The course will explore the development of a new authorial subject in 13th-and 14th century European literature culminating in Petrarch's CANZONIERE. The central problem will be the changing status of "confessional" discourse in terms of selfhood and power. Of particular importance will be radical shifts in the relation between confession and conversion. Starting with Augustine's CONFESSIONS as privileged model for medieval confessional narratives, texts studied will include Heloise and Abelard (HISTORIA CALAMITATUM), Brunetto Latini (IL TESORETTO), Dante's VITA NUOVA, and Petrarch's SECRETUM. Taught in English.
A close reading of the *Purgatorio* and the *Paradiso* which focuses on a series of interrelated problems raised by the poem: authority, representation, history, politics and language. Particular attention will be given to Dante's use of Classical and Christian model texts: Ovid's *Metamorphoses*, Virgil's *Aeneid*, and the Bible (esp. The Gospel of St. John, The Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul's Letters, The Apocalypse). Dante's staging of literary genealogy will also be studied in the context of the medieval Italian and Provencal love lyric tradition. The course will be taught in English.
Until very recently (in the work of scholars such as Margreta de Grazia), the notion of an epoch-makingshift between 'medieval' and 'Renaissance' periods has been assumed rather than examined; medieval/ Renaissance transitions remain as hazily undefined and unexplored as those posited between 'the modern' and 'postmodern'. Many theorists (such as Foucault and Homi Bhaba) have fashioned a simplified or idealized image of the Middle Ages from which the modern (sexuality or the nation state) are said to emerge. This course delineates passages from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries through a variety of fields (the history of religion, the history of art, thehistory of state formations, economics, sexualities, sociology, etc.). Such interest in longer time complements explorations of wider space: sites such as Calais (in English hands from 1347 to 1558) will be considered, along with the writings of Boccaccio and Petrarch, the paintings of Bruegel and Bosch, and the life of Joan of Arc (burned by the English in 1431). My personal orientation is broadly materialist, but classes will offer a smorgasbord of texts and approaches (to include, inter alia, women's studies and queer theory). English writers covered in this course will probably include Langland (brief extracts only), Chaucer, Margery Kempe (businesswoman, traveller, mystic, housewife), Thomas Hoccleve (staging the first nervous breakdown in English verse), Malory (Morte Darthur and the civil war), More (Utopia), Spenser (Colin Clout; Faerie Queen, Book I), Wyatt and Surrey, Leland/ Bale (and the destruction of medieval textual culture), Shakespeare, and possibily Aphra Behn (Oronoko). Particular issues considered by the course will include: social, sexual, and economic divisions of labor (and their attendant anxieties: Chaucer, Bosch, Michel de Certeau's Mystic Fable); the history of anti-semitism (Chaucer, Prioress's Tale; Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice); the rise of humanism and the return of slavery (Chaucer, Boccaccio, Petrarch, More, Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison). Particular attention will be paid to the precocious urban cultures of Flanders and Holland; the biggest-ever conference on these sites unfolds at Penn from 3-5 March 1999.
This seminar will examine how the "texts" of world traditions of festival drama are realized in performance and in participant experience. We will consider the techniques of the festival in manipulating space, time, and bodies, and how these affect the representation of narrative. We will also look at the range of participatory norms in these events--impersonation, possession, spectation, communion, etc.--as they create relationships between individuals, communities, history, and the divine. Each member of the seminar will select a specific tradition to study in depth and share with the class. Course requirements include participation in discussion and the writing of several short papers considering our theoretical questions in relation to the chosen tradition.
The purpose of this seminar is to introduce advanced undergraduates and graduate students to: 1) the history of German cinema; 2) the methods and techniques of film analysis and interpretation; 3) major films and filmmakers from the Weimar Republic to the present; and 4) the leading German Film Studies scholars in the U.S. After a two week introduction, the seminar will be led by a series of visiting film scholars including Eric Rentschler, Patrice Petro, Anton Kaes, Brigitte Peucker, Timothy Corrigan, Alice Kuzniar, Gerd Gemuenden, Barton Byg, and John Fuegi. Topics to be covered include: Weimar Cinema and Gender, Nazi Cinema, East German Film, The New German Cinema, Film and Painting, Documentary Film as Scholarship, Feminist Cinema, Queer Cinema, and the New German Levity. THE SEMINAR WILL BE TAUGHT IN ENGLISH. For more information contact srichter@sas.upenn.edu.
What do novels do to us and for us? Why do we turn pages, hungry for the next event, or toss a book in the corner, dismissing it as hopelessly dull? Have readers been formed by the novels they read? Is this a sociological, historical and/or psychological process? What does it mean to identify with characters? Do novels also read us: our expectations, wishes, hopes and fears? Have novels changed the world they both reflect and attempt to recreate? We will try to answer these questions, beginning with Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, one of the earliest English novels (1721), and take a literary expedition through the nineteenth century with Jane Eyre (1847), into the early twentieth-century with Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1922) and conclude in the present post-modern moment with Jamaica Kincaid's recent novel Autobiography of My Mother. We will see how the representation of reality changes over nearly three centuries. We will turn to short anthropological, psychoanalytic, literary and historical texts to help us figure out the reasons for the long and mighty reign of the novel in literary history.
Paul thought of himself as Jewish. Others have credited/blamed him as the real founder of Christianity! The purpose of this course is to learn how to understand a noted author/thinker of the past on his own terms and in relationship to his own world. The specific subject matter is PAUL, a Jewish adherent and spokesman for the "Jesus movement," in the Greco-Roman world during the first century of the common era (CE). The larger historical context is Judaism and Christianity in the first two centuries CE. This is a seminar. Intelligent class participation will be important. Each student will also prepare at least one carefully researched written paper of about 3000-4500 words based mainly on information culled from ancient sources by or about PAUL, and at the end of the course each student will participate in an oral evaluatory encounter (approximately 30 minutes) with the teacher, dealing with everything covered in the course. Access to the InterNet is crucial.
Anthropological study of languages and contributions of linguistics to study of culture and culturally patterned behavior. Types of speech and cultural communities; linguistic and cultural change (acculturation, pidginization, standardization, etc.) and its interpretation (genetic, typological, areal, evolutionary.)
Focusing on key texts by Lessing, Kant, Nietzsche, Lukacs, Benjamin and Adorno, this seminar will engage in a critical discussion of the German tradition in aesthetic theory from the 18th century to the 20th. All readings and lectures in English.
This team-taught course will introduce graduate students to issues in both Anglophone and Francophone African Literature. The course is organized under the following headings: Reclaiming the African Past, Colonial Relationships, National Consciousness, Gender and Power, Urban Perspectives, Elites and Dictatorships, and, finally, Immigration, Exile, and Metissage. We will discuss novels by both established and emerging writers, including Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Sembene Ousmane, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Ba, Henri Lopes, Bessie Head, Amadou Kourouma, Nozipo Maraire, and Zakes Mda. Some films and works in other genres may also be included. Four or five lectures by visiting scholars and/or writers, representing the cutting edge of new research and writing, will be considered as part of the seminar.
This course will focus upon a series of designed landscapes in the Philadelphia vicinity. In its preliminary sessions, the group will examine the existing histories of selected sites with a view to establish assumptions and narratives of American garden history in this region. Students will then research the histories of, and propose fresh historical narratives for, sites of their own choice based upon re-examined assumptions and fresh primary materials. The collaborative effort of this group will be to envisage innovative chapters in the story of landscape architectural practice in the Delaware Valley.
COML 614.640 Travel, Tourism, and Culture M 5:30-8:10 Bendix crosslisted with FOLK 615
QUOTA: CGS: RESERVED SEATING UNDERGRADUATES NEED PERMISSION
After two hundred years of growth as an industry, tourism has become one of the biggest sectors of employment worldwide, and its impact on cultures is correspondingly profound. This course will first critically examine the history of tourism's developme nt, and then focus on touristic experience and practice in the twentieth century. We will draw on the substantial theoretical literature from folkloristics, anthropology, sociology, and environmental studies, as well as on literary depiction's and reflec tions on travel and tourism. Course participants will have the option to carry out primary research in the Philadelphia area (with an historical or an ethnographic focus), and write a final essay tying their research into the literature. The course concludes with a final course conference.