Modern European literature (especially poetry), modernity and the postmodern, photography and painting, reception of the Enlightenment in the 19th and 20th centuries, lyric poetry and elegy, Romanticism and Antiquity, 19th and 20th century aesthetics and literary theory.
HUMN 2000 Methods and Approaches to the Humanities (Fall 2014), MWF 1.00-1.50
Topics covered by this course include: word/image studies; rhetoric; translation; the canon; gender studies; cultural studies; literature and the other arts; literary theory; philosophy and literature; etc.
Prerequisite HUMN 1010 or 1020. Restricted to Humanities majors.
HUMN 3660 The Postmodern (Summer 2014), M-F 11.00-12.30
This course will examine the event of the Postmodern and its effect within literature, film, architecture, culture, and critical theory. Beginning with works that signal and examine the onset of modernity, the consequences of postmodernity for our understanding of the modern as a sign of our intellectual, cultural, and social progress will be presented. Once defined in relation to the modern, our attention will turn to the problems and issues posed by the postmodern with respect to history, perception, and the concept of an era that is also our present. We will also examine various recent attempts to think beyond the postmodern. The course will include a broad selection of works ranging through literature, architecture, photography, painting, film, graffiti, and performance art.
HUMN 3092/ENG 3856 The Interpretation of Lyric (Spring 2015) TTh 11-12.15, Clare 209
The title of this course should be understood in a double sense: it addresses how lyric writing has been interpreted critically as well as the ways in which the lyric poem also performs acts of interpretation that question what it means to write lyrically. Topics to be examined include: pure poetry, language and the critique of generic definitions, the relation of lyric to narrative and history as well as violence and atrocity, and the extent to which modern lyric emerges as a tension that both sustains and denies the traditions it is said to represent. Lyrical writing will be understood to include both poetry and fictional prose. Authors to be studied include: Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Dickinson, Rilke, Yeats, Woolf, Plath, Bachmann, Sexton, Hill. The course will also study interpretations of lyric by critics such as Adorno, Benjamin, Staiger, de Man, Abrams, Wimsatt, Culler, Friedrich, Cameron, as well as more recent critical work.
COML 5370 Elegy and Exile
Propertius, Ovid, Donne, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Rilke, Geoffrey Hill, Anne Sexton
COML 5000 Comparison and Interdisciplinarity (Proseminar)
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 definable 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.? Course readings will include selections from Plato, Aristotle, Diderot, Kant, Benjamin, Heidegger, Wellek, Derrida, Foucault, Nancy, Gasché, Spivak, Apter, and Readings.