Emory | Comp Lit | Graduate Program

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2004

CPLT 550 000 Western & Russian Postmodernism

Epstein
Tu 4-6:30
Max 2
[Crosslisted with RUSS 485 and ILA 790]

Content: This course offers a comparative perspective on postmodernism in Western and Russian cultures (literature, art, religion, and cultural theory). The course will discuss the general concept of postmodernism as shaped by American, French and Russian theorists and will bring together various disciplinary perspectives on the questions of contemporary historical orientation and self-definition: How to characterize our
cultural period and its relation to the legacy of Modernity and Modernism? How the beginning of the new century can be situated in the history of culture? How the traditional views on individuality, authorship, truth, and reality are reshaped in postmodern theories and practices? And finally: what comes after this? post-?? The
Russian version of postmodernism will contribute essentially to our understanding of this global and multicultural phenomenon. The course will be taught in ENGLISH; knowledge of Russian is not required. Undergraduate students will need permission of the instructor.

Particulars: Class attendance and participation, oral presentations,
term paper.

CPLT 551 000 Discourse of the Passion in the Classical Period

Judovitz
Tu 1-4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with FREN 540]

Content: Merleau-Ponty commented that, ”Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words.” This is to suggest that the signs associated with emotion and its expression through behavior will vary both historically and culturally. In this course, we will examine the discourse of the passions in 17-th Century French Literature in order analyze the specific patterning of the body and world in emotion. We will begin with Pascal’s observation that, “The heart has reasons, that reason does not know,” in order to inquire into the paradoxes that subtend the elaboration of the passions in a culture that upholds the mastery of reason and the regulatory force of social norms. We will ask how love and self-love are depicted, and whether they are communicable or incommunicable? Why is love associated with monstrosity and why must it end in tragedy? Can the expression of emotions be simulated or counterfeit? The guiding question is how the representation of the passions challenges the limits of not just classical discourse, but discursivity in general.

Text: Guilleragues, Lettres portugaises; Racine, Phedre; Mme de Lafayette, “La Princesse de Montpensier”; La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (selections); Moliere, Tartuffe and theoretical texts by Sartre, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Kamuf, Peyre, Barthes, Lyotard, etc., available on on-line reserves.

CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories

Bennington
Th 1-4
[Crosslisted with FREN 780]

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

CPLT 751 002 Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

Felman
M 4-7
Max 4
[Crosslisted with ENG 789 and FREN 770]

Content: The course will look at various instances of testimony (literary, historical, legal, poetical, dramatic, political and psychoanalytic), as part of a general investigation of memory and trauma through narratives of individual and collective limit-experiences. In analyzing artís relation both to death and to survival, the course will probe (in texts and films) the limits of what can be said and the limits of representation in the face of events whose reality unsettles common sense, defies imagination and resists assimilation. Topics include the tension between violence and speech, truth and denial, and the concrete interrelations between language, silence, mourning, injury, identity, and cross-cultural exchanges.

Texts: Authors discussed and read (in relation to events of judgment and forgiveness) include: Plato; Oscar Wilde; E.M. Forster; Nella Larsen; Emile Zola; Hannah Arendt; Spinoza; Jacques Lacan. Secondary literature, critical and theoretical.

Particulars: two short papers in the course of the semester; weekly reading responses; oral presentations and ongoing active participation; viewing of films as part of seminar preparation, in complement and as a punctuation (or background)to an intensive weekly reading of specific literary and theoretical texts.

CPLT 751 003 The Limit Experience: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille

Robbins
W 1-4
Max 15
[Crosslisted with REL]

Content:

Texts:

Particulars:

CPLT 751 004 Introduction to Psychoanalytic Studies

Marder/Seelig
Th 9-12
Max 11
[Crosslisted with PSP 760 and 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 751 001 Foucault: The Order of Things

Flynn
Tu 1-4
Max 4
[Crosslisted with PHIL 789]

Content: A close reading of what is arguably Michel Foucault's major work and one both honored and criticized as the manifesto for the French Structuralist Movement in the 1960s.

Text: Michel Foucault,THE ORDER OF THINGS in addition to material on
electronic reserve.

Particulars: In addition to a careful reading and discussion of the text, each seminarist will be required to submit and defend orally a paper on an aspect of the book and to respond to questions posed on LearnLink regarding the essay prior to the seminar meeting in which it is discussed. A final essay is required as well.

CPLT 751 00P Literature, Politics, and the Woman Writer: Contemporary Novelists

Brownley
M 4-7
Max 4
[Crosslisted with WS 730R and ENG 789]

Content: A study of selected novels on political topics by contemporary women writers. The focus will be on the political-personal intersections developed in these fictions, with their considerations of reinscriptions of past history, postcolonial African and Caribbean politics, utopias and dystopias, and the ramifications of political activism. The relationships between literary and polemical discourses will be a major concern, as will feminist theory relevant to the writers covered.

Text: Specific works assigned will depend on what is available in paperback next semester, but the following writers will probably be covered: Toni Morrison; Doris Lessing; Paule Marshall; Margaret Atwood; Jeanette Winterson; Julia Alvarez; Nadine Gordimer; Christa Wolf; Maryse Condé.

Particulars: short paper; 2 class facilitations; final paper.

CPLT 751 000 Settling Accounts: Guilt and Narrative

Lang
F 1-4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with FREN 775]

Content: What is guilt? how is it intimately associated with the impulse to narrate? Are autobiographical narratives somehow inevitably “confessions” of guilt, and how is guilt symbolized in them? These are questions to be explored in this course, through the study of theoretical writings on the origins of the concept and experience of guilt as well as the autobiographies of three twentieth-century authors: Gide, Sartre, and Robbe-Grillet.

Texts: Readings from Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil; Freud, Totem and Taboo; Reik, Myth and Guilt; Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals; Foucault, Technologies of the Self; Gide, Si le grain ne meurt; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, L'Etre et le néant, Les mots; Robbe-Grillet, Romanesques.

Particulars: 1 class presentation, 1 paper.

CPLT 752 000 The Plantation Americas

Loichot
W 1-4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with FREN 785R]

Content: This course will explore how the Plantation machine produced repeating patterns in different parts of the Americas. We will look particularly at textual and cultural productions of the Caribbean and the Plantation South of the United States. Among the topics we will consider: family structures, including perversions of geneology, inversions of naming process; challenging authorship of texts; boundless proliferating narratives; creolized language; predominance of the oral collective voice; exploded notions of space; hybrid forms of temporality.

Texts: Fictional and theoretical readings from Antonio Benítez-Rojo, E.K. Brathwaite, Maryse Condé, J. Michael Dash, William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Saint-John-Perse, Derek Walcott, among others.

Particulars: The course is taught in English. Reading knowledge of French recommended but not required.

CPLT 752 002 Plato: love, art and critical theory

Glazov-Corrigan/Corrigan
Th 9-12
Max 6
[Crosslisted with ILA 790]

Content: This course will involve: a) a close reading of some of Plato's major dialogues on the questions , principally, of love, art, friendship,
city, soul, body, writing and discourse, namely, the Lysis, Phaedo,
Republic, Symposium, and Phaedrus, and b) the relation of readings of
primary texts to modern and contemporary critical theory from Nietzsche and Freud to Derrida, Gadamer, Kristeva, Lacan, and others. The course will focus primarily on questions of love and art from ancient to contemporary times.

CPLT 752 001 Holocaust Memoirs

Lipstadt/Bammer
W 4-7
Max 5
[Crosslisted with ILA 790 and JS 730]

Content: Taking Holocaust memoirs as the material focus of our inquiry, we will examine what it means for a text about the Holocaust to be both a historical document and narrative creation at the same time. Does it make a difference whether we read a particular text as "history" or as "literature"? We will explore questions of evidence and truth; the relationship between "truth," "reality" and "realism"; and the tension between expertise and memory.

Texts: Helen Epstein, Where She Came From; Alice Kaplan, French Lessons; Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair; Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, vol. 1 and 2; Ruth Kluger, Still Alive; Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat; Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, vol. 1 and 2.

Particulars: In addition to the readings, we will view a select number of films.

CPLT 752 01P Philosophy of Technology

Johnston
Th 10-1
Max 7
[Crosslisted with ENG 789]

Content: : Is human being technological in its essence? With this question in mind, we will first review of some of the primary positions and inherited frames for ascertaining the significance of technology in the West, from Plato and Aristotle on techne to Heidegger’s “questioning of technics,” Walter Benjamin’s “shock experience” [Chockerlebnis], writing as technology in Jacques Derrida and Jack Goody, and Bernard Stiegler on the repression of technology within philosophy. We will then examine a series of contemporary issues and themes: Robert Lilienfeld on systems thinking, Kittler on information theory, Gilles Deleuze on the cinematic and digital image, Baudrillard on simulacra, Virilio on modern war, Daniel Dennett on intentional systems and his assertion that research in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life are new ways of “doing philosophy,” and Jay David Bolter on word and image in computer technology. Finally, we will consider the challenges to philosophy of mind and cognitive science posed by the “biotechnological merger with new machines” as framed by Andy Clark in his recent book Natural-Born Cyborgs and the challenges to the definition of the human posed by biotech engineering as framed by Francis Fukiyama in Our Posthuman Future.

Text: The Philosophy of Technology, ed. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek; Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time; a packet of xeroxed selections by Benjamin, Heidegger, Lilienfeld, Deleuze; Derrida, Goody, Baudrillard, Virilio, Kittler, Dennett, Bolter and others. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence; Francis Fukiyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnolgy Revolution.

Particulars: an oral report and seminar paper.

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 2004 CPLT 550 000 Western & Russian Postmodernism Epstein Tu 4-6:30 Max 2 [Crosslisted with RUSS 485 and ILA 790] Content: This course offers a comparative perspective on postmodernism in Western and Russian cultures (literature, art, religion, and cultural theory). The course will discuss the general concept of postmodernism as shaped by American, French and Russian theorists and will bring together various disciplinary perspectives on the questions of contemporary historical orientation and self-definition: How to characterize our cultural period and its relation to the legacy of Modernity and Modernism? How the beginning of the new century can be situated in the history of culture? How the traditional views on individuality, authorship, truth, and reality are reshaped in postmodern theories and practices? And finally: what comes after this? post-?? The Russian version of postmodernism will contribute essentially to our understanding of this global and multicultural phenomenon. The course will be taught in ENGLISH; knowledge of Russian is not required. Undergraduate students will need permission of the instructor. Particulars: Class attendance and participation, oral presentations, term paper. CPLT 551 000 Discourse of the Passion in the Classical Period Judovitz Tu 1-4 Max 5 [Crosslisted with FREN 540] Content: Merleau-Ponty commented that, ”Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words.” This is to suggest that the signs associated with emotion and its expression through behavior will vary both historically and culturally. In this course, we will examine the discourse of the passions in 17-th Century French Literature in order analyze the specific patterning of the body and world in emotion. We will begin with Pascal’s observation that, “The heart has reasons, that reason does not know,” in order to inquire into the paradoxes that subtend the elaboration of the passions in a culture that upholds the mastery of reason and the regulatory force of social norms. We will ask how love and self-love are depicted, and whether they are communicable or incommunicable? Why is love associated with monstrosity and why must it end in tragedy? Can the expression of emotions be simulated or counterfeit? The guiding question is how the representation of the passions challenges the limits of not just classical discourse, but discursivity in general. Text: Guilleragues, Lettres portugaises; Racine, Phedre; Mme de Lafayette, “La Princesse de Montpensier”; La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (selections); Moliere, Tartuffe and theoretical texts by Sartre, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Kamuf, Peyre, Barthes, Lyotard, etc., available on on-line reserves. CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories Bennington Th 1-4 [Crosslisted with FREN 780] Content: An introduction to literary theoretical thinking, focusing on twentieth century structuralism, post-structuralism and contemporary theory. CPLT 751 002 Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History Felman M 4-7 Max 4 [Crosslisted with ENG 789 and FREN 770] Content: The course will look at various instances of testimony (literary, historical, legal, poetical, dramatic, political and psychoanalytic), as part of a general investigation of memory and trauma through narratives of individual and collective limit-experiences. In analyzing artís relation both to death and to survival, the course will probe (in texts and films) the limits of what can be said and the limits of representation in the face of events whose reality unsettles common sense, defies imagination and resists assimilation. Topics include the tension between violence and speech, truth and denial, and the concrete interrelations between language, silence, mourning, injury, identity, and cross-cultural exchanges. Texts: Authors discussed and read (in relation to events of judgment and forgiveness) include: Plato; Oscar Wilde; E.M. Forster; Nella Larsen; Emile Zola; Hannah Arendt; Spinoza; Jacques Lacan. Secondary literature, critical and theoretical. Particulars: two short papers in the course of the semester; weekly reading responses; oral presentations and ongoing active participation; viewing of films as part of seminar preparation, in complement and as a punctuation (or background)to an intensive weekly reading of specific literary and theoretical texts. CPLT 751 003 The Limit Experience: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille Robbins W 1-4 Max 15 [Crosslisted with REL] Content: Texts: Particulars: CPLT 751 004 Introduction to Psychoanalytic Studies Marder/Seelig Th 9-12 Max 11 [Crosslisted with PSP 760 and 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 751 001 Foucault: The Order of Things Flynn Tu 1-4 Max 4 [Crosslisted with PHIL 789] Content: A close reading of what is arguably Michel Foucault's major work and one both honored and criticized as the manifesto for the French Structuralist Movement in the 1960s. Text: Michel Foucault,THE ORDER OF THINGS in addition to material on electronic reserve. Particulars: In addition to a careful reading and discussion of the text, each seminarist will be required to submit and defend orally a paper on an aspect of the book and to respond to questions posed on LearnLink regarding the essay prior to the seminar meeting in which it is discussed. A final essay is required as well. CPLT 751 00P Literature, Politics, and the Woman Writer: Contemporary Novelists Brownley M 4-7 Max 4 [Crosslisted with WS 730R and ENG 789] Content: A study of selected novels on political topics by contemporary women writers. The focus will be on the political-personal intersections developed in these fictions, with their considerations of reinscriptions of past history, postcolonial African and Caribbean politics, utopias and dystopias, and the ramifications of political activism. The relationships between literary and polemical discourses will be a major concern, as will feminist theory relevant to the writers covered. Text: Specific works assigned will depend on what is available in paperback next semester, but the following writers will probably be covered: Toni Morrison; Doris Lessing; Paule Marshall; Margaret Atwood; Jeanette Winterson; Julia Alvarez; Nadine Gordimer; Christa Wolf; Maryse Condé. Particulars: short paper; 2 class facilitations; final paper. CPLT 751 000 Settling Accounts: Guilt and Narrative Lang F 1-4 Max 5 [Crosslisted with FREN 775] Content: What is guilt? how is it intimately associated with the impulse to narrate? Are autobiographical narratives somehow inevitably “confessions” of guilt, and how is guilt symbolized in them? These are questions to be explored in this course, through the study of theoretical writings on the origins of the concept and experience of guilt as well as the autobiographies of three twentieth-century authors: Gide, Sartre, and Robbe-Grillet. Texts: Readings from Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil; Freud, Totem and Taboo; Reik, Myth and Guilt; Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals; Foucault, Technologies of the Self; Gide, Si le grain ne meurt; Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre, L'Etre et le néant, Les mots; Robbe-Grillet, Romanesques. Particulars: 1 class presentation, 1 paper. CPLT 752 000 The Plantation Americas Loichot W 1-4 Max 5 [Crosslisted with FREN 785R] Content: This course will explore how the Plantation machine produced repeating patterns in different parts of the Americas. We will look particularly at textual and cultural productions of the Caribbean and the Plantation South of the United States. Among the topics we will consider: family structures, including perversions of geneology, inversions of naming process; challenging authorship of texts; boundless proliferating narratives; creolized language; predominance of the oral collective voice; exploded notions of space; hybrid forms of temporality. Texts: Fictional and theoretical readings from Antonio Benítez-Rojo, E.K. Brathwaite, Maryse Condé, J. Michael Dash, William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Saint-John-Perse, Derek Walcott, among others. Particulars: The course is taught in English. Reading knowledge of French recommended but not required. CPLT 752 002 Plato: love, art and critical theory Glazov-Corrigan/Corrigan Th 9-12 Max 6 [Crosslisted with ILA 790] Content: This course will involve: a) a close reading of some of Plato's major dialogues on the questions , principally, of love, art, friendship, city, soul, body, writing and discourse, namely, the Lysis, Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, and Phaedrus, and b) the relation of readings of primary texts to modern and contemporary critical theory from Nietzsche and Freud to Derrida, Gadamer, Kristeva, Lacan, and others. The course will focus primarily on questions of love and art from ancient to contemporary times. CPLT 752 001 Holocaust Memoirs Lipstadt/Bammer W 4-7 Max 5 [Crosslisted with ILA 790 and JS 730] Content: Taking Holocaust memoirs as the material focus of our inquiry, we will examine what it means for a text about the Holocaust to be both a historical document and narrative creation at the same time. Does it make a difference whether we read a particular text as "history" or as "literature"? We will explore questions of evidence and truth; the relationship between "truth," "reality" and "realism"; and the tension between expertise and memory. Texts: Helen Epstein, Where She Came From; Alice Kaplan, French Lessons; Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair; Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, vol. 1 and 2; Ruth Kluger, Still Alive; Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat; Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, vol. 1 and 2. Particulars: In addition to the readings, we will view a select number of films. CPLT 752 01P Philosophy of Technology Johnston Th 10-1 Max 7 [Crosslisted with ENG 789] Content: : Is human being technological in its essence? With this question in mind, we will first review of some of the primary positions and inherited frames for ascertaining the significance of technology in the West, from Plato and Aristotle on techne to Heidegger’s “questioning of technics,” Walter Benjamin’s “shock experience” [Chockerlebnis], writing as technology in Jacques Derrida and Jack Goody, and Bernard Stiegler on the repression of technology within philosophy. We will then examine a series of contemporary issues and themes: Robert Lilienfeld on systems thinking, Kittler on information theory, Gilles Deleuze on the cinematic and digital image, Baudrillard on simulacra, Virilio on modern war, Daniel Dennett on intentional systems and his assertion that research in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life are new ways of “doing philosophy,” and Jay David Bolter on word and image in computer technology. Finally, we will consider the challenges to philosophy of mind and cognitive science posed by the “biotechnological merger with new machines” as framed by Andy Clark in his recent book Natural-Born Cyborgs and the challenges to the definition of the human posed by biotech engineering as framed by Francis Fukiyama in Our Posthuman Future. Text: The Philosophy of Technology, ed. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek; Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time; a packet of xeroxed selections by Benjamin, Heidegger, Lilienfeld, Deleuze; Derrida, Goody, Baudrillard, Virilio, Kittler, Dennett, Bolter and others. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence; Francis Fukiyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnolgy Revolution. Particulars: an oral report and seminar paper. 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 2004

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2004