Comparative Literature

This course explores the urban experience as reflected in the Taiwan fiction from 1949 to the end of the 20th century. The focus is Taipei, but also includes the Peking experience of Lin Hai-yin, the New York and Chicago experience of Pai Hsien-yung, the Kyoto experience of Chu Tien-hsin and the Kaohsiung experience of Yang Ch'ing-ch'u. This first part readings include works of writers from different periods: Lin Hai-yin of the 50s (Memories of Peking), Pai Hsien-yung (Crystal Boys) and Wang Wen-hsin (Family Catastrophe) of the Modernist 60s, Chen Ying-chen (the “Washington Building” series) and Huang Chun-ming (“Two Sign Painters” and “The Young Widow”) of the Nativist-realist 70s, and Haung Fan (“Everybody Needs Chin Te-fu,” “Tung-pu Street,” and “Rainy Night”) and Chang Ta-chun (“A Guided Tour of the Apartment Complex,” “Alley 116, Liaoning Street,” and Wild Kids) of the urban-fiction 80s. The second group of readings focuses on five different themes, which are the city and marriage, the city and labor, the city and politics, the city and compounds of military families, and the city and consumption.

This transdisciplinary course covers utopian and dystopian visions in literature, painting, film, television, and political discourse, both past and present. It successively covers the main themes and concerns of various schools of utopia (alotopias, primitivism, Robinsonades, blueprint utopias, etc.) and dystopia (far-right and far-left politics, populism and demagoguery, fear of new technologies, fear of government censorship, dark anti-feminist visions of the future, fear of the growing need for conformity and political correctness, fear of growing crime and violence, etc.). The course broadens the vision of dystopian art, typically considered a Western phenomenon, to include key names from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. It includes student presentations of themes related to dystopia as presented in works from various cultures and countries of origin.

This course offers a study of film and literature. Topics include: film and its relationship with other art forms; film writing; adaptation; construction of the film narrative; film in debates of the artistic avant-garde; theories and poetics of realism; the crisis of reality and its fictions; the film essay.

This course explores the wide range of functions and representations of illness and disease in a variety of European literary and theoretical texts, primarily from the 20th and 21st centuries, but drawing on works from earlier periods for contextual framing. It considers how the metaphorical employment of illness can reflect changing beliefs related to individual identity, socio-cultural codes, narrative construction, and the possibilities and limitations of language itself. Students start with a series of approaches to illness and literature, including a brief theoretical overview of modern canonical writings on illness by Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, which provide an introduction to common tropes of mythologizing and metaphorizing illness as well as the linguistic challenges to its representation; the field of disability studies; and the representation of plague through time. They then move on to focused thematic explorations of disease via close comparative readings of texts, considering both what literature can tell us about illness, and what the use and representation of illness can tell us about literature.

Through reading world literary masterpieces, this course examines the composition of various literary elements, meaning of classic literature, and relationship between literature and our life and times. This course selects world literary masterpieces from different periods and regions, and analyzes the themes, characters, structure, style, and language of the works.

This course is a continuation of the survey of European literature from the cusp of Romanticism through Modernism, focusing on key literary texts, supplemented with other cultural material (from philosophy, the sister arts, etc.). The aim of this course is to familiarize DFLL students with key non-Anglophone European literary texts from the "long" 19th century as crucial to an understanding of the contemporary British and American texts in their other courses, and as recent prehistory of the present.