Comparative Literature Department :: University at Buffalo

University Registration Guidelines Website: http://src.buffalo.edu

April 21, 2008 - Registration for Undergraduate Students

April 21, 2008 - Department Force Registrations: Independent Studies

COL 226: MEMORY AS ART
COL 250: MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE MYTH AND EPIC
COL 301: HONORS - INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY SINCE 1965
COL 311: WOMEN IN TRAGEDY
COL 345: HONORS - EXPERIMENTAL AND OPPOSITIONAL: MODERN WOMEN WRITERS

COL 443: HONORS - LITERATURE AND WAR

Degree Requirements

COL 226: MEMORY AS ART (top)

Melinda Mejia

Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00am – 12:20pm, Clemens Hall 640

Registration Number: 020457

According to Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory is the mother of the Muses, the nine Greek goddesses whose role it is to inspire the poets and to promote artistic production and the sciences. This representation of Mnemosyne as the origin of the Muses signals the importance of the act of memory in relation to the production of art: Art comes from memory.

This course will primarily explore the function of memory in relation to the production of art and within the work of art itself. Is the production of art inextricable from the act of memory? To what extent does the act of imagination (a creative vision of the future) parallel the act of memory (a creative vision of the past)? And if memory is linked to the production of art what function does forgetting play in this same production?

We will also explore the question of memory and identity, both individual and collective. Is the self merely a collection and construction of memories? If memory plays an important role in both the production of art and the understanding of the self, to what extent are these two actions parallel? That is, is the understanding of self an artistic endeavor? Furthermore, to what extent is every act of memory artistic?

Our investigation of the question of memory will be guided by a variety of philosophical and literary texts spanning from Plato to Morrison. We will read some selections from the following list and possibly watch the film Memento:

Phaedrus, Plato

On Memory and Reminiscence, Aristotle

“Tintern Abbey,” William Wordsworth

“Mourning and Melancholia” or a selection from The Interpretation of Dreams,

Sigmund Freud

The Lover or The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras

Recollection of Things to Come, Elena Garro

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

a selection from Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

Beloved, Toni Morrison

“Funes the Memorious” aka “Funes, his Memory,” Jorge Luis Borges

The Secret Sharer Joseph Conrad

“The Swan,” Charles Baudelaire

Vertigo, W.G. Sebald

Course Requirements: Regular attendance and class participation, weekly reading responses and/or quizzes, a short presentation on one of the texts, an 8-10 page final paper

COL 250: MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE MYTH AND EPIC (top)

Nicole Jowsey

Wednesday, 6:30 – 9:10pm, One Class per Week, Clemens Hall 640

Registration Number: 301979

Mythologies have been important, if not the main, cornerstones of civilizations from ancient times. They often tell the origin of both the world and the people who reside within that world. Many myths have been handed down through epic poetry, from Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey to The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Bhagavad Gita. What is the relationship between myth and the epic, and how are they both pertinent to modernity? By investigating this relationship through close readings of various cultural myths and epics, we will be able to see how these traditions are inherited in contemporary cultures. Furthermore, we shall begin to think about the spheres of influence that epic poetry and mythology have within Abrahamic religions and, more broadly, Western thought. This course will include readings from various epic poems and myths, along with contemporary theories of myth. We will also study the retelling of mythical stories in contemporary cinema.

Requirements: A 10-minute presentation, participation in class discussions and an 8-10 page final paper.

Required Texts: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Selections from The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

The Bhagavad Gita

Selections from the Torah, The New Testament, and The Koran

Roland Barthes, Mythologies.

Selected essays from the following thinkers will also be discussed: Mircea Eliade,

Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Films: Troy, 300, The 13th Warrior, What Dreams May Come and Selections from The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

COL 301: HONORS - INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY SINCE 1965(top)

Professor Shaun Irlam

Thursday, 9:30 – 12:20 pm, One Class per week, Clemens Hall 606

Honors

“These are the days when our work has come asunder

And these are the days when we look for something other”

--- U2

U2’s lyrics nicely sum up a pervasive sense of crisis that generally surrounds the idea of literary or cultural "work." Do we still believe in “literature” today? What counts as “literature”? How do we differentiate between literary and non-literary writing and, most importantly, how do we read it? We all know (or think we know), how to read by the time we get to college. During this course we will examine how we read: what decisions we make about what’s important, what’s meaningful and what guides us in these operations. We will observe this process through our own reading and the critical readings of others. This course will provide a familiarity with some defining issues, key thinkers, and theoretical texts that have shaped the critical investigation of literature and literariness in the quarter century since the publication of Michel Foucault's Order of Things (1966) and Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967), two major theoretical events of the last half-century.

In this course we shall encounter some of the texts and vocabularies of such thinkers as Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and others. We shall also develop some familiarity with some of the major trends in late twentieth-century literary theory such as feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, Marxist criticism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic criticism, cultural studies and queer theory. We shall attempt to understand why critical thinking has witnessed the problematization and critique of all conceptual and foundational vocabularies, including such indispensable terms as "text," "sign" "writing" "meaning" "identity" "representation" "subjectivity" "self" "other" and why literary studies has been bedevilled by these inquiries. This course assumes no prior familiarity with any of the authors or texts mentioned above; however, those of you familiar with some of these writers will know that this is not a course for the faint-hearted. Some of these readings are difficult and demand close and careful reading, but if you're looking for a good intellectual challenge next semester....

COL 301 requires active class participation, short class presentations, two short papers during the semester as well as a final term paper (approx. 10 pages).

COL 311: WOMEN IN TRAGEDY (top)

Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

Wednesday, 3:30 – 6:10pm, One Class per Week, Clemens 436

Registration Number: 254937

The seminar focuses on the function of women in ancient tragic works. Beyond the social, historical, and symbolic roles of women, however, we will explore the philosophical questions posed by the experience of femininity in the ancient world. How does sexual difference inform and inflect tragic experience itself, an experience that for the Greeks (but also for several modern ethical philosophers) has been understood to be universally human? How does the feminine as lover, mother, sister, citizen, or worshipper affect and become affected by strife and suffering—whether this is war, tyranny, betrayal, or the trials of revelation?

We will read four representative tragic works—namely, Medea, The Trojan Women, The Bacchae, and Antigone, as well as theoretical writings on tragedy from Hegel, Nicole Loraux, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Helene Foley.

There will be four short responses for each play (2–3 pages each), and one final paper on a text or texts of your choice (5–7 pages).

COL 345: HONORS - EXPERIMENTAL AND OPPOSITIONAL: MODERN WOMEN WRITERS (top)

Professor Ewa P. Ziarek

Tuesday, 3:30 – 6:10pm ( One Class per Week ), Clemens Hall 218

Honors

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters ... But to
sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference
to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a
measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, wrote Virginia Woolf
in A Room of One’s Own. In the spirit of the defiance of cultural and political
authorities, Woolf proclaimed that in the realm of literature nothing is
forbidden, even at the wildest experiment. Yet what is at stake in such wild
literary experiments? How is a literary experiment different from a scientific
experiment? How is it related to what Erica Hunt, an African-American poet,
calls oppositional poetics ? We will explore these questions by reading
closely modern fiction and postmodern poetry, often written as the contestation
of social, literary, racial and sexual norms. In the first part of the semester
we will focus on the novels of Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf, and then we will
move to the brave new world of experimental poetry. We will examine
experimental attitude to literary language, the attempts to imagine and create
new forms of female subjectivity, playful explorations of sexuality, pleasure
and desire. But we will also discuss sometimes tragic costs of such daring
artistic struggle for freedom: loneliness, isolation, loss, mourning, and
destruction. The larger question we will raise in the course is about the role of
literature and art in social, political, and personal transformations.
The texts we will read are challenging, but the course does not require prior
literary knowledge. What is DOES require is intellectual curiosity and
willingness to learn.

Requirements: fresh ideas, interesting questions, and active participation in
class discussion; class presentations; one page typed weekly discussion
questions, and a short research paper (6-8 pp., with at least 6 critical sources)
devoted to one of the texts discussed in this course, midterm, the complete
folder turned in with all the assignments at the end of the semester.

COL 443: HONORS - LITERATURE AND WAR (top)

Professor Rodolphe Gasché

Tuesday and Thursday, 3:30 – 4:50pm, Talbert Hall 212

Honors

We will read a number of philosophical and literary texts ranging from the fifth century BC to the present. We will be examining how the concept of war and the art of strategy have developed from the Chinese sage Sun Tsu to the great continental strategist of the 19th century von Clausewitz. The literary portraits of war that we will be dealing with will be analyzed with regard to the idea of these thinkers. In doing this, we will also be looking at the specific issues, historical, psychological, autobiographical, that these literary works are concerned with. This course will also be interested in the question of why wars have been such a privileged subject in literature and how the art of military

strategy can be compared with the art of writing. Readings will include the following: Sun Tsu, The Art of War, J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (selections), Carl v. Clausewitz, On War (selections), S. Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”, and “Why War?”, G. Glaubert, Salambo, E. Junger, The Storm of Steel, J. Swift, The Battle of the Books, S. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.

Comparative Literature Degree Requirements

The Undergraduate Minor (18 Credits)

COL 301 and 302
Up to five additional courses
Two courses may be course you take toward your major

The Undergraduate Major (45 credits; varies)

All Comparative Literature Majors are self-designed and must be approved by

the College of Arts and Sciences Special Major Advisor, as well as by two faculty

advisors from the COL Department. If you are interested in designing a Comparative

Literature Special Major, please consult the COL Director of Undergraduate Studies.

The M.A. (36 credits)

27 Credits (9 courses) Intensive (A) Seminars
3 Credits of extensive (B) Seminar or Independent Study
6 credits Thesis Guidance
Master's Thesis (approximately 50 -100pages)

The Ph.D. (72 Credits)

30 Credits (10 courses) Intensive (A) Seminars
Orals Examination (upon completion, students can apply for the M.A.)
Dissertation (approximately 150-300 pages)
Dissertation Defense

The above information is provided as a guide. Requirements may vary. Please see the

Department Director of Graduate Studies, the Director of Undergraduate Studies, or

your advisor for information tailored to your situation.


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	:: Fall 2008 - Undergraduate Courses
Graduate Undergraduate Course Archive	University Registration Guidelines Website: http://src.buffalo.edu April 21, 2008 - Registration for Undergraduate Students April 21, 2008 - Department Force Registrations: Independent Studies COL 226: MEMORY AS ART COL 250: MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE MYTH AND EPIC COL 301: HONORS - INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY SINCE 1965 COL 311: WOMEN IN TRAGEDY COL 345: HONORS - EXPERIMENTAL AND OPPOSITIONAL: MODERN WOMEN WRITERS COL 443: HONORS - LITERATURE AND WAR Degree Requirements COL 226: MEMORY AS ART (top) Melinda Mejia Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00am – 12:20pm, Clemens Hall 640 Registration Number: 020457 According to Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory is the mother of the Muses, the nine Greek goddesses whose role it is to inspire the poets and to promote artistic production and the sciences. This representation of Mnemosyne as the origin of the Muses signals the importance of the act of memory in relation to the production of art: Art comes from memory. This course will primarily explore the function of memory in relation to the production of art and within the work of art itself. Is the production of art inextricable from the act of memory? To what extent does the act of imagination (a creative vision of the future) parallel the act of memory (a creative vision of the past)? And if memory is linked to the production of art what function does forgetting play in this same production? We will also explore the question of memory and identity, both individual and collective. Is the self merely a collection and construction of memories? If memory plays an important role in both the production of art and the understanding of the self, to what extent are these two actions parallel? That is, is the understanding of self an artistic endeavor? Furthermore, to what extent is every act of memory artistic? Our investigation of the question of memory will be guided by a variety of philosophical and literary texts spanning from Plato to Morrison. We will read some selections from the following list and possibly watch the film Memento: Phaedrus, Plato On Memory and Reminiscence, Aristotle “Tintern Abbey,” William Wordsworth “Mourning and Melancholia” or a selection from The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud The Lover or The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras Recollection of Things to Come, Elena Garro Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov a selection from Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust Beloved, Toni Morrison “Funes the Memorious” aka “Funes, his Memory,” Jorge Luis Borges The Secret Sharer Joseph Conrad “The Swan,” Charles Baudelaire Vertigo, W.G. Sebald Course Requirements: Regular attendance and class participation, weekly reading responses and/or quizzes, a short presentation on one of the texts, an 8-10 page final paper COL 250: MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE MYTH AND EPIC (top) Nicole Jowsey Wednesday, 6:30 – 9:10pm, One Class per Week, Clemens Hall 640 Registration Number: 301979 Mythologies have been important, if not the main, cornerstones of civilizations from ancient times. They often tell the origin of both the world and the people who reside within that world. Many myths have been handed down through epic poetry, from Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey to The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Bhagavad Gita. What is the relationship between myth and the epic, and how are they both pertinent to modernity? By investigating this relationship through close readings of various cultural myths and epics, we will be able to see how these traditions are inherited in contemporary cultures. Furthermore, we shall begin to think about the spheres of influence that epic poetry and mythology have within Abrahamic religions and, more broadly, Western thought. This course will include readings from various epic poems and myths, along with contemporary theories of myth. We will also study the retelling of mythical stories in contemporary cinema. Requirements: A 10-minute presentation, participation in class discussions and an 8-10 page final paper. Required Texts: The Epic of Gilgamesh Selections from The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy The Bhagavad Gita Selections from the Torah, The New Testament, and The Koran Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Selected essays from the following thinkers will also be discussed: Mircea Eliade, Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy. Films: Troy, 300, The 13th Warrior, What Dreams May Come and Selections from The Lord of the Rings Trilogy COL 301: HONORS - INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY SINCE 1965(top) Professor Shaun Irlam Thursday, 9:30 – 12:20 pm, One Class per week, Clemens Hall 606 Honors “These are the days when our work has come asunder And these are the days when we look for something other” --- U2 U2’s lyrics nicely sum up a pervasive sense of crisis that generally surrounds the idea of literary or cultural "work." Do we still believe in “literature” today? What counts as “literature”? How do we differentiate between literary and non-literary writing and, most importantly, how do we read it? We all know (or think we know), how to read by the time we get to college. During this course we will examine how we read: what decisions we make about what’s important, what’s meaningful and what guides us in these operations. We will observe this process through our own reading and the critical readings of others. This course will provide a familiarity with some defining issues, key thinkers, and theoretical texts that have shaped the critical investigation of literature and literariness in the quarter century since the publication of Michel Foucault's Order of Things (1966) and Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967), two major theoretical events of the last half-century. In this course we shall encounter some of the texts and vocabularies of such thinkers as Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and others. We shall also develop some familiarity with some of the major trends in late twentieth-century literary theory such as feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, Marxist criticism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic criticism, cultural studies and queer theory. We shall attempt to understand why critical thinking has witnessed the problematization and critique of all conceptual and foundational vocabularies, including such indispensable terms as "text," "sign" "writing" "meaning" "identity" "representation" "subjectivity" "self" "other" and why literary studies has been bedevilled by these inquiries. This course assumes no prior familiarity with any of the authors or texts mentioned above; however, those of you familiar with some of these writers will know that this is not a course for the faint-hearted. Some of these readings are difficult and demand close and careful reading, but if you're looking for a good intellectual challenge next semester.... COL 301 requires active class participation, short class presentations, two short papers during the semester as well as a final term paper (approx. 10 pages). COL 311: WOMEN IN TRAGEDY (top) Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Wednesday, 3:30 – 6:10pm, One Class per Week, Clemens 436 Registration Number: 254937 The seminar focuses on the function of women in ancient tragic works. Beyond the social, historical, and symbolic roles of women, however, we will explore the philosophical questions posed by the experience of femininity in the ancient world. How does sexual difference inform and inflect tragic experience itself, an experience that for the Greeks (but also for several modern ethical philosophers) has been understood to be universally human? How does the feminine as lover, mother, sister, citizen, or worshipper affect and become affected by strife and suffering—whether this is war, tyranny, betrayal, or the trials of revelation? We will read four representative tragic works—namely, Medea, The Trojan Women, The Bacchae, and Antigone, as well as theoretical writings on tragedy from Hegel, Nicole Loraux, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Helene Foley. There will be four short responses for each play (2–3 pages each), and one final paper on a text or texts of your choice (5–7 pages). COL 345: HONORS - EXPERIMENTAL AND OPPOSITIONAL: MODERN WOMEN WRITERS (top) Professor Ewa P. Ziarek Tuesday, 3:30 – 6:10pm ( One Class per Week ), Clemens Hall 218 Honors So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters ... But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. In the spirit of the defiance of cultural and political authorities, Woolf proclaimed that in the realm of literature nothing is forbidden, even at the wildest experiment. Yet what is at stake in such wild literary experiments? How is a literary experiment different from a scientific experiment? How is it related to what Erica Hunt, an African-American poet, calls oppositional poetics ? We will explore these questions by reading closely modern fiction and postmodern poetry, often written as the contestation of social, literary, racial and sexual norms. In the first part of the semester we will focus on the novels of Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf, and then we will move to the brave new world of experimental poetry. We will examine experimental attitude to literary language, the attempts to imagine and create new forms of female subjectivity, playful explorations of sexuality, pleasure and desire. But we will also discuss sometimes tragic costs of such daring artistic struggle for freedom: loneliness, isolation, loss, mourning, and destruction. The larger question we will raise in the course is about the role of literature and art in social, political, and personal transformations. The texts we will read are challenging, but the course does not require prior literary knowledge. What is DOES require is intellectual curiosity and willingness to learn. Requirements: fresh ideas, interesting questions, and active participation in class discussion; class presentations; one page typed weekly discussion questions, and a short research paper (6-8 pp., with at least 6 critical sources) devoted to one of the texts discussed in this course, midterm, the complete folder turned in with all the assignments at the end of the semester. COL 443: HONORS - LITERATURE AND WAR (top) Professor Rodolphe Gasché Tuesday and Thursday, 3:30 – 4:50pm, Talbert Hall 212 Honors We will read a number of philosophical and literary texts ranging from the fifth century BC to the present. We will be examining how the concept of war and the art of strategy have developed from the Chinese sage Sun Tsu to the great continental strategist of the 19th century von Clausewitz. The literary portraits of war that we will be dealing with will be analyzed with regard to the idea of these thinkers. In doing this, we will also be looking at the specific issues, historical, psychological, autobiographical, that these literary works are concerned with. This course will also be interested in the question of why wars have been such a privileged subject in literature and how the art of military strategy can be compared with the art of writing. Readings will include the following: Sun Tsu, The Art of War, J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (selections), Carl v. Clausewitz, On War (selections), S. Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”, and “Why War?”, G. Glaubert, Salambo, E. Junger, The Storm of Steel, J. Swift, The Battle of the Books, S. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage. Comparative Literature Degree Requirements The Undergraduate Minor (18 Credits) COL 301 and 302 Up to five additional courses Two courses may be course you take toward your major The Undergraduate Major (45 credits; varies) All Comparative Literature Majors are self-designed and must be approved by the College of Arts and Sciences Special Major Advisor, as well as by two faculty advisors from the COL Department. If you are interested in designing a Comparative Literature Special Major, please consult the COL Director of Undergraduate Studies. The M.A. (36 credits) 27 Credits (9 courses) Intensive (A) Seminars 3 Credits of extensive (B) Seminar or Independent Study 6 credits Thesis Guidance Master's Thesis (approximately 50 -100pages) The Ph.D. (72 Credits) 30 Credits (10 courses) Intensive (A) Seminars Orals Examination (upon completion, students can apply for the M.A.) Dissertation (approximately 150-300 pages) Dissertation Defense The above information is provided as a guide. Requirements may vary. Please see the Department Director of Graduate Studies, the Director of Undergraduate Studies, or your advisor for information tailored to your situation.
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	Department of Comparative Literature \| 638 Clemens Hall \| Buffalo, NY 14260-4610 Telephone: 716.645.2066 \| Fax: 716.645.5979 \| Email: complit@buffalo.edu © College of Arts and Sciences 2005. All rights reserved. This website is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences web team. Inquiries or comments about this website should be directed to the College of Arts and Sciences webmaster.