Emory | Comp Lit | Graduate Program

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2005

CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories

Marder
W 1-4
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 770]

Content: An introduction to literary theoretical thinking, focusing on twentieth century structuralism, post-structuralism and contemporary theory. Readings include influential texts by: Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Cixous, Irigaray, de Man and Benjamin.

CPLT 751 Debts of Affect

Nouvet
Tu 7-10
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 780]

Content: "One owes the affect," claims Jean-François Lyotard in one of his most enigmatic phrases. This debt, he adds, cannot be acquitted once and for all, but can only be endlessly recognized in an act of testimony. How can this "debt of affect" be understood? And how does one acquit oneself of it: in a tone, a susceptibility to transmission, an intractable resistance, a work be it philosophical, analytical or literary? To testify to the affect is, for Lyotard, the task of literature which labors to say a "secret affection" that a writer worthy of the name knows to be unsayable, irreducible to articulation. But it is also the task of analysis, which tries to articulate the mute intensity of the affect that it has unleashed. This debt to the affect, it is not just the patient and the writer who must pay it, each in their own way. The analyst too must pay it, especially when s/he begins to write. After confronting the Lyotardian articulation of the problem of affect (the muteness of affect, its radical heterogeneity to articulation, its traumatic temporality, its tonal imprint on articulated discourse, and its transmission) with the psychoanalytic literature on the subject, we will explore the different modes (literary, psychoanalytic and philosophical) of acquitting one's own affective debt.

Texts: Freud, Two Case Histories, selection from The Project; Winnicott, TBA; Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma; Jean-Françoise Lyotard, "Prescription" and "Voix" in Lectures d'Enfance, "Emma" and "La phrase-affect" in Misère de la philosophie; De Quincy, Suspiria Profundis; and Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les diaboliques.

Particulars: One class presentation and one final paper.

CPLT 751 Plantation Americas

Loichot
F 1-4
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 785R and ILA 790]

Content: Martinican writer Édouard Glissant identifies the Plantation as "one of the bellies of the world" ( Poetics of Relation). This course explores how the Plantation machine produced repeating cultural and literary patterns in the Americas in the aftermath of slavery. We will look particularly at textual and cultural productions of the Caribbean . Among the topics we will consider: subversions of genealogy; deviant sexualities; memory and history; challenged authorship of texts; theories of creolization and métissage.

Texts: Readings include works by Antonio Benítez Rojo, E.K. Brathwaite, J. Michael Dash, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Françoise Vergès, and Derek Walcott. Students' research projects will culminate in an analysis of a novel of the Plantation (e.g. Chamoiseau, Condé, Glissant, Faulkner, Morrison, etc.) in light of the seminar’s theoretical readings.

Particulars: One research paper, one oral presentation, active class participation. The course is taught in English.

CPLT 751 Empire: Fiction and Theory

Bahri
2 sections offered: W 1-4 and Th 4-7
Max 2 for each section
[Crosslisted with ENG 789R and ILA 790]

Content: How does the work of empire begin? What are its tools, its theories, and its fictions? Does empire create nervous conditions among the natives? When the empire writes back, what are its major concerns, its favored genres, its aesthetic forms? This course will survey major works in the literature of empire, investigating the following topics: nation, race, gender, trauma, hybridity, and subalternity. Students can also expect discussions on definitions of postcoloniality, the rise of postcolonial studies in the context of economic and cultural globalization, the operation of neo-colonial maneuvers in both spheres, and the intersection of postcolonial discourse with feminism, marxism, and psychoanalytic studies.

Texts: Texts will include significant colonial statements on empire, major works in postcolonial theory, and a selection of fiction from writers originating in postcolonial world.

Particulars: Oral presentation followed by a written report, and a final paper written with an eye toward publication and/or conference presentation. Papers written in this class should demonstrate an understanding of some of the major theoretical debates surrounding postcolonial literature/criticism and bring an interdisciplinary approach to the study of postcolonial texts.

CPLT 751 Precision & Soul: Reading Robert Musil

Aue
Th 4-7
Max 10
[Crosslisted with GER 550]

Content: Although Robert Musil had the option of becoming an engineer and a psychologist, he chose the life of a writer because he believed that fiction, and in particular the form of the novel, allowed him to make the most significant contribultions to coming to terms with a world that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was undergoing radical change. In this course we will examine how he did this by a careful reading of his work focusing on his multifaceted, experimental novel, The Man Without Qualities.

Texts: Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities (2 vols); The Confusions of Young Torless; Posthumous Papers of a Living Author; Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses; Five Women; and Musil Diaries.

CPLT 752 Levinas

Robbins
Th 1-4
Max 8
[Crosslisted with RLR 725L]

Content: This course centers on a reading of Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity. Our reading will be cross-referenced with Levinas's writings from the late forties (Time and the Other, Existents and Existence), and the key philosophical essays, "Philosophy and The Idea of Infinity" (1957), "God and Philosophy" (1975), and "Useless Suffering" (1982). We will attend closely to interpretations of Levinas by Derrida, Blanchot and Lyotard.

Texts: Levinas, Totality and Infinity and Existents and Existence, Time and the Other, and Collected Philosophical Papers; Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics"; and Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation.

CPLT 752 Imperial Spain. Inquisition, Surveillance, and the Question of Literature

Carrión
W 1-4
Max 3
[Crosslisted with SPAN 530]

Content: This course examines the correspondences between the Inquisition, surveillance, and the questions surrounding the formation of literature (as an idea, a practice, and an establishment) in the frame of the first official recognition of Spain as an imperial force. Rather than tracing a parallel history of Empire and the Holy Office, the seminar seeks to tease out the tensions that lead to the canonization of the Spanish Golden Age as the historicized, over-scrutinized, and pro-empire version of the cultural and literary production of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. Topics of discussion: genesis of the Holy Office and its gradual degeneration; staging 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, mimesis; 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 visual 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.

Texts: Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática castellana (Prólogo); Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la lengua (sel.); Juan Luis Vives, Institutio Foemina Christianae (sel.); Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes; Jorge de Montemayor, Los siete libros de la Diana (sel.); Luis de León, La perfecta casada (sel.); Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (sel.); Lucrecia de León, Los sueñons (sel.); Teresa de Jesús, Libro de la vida (sel.); Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache (sel.); Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha and El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros; Félix Lope de Vega, El perro del hortelano and El Otomano famoso; Calderón de la Barca, El médico de su honra; María de Zayas, Desengaños amorosos (sel.)

Films: Teresa de Jesús; Las Pícaras; El pícaro; El rey pasmado; El perro del hortelano; Elizabeth; The Pitt and the Pendulum; Farenheit 451; En tiempos de la Inquisición; and Monty Python's The Spanish Inquisition.

Particulars: Attendance and class participation (45%), class presentations (10%), and one research paper or final exam (45%).

CPLT 753 Literature and Justice

Felman
M 4-7
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 780 and ENG 789]

Content: A study of scenes of judgment in literature and art (narrative tales, theatrical and operatic dramas, poems, prefaces and critical essays) focusing on literature's specific ways of dealing with injustice in various legal, historical, political and artistic circumstances. We will examine both literary and artistic texts and actual trials that invoke the act of justice. Topics under discussion include the contrast and the interrelations between justice, forgiveness, truth, desire, testimony, injury, identity, exile, memory and cross-cultural, border-crossing exchanges.

Texts: Balzac, Selected Stories; Buchner, Danton's Death; Flaubert, Three Tales; Merimée, Carmen; Ibsen, A Doll House and The Wilde Duck; Shaw, Pygmallion and Saint Joan; Anouilh, The Lark; Artaud, Theater and its Double; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway; and additional (correlative secondary) critical and theoretical materials.

Particulars: two papers (distributed over the course of the semester); oral presentations; regular attendance and ongoing participation.

CPLT 753 Semiotics and Poetics

Epstein
Tu 4-7
Max 5
[Crosslisted with ILA 790j and RUSS 797R]

Content: This course is an introduction to the general science of signs which revolutionized many scholarly disciplines of the twentieth century, not only poetics and literary theory, but also philosophy, history, cultural studies, and theories of mythology and ideology. The categories of semiotic analysis, such as "sign," "the signifier," "the signified," "structure" and "function," are indispensable for any contemporary research in the humanities. The course will explore major problems of semiotics and the broad interdisciplinary range of its applications from the foundational conceptions of Charles Pierce and F. de Saussure to the provocative structuralist and poststructuralist writings by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Special attention will be given to semiotic methods emerging from different cultural traditions, including Russian contributions by Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, and Yury Lotman. Students are encouraged to apply semiotic methods to their respective fields of concentration.

Particulars: Class presentations and term 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 2005 CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories Marder W 1-4 Max 8 [Crosslisted with FREN 770] Content: An introduction to literary theoretical thinking, focusing on twentieth century structuralism, post-structuralism and contemporary theory. Readings include influential texts by: Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Cixous, Irigaray, de Man and Benjamin. CPLT 751 Debts of Affect Nouvet Tu 7-10 Max 8 [Crosslisted with FREN 780] Content: "One owes the affect," claims Jean-François Lyotard in one of his most enigmatic phrases. This debt, he adds, cannot be acquitted once and for all, but can only be endlessly recognized in an act of testimony. How can this "debt of affect" be understood? And how does one acquit oneself of it: in a tone, a susceptibility to transmission, an intractable resistance, a work be it philosophical, analytical or literary? To testify to the affect is, for Lyotard, the task of literature which labors to say a "secret affection" that a writer worthy of the name knows to be unsayable, irreducible to articulation. But it is also the task of analysis, which tries to articulate the mute intensity of the affect that it has unleashed. This debt to the affect, it is not just the patient and the writer who must pay it, each in their own way. The analyst too must pay it, especially when s/he begins to write. After confronting the Lyotardian articulation of the problem of affect (the muteness of affect, its radical heterogeneity to articulation, its traumatic temporality, its tonal imprint on articulated discourse, and its transmission) with the psychoanalytic literature on the subject, we will explore the different modes (literary, psychoanalytic and philosophical) of acquitting one's own affective debt. Texts: Freud, Two Case Histories, selection from The Project; Winnicott, TBA; Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma; Jean-Françoise Lyotard, "Prescription" and "Voix" in Lectures d'Enfance, "Emma" and "La phrase-affect" in Misère de la philosophie; De Quincy, Suspiria Profundis; and Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les diaboliques. Particulars: One class presentation and one final paper. CPLT 751 Plantation Americas Loichot F 1-4 Max 8 [Crosslisted with FREN 785R and ILA 790] Content: Martinican writer Édouard Glissant identifies the Plantation as "one of the bellies of the world" ( Poetics of Relation). This course explores how the Plantation machine produced repeating cultural and literary patterns in the Americas in the aftermath of slavery. We will look particularly at textual and cultural productions of the Caribbean . Among the topics we will consider: subversions of genealogy; deviant sexualities; memory and history; challenged authorship of texts; theories of creolization and métissage. Texts: Readings include works by Antonio Benítez Rojo, E.K. Brathwaite, J. Michael Dash, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Françoise Vergès, and Derek Walcott. Students' research projects will culminate in an analysis of a novel of the Plantation (e.g. Chamoiseau, Condé, Glissant, Faulkner, Morrison, etc.) in light of the seminar’s theoretical readings. Particulars: One research paper, one oral presentation, active class participation. The course is taught in English. CPLT 751 Empire: Fiction and Theory Bahri 2 sections offered: W 1-4 and Th 4-7 Max 2 for each section [Crosslisted with ENG 789R and ILA 790] Content: How does the work of empire begin? What are its tools, its theories, and its fictions? Does empire create nervous conditions among the natives? When the empire writes back, what are its major concerns, its favored genres, its aesthetic forms? This course will survey major works in the literature of empire, investigating the following topics: nation, race, gender, trauma, hybridity, and subalternity. Students can also expect discussions on definitions of postcoloniality, the rise of postcolonial studies in the context of economic and cultural globalization, the operation of neo-colonial maneuvers in both spheres, and the intersection of postcolonial discourse with feminism, marxism, and psychoanalytic studies. Texts: Texts will include significant colonial statements on empire, major works in postcolonial theory, and a selection of fiction from writers originating in postcolonial world. Particulars: Oral presentation followed by a written report, and a final paper written with an eye toward publication and/or conference presentation. Papers written in this class should demonstrate an understanding of some of the major theoretical debates surrounding postcolonial literature/criticism and bring an interdisciplinary approach to the study of postcolonial texts. CPLT 751 Precision & Soul: Reading Robert Musil Aue Th 4-7 Max 10 [Crosslisted with GER 550] Content: Although Robert Musil had the option of becoming an engineer and a psychologist, he chose the life of a writer because he believed that fiction, and in particular the form of the novel, allowed him to make the most significant contribultions to coming to terms with a world that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was undergoing radical change. In this course we will examine how he did this by a careful reading of his work focusing on his multifaceted, experimental novel, The Man Without Qualities. Texts: Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities (2 vols); The Confusions of Young Torless; Posthumous Papers of a Living Author; Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses; Five Women; and Musil Diaries. CPLT 752 Levinas Robbins Th 1-4 Max 8 [Crosslisted with RLR 725L] Content: This course centers on a reading of Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity. Our reading will be cross-referenced with Levinas's writings from the late forties (Time and the Other, Existents and Existence), and the key philosophical essays, "Philosophy and The Idea of Infinity" (1957), "God and Philosophy" (1975), and "Useless Suffering" (1982). We will attend closely to interpretations of Levinas by Derrida, Blanchot and Lyotard. Texts: Levinas, Totality and Infinity and Existents and Existence, Time and the Other, and Collected Philosophical Papers; Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics"; and Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation. CPLT 752 Imperial Spain. Inquisition, Surveillance, and the Question of Literature Carrión W 1-4 Max 3 [Crosslisted with SPAN 530] Content: This course examines the correspondences between the Inquisition, surveillance, and the questions surrounding the formation of literature (as an idea, a practice, and an establishment) in the frame of the first official recognition of Spain as an imperial force. Rather than tracing a parallel history of Empire and the Holy Office, the seminar seeks to tease out the tensions that lead to the canonization of the Spanish Golden Age as the historicized, over-scrutinized, and pro-empire version of the cultural and literary production of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. Topics of discussion: genesis of the Holy Office and its gradual degeneration; staging 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, mimesis; 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 visual 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. Texts: Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática castellana (Prólogo); Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la lengua (sel.); Juan Luis Vives, Institutio Foemina Christianae (sel.); Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes; Jorge de Montemayor, Los siete libros de la Diana (sel.); Luis de León, La perfecta casada (sel.); Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (sel.); Lucrecia de León, Los sueñons (sel.); Teresa de Jesús, Libro de la vida (sel.); Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache (sel.); Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha and El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros; Félix Lope de Vega, El perro del hortelano and El Otomano famoso; Calderón de la Barca, El médico de su honra; María de Zayas, Desengaños amorosos (sel.) Films: Teresa de Jesús; Las Pícaras; El pícaro; El rey pasmado; El perro del hortelano; Elizabeth; The Pitt and the Pendulum; Farenheit 451; En tiempos de la Inquisición; and Monty Python's The Spanish Inquisition. Particulars: Attendance and class participation (45%), class presentations (10%), and one research paper or final exam (45%). CPLT 753 Literature and Justice Felman M 4-7 Max 8 [Crosslisted with FREN 780 and ENG 789] Content: A study of scenes of judgment in literature and art (narrative tales, theatrical and operatic dramas, poems, prefaces and critical essays) focusing on literature's specific ways of dealing with injustice in various legal, historical, political and artistic circumstances. We will examine both literary and artistic texts and actual trials that invoke the act of justice. Topics under discussion include the contrast and the interrelations between justice, forgiveness, truth, desire, testimony, injury, identity, exile, memory and cross-cultural, border-crossing exchanges. Texts: Balzac, Selected Stories; Buchner, Danton's Death; Flaubert, Three Tales; Merimée, Carmen; Ibsen, A Doll House and The Wilde Duck; Shaw, Pygmallion and Saint Joan; Anouilh, The Lark; Artaud, Theater and its Double; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway; and additional (correlative secondary) critical and theoretical materials. Particulars: two papers (distributed over the course of the semester); oral presentations; regular attendance and ongoing participation. CPLT 753 Semiotics and Poetics Epstein Tu 4-7 Max 5 [Crosslisted with ILA 790j and RUSS 797R] Content: This course is an introduction to the general science of signs which revolutionized many scholarly disciplines of the twentieth century, not only poetics and literary theory, but also philosophy, history, cultural studies, and theories of mythology and ideology. The categories of semiotic analysis, such as "sign," "the signifier," "the signified," "structure" and "function," are indispensable for any contemporary research in the humanities. The course will explore major problems of semiotics and the broad interdisciplinary range of its applications from the foundational conceptions of Charles Pierce and F. de Saussure to the provocative structuralist and poststructuralist writings by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Special attention will be given to semiotic methods emerging from different cultural traditions, including Russian contributions by Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, and Yury Lotman. Students are encouraged to apply semiotic methods to their respective fields of concentration. Particulars: Class presentations and term 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 2005

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2005