Topics course. A study of South African literature and film since 1948 in their historical, social, and political contexts. How do writers and film makers 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?

Same as EAL 239. An exploration of major themes through close readings of contemporary fiction by women from China, Taiwan, Tibet, and Chinese diasporas. Theme for 2011: 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?

Same as ENG 230 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.

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?).

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 203/ENG 203, like CLT 202/ENG 202, is among the 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.

CLT 203/ENG 203, like CLT 202/ENG 202, is among the 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.

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.

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.

Admission by permission of the department; for majors/minors and advanced students who have had three Classics or other courses on the ancient world and two intermediate courses in Greek or Latin.