Comp. Lit. 70300 - Greek Mythology and Literature
GC: Tues., 4:15-6:15 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Stern (93496)
Comp. Lit. 79800 - Independent Studies
Variable credit up to 6, Staff
Note: All proposals for Independent Study must have the Executive Officer’s prior approval
Comp. Lit. 80100 - The Faust Legend
GC: Mon. 6:30-8:30 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Oppenheimer (93499)
Comp. Lit. 80900 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies: Early Modern Print and Its Detractors: Author and Artist, Publisher and Reader
GC: Mon., 6:30-8:30 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Elsky
(Crosslisted with RSCP 72100) (93497)
Comp. Lit. 82200 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
GC: Wed., 4:15-6:15 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Brenkman (93500)
Comp. Lit. 84000 - Alexander Pushkin
GC: Mon. 4:15-6:15 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Peterson (93501)
Comp. Lit. 85000 - Studies in the Modern Period: Structure and Transformation in Life Historical Literature
GC: Wed., 2:00-4:00 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Crapanzano
(Crosslisted with Anthro. 81000) (93502)
Comp. Lit. 85000 - Postmodernism: Italy and Beyond
GC: Mon., 2:00-4:00 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Lombardi (93503)
Comp. Lit. 88100 - Medieval Lyric Poetry
GC: Thurs., 6:30-8:30 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. DiScipio (93703
Comp. Lit. 89100 - History of Literary Theory and Criticism I
GC: Thur., 4:15-6:15 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Elsky (93505)
Comp. Lit. 89800 - Independent Studies
Variable credit up to 6, Staff
Note: All proposals for Independent Study must have the Executive Officer’s prior approval
Comp. Lit. 90000 - Dissertation Supervision
GC: 1 cr, Staff
CL 80101 - Dante’s Paradiso
NYU: Mon., 3:30-6:15 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Freccero (93508)
CL 80102 - The Arts of Eloquence Medieval and Renaissance Italy
NYU: Wed., 3:30-6:15 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Cox (93509)
CL 80103 - Topics in Italian Culture
NYU: Thurs., 3:30-6:15 p.m., 4 cr., TBA (93510)
CL 80104 - Topics in Italian American Culture
NYU: Tues., 3:30-6:15 p.m., 4 cr., Prof. Cinotto (93511)
Comp. Lit. 70300 - Greek Mythology and Literature
Prof. Stern
This course will in the first instance provide an overview of the complex and extensive mythological system of the ancient Greeks. Additionally, we will consider the ways in which the ancients themselves understood their myths (e.g. rationalism, allegory, etymology, aetiology, euhemerism) and the ways in which various 20th century schools of interpretation have offered explanations. One particular emphasis will be on the relationship of myth to religion, in terms of such areas as the primary festivals of the ancient Athenian calendar, sacrifice, scapegoating, oracles, and attitudes toward death.
Among primary sources we will study the following: Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days; Homer, Odyssey; Homeric Hymns to Demeter, Apollo, and Aphrodite; Aeschylus, Oresteia; Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Coloneus; Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis; Bacchae; Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazousae; Herodotus, Histories (selections); Plato, Euthyphro; Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica; Apollodorus, The Library. A bibliography of secondary works will be provided.
Knowledge of Classical Greek is not required for this course. However, students who intend to read substantial amounts of the material in Greek should speak with the instructor after the first class: an additional meeting will be planned for them and adjustments made in other course requirements.
A term paper on a topic approved by the instructor is required.
Comp. Lit. 80900 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies: Early Modern Print and Its Detractors: Author and Artist, Publisher and Reader
Prof. Elsky
This course will examine the possibilities that the mechanically reproducible word and image brought to the production of the literary, visual, and intellectual arts and their delivery to an audience. Readings will be drawn from history, literature, and art history. We will begin by considering the various ways print technology affected the dissemination of ideas and information in early modern culture. We will then turn to the impact of print on literature and art in relation to competing forms of publication (painting, manuscript, and performance). Topics will include the relation between painting and the reproducible print, and the professionalization of the printmaker as artist in Italy and Northern Europe; the rivalry between print publication and manuscript circulation of verse and prose; the relation between print and performance versions of drama; the development of the professional authorial persona and the resistance to authorial status; the place of women writers in networks of publication; the deployment of varied means of publication to negotiate position with family, coteries, and patrons. The course will end by considering the combination of text and image in the illustrated publication of news of the conquest of the New World. Topics will be examined in relation to specific writers and artists, including Mantegna, Dürer, Diana Mantuana, Petrarch, Erasmus, Montaigne, Labé, Shakespeare, Donne, Wroth, and Cortés. Because this is a cross-disciplinary course, participants are encouraged to make use of material from their home discipline. Assignments will include an oral report and a semester project.
Comp. Lit. 80100 - The Faust Legend
Prof. Oppenheimer
Few figures in Western literature have attracted as much continuous interest from as many important writers, artists, composers and film-makers as that of Doctor Faustus, the mysterious sixteenth-century physician and necromancer whose legendary pact with the devil granted him superhuman powers. Starting with the earliest published version of the story, the famous Faust book dating from 1587 in Frankfurt (also available in translation), the course will explore strikingly different treatments of Faust’s career by Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann, and the conflicting views of humanity’s relations to nature and the divine implied by their masterpieces. Also investigated will be the influence of the Faust story on writers as diverse as Byron, Carlyle, Dostoyevski, Pushkin, Hawthorne, Paul Valéry, and Lawrence Durrell. Films such as Mephisto, Hanussen, and Bedazzled, which approach the story and its motif of the devil pact in modern ways, will be considered and, where possible, shown; operatic and other musical treatments will be considered, along with the Faust legend’s impact on painting.--One brief in-class presentation. One research paper.
Comp. Lit. 82200 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Prof. Brenkman
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) remains strikingly contemporary, having inaugurated many forms of writing and thought that are as vital and troublesome in today’s culture as they were in his own time.
In the Confessions and Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau invented modern autobiography. He brought the shaping power of childhood into focus; linked moral self-reflection to the unvarnished revelation of one’s own failings, fantasies, and wrongdoings; and put feeling on a par with action in evaluating and making sense of an individual life. In Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Human Inequality and The Social Contract, Rousseau initiated the effort to link the hypothesis of an original social contract not simply to government or sovereignty, as Hobbes had done, but to the very idea of democracy. He thus implanted in modern political thought, indeed in modern political culture, the vision of a democratic founding, of an inaugurating act that would square equal participation and legitimate authority. In Émile and Julie, or the New HeloVse, Rousseau the novelist advanced down the path opened by Samuel Richardson in making the novel a means of moral reflection on the nature of passion and intimacy and of the growth and education of the personality.
Much of the challenge of understanding Rousseau arises from the very fact that the unity of his work as a writer is embodied in the most varied genres: novel, autobiography, philosophy, and polemic. We will read the major works mentioned above (students may read them in French or in translation). We will also look at some of the major commentators on Rousseau, from Jean Starobinski to Derrida and de Man; philosophical critics and advocates, including John Rawls, Luc Ferry, and Charles Taylor; and feminist critics, including Carole Pateman, Joan B. Landes, and Susan Moller Okin.
Comp. Lit. 84000 - Alexander Pushkin
Prof. Peterson
The course will examine Pushkin's innovations in both their Russian and larger European contexts. Particular attention will be given to the structural, stylistic, and thematic developments of his major verse forms as well as to Pushkin's experiments with prose. Some time will be devoted to Pushkin's reception by his contemporaries, to the myth or cult of Pushkin in today's Russia, and to the challenges of translating Pushkin into English. Students with advanced knowledge of Russian are expected to read all of the materials in the original. English speakers will study the best available English translations of Pushkin's work.
Requirements: 1. weekly response papers; 2. research paper.
Comp. Lit. 85000 - Studies in the Modern Period: Structure and Transformation in Life Historical Literature
Prof. Crapanzano
This seminar is concerned with the various modes of life historical depiction and the central role that transformation plays in such depictions. Through careful reading of life historical texts such as autobiographies, confessions, fictional accounts written in autobiographical form, and case studies, we will explore the inter- and intra- locutory dimensions and narrative techniques of life historical writing, the constitution of the subject (or self), subjectivity, innerness, depth, the mystical experience, madness, and the play of memory and forgetfulness. Particular attention will be given to self-understanding, self-allegorization, exceptionalism, and objectification as well as to the various modes of justifying the autobiographical – the life historical – project and the interpretations that follow therefrom. Reading will include both classics in life historical writings ( e..g. those of Augustine, Saint Theresa, Montaigne. Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Rilke, Woolf, Barthes, ), and theoretical writings (e.g. William James, Michel de Certeau, Freud, Sartre) Several ethnographic texts and relevant theorizing will be included.
Comp. Lit. 85000 - Postmodernism: Italy and Beyond
Prof. Lombardi
“Postmodernism”, a word used and misused in countless disciplines, is the name given to current cultural practices characterized by major paradoxes of form and ideology. This course will investigate the poetics of postmodernism as drawn from those contradicting practices. Special emphasis will be placed on “historiographic metafiction” and on postmodern reconfigurations of narrative, reference, subjectivity, and intertextuality. The study of seminal works by Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Umberto Eco, and Carlo Emilio Gadda will thus be contextualized within a larger framework, which will include fictional works by William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Alain Robbe Grillet, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Fernando Pessoa, as well as theoretical writings by Fredric Jameson, Jean François Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon, and Hayden White.
Comp. Lit. 88200 - Medieval Lyric Poetry
Prof. DiScipio
The course consists of an in-depth study of Italian Poetry of the Duecento and Trecento concentrating on its major authors and on the cultural and intellectual currents of the time. We will begin with a study of the lyric tradition of Provence and the notion of courtly love; then continue with study of the culture and poetry of the Sicilian School at the court of Frederick II. We shall spend at least one session on the Poesia religiosa of Iacopone and St. Francis before moving into the area of Guittone and the Siculo-Tuscan poets. The last part of the course will be dedicated to the major poets of the Trecento, both I Poeti realisti and Il Dolce Stil Novo. The course will be conducted in Italian, unless it will be necessary to do otherwise. There will be class reports and two papers, a shorter one at midterm time and a longer one of 25 pages at conclusion.
The basic texts can be taken from:
Gianfranco Contini. Poeti del Duecento, Volume I, Tomo I.
Poesia didattica dell`Italia centrale, Poesia Realistica Toscana, Vol II, Tomo I.
Dolce Stil Novo Milano- Napoli: Mondadori, Classici Ricciardi, 1995.
Giuliani, Alfredo. Antologia della poesia italiana. Dalle Origini al Trecento. Milano Feltrinelli, 2 vols, 1975.
Poesia italiana del Trecento, a cura di Piero Cudini. Milano : Garzanti, 1978.
Antologia della Poesia italiana, Duecento Trecento. Diretta da Cesare Segre e Carlo Ossola. Torino, Einaudi, 1997. There is a special edition of this for Biblioteca della Repubblica, vol. I . Roma: Editoriale La Repubblica, 2004.
Some critical texts besides the above:
Dai Siciliani ai siculo-toscani: lingua metro e stile per la definizione del canone. Atti del Convegno, Lecce, 21-23 aprile 1998. A cura di Rosario Colluccia e Riccardo Gualdo. Galatina: Congedo, 1999.
Fratta, Aniello. Le fonti provenzali dei poeti della Scuola Siciliana. Firenze: Le Lettere, 1996.
Marti, Mario. Cultura e stile nei poeti giocosi al tempo di Dante. Pisa, 1953.
Sapegno, N. Il trecento, Milano. 1952.
Zumthor, Paul. Toward a Medieval Poetics. Trans. Philip Bennet. St. Paul, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
A full bibliographical list will be given later with the syllabus.
Comp. Lit. 89100 - History of Literary Theory and Criticism I
Prof. Elsky
A study of the development of thought about literature in the classical, medieval, and early modern periods. The course will focus on issues related to the nature of literary representation. Topics will include mimesis and imitation; literary truth and beauty; genre and structure; figurative language; affectivity; and the impact of religious, philosophical, and political thought on literary categories. Classical readings will include Plato, Aristotle, and Horace; medieval readings will include Augustine and Dante; Renaissance readings will include Valla, Tasso, Sidney, and Milton. Eighteenth-century readings will include Boileau, Schiller, Dryden, and Burke.
If you wish to unsubscribe from the COMPLIT-L List, please send an E-mail to: listserv@gc.listserv.cuny.edu. Within the body of the text, only write the following: "SIGNOFF COMPLIT-L".