Graduate Courses
CPLT 924 Modernism and Avant-Garde in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics and Theory
Modernism in Hebrew poetry: close readings of the poetry of Nathan Alterman, Lea Goldberg, Nathan Zach, Yona Volakh, Avot Yeshurun.
Hannan Hever hannan.hever@yale.edu
CPLT 925 The Practice of Literary Translation
Intensive readings in the history and theory of translation paired with practice in translating. Case studies from ancient languages (the Bible, Greek and Latin classics), medieval languages (classical Arabic literature), and modern languages (poetic texts).
CPLT 925: Practice of Literary Translation
Intensive readings in the history and theory of translation paired with practice in translating. Case studies from ancient languages (the Bible, Greek and Latin classics), medieval languages (classical Arabic literature), and modern languages (poetic texts).
CPLT 925: The Practice of Literary Translation
Intensive readings in the history and theory of translation paired with practice in translating. Case studies from ancient languages (the Bible, Greek and Latin classics), medieval languages (classical Arabic literature), and modern languages (poetic texts).
CPLT 925: The Practice of Literary Translation
Intensive readings in the history and theory of translation paired with practice in translating. Case studies form ancient languages (the Bible, Greek and Latin classics), medieval languages (classical Arabic and Persian literature), and modern languages (European poetic texts).
Crosslisted as JDST316/ENGL456/HUMS427/LITR348
CPLT 929 Film and Fiction in Interaction
Beyond adaptations of complex fiction (Henry James, James Joyce) literature may underlie “original” film masterpieces (Rules of the Game, Voyage to Italy). What about the reverse? Famous novelists moonlighted in the film world (Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene). Others developed styles in contact with cinema (Marguerite Duras, Eileen Chang, Kazuo Ishiguro). Today are these art forms evolving in parallel and in parity under new cultural conditions?
CPLT 932: Scandinavian Cinema and Television
Contemporary Scandinavian film and television examined in relation to earlier cinematic highpoints. Europe’s first art cinema, early Scandinavian film was catalyzed and sustained by modernist breakthroughs in theater, literature, and painting. Contemporary cinema and television (Dogma films; Nordic Noir television; experimental music and genre film) continue to develop innovative aesthetic, funding, and exhibition models. The course explores regionally specific ideas about acting, visual culture, and the role of art; feminism and the social contract; historical forces and social change. Films by Bergman, Dreyer, Sjöström, Sjöberg, Vinterberg, von Trier, Östlund, Kaurismäki, Kjartansson; as well as contemporary television series selected by students.
CPLT 933: British Cinema
Key films and topics in British cinema. Special attention to the provincial origins of British cinema; overlaps between filmic, literary, and visual modernism; attempts to build on the British literary and dramatic tradition; cinema’s role in the war effort and in redefining national identity; postwar auteur and experimental filmmaking; “heritage” films and alternative approaches to tradition. Accompanying readings in British film theorists, film sociology (including Mass Observation), and cultural studies accounts of film spectatorship and memories. Films by Mitchell and Kenyon, Maurice Elvey, Anthony Asquith, Len Lye, John Grierson, Alfred Hitchcock, Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphrey Jennings, Michael Powell, Carol Reed, David Lean, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Stanley Kubrick, Laura Mulvey, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway, Michael Winterbottom, Patrick Keiller, Steve McQueen.
CPLT 935 French Cinema through the New Wave
This seminar uses a sample of twenty films (with clips from many others) to survey four decades of the tradition of French cinema crowned by the privileged moment of the New Wave. Graduate students are asked to challenge the idea of “national cinema” by reporting on some non-canonical or marginal film before midterm. Keeping the culture industry in view, we question the extent to which such a consistently robust cinema has been bound to—or remained partly independent of—a nation that from 1930 to 1970 underwent a depression, a socialist experiment, an occupation, a liberation, and the humiliations of decolonization abroad and social unrest (May ’68) at home. In addition to the midterm contribution, graduate students write a substantial term paper.
This seminar uses a sample of twenty films (with clips from many others) to survey four decades of the tradition of French cinema crowned by the privileged moment of the New Wave. Graduate students are asked to challenge the idea of “national cinema” by reporting on some non-canonical or marginal film before midterm. Keeping the culture industry in view, we question the extent to which such a consistently robust cinema has been bound to—or remained partly independent of—a nation that from 1930 to 1970 underwent a depression, a socialist experiment, an occupation, a liberation, and the humiliations of decolonization abroad and social unrest (May ’68) at home. In addition to the midterm contribution, graduate students write a substantial term paper.
CPLT 935: French Cinema through the New Wave
This seminar uses a sample of twenty films (with clips from many others) to survey four decades of the tradition of French cinema crowned by the privileged moment of the New Wave. Graduate students are asked to challenge the idea of “national cinema” by reporting on some non-canonical or marginal film before midterm. Keeping the culture industry in view, we question the extent to which such a consistently robust cinema has been bound to—or remained partly independent of—a nation that from 1930 to 1970 underwent a depression, a socialist experiment, an occupation, a liberation, and the humiliations of decolonization abroad and social unrest (May ‘68) at home. In addition to the midterm contribution, graduate students write a substantial term paper.
CPLT 937 Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, and History in Literature and Film
In 1976, the paired concepts “Ideology and Utopia” appear in the bibliographies of both Paul Ricoeur and Fredric Jameson, two towering intellectuals with exceptionally long careers. This seminar will examine the indispensable place of aesthetics and interpretation (mainly of fiction) in their approach to human history and present ethics/politics. Ricoeur had just published The Rule of Metaphor, arguing that philosophy needs novels and films, as metaphors that open up the future of history and of thought. Jameson preferred Allegory to open up Balzac, science fiction, detective novels, and—starting in 1976—Hollywood and art films. Last year he published Allegories of ideology.
This seminar will examine Ricoeur on metaphor and Jameson on allegory at the place where both of them labored, narrative, and in view of their mutual belief in history as the (battle)ground of “ideology and utopia.” Ricoeur’s roots in phenomenology and hermeneutics stress temporality (Temps et Recit), while Jameson’s Marxist structuralism leads him to spatialize narrative as an ideological or cognitive map. Both men gather vast philosophical traditions; both tangle openly with competing views (Deleuze, Lacan, et al) and both write with an urgency about immediate social consequence, one from a generally Christian aspiration, the other a generally Marxist one.
Sampling key moments of their vast output, we will also interpret fiction and images as they would have us do, i.e., as extended metaphors or allegories. We will certainly discuss Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma as a contemporaneous intervention via images in ideology and utopia. Lanzmann’s Shoah must also be confronted. Participants will prepare two submissions, one extending or disputing the thought of either theorist (due April 1); the other a full reading of a prose narrative or feature film inspired by one or the other of them (May 15).
CPLT 940 Realismo mágico—Magical Realism
Latin American novels and short stories from the 1920s to the 1990s in which the fantastic appears, derived from avant-garde tendencies, anthropology, and popular Afro-Hispanic religions (santería) and a Catholic tradition of miracles. Theoretical texts by Franz Roh, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Mauss, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Arturo Uslar Pietri, Gabriel García Márquez, and Roberto González Echevarría. Prose fiction by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Borges, Lydia Cabrera, Carpentier, García Márquez, João Guimarães Rosa, and Juan Rulfo, among others. Novels such as El reino de este mundo, Cien años de soledad, and Aura, and short story collections such as Cuentos negros de Cuba, Leyendas de Guatemala, and Guerra del tiempo. Conducted in Spanish; course work for students in departments other than Spanish and Portuguese in English. Open to undergraduates.
CPLT 940: Magical Realism and Its Sequels in Modern Latin American Fiction
The course concentrates on the major writers who practiced what is called “magical realism”—Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and others—after studying the trend’s antecedents in the colonial, post-independence, and early twentieth century. The role of Jorge Luis Borges in the beginnings of magical realism, the works of writers such as Miguel Ángel Asturias and Juan Rulfo, and those of more recent writers who rejected the trend, such as Roberto Bolaño and Fernando Vallejo. The considerable critical corpus on the topic is studied. In Spanish.
CPLT 940: Magical Realism and Its Sequels in Modern Latin American Fiction
The course concentrates on the major writers who practiced what is called “magical realism”—Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and others—after studying the trend’s antecedents in the colonial, post-independence, and early twentieth century. The role of Jorge Luis Borges in the beginnings of magical realism, the works of writers such as Miguel Ángel Asturias and Juan Rulfo, and those of more recent writers who rejected the trend, such as Roberto Bolaño and Fernando Vallejo. The considerable critical corpus on the topic is studied. In Spanish.
CPLT 942:The Borges Effect
Since the publication of Ficciones in 1944 and especially since achieving world-wide acclaim after receiving ex-aequo with Samuel Beckett the Formentor Prize in 1961, Jorge Luis Borges has become one of the most influential modern writers. His is a recognizable and often acknowledged presence in the work of novelists and short-story writers, as well as in that of philosophers and literary theorists. There is a Borges “effect,” that can be perceived in John Barth, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco; and in Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gerard Genette and Jacques Derrida, among others. That effect is also projected retrospectively in Borges’s particular way of reading classics like Homer, Dante and Cervantes. An elegant, playfully ironic skepticism, together with a fondness for aporias, enigmas, puzzles, labyrinths as well as for minor genres such as the detective story are the most visible components of Borges’s style and thought. Taken together these components suggest theories about writing and reading that have been associated with what is called postmodernism. Classes on Carpentier and García Márquez will contrast Borges’ theory and practice of fantastic literature with what has come to be known as “magical realism.” Class discussions will be in English and readings in English or the French, Spanish and Italian originals.
CPLT 950: Latin American Gender Debates and Feminist Traditions
This seminar is an introductory overview of Latin American gender debates and feminist traditions since the turn of the twentieth century up to today’s conversations around gender identity, human rights, gendered violence, and decolonial feminisms. The seminar consists of three basic units: (1) women’s social movements from anarchism to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to indigenous feminisms and the regional debate around practical and strategic gender needs; (2) local theories of patriarchy and gendered violence; (3) new gender identity laws, the discussion around sexual diversity and sexual difference, and the transgender movement today (this unit includes the analysis of one autobiography, two literary texts, and four cinematic representations). We study texts written in Latin America, at times read in comparison with some European and North American texts, and we look at their migration outside the region. The majority of texts are in Spanish, though there will be as many translations as possible for those who read more comfortably in English. Seminar meetings are conducted in Spanish.
CPLT 952: Modern Novel in Japan and Brazil
Brazilian and Japanese novels from the late nineteenth century to the present. Representative texts from major authors are read in pairs to explore their commonalities and divergences. Topics include nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, the rise of mass culture and the avant-garde, and existentialism and postmodernism.
Brazilian and Japanese novels from the late nineteenth century to the present. Representative texts from major authors are read in pairs to explore their commonalities and divergences. Topics include nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, the rise of mass culture and the avant-garde, and existentialism and postmodernism.
CPLT 953 Topics in Sinophone and Chinese Studies
This seminar examines the current state of the field of Chinese and Sinophone studies from different geographical and theoretical perspectives. It is a research seminar and colloquium, and we use texts in the original as well as translated languages. Topics vary.