Undergraduate Courses

Exploration of East Asian literature, film, culture, and history through examination of the genre of “crime” or “detective” fiction. Topics include genre theory, as well as a variety of traveling themes in modernity, such as sexuality, surveillance, colonialism, scientific rationality, perversion, the urban, debt, violence, and transnational cultural flows.

Course multi titled as EALL289

Instructor: Stephen Poland

This course is a seminar on the complete short stories of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), a master of the genre and one of the major authors of twentieth-century Brazil known for existentialism, mysticism and feminism.

This course is a seminar on the complete short stories of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), a master of the genre and one of the major authors of twentieth-century Brazil known for existentialism, mysticism and feminism.

An introduction to Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Works by Borges, García Márquez, Paz, Neruda, Cortázar, and others.

Brazilian concrete poetry in international perspective; production and theory of concrete poetry, translation, and criticism during the second half of the twentieth century. Brazilian concrete poets in the context of visual and concrete poetics. Representative works include ‘Pilot Plan’ and Theory of Concrete Poetry, graphic and spatial poems, and public expositions of works. Brazilian concrete poets were among the leaders of an international neo-vanguard movement in mid-twentieth century related to geometrical abstraction in painting. In the journals Noigandres and Invenção, and the Theory of Concrete Poetry the Brazilians link their poetics to Pound, Mallarmé, cummings and other inventive figures in world poetry, while relating poetry to graphic arts through reference to painting and to semiotics, including Fenollosa’s essay on use of the Chinese character. The exhibit in S. Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art in December 1956 was the beginning of the public exhibition of concrete poetry, now the topic of anthologies, websites, criticism, and museum retrospectives. Concrete poetics dominated the production of poetry in Brazil for half a century with a major effect on cultural and intellectual life.

Prerequisite: PORT 140 or equivalent.

Exploration of the life of English literature in the colonial and postcolonial world, from the nineteenth century to the present. Close reading of literary texts, publishing statistics, school textbooks, film, and postcolonial theory. Topics include canon formation, education reform, colonial publishing, gender and education, global Shakespeare.

Georg Büchner’s (1813-1837) is a work across times and places. In Danton’s Death he reenacts the French Revolution, in the pamphlet Hessian Messenger he calls for revolution in German lands. Büchner’s other, simultaneous, revolution is one of language and literature. In the narrative Lenz and the theater play Woyzeck, Büchner turns the Romanticism of his own time upside down and the two works resurface only ca. 1900 as trail blazers of social naturalism and modernist (postdramatic) theater. Celan, in the Meridian, gives an idiosyncratic account of Büchner’s travel across times and places. The course contextualizes the close reading of Büchner’s work with materials from the French Revolution, early socialists, Marx; French, German, British Romanticism; prose and theater ca. 1900 when Büchner is rediscovered; Celan.

Rüdiger Campe rudiger.campe@yale.edu

Dietrich Thomae dietrich.thomae@yale.edu

Recent headlines about China in the world, deciphered in both modern and historical contexts. Interpretation of new events and diverse texts through transnational connections. Topics include China’s international relations and global footprint, Mandarinization, Chinese America, science and technology, science fiction, and entrepreneurship culture.

Readings and discussion in English.

After Independence dictators emerged in the newly established Latin American countries.  Not a few were military men who had risen to prominence during the struggle against Spain.  They established repressive regimes bolstered by the army and powerful landowners.  Some, like Juan Manuel Rosas in Argentina became all powerful figures who provoked intense, often bloody opposition.  Their tradition continued in the twentieth century in figures such as Anastasio Somosa in Nicaragua, and Fidel Castro in Cuba.  An accompanying tradition of books about dictators, mostly novels, arose, with famous works such as El señor presidente (1946) by the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, and others like El otoño del patriarca (1975), by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, El recurso del método (1974), by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, and Yo el supremo (1976), by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos.  More recently Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian, published La fiesta del chivo (2000), about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. All of those novels will be read in the course, plus Facundo (1845), of uncertain genre, their precursor, by the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Tirano Banderas (1925), the first dictator novel, by the Spaniard Ramón del Valle Inclán.  The aim of the course will be to learn how literature has portrayed such a figure, which became the most prominent protagonist in Latin American fiction, and to ponder the reasons for the emergence of dictators in the region.  Essays by Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Juan Linz, among others, will be discussed, as will the history of Latin America by Edwin Williamson.

Survey of major twentieth-century Caribbean poets such as Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and Aimé Césaire.

Course multi titled as ENGL335/AFAM338

Instructor: Anthony Reed

A lecture course introducing undergraduates to the rich tradition of poetry written in French (and German) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each week is devoted to exploring the life and work of a poet whose ways of behaving, creating, and perceiving the world might be described as insane. There is, perhaps, no shortage of mad poets, but those whose life and work provide topics for discussion here include Hölderlin, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Apollinaire, Breton, Artaud, and Celan. Students become familiar with the tools required to read, interpret, understand, and enjoy poetry, and develop an understanding of the poems’ broader literary historical, philosophical, and political significance. Regular references are made to other modes of expression, including painting, photography, film, music, dance, philosophy, theater, and architecture. 

Lectures in English. Sections in English or French. Readings available both in original language and in English translation.