Global Arc

Wagner's 15-hour opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen is a unique masterpiece that transformed opera as a genre. With enormous emotional and intellectual power, it provides insight into key social and political issues that were particularly troubling in 19th-century Europe. It is also the magnum opus of a controversial composer whose overt anti-Semitism resonates well into the present. Through a close study of audio and video recordings, and with equal emphasis on musical and theatrical aspects, this course will offer a cross-disciplinary introduction to the Ring, unpacking the musical, cultural, political and economic history of the period.

An introductory course in the history of European literary theory. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Boccaccio, Dryden, Corneille, Schiller, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida. Theories will be related to selected literary texts in an effort to explore how theory illuminates literature while shedding light upon larger human questions. One lecture, one two-hour seminar.

A first course for students in reading Egyptian hieroglyphs. Serious work in ancient Egyptian grammar, vocabulary, etc. (i.e., the staples of a classical language course) plus work on the relation between hieroglyphs and the painting, relief and sculpture of ancient Egypt.

This course continues from "Read Like an Egyptian" COM 222 (Spring 05), with extensive work on the Middle Egyptian verbal system. In addition to the standard work necessary in a classical language course, this course will explore further relations between Middle Egyptian and the cultures of the ancient Nile Valley. The course will include some readings from "The Tale of Sinuhe" and perhaps other ancient Egyptian literature in the original.

The Queen of Sheba is perhaps the most famous woman in history, having been depicted for two thousand years in three great world traditions--Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Comparing representations of the queen across these traditions provides a unique opportunity to study the complex ways that groups think about national identity, gender, and race. Students will learn to detect the cultural assumptions underlying texts from other societies and become more aware of their own assumptions. All assigned texts will be read in English, but students with skills in relevant languages (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Ethiopic) are most welcome.

"How was your day?" "Tell me about yourself." Such commonplace prompts draw out "everyday stories" of real, unremarkable life. But what counts as real life or unremarkable life, and what happens when it gets into literature, too? What parts of reality do everyday stories suppress or show up? Drawing on writers from Roland Barthes to Christopher Isherwood to Virginia Woolf, this course looks at novels, stories, diaries, and essays that present versions or theories of everyday life. Students will also be invited to experiment with their own stories or non-stories of the everyday.

This course is devoted to different varieties of modern fantastic fiction. Our readings will include a tale told by a dead dreamer or his double, a counterfactual history, an animal fable, a hybrid science fiction-detective novel, and several surreal political satires. We will discuss the literary conventions that govern fiction ranging from the banally implausible to the studiedly outrageous, and address the particular cultural contexts that produce and sustain these works.

This course explores oral traditions and oral literary genres (in English translation) of the Balkan and East European world, both past and present. Topics include traditional rituals (life-cycle and seasonal) and the music and song associated with them, contemporary forms of traditional and popular culture, and oral traditional narrative: prose (folktale and legend) and poetry (epic and ballad). Discussion and analysis will focus on the roles and meanings of Balkan and East European oral traditions as forms of expressive culture.

A class in both drama and theater. Students will read a range of dramatic comedies, from pre-modern to modern times, including the work of such playwrights as Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, and Ionesco. One day a week there will be a lecture on the play, while in the next class students will observe actors performing scenes from the play so as to demonstrate different interpretive approaches. Topics of interest will include the relation between stage and page, the nature of laughter, the place of comedy in the history of culture, and the varying styles in which comedies have been both written and performed.

This course is an introduction to the study of contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts with a transatlantic perspective. Placing special emphasis on the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, the course will analyze different genres and artistic styles that emerge with new forms of imagining the political from the 1960s to the present. Readings will include critical texts on minor literatures, transatlantic connections, new social movements as well as literature dealing with situationism, romance reportagem, indigenous movements, testimonio, zapatism and contemporary global mobilizations.