Emory | Comp Lit | Graduate Program

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2002

CPLT 751 000 Literature and Beginnings

Caruth 1:00-4:00
Th 1-4
[Crosslisted with ENG 789]

Content: This course examines the nature of literary, political and historical beginnings in British and French literature of the nineteenth century and in literary and political theory. We will examine in particular the French Revolution understood as an originary historical and political event and its relation to a reflection on poetic origination in these texts. Among our interests will be the relation between history and act, between historical and linguistic events, and between catastrophic repetition and historical/political origination. We will also consider the notion of the subject as it is constituted by political and linguistic acts or the relation between subjectivity and freedom.

Texts: In addition to French and British literary authors (including Balzac, Hugo, Wordsworth and Shelley, among others) we will read political and literary theorists (and historians), including (among others) Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Francois Furet, Claude Lefort, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

CPLT 751 001 French Literary Theory

Bennington
M 4:30-7:30
[Crosslisted with FREN 780]

Content: The course will track some of the principal moments in 20th-century French theoretical reflection on literature, from the linguistic basis provided by Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, passing through Sartre ('Qu'est-ce que la literature?') Structuralism (especially Genette and Barthes), Phenomenology (the so-called 'Ecole de Genève'), Marxism (Macherey), and ending with Derrida's assessment of these different movements and some of his own readings of literary texts. Our guiding question will be that of reading, and the extent to which the reading called for by literary texts exceeds the grasp of theory as such.

CPLT 751 00P Queer Theory

Jordan
Tu 4-7
[Crosslisted with RLTS 710, ILA 790, WS 585]

Content: This seminar is a sort of boot-camp (all puns half-intended) in the assortment of theories, protests, strategies, tropes, and gestures now known as "queer theory." Its main purpose is to think through some of the best known texts behind the assortment. It may also touch on questions about relations of "theory" to activism or historiography, about what it takes to get respect in academia, and about the disconcerting relations between the constructs "lesbian" and "gay male."

Texts: The readings will include at least some early lesbian/gay manifestos, essays by Gayle Rubin, Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality 1, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, David Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, together with more recent work by Carolyn Dinshaw, Michael Warner, and Douglas Crimp.

Particulars: Members of the seminar will be expected to read the assigned texts carefully and to discuss them constructively. They will be asked to write three or four short interpretive exercises and a final paper of medium length. There will be no examinations. There will be prizes for best boots.

CPLT 751 002 Caribbean Fiction and Theory

Loichot
Th 1-4
[Crosslisted with FREN 780]

Content: This course will explore various fictional and theoretical strategies used by Caribbean writers to reconstruct language, narrative, and histories in the aftermath of colonial conquest, slavery, and diaspora. Special emphasis will be put on Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti.

Texts: Aime Cesaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Conde, Edwidge Danticat, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Rene Menil, Jacques Roumain, Zoe Valdes, and Derek Walcott

CPLT 751 003 Introduction to Graduate Studies in Film Studies

Martin
M 1-4
[Crosslisted with FILM 500]

Content: This course will provide graduate students with the tools and skills to closely analyze films texts, combining aesthetic and institutional film studies with cultural and ideological contexts. The first half of the course will be a detailed exploration of the discipline’s specific aesthetic practices (editing, narration, mise-en-scene, cinematography, etc.), with students able to produce detailed shot-by-shot analysis at midterm. The second half of the course incorporates this analytic ability with genre study and ideological analysis, where students will write a film analysis seminar paper, and revise this paper for a short presentation at the end of the semester. We will also investigate the various methodologies that make up "Film Studies" throughout the course.

Texts: Film Art: An Introduction—David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 6th Edition, 2000 Film Studies: Critical Approaches—ed. John Hill, 2000 Reinventing Film Studies—ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 2000 The Horror Genre: From Beezlebub to Blair Witch—Paul Wells, 2001

CPLT 751 005 Power Plays, Inquisition, Empire, and The Spanish Golden Age

Carrion
W 1-4
[Crosslisted with SPA 530, WS 585]

Content: This course proposes a rereading of the concept of “Golden Age Spain” based on readings of the numerous points of correspondence between the institution of the Spanish Inquisition, the idea and practices of the Spanish Empire, and the canonization of the “Spanish golden Age” as the historicized version of the cultural and literary production of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. Aspects of this interrelation that we will explore in class include, but will not be limited to: the genesis of the Holy Office and its gradual de-generation; the staging of subjectivity in public/published spaces; fear, threat and violence; blood purity in legal and medical discourses; cohabitation, suspicion, and discrimination; representation of moriscos and judaizantes; love, discernment, and hate; sex, gender, sexuality and difference; laughter, parody, irony, and other mimetic outlets; witches and women; torture as a "legal" device and shaper of confession and autobiography; questions of evidence, self-evidence, concealment, and publication; identities, performances, power and issues of control; faith, trust and rhetoric; recording histories and keeping memories. Written texts from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain will be compared to films and television adaptations of such texts, in an attempt to test the discursive boundaries of historical memory, and the limits of interpretation of evidence pertaining to the Santo Oficio, as well as its impact on the staging and remembrance of the “Golden Age.” The course seeks to develop a critical perspective from which to study this interrelation of the Santo Oficio and the political and poetic projects of Empire as expressions of literary, sociological and historical phenomena during the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque periods. In Spanish.

Texts: Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática castellana; Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la lengua; Juan Luis Vives, Institutio Foemina Christianae; Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes; Jorge de Montemayor, Los siete libros de la Diana; Luis de León, La perfecta casada; Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias; Lucrecia de León, Los sueños; Teresa de Jesús, Libro de la vida; Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache; Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha y El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros; Félix Lope de Vega, El perro del hortelano y El Otomano famoso; Calderón de la Barca, El médico de su honra; Ana Caro, El Conde Partinuplés; María de Zayas, Desengaños amorosos. Videos: Teresa de Jesús; Las Pícaras; El pícaro; El rey pasmado; El perro del hortelano; The Pitt and the Pendulum; Farenheit 451; The Spanish Inquisition (Monty Python)

Particulars: Attendance and class participation (45%), class presentations (10%), and one research paper (possibly substituted by a final exam in consultation with Professor Carrión and the Director of Graduate Studies, Prof. Stolley) (45%).

CPLT 751 004 The Art of Nothing: Hesse, Bochner, Smithson, LeWitt

Meyer
Tu 1-4
[Crosslisted with HART 775]

Content: A course on Postminimalism focusing on the circle of Eva Hesse, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson, and Sol LeWitt, and the pursuit of a formal logic of paradox. Extending and subverting Minimalism's tautological premise, the work of these artists instead explores strategies of doubling, complementarity, and contradiction, suggesting a model of illogic or non-sense: an art about "nothing."

Texts: Essays by Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy Lippard, Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Susan Sontag, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, and Martin Gardner.

CPLT 751 01P Global Cultures

Bahri
Tu 1-4
[Crosslisted with ENG 789]

Content: One of the "god terms" of the fin de sicle, "globalization" is by now taken almost for granted. But what is globalization, when did it begin, what changed with globalization, and how does one study it? Cultural expression serves as one index for cataloging its impact in diverse locations, as much to investigate what is new and different as to understand what does not change and "For Whom Things Did Not Change," to use Ama Ata Aidoo's short story title, with its ersatz advent in the hinterlands of modernity and development. To contain an otherwise rampant discourse, this course will focus on the increased "time-space compression" (David Harvey's phrase) that comes with globalization. Through this lens, in theory as well as in the practice of reading culture, we will explore evolutions in capital, the rise of the city as the locus classicus of modernity, the salience of cyberlocalities in the new pax electronica, and new expressions of sexuality.

Texts: Readings include theory by Simmel, Marx, Harvey, Berman, Jameson, Spivak ; novels such as _White Teeth_, _Such a Long Journey_, _The Blue Bedspread_, _The Moor's Last Sigh_; a movie (_Monsoon Wedding_); clips from Asian MTV; excerpts from internet sites; & transcripts of pirate radio broadcasts.

CPLT 751 006 Introduction to Psychoanalytic Studies

Marder/Seelig
Tu 9-12
[Crosslisted with ILA 790]

Content: This course is intended to give a graduate student in any relevant department a grounding in the history and fundamental concepts of clinical, theoretical, and applied psychoanalysis. It aims to make an overview of the diverse scope of the field of psychoanalysis thought readily available to any interested graduate student, and to provide the necessary groundwork for further explanation. This course is required for every student pursuing a Minor Certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies, but is open to all students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

CPLT 751 007 Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, Complexity Theory

Johnston
W 1-4
[Crosslisted with ENG 789 and ILA 790]

Content: What do immune systems, ant colonies, the human brain, and the stock market all have in common? Answer: they are all self-organizing, complex adaptive systems whose “emergent” global behavior is more complex than that of their individual component parts and processes. More simply, in these dynamically self-regulating systems order arises from the “bottom up,” without any centralizing agency of command and control. While Romantic poets and social philosophers found in organicism a similar theory in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, in the last two decades scientists across a wide spectrum of fields have begun to see that many systems behavior. These systems cannot be analyzed using traditional methods (breaking them down component parts and processes), so scientists must resort to synthesis and simulation, most often on computers. Beginning in physics, biology and computer science, Complexity theory has been used to explain traffic jams and growth patterns, network dynamics and the formation of urban neighborhoods, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the Anasazi Indians. Recently works of cultural theory like Steven Johnson Complexity: Emerging Network Culture have argued for the theory intellectual and cultural significance, seeing emergent complexity in a range of contemporary social activities and artistic practices. This course will explore the "moment of complexity," after first locating its origins in cybernetics and systems theory and its further development in Maturana and Varela specific examples of self-organizing systems in biology (Stuart Kauffman and Brian Goodwin), Artificial Life (Christopher Langton and Tom Ray), autonomous agent theory (Pattie Maes), and collective or "swarm intelligence" (James Kennedy). Depending on student interests, we can explore further examples in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and/or social theory, art and esthetics.

Texts: A collection of xeroxed essays; Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Machines: Cybernetics and Society; Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge; Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos; John Casti, Would-Be Worlds; and Mitchel Resnick, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams.

Requirements: an individual (or small group) presentation and seminar essay.

CPLT 751 009 Levinas

Robbins
Tu 1-4

Content: This course centers on a reading of Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity, with special emphasis on Sections I and III. Our reading will be cross-referenced with key phenomenological texts by Levinas from the late forties, philosophical essays from the fifties and sixties, and at least one Talmudic reading.

Texts: We will attend closely to the influential interpretations of Levinas by Derrida, Blanchot, and Lyotard. Readings include: Levinas, Totality and Infinity; Existents and Existence; Time and the Other; Collected Philosophical Papers, selections; the "The Temptation of Temptation" Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics"; and selections from Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation and Lyotard, The Differend.

CPLT 752 000 Aesthetics of the Visible

Judovitz
Tu 1-4
[Crosslisted with FREN 770G]

Content: The Aesthetics of the Visible Judovitz This course examines the construction of the "visible" from a philosophical, artistic and social perspective. Starting with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on painting and vision, we will discuss how painting references the body, and senses. Rather than treating the "visible" as a "given", we will examine how artworks construct visual reference, according to pictorial conventions and specific idealogies of spectatorship. The representation of the body as topic and material pigment, the nude as pictorial genre, questions of pictorial production and reproduction and the development of conceptual art will be at issue.

Texts: Readings will include, Merleau-Ponty, Blumenberg, Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Bryson, Mulvey, Berger, Bourdieu, Krauss, Didi-Huberman, etc. along with artworks by La Tour, Gericault, Courbet, Manet, Soutine, Bacon, Duchamp, and Wilson.

CPLT 797R Directed Readings

By permission of the Director. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information.

CPLT 799R Dissertation Research

By permission of the Director. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information.






	graduate program handbook courses spring 2007 fall 2006 spring 2006 fall 2005 spring 2005 fall 2004 spring 2004 fall 2003 spring 2003 fall 2002 spring 2002 fall 2001 students admissions Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings Fall 2002 CPLT 751 000 Literature and Beginnings Caruth 1:00-4:00 Th 1-4 [Crosslisted with ENG 789] Content: This course examines the nature of literary, political and historical beginnings in British and French literature of the nineteenth century and in literary and political theory. We will examine in particular the French Revolution understood as an originary historical and political event and its relation to a reflection on poetic origination in these texts. Among our interests will be the relation between history and act, between historical and linguistic events, and between catastrophic repetition and historical/political origination. We will also consider the notion of the subject as it is constituted by political and linguistic acts or the relation between subjectivity and freedom. Texts: In addition to French and British literary authors (including Balzac, Hugo, Wordsworth and Shelley, among others) we will read political and literary theorists (and historians), including (among others) Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Francois Furet, Claude Lefort, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. CPLT 751 001 French Literary Theory Bennington M 4:30-7:30 [Crosslisted with FREN 780] Content: The course will track some of the principal moments in 20th-century French theoretical reflection on literature, from the linguistic basis provided by Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, passing through Sartre ('Qu'est-ce que la literature?') Structuralism (especially Genette and Barthes), Phenomenology (the so-called 'Ecole de Genève'), Marxism (Macherey), and ending with Derrida's assessment of these different movements and some of his own readings of literary texts. Our guiding question will be that of reading, and the extent to which the reading called for by literary texts exceeds the grasp of theory as such. CPLT 751 00P Queer Theory Jordan Tu 4-7 [Crosslisted with RLTS 710, ILA 790, WS 585] Content: This seminar is a sort of boot-camp (all puns half-intended) in the assortment of theories, protests, strategies, tropes, and gestures now known as "queer theory." Its main purpose is to think through some of the best known texts behind the assortment. It may also touch on questions about relations of "theory" to activism or historiography, about what it takes to get respect in academia, and about the disconcerting relations between the constructs "lesbian" and "gay male." Texts: The readings will include at least some early lesbian/gay manifestos, essays by Gayle Rubin, Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality 1, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, David Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, together with more recent work by Carolyn Dinshaw, Michael Warner, and Douglas Crimp. Particulars: Members of the seminar will be expected to read the assigned texts carefully and to discuss them constructively. They will be asked to write three or four short interpretive exercises and a final paper of medium length. There will be no examinations. There will be prizes for best boots. CPLT 751 002 Caribbean Fiction and Theory Loichot Th 1-4 [Crosslisted with FREN 780] Content: This course will explore various fictional and theoretical strategies used by Caribbean writers to reconstruct language, narrative, and histories in the aftermath of colonial conquest, slavery, and diaspora. Special emphasis will be put on Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti. Texts: Aime Cesaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Conde, Edwidge Danticat, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Rene Menil, Jacques Roumain, Zoe Valdes, and Derek Walcott CPLT 751 003 Introduction to Graduate Studies in Film Studies Martin M 1-4 [Crosslisted with FILM 500] Content: This course will provide graduate students with the tools and skills to closely analyze films texts, combining aesthetic and institutional film studies with cultural and ideological contexts. The first half of the course will be a detailed exploration of the discipline’s specific aesthetic practices (editing, narration, mise-en-scene, cinematography, etc.), with students able to produce detailed shot-by-shot analysis at midterm. The second half of the course incorporates this analytic ability with genre study and ideological analysis, where students will write a film analysis seminar paper, and revise this paper for a short presentation at the end of the semester. We will also investigate the various methodologies that make up "Film Studies" throughout the course. Texts: Film Art: An Introduction—David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 6th Edition, 2000 Film Studies: Critical Approaches—ed. John Hill, 2000 Reinventing Film Studies—ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 2000 The Horror Genre: From Beezlebub to Blair Witch—Paul Wells, 2001 CPLT 751 005 Power Plays, Inquisition, Empire, and The Spanish Golden Age Carrion W 1-4 [Crosslisted with SPA 530, WS 585] Content: This course proposes a rereading of the concept of “Golden Age Spain” based on readings of the numerous points of correspondence between the institution of the Spanish Inquisition, the idea and practices of the Spanish Empire, and the canonization of the “Spanish golden Age” as the historicized version of the cultural and literary production of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. Aspects of this interrelation that we will explore in class include, but will not be limited to: the genesis of the Holy Office and its gradual de-generation; the staging of subjectivity in public/published spaces; fear, threat and violence; blood purity in legal and medical discourses; cohabitation, suspicion, and discrimination; representation of moriscos and judaizantes; love, discernment, and hate; sex, gender, sexuality and difference; laughter, parody, irony, and other mimetic outlets; witches and women; torture as a "legal" device and shaper of confession and autobiography; questions of evidence, self-evidence, concealment, and publication; identities, performances, power and issues of control; faith, trust and rhetoric; recording histories and keeping memories. Written texts from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain will be compared to films and television adaptations of such texts, in an attempt to test the discursive boundaries of historical memory, and the limits of interpretation of evidence pertaining to the Santo Oficio, as well as its impact on the staging and remembrance of the “Golden Age.” The course seeks to develop a critical perspective from which to study this interrelation of the Santo Oficio and the political and poetic projects of Empire as expressions of literary, sociological and historical phenomena during the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque periods. In Spanish. Texts: Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática castellana; Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la lengua; Juan Luis Vives, Institutio Foemina Christianae; Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes; Jorge de Montemayor, Los siete libros de la Diana; Luis de León, La perfecta casada; Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias; Lucrecia de León, Los sueños; Teresa de Jesús, Libro de la vida; Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache; Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha y El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros; Félix Lope de Vega, El perro del hortelano y El Otomano famoso; Calderón de la Barca, El médico de su honra; Ana Caro, El Conde Partinuplés; María de Zayas, Desengaños amorosos. Videos: Teresa de Jesús; Las Pícaras; El pícaro; El rey pasmado; El perro del hortelano; The Pitt and the Pendulum; Farenheit 451; The Spanish Inquisition (Monty Python) Particulars: Attendance and class participation (45%), class presentations (10%), and one research paper (possibly substituted by a final exam in consultation with Professor Carrión and the Director of Graduate Studies, Prof. Stolley) (45%). CPLT 751 004 The Art of Nothing: Hesse, Bochner, Smithson, LeWitt Meyer Tu 1-4 [Crosslisted with HART 775] Content: A course on Postminimalism focusing on the circle of Eva Hesse, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson, and Sol LeWitt, and the pursuit of a formal logic of paradox. Extending and subverting Minimalism's tautological premise, the work of these artists instead explores strategies of doubling, complementarity, and contradiction, suggesting a model of illogic or non-sense: an art about "nothing." Texts: Essays by Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy Lippard, Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Susan Sontag, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, and Martin Gardner. CPLT 751 01P Global Cultures Bahri Tu 1-4 [Crosslisted with ENG 789] Content: One of the "god terms" of the fin de sicle, "globalization" is by now taken almost for granted. But what is globalization, when did it begin, what changed with globalization, and how does one study it? Cultural expression serves as one index for cataloging its impact in diverse locations, as much to investigate what is new and different as to understand what does not change and "For Whom Things Did Not Change," to use Ama Ata Aidoo's short story title, with its ersatz advent in the hinterlands of modernity and development. To contain an otherwise rampant discourse, this course will focus on the increased "time-space compression" (David Harvey's phrase) that comes with globalization. Through this lens, in theory as well as in the practice of reading culture, we will explore evolutions in capital, the rise of the city as the locus classicus of modernity, the salience of cyberlocalities in the new pax electronica, and new expressions of sexuality. Texts: Readings include theory by Simmel, Marx, Harvey, Berman, Jameson, Spivak ; novels such as _White Teeth_, _Such a Long Journey_, _The Blue Bedspread_, _The Moor's Last Sigh_; a movie (_Monsoon Wedding_); clips from Asian MTV; excerpts from internet sites; & transcripts of pirate radio broadcasts. CPLT 751 006 Introduction to Psychoanalytic Studies Marder/Seelig Tu 9-12 [Crosslisted with ILA 790] Content: This course is intended to give a graduate student in any relevant department a grounding in the history and fundamental concepts of clinical, theoretical, and applied psychoanalysis. It aims to make an overview of the diverse scope of the field of psychoanalysis thought readily available to any interested graduate student, and to provide the necessary groundwork for further explanation. This course is required for every student pursuing a Minor Certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies, but is open to all students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. CPLT 751 007 Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, Complexity Theory Johnston W 1-4 [Crosslisted with ENG 789 and ILA 790] Content: What do immune systems, ant colonies, the human brain, and the stock market all have in common? Answer: they are all self-organizing, complex adaptive systems whose “emergent” global behavior is more complex than that of their individual component parts and processes. More simply, in these dynamically self-regulating systems order arises from the “bottom up,” without any centralizing agency of command and control. While Romantic poets and social philosophers found in organicism a similar theory in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, in the last two decades scientists across a wide spectrum of fields have begun to see that many systems behavior. These systems cannot be analyzed using traditional methods (breaking them down component parts and processes), so scientists must resort to synthesis and simulation, most often on computers. Beginning in physics, biology and computer science, Complexity theory has been used to explain traffic jams and growth patterns, network dynamics and the formation of urban neighborhoods, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the Anasazi Indians. Recently works of cultural theory like Steven Johnson Complexity: Emerging Network Culture have argued for the theory intellectual and cultural significance, seeing emergent complexity in a range of contemporary social activities and artistic practices. This course will explore the "moment of complexity," after first locating its origins in cybernetics and systems theory and its further development in Maturana and Varela specific examples of self-organizing systems in biology (Stuart Kauffman and Brian Goodwin), Artificial Life (Christopher Langton and Tom Ray), autonomous agent theory (Pattie Maes), and collective or "swarm intelligence" (James Kennedy). Depending on student interests, we can explore further examples in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and/or social theory, art and esthetics. Texts: A collection of xeroxed essays; Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Machines: Cybernetics and Society; Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge; Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos; John Casti, Would-Be Worlds; and Mitchel Resnick, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams. Requirements: an individual (or small group) presentation and seminar essay. CPLT 751 009 Levinas Robbins Tu 1-4 Content: This course centers on a reading of Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity, with special emphasis on Sections I and III. Our reading will be cross-referenced with key phenomenological texts by Levinas from the late forties, philosophical essays from the fifties and sixties, and at least one Talmudic reading. Texts: We will attend closely to the influential interpretations of Levinas by Derrida, Blanchot, and Lyotard. Readings include: Levinas, Totality and Infinity; Existents and Existence; Time and the Other; Collected Philosophical Papers, selections; the "The Temptation of Temptation" Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics"; and selections from Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation and Lyotard, The Differend. CPLT 752 000 Aesthetics of the Visible Judovitz Tu 1-4 [Crosslisted with FREN 770G] Content: The Aesthetics of the Visible Judovitz This course examines the construction of the "visible" from a philosophical, artistic and social perspective. Starting with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on painting and vision, we will discuss how painting references the body, and senses. Rather than treating the "visible" as a "given", we will examine how artworks construct visual reference, according to pictorial conventions and specific idealogies of spectatorship. The representation of the body as topic and material pigment, the nude as pictorial genre, questions of pictorial production and reproduction and the development of conceptual art will be at issue. Texts: Readings will include, Merleau-Ponty, Blumenberg, Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Bryson, Mulvey, Berger, Bourdieu, Krauss, Didi-Huberman, etc. along with artworks by La Tour, Gericault, Courbet, Manet, Soutine, Bacon, Duchamp, and Wilson. CPLT 797R Directed Readings By permission of the Director. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information. CPLT 799R Dissertation Research By permission of the Director. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information.

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings Fall 2002

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2002