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Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2007
CPLT 750 Literary Theories
Bennington
M 4-7
Max 12
[Cross-listed with FREN 780]
Content: The course explores some of the ways in which an influential way of thinking about language has affected ways of thinking about literature. After investigating the main tenets of structuralist theory, as derived from Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, we shall go on to see how the internal logic of structuralism led to the rather different positions often referred to as 'post-structuralism' and/or 'post-modernism', and to a questioning of the position of theory itself.
CPLT 751R The Origins of Subjectivity
Judovitz
W 1-4
Max 8
[Cross-listed with FREN 770]
Content:Reflecting on the burden of the Cartesian legacy to modernity, Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted that "there are some ideas that make it impossible to return to a time prior to their existence, even and especially if we moved beyond them, and subjectivity is one of them." This course will examine the elaboration of rational consciousness in Descartes as a foundational moment in the development of modern metaphysics. At issue will be the radical shift from notions of self (notably as elaborated in Montaigne) to subject, that will inaugurate not just a new understanding of truth but a new way of being in the world. The relation of subjectivity to representation, the mind-body dualism, the analogy of the body to a machine, and the question of technology will be at issue along with attendant philosophical/theoretical and literary critiques by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Emile Benveniste, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, etc.
TextsMontaigne, "Of Experience," and "On Some Verses of Virgil" from the Essays; Descartes, The Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy; Heidegger, "What is a Thing/" (selections); "The Age of the World Picture;" "The Question of Technology;" Merleau-Ponty, "The Cogito," and "The Body as Expression and Speech" from The Phenomenology of Perception; Benveniste, "Of Subjectivity in Language;" Georges Canguilhem, "Machine and Organism;" Foucault, The Order of Things (selections); Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness;" Foucault, "Technologies of the Self."
CPLT 751R Revolutionary Perversions
Marder
Tu 1-4
Max 8
[Cross-listed with FREN 775]
Content:In this course, we shall examine how representations of "non-normative" sexuality in several major nineteenthcentury works relate to the problem of representing history in the aftermath of the French revolution. Many of the canonical literary texts written between 1789 and 1848 are organized around explicit or implicit depictions of impotence, lesbianism, hysteria, cross dressing, masturbation and prostitution. By focusing on these figures (as they appear in literary form) we shall explore how these nineteenth-century literary inscriptions of ' perverse' forms of sexuality enable us to read changing conceptions of the relationship between language, history, gender and power.
Texts:Possible texts include: /La Philosophie dans le boudoir / (Sade), /René/ (Chateaubriand), /Armance /(Stendhal), /Le Père Goriot/ and /La Fille aux yeux d'or/ (Balzac), /L'Education sentimentale / (Flaubert), /La Curée/ (Zola) and selections from Baudelaire's prose poems. Critical readings may include works by Freud, Marx, Benjamin and others.
CPLT 751R Food and Cannibalism in Caribbean Literature
Loichot
Th 1-4
Max 8
[Cross-listed with FREN 785]
Content:The Caribbean, in the European conquerors' imagination, began with Columbus's confusion, mistaking the name Cariba, screamed by the Carib Amerindians calling out their name, for canibal. The name of a nation thus quickly dissolved into the figure of the savage man-eater. "Cannibal islands," "succulent women," "peppery language": since the original encounter, Europeans and other Western colonizers, tourists, and readers persisted in reducing the Caribbean to the primal act of eating, whether in the figure of the cannibal, or in that of its tamed counterpart, the Caribbean -its land, women, men, and language-- turned into palatable objects of consumption. This seminar proposes to examine the response of Caribbean writers who reclaim their cultural and historical autonomy and particularity through the representation and control of food in acts of ingesting, regurgitating, cooking, or simply listing culinary products. The course will focus specifically on Martinique and Guadeloupe but students will be invited to extend the reflection to the greater Caribbean, to the Americas, and to the global postcolonial context. The following questions will lead our reflection: Why is the act of "eating the other" a privileged trope in the colonial/postcolonial encounter? Why would European writers have a right of ownership of their colonial text in the aftermath of pillage and destruction of indigenous modes of communication? Hence, can we really say that Caribbean writers who "cannibalize" canonical texts also plagiarize? How can tourism be seen as a form of cannibalistic consumption? How do European and US readers ingest the Caribbean text by turning it into a palatable object? How do dishes such as calalou or soupe à congo act as central vehicles for memory and creolization?
Texts:1. Texts by Caribbean writers: Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal; Suzanne Césaire, "Malaise d'une civilisation;" Maryse Condé, La Migration des coeurs; Édouard Glissant, Tout-Monde; Gisèle Pineau, Chair Piment. 2. Travelers' accounts: Christopher Columbus, Lafcadio Hearn, André Breton. 3. Theories of cannibalism by Montaigne, Oswald de Andrade, Freud, Hulme, and Lestringant.
Particulars:One research paper, one oral presentation, active class participation including leading discussion and short written responses. The seminar will be conducted in French but students from other departments who have a reading knowledge and good conversational skills in French are encouraged to enroll. They will be able to deliver their presentation and write their paper in English. Most texts will be available in French and English
CPLT 751R Memorial Cultures
Bammer
M 1-4
Max 5
[Cross-listed with ILA 790]
Content:This course is designed both as a companion piece to my seminar on "The Work of Memory" and as an inquiry in its own right. Whereas "The Work of Memory" examines memory from a more theoretical and structural perspective, using memorial examples as illustration, this course proceeds in an inverse manner to explore the forms and functions of remembering practices. We will adopt a case study approach, working out from particular memorial instances to the issues (philosophical, historical, aesthetic, ethical and social) that a particular event and its remembrance raises. Issues to be explored will include: the relationship between personal and public remembering practices; them tensions between different perspectives on the memory of a particular event; gender and class as particular shaping factors; displacement and trauma; subalternity and history; the role of narrative, place, the senses (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch), "work" and "ghostly matters" in acts of personal and public remembering. Roughly two-thirds of the course will be based on materials selected by the instructor; the final third will be devoted to work that seminar participants prepare.
Texts:I. Memorials and memorial practices to be examined will be selected from among the following: photographs (from private albums to museum displays); cook books and community gardens as forms of remembrance for displaced persons (immigrants, refugees, exiles); commemorative rituals; "placed" memorials such as the Bavarian Quarter in Berlin, the District Six Museum in Capetown, photographs and sculptures by William Christenberry, and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project; sound memorials such as the Chilean "1197," John Adams "The Transmigration of Souls," or John Cage on silence; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection; Art Spiegelman's 9/11 memorial text, In the Shadow of No Towers, Toni Morrison's Beloved on the memory of those who disappear from the historical record, and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz on the effort to salvage memory from the clutches of forgetting. II. Readings might include selections from Paul Connerton, Annette Kuhn, Jacques Derrida, Carolyn Steedman, the Signs special issue on "Gender and Cultural Memory," Roland Barthes, John Berger, Czeslaw Milosz, Keith Basso, Avery Gordon, Nicole Loraux, Aldo Rossi, Walter Benjamin.
Particulars:Each seminar participant will produce a seminar paper designed as an essay to be submitted for publication to Memory Studies or another journal, proposed by the student, in her or his field of professional interest.
CPLT 751R The Gift
Robbins
W 1-4
Max 10
[Cross-listed with RELTS 750]
Content:
Texts:Readings include Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Mauss, Derrida, Bourdieu, Bataille
CPLT 751R Poststructuralist Theory and Technical Culture
Johnston
W 4:15-7
Max 8
[Cross-listed with ENG 789R]
Content:This course will examine the general claim that technology is the "unthought" (l'impensé) of poststructuralist theory. Beginning with Heidegger's questioning of technics and his formulation of a primordial opposition between phusis and techne, we will consider how poststructuralist discourse addresses the traditional metaphysical oppositions between animal, human and machine. Among the topics and perspectives we will take up are Jacques Lacan on the symbolic and the machine, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desiring machines and the assemblage, Derrida on the writing machine and the archive, the move from discourse analysis (Foucault) to discourse networks and mediality (Kittler), the differences between a technical system (Stiegler) and systems theory (Niklas Luhman). To explore this triad from another side, we will draw upon selected writings of Georges Bataille and Giorgio Agemben, considering themes such as virulent materialism, general as opposed to restricted economy, excess and a science of the heterogeneous, the open, zoe versus bios, the anthropological machine, etc. not only in relation to techne but to technological administration more generally. The course will not presuppose any familiarity with any of these writers.
Texts: Martin Heidegger, The Question of Technology; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (excerpts); Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Paper Machines; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (excerpts); Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time; Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (excerpts); Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and the Animal; selected xeroxed essays
Particulars:a short presentation and a seminar essay.
CPLT 751R Milton
Goldberg
Th 1-4
Max 4
[Cross-listed with ENG 717R]
Content:The focus of this course will be to articulate Milton's writing with that of his contemporaries during the revolutionary period, particularly his relationship to political/ philosophical thought (e.g. Hobbes, the Levellers, Winstanley, Lucy Hutchinson), scientific/ philosophical thought (e.g. Margaret Cavendish, Boyle), as well as contemporary poetry (e.g. Marvell). Paradise Lost as well as several prose tracts will be the main focus, as well as a sampling of literary criticism, older (e.g. William Empson) as well as more recent.
Texts:Milton: Major Works, ed. S. Orgel and J. Goldberg (Oxford); Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge); Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (Cambridge); Hutchinson, Life of Colonel Hutchinson (if available), and other texts by or about the authors named above, as available.
Particulars: report and a seminar paper
CPLT 751R Globalization Disaster, and Literary Witness
Kalaidjian
T 4-7
Max 4
[Cross-listed with ENG 752R]
Content:Somewhat prophetically, former President Bill Clinton warned in 2000 that "Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off...it is the economic equivalent of a force of nature-like wind or water." In Clinton's naturalized metaphor globalization assumed the power of an inevitable and irresistible energy flow. Read in retrospect, however, his analogy appears tellingly haunted by the specter of a violence to come: a specter of disaster that has increasingly overshadowed if not entirely displaced globalization's purchase on capital's utopian future. After 9/11, no key terms would appear more antithetical yet also more intimately related than the two semantic markers of globalization and disaster. The destruction of the World Trade Center remains, no doubt, the inaugural trauma of the 21st Century insofar as it decisively sutured globalization and disaster into the defining symptom of our times. This seminar will explore critical theories, cultural objects, and literary texts that link globalization, flexible citizenship, and disaster with psychoanalytic accounts of trauma, delusion and psychosis in the public sphere. Our aim will be to generate original readings of aesthetic and cultural testimony to modernity and the emerging post-9/11 condition.
Texts:Tentative Reading List: Hany Abu-Assad, Paradise Now; Siddiq Barmak, Osama; Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days; Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis; Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; H.D., Trilogy and Tribute to Freud; Ian McEwan, Saturday; Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children; Richard Powers, The EchoMaker; John Updike, Terrorist Excerpts from: Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers; Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster; Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence; David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses; Aiwa Ong, Introduction to Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality; Andrew Ross, Fast Boat to China
Particulars: Requirements will comprise a short response essay, a research paper, and a short presentation
CPLT 751R The Sublime
D. White
Th 4-7
Max 4
[Cross-listed with ENGR 789R]
Content:This course will explore the idea of the sublime especially as it informs eighteenth-century British poetry and prose with additional attention to philosophical writings from Germany and France. What is the sublime? The ecstatic, the extreme, the difficult-any mode or figure that involves the intertwining of pain and pleasure-all these belong to the traditional notion of the sublime along with an imagery of ruins, darkness and natural disaster. Our readings and discussions will consider how the notion of the sublime involves a power that exceeds the power of representation to contain it and thus marks the limits of aesthetics within the language of aesthetics itself. With these issues in mind, we will conclude with consideration of how more recent post-structuralist thought addresses the sublime. Readings will be structured around three nodal points in the history of this discourse: Longinus, Burke, and Kant. Other readings to be drawn from Dennis, Addison, Thompson, Young, H. Blair, Ossian, Gray, Collins, Shelley, Hegel, Derrida, and De Man.
CPLT 751R Foucault
Jordan/Huffer
W 10-1
Max 5
[Cross-listed with WS 585]
Content: For some decades now, it has been much easier to have a passionate opinion about Michel Foucault than a careful reading of him. He is a saint or a demon, a liberator or a desecrator, the heroic promoter of an agenda or the debauched prophet of despair. This seminar will be less concerned to foster impassioned uses of Foucault, or even to analyze his remarkable susceptibility to abuse, than it will be to think with and about some texts that bear his name. We will be particularly concerned with his 'ethical' and 'political' texts-texts about the consequences of medicalizing madness or normalcy, about the powers coded into the category 'sexuality,' about ancient or contemporary alternatives to contemporary management of human life. Members of the seminar will be encouraged to connect their readings in Foucault with their own intellectual projects.
Texts: The seminar will concentrate on texts by Foucault rather than by his interpreters. The major texts will include History of Madness, Abnormal, History of Sexuality 1, and Hermeneutics of the Subject. We will also study some of the pieces collected in the English anthology, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.
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 three short exercises (5 pp. each) during the course of the semester and then a final paper (15-20 pp.) at its conclusion. There will be no examinations-except for those imposed by Foucault.
CPLT 751R Introduction to PSP
Gilman/S. Levy
T 12:45-2:45
Max 5
[Cross-listed with PSP 760, ILA 790]
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 751R Clinical Methods in Psychoanalysis
Furman/S. Croft
W 1-2:30
Max 5
[Cross-listed with PSP 761, ILA 790]
Content:This is the Clinical Methods/Joint Clinical Case Conference offered through the School of Medicine and the GSAS. It is designed for those students with a background in psychoanalysis as a theory of mind and as a method for research who wish to explore the clinical/therapeutic aspects of the endeavor. It is a continuous case seminar designed to allow for an in-depth exploration of psychodynamic material. The course will meet weekly for 1.5 hours and uses as its primary materials actual psychodynamic case material. Relevant journal articles will also be assigned.
CPLT 751 Goethe's Shadow
Waniek
M 3-6
Max 7
[Cross-listed with GER 550]
Content: German literature does not begin with Goethe but his works (in poetry, drama, novel, essay) form an almost inescapable reference point for the most writers following, even when they do not acutely suffer from any "anxiety of influence". And among the multitude of Goethe's concerns one specifically casts a long shadow and has been identified as a peculiar preoccupation of German literature, namely the clash of the "pretended freedom of our will with the necessary course of the whole". With Goethe and this topic as our two coordinates I suggest to look in a survey, requiring extensive reading, at certain works from Schiller to Kleist, Buchner, Heine, Fontane, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Brecht (and, as time allows, Foscolo, Coleridge, Bunin, Nietzsche, Freud). While the emphasis will be on prose, some dramas of the seminal kind (perhaps Wedekind of current Broadway fame: Spring Awakening) will be considered, and we will read a generous portion of poetry, ending with Paul Celan. Special attention will be given to the turning point around 1900, and to the growing distance from Goethe.
Texts:: Penguin Book of German Verse; selected works, including Elective Affinities, Penthesilea, Woyzeck, Effi Briest, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and Doktor Faustus.
Particulars:: Class facilitations; one short paper; one 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.