Curriculum
Course Offerings
CPLT 113/ENG 113 Studies in Fiction
Ko (English)
Topic for 2012-13: The World of Fiction. A journey into worlds of fiction that range from grimy and scandalous to fantastic and sublime. As we enter wildly different fictional worlds, we will also think about how those worlds illuminate ours. The syllabus will likely include Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Isak Dinesan’s short story ‘‘Babette’s Feast,’’ and Ha Jin's Waiting. Taught primarily in lecture, this course will not be writing-intensive. Students may register for either CPLT 113 or ENG 113 and credit will be granted accordingly.
Prerequisite: None. Especially recommended to non-majors.
Distribution: Language and Literature
Semester: Spring, Summer I Unit: 1.0
CPLT 120 First-year Seminar: Master of Suspicion: Readings in Enlightenment
Nolden (German)
The course will focus on the main tenets of the Enlightenment and thus introduce students to an important segment of European and American intellectual history. Students will become familiar with the core ideas of enlightenment and rationalism (critique, tolerance, universalism, secularization, etc.) and will learn to understand how these ideas were debated and articulated in different and yet related arts, disciplines, and cultural and political discourses. They will become familiar with patterns of intellectual transfer across Europe and the US, and they will develop an understanding of how deeply the legacy of enlightenment has influenced the world we live in today.
Prerequisite: None. Open only to first-year students.
Distribution: Language and Literature
Semester: N/O Unit: 1.0
CPLT 180 World Literature
Sides (English)
This course is an introduction to the study of world literature. Students will read a selection of foundational works of literature from a variety of times and cultures, observing those qualities that allowed the works to transcend their historical moment in order to enter into global consciousness. We will study the assigned texts from three points of view: as individual works of literary art, as rising out of a specific cultural context, and as works that have escaped that original context into other languages and ages. Noting how some meanings are lost in translation and others gained, students will develop a mode of reading and a critical vocabulary. The required readings will likely be drawn from the following works: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Ramayana, The Aeneid, One Thousand and One Nights, The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Omeros, The Satanic Verses, Things Fall Apart.
Prerequisite: None
Distribution: Language and Literature
Semester: Spring Unit: 1.0
CPLT 208/REL 208 Legend, Satire, and Storytelling in the Hebrew Bible
Silver (Religion)
The art of narrative composition in the Hebrew Bible. The literary techniques and conventions of ancient Israelite authors in the Bible’s rich corpus of stories. Philosophical and aesthetic treatment of themes such as kingship, power, gender and covenant. Primary focus on the role of narrative in the cultural life of ancient Israel, with attention also to the difficulties of interpreting biblical stories from within our contemporary milieu. Students may register for either CPLT 208 or REL 208 and credit will be granted accordingly.
Prerequisite: None
Distribution: Historical Studies or Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy
Semester: Spring. Unit: 1.0
CPLT 229 Telling Stories from the Past
Ward (Italian)
Drawing on works from a number of national traditions and genres, the course focuses on the telling of the story of history. Beginning with a reflection on the writing of history and literature, the course goes on to examine the interaction between past events and literary, cinematic and historiographical texts. What happens when past events are represented in literary, cinematic and historiographical texts? How are past events made present? What difficulties do literature, cinema and history encounter in representing atrocious events like the Holocaust? To work toward answering some of these questions, we will read historical novels (or extracts from them), as well as view films and survey some of the many critical writings that have addressed these thorny and often contentious issues.
Prerequisite: None
Distribution: Language and Literature
Semester: Spring. Unit: 1.0
CPLT 284 Magical Realism
Weiner (Russian)
This course examines fictions whose basic reality would be familiar if not for the introduction of a magical element that undermines commonplace notions about what constitutes reality in the first place. The magical element can be a demon, talisman, physical transformation, miraculous transition in space or time, appearance of a second plane of existence, revelation of the unreality of the primary plane of existence, etc. Students will read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Queneau’s The Blue Flowers, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Calvino’s If on a Winter Night a Traveler, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Sokolov’s School for Fools, and short stories by Borges, Cortazar, and Nabokov.
Prerequisite: None
Distribution: Language and Literature
Semester: N/O Unit: 1.0
CPLT 288 The Art of the European Novel
Nolden (German)
Our course will trace the development of the novel from its early beginnings (Apuleius’ Metamorphoses/The Golden Ass written in the second century A.D.) through its reincarnation in the Middle Ages (Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival) to its popular rise in the last three centuries. We will include authors from France (Rabelais, Flaubert), Spain (Cervantes), England (Richardson, Brontë), Germany (Goethe, Kafka), Russia (Tolstoy) and Italy (Calvino) and discuss various sub-genres of this most popular of all literary genres (among them the picaresque novel, Bildungsroman, gothic novel, etc.).
Prerequisite: None
Distribution: Language and Literature
Semester: N/O Unit: 1.0
CPLT 350 Research or Individual Study
Prerequisite: By permission of the Director. See Academic Distinctions.
Distribution: None
Semester: Fall, Spring Unit: 1.0
CPLT 360 Senior Thesis Research
Prerequisite: By permission of the Director. See Academic Distinctions.
Distribution: None
Semester: Fall, Spring Unit: 1.0
CPLT 370 Senior Thesis
Prerequisite: 360 and permission of department.
Distribution: None
Semester: Fall, Spring Unit: 1.0
