COL 203 - European Women's Responses to War
COL 240 - Love in History
COL 320 - Literature and Desire
COL 303 - Fathers of Japanese Film
COL 203 - EUROPEAN WOMEN'S RESPONSES TO WAR (top)
Jen CarusoTue/Thur, 11:00-12:20
Room: Clemens 640
Registration Number: 107042
In the decades immediately following World War II, while official historical reasoning asked that the events of this time - particularly the Holocaust -- be worked through, dealt with and put aside, European women writers often took up the burden of remembering, bearing witness and mourning the dead. In this course, we will consider the work of writing as literary testimony. First, we will consider the new forms that these works take. How do we characterize these broken narratives? What is "melancholic writing"? What does it mean that these texts often blur the relationship between autobiography and art? Second, we will examine the content of these works. Why do these writers re-vamp mythical heroines like Antigone and Cassandra? How do they re-envision certain archetypes of women (dolls, witches, sirens)? Finally how does history appear in these texts through the figure of the ghost?
In the first part of the course, we will ask what it means to work through the past, and consider the work of writing as a response to the breakdown of systems of authority which took place after the Holocaust. In the second part of the course, we will explore how writers re-envisioned the mother-daughter relationship as a way of breaking with authoritarian regimes. In the third part of the course, we will examine new aesthetic forms, political structures, and modes of political action which are represented in these texts (for example: pacifism, terrorism) and developed through the idea of forming relationships between sisters.
Among the texts, films and artworks we may examine:
Witnessing, Memory
- Marguerite Duras, The War and Hiroshima mon amour. (film) Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After.
- Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T.
- Ingeborg Bachman. "Among Murderers and Madmen"
- Works by Hannah Hoch
Revisioning and Re-envisioning Mothers and Fathers
- Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat.
- Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father.
- Unica Zurn Dark Spring. (also Hans Bellmer's images)
- Helma Sanders-Brahms, Deutschland, bleiche Mutter. (film)
Daughters and Sisters
- Ulrike Meinhof, Letters and Prison Diary.
- Angela Carter, "Elegy for a Freelance"
- Greta Weil, My Sister Antigone.
- Christa Wolf, Cassandra.
- Margarethe von Trotta, Die bleierne Zeit (film)
This course is reading and writing intensive.
Requirements: weekly response journal or response papers, a short presentation, and two essays. Class participation is expected and required.
COL 240 - LOVE IN HISTORY (top)
Rares PiliouTues/Thurs, 9:30-11:10
Room: Clemens 640
Registration Number: 312961
Love, as simple or as complicated as that may be, has always been an occasion for reflection and confession in literary form. Absolute love, impossible love, divine love, bodily love, have all had their place in the history of literature. Our search for some key aspects of love pertaining to this tradition will start with Plato and his conception of absolute love-one occasion of seeing exactly what "Platonic love" means. The Platonic heritage and conception of love has been later developed by to major writers, Plotinus and St. Augustine, whose writings will take us into two other types of devotion: to wisdom (the meaning of philosophy) and to God (the meaning of Christian love).
We will attempt to define the Middle Ages by studying three types of love, absolute, forbidden, and voluptuous. These represent the core of the famous correspondence between Father Abelard and the nun Heloise, and later on, of Pierre Corneille's classical drama, The Cid. We move next to Romanticism, in which love is conceived as a vibrant and authentic emotion, the one which gave its name to our common phrase "romantic love". Some poems by William Wordsworh and Gérard de Nerval will illustrate this mood for love. Finally, we shall study modernity's contribution to the story of love by studying self-love in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
Requirements: seminar participation (25%), two short response paper ( 25%), and a final paper (50%).
COL 320 - LITERATURE AND DESIRE (top)
Alla IvanchikovaTues, 3:30-6:40
Room: Norton 214
Registration Number: 140872
The course will investigate the notion of foreign love and love of the foreign. We will concentrate on literary texts dealing with the idea of love and difference. What does it mean to be a foreigner in a love relationship? What constitutes foreignness? What is a couple? How can we understand the relationship between desire and language?
We will see that the foreigner is the figure that on the one hand brings forth our hopes by promising resolution to our internal conflicts and on the other hand reinforces our fears. Famous love stories both in ordinary consciousness and in literature are stories of transgressive love, outlaw love and adulterous love. The loving couple is perceived as a unity outside the law, in exile. The example of 'foreign love' both falls into this pattern and also supercedes it, suggesting that there is foreignness within the couple itself.
We will read several novels - Marguerite Duras, The Lover, Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being; John Rechy, Sexual Outlaws, Sarah Schulman, Rat Bohemia, etc.
Several theoretical texts will be brought in the discussion of this theme, such as - Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves; Julia Kristeva, Romeo and Juliet; S. Freud, Wolf-man. Films like - Romeo and Juliet; Orlando; Death In Venice, Casablanca; The Lover; Before the Rain will be screened in class. Students are welcome to bring in ideas about the films that could be relevant to our topic.
Requirements: I will expect you to write one final paper and two response papers during the course of the semester. Mostly, your grade will depend of your attendance and participation.
COL 303 - FATHERS OF JAPANESE FILM (top)
Professor Margherita LongTues/Thurs, 2:00-3:20
Room: Norton 209
Film Screenings: Monday 5:00-7:00; Room: CFA 232
Registration Number: 227729
The history of the Japanese film industry is a history of paternity, legacy, and resistance. The early studio films and their iconic directors -- Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa -- established formidable traditions that every subsequent director struggled to inherit his (or in rare cases, her) own way. Within this history, however, a dominant strain of the films themselves features weak fathers who fail to bestow their children with anything at all.
This course examines 14 of Japan's best-known films to focus on some classic problems of paternity: influence and independence, prohibition and desire, rebellion and contrition, power and its passage. Beginning with "Golden Age" films by the master directors, it explores the "Sun Tribe" of the late 1950s, the "New Wave" of the 1960s, and the independent films, gangster films and family documentaries of the 1970s, 1980, and 1990s.
Directors include Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa, Nakahira Kô, Oshima Nagisa, Shinoda Masahiro, Suzuki Seijun, Imamura Shôhei, Morita Yoshimitsu, Nakata Tôichi, Kawase Naomi, and Kitano Takeshi.
The course meets twice a week in addition to film screenings on Monday night. Assignments include four 2-page papers and a final 10-page paper. No prior knowledge of Japan or film is required. The course is open for graduate credit under COL 570.
