, Pere Goriot; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. There are some additional readings in history, criticism, and political theory.

 

FYS 167 Viking Diaspora

Craig Davis: T TH 10:30 AM-11:50 AM

The Norse colonies of Iceland and Greenland, and the attempted settlement of Vinland in North America, were the first European societies of the New World, revealing patterns of cultural conflict and adaptation that anticipated British colonization of the mid-Atlantic seaboard seven centuries later. We will compare the strengths and weaknesses of the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, founded in 930, with the 1787 Constitution of the United States, both political systems facing serious crises within two generations. Our sources for these experimental communities are the oral memories of founding families preserved in the later Islendingasogur, "Sagas of Icelanders," of the thirteenth century.

FYS 175 Love Stories

Ambreen Hai: W F 1:10 PM-2:30 PM

Could a Jane Austen heroine ever marry a servant? What notions about class or decorum dictate what seem to be choices of the heart? How are individual desires in fact shaped or produced by social, historical, and cultural forces, by dominant assumptions about race, class, gender, or sexuality? How do dominant love stories both reflect these assumptions, and actively create or legislate the boundaries of what may be desired? How many non-dominant (queer or interracial) love stories contest those boundaries, creating alternative narratives and possibilties? This course explores how notions of love, romance, marriage or sexual desire are structured by specific cultural and historical formations. We will closely analyze literature and film from a range of locations: British, American and postcolonial. We will also read some theoretical essays to provide conceptual tools for our analyses. Enrollment limited to 16 first-year students. This course may count towards the major in English, CLT, or SWG.

 

CLT 202/ENG 202 Western Classics in Translation, from Homer to Dante

Texts include the Iliad; tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Plato's Symposium; Virgil's Aeneid; Dante's Divine Comedy

Robert Hosmer: MW 9:00 AM-10:20 AM

Ann Jones: WF 2:40 PM-4:00 PM

Justina Gregory: T Th 9:00 AM-10:20 AM

CLT 202/ENG 202, like CLT 203/ENG 203, is among the four courses from which Comparative Literature majors choose two as the basis of the major. Students interested in Comparative Literature and/or the foundations of Western literature and wanting a writing-intensive course should take 202 or 203, or both.

Intermediate Courses:

Some classes are open to students at all levels. Others are open to first-year students by permission of the instructor.

CLT 204 Writings and Rewritings: Don Quixote and Don Juan

Reyes Lazaro: MW 9:00 AM-10:20 AM

Don Quixote is statistically the most famous read and rewritten of novels in the world. Don Juan is the central modern myth of seduction. Why do these two 17th-century Spanish texts continue to attract so many readers and writers to this day? First, because  they are fun. Moreover, because fractured Spanish identity (Jewish, Islamic, Christian) made possible the surge of our contemporary sensibility. Finally, because these texts pose fundamental questions about the nature of fiction, humor, sex, power, madness, and seduction. In addition to the texts by Cervantes and Tirso de Molina themselves, we will examine the mad adventures of Don Quixote and the perverse seductions of Don Juan and some of their respective progenies in a variety of genres (film, theater, poetry, Yiddish parody, opera and novel) and with authors such as Molière, Mozart, Zorrilla, Borges, Abramovitch/Mendele the book peddler, and Zapatista leader and writer Subcomandante Marcos.

CLT/EAL 232 Modern Chinese Literature

Sabina Knight: T Th 1:00 PM-2:50 PM

A window into China, Taiwan, Tibet and Chinese diasporas, this course introduces themes and movements from the late imperial period to the present. We will explore questions of political engagement, social justice, class, gender, and human freedom and responsibility. Readings are in English translation and no background in China or Chinese is required.

CLT 242 Main Street

Ann Leone: MWF 11:00 AM-12:10 PM

Where is Main Street? What times, spaces, or places does the expression conjure? Are there equivalent concepts and places in other cultures? What are the aesthetics, the life and livelihoods, the politics that we associate with it? How are images and the concept manipulated to affect us, in the arts, in environmental issues, and in public discourse? When do we treasure this landscape and when do we flee it? We will begin by looking at American Main Streets, and then explore related concepts in British, French, German, and Russian texts and other media. Prerequisite: one course in literary studies.

GER 231 Topics in German Cinema

Joel Westerdale: Lecture T Th 1:10 PM -2:30 PM,

Film M 7:30 PM-9:30 PM

A study of German cinema during the Third Reich: the legacy of Weimar cinema; popular and high culture in Nazi ideology; the popular function of entertainment; the question of fascist esthetics; constructions of masculinity and femininity; imaginations of the Other. Special focus on the films of Leni Riefenstahl. For comparison we will draw on some American examples (F. Capra, C. Chaplin, F. Zinnemann). Films to be studied: Hitler Youth Quex; Triumph of the Will; Olympia; Jew Suess, Muenchhausen, and others. Conducted in English.

Advanced Courses:

Pre-requisite: A 200-level course in literature or permission of the instructor.

PRS 301 Translating New Worlds

Dana Leibsohn, Ann Jones: T 1:00 PM-2:50 PM

This course investigates how New World explorations were translated into material culture and patterns of thought in early modern Europe and the Americas (1500-1750). Focusing upon geographies, "anthropologies," material objects, and pictorial and written records, students analyze how travel to and through the Americas reshaped the lives of consumers and thinkers, from food and finery (chocolate and silver, sugar and feathers) to published narratives and collections of objects made in New Spain, New England and New France. In addition to initial sixteenth-century contacts, we discuss cultural practices—material, imagined, factual or fantastical—that arose from the first encounters, conquests and settlements.

PRS 319 South Asians in Britain and America

Ambreen Hai: Th 1:00 PM-2:50 PM

This seminar will compare the cultural implications of two recent waves of migration of South Asian people: post-World War Two migrations of "skilled/unskilled" labor to Britain; and the still ongoing, post-1965 migrations to North America. We will focus on cultural production (literature, film, music) that records, reflects on, and seeks to intervene in the cultural process of such profound shifts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will investigate causes and consequences of migration and diaspora in their historical, political, and economic contexts, emphasizing questions of gender, globalization, community, identity, religion, fundamentalism, and assimilation. Writers include. Rushdie, Naipaul, Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, among others. Open to students interested in the South Asia concentration, literature, film, history, anthropology, AMS, SWG, and others.

Critical Theory & Method

CLT 300 Foundations of Contemporary Literary Theory

Janie Vanpée: T Th 3:00 PM-4:50 PM

The interpretation of literary and other cultural texts by psychoanalytic, Marxist, structuralist and post-structuralist critics. Emphasis on the theory as well as the practice of these methods: their assumptions about writing and reading and about literature as a cultural formation. Readings include Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault.

CLT 301 Contemporary Theory in French

Janie Vanpée: TBD

For students concurrently enrolled in CLT 300, wishing to read and discuss in French the literary theory at the foundation of contemporary debates. Readings of such seminal contributors as Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, Fanon, Deleuze, Baudrillard. Optional course. Graded S/U only.

Spring 2013

Introductory Courses:

CLT 100 Introduction to Comparative Literature: The Pleasures of Reading

Margaret Bruzelius

Topic: Love, Death and Art: Orpheus and Eurydice

Orpheus’s song persuades the powers of Hell to give him back his wife Eurydice; his glance back at her as they emerge from the underworld condemns her once more to Hell but also transforms Orpheus into the ultimate artist, able to change Nature itself through the power of his song. This course examines uses of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in literature and film in the work of an extraordinarily diverse group of writers: Sartre and Fanon, Adrienne Rich and H.D., Rilke and Blanchot. We will also watch films in which the story is retold by Cocteau, Marcel Camus, and Carlos Dieques. Students in the course will become familiar with the original account of the Orpheus story in Virgil and Ovid, and follow its modern development as a fable for the idea of the artist as a transformative figure. We will examine modern, post-modern, post-colonial and feminist versions of the tale in prose, poetry and film as an introduction to major currents in modern literature and literary theory.

 

CLT 150 Politics and Poetics of Translation

Carolyn Shread

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 in a range of contexts by hearing lectures by experts in the history, theory and practice of translation. Knowledge of a foreign language useful but not required. Graded S/U only.

CLT/ENG 203 Western Classics in Translation, from Chrétien de Troyes to Tolstoy

Robert Hosmer; William Oram

Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain; Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; Cervantes' Don Quixote; Lafayette's The Princess of Clèves; Goethe's Faust; Tolstoy's War and Peace. Lecture and discussion.

 

Intermediate Courses:

Some classes are open to students at all levels. Others are open to first-year students by permission of the instructor.

CLT 207/HSC 207 The Technology of Reading and Writing

Douglas Patey

An introductory exploration of the physical forms that knowledge and communication have taken in the West, from ancient oral cultures to modern print-literate culture. Our main interest will be in discovering how what is said and thought in a culture reflects its available kinds of literacy and media of communication. Topics include poetry and memory in oral cultures; the invention of writing; the invention of prose; literature and science in a script culture; the coming of printing; changing concepts of publication, authorship, and originality; movements toward standardization in language; the fundamentally transformative effects of electronic communication.

 

CLT 214 Literary Anti-Semitism

Jocelyn Kolb

How can we tell whether a literary work is anti-Semitically coded? What are the religious, social, cultural factors that shape imaginings of Jewishness? How does the Holocaust affect the way we look at constructions of the Jew today? A selection of seminal theoretical texts; examples mostly from literature but also from opera and cinema. Shakespeare, Marlow, Cervantes, G.E. Lessing, Grimm Brothers, Balzac, Dickens, Wagner, T. Mann, V. Harlan; S. Friedlander; M. Gelber, S. Gilman, G. Langmuir, Y.H. Yerushalmi.

CLT 229 The Renaissance Gender Debate

Ann Jones

In “La Querelle des Femmes” medieval and Renaissance writers (1350-1650) took on misogynist ideas from the ancient world and early Christianity: woman as failed man, irrational animal, fallen Eve. Writers debated women’s sexuality (insatiable or purer than men’s?), marriage (the hell of nagging wives or the highest Christian state?), women’s souls (nonexistent or subtler than men’s?), female education (a danger or a social necessity?). In the context of the social and cultural changes fuelling the polemic, we will analyze the many literary forms it took, from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, story collections such as Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, women writers’ dialogues, such as Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women, and pamphlets from the popular press. Some attention to the battle of the sexes in the visual arts.

CLT 231 American Jewish Literature

Justin Cammy

Explores the significant contribution of Jewish writers and critics to the development of American literature, broadly defined. Topics include narratives of immigration; the American dream and its alternatives; ethnic satire and humor; literary multilingualism; crises of the left involving Communism, Black-Jewish relations, and ‘60s radicalism; after-effects of the Holocaust; and the aesthetic engagement with folklore. Authors may include Yiddish and Hebrew modernist poets, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, I.B. Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick. We also consider how Canadian novelists (Mordecai Richler, Regine Robin) and Latin-American writers such as Moacyr Scliar, Isaac Goldemberg or Ilan Stavans provide transnational perspective. Must Jewish writing in the Americas remain on the margins, “too Jewish” for the mainstream yet “too white” to qualify as multicultural?

CLT 239 Contemporary Chinese Women's Fiction

Sabina Knight

An exploration of major themes through close readings of contemporary fiction by women from China, Taiwan, Tibet, and Chinese diasporas. Theme for 2013: Intimacy. How do stories about love, romance, and desire (including extramarital affairs, serial relationships and love between women) reinforce or contest norms of economic, cultural, and sexual citizenship? What do narratives of intimacy reveal about the social consequences of economic restructuring? How do pursuits, realizations, and failures of intimacy lead to personal and social change? Readings are in English translation and no background in China or Chinese is required.

ENG 246 South Asian English Literatures

Ambreen Hai

This course will explore the rich diversity of late 20th and 21st century literatures written in English and published internationally by award-winning writers of South Asian descent from Britain, the U.S., Canada, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh. Writers range from established celebrities (Rushdie, Naipaul, Kureishi, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ondaatje, Selvadurai, Ghosh) to promising new stars (Kiran Desai, Hari Kunzru, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Daniyal Mueenuddin). Among many questions, we will consider how writers craft new idioms and forms to address multiple audiences in global English, how they explore or foreground emergent concerns of postcolonial societies and diasporic, migrant, or transnational peoples in a rapidly globalizing but by no means equalizing world. Not recommended for first-year students.

ENG 249 Literatures of the Black Atlantic

Andrea Stone

Visiting the pulpits, meeting houses, and gallows of British North America to the colonial West Indies and docks of Liverpool to the modern day Caribbean, U.S., Canada, U.K., and France, this course analyzes the literatures of the Black Atlantic and the development of Black literary and intellectual history from the 18th to the 21st century. Some key theoretical frameworks, which will help inform our study of literature emerging from the Black Atlantic, include diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Readings range from early African diasporic sermons, dying words, poetry, captivity and slave narratives to newspapers, essays, novels, drama and film.

CLT 266 Studies in South African Literature and Film

Don Weber

Topic: The Political Imagination in Contemporary South Africa

This course examines the variety of literary and cultural expression in South Africa since the 1970s, focusing on the relations between art and political struggle. Among the topics to be discussed are the imagination of history in South African literature; the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement (and its legacies); responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Among the authors to be studied are Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coeztee, Njabulo Ndebele, Zoe Wicomb, and Zakes Mda, along with a number of contemporary poets, playwrights, and filmmakers.

Advanced Courses:

Pre-requisite: A 200-level course in literature or permission of the instructor.

EAL 360 Topics in East Asian Languages and Literature

Sabina Knight

Topic: Deep China: Literary and Interdisciplinary Analysis

Literature is crucial to understanding China, from healthcare and social movements to debates about legal reform, civic freedoms, and clean energy policies. This course approaches China through literary analysis informed by the work of anthropologists, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists. Each unit conjoins theoretical works, fieldwork essays, and Chinese literary works (stories, novels, films). Student projects integrate literature and topics in public policy, healthcare, or the social sciences. Critical thinking required; prior knowledge of China helpful but not required.

ENG 311 Reimagining Classics for Children

Naomi Miller

In this course, we will consider how the Bible, Homer’s Odyssey, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest have been reimagined for different audiences, focusing particularly on the creation and use of contemporary adaptations for children, both within and outside the classroom at different educational levels. We will read a range of Bible stories, stories from Homer’s Odyssey, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well as adaptations of these stories for children and young adults, in genres ranging from picture books to longer narratives.

Critical Theory & Method

CLT 340 Problems in Literary Theory

Ann Jones

A final seminar required of senior majors, designed to explore one broad issue (e.g., the body, memory and writing; exile; postcolonial rewritings) defined at the end of the fall semester by the students themselves.