Emory | Comp Lit | Graduate Program

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2003

CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories

Caruth
Th 1-4
[Crosslisted with ENG 780]

Content: An introduction to literary theoretical thinking, focusing on twentieth century structuralism, post-structuralism and contemporary theory.

CPLT 751 000 Blanchot

Robbins
M 1-4
[Crosslisted with FR 780]

Content: This course studies key texts by Maurice Blanchot, whose works interrogate the very conditions of literature and literary criticism. Many of Blanchot's critical essays take their starting point in a pragmatic question specific to the interpretation of a particular writer and open up to problems that concern ontology, ethics, and the whole of existence as such. Blanchot thematizes the relationship to alterity in terms of writing, the neutral, death, and the disaster. Moreover, he gains access to these alterities within an experience he calls "literature," providing along the way a distinctive "phenomenology" of reading. Focus will be on Blanchot's critical essays, with some attention to the narrative prose.

CPLT 751 001 Foucault and Christianity

Jordan
W 9:30-12:30
[Crosslisted with RLTS 750F]

Content: Michel Foucault’s later writing is uncannily pertinent to Christianity—not only in being about it or around it, but in posing new questions or possibilities for it. This seminar will examine the double pertinence by reading some of Foucault’s major works in connection with his lesser or occasional pieces that touch on religion in general or Christianity in particular. We will be concerned to ask not only what Foucault thinks about Christianity, but also how far his thinking might be determined by a certain relation to it.

Texts: The readings will include Foucault’s “Discourse on Language” (“L’ordre du discours”), Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality 1, and the selections in Jeremy Carrette’s Michel Foucault: Religion and Culture among others.

Particulars: Members of the seminar will be expected to read the assigned texts carefully and to discuss them constructively. They will be asked to present three or four short interpretive exercises to the seminar and then to write a final paper of 15-20 pages.

CPLT 751 002 Approaches to Bible & Law: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Anthropology

Goldman
M 1-4
[Crosslisted with MES 570R]

Content: In this seminar, we will study the first section of the Hebrew Bible, the Five Books of Moses, as both a religious document and as a key text in the development of modern thought. Our focus will be on the concept of the Mosaic Law and how that law was understood and interpreted in antiquity and modernity. In conjunction with Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus we will engage three modern texts, each of which is a classic within its discipline: Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" and Douglas's "Purity and Danger." Each of these texts has had profound influence on contemporary thought. We will also study contemporary responses to these texts.

Texts: The Hebrew Bible, Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.

Particulars: 1) a 2-3 page response to the assigned readings, due each week 2) a 20 page research paper due at the end of the course 3) a brief presentation of your research to the class.

CPLT 751 003 Existentialism, Classic Texts

Flynn
Tu 1-4
[Crosslisted with PHIL 789]

Content: The existentialist movement was one of the major philosophical events of the 20th century. Its effects continue to be felt in philosophical, social scientific and artistic circles to this day. By a careful reading and discussion of seminal texts by a number of major existentialist philosophers we shall try to analyze and assess the basic theses and themes of this "school" that was by definition not one.

Texts: Essays and excerpts from Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, José Ortega y Gasset, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. We shall also consider uses of existentialist concepts and arguments by current philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Tom Nagel.

Particulars: Seminar format. Each student will be expected to defend orally a seminar paper prepared and submitted in advance as well as to answer questions raised by the other seminarists regarding these papers via LearnLink (the campus electronic computer network). A term essay of moderate length will be required.

CPLT 751 004 Post Modernity & the Post-Modern Plato

Corrigan
Tu 9-12
[Crosslisted with ILA 790]

Content: The major aims of this course are:1) to provide students with an in-depth critical understanding of the importance- positive, negative,or neutral- of various notions of Platonism in some seminal modern to postmodern thinkers from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to Derrida, Barthes, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard, Heidegger, Levinas, Butler, Kristeva etc.; 2) to give a useful sketch of various Platonisms in the making of Modernity generally; and 3) to give students the opportunity to read 2 dialogues, the Symposium and Phaedrus, against the background of the Republic, in a critical open-ended way with a view to uncovering, if possible, a much more "Postmodern Plato" than is usually accepted or at least a Plato with some complex resonance for the bewildering variety of Postmodern Platonisms available to the unsuspecting student.

CPLT 751 005 Theories of Subjectivity

Nouvet and Judovitz
Tu 1-4
[Crosslisted with FREN 770]

Content: This course will examine two seminal moments in the "invention" and consolidation of modern notions of subjectivity. The first involves the elaboration of rational consciousness in Descartes as a foundational moment for the development of modern metaphysics. The relation of subjectivity to representation, the mind-body dualism, and the emergence of the passions will be at issue, along with attendant philosophical critiques by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, and Irigaray,. The second involves the emergence of the unconscious and the elaboration of notions of affect whose expression tests the limits of both body and speech in the works of Freud, Lyotard, and Lacan. Starting with an exploration of gestural excess in hysteria, it will go on to examine how affect strains the limits of articulation in terms of its muteness as communicative meaning and its tonal inflections.

CPLT 751 006 Travel Theory: Cultural Studies

Karp
M 4-7
[Crosslisted with ILA 790, ANT 585]

Content: Cultural Studies is a way of examining the world as well as a set of specific concepts whose use varies according to the different national traditions out of which cultural studies emerged and against which it often writes. This course examines cultural studies in three different contexts: (1) English Cultural Studies, especially the competing perspectives associated with Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall, (2) American Cultural Studies and the tension between anthropological approaches such as the New Historicism and literary approaches characteristic of American Studies, and (3) writing of third world scholars who are not part of the cultural studies canon, but whose perspectives are derived from their location on the periphery of capitalist expansion and across the divide between the colonial and the postcolonial periods, such as African philosophers and the Subaltern Studies group in India.

Texts: Chaterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments; Greenblatt, Stephen, Learning to Curse; Guha and Spivak (eds.) Selected Subaltern Studies Morley and Chen (eds.); Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common; Mudimbe, V.Y., The Surreptitious Speech; Tomlinson, John, Cultural Imperialism; Turner, Graeham, British Cultural Studies Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature; Willis, Paul, Learning to Labour.

CPLT 752 000 Metaphysics, Culture and History: Vico's New Science

Verene and Branham
W 1-4
[Crosslisted with PHIL 789]

Content: Vico’s New Science. What is the relation of metaphysics and history? What is the difference between truth as made and truth as discovered? In what sense is there a natural law that develops within the world of nations? What are the principles of Humanity within the great city of the human race? Vico is commonly regarded as the founder of the philosophy of history. In addition to his conception of historical cycles, his conceptions of language, myth, poetics, and politics have become themes in recent thought. Vico has entered Gadamer’s Truth and Method (esp. pt. 1), Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and Habermas’s Theory and Practice. This seminar is a section-by-section study of Vico’s New Science as a source for the problems of modern philosophy and as influenced by the questions of the ancients, especially the Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics. Special attention will be given to Vico’s classical sources. Karl-Otto Apel called Vico “the Owl of Minerva (Hegel) of Italian Humanism.” Cassirer called him the “real discoverer of the myth.” James Joyce said: “My imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.” All the fundamental questions of philosophy will be discussed—knowledge and the real, human nature, memory and imagination, the nation, providence and prudence, the cycles of history, truth and certainty. The seminar is a study both of Vico’s major work and of these questions themselves. As Michelet said: “All the giants of criticism are contained, with room to spare, in the little pandemonium of the New Science.”

Texts: Vico, The New Science.

Particulars: Seminar discussion and final paper.

CPLT 752 003 The 18th c. Novel and 'Le Monde'

Bennington
Th 1-4
[Crosslisted with FREN 730]

Content: Monde et roman au XVIIIe siècle The course will explore the 18th-century French novel, and more especially one of its organizing figures, that of ‘le monde’. Taking a broadly ‘political’ approach, we shall attempt to reconstruct the inner logic and dynamic of ‘le monde’, and examine the effects of its exposure at its edges to its various others.

Texts: Texts to be read will include Les lettres persanes, Le paysan parvenu, Les égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, Julie ou la nouvelle Heloïse (extracts), Jacques le fataliste, and Les liaisons dangereuses. Formal features of these novels will be related to the underlying political thematic.

CPLT 752 001 Tormented Couplings: France and Algeria

Loichot
W 1-4
[Crosslisted with FREN 785]

Content: The unspeakable political relationship between France and Algeria has found frequent literary expression in the metaphor of coupling, whether nuanced as familial, amorous, perverse, or worse. In this course, we reflect on this recurring metaphor. Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, and Frantz Fanon extend the coupling metaphor into ideas of offspring, ranging from the monstrous to the beautiful, from damaged family to orphaned child. These writers explode the colonialist notion that "civilized" Europe stands as a strict parent to childlike colonies in need of knowing upbringing. Narratively, motherless or fatherless characters (e.g. in Djebar and Camus, respectively) sound out the loss and fragmentation of a political, colonial situation. Metaphorical sexual encounter also engenders hybrid linguistic children. Nation, bodies, and language are forced into troubled unions. Derrida's notion of "Nostalgérie" and Cixous' "inséparabe" suffer an inextricable pain, like Camus' imagined body: "j'ai mal à l'Algérie comme on a mal aux poumons." This course will question the allure and necessity of coupling and familial metaphors in the literary endeavor to approach, differ, obliterate, denounce or sublimate the violent, political, colonial, or postcolonial encounter between two nations. Particulars: One response paper, one presentation, one final paper. The class will be taught in French. Most readings will also be available in English. Students from departments other than French who have advanced reading and comprehension knowledge of French are encouraged to enroll. They will be able to intervene in class discussions, deliver their presentation and write their papers in English if they wish.

Texts: Narrative treatments of the French-Algerian encounter: Camus, Le Premier homme; Cixous, "Pieds nus"; Dib, La Grande maison; Djaout, Chercheurs d'os; Djebar, La Femme sans sépulture; Genet, Les Paravents. Theory: Derrida, Monolinguisme de l'autre; Fanon, L'An cinq de la révolution algérienne; Khatibi, Amour bilingue; Stora, La Gangrène et l'oubli. Film: Lakhdar-Hamina, Chronicle of the Years of Embers; and Pontercorvo, La Bataille d'Alger.

CPLT 752 002 Freedom of Verse: Lyric, Form & History

Good
Tu 1-4
[Crosslisted with SPAN 560]

Content: Free verse was once a topic as controversial as war, but today it has been largely relegated to a yesteryear of formalist literary criticism. This seminar will take up free verse as an anachronistic, but oddly provocative, lens with which to explore questions of genre, lyric, form, comparative literary/linguistic history and “traumatic modernity.” Our primary reading context will be poetry of Latin American Modernism (Modernismo and Vanguardia) viewed through its interrelations with North American and European poetry during this period, but we will also explore more broadly the historical development of European poetic and lyrical theory in order to complicate the usual assumptions about what free verse is and when it appears as an “event.” We will consider free verse in both its visual and metrical dispositions, looking at it as a problem of rhetoric/convention as well as materiality/technology, thereby relating it to broader conceptions of literature. Finally, but perhaps most centrally, we will be especially interested in the way so many Modernist contexts of free verse poetry and theory are unusually haunted by the specters of other languages. We will ask what relation the problem of linguistic/literary alterity might have to questions of the relation between free verse, form and history in the Modernist context, and particularly in the relation between Latin American writers and the rest of the world.

Texts: We will pay particular attention to the poetry of Lugones, López Velarde, Borges, Vallejo, Huidobro and Villaurrutia, although our discussions will treat many other figures within and beyond the Latin American context. Other readings will include theories of poetry and lyric (de Man, Bakhtin, Pound, Eliot, Paz, Sucre and many others); studies of free verse and poetic form (Hartman, Paradiso, Beyers and others); and recent theoretical formulations linking literature, trauma and history.

Particulars: One class presentation and a final exam or paper.

CPLT 760 00 Global Cultures and the Future of the Humanities

Epstein
W 4-7
[Crosslisted with RUSS 550, ILA 790]

Content: This course will explore the role and changing paradigms of the humanities in the 20th and 21st cc. (mostly literary and cultural studies, philosophy and linguistics). Emphasis will be placed on contemporary challenges to the very concept of the humanities from various theoretical perspectives, such as the poststructuralist notion of "the death of the human" and visions of the "posthuman" age governed by thinking machines and artificial intelligence. The course will examine how new informational technologies radically change, both in a defiant and enhancing manner, the profession of the humanist, the traditional concepts of text and knowledge, the methods of scholarship, and the ethos of the intellectual community. We will also discuss the issues of creativity as they pertain to the development of new ideas in the humanities and the change of scholarly paradigms. Finally, we shall outline the prospects for the new intellectual technologies necessary for the survival and enhancement of humanistic professions in the 21st century.

Texts: Readings will includes chapters from the following books: Cassirer, Ernst. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. Hayles, N. Katherine. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetrics, Literature, and Informatics Hofstadter, Douglas R., and Dennett, Daniel C. The Mind's I. Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. Toronto, New York et al.: Bantam Books, 1998. Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York et al.: Penguin Books, 1999. Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Philosophy in Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenges to Western Thought. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Berry, Ellen, and Epstein, Mikhail. Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication.

Particulars: Class attendance and participation (40%), oral presentations (20%), term paper (40%).

CPLT 797R 00P Directed Readings

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

CPLT 799R 00P 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 2003 CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories Caruth Th 1-4 [Crosslisted with ENG 780] Content: An introduction to literary theoretical thinking, focusing on twentieth century structuralism, post-structuralism and contemporary theory. CPLT 751 000 Blanchot Robbins M 1-4 [Crosslisted with FR 780] Content: This course studies key texts by Maurice Blanchot, whose works interrogate the very conditions of literature and literary criticism. Many of Blanchot's critical essays take their starting point in a pragmatic question specific to the interpretation of a particular writer and open up to problems that concern ontology, ethics, and the whole of existence as such. Blanchot thematizes the relationship to alterity in terms of writing, the neutral, death, and the disaster. Moreover, he gains access to these alterities within an experience he calls "literature," providing along the way a distinctive "phenomenology" of reading. Focus will be on Blanchot's critical essays, with some attention to the narrative prose. CPLT 751 001 Foucault and Christianity Jordan W 9:30-12:30 [Crosslisted with RLTS 750F] Content: Michel Foucault’s later writing is uncannily pertinent to Christianity—not only in being about it or around it, but in posing new questions or possibilities for it. This seminar will examine the double pertinence by reading some of Foucault’s major works in connection with his lesser or occasional pieces that touch on religion in general or Christianity in particular. We will be concerned to ask not only what Foucault thinks about Christianity, but also how far his thinking might be determined by a certain relation to it. Texts: The readings will include Foucault’s “Discourse on Language” (“L’ordre du discours”), Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality 1, and the selections in Jeremy Carrette’s Michel Foucault: Religion and Culture among others. Particulars: Members of the seminar will be expected to read the assigned texts carefully and to discuss them constructively. They will be asked to present three or four short interpretive exercises to the seminar and then to write a final paper of 15-20 pages. CPLT 751 002 Approaches to Bible & Law: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Anthropology Goldman M 1-4 [Crosslisted with MES 570R] Content: In this seminar, we will study the first section of the Hebrew Bible, the Five Books of Moses, as both a religious document and as a key text in the development of modern thought. Our focus will be on the concept of the Mosaic Law and how that law was understood and interpreted in antiquity and modernity. In conjunction with Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus we will engage three modern texts, each of which is a classic within its discipline: Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" and Douglas's "Purity and Danger." Each of these texts has had profound influence on contemporary thought. We will also study contemporary responses to these texts. Texts: The Hebrew Bible, Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. Particulars: 1) a 2-3 page response to the assigned readings, due each week 2) a 20 page research paper due at the end of the course 3) a brief presentation of your research to the class. CPLT 751 003 Existentialism, Classic Texts Flynn Tu 1-4 [Crosslisted with PHIL 789] Content: The existentialist movement was one of the major philosophical events of the 20th century. Its effects continue to be felt in philosophical, social scientific and artistic circles to this day. By a careful reading and discussion of seminal texts by a number of major existentialist philosophers we shall try to analyze and assess the basic theses and themes of this "school" that was by definition not one. Texts: Essays and excerpts from Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, José Ortega y Gasset, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. We shall also consider uses of existentialist concepts and arguments by current philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Tom Nagel. Particulars: Seminar format. Each student will be expected to defend orally a seminar paper prepared and submitted in advance as well as to answer questions raised by the other seminarists regarding these papers via LearnLink (the campus electronic computer network). A term essay of moderate length will be required. CPLT 751 004 Post Modernity & the Post-Modern Plato Corrigan Tu 9-12 [Crosslisted with ILA 790] Content: The major aims of this course are:1) to provide students with an in-depth critical understanding of the importance- positive, negative,or neutral- of various notions of Platonism in some seminal modern to postmodern thinkers from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to Derrida, Barthes, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard, Heidegger, Levinas, Butler, Kristeva etc.; 2) to give a useful sketch of various Platonisms in the making of Modernity generally; and 3) to give students the opportunity to read 2 dialogues, the Symposium and Phaedrus, against the background of the Republic, in a critical open-ended way with a view to uncovering, if possible, a much more "Postmodern Plato" than is usually accepted or at least a Plato with some complex resonance for the bewildering variety of Postmodern Platonisms available to the unsuspecting student. CPLT 751 005 Theories of Subjectivity Nouvet and Judovitz Tu 1-4 [Crosslisted with FREN 770] Content: This course will examine two seminal moments in the "invention" and consolidation of modern notions of subjectivity. The first involves the elaboration of rational consciousness in Descartes as a foundational moment for the development of modern metaphysics. The relation of subjectivity to representation, the mind-body dualism, and the emergence of the passions will be at issue, along with attendant philosophical critiques by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, and Irigaray,. The second involves the emergence of the unconscious and the elaboration of notions of affect whose expression tests the limits of both body and speech in the works of Freud, Lyotard, and Lacan. Starting with an exploration of gestural excess in hysteria, it will go on to examine how affect strains the limits of articulation in terms of its muteness as communicative meaning and its tonal inflections. CPLT 751 006 Travel Theory: Cultural Studies Karp M 4-7 [Crosslisted with ILA 790, ANT 585] Content: Cultural Studies is a way of examining the world as well as a set of specific concepts whose use varies according to the different national traditions out of which cultural studies emerged and against which it often writes. This course examines cultural studies in three different contexts: (1) English Cultural Studies, especially the competing perspectives associated with Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall, (2) American Cultural Studies and the tension between anthropological approaches such as the New Historicism and literary approaches characteristic of American Studies, and (3) writing of third world scholars who are not part of the cultural studies canon, but whose perspectives are derived from their location on the periphery of capitalist expansion and across the divide between the colonial and the postcolonial periods, such as African philosophers and the Subaltern Studies group in India. Texts: Chaterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments; Greenblatt, Stephen, Learning to Curse; Guha and Spivak (eds.) Selected Subaltern Studies Morley and Chen (eds.); Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common; Mudimbe, V.Y., The Surreptitious Speech; Tomlinson, John, Cultural Imperialism; Turner, Graeham, British Cultural Studies Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature; Willis, Paul, Learning to Labour. CPLT 752 000 Metaphysics, Culture and History: Vico's New Science Verene and Branham W 1-4 [Crosslisted with PHIL 789] Content: Vico’s New Science. What is the relation of metaphysics and history? What is the difference between truth as made and truth as discovered? In what sense is there a natural law that develops within the world of nations? What are the principles of Humanity within the great city of the human race? Vico is commonly regarded as the founder of the philosophy of history. In addition to his conception of historical cycles, his conceptions of language, myth, poetics, and politics have become themes in recent thought. Vico has entered Gadamer’s Truth and Method (esp. pt. 1), Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and Habermas’s Theory and Practice. This seminar is a section-by-section study of Vico’s New Science as a source for the problems of modern philosophy and as influenced by the questions of the ancients, especially the Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics. Special attention will be given to Vico’s classical sources. Karl-Otto Apel called Vico “the Owl of Minerva (Hegel) of Italian Humanism.” Cassirer called him the “real discoverer of the myth.” James Joyce said: “My imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.” All the fundamental questions of philosophy will be discussed—knowledge and the real, human nature, memory and imagination, the nation, providence and prudence, the cycles of history, truth and certainty. The seminar is a study both of Vico’s major work and of these questions themselves. As Michelet said: “All the giants of criticism are contained, with room to spare, in the little pandemonium of the New Science.” Texts: Vico, The New Science. Particulars: Seminar discussion and final paper. CPLT 752 003 The 18th c. Novel and 'Le Monde' Bennington Th 1-4 [Crosslisted with FREN 730] Content: Monde et roman au XVIIIe siècle The course will explore the 18th-century French novel, and more especially one of its organizing figures, that of ‘le monde’. Taking a broadly ‘political’ approach, we shall attempt to reconstruct the inner logic and dynamic of ‘le monde’, and examine the effects of its exposure at its edges to its various others. Texts: Texts to be read will include Les lettres persanes, Le paysan parvenu, Les égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, Julie ou la nouvelle Heloïse (extracts), Jacques le fataliste, and Les liaisons dangereuses. Formal features of these novels will be related to the underlying political thematic. CPLT 752 001 Tormented Couplings: France and Algeria Loichot W 1-4 [Crosslisted with FREN 785] Content: The unspeakable political relationship between France and Algeria has found frequent literary expression in the metaphor of coupling, whether nuanced as familial, amorous, perverse, or worse. In this course, we reflect on this recurring metaphor. Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, and Frantz Fanon extend the coupling metaphor into ideas of offspring, ranging from the monstrous to the beautiful, from damaged family to orphaned child. These writers explode the colonialist notion that "civilized" Europe stands as a strict parent to childlike colonies in need of knowing upbringing. Narratively, motherless or fatherless characters (e.g. in Djebar and Camus, respectively) sound out the loss and fragmentation of a political, colonial situation. Metaphorical sexual encounter also engenders hybrid linguistic children. Nation, bodies, and language are forced into troubled unions. Derrida's notion of "Nostalgérie" and Cixous' "inséparabe" suffer an inextricable pain, like Camus' imagined body: "j'ai mal à l'Algérie comme on a mal aux poumons." This course will question the allure and necessity of coupling and familial metaphors in the literary endeavor to approach, differ, obliterate, denounce or sublimate the violent, political, colonial, or postcolonial encounter between two nations. Particulars: One response paper, one presentation, one final paper. The class will be taught in French. Most readings will also be available in English. Students from departments other than French who have advanced reading and comprehension knowledge of French are encouraged to enroll. They will be able to intervene in class discussions, deliver their presentation and write their papers in English if they wish. Texts: Narrative treatments of the French-Algerian encounter: Camus, Le Premier homme; Cixous, "Pieds nus"; Dib, La Grande maison; Djaout, Chercheurs d'os; Djebar, La Femme sans sépulture; Genet, Les Paravents. Theory: Derrida, Monolinguisme de l'autre; Fanon, L'An cinq de la révolution algérienne; Khatibi, Amour bilingue; Stora, La Gangrène et l'oubli. Film: Lakhdar-Hamina, Chronicle of the Years of Embers; and Pontercorvo, La Bataille d'Alger. CPLT 752 002 Freedom of Verse: Lyric, Form & History Good Tu 1-4 [Crosslisted with SPAN 560] Content: Free verse was once a topic as controversial as war, but today it has been largely relegated to a yesteryear of formalist literary criticism. This seminar will take up free verse as an anachronistic, but oddly provocative, lens with which to explore questions of genre, lyric, form, comparative literary/linguistic history and “traumatic modernity.” Our primary reading context will be poetry of Latin American Modernism (Modernismo and Vanguardia) viewed through its interrelations with North American and European poetry during this period, but we will also explore more broadly the historical development of European poetic and lyrical theory in order to complicate the usual assumptions about what free verse is and when it appears as an “event.” We will consider free verse in both its visual and metrical dispositions, looking at it as a problem of rhetoric/convention as well as materiality/technology, thereby relating it to broader conceptions of literature. Finally, but perhaps most centrally, we will be especially interested in the way so many Modernist contexts of free verse poetry and theory are unusually haunted by the specters of other languages. We will ask what relation the problem of linguistic/literary alterity might have to questions of the relation between free verse, form and history in the Modernist context, and particularly in the relation between Latin American writers and the rest of the world. Texts: We will pay particular attention to the poetry of Lugones, López Velarde, Borges, Vallejo, Huidobro and Villaurrutia, although our discussions will treat many other figures within and beyond the Latin American context. Other readings will include theories of poetry and lyric (de Man, Bakhtin, Pound, Eliot, Paz, Sucre and many others); studies of free verse and poetic form (Hartman, Paradiso, Beyers and others); and recent theoretical formulations linking literature, trauma and history. Particulars: One class presentation and a final exam or paper. CPLT 760 00 Global Cultures and the Future of the Humanities Epstein W 4-7 [Crosslisted with RUSS 550, ILA 790] Content: This course will explore the role and changing paradigms of the humanities in the 20th and 21st cc. (mostly literary and cultural studies, philosophy and linguistics). Emphasis will be placed on contemporary challenges to the very concept of the humanities from various theoretical perspectives, such as the poststructuralist notion of "the death of the human" and visions of the "posthuman" age governed by thinking machines and artificial intelligence. The course will examine how new informational technologies radically change, both in a defiant and enhancing manner, the profession of the humanist, the traditional concepts of text and knowledge, the methods of scholarship, and the ethos of the intellectual community. We will also discuss the issues of creativity as they pertain to the development of new ideas in the humanities and the change of scholarly paradigms. Finally, we shall outline the prospects for the new intellectual technologies necessary for the survival and enhancement of humanistic professions in the 21st century. Texts: Readings will includes chapters from the following books: Cassirer, Ernst. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. Hayles, N. Katherine. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetrics, Literature, and Informatics Hofstadter, Douglas R., and Dennett, Daniel C. The Mind's I. Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. Toronto, New York et al.: Bantam Books, 1998. Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York et al.: Penguin Books, 1999. Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Philosophy in Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenges to Western Thought. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Berry, Ellen, and Epstein, Mikhail. Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication. Particulars: Class attendance and participation (40%), oral presentations (20%), term paper (40%). CPLT 797R 00P Directed Readings By permission of the Director. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information. CPLT 799R 00P Dissertation Research By permission of the Director. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information.

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings Fall 2003

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2003