118. Regional Literature in the United States, Volume 5: The Southwest

T. Walter Herbert describes regional literature. How the rough and grotesque humor of the 1830s old Southwest (now considered the South) became an American ideal and raised class and political issues (i.e., Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Woody Guthrie's songs, Davy Crockett). Texas and history, Hispanic traditions, the Mexican border, and nostalgia--for cowboys, ranches, and farming. Writing from J. Frank Dobie, Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove; The Last Picture Show; Horseman, Pass By), and Katherine Anne Porter (Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Ship of Fools).

Participants: Don Graham, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Edward A. Shannon, T. Walter Herbert.

119. Literary Translations, Volume 2

The art of translation from the perspective of three translators. S. Y. Agnon's Hebrew novel Only Yesterday, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers and other Latin American texts, and Franz Kafka's The Castle.

Participants: Mark Harman, Barbara Harshav, Suzanne Jill Levine.

120. Popular Historical Novels

How historical novels show the ways that the past shapes the present and make readers feel like participants. The novels of three contemporary writers of historical fiction: Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, Gore Vidal's novels, Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.

Participants: Peter Hitchcock, Donald Pease, Ryan Trimm.

121. Literary Portrayals of Men

How images, ideals, and stereotypes of masculinity have changed over time and differ from one culture to another. Masculinity in the Jewish Talmud and folklore. American manhood, and the development of the United States as a nation. Race, land ownership, fatherhood, and paternalism in Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. Royall Tyler's play The Contrast and independence, whiteness, and citizenship. Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond and the deleterious effects of market competition on male independence. Black masculinity and slavery in the writings of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. The choreographer Bill T. Jones and his portrayal of the challenges African American men confront.

Participants: Daniel Boyarin, Dana Nelson, Maurice Wallace.

122. Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes's seventeenth-century novel and its influence on music, film, theater, and literature. Jorge Luis Borges on Cervantes. The character as a reader and the danger of reading fiction as real. Don Quixote's literary madness and his reading of chivalric romances; the novel as a comedy that emphasizes the impossibility of knightly ideals in a seventeenth-century mercantile economy. The use of technology in the novel and how it reflects tensions in Spain between medieval and early modern social and religious values, between medieval scholasticism and modern empiricism. Change from multiculturalism to ethnic and religious puritanism in the Iberian peninsula after 1492.

Participants: Carroll B. Johnson, Cory Reed, Lía Schwartz.

123. Portraits of Oscar Wilde

The portrait that emerges from Wilde's biography and from the newspaper accounts of his trials. The portrayal of Wilde in the recent plays Gross Indecency by Moises Kaufman and The Judas Kiss by David Hare. Wilde's use of a portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Participants: Ed Cohen, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, John Paul Riquelme.

124. Short Stories, Volume 1

Franz Kafka and the differences between American and German short stories, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges's parable-like short stories, and nineteenth-century short stories by the African American writers Victor Séjour and Charles W. Chesnutt.

Participants: Mark Anderson, William L. Andrews, Nicolas Shumway.

125. Writers and Painters

Artists who were both writers and painters. The twentieth-century surrealism of André Breton and Robert Desnos. William Blake's integration of words and images in his painting and poetry. The Renaissance artist Michelangelo's poetry and his theory of artistic perfection.

Participants: Santa Casciani, Mary Ann Caws, Morris Eaves.

126. Immigrant Filmmakers

The role of early-twentieth-century immigrant filmmakers in the development of cinema and their continuing influence. The German director Fritz Lang's Hollywood movies (Fury, The Big Heat) as precursors of film noir. The Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's writings, and his moviemaking in the United States and Mexico, and his contribution of montage. The Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee's changes to the wuxia genre and attention to myth, romance, female agency, and the changing role of men in his movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Participants: John Davidson, James Schamus, Barry Scherr.

127. American Musicals

Showboat as the first serious social-problem musical in American theater. Oklahoma! as a musical play. West Side Story's focus on urban trouble, juvenile delinquency, and people of color at the heart of the city.

Participants: Lauren Berlant, Andrea Most, Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez.

128. Travels to Italy

Writers whose works reflect their passions for Italy: E. M. Forster's sense of a real versus a tourist Italy, the poetry of Robert Browning and Italian sensuousness, Margaret Fuller's newspaper accounts of the 1848 revolution in Rome.

Participants: Eleanor Cook, Karen McLeer, Larry Reynolds.

129. How Writers Use the Bible

The Bible as foundational text in Dante's Divine Comedy, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Herman Melville's poetry and novel Moby-Dick.

Participants: Peter S. Hawkins, Wyn Kelley, Michael Lieb.

130. Minority Writings in Europe

How Turkish writers in Germany inhabit a shared culture and have had to negotiate Germany's Nazi past. Writings by Zafer Şenocak. Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Life Is a Caravanserai and Mother Tongue. Azouz Begag's Le gone du Chaâba and Beur or Maghrebi writers in France, their North African and Algerian origin, and their expansion and diversification of French culture. The large wave of immigration in the 1970s that brought Somalian and Senegalese writers to Italy.

Participants: Leslie Adelson, Alec Hargreaves, Graziella Parati.

131. Favorite Poems, Volume 2

Scholars read and discuss their favorite poems: Pablo Neruda's "Ode to My Socks," Gwendolyn Brooks's sonnet "Gay Chaps at the Bar," George Herbert's seventeenth-century "Redemption."

Participants: Gwen Kirkpatrick, Hortense Spillers, Susan Stewart.

132. Vietnam War Movies

Michael Cimino's 1978 The Deer Hunter and its focus on class issues, religion, and American values and its metaphor of the Russian roulette game; Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; Oliver Stone's 1989 Born on the Fourth of July, based on the book by Ron Kovic.

Participants: Robert Eberwein, Susan Jeffords, Margot Norris.

133. Chinese Women's Poetry

The vibrant period of poetry writing by Chinese women in late imperial China (from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth) and how their poetry evinces a strong autobiographical strand that debunks the myth that women were silent and passive and inhabited a primarily private, domestic world. Readings from poems from the first century BCE to the seventeenth century. Li Qingzhao's invention of a genre of brief poems developed from popular song in the twelfth century. The seventeenth-century's heroic, masculine style. Twentieth-century women poets in Taiwan and mainland China and their conscious break from tradition in form, language, subject matter, imagery, sensibility, and worldview. Poetry after the Cultural Revolution.

Participants: Grace Fong, C. P. Haun Saussy, Michelle Yeh.

134. The Fascination of Faust

The history of Faust and why the story of Faust is so compelling. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's nineteenth-century drama Faust. The Gretchen character in Goethe and in opera versions of the Faust legend. Comments on a 1990 live performance of the uncut Faust in Vienna.

Participants: Peter Beicken, Jane Brown, Marshall Brown.

135. The Battle for the Vernacular

How, in the fourteenth century, everyday spoken languages--English, French, and German--came to be used instead of Latin for writing literature, philosophy, and translations of the Bible. Dante's Divine Comedy, François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, and William Tyndale's sixteenth-century English translation of the Bible.

Participants: Teodolinda Barolini, Jean-Claude Carron, Anne Richardson.

136. The Avant-Garde

How artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries challenged the status quo through art, poetry, novels, and drama. Marcel Duchamp; books by the surrealists Robert Desnos and Louis Aragon; manifestos of Antonin Artaud; Fours Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein, which serves as the libretto for Virgil Thomson's opera.

Participants: Katharine Conley, Marjorie Perloff, Martin Puchner.

137. W. E. B. Du Bois

The life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois and his book The Souls of Black Folk. Issues of race, masculinity, democracy, civil and voting rights, economic equality, and segregation. The relation of Du Bois's ideas to those of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass.

Participants: Cheryl T. Gilkes, David Levering Lewis, Marlon B. Ross.

138. Divided Cities

Human dimensions of social and political rifts. The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider about divided Berlin. Carlos Fuentes's La frontera de cristal (The Crystal Frontier) and Ricardo Aguilar's A barlovento, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, and the United States-Mexico border. Representations of Jerusalem by Palestinian and Israeli writers.

Participants: Carol Bardenstein, Irene Kacandes, Maarten Van Delden.

139. Landscapes in Literature

Landscape as homeland in nineteenth-century Latin America, the poetry of Andrés Bello, and Gabriel García-Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Paul Bowles, North Africa, and the Sahara desert. The experience of scenery and landscape in William Wordsworth's Prelude.

Participants: Paul Fry, Elmokhtar Ghambou, Diana Sorensen.

140. Politics and Literature

The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes; the American writer Robert Penn Warren's 1946 All the King's Men, based on the contradiction between Huey Long's political ideals and corrupt methods; the nineteenth-century British writer Anthony Trollope's growing pessimism about the dishonesty and self-interest of the politicians of his day.

Participants: Jonathan Cullick, John Halperin, Mario J. Valdés.

141. The Harry Potter Phenomenon

The popularity of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and their literary elements. The books' similarities to other works of children's literature: Harry as a hero on a quest, as an orphan, and as an outsider. Why girls like Harry Potter. What gets lost in the film version of the Harry Potter book.

Participants: Holly Blackford, June Cummins, Lisa Makman.

142. Literature of Friendship

Plato's critique of the Greek model of friendship as an erotic relationship between men and his concept of love as the philosophical pursuit of wisdom. Montaigne and the interrelation of literature and friendship. Plato's and Montaigne's idea that literature is a dialogue with a potential friend--the reader. Interracial friendship, brotherhood, and democracy in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Friendship between two African American women in Toni Morrison's Sula.

Participants: Edwin Duval, Ivy Schweitzer, Cheryl Wall.

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