Course Level: Graduate

Advanced Studies in World Literature (3)

Pacific Crossings

This course is a critical survey of popular culture circulated among Chinese and Chinese diasporic communities across the Pacific. Emphases are on popular fiction, political posters, cinema, music, and new media. Analyzing the Asia-Pacific as a space for cultural production, the class investigates the important roles different media play in the formation of transpacific "Chinese" worlds. Meets with LIT-467 001.

Course Level: Graduate

Advanced Studies in World Literature (3)

Reading the Global Novel: Modernity and its Others

This course examines Western and non-Western visions of modernity through an exploration of the global novel. The class discusses what it means to be modern, what it means to be excluded from modernity, and how postcolonial authors might re-conceptualize the modern. Topics such as colonialism, capitalism, empire, science, reason, magic, and environmental injustice are also covered.

Course Level: Graduate

Advanced Studies in World Literature (3)

Classical Drama

Ancient drama continues to haunt the Western imagination, as playwrights and poets even today rework these archetypal stories of blood feuds, transgressive desire, and doomed individuals. This seminar considers the enduring appeal of Greek tragedy, looking not only at the usual canonical texts, such as Oedipus the King, the Oresteia, and Antigone, but also reading equaling compelling plays such as Sophocles' Philoctetes, Euripides' Hippolytus, and Aeschylus' Persians. Readings include one or two instances of Greek "old" comedy by Aristophanes in addition to Hellenistic comedies by Menander and Terence, as well as a Roman tragedy by Seneca. Selections from important theoretical readings supplement primary texts and include Aristotle's Poetics, Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred, Hegel's lectures on tragedy, and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. In addition to these important texts, the class considers a variety of frameworks through which to think about ancient drama and theatre, ranging from performance to trauma theory. Meets with LIT-467 001.

Course Level: Graduate

Advanced Studies in World Literature (3)

Mario Vargas Llosa

In 2010, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. As the author whose first novel, The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros), started what would be known as the "boom" of Latin American novels of the 1960s and 70s, Vargas Llosa has long been the most internationally recognizable Peruvian artist, one for whom literature and politics, both the right and the left, are linked. This online course surveys Vargas Llosa's major works, along with the political, historical, and literary contexts in which they were written and read. In the process, the class examines the effects of literary prizes and international readership on the canonization process; or put another way, what makes a major author in a contemporary contest. Meets with LIT-467 E01L.