CMLT-C 205 COMPARATIVE LITERARY ANALYSIS (3 CR.)
Introduction to basic concepts of literary criticism through comparative close readings of texts from a variety of literary genres - fiction, poetry, drama, essay - from diverse traditions.
1 classes found
Spring 2024
Component | Credits | Class | Status | Time | Day | Facility | Instructor |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
LEC | 3 | 29431 | Closed | 3:00 p.m.–4:15 p.m. | TR | HU 111 | Van der Laan S |
Regular Academic Session / In Person
LEC 29431: Total Seats: 25 / Available: 11 / Waitlisted: 0
Lecture (LEC)
- IUB GenEd A&H credit
- COLL INTENSIVE WRITING SECTION
- COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inq
- A portion of the above class reserved for majors
- Above class COLL Intensive Writing section
- Above class meets with HON-H 211
- IUB GenEd A&H credit
- COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Topic: Writing about writing
How do stories shape our lives, our worlds, our relationships? How much power do we give the narratives that other people, or society at large, create for us? How do we take control of our own narratives, or expose and rewrite the fictions that shape our cultures? The term metafiction describes those stories, plays, films, and other media that draw attention to their nature as fictions - as creations of the human imagination - in order to blur the lines between the worlds of the text (or stage, or film) and the reader (or audience) and to suggest that the reader's world too is shaped by language and narrative, and thus capable of being reimagined and rewritten. This course will introduce students to both the mind-bending genre of metafiction and the discipline of comparative literature, which brings together literature and other arts from around the world to explore pressing questions across national, historical, cultural, and linguistic borders. We will read William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the medieval Middle Eastern folktales collected in the One Thousand and One Nights and works inspired by them from Jorge Luís Borges' short stories to Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler to Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories - or perhaps Jamila Ahmed's newly-published Every Rising Sun. By pairing classics with modern reinterpretations, will discover how works cross borders of time, space, and language; how texts create conversations among themselves; and how creators interrogate their predecessors, reimagine their traditions, and make old and foreign texts live again in new contexts.