Comparative Literature 100 - INTRO:THE PLEASURES OF READING

Topic(s) course. 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.

Topic: Love, Death and Art: Orpheus and Eurydice.