Comparative Literature

Paris inscribes on every street corner a page of France's history. Its cobblestone streets record centuries of struggle, offering a narrative of this history. Writers, chroniclers, and later filmmakers have picked up these narratives and turned them into eternal works of art. The historian of today, retracing this past, has turned them into sites of memory. This course uses literary texts and films as well as historical texts to search for and reconstruct these sites of memory. From the French Revolution to the student revolt of May 1968, this course follows Parisians, exploring the ways in which cinematic representations and literary texts shape collective memory and are a particular historical/political representation of France. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach and compares and contrasts works of fiction with works of non-fiction, the written word with the visual representation, and includes site visits. Classes are broken up into specific themes each pertaining to a major event in the life of France.

This course examines erotic literature from antiquity to the present. It also discusses the depiction of erotic literature in film.

This course examines how the tragic worldview is expressed in the great dramas of Greek antiquity, such as Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Antigone and Euripides’ Bacchae.  Attention is paid – through the study of the Old Testament book of Job and Marlowe’s Faust – to the continuing importance of the tragic worldview in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Finally, after exploring the political and philosophical conditions that caused the ever-decreasing importance of tragic modes of thought in modern times, the course turns to the remarkable new meaning the tragic legacy of the Greeks took on at the end of the nineteenth century. Through Friedrich Nietzsche’s mightily influential The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and a series of important works it inspired, it will be shown how the tragic worldview of the Greeks inspired artists to reject the dogmatism of reason and to find beauty, happiness, and truth in the irrational, subconscious and at times dark recesses of the human soul.

This course introduces Francophone literature through the reading of two different works: Tahar Ben Jalloun's L'ENFANT DE SABLE (1985) and Marima Bâ's UN SI LONGUE LETTRE (1979). Through these texts, the course examines the themes of sexuality, the question of masculine and feminine roles in francophone society (notably in Morocco and Senegal), while also analyzing how their culture and religion may have affected the author's upbringing and writing.

This trans-disciplinary course provides details on past and current systems and cases of censorship to allow for in-depth study of certain landmark plays, novels, and film adaptations that have caused the greatest scandals and most intense censorship over the past century. It brings together notions of media studies, sociology, history, law and key legal battles, publication processes, as well as literary and film analysis. The course mainly focuses on banned and censored books and film adaptations in Great Britain and the United States, and students have the opportunity to bring in such cases in other countries during the weekly round table debates and in-class discussions.

This course examines and analyzes the worth of representative poets and masterpiece in Modern Korean poetry from the 1920s to the 2000s. It also introduces concepts, basic principles of modern Korean poetry and students get the pleasure of reading poems once again. This process is a time of the reenacted experience about historical experience, philosophical experience, sensuous experience in the modern poetry. In this lecture, students read Korean modern poetry and study basic poetics and theory of poetry at same time. In addition, we widen the extent of the understand by studying about variety of a cultural experience that appeared on modern Korean poetry. We  study Korean poetry along with multiple genre of art, as well as ideology of history, politics, folk, and themes such as love, food, fashion . Students contemplate 'What is poetic thing?' While all students who like poetry can enjoy this course, appreciation of poems at the University-level is beyond the level of that reading comprehension. By reading poems, students can find the important poetic spirit that penetrate contemporary culture.