Emory | Comp Lit | Graduate Program

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2006

CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories

Caruth
Th 1-4
Max 15
[Cross-listed with ENG 789]

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

CPLT 751 Theological Problems: Divine Names

Jordan
W 9:30-12:30
Max 5
[Cross-listed with RLTS 710C]

Content: Christian theology claims a long tradition of “negative theology,” of writing that registers how unlikely are the “names” of God, even (or especially) in scripture. This seminar will consider the constitution of that tradition, some ways in which it has been ignored, and possibilities it offers for writing theology in the present. The first part of the seminar will consider influential works from the beginning of the tradition into the late Middle Ages. The second part of the seminar will turn to contemporary appropriations, modifications, and rejections.

Texts: The first part of the seminar will read works by Plato, Augustine, Ps-Dionysius, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. The second part of the seminar will read at least Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida.

Particulars: Members of the seminar will be expected to read the assigned texts attentively and to discuss them constructively. They will also be asked to write four or five short exercises. The topics for the exercises will be both interpretive and constructive. There will be no examinations.

CPLT 751 The Sexual Outlaw

Goldberg
Tu 4-7
Max 3
[Cross-listed with ENG 789]

Content: This seminar takes up the recent anti-social impetus in queer theory most closely associated perhaps with Leo Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave,” and arguably a component in Foucault’s work in the history of sexuality as well. We will be reading these theorists as well as others, including Lee Edelman, D.A. Miller and Candace Vogler. The course will focus on the novels of Patricia Highsmith and some of the films they have inspired. For the sake of comparison, some novels by Jean Genet and films derived from them also will be studied.

Texts: Texts will include Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave,” “The Sexual Outlaw” (from Homos); Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction and Abnormal; Edelman, No Future; essays by Miller, Vogler, and others; Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Hitchcock’s film version; the first three Ripley novels and their film counterparts (Rene Clement, Purple Noon; Wim Wenders, The American Friend; Anthony Minghella, Talented Mr. Ripley; Liliana Cavani, Ripley’s Game); Genet’s Querelle and Fassbinder’s film of the same name; Miracle of the Rose and Todd Haynes, Poison.

Particulars: Class presentation and a seminar paper that may focus on theoretical questions, on Genet or Highsmith, on one or more of the filmmakers, or any combination of these possibilities.

CPLT 751 Blanchot

Robbins
Tu 1-4
Max 12
[Cross-listed with FREN 770]

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 Feminist Literary Theory and Critical Practice

Brownley
M 1-4
Max 3
[Cross-listed with WS 585 and ENG 789]

Content: This seminar will examine various methods through which contemporary feminist theoretical work can be deployed in literary analyses. The concern will be with practical applications, ranging from individual works to genres, evolved in terms of a number of the major theoretical movements within feminism. The course will be developed as a series of individual case studies rather than as a comprehensive historical or theoretical survey.

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

CPLT 751 The Body and the Stage: Theater, Trials, and the Spectacle of History

Felman
M 4-7
Max 10
[Cross-listed with FREN 740R and ENG 789]

Content: This course will study plays that represent historic legal cases and gripping courtroom dramas whose outcome changed the world. In studying the specificity of the theatrical language of these plays, the course will reflect on the relation between the legal stage and the theatrical stage, as well as on the notion of performance in both kinds of dramas. Legal trials share with theatrical plays the fact that they are social spectacles of living confrontations, embodying political conflicts and disputes that are enacted on a stage, address an audience, follow ceremonial practices and ritual protocols, and use dialogue and actors (or performers) who appear in costumes to play designated roles. This course will ask: What is the reason for modern theater’s increasing emphasis on trials? What can trials teach us about theater? And conversely, what can the theater teach us about trials? What is the role of trials – as spectacular crises of truth – in the theater of history and the theater of memory? What does it mean to be a player (in life, and in the world)? In studying (in Sartre’s words) “man as event and man as history in the event”, we will pay close attention to issues of representation (both legal and theatrical), and to historical and theatrical moments of deliberate subversion of representation. We will view the stage as a space of intersection between the private and the public, between the individual and the collective, between the sacred and the secular, as well as a space of exchange between illusion and reality, reason and madness, consciousness and the unconscious (“the other scene”, in Freudian terms). We will examine thus the interactions among space, language and gesture, and the use of the speaking body on the stage, in investigating the relationship between the theatrical and the historical/political/philosophical/psychoanalytic.

Texts: Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Bertold Brecht, Jean Anouilh, Bernard Shaw, Moises Kaufman, Peter Weiss. (Legal interrogations of Oscar Wilde, Bertold Brecht, Joan of Arc, Galileo.)

Critical and theoretical texts selected among: Antonin Artaud, Bertold Brecht, Peter Brook, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx.

Particulars: Regular attendance and ongoing participation; two short papers; brief oral presentations.

CPLT 751 Duchampian Strategies & Postmodern Aesthetics

Judovitz
W 1-4
Max 8
[Cross-listed with FREN 780]

Content: Postmodern aesthetics has been associated with such key issues as the end of art, anti-aesthetics and anti-visual critiques, as well as interrogations of authorship and artistic production. These seminal issues have also been central to Marcel Duchamp’s radical, indeed revolutionary break with conventional art and aesthetics. This course will focus on the theoretical underpinnings at stake in Duchamp’s practice (as reflected in his works and writings), in order to examine the implications of his strategic play with art in bringing about the endgame of modernity. Theoretical readings will include essays by Lyotard, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Krauss, Macherey, De Duve, Damisch, Bourdieu, Bürger, Jay, Eliot, Barthes and Foucault, etc. in order to elaborate the logic of the readymade as visual simulacrum, the play between the object as commodity and/or as art, the shift from the visual to the optical, the analysis of puns as verbal and visual machines (transformers), endgames in art and chess, and appropriation as a strategy for redefining authorship and artistic creativity.

Texts: CLASS READER; Cabanne, Interviews with Marcel Duchamp; The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds Sanouillet and Peterson.

CPLT 752 Inwardness & Irrationalism in a Franco-German Context

Butler
TTh 1:00-2:15
Max 6
[Cross-listed with GER 550]

Content: The first part of this course situates theoretical debates of our own day in their generative matrix: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German efforts to assert independence from French political, literary, and philosophical institutions. German “inwardness” (Innerlichkeit), a term employed by the epoch itself, and “irrationalism,” a descriptor of later coinage, draw their substance from their opposition to the cultural climate of contemporary France. The second part of the course explores French encounters with German introspection from Mme de Staël to Derrida. Though readings are arranged chronologically, our focus falls on the persistent structural interdependence of the illuminist public sphere in France, on the one hand, and “critical forests” (to use Herder’s term) in German territories, on the other. Particularly close attention will be paid to German Romanticism (the Schlegels and Novalis) and the “dialectic of enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno).

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 2006 CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories Caruth Th 1-4 Max 15 [Cross-listed with ENG 789] Content: An introduction to literary theoretical thinking, focusing on twentieth century structuralism, post-structuralism and contemporary theory. CPLT 751 Theological Problems: Divine Names Jordan W 9:30-12:30 Max 5 [Cross-listed with RLTS 710C] Content: Christian theology claims a long tradition of “negative theology,” of writing that registers how unlikely are the “names” of God, even (or especially) in scripture. This seminar will consider the constitution of that tradition, some ways in which it has been ignored, and possibilities it offers for writing theology in the present. The first part of the seminar will consider influential works from the beginning of the tradition into the late Middle Ages. The second part of the seminar will turn to contemporary appropriations, modifications, and rejections. Texts: The first part of the seminar will read works by Plato, Augustine, Ps-Dionysius, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. The second part of the seminar will read at least Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida. Particulars: Members of the seminar will be expected to read the assigned texts attentively and to discuss them constructively. They will also be asked to write four or five short exercises. The topics for the exercises will be both interpretive and constructive. There will be no examinations. CPLT 751 The Sexual Outlaw Goldberg Tu 4-7 Max 3 [Cross-listed with ENG 789] Content: This seminar takes up the recent anti-social impetus in queer theory most closely associated perhaps with Leo Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave,” and arguably a component in Foucault’s work in the history of sexuality as well. We will be reading these theorists as well as others, including Lee Edelman, D.A. Miller and Candace Vogler. The course will focus on the novels of Patricia Highsmith and some of the films they have inspired. For the sake of comparison, some novels by Jean Genet and films derived from them also will be studied. Texts: Texts will include Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave,” “The Sexual Outlaw” (from Homos); Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction and Abnormal; Edelman, No Future; essays by Miller, Vogler, and others; Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Hitchcock’s film version; the first three Ripley novels and their film counterparts (Rene Clement, Purple Noon; Wim Wenders, The American Friend; Anthony Minghella, Talented Mr. Ripley; Liliana Cavani, Ripley’s Game); Genet’s Querelle and Fassbinder’s film of the same name; Miracle of the Rose and Todd Haynes, Poison. Particulars: Class presentation and a seminar paper that may focus on theoretical questions, on Genet or Highsmith, on one or more of the filmmakers, or any combination of these possibilities. CPLT 751 Blanchot Robbins Tu 1-4 Max 12 [Cross-listed with FREN 770] 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 Feminist Literary Theory and Critical Practice Brownley M 1-4 Max 3 [Cross-listed with WS 585 and ENG 789] Content: This seminar will examine various methods through which contemporary feminist theoretical work can be deployed in literary analyses. The concern will be with practical applications, ranging from individual works to genres, evolved in terms of a number of the major theoretical movements within feminism. The course will be developed as a series of individual case studies rather than as a comprehensive historical or theoretical survey. Particulars: 2 class facilitations; short paper; final paper. CPLT 751 The Body and the Stage: Theater, Trials, and the Spectacle of History Felman M 4-7 Max 10 [Cross-listed with FREN 740R and ENG 789] Content: This course will study plays that represent historic legal cases and gripping courtroom dramas whose outcome changed the world. In studying the specificity of the theatrical language of these plays, the course will reflect on the relation between the legal stage and the theatrical stage, as well as on the notion of performance in both kinds of dramas. Legal trials share with theatrical plays the fact that they are social spectacles of living confrontations, embodying political conflicts and disputes that are enacted on a stage, address an audience, follow ceremonial practices and ritual protocols, and use dialogue and actors (or performers) who appear in costumes to play designated roles. This course will ask: What is the reason for modern theater’s increasing emphasis on trials? What can trials teach us about theater? And conversely, what can the theater teach us about trials? What is the role of trials – as spectacular crises of truth – in the theater of history and the theater of memory? What does it mean to be a player (in life, and in the world)? In studying (in Sartre’s words) “man as event and man as history in the event”, we will pay close attention to issues of representation (both legal and theatrical), and to historical and theatrical moments of deliberate subversion of representation. We will view the stage as a space of intersection between the private and the public, between the individual and the collective, between the sacred and the secular, as well as a space of exchange between illusion and reality, reason and madness, consciousness and the unconscious (“the other scene”, in Freudian terms). We will examine thus the interactions among space, language and gesture, and the use of the speaking body on the stage, in investigating the relationship between the theatrical and the historical/political/philosophical/psychoanalytic. Texts: Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Bertold Brecht, Jean Anouilh, Bernard Shaw, Moises Kaufman, Peter Weiss. (Legal interrogations of Oscar Wilde, Bertold Brecht, Joan of Arc, Galileo.) Critical and theoretical texts selected among: Antonin Artaud, Bertold Brecht, Peter Brook, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx. Particulars: Regular attendance and ongoing participation; two short papers; brief oral presentations. CPLT 751 Duchampian Strategies & Postmodern Aesthetics Judovitz W 1-4 Max 8 [Cross-listed with FREN 780] Content: Postmodern aesthetics has been associated with such key issues as the end of art, anti-aesthetics and anti-visual critiques, as well as interrogations of authorship and artistic production. These seminal issues have also been central to Marcel Duchamp’s radical, indeed revolutionary break with conventional art and aesthetics. This course will focus on the theoretical underpinnings at stake in Duchamp’s practice (as reflected in his works and writings), in order to examine the implications of his strategic play with art in bringing about the endgame of modernity. Theoretical readings will include essays by Lyotard, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Krauss, Macherey, De Duve, Damisch, Bourdieu, Bürger, Jay, Eliot, Barthes and Foucault, etc. in order to elaborate the logic of the readymade as visual simulacrum, the play between the object as commodity and/or as art, the shift from the visual to the optical, the analysis of puns as verbal and visual machines (transformers), endgames in art and chess, and appropriation as a strategy for redefining authorship and artistic creativity. Texts: CLASS READER; Cabanne, Interviews with Marcel Duchamp; The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds Sanouillet and Peterson. CPLT 752 Inwardness & Irrationalism in a Franco-German Context Butler TTh 1:00-2:15 Max 6 [Cross-listed with GER 550] Content: The first part of this course situates theoretical debates of our own day in their generative matrix: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German efforts to assert independence from French political, literary, and philosophical institutions. German “inwardness” (Innerlichkeit), a term employed by the epoch itself, and “irrationalism,” a descriptor of later coinage, draw their substance from their opposition to the cultural climate of contemporary France. The second part of the course explores French encounters with German introspection from Mme de Staël to Derrida. Though readings are arranged chronologically, our focus falls on the persistent structural interdependence of the illuminist public sphere in France, on the one hand, and “critical forests” (to use Herder’s term) in German territories, on the other. Particularly close attention will be paid to German Romanticism (the Schlegels and Novalis) and the “dialectic of enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno). 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 2006

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2006