החוג לאנגלית ולימודים אמריקניים לשנת תשס"ט

בקורס נערוך סקירה ביקורתית של הקאנון המקובל בזרמי האמנות המודרנית, דרך סוגיות פמיניסטיות העולות מן היצירות והנדונות בטקסטים של בקורת מגדרית.

במהלך הסמסטר נבחן שאלות מרכזיות כמו למשל מדוע כה רבות מיצירות האמנות של התקופה מתארות את הגוף הנשי, לרוב העירום; מה באמת בין פורנוגרפיה לאמנות "גבוהה"; מה בחווייה "המודרנית" של פריס גרם לשגשוג האמנים הגברים ולדיכוי ולהשכחה של נשים יוצרות; אילו נושאים וסגנונות בכל זאת יצרו הנשים האמניות בתקופה הנדונה; אילו מגמות חדשות עלו במחצית השניה של המאה העשרים שאיפשרו שינוי עמוק ומהותי במעמדן ובמיקומן של אמניות נשים; מה היתה השפעתו של העידן הפוסט מודרני על יצירתן של נשים ועוד.
חובות הקורס: קריאה שוטפת במהלך הקורס ומבחן בית.

In this course we will conduct a critical survey of the modern art history and of several canonical art works well-known, using feminist methodology and seminal texts regarding gender issues in these works.

We will perform re-readings of familiar subjects in art history and suggest interpretation that prevail in the contemporary disciplinary discourse, among them multi-culturalism; globalization and post-colonialism.

During the course will we survey two major time periods – the 19th Century and the 20th Century. In the first part, we will discuses and analyze artifacts from the European continent and in the second part we will move on to have a close look at art made in the Americas. We will be asking questions such as why so many of the art works focus on depicting the female body – mostly naked; what exactly was in the 'modern experience' of the 19th Century in Paris that gave way for man to prosper and to the exclusion of women-artists, and what kind of subjects, themes and media did women-artists work in during that period in spit of their difficulties; what is the connection and the relations between pornography and 'high art'; which new trends in the second half of the 20th Century gave way to new opportunities for women-artists and changed their position in the art-scene and in culture in general; and many more.

הקורס דן בארועים מרכזיים ותהליכי יסוד שעברו על החברה האמריקאית מהשליש האחרון של המאה ה-19 ועד להפיכתה של ארה"ב למעצמת-על בתום מלחמת העולם השניה. זוהי התקופה שבה הפכה ארה"ב למדינה מודרנית ברוב המובנים של המושג. היא צמחה מבחינה כלכלית והפכה מתועשת ובעלת אוכלוסיה המתגוררת בערים, היא יצרה מערכות חברתיות להתמודדות עם משברים, החלה להתערב מבחינה פוליטית וצבאית בעולם כולו, ואף הגיעה להגמוניה מן ההבט המדעי והאינטלקטואלי כתוצאה מהגירת מדענים, אמנים ואנשי רוח בשנות השלושים. בקורס נעסוק בנושאים כגון השיקום שלאחר מלחמת האזרחים, תיעוש, הגירה ועיור, תנועות מחאה ורפורמה, התקופה הפרוגרסיבית, שנות העשרים, המשבר הגדול, הניו דיל, והתערבות ארצות הברית במלחמת העולם השניה. הקורס בנוי על הרצאה ובסיומו תערך בחינה שתבסס על ההרצאה והביבליוגרפיה.
ספר בסיס מלווה לאורך הקורס: ארנון גוטפלד, ארצות הברית ממלחמת האזרחים למלחמה הקרה (תל אביב: הוצאת האוניברסיטה המשודרת, משרד הבטחון, 1987)

ד"ר מיכאל זכים
התרגיל עוסק בהיסטוריה של ההתיישבות האירופאית בצפון אמריקה, החל מהניסיונות במאה ה-17 להעתיק את הסדר החברתי מהעולם הישן אל "החדש", ועד העימות הגורלי באמצע המאה ה-19 בין הצפון לדרום על אופי המדינה הלאומית האמריקאית. נתמקד במושגים המרכזיים המתבנתים את החוויה האמריקאית: קידמה, ספר, קפיטליזם, דמוקרטיה, בורגנות, שוויון, עבדות, גזענות, נשיות.

פרופ' אייל נווה
התרגיל יעסוק בהתגבשות החברה האמריקנית במאות ה- 19-17. נתמקד בדפוסי ההתפתחות הכלכלית, החברתית והתרבותית של המושבות הבריטיות בצפון אמריקה, במהפכה האמריקנית והקמת ארה"ב, בנסיבות לניסוח החוקה האמריקנית, בתוכנה ובמשמעותה. הקורס ילווה את ההיסטוריה של ארה"ב עד לפרוץ מלחמת האזרחים באמצע המאה ה-19, וינסה לברר את הסיבות והשלבים שהביאו להתפרקות הברית ופרוץ המלחמה.

ד"ר דפנה שטראוס
בקורס יסקרו סוגיות מרכזיות בהיסטוריה החברתית, הכלכלית, הפוליטית והדתית של המושבות האנגליות בצפון אמריקה ושל ארצות הברית ערב מלחמת האזרחים. לאורך הקורס ייבחנו שני מוטיבים הקושרים בין הסוגיות השונות: תפיסת הייעוד וההבטחה האלוהית אשר עיצבה לאורך הדורות את הדרך שבה הבינו האמריקנים את תפקידם ההיסטורי ואת מעשה ההתיישבות וההתפשטות ברחבי היבשת; ובעיית ההגדרה של החברה האמריקנית ושל הרפובליקה האמריקאית לאור המתח המתמיד בין פרטים לכלל, בין קבוצות אתניות ללאום ובין מדינות לממשל מרכזי.

הקורס יעסוק במקורותיה של ארה"ב ובעיצוב החברה והמשטר האמריקני הייחודי. נבדוק את הווצרות החברה הקולוניאלית בצפון אמריקה ונתמקד בעיקר על תקופת העיצוב והכינון של ארצות הברית. נברר את מרכיבי הצהרת העצמאות האמריקאית ואת אפיונה ומעמדה של החוקה האמריקנית כמסמך בונה משטר ומעצב זהות. כמו כן נעסוק בארועים מרכזיים בהיסטוריה של ארה"ב משלב הקמתה ועד לפרוק הברית ולפרוץ מלחמת האזרחים במחצית המאה ה19.
ספר בסיס: אייל נווה, "ארצות הברית – דמוקרטיה בהתהוות מתמדת" (הוצאת האוניברסיטה הפתוחה, 2007)

הסמינר יעקב אחרי ההיסטוריה הפוליטית והחברתית של הדמוקרטיה האמריקאית, הן כערך רעיוני והן כמנגנון שלטון, למן סוף המאה ה-18 ועד הלום. תמורה מהותית התחוללה במעמדה של הדמוקרטיה במשך תקופה זו, בהפיכתה מכינוי גנאי וסכנה מוחשית לסדר הציבורי בימי המהפכה וכינון הרפובליקה, למותג עולמי המייצג את הנשגב שבתרבות האמריקאית, ובטבע האדם בכלל, בימינו אנו. תהליך זה חןשף סוגיות מרכזיות בתולדות הליברליזם: כיצד הקונפליקט והתחרות האופייניים לחיים הדמוקרטיים היו למפתח של סדר ויציבות? מה משמעו של סדר בחברה שדוגלת בחופש הפרט? מיהו הפרט ומה יחסו לכלל? כיצד האוניברסליות והאינדבידואליזם, המנוגדים זה לזה לכאורה, מהווים יחד את ערכי היסוד של החיים הליברליים? מה הקשר בין חופש הפרט לשוק החופשי? בין השאיפה לקידמה למסורת תחוקתית? בין מוביליות חברתית לשליטה עצמית? יהיה מעניין
הערות:

הסמינר יתמקד בסוגיות היסוד בהסטוריה של מדינות הדרום בארצות הברית, מהתגבשות משטר עבדות בליבה של הדמוקרטיה המודרנית הראשונה, דרך פירוק הברית ומלחמת האזרחים, ועד ליצירת משטר ההפרדה הגזעית ותחילת ההגירה של השחורים צפונה. נעסוק בשאלות תרבותיות, חברתיות ופוליטיות ונתעמק בתופעות הבדלנות, הגזענות והאלימות שאפיינו את האזור במאה התשע עשרה וממשיכות להשפיע על ארצות הברית גם בימינו אנו.

This seminar will engage with the basic themes in the history of the American South, from the formation of a slave society in the midst of the first modern democracy, through secession and the Civil War, to the emergence of the Jim Crow regime and the Great Migration. We will focus on cultural, political, and social questions and delve into the violence, racism, and separatism that characterized the region in the nineteenth century.

We live in a sea of stories. Not only literary texts but also biographies, history textbooks, films, graphic novels, and news broadcasts are narratives. But what is narrative? How is it constructed? What are its basic elements? What distinguishes a narrative from a non-narrative text?
In this course we will try to answer these questions, while giving an overview of contemporary narrative theory, which is central to literary and cultural studies. The course provides an introduction to the basic conceptual tools of narrative theory and illustrates their application on a range of short texts. The course is theoretical and requires analytical and original thought.
All the reading material will be accessible on the Virtual TAU site for the course.

This course provides basic terminology and techniques for understanding and discussing poetry. On the assumption that poetic language is different from the language of prose, and reading poetry demands different tools, we will study subjects such as imagery, meter, speaker, and forms, through a close examination of examples from classical and contemporary English and American poetry.

WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS: 4 quizzes, one final examination.

PRIMARY TEXT: All the reading will be available on the virtual site

This course is an introduction to William Shakespeare and his world. We shall examine his vast canon by first perusing the Sonnets, and then proceed to consider six plays from a generic perspective. Each genre will be discussed, followed by a close reading of the relevant text, encompassing: tragedy, revenge drama, comedy, tragicomedy, and problem plays. Each text will be contextually considered within the pertinent socio-cultural background, to illustrate the mutual influence of drama and ideology. Relevant critical articles will also be studied to evaluate the changing methodological approaches to the world of Shakespeare.

Texts
Sonnets
Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, The Tempest
Requirements
One in-class quiz, one take-home assignment, mid and final examinations

An encounter with systematic thinking on language, representation, and literature, from antiquity (Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, Platonic aesthetics) through the Middle Ages (scholastic logic, Thomas Aquinas), the Renaissance (Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie, Abraham Frauce's Arcadian Rhetorike) the eighteenth century (Kant on aesthetic judgment), Victorian aestheticism (Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde) through twentieth century formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and philosophical reflections on language and literature (e.g. Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Wittgenstein).

This course is an introduction to British literature, from its beginnings to the mid-twentieth century. The course surveys major movements in British culture, from the Anglo-Saxon epic to Modernism. While our focus will be on intensive study of the literature of the British tradition, we will consider this material within the context of other forms of culture, such as language, visual arts, music, history, politics, and religion. The course is designed to prepare students for advanced work in British literature in this department. To that end, we will give special attention to techniques of reading and writing about literature, including close analysis of selected passages.

Text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major Authors (eds. Abrams and Greenblatt).

Requirements: Two midterm exams and a final exam.

This course will provide an overview of American Culture based on written texts from the Colonial Period to the contemporary scene. Material will be drawn from a variety of genres, among them poetry, slave narrative, captivity narrative, autobiography, novel, romance, essay, and short story.
The text for this course is The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Sixth edition, which is available at the Dyonon.
In addition, we will be reading three full-length novels: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (also available at the Dyonon) Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the full text included in the Norton anthology), and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

The aim of the proseminar is to prepare you for participation in academic seminars and for the writing of seminar papers. You will be required to develop an extended, researched analysis of a literary work assigned in class. This course is designed to teach and rehearse specific skills, such as close reading and analysis of a literary text; defining purposes and terms; problematizing; planning, positioning yourself in an existing interpretive framework and finding your own perspective, addressing and negotiating critical views, developing a coherent critical thesis of your own, summarizing and abstracting; producing a bibliography, sifting evidence; revising purposes, contents, organization, language; editing, etc. The research paper you produce as a result of this course (about 10 pages, or 2000 words) will be your contribution to the ongoing conversation about the literary work. It is due at the end of the semester, but the first draft is submitted halfway through and then revised and expanded through discussions with the instructor and input from other students.

Text: a different primary text every semester.
A good English-English dictionary, such as the Webster’s, Oxford, Random House

Because this is an intensive writing course, please take into account that you will need to set aside between 6 and 8 hours per week for your reading, writing and library research in addition to the 4 hours of class time.

The terms “Realism” and “Naturalism” are used in the context of American cultural history to describe the dominant literary styles of US fiction during the period between the Civil War and the beginning of the Twentieth Century. In this course we will analyze these two styles in relation to social and political changes in the US in this period: Reconstruction, the increasing rate of democracy and literacy, industrial and urban growth, expanding population base due to immigration, the rise in middle-class affluence, and changes in the definitions of womanhood
TEXTS will include novels by Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Kate Chopin.
REQUIREMENTS: attendance and participation, short reading responses, short paper, and final exam.

"What is an American?" This question, posed by writer St. Jean de Crevecoeur in an essay by that title only a few short years after the American Revolution, continued to occupy American writers in the decades to come. Writers from Cooper to Melville attempted to formulate a coherent and inclusive American identity, an attempt that often involved the negation, exclusion, or suppression of alternatives. This course will examine debates over national character and national identity as they played themselves out in both canonical and neglected texts, through transformations in language, literary genres, and prose styles.
TEXTS will include novels by J. F. Cooper, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Wilson, and short works of fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and H. D. Thoreau.
REQUIREMENTS: attendance and participation, short reading responses, short paper, and final exam.

The pastoral mode in literature portrays the deceptively simple life of shepherds, using it to represent the conflicts and tensions between simplicity and complexity, nature and artifice, tradition and innovation.
In this course, we will study the classical conventions of pastoral established by Theocritus and Virgil and trace their elaborate transformations, merging with such diverse genres as song, eclogue, epithalamium, epic, prose romance, comedy in major Renaissance pastoral works: Sidney’s Arcadia (excerpts), Spenser’s Shepheards Calendar and The Faerie Queene, Book VI, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It. We will look at later Renaissance poetry by Milton and Marvell and examine the pastoral influences in such later authors as Pope and Wordsworth in England and Emerson and Thoreau in America. We will then trace the presence of the pastoral ethos and concerns in later authors, who may include George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Annie Proulx (not all of these), as well as in film and in painting.

Requirements: two summaries/ reports, two short responses or quizzes, a term paper, a final examination; attendance and participation.
In your term paper, you will be able to trace the influences of the pastoral in any literary work of your choice (you may also draw relevant parallels with the fields of music or the fine arts, if you have the necessary background), not necessarily from our syllabus.

This course will examine the novels of Jane Austen as well as works of women writers who were her contemporaries. We will locate Austen's writing within the cultural and historical contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and engage in the debate surrounding the political positioning that appears within these texts. In addition to Austen, we will read works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe and Elizabeth Inchbald.

Requirements:

Midterm paper
Final exam
Written responses
Attendance and participation

This course will explore the link between Jazz music and 20th century American literature and culture. Listening to musical examples in the class, and reading theoretical work on the politics of aesthetics, the course will offer an introduction to jazz as a basis for literary analysis. Examining texts such as the blues poetry of Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the course will explore the wide variety of jazz presences in literature. The different writers use jazz differently – as imagery, content, language, and narrative structure – in order to locate themselves in a particular historical, political, social, and aesthetic moment.
Course requirements: attendance, short written exercises, final exam.

Early Modern treatises on English rhetoric attribute the invention of this art to poets. According to Thomas Wilson, the art of remembrance was first invented by the Greek poet Simonides, who was able to call by name the disfigured carcasses of the dead because he remembered the sitting place of each and every one of them. Hence, trauma, memory, and language as the art of naming the dead are deeply interrelated.
In this course we will explore the interrelations between language and death through Early Modern poetry and theorizations of rhetoric, and Freud's writings on war, trauma, mourning, and melancholy. We will examine these interrelations in contemporary representations of trauma, in cinematic visions of the Holocaust, as is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.
Reading Material: excerpts from Early Modern treatises on rhetoric, poems by Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and others. Excerpts from Freud's writings.
Requirements: Attendance, participation, reading the required texts and watch the films (be advised, some of the materials are difficult to watch). Two quizzes in class, and a final paper.

The "scholastics of unhappy love" characterizing courtly love poetry, Jacques Lacan argues in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, are a manifestation of the vicissitude of the drive Freud termed "sublimation," in particular in the clinical structure of obsessional neurosis. Taking Lacan's theorizations of the clinic of courtly love poetry as our cue and point of departure, we will aim for the formalization of a psychoanalytic poetics of courtly love, as it appears in the writings of English poets of the late sixteenth century, including its psychic function for the poet, its phantasmatic veils, and the libidinal specifics of its style. We will go on to explore the vicissitudes of this poetics in the lyrical and narrative poetry of Shakespeare, which uses the debris of the components of courtly love poetry as the substrate for the unconscious production of a singular erotics of rhetoric whose core is an opaque mode of enjoyment.

In this course we will explore the works of Walt Whitman – arguably the greatest and most influential poet in American history. He is also one of the most controversial figures in the literary world. With the first publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman shattered numerous poetic conventions, challenging (and confounding) his audience with free verse writings that involved sexuality, race, democracy, and nationhood. He continued this project in seven other revised editions of Leaves of Grass published throughout his lifetime. We will read many of Whitman’s most famous works, and discuss topics in the current scholarly debate. We will also look at how Whitman’s writing has inspired literature that spans nations and cultures, not only in the US, but throughout the world. And at every turn we will be faced with the many contradictions Whitman’s work embodies, work that famously contains “multitudes.”

The grade for this course will be based 10% on participation, 40% on a midterm paper, and 50% on a final exam.

Apocalypse – the end of time - is a widespread topos in contemporary culture. Popular films, from Day After Tomorrow to Cloverfield, endlessly recycle images of wholesale destruction. Innumerable science fiction novels depict the human race wiped out by disease, ecological crisis, or malevolent aliens. Warnings about climate change are often couched in apocalyptic terms, while a rapidly growing community of fundamentalist believers has started a countdown to the End of Days.
Utopia – a representation of an ideal state of humanity – seems to be the opposite of apocalypse; and indeed, literary utopias are rare nowadays. However, a careful look at apocalyptic narratives will show that they contain an unexpected utopian potential. After the destruction, comes the millennium. After the City of Darkness is destroyed, the City of Light will rise on its ruins. Why do we need this?
In this course we will try to answer this question. We will explore the narrative, cultural, and ideological nexus between apocalypse and utopia in a range of fictional texts. We will start with the foundational apocalyptic text of Western culture, The Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine, the last book of the Christian Bible. The rest of our texts, however, will be contemporary, many familiar to the students who enjoy science fiction.

List of Primary Texts (subject to change)
The Book of Revelation (www.bibleontheweb.com)
H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
J.G. Ballard, Crystal World
Greg Egan, Distress
Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Left Behind

Films: End of Days, Independence Day, Apocalypto, Cloverfield
Additional texts/films may be added and/or substituted at the beginning of the semester. Critical texts will also be provided.

The English Renaissance was an age of radical social and cultural change, when ancient notions about the cosmos, the created world, the relationship between man and God, and the very meaning of what it is to be human were renegotiated with astonishing energy, often with unpredictable results. Unfettered by stylistic or grammatical conventions, the poets and authors of this age were themselves pioneers and explorers, continually breaking new grounds in poetry, prose and drama. In this course we will examine the various historical, cultural, intellectual, social and religious forces which shaped the English Renaissance in the sixteenth century and produced some of the English language’s most memorable body of literature. The main objective will be to engage with the English Renaissance mind on its own terms and to understand the diverse and often contradictory habits of thought in the period. The towering figure in this golden age of English literature and culture is of course Shakespeare, but we will seek to look beyond Shakespeare at many of the other literary dramatis personae in the period whose enormously varied literary output captured the spirit of their age even as they moulded it. We will examine a range of verse and prose texts from the period as they relate to a number of cultural themes. We will look at English humanism and the impact of humanist education on literary tastes and practices, the reinvention of classical myth and genre, theories of poetry and artistic verisimilitude, patronage and coterie poetry, court poets and the politics of panegyric, ideas of love and seduction, religious reform and devotional poetry, and the rise of consumerism and the New World aesthetic in the arts.

Primary texts: Apart from a range of selected passages from contemporary non-fictional prose works which will be assigned as weekly reading, we will study the following texts (with the exception of More’s Utopia, this list of texts is subject to change):

More’s Utopia (in an English translation), Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and The Lady of May, Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calneder (select eclogues) and Books I-III of The Faerie Queene, Ralegh’s The Ocean to Cynthia and The Discovery of Guinea, Marlow’s and Chapman’s Hero and Leander, selected poems and sonnets by Skelton, Wyatt, Lyly, Southwell, Drayton, Donne, Alabaster, Jonson, Crashaw, Herbert and others.

Requirements: There will be a midterm exam, a final exam and a term paper where students will be asked to analyse in light of the material covered in the course one of five unseen poems or prose passages from the period.

From different angles the argument has been made that poetry is unique in terms of its attitude towards language. In this course we will explore this argument while reading poetry both old and new, focusing on different aspects of the poems’ language: the individual word, the grammar, the sound, and the rhythm. Students’ suggestions for poems to consider in class are most welcome.

This course traces the origins of European modernity by looking at key texts of the “long eighteenth century”—from the Restoration in 1660 to the 1820s—an era of political, social, and cultural transformation in England. We will look closely at the literature of this period, considering its forms (the diary, the Restoration comedy, satire, polemic, novel, travel narrative and poetry) and its ideas. We will also consider the contexts of enlightenment literature, such as the aftermath of England’s failed civil war, the rise of industrialism, the unprecedented participation of women in literature, and the emergence of new scientific, political and philosophical movements.

Readings will be taken from Dryden, Philips, Montagu, Congreve, Cavendish, Haywood, Bunyan, Sterne, Pepys, Behn, Swift, and others.

Requirements: Several short writing assignments, a term paper, and final exam.

This course will explore the various ways in which the visual has altered our ways of conceiving our world, ideas and selves. We will examine the ways in which politically motivated images are produced, circulated and consumed to both construct, reinforce, resist and overthrow articulations of sexual or racial beings, identities and subjectivities – such as in black, feminist or queer visual cultures. We will consider what determines our looking, seeing or viewing practices, how looking is a form of power and how power can be gendered, eroticized or racialized. We will think about the ways in which new techniques of visualization transform the body itself into a visual medium, as we consider plastic surgery, fashion, performance and body art.

During the course we will read a series of articles by theoreticians and practitioners of visual culture. A potential and partial reading list would include the works of W.J.T. Mitchell (Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture), Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (What is Visual Culture?), Nicholas Mirzoeff (What is Visual Culture?), Judith Adams (The Promotion of New Technology through Fun and Spectacle), Reina Lewis (Looking Good), Anne Balsamo (On the Cutting Edge), Amelia Jones (Body Art), Brenda Dixon Gottschild (The Black Dancing Body).

What is the form and function of the novel within the African American literary tradition, a tradition which came into being while literacy was prohibited for the majority of African Americans? In exploring this question, we will closely read and discuss several major novels of the African American literary tradition, emphasizing issues of aesthetics and ideology, such as identity and racism, blues and jazz, language and the vernacular, form and voice, gender and sexuality.

We will begin with Clotel, or, the President's Daughter (1853), credited to be the first African American novel, and written by a former slave, William Wells Brown. The novel portrays the evils of slavery and introduces the Tragic Mulatto, a product of miscegenation and a type we will further explore in Nella Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing.

The next two novels we will discuss present two diametrically opposed literary styles and approaches: the protest novel, as exemplified by Richard Wright in Native Son (1940); and the modernist novel, as seen through Ralph Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952).

We will conclude with two contemporary writers, Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye, 1970) and John Edgar Wideman (Sent for You Yesterday, 1983), who both grapple with the legacies of racism, while drawing strength from the vernacular tradition.

Clotel, or, the President's Daughter (1853) William Wells Brown
Passing (1928) Nella Larsen

Native Son (1940) Richard Wright
Invisible Man (1952) Ralph Ellison

The Bluest Eye (1970) Toni Morrison
Sent for You Yesterday (1983) John Edgar Wideman

The emphasis in this course is on the contemporary drama produced during the past three decades. The plays have been drawn together with a view to exploring certain interconnections in their themes: territory, property, oppression (political and sexual), the boundaries of the 'normative'. In addition we will examine the historical and cultural in each play as written by the playwright; attention will be paid to the cultural and theatrical milieux from which each play arose, and to the varied presentation methods which the writers choose.

Harold Pinter, Betrayal 1978
Caryl Churchill, Top Girls 1982
David Mamet, Oleanna 1992
Sarah Kane, Blasted 1995

The emphasis in this course is on the contemporary drama produced during the past three decades. The plays have been drawn together with a view to exploring certain interconnections in their themes: territory, property, oppression (political and sexual), the boundaries of the 'normative'. In addition we will examine the historical and cultural in each play as written by the playwright; attention will be paid to the cultural and theatrical milieux from which each play arose, and to the varied presentation methods which the writers choose.

Harold Pinter, Betrayal 1978
Caryl Churchill, Top Girls 1982
David Mamet, Oleanna 1992
Sarah Kane, Blasted 1995 ** will now be : Timerberley Wertenbaker Our Country’s Good 1988

This course offers an introduction to Native American literatures spanning the twentieth century, from Ella Deloria and D’Arcy McNickle at the beginning of the century, to writers of the Native American Renaissance, including N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor, to contemporary writers. We will explore the complex relations between Native American literature and anthropology, examine the ways in which writers address representations of the Indian in popular culture, and discuss identity, authenticity, orality/literacy, and storytelling.

Texts:
D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
Ella Deloria, from Waterlily
Leslie Marmon Silko, from Storyteller
A selection of short stories by Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie and Thomas King.

This course explores the various experiences of some of the ethnic minorities in the USA during the twentieth century through the writings of Native, Asian and African American authors. We will examine the ways in which writers address split readership and use voice and dialect, and will discuss cultural encounters, ethnographic spectacles, modes of performativity, and identity constructions.

Texts:
Zora Neal Hurston, Mules and Men
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land
Mourning Dove, from Cogewea
Leslie Marmon Silko, from Ceremony
Short stories by Sui Sin Far, D’Arcy McNickle, Langston Hughes, Hisaye Yamamoto, Sherman Alexie.

From its earliest days, the genre of science fiction has explored the limits of humanity and how these may be transcended. This course will focus on the recognisable Americanness of a significant subset of the genre, as American writers from the middle of the twentieth century onwards have created alternate geographies, societies, histories, and humanities, to explore contemporary anxieties, politics, and cultural concerns of American society. Central themes explored will be national ideologies and Cold War politics, the city, the suburb, gender, and language as we consider the American Body and how it is perceived, represented, or critiqued in this literature.

Course requirements: attendance, short essay, take-home exam.

In this course we will examine the classical and Christian background which gives English (and European) literature of any period its basic intellectual contours. The aim is to allow students of English and American literature to have at their disposal the necessary framework for examining in their proper cultural and historical contexts the many religious, philosophical and aesthetic ideas which shape what we now think of as Western, predominantly Christian culture, and which constitute a pervasive subtext in its literature and visual arts. Using a variety of English texts as our reference points we will survey and discuss a number of key themes in Western intellectual history ranging from pagan antiquity to modern times, including ideas about the soul and the body, art and verisimilitude, sin and redemption, semiotics and ideas of meaning, heaven and hell, religious mysteries, mysticism and ideas of ecstasy. Throughout, the emphasis will be on the literary and aesthetic implications of these ideas when viewed in a broader cultural view, where we will not only seek to understand the basic classical and Christian ideas at the root of the culture, but also how key English authors across the ages engage with one or more of these ideas and transform them into matter for their art.

Primary works: throughout the course we will read a variety of selected passages ranging in time and place from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Swift, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Derrida, and others. Where the original text is not in English we will use English translations. We will also examine in detail the following literary texts in full: Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Euripides, Bacchae; Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; James Joyce, The Dead; T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland and The Four Quartets; poems by Philip Sidney, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, Alexander Pope, William Blake, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, Larkin and others.

Requirements: There will be a midterm exam, a final exam and a term paper. In the term paper students will have the opportunity to analyse the treatment of one or more of the themes discussed in the course in any English literary work of their choice not already included in the syllabus. I will also provide a number of optional texts for students to choose from, but these will not be binding.

The detective story is one of the most significant literary genres, for the scholar and the lay reader alike. It has been subject of many exemplary studies in genre theory due to its tight structure and well-defined history. At the same time, it is a highly popular form, unrivaled in its influence upon (post)modern literature and cinema.
This seminar will focus upon the formal and thematic features of the detective story, tracing its history from Poe to postmodernism. We will follow the development and mutations of the genre, with special attention being paid to its narrative form and to the issue of intertextuality. We will ask ourselves what the conventions of the detective story tell us about the cultural constructions of rationality, violence, and subjectivity. And we will consider how the historical changes in these constructions are reflected in the transformations of the detective story for the last 150 years.

This course will focus on American literature written in the period following World War II, and will include texts written from the 1950s to the last decades of the 20th century. Our reading will reflect the political, social and cultural changes that took place in the second part of the 20th century.
We will discuss issues of identity formation – national and individual – in the literary works of writers such as Saul Bellow, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, Alice Walker and James Baldwin. The reading will reflect the diversity inherent in the writing of the period in terms of race, ethnicity and gender

Written assignments: mid-term exam and final exam

In this seminar we will examine in detail Shakespeare’s dramatic preoccupation with the history, ideology, ethics and politics of ancient Rome through the close reading and analysis of four plays: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Using the texts of the plays as a platform for discussion we will examine Shakespeare’s innovative use of classical sources, his experiments in these plays with genre and dramatic conventions, his engagement with epicurean and stoic philosophy, as well as the wider significance of Rome as a political allegory in the period, and the ways in which Shakespeare reinvents the Renaissance ideal of the Roman metropolis and the values associated with its ethos as a vehicle for Renaissance tragedy.

Primary texts: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus with side glances at The Rape of Lucrece, Richard III, Hamlet, Cymbeline and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great.

Requirements: A seminar paper of about 18-20 pages, oral presentations with written summaries to be handed in for evaluation, and two short take-home exam essays in lieu of a midterm.

This course will examine the development of Jewish-American literature within the context of the American literary tradition, of the history of the Jews in the United States, and of the problematics of identity (ethnicity, religion, race, and class). We will be focusing on various aspects of memory and textuality, first in relation to the experience of immigration and then with regard to post-holocaust consciousness, home and exile, and multiculturalism in America. Among issues that will be studied are canon, genre, voice and speech representation, translation and translatability, intertextuality, and the ethics and poetics of post-holocaust literature.
The readings consist of short stories, poems, essays, novels, and autobiographical writing.

The book-length works available at the Dionon will be:

Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology
(a few of these will also be on reserve at Weiner)
The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature

The other works to be purchased will be announced later in the summer.

Evaluation
Students will be expected to attend regularly (no more than three absences), to participate in class discussion, present a referat in class, prepare a seminar paper proposal and annotated bibliography, and submit a seminar paper. There may be occasional short writing assignments.

The course explores issues of Canadian culture and identity formation through the fiction of prominent Canadian women authors writing in the second half of the 20th century. The reading list will include works by Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Carol Shields Dionne Brand and Joy Kogawa.

Requirements: Active participation, short written responses to texts, seminar paper

**Students who took the "Canadian Literature" advanced course in the second semester 2008, cannot register for this seminar

Famous modernist architect Le Corbusier called nineteenth-century London “the beast of the great city”. Famous politician and writer Benjamin Disraeli called it “the type of some great idea.” Between those two extremes lies Victorian London, the largest metropolis of its time, the city of abject poverty and glittering riches, of superb technology and rampant crime; the cradle of postmodern urbanism and the pre-figuration of its many problems. The city is far more than a mere setting for Victorian novels; it is the space of the imagination that conditions representations of subjectivity, class, gender, and violence.
In this course we will look at some famous Victorian urban novels and consider their representations of London in the light of contemporary urban theory.

Reading List of Primary Texts (subject to change)
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son
Robert Luis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Richard Marsh, The Beetle
Additional material will be provided at the beginning of the semester

In 1290 England became the first European nation to expel its Jews; in 1656, it allowed Jewish settlement, with the hope of providing a temporary home to Jews before their return to the Land of Israel. In the intervening years, Jews appear with surprising frequency in English literature. In this course we will explore why Jews and Judaism had an important part to play in medieval and Renaissance literature, even as living Jews were excluded from English life. The class will examine representations of Jews and Judaism in works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Lanyer, Donne, Haywood, Edgeworth and others and ask questions about how literature reflects and often creates social change.

This seminar will trace the representation of the "orient" in America, and the influence of the "Near East" on the development of American culture, from the 18th to the 20th century. Among topics covered: Puritan typology and Christian Hebraism, 19th century travelers to the Near East, representations of Arabs and Islam in American literature, Protestant imaginings of the Holy Land, and Hollywood's early treatment of the Middle East.
REQUIREMENTS: active participation, preparation of study questions, quizzes, and a seminar paper.

"Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious" constitutes Freud's most extended meditation on the linguistic technique of a textual genre and its relation to the linguistic structures and mechanisms of the psyche. In his fifth seminar on "The Formations of the Unconscious," Jacques Lacan returns to Freud's text in relation to Roman's Jakobson's theorizations of the poetic function of language and language's metaphoric and metonymic poles. The yield is a psychoanalytic theory of language with specific implications for the conceptualization of the structures and mechanisms of poetry. In the seminar we will read these texts by Freud and Lacan as well as contemporary theorizations of the relations between psychoanalysis and poetry, bringing them to bear on poetry in the English language.

John Milton (1608-1674), one of the greatest poets in the English language is also one of the most difficult and challenging. 400 years after his death, he is also one of the most relevant today. His major poems continue to stimulate profound debates across continents, not only about his singular achievements as a poet and his profound and lasting influence on English language and literature, but also as one of the earliest (and complicated) champions of the individual, domestic, national and religious liberties we take today for granted in our societies. As a polemicist and public servant in England’s Revolutionary decades, he was at the centre of the greatest political upheaval in English history. He is the supreme radical of English writing – a revolutionary in the full sense of the term in politics, theology and literature, whose writings influenced poets, thinkers and revolutionaries for centuries to come in France, Germany, America, Russia and beyond. At the same time, ‘Milton’ is also a critical phenomenon. Other than Shakespeare, no other English author has had more books and scholarly essays devoted to his works, and the rampant industry of Milton criticism shows no signs of flagging. Viewed historically, the monumental body of Milton criticism tells its own fascinating story about the spirit of each age coming to terms with Milton’s poetry and prose as it relates to shifting debates about belief and secularism, free will and moral accountability, individuality and social responsibility, gender values and misogyny, tyranny and political freedoms. In this seminar we will study Milton’s oeuvre in the round by examining in detail all of his major verse and prose works. Pursuing a chronological approach, we will trace the development and trajectory of Milton’s creative career as poet, prophet and pamphleteer in light of a variety of contexts and critical approaches. We will do this with a constant eye to the corresponding trajectory and merit of Milton criticism throughout the centuries, its trends and its cumulative effect on how we assess today Milton’s place in the English canon.

Primary texts: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes. From the minor poems: one or two of the Latin elegies (alongside a prose translation), the English Sonnets, the Psalm paraphrases, ‘The Nativity Ode’, ‘The Passion’, ‘At a Solemn Music’, ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), ‘Lycidas’ and ‘Epiatphium Damonis’ (alongside a prose translation). From the prose: the full texts of Areopagitica, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and Eikonoklastes. Excerpts from Reason of Church-Government, Apology against a pamphlet, Of Education, The Readie and Easie way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and Of True Religion, as well as key passages from Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana and the Trinity College manuscripts, and his commonplace book.

Requirements: A referat of around 10-15 pages, which may be expanded into a longer seminar paper, and oral presentations with written summaries to be handed in for evaluation. In addition, every other week students will be required to write very brief responses to the assigned critical readings of the previous two weeks.

This seminar will discover the major poets and the major issues writing from the 1950- 2005. Although we will be using a text, the seminar will consist in a large part of supplementary material determined in part by the participants in the seminar. Students are encouraged to bring in materials -- poems, performances, disks, etc, that will contribute to the discussion of the nature, characteristics, forms, and direction of contemporary poetry. We will begin the semester by exploring the ‘first generation:’ Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, then proceed to ‘classic’ contemporary poets such as Louise Gluck, Mark Strand, Robert Haas, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Anne Sexton, and others. Finally we will study the “Language” poets, such as Charles Bernstein and Robert Perlman, the Nuyoricians, the Midrashic feminists, and others.

TEXTS: Paul Hoover. Postmodern American Poetry. Norton, 1994

J. D. McClatchy. The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry
Vintage Books USA, 2003.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

Students will be required (1) to provide materials and discussion questions for one class discussion (2) to join with another student to discuss in class opposing views on a poetic issue (3) to write 10 one-page critical responses to the poetry and theory introduced during the semester (4) to write a summary for the seminar at the end of the semester.

An engagement with literary texts reflective of its ethical stakes must render an account of interpretation: its nature, its purpose, its effects. Psychoanalysis as a clinical practice whose point of departure is the text of the analysand's speech has generated theories of interpretation from its very inception. Yet because of the special status granted in psychoanalytic thinking to representation's beyond, these theories of interpretation are markedly different from those articulated or implicitly assumed in the sphere of literary theory, from New Criticism through deconstruction. What might literary theory learn from psychoanalytic theories of interpretation? How might we think towards a psychoanalytic theory of literary interpretation? We will explore these questions by re-examining classical theories of literary interpretation in the light of psychoanalytic theories of interpretation, from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and "Constructions in Analysis," through the various theories of interpretation offered in the teaching of Jacques Lacan, from intersubjective interpretation which aims at the liberation of an unconscious signified, to interpretation aimed at the full speech of unconscious desire as what flows between the signifiers as opposed to the empty speech of consciousness and the ego, to interpretation targeting the drive and the cause of desire which is beyond representation, to interpretation that can only be half said, to Jacques-Alain Miller's conceptualizations of "interpretation in reverse" and interpretation that makes an "effort towards poetry." In particular, we will consider the consequences for a practice of literary interpretation of the psychoanalytic practice of interpretation as aimed not towards the proliferation of sense but towards the depletion of sense from the phantasm in the process of its reduction to its real kernel

This course will examine the writings of Virginia Woolf from a variety of perspectives: modernism (in terms of narrative form, theme, and intellectual history); genre (artistic subversions and experimentation with traditional genres); gender (the construction of masculinity and femininity as theme and narrative strategy); national identity (exile, emigre, imperialism, imagining national communities); aesthetics and ethics (concerns about the relation between art and war, between art and commerce); historical and social contexts (social class, commodity culture, “Gilded Age,” and “Victorian-Edwardian England”); self-reflexivity (the authors’ own artistic theories as well as art as theme and narrative in relation to other art forms).

Texts:
Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"
"Modern Fiction"
Mrs. Dalloway or The Voyage Out (to be announced)
To The Lighthouse
A Room of One's Own
The Waves
Between the Acts

Fantasy has been defined so broadly as to encompass the whole of literature and so narrowly as to refer to only the Harry Potter look-alikes. Is fantasy a genre, a mode, a psychological faculty, or a particular set of narrative strategies? This seminar will attempt to address these questions by utilizing the theory of fictional worlds. We will study the narrative features of fantasy, while drawing distinctions between fantasy and related genres: science fiction and horror fiction. We will refer to the history of fantasy in order to show how fantasy is rooted in a particular construction of social reality, which it simultaneously references and contests.
A companion to my seminar on Science Fiction, this course will broaden our narratological exploration of the fantastic genres in order to situate them culturally and ideologically in relation to the world of consensus reality.

List of Primary Texts (subject to change)
Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Greg Bear, The Infinity Concerto
Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
George R. R. Martin. A Game of Thrones
Gardner Dozois, ed. Modern Classics of Fantasy
Additional texts may be added and/or substituted at the beginning of the semester. Critical texts will also be provided.

What do we talk about when we talk about literature? This course offers advanced students the opportunity to consider the academic study of literature as an intellectual discipline and to ask major theoretical questions about the meaning and importance of literature. Looking at key texts from various periods of British and American literature, we will ask what constitutes a novel, a drama, and a poem, how these forms work, and what we might say about them. We will also learn about the history of the field and the changing practices of literary scholarship, and consider what literary criticism can (and cannot) do.

This course will examine the writings of Henry James from a variety of perspectives: modernism (in terms of narrative form, theme, and intellectual history); genre (artistic subversions and experimentation with traditional genres; gender (the construction of masculinity and femininity as theme and narrative strategy); national identity (exile, emigre, imperialism, imagining national communities); aesthetics and ethics (concerns about the relation between art and war, between art and commerce); historical and social contexts (social class, commodity culture, “Gilded Age,” and “Victorian-Edwardian England”); self-reflexivity (the author's own artistic theories as well as art as theme and the relation to other art forms).

Texts:

James, The Portrait of a Lady
The Aspern Papers
The Turn of the Screw
"The Art of Fiction"
The Figure in the Carpet"
"The Beast in the Jungle"
"In the Cage"
Excerpts from The American Scene
The Wings of the Dove

All of the works in italics (with the exception of The American Scene) have been ordered and can be purchased on campus. The other works are available as e-books online (project Gutenberg) , and are also on reserve and can be photocopied. "The Beast in the Jungle" is in the Norton Anthology of American Literature used in the Introduction to American Culture Course.

Course Requirements

1. Participation in Class Discussion

2. Three short reports (2-3 pages). Two on recommended critical readings (which are due on the day of our discussion), and one on either a critical work of your choice or a response to James' text. An oral report.

3. A referat of 10-12 pages. Topic and preliminary bibliography must be approved before submission.

Postmodernity has been described as the end of grand narratives. But narrative is very much alive, penetrating every nook and cranny of contemporary culture. From films to computer games; from shared virtual worlds to graphic novels, narrative forms dominate the construction of the global representational space. Historians question the distinction between fictional and non-fictional narratives; psychologists describe the “genres” of subjectivity; and scientists analyze cosmology and evolutionary biology as narrative sciences.
How does traditional narratology copes (or does not) with the postmodern condition? Is there a need for new conceptual tools to describe narratives of postmodernity, and is this need being met? Do postmodern narratives dispense with time in favor of space? What is the influence of the Web on our idea of “a well-made story”?
The seminar will address these and related questions by looking at, discussing, and contesting a broad range of postmodern narrative theories. Our focus will be squarely on theoretical issues; but as illustrations, we will consider select literary and cinematic texts, including (but not limited to) films Blade Runner and Pulp Fiction and stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Neil Gaiman, and John Barth. Students will be encouraged to independently select appropriate texts for their final paper.
Theory Reading List (subject to change)
Roland Barthes, S/Z
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction
Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, eds. A Postmodern Reader
Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory
Additional and/or alternative materials will be provided at the beginning of the semester

הקורס ינתח את השפעת טכנולוגיות המידע והתקשורת, החל מהדפוס והטלגרף וכלה באינטרנט ובטכנולוגיות הסלולאריות , על תופעות ותהליכים מרחביים בני זמננו. הקורס יתרכז בשלושה תהליכים חברתיים בעלי היבט מרחבי מובהק: תהליך הגלובליזציה והפיכתו של העולם ליחידה מאוחדת אחת, תהליך הרישות והמעבר ממבנים חברתיים היררכיים למבנים שטוחים ותהליך הוירטואליזציה- המיקום מחדש של הפרקטיות החברתיות במרחב הוירטואלי.

הרכב הציון הסופי בקורס: 100% מבחן הבית

Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution

In this course we discuss the impact of communication technologies on the social space. We analyze the role of different technologies (printing, telegraph, television and mainly the internet) in shaping current spatial processes such as: Globalization, Networking and Virtualization.

הקורס יעסוק בהשפעתן של האינטרנט וטכנולוגיית המידע על מוסדות חברתיים ויחסים בין אישיים. נתמקד בניתוח התפתחות תפיסת הקהילה והרשת החברתית של הפרט ובהון חברתי כמושג מרכזי בשדה זה.

דרישות הקורס וחובות התלמידים:
קריאה שוטפת של הפריטים הביבליוגרפים
השתתפות פעילה בדיונים
בסיום הקורס - הגשת עבודה.

האופן בו יסתיים השיעור :
בסיומו של הקורס תוגש עבודה המנתחת שדה חברתי שיבחר בתיאום עם המרצה.
מרכיבי הציון הסופי:
עבודה מסכמת: 100%.

Introduction to Sociology of the Internet: Social interactions, institutions, networks and social capital in the age of information.

The course will deal with the manner in which the Internet and information technology effect social institutions and interpersonal relations. We will focus on the development of the perception of community and the individual’s social network, and on social capital as a key term in this field.

עד לא מכבר היתה "מגילת הזכויות" של גולש האינטרנט מפוארת. ליצור, להחליף, לקשר, לתכנת, לפרסם, להביע, ואפילו להשתגע. לא עוד. בשנים האחרונות עברה האינטרנט שורה ארוכה של תמורות. חוקי זכויות היוצרים, הופעתה של גוגל, עידן הדוט.קום, תופעת האקטיביסטים ושאלות באשר למעמד חופש הביטוי, אנונימיות, החלפת קבצים ועוד הובילו ללידתה מחדש של הרשת. מי ירוויח מאילוף האינטרנט ומי יפסיד? במהלך הקורס ננתח את האירועים המרכזיים שהשפיעו על אופייה של הרשת מראשית שנות ה-60' ועד היום, ונבדוק מהו הלקח מכל אירוע וכיצד הוא עומד להשפיע על ההווה והעתיד הדיגיטלי שלנו.

חובות הקורס: בסוף הקורס יגישו הסטודנטים עבודה שתתבסס על החומר שנלמד בכיתה, על הרשימה הביבליוגרפית ומקורות נוספים.

Taming of the Shrew – Landmarks in the Internet Development

A while ago, the Internet's "bill of rights" was grandiose. Not anymore. In the past few years the Internet experienced deep transformations. Copyright laws, the birth of Google, the dot.com era, the hactivism phenomena and questions regarding the status of free speech, anonymity, file sharing etc. led to the rebirth of the Internet. Who will benefit from the taming of the shrew and who will lose? During this course we will analyze the main events that influenced the Internet from the early 60's until our time and examine the lesson from each and any event.

מאז היווצרותו והודות למבנהו הייחודי, מרחב הסייבר מתאפיין בעיצוב מחדש של קהילות מצד אחד, וביכולת משוכללת להשתלבות כלכלית של חברות ויחידים למטרות רווח. הקורס יעסוק ביחסי הגומלין של שני ממדים מרכזיים אלה של מרחב הסייבר. טענת המחקר בקורס זה היא שלשני ממדים אלה, הממד הקהילתי והממד העסקי שורשים אנגלו-סקסים (באנרכיזם, ליברטריאניזם) תרבותיים עמוקים ורבי השפעה. שני ממדים אלה מתאפיינים לעיתים ביחסים הרמוניים ולעיתים ביחסים הרסניים זה לזה.
שיעור +21 (5 + 12 מרץ)
מבוא: בורגנים או בוהמה, עסקים או אנרכיזם
במבוא זה נבחן שני נרטיבים מרכזיים המבוססים על אחד ממאפייני העומק של החברה מהערבית המודרנית. בלעדי נרטיבים אלה הזוקקים לשני מימדים של הקיום המודרני, אין להבין את השניות המאפיינת את האינטרנט.
קריאת חובה:
אורן הרמן, "המסע אל מקורות טוב הלב" אודיסיאה, גליון 1, 2008, עמ. 30-37.
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, University of California Press, 1969.
שיעור 3 + 4 (19 + 26 מרץ)
הארכיטקטורה הקיברנטית: בין אנרכיזם אנגלו-סקסי (ליברטריאניזם)
וקפיטליזם
כיצד האינטרנט השתנה מיציר הקומפלקס התעשייתי צבאי של המלחמה הקרה למעוזם של האקרים אינדיבידואליסטים ואנרכיסטים – נוער הפרחים של שנות השישים. מהו אנרכיזם ומהו ליברטריאניזם
קריאת חובה:
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 1-68.
Timothy C. May, “A Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” in Peter Ludlow (ed.) High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, MIT Press, 1996(1991) pp. 237-239.
שיעור 5 (2 אפריל)
המעבר מחברה מתועשת ל network society
קריאת חובה:
Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society, Oxford University Press.
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 237-262
שיעור 6 (23 אפריל)
מושג הקהילה בעולם הסייבר
כיצד התהווה מושג הקהילה שהוא מן המרכזיים בחלל הוירטואלי
קריאת חובה:
Manuel Castells, “Virtual Communities or Network Society?” in The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 116-136.
Howard Rheingold, “Community Development in the Cybersociety of the Future” in (David Gauntlett, ed.) Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies of the Digital Age, pp. 170-177
Pavel Curtis, "MUDding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities” in Peter Ludlow, ed., High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, MIT 1996, pp. 347-374. http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Security/Hacking_cracking_phreaking/Net_culture_and_hacking/MOO_MUD
Wellman, Barry & Guilia, Millena (1999) Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities in Marc Smith and Peter Kollock (ed.) Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge.

שיעור 7 (30 אפריל)
השוק כתופעה כלכלית היסטורית מגיע לסייבר
קריאת חובה:
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 103-206.
שיעור 8 (7 מאי)
חילופי קבצים, כלכלת מתנות או עשיית רווחים מסחרית?
קריאת חובה:
Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, O’reilly Media 2001.
John Perry Barlow, “Napster’s Enormous Music Room” New York Times
http://members.aye.net/~hippie/barlow/jpb-nap.htm
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Portfolio, 2008.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk to Customers, 2006.
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Penguin 2004
http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
שיעור 9 10 + (14 מאי + 4 יוני)
eBay כמקרה מבחן: כיצד קהילה ופעילות מסחרית מתנגשים
Ofer Nordheimer Nur, The Sovereign State of eBay Unpublished manuscript.
שיעור 11 (11 יוני)
מודלים פוליטיים למרחב האינטרנט
אם נכונה הטענה שהאינטרנט הוא מרחב בעל מימד פוליטי, מהם הכלים הפוליטיים הרלוונטיים למרחב זה?
קריאת חובה:
מבחר מתוך
Peter Ludlow, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, MIT Press, 2002
The Debate over the Internet Governance: A Snapshot in the Year 2000 (Interview with John Perry Barlow) http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/is99/governance/barlow.html#governance5
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (Feb. 1996)
שיעור 12 (18 יוני)
סיכום

חובת נוכחות, וקריאה שוטפת.

הקורס יסתיים בבחינת בית.

10% נוכחות ו 90% בחינת בית.

Communities,Marketplace,Politics in Cyberspace

Since its inception, and as a result of its unique structure, cyberspace has come to transform, shape and reshape the ways in which individuals interact with online communities. It has also allowed for unprecedented for-profit activities between individuals and companies. This course examines the ways in which these two primal dimensions intersect and interact with each other. The research hypothesis that generates this class claims that these two dimensions have deep cultural roots in Anglo-saxon anarchism (Libertarianism). These two dimensions prove to be both harmonious and destructive to each other.

למרות שהיסטוריונים רבים רואים את ראשית העת המודרנית כבר במאה ה-17, בדרך כלל כאשר מדברים על התקופה המודרנית, מכוונים למערך של שינויים חברתיים, פוליטיים, תרבותיים, טכנולוגיים ודיסיפלינאריים שהחלו באמצע המאה ה-19. בקורס זה נבדוק מהם המאפיינים המרכזיים של המודרניזם – המהלך האסתטי שיוצא לדרך בתקופה זו – תוך התמקדות במודרניזם באמנות החזותית. איך נראה המודרניזם? איזלו בשורות אסתטיות חדשות הוא נשא בחובו? כיצד הדהדו בו שינויים תאורטיים כגון פסיכואנליזה, מרקסיזם, פורמליזם?
אל מול העוצמה והחדשנות של המודרניזם ניצבו לאורך כל הדרך תנועות אשר הצביעו על אופציות יצירה וחשיבה אחרות. בהמשך הקורס נתמקד בתנועות אנטי מודרניסטיות אלו – האוונגרד – אשר העלו שאלות חדשות בנוגע למעמדו של המדיום, של האמנות (או הספרות) כקטגוריה נפרדת מ"העולם והחיים", והציעו מערכים שונים של מענים ופרוצדורות לסוגיות האסתטיות, האונטולוגיות והפוליטיות.
לסיום נתמקד בשינויים הדרמטיים אשר חלו החל משנות השישים המאוחרות, אשר נהוג לסכמם תחת המטריה של פוסט-מודרניזם. במה הוא שונה מהמודרניזם? מהם מאפייניו? אלו סוגיות חדשות הוא מעלה? האם ניתן לראותו כממשיך המודרניזם, או כתפנית היסטורית?
במהלך הקורס נקרא טקסטים מכוננים הדנים בשלושת המהלכים החשובים הללו. המפגשים ילוו בהקרנת דימויים וסרטים רלוונטים.

הקורס יסתיים במבחן בית.

Modernism, Anti-modernism, Post-modernism

Although some historians point to the 17th century as the beginning of the modern era, usually when referring to this epoch, a set of social, political, cultural, technological, and disciplinary changes, that began in the middle of the 19th century, are seen as the starting point. In this course we will examine what are the central characteristics of modernism – the aesthetic breakthrough that was set under way in this period. While not excluding other media, we will concentrate on the visual arts, especially the fine arts. How did Modernism look? What were its new aesthetic credos? What were its relationship to new theoretical approaches, such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and formalism?
Against the innovative force of modernism, all along the way, stood movement who suggested other ways of thinking about, and making, culture. Next, we will see how these anti-modernist movements – the avant-guarde – raised new questions in regard to the status of the medium, the object, and art itself. We will check what procedures and responses they offered to aesthetic, ontological, and political problems. Finally, we will concentrate on the dramatic changes that took place from the 1960', usually under the term "post-modernism". How is it different from modernism? What are the new issues it raises? Can it be seen as a continuation of modernism, or as a historical turn?

קורס זה יעקוב אחרי חוויותיהם של יהודים ביבשת הצפון אמריקאית. בין השאר, יועלו בקורס השאלות הבאות: מתי ואיך הגיעו יהודים לאמריקה ואיך חוויותיהם משקפות את השינויים בחברה האמריקאית במהלך המאות ה-18, ה-19 וה - 20? האם החברה היהודית באמריקה באמת הייתה שונה משאר הקהילות היהודיות בעולם? או, האם גם היא עברה תהליכים דומים במהלך העת החדשה כמו אמנסיפציה, התבוללות ואנטישמיות? יתרה מזו, מה נוכל ללמוד על העולם היהודי והעולם בכלל על פי החוויה ההיסטורית של יהודי ארה"ב וקנדה. בנוסף לסקירת אירועים היסטוריים מרכזים, קורס זה ידון גם בהיבטים תרבותיים וגם ביחסים בין יהודים ובין קבוצות אתניות אחרות, ובמיוחד עם הקהילה השחורה בארה"ב.

This course will examine the lives and experiences of Jews on the North American continent. Among the questions that will be raised, this course will ask: When and how did Jews arrive in America and how do their experiences reflect changes in the larger society over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Was the Jewish experience in America really so different from that of other Jewish communities? Or, did this community also go through similar processes characteristic of the modern era like emancipation, assimilation and antisemitism? Additionally, what can we learn about the Jewish world and about the modern world through the history of Jews in the US and Canada? In addition to an overview of central historical issues, this course will also look at cultural artifacts and relations between Jews and other ethnic groups, in particular African-Americans.

תרגיל זה יעקוב אחרי דמותם של יהודים בקולנוע האמריקאי, המזרח אירופאי והישראלי במהלך המאה העשרים. בנוסף לצפייה ודיון בסרטים אילמים מתחילת המאה, נצפה גם בסרטים ביידיש שנעשו בפולין ובאמריקה בין המלחמות וגם בסרטים הנוגעים בדמותם של יהודים, שהופקו בפולין, בישראל ובאמריקה במחצית השנייה של המאה העשרים. דגש מיוחד יושם על ייצוגם של תפקידים מגדריים, שאלות של יופי ויחסים בין יהודים ולא יהודים. הקורס יתרכז על איך דמותם של יהודים ויהודיות השתנו ממקום למקום במהלך המאה העשרים ואיך השינויים הללו משקפים את מקומם של היהודים בחברה הסובבת. כמו כן, נדון בשאלה האם סרטים מייצגים את המציאות, או שמא הם יוצרים מציאות חדשה?

This course will examine representations of Jews and Judaism in American, East European and Israeli film over the course of the twentieth century. In addition to viewing silent films from the beginning of the century, we will also view and analyze Yiddish films from interwar Poland and America and post-World War II representations of Jews and Judaism in all three centers. Special attention will be paid to questions of beauty, gender roles and relations between Jews and non-Jews. Do movies reflect reality; Or, do

הקורס יעסוק בקריאה לעומק של יצירותיה של טוני מוריסון, תוך ניסיון להדגיש את קשרי הגומלין שביניהן. הקריאה ביצירות תכוון לא רק לאינטרפרטציה שלהן, אלא גם לניסיון לתאר את טביעת האצבע הייחודית של היוצרת, העדפותיה במישורים השונים של הטקסט, והקשר האפשרי בין העדפות אלה.

The course will consist of reading and interpreting Morrison's work, while putting an emphasis on the interrelations between the different novels. Reading the novels will aim not merely at an interpretation, but rather at a description of the writer's unique finger-prints: her preferences in the various choices a writer makes, and the possible connections between these different preferences.

הקורס יעסוק במחזות של מספר מחזאים אמריקניים מרכזיים בהקשר של ההיסטוריה של תיאטרון אמריקני. נבחן את העקרונות הפואטיים של מחזאים כמו יוג'ין אוניל, טנסי וויליאמס ואדוארד אולבי וכן נדון בהתקבלותם הביקורתית.
חובות הקורס: קריאה של מספר מחזות של המחזאים הנידונים וכמה מאמרים העוסקים ביצירותיהם, הצגת רפרט וכן הגשת סמינריון או עבודה מסכמת.

American Playwrights: Poetics and History:

The seminar deals with a number of plays of major American playwrights in the context of the history of American theatre. We will examine poetic principles in the plays of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee and discuss these dramatists' critical reception.