Download Course Listing and course Descriptions for Spring 2008 (pdf)
An introduction to literary theory through texts on difference, performance, and repetition. The course takes as its starting point J.L. Austin's and Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of language and explores their development in thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida, Searle, and Judith Butler. We will also read related texts by Benjamin, Henry Louis Gates, Freud, Irigaray, and Rosalind Krauss.
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This interdisciplinary course explores contemporary controversies around Islam in Germany by examining their representation in a wide range of cultural "texts," such as fiction, film, websites, political texts, newspapers, magazines, television. While the focus is on controversies that arise in the German context, we will carefully place the issues in relevant European as well as other transnational contexts. We will also inform our analyses with multiple disciplinary perspectives. Topics may include: Language and identity, headscarf debates, experiences of violence, terrorism, religious institution, public space. Taught in English. Students will have option of completing some work in German if they choose. Same as GRMN 5520-001.
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A study of Nabokov’s major English-language works, with attention to his self-translated Russian and French writing, his literary theory, and his reputation as a scientist in the study of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). Because his career has a Russian, a European, and an American phase and merges literature with science, the course will emphasize intercultural and interdisciplinary topics. Among these will be his use of cinematic techniques in his writing, his use of film as a theme, and his influence on film. (We will study his Lolita screenplay together with the two film versions of Lolita and will consider the film adaptations of some of his other works, such as The Defense.) Other topics will include his prose style, his poetry, his ethics, his metaphysics, his theory and practice of translation, and his treatment of sexuality and gender. In addition, we will consider his butterfly hunting from both a scientific and an ecocritical perspective. Many of these topics—especially the film study––will receive multimedia presentation and investigation. The course will meet in the new ATLAS building and make full use of its extensive technology. Laptops will be available in the classroom for every student, and we will use them for researching Nabokov on the web among other purposes. The emphasis will be on Nabokov now: his connection to modernism and post-modernism and his ever expanding (and ever controversial) role as a nexus for interdisciplinary thought and cultural criticism. The main goal will be for each student to produce, by semester’s end, a substantial (15-20 pages) and publishable paper revolving around Nabokov and /or his impact on literature, theory, or culture. In addition to criticism by and about Nabokov, the reading list (subject to revision) will include the following: his novels Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, Bend Sinister, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; his Lolita: A Screenplay; his autobiography Speak, Memory; plus selected poems, essays, interviews, translations, and scientific writings. For further information about the course, email ed.rivers@colorado.edu. Taught with ENGL 5529-001.
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This course, which is called "Introduction to the Literature of the British Isles 1660-1900," will move beyond those parameters to include a comparative approach. One of the dominant themes, among other concerns we'll address, is “Social Contracts: Individuals, Communities, and Nations.” I'd like us to explore the challenges (including the tragedies and successes) of the national, aesthetic, and romantic contracts individuals and communities form. We will read English, German and French literature (all in translation), including many if not all of the following authors: Voltaire, Pope, Rousseau, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Fanny Burney, John Locke, Kant, Austen, Mme de Stael, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, Barrett Browning, Hugo, Browning, Anne Bronte, Zola, and Henry James. Works will be drawn from the 18th and 19th centuries, and we will learn about the French and British Enlightenments, the Romantic Period, the Victorian Era, Romance, Realism, and Naturalism. Genres will include poetry, fiction, and drama.. Same as ENGL 5059-001.
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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. 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 three fold: 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, Sarah 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”, particularly in the area of Film Studies.
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 other writers after Freud already mentioned.
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Download Course Listing and course Descriptions for Fall 2007 (pdf)
The course is meant to introduce basic issues in comparative literature and basic problems in literary history, and to provide an overview of history and rationale of the discipline, traditional areas of research, and recent developments. The hypothesis we will take as our starting point is that of a historical and theoretical link between the discipline of comparative literature and the event of exile, but, even more so, between literature as such and the experience of exile. We will be reading works of fiction from contemporary novelists, such as W. G. Sebald, David Malouf and Christian Ransmayr, but also works of ancient and modern poetry (by Ovid and Edmund Jabes), modernist fictions by Conrad, Nabokov, Joyce, and Karen Blixen, along with critical works by, among others, Gayatry Spivak, Ngugi wa Thoing'o, Terry Eagleton, Helene Cixous, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari.
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The novel in Russia, since the mid-19th century, has served as a discursive field in which the ways of modernity were tested, problematized, and frequently discredited. Because of this tendency in the Russian novel, theories of the novel which reflect upon the experience of Russian literature typically generate heuristic models for the undermining of the modern world-view and world-construction (estrangement, dialogism, etc.). As a result, such theories transcend the limits of a poetics of the novel. Within this context, this course will examine the Russian novel and its evolution as well as Western and Russian theories of the novel as they engage and reflect upon the claims of modernity. Same as GSLL 5352.
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The seminar will explore the literary and critical significance of lyric poetry in the modern age. We will begin with Romanticism, in particular, Hölderlin and Shelley, then work through the poetry by Baudelaire, Dickinson, Yeats, Lorca, Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Geoffrey Hill. This course is not a survey of modern lyric, rather, the emphasis will be on the close reading of specific works that address the following issues: the relation of lyric to the experience of modernity, the reflection on the legacy of the subject within the language of the lyric, the allegorization of history in the form of individuality, the iconic status of particular lyric poets within our critical and theoretical history. In addition to the poetry, other readings on the lyric will be drawn from the writings of Benjamin, Adorno, Emil Staiger, Hugo Friedrich, Peter Szondi, Paul de Man, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Same as ENGL 5549.
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We emphasize Goethe's Faust parts I and II, but the course begins with Marlowe's reworking of the original Faust material, includes Byron's Manfred and selections from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, before concluding with Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. The Faust theme has intrigued students of literature and thought for many centuries, and it serves as a metaphor for the modern condition. How does one assign a value to the human soul, if Christianity is not accepted as the supreme authority? What happens to notions of the good life in the age of Enlightenment? How are human beings disposed to conceive of their essence "after the death of God?" How does evil manifest itself in the twentieth century? How does the dualism of the here and now versus the here-after influence humanity's habitation of the Earth? Requirements include short papers on the three main readings, midterm, and final or research paper. Same as HUMN 4504 / GRMN 4504 / GSLL 5504.
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The seminar explores the human body as both the instrument and emblem of modern historical experience in baroque theatre. Themes include: theatre’s relation to painting and rhetoric; the shift from a Renaissance poetics of masculine "deeds" to the neo-Aristotelian aesthetics of feminized "action;" the impact of scientific modes of knowledge on baroque aesthetic practices and the relation between "experience" and "experiment"; the critical anatomy of forms of sensory experience as both staged in theatre and represented in painting; and the theologico-political implications of theatrical (and more generally theatricalized) spectacle. Readings will feature plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Milton, Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Bidermann, and Lohenstein. In addition to working with secondary sources relevant to the topics they choose to write on in their final research papers, students will be exposed to a variety of critical, theoretical, and historical studies by such writers as Mieke Bal, Francis Barker, Walter Benjamin, Harry Berger, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Marin, Joseph Roach, and Viktor Stoichita. Same as FREN 5120.
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An examination of the theory of the spectacle in the writings and films of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. The seminar will situate this theory in two traditions: the history of the avant-garde and the theorization of the commodity. Topics will include commodity fetishism; Dada, Surrealism, and the COBRA group; montage and the readymade; the form of the artist’s book; feminist readings of Marx; and the avant-garde’s relation to colonialism. Readings by Marx, Mallarme, Karl Kraus, Lukacs, Hugo Ball, Schwitters, Duchamp, Asger Jorn, Breton, Henri Lefebvre, Aime Cesaire, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati, Irigaray, and others. Same as GRMN 5520-001.
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This course serves as an introduction to the "Frankfurt School" and Critical Theory with particular emphasis upon rationality, social psychology, cultural criticism and aesthetics. Through close readings of key texts by members of the school (Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas) we will work toward a critical understanding of the analytical tools they developed and consider their validity. Students will be required to make one in-class presentation, and complete a substantive term paper in consultation with the instructor.
Seminar partication is a must.
Knowledge of German is desirable, but all readings and discussion are in English.
Same as GRMN 5410.
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Fall '08 Courses
