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Investigates how sex, gender, and power are entwined in the Chinese experience of modernity. Topics include anti-footbinding campaigns, free love/free sex, women's mobilization in revolution and war, the new Marriage Law of 1950, Mao's iron girls, postsocialist celebrations of sensuality, and emergent queer politics. Readings range from feminist theory to China-focused historiography, ethnography, memoir, biography, fiction, essay, and film. All course materials are in English.

Preference to freshmen. Tensions inherent in the democracy of ancient Athens; how the character of Antigone emerges in later drama, film, and political thought as a figure of resistance against illegitimate authority; and her relevance to contemporary struggles for women's and workers' rights and national liberation. Readings and screenings include versions of Antigone by Sophocles, Anouilh, Brecht, Fugard/Kani/Ntshona, Paulin, Glowacki, Gurney, and von Trotta.

Introduction to the sex-gender system of ancient Greece, with comparative material from modern America. How myths, religious rituals, athletics, politics and theater reinforced gender stereotypes and sometimes undermined them. Skills: finding clues, identifying patterns and making connections amongst the components of a strange and beautiful culture very different from our own.

Preference to freshmen. Sappho's surviving fragments in English; traditions referring to or fantasizing about her disputed life. How her poetry and legend inspired women authors and male poets such as Swinburne, Baudelaire, and Pound. Paintings inspired by Sappho in ancient and modern times, and composers who put her poetry to music.

Representation of women in ancient Chinese and Greek texts. How men viewed women and what women had to say about themselves and their societies. Primary readings in poetry, drama, and didactic writings. Relevance for understanding modern concerns; use of comparison for discovering historical and cultural patterns.

Rather than try to examine the whole of such an extensive body of work by artists of Mexican descent living in Mexico and the United States, the focus will be on the transnational themes of border thinking, memory, and identity (both personal and collective). Looking at the foundational poetry, auto-ethnographies, and narratives by Américo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldúa and how their literary and ethnographic work laid the groundwork for subsequent imaginings in the narratives, poetry, and theory of border thinking and writing. We will explore the trans-frontier cultural conditions under which imaginative literary texts are produced, disseminated, and received. We will consider not only the historical transnational experiences that inform these borderlands texts but the potential futures of Mexico and the United States they imagine.

It is a given that today's world is increasingly "networked": we are connected to a wider spectrum of people and places than ever before, in multiple ways. Our economic, political, technological, financial, cultural, ecological worlds seem blended into one. And yet amidst all that we seem to have in common, we also have sometimes very different ways of understanding those connections, both as individuals and as members of different national communities. In this course, we will learn how great works of literature help us not only imagine those connections between people and between nations as they have been produced historically and as they exist today, but also to see how literature helps us imagine the future. We will read novels from various locales, explore the cultures and histories from which they emerged, and link them together in a conversation. Works include: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide; Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah; Ondatjee, The English Patient; Ibrahim Al-Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone.

We may "know" "who" we "are," but we are, after all, social creatures. How does our sense of self interact with those around us? How does literature provide a particular medium for not only self expression, but also for meditations on what goes into the construction of "the Self"? After all, don't we tell stories in response to the question, "who are you"? Besides a list of nouns and names and attributes, we give our lives flesh and blood in telling how we process the world. Our course focuses in particular on this question--Does this universal issue ("who am I") become skewed differently when we add a qualifier before it, like "ethnic"? Satisfies PWR2.

Introduction to the comparative literary study of important gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender writers and their changing social, political, and cultural contexts from the 1890s to today: Wilde, Gide, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Radclyffe Hall, E.M. Forster, Thomas Mann, Georges Bataille, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters, Audre Lorde, discussed in the context of 20th-century feminist and queer literary and social theories of gender and sexuality (Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Julia Serano, and others).