COL 203 - This Hard Land: The Italian-American Experience
COL 210 - Fashion and Literature
COL 250 - Masterpieces in World Literature
COL 302 - Literary Theory
COL 470 - Rethinking Bodies
COL 203 - THIS HARD LAND: THE ITALIAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE (top)
Samuele PardiniTue/Thur, 11:00-12:20
Room: Clemens 640
Registration Number: 258408
"We're all immigrants."
--Waller Lippman
"Well, I came to this country because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here I Found out three things: first, the streets weren't paved with gold: second, they weren't paved at all) and third. I was expected to pave them ."
--Old Italian story
"Well now Columbus he discovered America even though he hadn't planned on it" as Bruce Springsteen sings, and maybe it would have been better if America had not been "discovered" as Mark Twain said once. But life is cruel, both things happened, and since then millions of people came to this country, many of them Italians. The outcome is particularly strong legacy between the two countries, Italy and America, that we will investigate in this course from a cultural point of view.
We will begin by reading Columbus himself and the marvelous things he "imagined", Stephen Greenblatt (excerpts from "Marvelous Possessions" and "New World Encounter") St. John de Crevecoeur ("What is an American?"), Alexis de Tocqueville (excerpts from "Democracy in America"), Frederick Jackson Turner's historical essay on the importance of the frontier in American history (written in 1893, when the main Italian immigration to America was in Rill progress), C. Van Woodward on American history, Werner Sollors on ethnicity ("The Invention of Ethnicity"), Paul Ginsborg on what he calls "familismo" and Jacques Derrida (excerpts from "The Policy of Friendship"). Then, we will proceed on exploring a number of issues posed by the Italian-American Experience as depicted by Italian, American, and Italian-American writers and filmmakers: Mario Puzo (The Godfather), Gay Talese (Honor the Father, Unto the Sons), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather I and II), and Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas) on immigration, cultural codes, and the Mafia (indeed!); Cesare Pavese (The Moon and the Bonfire) Leonardo Sciascia (American Uncles), and John Fante (Ask the Dust) on imagining/experiencing America and the Great Depression; Henry James (Italian Hours) and Leslie Fiedler (An End to Innocence) on (re)discovering America from Italy; Mario Soldati (The American Bride) Marianna De Marco Torgovnick (Crossing Ocean Park) Camille Paglia (an interview) and the collection "Italian-American Women Folktales" on gender and religion; Frank Lentricchia (The Genealogy of Ice) and Jerry Mangione (Mount Allegro) on identity; Richard Gambino (Vendetta: New Orleans Mass Murder 1891) and Spike Lee (Do the Right Things) on ethnic conflicts; Vincent Schiavelli (Brusculimi, America, and The Sicilian Cookbook) on growing up Italian in Brooklyn and on food; Paul Oriolo (How to Say It: English, Amharic, Italian) on language; Umberto Eco (some excerpts) and Alessandro Portelli (The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories) on the Italian intellectuals in/and American.
A couple of guests from the Italian-American community in Buffalo will speak on their own experience.
Requirements: a brief (15 minutes) report on a book from a reading list I'll provide at the beginning of the semester, a short midterm paper that you can turn into a fieldwork paper (a genealogical reconstruction of your family tree if you have Italian origins, an interview to a member of your family if of Italian origins or on his/her memories of the Italian community in his/her hometown, a research on the relationship between Italians and oilier ethnic groups), and a final paper (7-8 pages).
COL 210 - FASHION AND LITERATURE (top)
Prasanta ChakrabortyMon/Wed, 9:30-10:50
Room: Clemens 640
Registration Number: 261674
Fashion: that magic word of our dreams and television shows is also a part our daily life. Who decides what we wear? What is the role of religion, ritual and family values in creating fashionable tastes? Where lies the fine line between clothing and costume? Does fashion improve or merely come back in cycles?
These are some of the prickly questions that will engage us in course. We shall take a roller -coaster ride from the medieval mystery plays to the Renaissance upside-down world of cross-dressers and fetishisms. We shall enquire how Chinese and Indian 'motifs' became 'exotic' one fine morning. In short we shall look into the concept of fashion as it developed in different places and times till it became the finished product of today.
Readings include romances and underground pamphlets, aesthetic essays and excerpts from fashion magazines. And of course we are going to watch and interpret a few 'fashionable' movies!
Requirements: include weekly semi-formal papers, one presentation and a term paper.
COL 250 - MASTERPIECES IN WORLD LITERATURE (top)
Professor Henry SussmanTue/Thur, 11:00-12:20
Room: Hochstetter 114
Registration Number: 140872
This is a course aimed at students who enjoy reading but may not have yet been exposed to a broad variety of literary cultures, and at literature students who seek to supplement their reading with important representative texts from around the world. Particular emphasis will be laid on presenting celebrated writers of the twentieth century from all corners of the globe. The class is taught by a variety of faculty members all teaching only in their area of expertise, so students acquire not only a breadth of readings, but also depth of presentation and insight into specific texts. Some of the authors covered will include: Ba, Gogol. Tanizaki, Genet, Lispector, Woolf, Borges, and S.Y. Agnon. Films will also form an integral part of the course, with showings of Querelle and The Piano among others. Students will be familiarized with the fundamentals of literary analysis and the sociology of literature through both lectures and extensive class discussion.
COL 302 - LITERARY THEORY (top)
Professor Shaun IrlamTue, 4:00-6:40
Room: Talbert 112
Registration Number: 347268
"Man makes a picture/ A moving picture/ Through light projected/ He can see himself up close."
--U2
Throughout the history of culture, people have asked a simple but devastation questions: "What is Art?" Answers have been philosophical, anthropological, theological, forma, technical and political. And the jury 's still out! If you're a humanities, politics or sociology student you cannot afford not to ask what vital roles art plays in society and history.
Since Antiquity, philosophers have struggled to draw the line between art and reality, between good and bad art, between signs and things. (Thus we ask: Is a sign a thing? Or the "picture" of a thing? Or somehow both?). This course provides an introduction to the classical problems raised by critical theories as well as the emerging idea of the aesthetic from antiquity to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Because there is little agreement about the meaning of art, we shall explore a variety of topics and issues, but we shall focus our discussion on the narrower question: "What is Beauty?" This prompts a farther set of questions: Is beauty only in the eye of the beholder? Who decides what is beautiful? What are the links between beauty and truth? Between beauty and morality? Between beauty and form? Between beauty and power? Between beauty and sexuality? How is beauty determined by gender? Hs Beauty had its day? What types of cultural work does beauty perform? Finally, who do cultures reproduce their ideas of the Beautiful.
In this course we shall examine some of the social, pedagogical, moral, anthropological, ideological and political functions of art and of beauty as they have been articulated in the works of Plato and Aristotle, Burke, Johnson, Kant, Hegel Heidegger and others.
COL 470 - RETHINKING BODIES (top)
Professor Elizabeth GroszMon/Wed, 11:00-12:20
Room: Clemens 640
Registration Number: 216022
This course is an introduction to various philosophical and theoretical accounts of the body. The concept of the body is generally relegated to a secondary or subordinate category relative to the privilege of mind or reason in the history of Western thought. This course will examine the work of a number of theorists who have questioned and problematized the subordination of body to mind. It is divided into four parts: the first is an introduction and selective survey of tile ways in which tile body (and mind) have been formulated in modern Western thought. The second part focuses on phenomenological and psychoanalytic conceptions of the lived body, the body of experience or (lie corporeal schema. The third part examines the body as a (writing) surface) a surface of social inscription, marking, and training. The fourth and final part explores the implications of acknowledging the sexual specificity of the body for notions of knowledge and representation.
