comparative literature 210 FALL 2002
gender/image/power/text
comparative literature for the 21st century
The First Walter Benjamin/Rosario Castellanos Colloquiain Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies
The Department of English and Comparative Literature
San Diego State University

The First Walter Benjamin/Rosario Castellanos Colloquia™ in Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies, a special section of CompLIT 210,  Introduction to Comparative Literature (FALL 2002), will NOT clarify the boundaries of Comparative Literature; in fact, it is our sublime hope that students will leave this series convinced that comparative literature is more process than product, more wave than stone, more explosive than sedentary. If anything, you can think of this experiment as a four-month odyssey guided by an oddly rigorous, eclectic wandering or, alternatively, as a months-long exercise in aesthetic seduction. 

Part of this is owing to the course design: each weekly gathering features a different lecturer and a different text--around SDSU, the class is known as the "test-drive a professor" seminar. The variety does not stop there, as some of our invited scholars are not from the Department of English and Comparative Literature. The most dynamic aspect of Comparative Literature as a "field" or "fields" is that it supports aesthetic, intellectual and cultural investigations that cross geographic and institutional boundaries. So it is that Philosophers, Anthropologists, Editors, Poets, Biblical Scholars and maybe even a Performance Artist or two will enter our seminar this term to build bridges between their domain and ours. In the end we may find we share more than we understood to be possible. This class is open to all majors, and while it is a requirement for Comparative Literature majors, you may rest assured that all curious, dedicated literature-starved wanderers will find a home away from home here with us this semester. 
 
 
Gender / Image / Power / Text
A Comparative Literature for the 21st Century
SCHEDULE...
unless otherwise noted, all presentations are in AH 2134 from 4 to 6:40 (with breaks!).

Tuesday September 10
Cinema, Triptychs, Narratology and FLIRT: The Literary Cinema of Hal Hartley
Dr. W. Nericcio

Tuesday, September 17
Art History, Graphic Narrative, and the Novel: Dan Clowes's Ghost World
Dr. W. Nericcio

Tuesday, September 24
Literary Journals, Editors and Comparative Literature
Gwendolyn 
Spring Kurtz, John D. Rall & The Staff of Pacific Review 2002 & 2003

Tuesday, October 1
OPEN

Tuesday, October 8
Shakespeare's Pericles
Jill Holslin, PhD Program in Literature, UCSD/lecturer, SDSU
WEBinfo on PERICLES @ the OLD GLOBE THEATER, San Diego
REVIEWs & more info on PERICLES @ the OLD GLOBE...

Tuesday, October 15
The Haunting Absence
Prostitution in California, 1868-1872
Hellen Lee
Ph.D. Program in Literature
UCSD

Hellen Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature/Cultural Studies at UCSD. Her current work examines literary representations of sex work and racialized women’s laboring conditions in 19th c. San Francisco in relation to other written historical materials. Until recently, her focus has been primarily women’s labor issues in 19th c. Paris. She wrote her master’s thesis on 19th c. representations of sex work in the paintings of Edouard Manet and in Emile Zola’s Nana at California State University Dominguez Hills. While she focuses on particular periods and regions, she finds that sex work is never isolated from larger economic, racial, gendered, political and geographical contexts.

 Tuesday, October 22
Anthropology and Comparative Literature
The Case of Carlos Castaneda
Dr. Adelaida del Castillo
class meets in AH 4176

Tuesday, October 29
What Price Purity? :Sex(TEXT)ual Politics and the Question of Agency-->A Comparative Approach to Lit/Poetry/Music
Jonathan Holt, MA candidate/Lecturer, SDSU

Tuesday, November 5
No Lecture Today!  Reading and Conferences open.

Tuesday, November 12
The Book of Ruth
Dr. Ita Sheres
class meets in AH 2128

Tuesday, November 19
Visions of Hell in Dante's Inferno
Dr. Laurel Amtower, SDSU

Tuesday, November 26
NO CLASS--THANKSGIVING WEEK
 

Tuesday, December 3
[note, this is a LAST minute CHANGE at a
DIFFERENT CLASSROOM AND LATER START TIME]
MUSIC AND LITERATURE
Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music/La Historia de Lydia Mendoza. NorteñoTejano Legacies.
DR. Yolanda Broyles-González
Tuesday, December 3, 2002 
at 4:30 p.m. in CG-333
Professor Broyles-González of Chicano Studies and German Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will discuss her bilingual biography of a legendary singer, Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music/La Historia de Lydia Mendoza. NorteñoTejano Legacies.


Tuesday, December 10
Blaxploitation Sinemadness and the Harlem Renaissance
Shelley Scott, MA Candidate SDSU

Dr. Bill Nericcio
coordinator/professor/ringleader