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Undergraduate
Course Descriptions Although its pages may appear innocuous enough, bound innocently between non-descript covers, the book has frequently become the locus of intense suspicion, legal legislation, and various cultural struggles. But what causes a book to blow its cover? In this course we will consider a range of specific censorship cases in the west since the invention of the printed book to the present day. We will consider the role of various censorship authorities (both religious and secular) and grapple with the timely question about whether censorship is ever justified in the building of a better society. Case studies will focus on many well-known figures (such as Martin Luther, John Milton, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Karl Marx, and Salman Rushdie) as well as lesser-known authors, particularly Anonymous (who may have chosen to conceal her identity to avoid pursuit by the Censor). COML 080.402 ITALIAN CINEMA: Introduction to Italian Cinema This
course will introduce major directors, movements, and genres in
Italian cinema from World War II to the present. Both classic "auteurs"
(Blasetti, Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni) and
newer directors (Olmi, Scola, Amelio, Moretti) will illustrate trends
over the last fifty years through screenings of a variety of film
types, from the historical drama to commedia all’italiana.
The distinct national identity of Italian cinema will be emphasized
with reference to the Risorgimento (Unification), Mussolini’s
Fascism, regional diversity, gender roles, and minority communities.
Readings will be on Italian cinema, modern Italian history, and
the vocabulary of film analysis. COML
090.401 Gender, Sexuality and Lit: Women and Fiction: Contemporary
Literature This
course will cover a wide range of fiction by contemporary women
writers from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Africa, the Middle East,
and the Caribbean. The first part of the course will explore several
versions of the "mad woman in the attic" motif and consider
the effects of patriarchal oppression in several different cultural
contexts. The second part of the course will take a more optimistic
turn and focus on various forms of resistance and creative self-affirmation.
We will consider feminist revisions of received traditions and narrative
forms, e.g., the Bible; fairy tales and legends; magic and other
marginalized forms of knowledge; official and unofficial versions
of history; and the politics of textual interpretation. Readings
will include: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Doris Lessing, The Grass
is Singing; Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea; Tsisti Dangarembga,
Nervous Conditions; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Louise Erdrich,
Tracks; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Jeanette Winterson,
Oranges are not the Only Fruit; Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis; and
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale. We will also view a few films,
including Sugar Cane Alley, The Official Story, and Bend it Like
Beckham. All interested Penn students are welcome in this course,
irrespective of gender, age, and major. All that is required is
a taste for good contemporary fiction, a willingness to work on
your writing, and to get up a little early on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
This
course will provide an introduction to important writing across
the twentieth century, chosen to offer a broad sampling of prose
and poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Along with careful readings
of each work, the lectures will situate the literary texts in some
of their relevant contexts. The list of required readings will include,
among others: T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"
and The Waste Land; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God; Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot;
Philip Larkin, selected poems; Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"
and selected poems; Ian McEwan, Atonement; and Nilo Cruz, Anna in
the Tropics. I will occasionally introduce major paintings, as appropriate,
and excerpts from a number of significant films will also be introduced,
including Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, Orson Welles's Citizen
Kane, and Carol Reed's The Third Man and Woody Allen's Zelig. Finally,
a set of supplementary readings will be posted on the course website.
This
course will cover both Western and non-Western cultures and performance
forms. We will be investigating urban political and social history,
the arts, and all aspects of performance, from theatre architecture
to acting and design methods as functions of representation, and
plays.
Post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema has gained exceptional international reception in the past two decades. In most major national and international festivals, Iranian films have taken numerous prizes for their outstanding representation of life and society, and their courage in defying censorship barriers. In this course, we will examine the distinct characteristics of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Discussion will revolve around themes such as gender politics, family relationships and women's social, economic and political roles, as well as the levels of representation and criticism of modern Iran's political and religious structure within the current boundaries. There will be a total of 12 films shown and will include works by Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Beizai, Milani, Bani-Etemad and Panahi, among others.
What is the "Fantastic"? And how can we describe the "Uncanny"? The course will examine these questions, and investigate the historical background of our understanding of "phantasy," as well as our concepts of the "fantastic" and "uncanny" in literature. Our discussions will be based on a reading of Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny, a choice of Friedrich Schlegel's and Novalis' aphorisms, and Romantic narratives by Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. All the texts will be available in English, in English translation, and no knowledge of a foreign language is required.
This course will approach selected classic works of Western culture up to the Middle Ages with two purposes in mind. First, we will try to see how our notions of authority, agency, will and history have been shaped by these texts, in particular by epic and tragedy; further, we will consider how such concepts in turn have been complicated by the authors recognition of the power of desire and shifting definitions of gender and identity. Second, we will look at how we identify a "classic" in our culture, and will try to understand what sort of work it does for us. Texts to be read may include: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Euripides' Bacches; Sophocles' Oedipus the King; Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound; Aristophanes' Frogs; Virgil's Aeneid; The Confessions of Saint Augustine, and Dante's Divine Comedy. All works will be read in translation.
COML 214.401 Italian Cinema and the Sacred
In
this course we'll consider the relationships of women to writing
from c. 1220 (Ancrene Wisse, a text written for enclosed religious
women) to 1673 (the death of ‘Mad Madge,’ a playwright
much reviled by Virginia Woolf). We'll concern ourselves mostly
with texts written, dictated, inspired or commissioned by women,
plus texts written against or forced upon women: texts, in short,
that helped shape the possibilities of premodern women's lives.
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the methods and resources used in the modern study of the Bible. To the extent possible, these methods will be illustrated as they apply to a single book of the Hebrew Bible that will serve as the main focus of the course.
How does one write about oneself? Who is the “author” writing? What does one write about? And is it fiction or truth? Our seminar on autobiographical writing will pursue these questions, researching confessions, autobiographies, memoirs, and other forms of life-writing both in their historical development and theoretical articulations. Examples will include selections from St. Augustine’s confessiones, Rousseau’s Confessions, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, as well as many examples form contemporary English, German, French, and American literature.
This
course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from
1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic
representation of Japan s war experience and post-war reconstruction,
This course concentrates on contemporary Israeli short stories, post-modernist as well as traditional, written by male and female authors. The diction is simple, often colloquial, but the stories reflect an exciting inner world and a stormy outer reality. For Hebrew writers, the short story has been a favorite genre since the Renaissance of Hebrew literature in the 19^th century until now, when Hebrew literature is vibrant in a country where Hebrew is spoken. The lion share of the course focuses on authors who emerged in the last 25 years like Keret, Kastel-Bloom, Taub. Texts read in the original language but student level and literary taste will influence the choice of works. Prerequisite:
Hebrew 059 or equivalent. Five 1-page response papers, a 5-page
midterm paper in Hebrew and a final exam. Since the content of this
course varies from year to year, students may take it more than
once.
An introduction to the momentous history of German film, from its beginnings before World War One to developments following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990. With an eye to film's place in its historical and political context, the course will explore the "Golden Age" of German cinema in the Weimar Republic, when Berlin vied with Hollywood; the complex relationship between Nazi ideology and entertainment during the Third Reich; the fate of German film-makers in exile during the Hitler years; post-war film production in both West and East Germany; the call for an alternative to "Papa's Kino" and the rise of New German Cinema in the 1960s.
The Jews are among the few nations and ethnic groups whose oral tradition occurs in literary and religious texts dating back more than two thousand years. This tradition changed and diversified over the years in terms of the migration of Jews into different countries and historical, social, and cultural changes that these countries underwent. The course attempts to capture their historical and ethnic diversity of Jewish folklore in a variety of oral literary forms. A basic book of Hasidic legends from the 18th century will serve as a key text to explore problems in Jewish folklore relating to both earlier and later periods.
What
does theory do for literature? What does literature do for theory?
In this seminar we will examine some major works of literary criticism
produced in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, asking
specifically what we can learn from a close attention to literary
critics' use of that body of writing we have come to call "theory."
What can we learn, for example, from closely examining D.A. Miller's
application of Michel Foucault's theory of sexuality to Charles
Dickens's David Copperfield in Miller's own book The Novel and the
Police? How does Eve Sedgwick's engagement with structuralism help
her bring out new insights about George Eliot's novel Adam Bede
in her critical work Between Men? Each week we will read (often
in excerpt) a work of literary criticism, one of the works of literature
it analyzes, and one of its guiding theoretical texts in order to
give ourselves the tools to knowledgably discuss literary critics'
uses of theory. How and why, we will ask, do literary critics engage
with theories drawn from the realms of cultural criticism, poststructuralist
philosophy, and linguistic theory as well as from the world of literary
theory? We will also seek to trouble the distinctions between literature
and theory, and between "primary" and "secondary"
works. How might we think of using a novel, for example, as a framework
for understanding a more "theoretical" work?
In this course we will read the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, focusing on a series of interrelated problems raised by the poem: authority, fiction, history, politics and language. Particular attention will be given to how the Commedia presents itself as Dante's autobiography, and to how the autobiographical narrative serves as a unifying thread for this supremely rich literary text. Supplementary readings will include Virgil's Aeneid and selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses. All readings and written work will be in English. Italian or Italian Studies credit will require reading Italian texts in their original language and doing the written assignments in Italian.
This course takes a number of different areas of Literary Theory and, on the basis of research completed and in progress in both Arabic and Western languages, applies some of the ideas to texts from the Arabic literary tradition. Among these areas are: Evaluation and Interpretation, Structuralism, Metrics, Genre Theory, Narratology, and Orality.
What is semiotics? Where is semiotics? Ferdinand de Saussure, a founder of linguistics and also of what is usually referred to as semiotics, wrote: "It is... possible to conceive of a science which studies the roles of signs as part of social life... It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them." As it is the study of signs, semiotics, therefore, may be everywhere. Baudelaire wrote, "Man passes... through a forest of symbols." We could say: "Man lives through forests of signs." The course will offer a survey of major currents in the modern theory of signs and languages, ranging from linguistics through the perspectives of semiotics, rhetoric, and hermeneutics. The course readings will include modern works on semiotical and rhetorical theory (Saussure, Jakobson, Hjelmslev, Lotman, Weinrich, Barthes, Genette, Dubois, Riffaterre, Eco, Segre, De Mauro). Classes will propose close analysis of primary texts in Italian literature (Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, Tesauro, Manzoni, Pirandello, Svevo), as well as other forms of communication including advertising, journalism, film, and television. All readings will be in translation. Course requirements: three short papers (7 pages), and one oral report (accompanied by bibliography) as a final project. The course will be conducted in English.
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