Spring 2021  |  CSCL 3122 Section 001: Movements and Manifestos (51549)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
Completely Online
Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
Delivery Mode
Online Course
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/19/2021 - 05/03/2021
Tue, Thu 11:15AM - 12:30PM
Off Campus
UMN REMOTE
Enrollment Status:
Open (29 of 30 seats filled)
Also Offered:
Course Catalog Description:
Movements that emerge when a group of writers, filmmakers, artists, composers, or musicians puts forth a new definition of literature, film, art, or music - and sets in motion new relations (aesthetic and social) of word, image, sound. Manifestos - statements of position - that articulate or counter such definitions. Movements created by scholars or critics after the fact. Focuses on one or two related movements (e.g., romanticism and realism, surrealism and negritude, new wave and third cinema).
Class Description:
If much of the world today has learned to imagine language similarly, to see and hear through language similarly - and that's a big "if" - why? This course will venture an answer to that question by taking a transcontinental approach to two modern literary movements, Romanticism and realism, often understood in exclusively European terms. We will rethink Romanticism and realism as movements of literature between Europe and key parts of Africa and Asia that articulated new relations--aesthetic and social--between word, image, and sound. During the long nineteenth century, Europeans imagined other lands as wellsprings that might breathe new life into Western literature--yet paradoxically, too, as territories that Europe should colonize, control, or "civilize." Writers from Egypt and Ottoman Syria, India, Japan, and Senegal, in turn, confronted the force of modern European empires by "reviving" their literary or expressive traditions with transfusions from the West--even as they interrogated the logics of life, nature, the "real," the imagination, and the supernatural that underpinned modern Western understandings of word/image/sound. In this traffic, the language of modern literature was born. With an eye to this troubled history, we will read manifestos and literary works (cross-cut with visual art and film) that announce or critique the movements of Romanticism and realism, as well as criticism and theory by contemporary scholars who are reframing their terms for comparative literary studies. We will explore vital questions: How did the idea of literature itself migrate between East and West, North and South, in an age of imperialisms and nationalisms? How and why did specific literary genres travel under these conditions, and what ideological baggage did they carry along the way? How do our understandings of word/image/sound today hark back to the long nineteenth century? And what might the deep interrelations between art, science, and empire in Romanticism and realism teach us about similar interrelations now, in the twenty-first century?

We will begin by examining the politics of the "new" that drive literary and artistic movements and manifestos, whether statements that explicitly herald the new or artworks that imply it. We will consider how Romanticism and realism, often entangled with cultural "renaissances," shaped modes of literary and artistic modernity closely tied to the rise, decline, and reassertion of empires. With manifestos that defined modern understandings of language and literature in the global North and South--essays by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, Rabindranath Tagore, and Khalil Gibran--we will read novels, short fictions, and poetry as complex manifestos in their own right, as texts that define, defy, and exceed Romanticism and realism: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot (1835), Rabindranath Tagore's "Postmaster" (1891), Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī's What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us; or, A Period of Time (1898-1902, 1907), Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat (1905-1906), and Léopold Sédar Senghor's "In Memoriam" (1930s, published 1945). Turning to moving images, we will compare the first film adaptations of Shelley's Frankenstein (1910, dir. J. Searle Dawley, prod. Thomas Edison) and Tagore's "Postmaster" (1961, dir. Satyajit Ray). Critical and theoretical writings by scholars such as Raymond Schwab, Raymond Williams, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mrinalini Chakravorty, Maha Abdel Megeed, Samah Selim, Karatani Kōjin, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne will complement our readings.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/51549/1213
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
19 January 2021

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