As a means of introduction to Comparative Literature, this course will examine the history of comparison
as a critical mode of knowledge while following its transformation into interdisciplinarity. The centrality
of this transformation to the current state of the humanities as well as the discipline of comparative
literature will provide the occasion for a series of questions about the critical and historical forces that
now contend within the study of literature: to what extent is the rise of comparison a sign of the failure of
individual disciplines to sustain national and historical agendas as a basis for literary study? does
comparison provide another model for literary study or is its transformation into interdisciplinarity a
distraction through which the endgame of literary study and the humanities within the modern university
is being played out? does such an interdisciplinarity perpetuate or resolve an intellectual crisis within the
humanities? (and why do the humanities need a sense of crisis?) to what extent can postmodernity and
the emergence of the social sciences be traced back to the enlightenment as a continuation of its project of
reason? to what extent is the modern university defineable as a comparative and interdisciplinarity
project, i.e., as a project aware from its inception that it arose from a crisis in reason that it could only
disguise in the form of the pursuit of knowledge, truth, excellence, etc.? Readings will include selections
from Plato, Aristotle, Diderot, Kant, Benjamin, Heidegger, Wellek, Derrida, Foucault, Nancy, Gasché,
Spivak, Damrosch, Moretti, and Readings.
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This course will be an intensive comparative study of contemporary
postcolonial-borderland literature and film. We will cover a range of
"realist" storytelling modes--historical narrative, magical realism,
metafiction, picaresque, docudrama, and romance, to name a few--with the
aim of better understanding how authors and directors employ a number of
different narrative devices to create narratives that engage audiences
and convey worldviews. We will ask: what can literature and film
actually do in the world? Can a novel or film really have the power to
naturalize the presence of postcolonial diasporic communities in Colombo,
London, L.A., San Fran, Bombay, for example?
Our analysis of the below mentioned novels, short stories, comic book, and films will allow us to
look at realism as fictional construct with all of its attendant
affective components: how they draw readers into their storyworlds, how
they work to tug forth a range of emotions, how the "gestalt effect"
triggers the imagination, how the presence of a "will to style" allows us
to construct the holographic presence of an implied
author/director.
Finally, the course aims to re-establish the category
"realism" as an extremely organized and elaborated form of reality out
there and as literary technique: authors/directors inventing a realism
(broadly defined) that both creates a "reality effect" that seduces and
announces that it is an illusion of ontological "realism".
You will be expected to write a 20-25 page research paper due at the end
of this course.
(Primary texts available at university bookstore; films available either
at library or at local video rental store; articles either sent via email
or to be copied from master in dept. office.)
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When can Foucault teach us about reading literature? What relations tie literary language to power? This seminar will be framed by these two questions; it will be an introduction to Foucault as well as an investigation of Foucault's relevance for literary studies. In the first part of the semester, we will read his early essays on literature, excerpts from Madness and Civilization, and the Foucault/Derrida debate with the aim of understanding Foucault's concepts of transgression, the "outside," and madness. The second part of the semester will be dedicated to Foucault's notions of disciplinary power and biopolitics and their possible relation to literature. Authors to be discussed include Nietzsche, Conrad, Genet, Musil, and Robert Walser, and we will also read Deleuze's texts on Foucault. All texts will be available in translation, but students will be encouraged to work on original texts in languages in which they are competent.
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Psychoanalysis can be one of the most effective tools for analyzing
what has always been acknowledged as the necessarily latent meaning of
the work of art. Or, at the very least, every student of art and
literature must understand the basic terms and ideas of psychoanalysis-if
only to critique them.
The purpose of this class is threefold: first, to familiarize students
with psychoanalysis as a particular hermeneutic methodology; second, to
demonstrate the practical value of incorporating psychoanalysis into the
study of art and art-related matters; third, to examine the psychoanalytic
corpus "after Freud," particularly the writings of Jacques Lacan,
Sara Kofman, Jacques Derrida, Neil Hertz, Charles Bernheimer, Shoshana
Felman, Jane Gallop, Jean Laplanche, Slavoj Zizek, Laura Mulvey and others
who have engaged psychoanalysis theoretically, either pro or con.
Finally: a major facet of this class will deal with "Psychoanalysis and
Feminism," the reception (again, both pro and contra) of psychoanalysis
by feminism and vice versa.
The course will read some of the general works (Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, etc.) before beginning
our reading of Freud's essays on art and art-related matters ("The Poet
and Daydreaming," "On the Uncanny," "The Theme of the 3 Caskets," etc.)
and incorporating whenever possible readings of the artworks Freud discusses
(Gradiva, Oedipus, Judith and Holofernes, The Sandman, etc.). We will then
attempt to incorporate Freud's ideas into readings of a number of films
and literary works of the class's choosing before turning our attention
to the abovementioned theorists, "psychoanalysis and feminism," etc.
Sample Texts:
Freud: Writings on Art
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Mourning and Melancholia
On Narcissism
Bernheimer In Dora's Case : Freud--Hysteria--Feminism
Derrida Carte Postale.
Felman What does a woman want? : reading and sexual difference
Gallop The daughter's seduction : feminism and psychoanalysis
Hertz The end of the line : essays on psychoanalysis and
the sublime
Hitchcock Vertigo
Jacobus The Phallic Woman
Lacan The Meaning of the Phallus
Machelidon: Masquerade: a feminine or feminist stragegy?
Mulvey Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema
Zizek Everything You Wanted to Know about Hitchcock. . .
Requirements: participation in the seminar (each student will
present one of the texts each week) and a research project (ca. 20 pp.).
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This seminar is intended to introduce students to historically significant
models of rhetoric with an eye toward their value and applicability in
the present day. Rhetoric has been a subject of scholarly reflection
and instruction in the Western tradition since the fifth century BCE.
The concerns of this tradition have been strongly influenced by the changing
forces of significant philosophical, political, and social developments
and by the pragmatic roles that they accorded language and discourse.
At the same time, rhetoric has retained a continuous concern for how discourses
influences social and political life. Originally these concerns were
confined to politics, the courts, and the affairs of state. These
were later extended to the pulpit and epistolary forms, and during the
modern period to letters. Today those who are writing about rhetoric
come from the broad spectrum of the humanities and social sciences, in
which there is a growing discussion about the role of rhetorical discourse
in social practices, intellectual practices, and discourse in general irrespective
of context or setting.
In this seminar we will consider significantly influential theories
of rhetoric in terms of the system of presuppositions and historical circumstances
that conditioned each and as comparative models for scholarly inquiry into
the constitutive dimensions of discourse, including the ways by which discourse
constitutes social and political relations of knowledge and power.
The seminar is organized historically, and emphasizes close reading of
major theoretical texts rather than survey. Members of the seminar
will write several smaller papers in the comparative mode and one major
research paper. The major systems/theories of rhetoric to be examined
will include those of Plato, Aristotle, George Campbell, and Kenneth Burke.
Developments of the twentieth century will receive focused attention during
the last half of the seminar.
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In The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of
Nature, Ilya Prigogine speculates that the universe is a "giant
thermodynamic system far from equilibrium" whose ongoing
complexification depends upon the amplification of chance
fluctuations. Similarly, in Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in
Nature, Eric Chaisson argues that the material becoming of reality is
premised upon "randomness, chance, stochasticity." Emergent
phenomena, he says, "are the macroscopic manifestations of fundamental
fluctuations...arising on the microscopic level within unstable
dynamical systems."
We will assume as a beginning premise for this seminar that the
constitutive role assigned to chance in such representations of cosmic
process has for its aesthetic corollary the conflicted spectrum of
affective response ranging from wonder and astonishment to fear and
horror to which we conventionally refer under the rubric of the
sublime. In other words, the concept of sublimity customarily applied
to phenomena surpassing or confounding received protocols of
understanding may provide the basis for an appropriate aestheticization
of a "chaosmos," to borrow a term from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, in which
chance serves as an ontological first principle in the genesis of the
way things are.
Our reflections will commence with a Classical precedent, the
ancient Roman poet Lucretius's On The Nature of Things which we will
read in conjunction with Michel Serres's The Birth of Physics in the
Text of Lucretius: Flows and Turbulence. From here, we'll survey a
series of contemporary scientific accounts by Chaisson, Prigogine, and
others, along with touchstone discussions of the sublime including those
by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. We'll then explore a selection of
20th-century literary texts-- Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and The
Waves, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics-- and
two films-- John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness and Higuchi Akihiro's
Uzumaki-- that collectively deploy a figuration of existence as a
chance-driven, shapeshifting "streamsbecoming," to borrow another
Joycean term, in which horror at the prospect of primal formlessness and
the ultimate incomprehensibility of fundamental reality alternates with
delight in the endlessly metamorphic renovation of the world.
Toward the end of the seminar, we'll undertake a brief excursion
into a related problematic: the evolutionary becoming of terrestrial
life. We'll consider evolutionist writings from Charles Darwin and T.H.
Huxley to Lynn Margulis and Stephen Jay Gould before proceeding to H.G.
Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau, a second Carpenter film-- The Thing-- and
Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. In this last portion of the
course, we'll invoke a further aesthetic concept-- the grotesque-- as
that notion has been formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva.
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An axiom shared by historical right and left alike holds that the crucial turningpoint in Western modernity is the advent of the so-called "modern subject," the sovereign rational mind personified by Descartes. Now applauded as the spring of self-determining freedom and genuine scientific knowledge Richard Popkin and Hans Blumenberg celebrate, now lamented as the fount of modern alienation Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, and Michel Foucault indict, the dualist severance of mind and body is universally agreed to inaugurate a new era; and that era's grounding postulate is reason's at once critical and instrumental detachment from both physical nature and the cultural allegiances and authorities inherited from the past. Against this view, the course proposes that we cannot take the self of modern rationality at what we imagine to be face value. The early modern "invention of the mind" (Richard Rorty) is not just the heroic break with prejudice, fantasy, and error Blumenberg chronicles. But neither is it simply the hubristic mask for the new rationalist tyranny epitomized by Foucault's favorite icons of the modern state-the insane asylum, the panoptical prison, the school. The rationalist ego is rather a perplexed (and so a telltale) response to the very modes of physical, psychological, and historical embodiment from which it labors to escape.
The course aims to test this hypothesis by exploring in detail not only modern notions of self (those, e.g., of Hobbes, Pascal, Spinoza, and La Rochefoucauld) elaborated in more or less direct and explicit contrast to Descartes's, but also some of the crucial forms in which early moderns set out to represent it. An obvious point of departure will accordingly be the art of portraiture and the shifting conventions that governed the pictorial delineation of early modern "person"-a concept the more interesting for our purposes in that it denotes both the consciously crafted roles people played in their relations with others and the physical body that anchored those roles in shared human space. But the course will also turn to literary variants on the themes of "person" and "portrait" alike in theatre (Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Jesuit school drama), fiction (Cervantes, Cyrano, La Fayette), history (early modern historical "character sketches" in Dryden's translations of Plutarch's Lives), and prose satire (the early modern "character" more generally in, e.g., Overbury, Earle, and La Bruyère).
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The course will explore the transformations of Russian and East-European cultures during the post-communist period (from 1989). All readings will be given in translation.
We will start with reading of the works describing ideological and cultural dynamics of the post-communist countries, in order to detect the major characteristics of the post-communism as a specific historical period. The central theoretical concepts of this course are, however, not political but rather philosophic and aesthetic categories of postmodernism and postmodernity. First and foremost we will discuss the differences and similarities between the Western concept of postmodernism and its East-European modifications. The very fact that in the late sixties and early seventies (simultaneously with the first wave of postmodernism in the United States and Western Europe), underground culture in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe had produced the works that later were described as belonging to the postmodernist canon, proves that postmodernist factors cannot be limited to the cultural conditions of Jamesonean "late capitalism”. One may argue that a crisis and consequent collapse of the utopian metanarrative (apparently triggered by the liberal period of the late fifties and early sixties in Russia – Soviet Thaw “Prague Spring,” etc.) may be very well interpreted in the terms of Jean-Francois Lyotard's theory of the postmodern condition as based on the crisis of grand narratives. This is why, even in the early expressions of postmodernism in Eastern Europe and Russia (“Ost-modernism”), one finds such characteristic postmodernist premises, (albeit shaped in Russian culture independently from Western influence) as disillusionment in totalities, anti-utopianism, and sensitivity to ideological simulacra and cultural simulation in general. However, from their early works written in the late sixties, writers of these countries desired to return to modernism, whose natural development was forcefully interrupted in the thirties by the totalitarian monopoly of Socialist Realism. Attempts to provide the rebirth to the interrupted tradition of European modernism, and the incorporation of Socialist Realist mythologies while putting it side by side with distinctive elements of postmodernist discourse are not typical for the Western brand of postmodernism.
The readings for the course will included the classics of the Western postmodernist philosophy (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Bauman) and the specialists in the postmodernist poetics (Hutcheon, McHale, Fokkema), as well the works of critics closely examining Russian and East European postmodernism (Groys, Epstein, Goscilo, Boym). We will analyze the role of the postmodernist aesthetics and ideology in the process of dismantling of the totalitarian culture, as well in the process of shaping of new, post-communist, cultural identities. These two major concepts (post-communism and postmodernism) will be applied to the analysis of the most interesting and prominent works of experimental literature, arts, and cinema in Russia and Eastern Europe from the beginning of the 1970s to the present moment. We will read and analyze the novels of those postmodernist writers who were developing postmodernism aesthetics within the totalitarian cultures or in direct confrontations with it (Erofeev, Kundera, Mrozek, Kis, Kristof). Another group of writers is represented by those who became acknowledged mostly during the post-communist period (Pavic, Pelevin, Petrishevskaya, Esterhazi). The course will also include the screening of 4 films by Russian, Polish, and German directors.
The seminars will focus on the following topics of lectures/discussions (each topic will take about a week).
Postcommunism as a historical and cultural period
Categories of postmodernism and their transformations in the communist countries.
Early East European postmodernism.
Sots-art in literature and arts.
Between myths and simulacra
Female voices articulated.
Inhabiting chaos: strategies of subjectivity in the postcommunist world.
Nostalgia in post-communist cultures.
The students will be required to review the secondary literature (from the reserve list). During the last 5 weeks of classes, students will have to present their research papers based on the readings/screenings.
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This seminar deals with the problems that now challenge the use of historical methods for interpreting everything from a poem to a political crisis. It has three sections:
- The "troubles" posed for habitual historicism by the critique of modernity as it has become established across the range of practice from physics to philosophy, art to politics;
- The possibilities for revising or modifying traditional historical practice for what I call the discursive condition;
- An experimental proposal for anthematic alternatives to historical method.
Materials for this course would come from various fields: literature and visual arts including film (for example, Nabokov, Hemingway, Piero, Tarentino), theory of history (for example, books by Herbert Butterfield, Hayden White, Robert Rosenbloom; articles from History and Theory and from Rethinking History), post-structuralist theory in small doses in key essays by Derrida ("Structure Sign and Play"), Cixous ("Laugh of the Medusa"), Foucault ( Discourse on Language ), very selected consideration of Saussure s lectures collected as General Course on Linguistic, articles on the problem of the founding subject of history by Catherine Belsey, Slavoj Zizek and selections from writers working through the cultural So What of post-structuralism such as E. Ermarth, G. Harpham and elegant predecessors such as William Ivins Jr. s essays on Art and Geometry and Rationalization of Sight and Alain Robbe-Grillet s Nature, Humanism and Tragedy.
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This class will study the defining authors, topics, themes, and genres,
of African literature in English and English translation. We will study
how changes in African history and politics have influenced the
development of African literatures. We will also examine the role of
culture in the formulation of important historical and political
questions in selected African countries.
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This course will emphasize what are perhaps two of most important essays written on the work of art in the 20th century: Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" and Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art. Although both essays are written at the same time in the mid-1930s, and although both claim a central importance (with varying emphasis) for the work of art in political and existential terms, their relation to one another differs sharply with respect to style, understanding of history and language, and the critical capacity of art. The course will examine this difference and its consequences through the intensive close reading of both these texts and their different versions (three in the case of each). In addition, related manuscript fragments in the case of Benjamin, and passages from other works by Heidegger will be included. The seminar will then conclude with a close reading of Derrida's extended essay on Heidegger from The Truth in Painting. Our concerns throughout will be on the interpretations of work, origin, foundation given in each of these essays. In particular, we will address the consequences these interpretations have for the theoretical context that now surrounds the modern relation to art and its significance; their critique of a history of art fixated on the limitations of subjectivity and the subject (not to mention the use of these categories in defining historical epochs for art); their critique of appearance as a defining concept of art; their reconfiguration of art's materiality and art's claim to truth.
Texts:
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" (second and third versions will be available as e-reserve; for those who like to own books, these are also available in Selected Writings, vols. 3 and 4); and in Gesammelte Schriften 1.2 (first , third versions), 7.1 (second version).
Derrida, "Restitutions," in The Truth in Painting (U of Chicago P, 1987); and in La verité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).
Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge UP, 2002); and in Holzwege (Gesamtausgabe V [Klostermann, 1977]); the 1960 text of this essay is also available in an economical Reclam paperback.
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Fall '08 Courses
