Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2008

CPLT 550 Love, blood and rhetoric

Branham
W 2-4
Max 9
[Cross-listed with GRK 597]

Content: This course will be an experiment.  Instead of reading a series of texts related to some topic, we will focus on one text and spend the whole year reading it intensively in the original:  Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialogue on the erotics of rhetoric and one of Ur-texts of rhetoric and poetics in the West.  Students will learn how to explicate Plato’s text both philologically and philosophically and we will also consider some of the most important responses it has inspired from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to contemporary readings by A. Nightengale, Derrida et al.  The Phaedrus is available in bi-lingual editions but some knowledge of Attic Greek will be required.

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CPLT 750 Literary Theories

Marder
T 1-4
Max 12
[Cross-listed with FREN 780]

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.

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CPLT 751 Politics in Deconstruction

Bennington
T 4-7
Max 12
[Cross-listed with FREN 770 and PHIL 789]

Content: Taking its lead from some of Derrida’s late work, this course will follow the threads of sovereignty and democracy through some of the great texts of political philosophy in the Western tradition.  We shall attempt to understand why both of these concepts, albeit in rather different ways, pose such problems for that tradition, and give rise to all manner of complications and paradoxes, which are however (or so I shall argue) definitive of the conceptual space of the political as such.  We shall wonder why all political philosophies are enamored of sovereignty, while almost none has anything good to say about democracy.  We shall also compare our deconstructive approach to these political questions with some other contemporary accounts, and consider the possibility of a non-trivial affinity between the political and the literary in their constant tendency to exceed philosophy’s grasp. 

Texts: Classic authors to be discussed will probably include Plato, Aristotle, Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville and Schmitt; contemporary theorists to be considered may include Agamben, Badiou, Mouffe and Rancière.

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CPLT 751 00P Literature and Justice: Writers on Trial

Felman
M 4-7
Max 7
[Cross-listed with ILA 790, FREN 780, and ENG 789R]

Content: History has put on trial a series of outstanding thinkers.  At the dawn of philosophy, Socrates drinks the cup of poison to which he is condemned by the Athenians for his influential teaching, charged with atheism, and corruption of the youth.  Centuries later, in modernity, similarly influential Oscar Wilde is condemned by the English for his homosexuality, as well as for his provocative artistic style.  In France, Emile Zola is condemned for defending a Jew against the state, which has convicted him.  E. M. Forster writes about a rape trial / race trial of an Indian by the colonizing British Empire.  Different forms of trial are instigated by religious institutions, as well as by psychoanalytic ones. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, compares his banning by, and expulsion from, the International Psychoanalytic Association, with a religious “excommunication” for charges of nonorthodoxy and heresy (Luther, Spinoza). However  different, all these accused have come to stand for something greater than themselves: something that was symbolized  -- and challenged – by their trials.  Through the examination of a series of historical and literary trials, this course will ask:  Why are literary writers, philosophers and creative thinkers, repetitively put on trial, and how in turn do they put culture and society on trial?  What is the role of literature as a political actor in the struggles over ethics, and the struggles over meaning?  Why does justice matter, philosophically, artistically and humanly, and how does it move us, make us think, and pervade the emotion and the drama of our lives?

Texts: Plato; Oscar Wilde; Moises Kaufman; E. M. Forster; Emile Zola; Hannah Arendt; Baruch de Spinoza; Jacques Lacan;  Nella Larsen; Virginia Woolf.

Particulars: Regular attendance; two short papers; brief oral presentations; intensive weekly reading and active  (annotated) preparation of texts for class discussion; ongoing participation.

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CPLT 751 Deception and War in the Age of the Image

Caruth
Th 4-7
Max 10
[Cross-listed with ILA 790, FREN 780, and ENG 789R]

Content: Taking as a starting point Hannah Arendt's late essays on lying and politicis, this course will examine the role of war in the era of what Arendt refers to as "image-making."  We will consider 20th-century literature and film, as well as political and literary thoery, in order to explore the relation between action and lying, "image-making" (of different kinds) and war-making, war and deception.  Across these various genres and media, we will ask: what is the relation between the possibility of history and the possibility of its denial?  And what does it mean to act, or to reveal truth, in the age of the modern (or absolute) lie?

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CPLT 751 Camp, Performance, Ritual

Jordan
M 2-5
Max 12

Content: Long before Butler juxtaposed (blurred?) a philosophical notion of the “performative” with meditations on drag, queer selves were diagnosed as “histrionic” and queer sensibilities derided as bad mime.  Indeed, a queer self couldn’t help but bring an odor of grease-paint wherever it was allowed to enter—even to church.  This seminar will exploit and resist such prejudices by examining the connections among camp, (identity) performance, and ritual (or liturgy) at several sites of production and reflection.  We will consider such topics as quarrels over camp, universal drag, cinematic excess, and initiation rituals among Radical Faeries, lesbian separatists, and queer Christians.

Texts: The seminar will read through a range of texts on camp, queer performance, and queer liturgy.  Texts will include (at least, probably): Sontag and her many respondents, including Babuscio, Cleto, and Miller; Artaud, Brecht, Muñoz, Newton, Parker, Phelan, and Tinkcom; Hay, Jordan, Neu, Stuart, and Thompson.

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 two or three short exercises (5 pp. each) during the course of the semester.  The exercises will focus attention on the challenges of describing or analyzing particular performances.   Members of the seminar will present a final paper (15-20 pp.) at the semester’s conclusion.  There will be no examinations.  There may be a show.

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CPLT 751 Roland Barthes

Lang
T 1-4
Max 9
[Cross-listed with FREN 770]

Content: Roland Barthes, though generally classified as a literary critic, is best defined as a “thinker”: theorist, aesthetician, intellectual, historian, writer. Seductive and persuasive but never dogmatic, his writings were both reflections of the philosophical and literary movements of his times and distinctive, innovative appropriations of them that in turn played a significant role in their evolution. Critics from a multiplicity of camps—marxist, structuralist, deconstructionist, feminist, queer, etc.—have acknowledged a debt to this “penseur glissant,” as Robbe-Grillet liked to call him. In this course we will read texts from the various periods of Barthes’s work with an eye to what made it so representative of the ideological trends of his times, and yet so uniquely “Barthesian.”

Texts: Readings from Éléments de sémiologie, Le Degré zéro de 1'écriture, Mythologies, Sur Racine, Essais critiques, Critique et vérité, S/Z, Le Plaisir du texte, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire and others.

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CPLT 751 Attentiveness: Rainer Maria Rilke

Waniek
Th 1-3:30
Max 4
[Cross-listed with GER 550]

Content: The focus of the course will be on the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies (with room for Malte Laurids Brigge, if so desired), and on an attempt to understand Rilke's effort and achievement in his language and his views. The wider horizon will be provided by placing Rilke in the European tradition, by looking at some of his contemporaries and successors (Baudelaire, Valery, Hofmannsthal, George, Trakl, --Kafka--, Benn, Brecht, Eliot, Yeats), and by exploring his notion of what it means to write poetry and be a poet, indeed a "mentor" (Malte, letters; Denise Levertov). Depending on students' knowledge of German, the course, conducted in English, will look at Rilke in the original, and glance at the (severe) problems of translation (Gass, Reading Rilke).

Texts: Stephen Mitchell, ed. & transl., The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke; Barnstone, transl., The Sonnets to Orpheus

Particulars: Class presentations and a final paper.

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CPLT 751 Contemporary Women Novelists

Brownley
T 1-4
Max 3
[Cross-listed with ENG 789R and WS 730]

Content: Since at least the 1970s, it has been a critical commonplace that contemporary women novelists have been engaged in wide-ranging projects of revising, and in the process re-envisioning, various historical, cultural, and literary pasts.  By now, however, many of the best of these novelists have been writing long enough to begin to revise their own discursive pasts, as they revisit earlier subject matter and themes to resituate their positions for the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

This course focuses on seven major women novelists who have treated political topics in their works: Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Julia Alvarez, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, and Christa Wolf.  Early and later novels of each will be juxtaposed to assess major trends in contemporary women’s fiction and evaluate the scope of these writers’  achievements over the past forty years.  Although feminist theory relevant to these novelists will be included, the focus of the course will remain primarily literary.

Particulars: short paper; 2 class facilitations; final paper

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CPLT 751 Architecture and the Body in Early Modern Spain

Carrión
M 1-4
Max 3
[Cross-listed with SPAN 530 and WS 585]

Content: This course traces theoretical and applied dimensions of architecture and the role the body played in its development as discipline, experience, science, method, and practice in Early Modern Spain.  Class discussions will be based on comparative representations of space, time, and the body as they flow between architectural boundaries established in imagined, designed, printed, and built texts.  Through the use of theoretical and historical materials, the class will examine the role played by race (ethnicity / religion) and gender (sexuality / sex) in the processes of design and erection of buildings, artistic personas, subjects, architectural structures, and rhetorical constructs.


Texts: Architectural texts: Synagogues: El Tránsito and Santa María la Blanca, Toledo. Palaces: La Aljafería, Zaragoza; La Alhambra, Granada; Alcázar, Segovia and Madrid.  Castles: Buen Amor, Salamanca; La Calahorra, Granada; Simancas, Valladolid.  Convents: San José de Ávila and Alba de Tormes (Discalced Carmelites); Sancti Spiritus, Toro (Dominicans); Santa María, Tordesillas (Clarisas); Descalzas reales, Madrid (Discalced Franciscans).  Houses: Ribad al-Bayyazin; Casa de Lorenzo el Chapiz; Casa de Hernán López el Feri.  Monasteries: Hyeronimite, San Lorenzo de El Escorial; Discalced Carmelites, Úbeda.  Prisons: galleys; Almadén, Toledo; secret inquisitorial prisons.  Theatres: El corral del Príncipe; Alcázar de Madrid; Coliseo de Madrid; Coliseo de Valencia.

Literary texts: al-Magribi, El libro de las banderas de los campeones: Ibn Hazm, El collar de la paloma; de Leon, Sefer Zohar; Llull, Llibre de Amic e Amat; Collaborative, Cantigas de Santa María; Amadís de Gaula; de San Pedro, Cárcel de amor; Colonna/Aldus, Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii; Boscán (traductor), El libro del Cortesano; Sagredo, Medidas del Romano; de Jesús, Castillo interior; Vandelvira, Libro de traças de cortes de piedras; Montemayor, Los siete libros de la Diana; Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha and poetry;  López de Arenas, Breve compendio de la carpintería de lo blanco y tratado de alarifes;  Calderón, La vida es sueño; Caro, El Conde Partinuplés;  Zayas, Desengaños amorosos; Quevedo, poetry.

Particulars: Particulars: Attendance and class participation (40%), a presentation (20%), one 10-page paper (40%).

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CPLT 751 Embodiment/Theory/Media

Moon
W 4-7
Max 4
[Cross-listed with ILA 790]

Content: Questions about how our individual and collective understandings of embodiment in its myriad manifestations are mediated, and the effects of different modes of mediation on the very nature / appearance / meaning of the bodily in our own and other people’s experience, are at the heart of this course. 

Texts: Print and visual texts for the course will be selected from the following: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”; Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons and Lifting Belly; Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Melanie Klein, selected writings; Maya Deren, selected films and writings; Stan Brakhage, selected films; Carolee Schneeman, Fuses; Jean Genet, Chant d’amour; Jean Rouch, Maîtres fous; writings on gender, race, sexuality, social class, and disability in relation to corporeality by Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Dorothy Allison, Bob Flanagan, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Butler; selected critiques of print and cyberporn from feminist, queer, and trans perspectives; selected essays on embodiment / disembodiment effects in new media.

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CPLT 751 From Simmel to Adorno

Goodstein
Th 9-12
Max 3
[Cross-listed with ILA 790, PHIL, HIST 585]

Content: In recent years, the sociologist and philosopher of culture Georg Simmel (1858-1918) has been discovered and rediscovered by scholars in a wide range of fields. He has been lauded as a theorist of modernity—and as post-modernist avant le lettre. His writings provide a seemingly inexhaustible source of brilliant aperçus for literary scholars, philosophers, and social scientists in search of insightful observations from the previous fin-de-siècle, and his remarks on fashion, on femininity, on the intricacies of social life, on the metropolis, are ubiquitous. However, the oft-touted Simmel renaissance has not necessarily resulted in sustained engagement with his work. His magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, remains high on the list of famous yet unread books, and his considerable influence on twentieth-century thought remains largely invisible. Simmel’s own prediction that his legacy would be “like one in cold cash,” invested “according to the nature of the heirs” in diverse undertakings that rendered its origin unrecognizable, proved all too accurate. In this seminar, we will, therefore, read Simmel and his more famous students and interlocutors—Lukács, Mannheim, Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno—in an attempt to discern Simmel’s influence and to understand the reasons he has remained on the margins of intellectual history.

As a writer, Simmel was a modernist in the broadest sense, an elegant stylist with intellectual interests that spanned the full range of high and low modern culture. His highly aesthetic mode of theorizing in essayistic tours de force that leap dizzyingly from idea to idea embodies a modernist commitment to self-reflection upon the significance of form. Simmel conceived of modern “forms of life” as both empirical objects and manifestations of more profound realities. Through theoretical syntheses centered on topoi such as sociability, travel, and urban life, he developed a modernist philosophical perspective that links the historical process of objectification to the modes of experience it produces. His approach—as much style of thought as hermeneutic method—brought the concerns of the German philosophical tradition into conversation with modern cultural realities. It is an approach that resonates in the writings of the better-known philosophers and cultural critics who were his students and readers. The goal of this seminar is both to give Simmel his rightful place in the intellectual history of modern thought and to explore the potential of his interdisciplinary method for integrating symbolic and empirical dimensions in the analysis of cultural phenomena in our own time.

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CPLT 752 Bodily Expression and Figurative Style in the Classical Period

Judovitz
W 1-4
Max 4
[Cross-listed with FREN 775]

Content: This course will examine the representation of the body in 17-th century French literature as gesture and speech. It will focus on the body’s expressive vocabulary as mobilized through gesture along with the specific stylistic implications that characterize its position and patterning within the baroque and classical worldviews. We will explore how the signs associated with bodily expression will shift and change in meaning given the epistemological rupture between baroque and classicism. We will inquire into the classical legacy that privileged the mastery of reason and the regulatory force of social norms, its emphasis on being rather than appearance. We will consider how the materiality of the body is constituted through gesture as reiterative performance rather than as object. Questions of love and self-love will be considered in terms of attendant issues regarding the play of language in representation. May love become the bearer of a monstrosity endemic to the order of representation? Can the expression of emotions be simulated or counterfeit? The guiding question is how the representation of gestures challenges the limits of classical discourse. Most reading assignments will be in French.

Texts: Required Texts: d’Urfe, L’Astrée (selections); Guilleragues, Lettres portugaises; Corneille, Le Cid; Racine, Phèdre; Molière, Tartuffe; Mme de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves; and theoretical texts by Sartre, Foucault, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Starobinski; Spitzer; Kamuf, Peyre, Barthes, Agamben, etc., available on on-line reserves.

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CPLT 752 Bakhtin and His Circles: Dialogues Across the Disciplines

Reed/Epstein
Th 1-4
Max 4
[Cross-listed with ILA 790, ENG 789, RUSS 550]

Content: This seminar will study the major writings of the 20th c. Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, placing them in dialogue with writings of others--those on whom he drew most deeply and those on whom he has been most influential. In some cases, as with his close associates in the 1920s, Voloshinov and Medvedev, or with the Russian Formalists, these "circles" are historically immediate. In other cases, as with Bakhtin's studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais, or his influence on Western cultural studies and Russian postmodernism, they are culturally mediated. The course will focus on the most innovative and cross-disciplinary aspects of Bakhtin's work, including his theories of dialogue, authorship, metalinguistics, and philosophical anthropology, as well as on his own dialogical engagements with Marxism and Existentialism.

Texts: Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Emerson;
Bakhtin,  The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Holquist
and Emerson;
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky;
Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans.McGee;
The Bakhtin Reader, ed. Morris;
Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics;
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky;
Friedman, ed. The Worlds of Existentialism:  A Critical Reader;
Felch and Contino, ed. Bakhtin and Religion:  A Feeling for Faith;
assorted essays by others.

Glossaries of Bakhtin's terms can be found in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp.
 423-434 and in The Bakhtin Reader, 245-252.

Particulars: Active participation in discussion, a 20-25 minute presentation to the class, and a term paper will be required of each student in the seminar. In addition, students will be invited to take part in a “collective improvisation” on a Saturday to be determined.

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CPLT 752 Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature: American Modernism and Archival Recovery

Kalaidjian
T 4-7pm
Max 3
[Cross-listed with ENG 752R, ILA 790, WS 585]

Content:Content: How do archives shape modern literary textuality and poetic discourse? What roles do first editions, anthologies, little magazines, ephemera, broadsides, exhibitions, avant-garde happenings, political movements, and popular culture play in the makeup and reception of modern American verse? In taking up such questions, this seminar will review archival theory and consider recent recovery projects in American literary Modernism that read twentieth-century American verse against the historic and transatlantic contexts of its material production. In particular, we will study how archives provide insight into modernist sites of cultural production such as salons, galleries, bookstores, and little magazine collectives: taking into account the nexus of aesthetic and social production in the modern women’s movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the American labor movement, and other emergent countercultural tendencies such as the Beat scenes in New York and San Francisco. For example, we will examine the formation of American modernism through the editorial collaborations of, say, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, Hilda Doolittle and Annie Winifred Ellerman, Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound, Max Eastman and Claude McKay, Diane Di Prima and Amiri Baraka. Beyond engaging close readings of canonical and emerging poetry, the seminar will employ the resources of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, the collections of James Weldon Johnson, Michel Fabre, Broadside Press, as well as MARBL’s collections in the Harlem Renaissance and African-American material culture generally.

Particulars: Assignments will include a short response essay, a research essay, and a short presentation of the research essay.

(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)

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CPLT 797R 00P  Directed Readings

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

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CPLT 799R 000   Dissertation Research

Faculty

*Must be taken S/U

Content: Variable Credit