1.1 Winter 2011

Tegan Zimmerman & Anita Buick

 

Includes: Africa, Asia, Australasia, Canada, Europe, South America and the United States.

 

Africa

 

LIT 2301 Major Works of World Literature

Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Description: An undergraduate course designed to give a generous sampling of major works of World Literature. The course focuses on reading, analyzing and discussing texts drawn from several periods, genres, genders, various geo-cultural regions, aboriginal and immigrant writers.

 

Asia

 

220 Emergent Literatures

University of the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines

Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Letters

Description: A graduate course examining alternative hegemony to the dominant literatures, particularly in Third World countries and 247 Third World Literature. Analysis of representative works from Asia, Africa and Latin America, reflecting Third World consciousness. The courses give students an introduction to the study of literature across geographic, historical, cultural, race, ethnic, religious, gender boundaries with emphasis on cross-national and regional comparative work (e.g., Philippine Literature, Indonesian/Mexican/French/Italian/Spanish Literatures or Philippine Literature and Southeast Asian Literatures/Latin American Literatures/African Literatures/European Literatures).

 

Australasia

 

Complit 703 Rethinking Literary Translation

University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts - School of European Languages and Literatures

Description: A graduate course in literary translation as it has come to be theorised as a dynamic and problematic process, central to comparative literature and shedding light on cross-cultural encounters, colonisation and the post-colonial. Alongside such theoretical considerations students undertake a practical translation project between languages in which they have expertise.

 

Canada

           

SCLA 5P74 Performance and Performativity

Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

Studies in Comparative Literatures and Cultures

Instructor: Natalie Alvarez

Description: This graduate course (MA) looks at notions of performance and performativity from various sources in the fields of anthropology, theatre studies, cultural studies and philosophy. Modes of artistic and cultural expression are discussed in relation to a world that is increasingly performative in nature.

 

LCO 6447 Modernités comparées. Les modernités du cinéma d'animation indépendant

Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec

Département de Littérature Comparée, Faculté des arts et des sciences       

Instructor: Livia Monnet

Description: Le cours propose un aperçu du cinéma d’animation indépendant de la deuxième moitié du XXe et le début du XXIe siècle. Après un survol de l’histoire et des théories,

techniques, et esthétiques du cinéma d’animation, la discussion portera sur quelques réalisateurs et artistes indépendants dont la riche vision a profondément marqué cet art. Le corpus comprend des films d’animation d’artistes connus tels Norman McLaren, Frédéric Back, Yuri Nornstein, Jan Svankmajer, les frères Quay, Tezuka Osamu, Kawamoto Kihachirô, Suzan Pitt et Caroline Leaf, ainsi que sur des oeuvres de jeunes réalisateurs émergents tels Tsuji Naoyuki, Nina Paley et Suzie Templeton. L’analyse de ces films sera développée dans le contexte de théories et philosophies de la modernité, de l’image mouvante, de l’histoire et du genre/gender.

 

FR 3704 Aspects des cultures francophones internationales (Aspects of World Francophone Cultures)

University of New Brunswick, Saint John, New Brunswick

Undergraduate Minor in Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts

Description: Ce cours décrit les changements récents dans les cultures francophones d'Afrique et des Caraibes dans contexte post-colonial et leurs rapports avec la France. (This course will expose recent changes in Francophone countries, mainly African and Caribbean, and their cultural relationships with France in the post-colonial context.)

 

Europe

 

EN917 Modes of Masculinity

University of Warwick, Coventry, England

Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

Instructor: Catherine Bates

Description: This Masters elective investigates representations of alternative or “perverse” masculinities that trouble the culturally sanctioned model of the “masterly” male in lyric poetry. The masculine subject presented in lyric poetry is disempowered, servile, and passive; this course draws on psychoanalytic models of desire, perversion, and gender construction in order to explore a series of weekly themes: perversion, masochism, melancholia, fetishism, and narcissism. The primary texts the course draws from ranges from Ovid to Pope, concentrating on the sonnet sequence as a form that focuses on issues surrounding male self-authoring and masculine subjectivity.

 

Poetyka Mediów [The Poetics of Media]

Universytet Warszawski [University of Warsaw], Warsaw, Poland

Instytut Literatury Polskiej wydzia? Polonistyki [Polish Literature Institute, Polish Studies Department]

Instructor: Ewa Szcz?sna

Description: This graduate course, taught in Polish, examines the construction of mass media (literature, film, theatre, painting, photography, websites, advertising) and their impact on textuality and culture. What is the aim of contemporary media and the texts produced by the hybridized, interactive, multimedia filled contemporary culture? The course explores artistic literary tools used in the media, types and functions of narration in literature, film, art, and comics, and images and visualization in the era of electronic media as well as the poetics of internet communications.

 

South America

 

A Negritude e suas Repercussões nas Literaturas Brasileira e Africanas de Língua Portuguesa [Negritude and its Repercussions in Brazilian and Portuguese African Literatures]

Universidade Federal da Paraíba [Federal University of Paraíba], João Pessoa/PB - Brasil

Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras (PPGL) [Graduate Program in Literature]

Instructor: Dr. Elisalva Fátima Madruga Dantas

Description: This graduate course, taught in Portuguese, aims to show the resonance of the Negritude movement, originating in France, in the literature of Brazil and Portuguese Africa. After exploring the historical ideological and aesthetic factors responsible for the emergence of the movement, the impact of Negritude in both Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Africa is examined through the critical examination of theoretical and poetic texts.

 

United States

 

LIT 263S Post-digital Architecture

Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Program in Literature

Instructor: Timothy Lenoir

Description: This graduate course centres on the impact of advanced technology on conceptions of architectural design, new urban environments, and the body since the mid-1990s. The late 1990s-2000s are explored in terms of postmodernism and the role of time based new media, game environments and virtual worlds technologies in the rise of digital architecture. Theoretical readings are taken from Deleuze, Pask, Grosz, Massumi, Denari, Eisneman, Koolhaas, Lynn, Diller, and Scofidio; discussions will examine how post-digital architecture and reflexive environments will engage the work of Simondon, Spillers, Armstrong, and others.

 

CPLT 351 Apocalypse Now: The Destruction of the World in Literature

University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA

Program in Comparative Literature

Instructor: Benjamin Bennett

Description: As its name suggests, this undergraduate course will discuss the film Apocalypse Now as well its model Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness,” and available translations of “some of the most violent World War One visions of the German expressionists.” The primary aim of the course is to refocus the concept of “world” in an age where sentiments concerning “global” concerns and “the planet” have become commonplace. To do so, the course will look at the value-laden notions of the world in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, in Brecht’s version of Marxism, the totalitarian thinking as the end of the world in Thomas Mann and other authors, the French Revolution as the same in Büchner, and doom of fate in tragedy from the Greeks to Cocteau.

 

COLT 46 Children On the Streets

Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Program in Comparative Literature

Instructor: Jessica Callaway Smolin

Description: Capitalizing on the international awareness raised by such films as Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire and Padilha’s Bus 174, this undergrad course explores the intersections of literary and familial structures – or lack thereof in the case of abandoned or neglected children – in social and psychological contexts. In examining the theme of the street child both historically and cross-culturally, the course seeks to analyse and define the components of the literary theme of the abandoned child. In order to explore citizenship, representations of the modern city, race, ethnicity, and theories of trauma such authors as Andersen, Dickens, de Assis, Riis, Amados, Buñuel, and Choukri will be included.

 

 

Bio

 

Tegan Zimmerman is a PhD Candidate in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Alberta with both academic and creative publications. Her research interests include women’s history, the (feminist) historical novel, feminist-Marxism and feminist theory.

 

Bio

 

Anita Buick is an MA student in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Alberta. Her thesis examines questions of identity and its expression in language through Polish-Canadian fiction, addressing concerns of émigré writing, Polish diaspora, ethnicity in Canadian writers and the effect of language on the Self.

 


 
 

Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature

Brought to you by Graduate Students from the Program in Comparative Literature
at the University of Alberta

ISSN 1923-5879
Email: inquire [at] ualberta.ca

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