Comparative Literature Department
Undergraduate Comparative Arts Courses
C151 Introduction to Popular Culture (3 cr.)
Explores the scope and methodologies for the serious study of entertainment for mass consumption, including popular theater and vaudeville, best sellers, mass circulation magazines, popular music, phonograph records, and popular aspects of radio, film, and television. Provides the basic background to other popular culture courses in comparative literature.
C251 Lyrics and Popular Song (3 cr.)
Survey of popular songs of Europe and the Americas, including modern ballads, cabaret songs, Spanish flamencos, Mexican rancheras, Argentine tangos, country western, and rock lyrics. Discussion of literary qualities of lyrics in context of musical setting and performance and independently as literature.
C252 Literary and Television Genres (3 cr.)
Comparative study of popular literary and television genres, such as farce, domestic comedy, melodrama, biography, mystery, adventure, western, the picaresque. Theoretical, technical, and ideological contrasts between the literary and television media.
C255 Modern Literature and the Other Arts: An Introduction (3 cr.)
Analyzes the materials of literature, painting, and music and the ways in which meaning is expressed through the organization of the materials. Investigates similarities and differences among the arts. Examples selected from the past 200 years. No previous knowledge of any art required. I Sem.,II Sem.
C256 Literature and the Other Arts: 1870-1950 (3 cr.)
Interaction of the arts in the development of Western literature, painting, and music in movements such as impressionism, symbolism, constructivism, expressionism, dada, and surrealism.
C257 Asian Literature and the Other Arts (3 cr.)
Selected literary texts of China, India, or Japan studied in the context of the art forms and cultures of these countries. Concentration on one culture each time course is offered. May be repeated once with different topic.
C355 Literature, the Arts, and their Interrelationship (3 cr.)
Discussion of theoretical foundations for study of the relationship of the arts; detailed analysis of specific works illustrating interaction of literature with other arts.
C356 Concrete Poetry (3 cr.)
Emphasizes the international character of the concrete poetry movement and its relationship to the literary tradition and to contemporary movements in the other arts.
C357 The Arts Today: From 1950 to the Present (3 cr.)
Shared trends in literature, the visual arts, music, dance, and theatre. The heritage of the grotesque and the absurd, dada and surrealism, and constructivism; the new realism. New materials; mixed media and multimedia; environmental and participatory art; happenings; minimal art, conceptual art, anti-art.
C358 Literature and Music: Opera (3 cr.)
Selected opera libretti from various periods. Comparison of libretti with their literary sources; emphasis on specific problems connected with the adaptation of a literary work to the operatic medium. Evaluation of representative libretti as independent literary works.
