A world of literature

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Comparitive & World Literature News

  • Sophia Ebel, of Champaign, and a graduate of the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, was awarded a Fulbright combined award to Austria. There, she will teach English at a teacher training college while also conducting research on the representation of refugee narratives within Austrian... Read full story
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Faculty Publication: Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner

Identity Theft focuses on the life and writing of Avraam Uri Kovner. As one of the fiery Jewish nihilists of his generation, variously a critic, author, and bank embezzler, Kovner embodies the problem of identity as a series of translations across cultural boundaries. Kovner, who initiated modern Hebrew criticism, published two novels in Russian as well as a weekly column in a widely read Russian newspaper. He forged a bank check and became notorious in the Russian press as an example of the danger integration of the Jews represented to Russian society. From prison, and later in...

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Indian Cinema in Context

Introduction to Indian mainstream (mainly Bollywood) cinema and its evolution through the last seven decades. Topics to be explored include, but not limited to, the relation between Indian society/culture and its cinematic representations, cinema's resistance to dominant nationalist and patriarchal ideologies

CWL 207

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Global Consciousness and Literature

Exploration of the cultural and historical roots of globalization and the development of global consciousness from ancient Greece to the present, as reflected primarily in literature, but also with reference to historiography, cartography, religion, art, politics, economics, and popular culture.

CWL 114

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Early Masterpieces of Western Culture

Comparative study of major works of literature, philosophy and culture in the Western tradition from the ancient world to the Renaissance, from Homer and the Bible to Shakespeare and Cervantes.

CWL 241

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Modern Masterpieces of Western Culture

A comparative study of major works of literature, philosophy and culture in the Western tradition from the Enlightenment to today, from Descartes and Voltaire to Dickinson and Calvino. Emphasis on the works as representative of their historical and cultural period, as well as how these works create the cultural world we live in today.

CWL 242

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