Graduate Seminars
Fall 2008
Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages

CPLT 219-001
Dante and Italian Cinema
Tuesday, 5:10-8:00 PM, HMNSS 1502
Professor Marguerite Waller
Email: mwaller@ucr.edu

Dante’s Commedia  has provided the fundamental screenplay and handbook of visual literacy for many of Italy’s best-known and most influential filmmakers, including Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Sergio Leone, Liliana Cavani, Lina Wertmuller, and Maurizio Nichetti. It has also provided Italian- American filmmakers (Capra, Coppola, Scorsese, for example) with an influential guide to the workings of different kinds of audio-visual image. The three sections of the poem, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, present themselves as three different kinds of talking image, tailored to the receptive state of their spectators. In this seminar, we will read sections from Inferno and Purgatorio (in Robert Durling's  bilingual edition) in relation to canonical and noncanonical Italian and  Italian American films. Theory, film, and 
literatuer will be inter-related as they function as media of subjectivity, history, and ideology.

CPLT 210-001
Canons in Comparative Literature­ Expanding the Canons
Thursday, 5:10-8:00 PM, LFSC  2418
Professor Henk Maier
Email: henk.maier@ucr.edu

Seminar around the work of some prominent (colonial and post-colonial) authors in Southeast Asia (Shahnon Ahmad, Rizal, Pramoedya, Kukrit Pramoj, Nguyen Huy Thiep, Couperus, Orwell),  addressing theoretical issues such as canon, literary life, 'world literature', translation, and most of all: close reading and interpretation.