Download Course Listing and course Descriptions for Fall 2008 (pdf)
Proseminar
Professor Jill Heydt-Stevenson |
COML 5000-001
Syllabus |
What is Comparative Literature? This introductory course will offer the chance to investigate what constitutes this field and practice what it means to participate in it. We will trace the history of the discipline and explore traditional as well as recent areas of research, such as interdisciplinarity and global, feminist, and multicultural comparativism, as we investigate how to more fluently cross the boundaries of disciplines and national literatures. The course will be organized loosely into four units: What was and is the field; Interdisciplinarity; Comparison and Difference; and Translation. Among others, we will look at readings by Bernheimer, Culler, Damrosch, Gasché, Higonnet, Pratt, Nancy, Saussy, and Spivak. We will also read essays by Montaigne to explore cultural difference; and juxtapose various texts: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza or Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color to investigate translation and the co-presence of different languages and cultures; Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Hugo’s Bug Jargal to analyze gendered and national understandings of colonial history; and an interdisciplinary unit on de Staël’s Corrine and one of the most famous museum rooms in Europe, the Tribuna in the Uffizi, in order to ask questions about the nature of collections, for example, the relationship of variety and unruliness to the question of diversity as communities of objects are formed.
[return to top of page]
This course will explore some classic statements on and experiments in the textual representation of time. As we will see, these statements constitute a long and evolving dialogue on the temporality of meaning, specifically as it emerges in text-based culture, and specifically as pertains to the possibility of immanence - - or the ramifications of its impossibility. The readings for the course are divided into groupings of writers: (1) Augustine, Heidegger, & Derrida; (2) Wordsworth & Geoffrey Hartman; (3) Charlotte Bronte, Frank Kermode, & Paul Ricoeur; (4) Proust & Kristeva; (5) Bergson & Deleuze; (6) Benjamin, Lukacs, & Henry James; (7) Herodotus, Virginia Woolf, and Ann Carson; (8) N. Katherine Hayles & Mark Z. Danielewski. Same as ENGL 7059-001.
[return to top of page]
Beginning with an introduction to affect theory, this course goes on to examine how certain affects and emotions have become sites of political anxiety and action. More specifically, it examines the association of religion with emotion, and the secularization of the latter with the emergence of the modern nation state. Throughout the course we will ask how certain emotions such as love, anxiety, disgust, indignation, horror, compassion and tolerance have become historically constitutive of imperial relations of power and the contemporary politics of fear surrounding Islam. Same as RLST 5820-002.
[return to top of page]
The Enlightenment
Professor Christopher Braider
|
COML 5830-001
Syllabus
|
An endemic paradox of the European Enlightenment is the persistence of traditional moral, philosophical, and artistic high-mindedness in a culture whose most advanced aesthetic and epistemological paradigms assert the primacy of empirical experience and the reductive picture of Nature this implies. 18th-century thought, art, literature, and historiography are characterized by what looks at first glance like the thoroughgoing repudiation of the idealisms of the Renaissance and baroque. Where their 16th- and 17th-century forebears remained agonistically yet consistently loyal to values and virtues grounded in the metaphysics of Platonized Christian transcendence, 18th-century novelists, historians, painters, and philosophers embraced a metaphysics of immanence and the naturalistic, skeptical, and ironic habits of expression and thought immanence dictates. Yet not only did these new habits fail to eliminate the idealisms they did so much to discredit; they regularly placed themselves in their service, as moral, stylistic, and ontological boundary conditions designed to ensure an at once spontaneous and irreducibly non-contingent exhibition of the transcendence they show to be impossible. Thus the priority of natural experience as a causal, historical, and behavioral test did not preclude but rather helped reframe the “belle nature” inherited from the moralized Renaissance and baroque aesthetics of ut pictura poesis. Similarly, the experimental insistence on the supremacy of the body over the mind, and the related conception of the body itself as a material machine entirely accounted for by naturalistic means, did not eliminate but rather gave fresh moral and aesthetic emphasis to the self-directed dressage by which the human animal was seen to transform itself into the autonomous rational Person of sentimental fiction, Academic painting, and Kant’s “categorical imperative” alike.
The course explores a variety of ways in which period writers, thinkers, and artists attempted to negotiate, mediate, and resolve these contradictions, with special emphasis on the central role played by the doctrine of the Aesthetic and its presumed experimental organ, the faculty of Taste. In addition to reviewing developments in visual art, and in particular in landscape design and in the paintings of Watteau, Fragonard, Chardin, Vernet, Greuze, Constable, Reynolds, and Hogarth, students will undertake readings in the work of the Britons, Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, Burke, and Hume, the German Winckelmann, Lessing, and Kant, and their French contemporaries, Batteux, Caylus, Diderot, and Rousseau. Representative themes will be 18th-century doctrines of the beautiful and the sublime, the pictorial dialectics of “theatricality and absorption” and their role in the development of notions of moral feeling in visual art, the emergence of the theory of Imagination as a means of reconciling moral and natural modes of experience, and the invention of the faculty of “moral taste” in both conjunction with and deviation from the standards of new-minted “critical” taste. Same as FREN 5110-001.
[return to top of page]
The Ruins of Modernity
Professor Davide Stimilli
|
COML 5830-002
 Syllabus
|
The course is devoted to three major works of German modernism: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. In spite of their status of torsos, having been, all of them, left unfinished at their authors’ death, these works still haunt us with their ambition of showing us the “face of time.” By looking at these monumental ruins, we will try to catch a glimpse of the ruins of modernity itself, as it is further reflected in the works of contemporary German artists, such as W. G. Sebald and Gerhard Richter.
Same as GRMN 5410-001.
[return to top of page]
Philosophy/Aesthetics of Cinema
Professor Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz
|
COML 6040-002
Syllabus
|
This course is an exploration of major trends in the theory of film aesthetics. We will look at the philosophical currents that have evolved into theoretical issues in film studies, particularly in the areas of ontology, phenomenology and aesthetics. Our seminar will concentrate on the logic of philosophical arguments when speaking, writing and thinking about classic and canonical films and on the arguments made for a film “canon.” Readings by André Bazin, Stanley Cavell, Noël Carroll, Jacques Aumont et al.; films by Charles Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Stanley Kubrick, Vittorio de Sica, etc. Same as ENGL 5529-002.
[return to top of page]
1968: Politics after Aesthetics
Professor David Ferris |
COML 6040-003
Syllabus
|
This course will examine the development of the concept of the political in the wake of 1968. The year is significant not just because of the student revolt in France but because it repudiates a model of politics and aesthetics that had dominated left wing thought through much of the 20th century—a model that reached its most extreme and negative point of development in Adorno’s dialectical account of how the aesthetic possesses social and political significance. Perhaps not coincidentally, Adorno’s development of such an account of the political occurs in the years surrounding the events of 1968—as if, with this year, a whole tradition of relating politics to the aesthetic had come to a close.
To establish the historical context out of which another way of thinking the political emerges after 1968, the seminar will return to the problems posed, first, by the relation of ideology and the aesthetic in Marx (The German Ideology), second, the challenge to liberal enlightenment developed by Carl Schmitt (Political Romanticism, The Concept of the Political, and Political Theology), and third, Adorno’s negative account of the political through aesthetic autonomy. The following works will then be examined as attempts to forgo a concept of the political no longer grounded in either post-enlightenment modernity, the conservative critique of liberalism, or the aesthetic tradition that stretches back to Plato: Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics; Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society; Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations; Chantal Mouffe, On the Political; Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, Disagreement; Alain Badiou, Metapolitics; Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community; Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community. Same as ENGL 5529-003.
[return to top of page]
Download Course Listing and Course Descriptions for Spring 2009 (pdf)
Studies in Poetry: Poetrics
Professor Jeffrey Robinson |
COML 5370-001
Syllabus |
In this course, conceived historically, we will open up the perennial questions: what does it mean to talk about poetry? And, what is it that poems are imagined to do? Beginning with a survey of Classic and Medieval/Renaissance statements (e.g. Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Dante, Sidney, Dryden), we will turn primarily to some of the major statements of Romanticism broadly defined (e.g. Blake, Schiller, Wordsworth, Coleridge, F. Schlegel, Keats, Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Rimbaud) and then to some of Romanticism’s 20th-century extensions and transformations. Although most of our readings center upon the Western tradition, a small selection will come from other traditions (e.g. the poetics of Japanese waka and haiku and the “ethnopoetics” from so-called traditional societies).
Along with reading the formal statements, we will pursue the possibility that poems can contain their own, self-directed, meta-discourse (e.g. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In this regard we will explore some of the manifestoes as well as poetry in Poems for the Millennium 3, The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry, and will read from a more recent vintage works such as Charles Bernstein’s Artifice of Absorption and Lyn Hejinian’s Happily.
Same as ENGL 5559-001.
[return to top of page]
Translation
Professor Ed Rivers
|
COML 5410-001
Syllabus |
PRE-REQUISITE: Students should know English and at least one other language well enough to translate from each to the other.
This course is for graduate students interested in literary translation. Not limited to Western languages, it is tailored to the interests of the students who sign up and is divided about equally between theory and practice. It emphasizes seminar discussion, workshop exercises, and individual instruction. The main goal is to gain skill in translating while evaluating and applying major translation theories. A second goal is to gain some acquaintance with languages and cultures other than those already known to them. By studying translation, the course explores how languages and cultures interact.
We will consider both literature and film and try to answer questions such as the following:
How does translation facilitate—or impede—cultural exchange? To what extent is it—or should it be—creative? Gendered? Political? How has it been influenced by recent theory (especially post-colonial and post-structuralist)? What are the problems of teaching works in translation and some possible solutions? What are the implications of inter-semiotic translation such as novel to film or painting to music? Is there such a thing as an “original” text? If so or if not, what are the implications for translation? To what extent is all reading, writing, and thinking a form of translation?
The final goal will be for each student to produce a substantial (15-20 pages) and publishable paper: a new translation, a theoretical paper, or an analysis of an existing translation. Students from past classes have published their projects, presented them at conferences, and used them as the basis for theses and dissertations. Same as ENGL 5549-001.
The course meets in the ATLAS building and takes full advantage of the building’s technological resources, including classroom laptops for every student. Because state-of-the-art technology is available in ATLAS, the instruction will often be multimedia.
THE INSTRUCTOR: Ed Rivers is a Professor of English and President’s Teaching Scholar. He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature and has published translations from Greek, French, German, and Spanish. His book Proust and the Art of Love contains first-time translations of suppressed texts. For more information about the course, e-mail ed.rivers@colorado.edu.
[return to top of page]
Studies in the Baroque: Monuments & Documents
Professor Christopher Braider
|
COML 5540-001
Syllabus
|
The seminar explores the problem of method in the humanities, with special emphasis on how this problem plays out in early modern literary and interart studies. To this end, the seminar stages a series of critical conversations between figures representing a wide variety of both com¬plementary and competing theoretical approaches—iconology and semiotics, Marxism and psychoanalysis, Critical Theory and deconstruction, feminism and the theory of speech acts. For example, students will read Michel Foucault’s pathbreaking analysis of the dismissal of madness in Descartes’s First Meditation in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s “differential” critique of Foucault’s interpretation. Similarly, Erwin Panofsky’s presentation of the method of iconology in art history will be read in conjunction with Mieke Bal’s at once feminist and reception-theoretical reworking of Panofsky’s method in the direction of outspoken political engagement and exposure of the “semiotics of rape” she regards as endemic to the history of European art. Or again, students will read J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words against the background of the questions Derrida raises about the normalizing control the existential setting in which people speak is alleged to exert, but also of the questions Shoshana Felman raises about what her own reading of Austin suggests is Derrida’s perverse deafness to the meanings enacted at the level of Austin’s style and tone.
In order at once to ground these conversations and to show their relevance to the detailed business of reading the monuments of early modern Western culture, these contextualizing theoretical writings will themselves in turn be put in context with images and texts by three crucial representatives of early modern literature, philosophy, and art, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Rembrandt. Beyond their common status as towering embodiments of all that is most glamorous as well as questionable in the culture of the early modern West, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Rembrandt invented the three fundamental forms in which modern Western culture conceives, expresses, and imagines conscious personhood: the dramatic soliloquy; the cogito and the phenomenological mode of analytic “meditation” on which the cogito rests; and both the portrait and, as at once a means and consequence of portraiture, the self-portrait. Close readings of texts and images both by and composed in the shadow of these three paradigmatic figures will thus enable the seminar not only to illustrate, but to test and, where necessary, to challenge and modify the analytical and theoretical models the methodological dialogues set out.
Same as FREN 5120-001.
[return to top of page]
Introduction to Literary Theory
Professor Patrick Greaney
|
COML 5610-001
Syllabus
|
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, and Irigaray.
[return to top of page]
Seminar: Foucault & Derrida: Politics after Modernity
Professor David Ferris |
COML 6040-001
Syllabus
|
Forthcoming
[return to top of page]
|
|
