Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2009

CPLT 750 000 Literary Theories

Bennington
Th 1-4
Max 10
[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.

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CPLT 751 000 Special Topics: Baudelaire & Benjamin: Poetry of Modern Life

Marder
M 4-7
Max 10
[Cross-listed with FREN 775]

Content: Baudelaire’s poetry continues to address contemporary readers and contemporary concerns.   From the first publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 up to the present day, Baudelaire’s poetry has fascinated many, if not most, of the major philosophers and thinkers of the 20th century (including: Valéry, Sartre, Bataille, Blanchot, Proust, de Man, Derrida, etc).  Many of Baudelaire’s readers have defined their own thinking through their reading of Baudelaire.  Before his suicide in 1940, Walter Benjamin devoted much of the last decade of his life in Paris to reading modern experience in and through Baudelaire’s writings.  By reading Baudelaire through Benjamin (and other readers) we will attempt to understand why Baudelaire remains the poet of modern life.

Texts: Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal, Le Spleen de Paris, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Les Paradis artificiels.  Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire,  The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk) and selected essays.

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CPLT 751 003 Special Topics: Vitalism, Technics, Autopoiesis: Life and Art within Systems and Networks

Johnston
T 1-4
Max 10
[Cross-listed with ENG 780R]

Content: In the 20th century what was generally called "life" was gradually volatilized in distributed systems, structures, and processes (e.g., biologists now study "living systems").  In the discourses of the post-industrial world, subjects and objects increasingly entered theoretical reflection as variations on subject-systems or subjects-in-process (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Kristeva) and  object-systems (Baudrillard).  Aesthetic theory seemed immobilized in Adorno's high modernist critique, completely dispersed in theories of textuality, or forever sent packing by cultural studies.  Yet the late 60s also witnessed  various proto-aesthetic formations in new amalgamations of science, technics, and media theory on the one hand, and new extensions and intensifications of bodily experience that the latest technologies made possible on the other.  Jack Burnham's notion of a "systems aesthetic"--according to which aesthetic experience is no longer triggered and sustained by the contemplation of a unified, integral object-- and Gene Youngblood's notion of an expanded visionary cinema are two examples par excellence, yet both were quickly marginalized within academic circles.  However, with the tremendous growth, variety, and vitality of new media art since the 90s, these and other experimental explorations of what art critic Hal Foster once called the "anti-aesthetic" seem harbingers of a deep rupture with old categories and oppositions (like that between physis and technē), and a shift to a whole new world or landscape of concepts based on information systems, noise, turbulence, and contingency, as evident in the Net art of Eduardo Kac and Daniel Suarez's recent novel Daemon.  This course will work through several key theoretical underpinnings of this shift.


Texts: Henri Bergson, essay on the comic, Creative Evolution
Gilbert Simondon, On the mode of Existence of Technical Objects
Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, "Systems  Aesthetics"
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela:  Autopoiesis and Cognition
Niklas Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory, The Reality of the Mass Media, and Art as a Social System (selections)
Michel Serres, The Parasite
Bert Kosko, Noise (excerpts)
Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
Mark Buchanan, Nexus:  Small Worlds and the Science of Networks
W.J.T. Mitchell, "The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction"
Eduardo Kac, Signs of Life:  Bio Art and Beyond
Eduardo Kac & Avital Ronell: Life Extreme: An Illustrated Guide to New Life
Daniel Suarez, Daemon, "Bot-mediated Reality"

Particulars: A seminar paper due at the end of the semester and a class presentation.

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CPLT 751 004 Special Topics: Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett

Moon
W 9-12
Max 5
[Cross-listed with ILA 790 and ENG 789R]

Content: The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove, Prefaces to the New York Edition; Stein:  Q.E.D., selections from The Making of Americans, Three Lives, Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights; Beckett: Molloy, All That Fall, Not I, late radio plays.  In reading and discussing these texts, we shall explore a range of questions about imitation, translation and bilingual discourses, archivization, the limits of representation, avant-gardism, adaptation across media, performance and performativity.

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CPLT 751 005 Special Topics: The Problem of Life and the Philosophy of Life

Goodstein
Max 5
[Cross-listed with ILA 790]

Content: As the de Anima attests, philosophical attempts to grasp the meaning of life are coeval with the western philosophical tradition itself. In modernity, however, the category of life became a problem in entirely new ways. Contemporary concerns about life center less on its definition, interpretation, and proper conduct than on its malleability, manipulability, reproducibility, and indeed technological producibility. This course will attempt a genealogy of what is quite literally a transformation in the meaning of life in modernity in an effort to understand not just the philosophical but also the historical and cultural significance of that transformation. After briefly considering predecessors from Aristotle to Emerson, we will focus on the “philosophy of life” that emerged in the late nineteenth century in response, on one hand, to Kant’s radical rethinking of philosophy itself and, on the other, to developments in the natural sciences.


Texts: Readings will include work by James, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Simmel, Bergson, and Freud. Time permitting, we will consider how Lebensphilosophie is criticized and extended in Husserl and Heidegger and explore later thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Maturana, and Agamben who take up the problem of life in new ways.

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CPLT 751 006 Special Topics: The Question of Art

Judovitz
W 1-4
Max 4
[Cross-listed with FREN 770]

Content: This course will challenge the traditional understanding of art as transcending temporal and historical considerations in its cult of beauty and the ideal. It will examine changes in the idea of art as a function of the historic character of modernity insofar as it implies new modes of production (such as mechanical reproduction) along with new forms of public consumption. At issue will be a re-examination of the ideas of the artist, the creative act and the art object as elaborated in modern literary, artistic and theoretical works. We will question the nature of the work of art insofar as its production, presentation and circulation take the form of material objects. As an object of visual consumption and public exchange can the art work escape its material destiny and market pressures? We will also examine the femininization of the work of art as an object of desire or even fetish, the revalorization of the artist as author/producer along with the spectator/ consumer and the redefinition of artistic making as a form of material production.

Texts: Readings will include works by Balzac, Flaubert, Ponge, T.S. Eliott, Marx, Benjamin, Sartre, Duchamp, Macheray, Bourdieu and De Duve, etc, along with some visual examples.

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CPLT 751 00P Special Topics: Studies in Romanticism

White
W 1-4
Max 4
[Cross-listed with ENG 730R]

Content: This seminar explores poetry and prose of British romantic writers.  We will give special attention to debates concerning literary history and literary modernity, the specificity of literary language and the relation between literature and philosophy.  More generally, we will consider how the authors we study pursue a “defense of poetry” (P. B. Shelley) in the context of modernization—that is, in the context of urbanization, industrialization, and utilitarianism. The romantic defense of what it calls poetry or, more expansively still, “imagination” serves not only as a springboard for philosophical aesthetics, but also for an engagement with performative and material dimensions of language that aesthetics often obscures. Our readings will therefore attend to the fault lines exposed within aesthetics by romantic writers precisely when they are most urgently engaged in an aesthetic project.

Texts: Readings to be drawn from the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Additional critical and theoretical readings from Chandler, Chase, Christensen, De Man, Hamilton, Hartman, McGann, Levinson, Pfau, Rajan, Wimsatt and others.

Particulars: This course is offered as a variable credit.

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CPLT 751 01P Special Topics: Foucault

Huffer
T 9-12pm
Max 3
[Cross-listed with WS 585 and PHIL 789)

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. 

*Permission required (department only-not instructor)


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.  The 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.

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CPLT 751 008 Special Topics: The Work of Memory

Bammer
M 1-4
Max
[Cross-listed with ILA 790]

Content: This course will review some of the key texts in the emerging field of memory studies, with a particular emphasis on the links–and separations–between history (what happened) and memory (what we remember and/or forget). In this context, we will explore some of the terms in which memory is talked about, including the distinctions and connections, between public, collective, or cultural memory, on the one hand, and private, personal, or individual memory, on the other. We will consider the ethical, political, social, aesthetic, and psychological dimensions of remembering and its counterpart, forgetting, and examine some of the ways in which these acts of remembering and forgetting are given expression in ritual and material form.

Texts: Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life; Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past; Richard Terdiman. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia; James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning; Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDs Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering; François Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilli P re, History Beyond Trauma: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent; Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory; Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination; selected essays by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Marianne Hirsch, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida.

Particulars: Students will prepare and present two studies that may take the form of two separate projects or may be linked into one longer project. The length and scope of each may vary; together they will be somewhere around 20 pp. One will be a case study of a particular memorial or memorial practice. The other will be a critical analysis of an issue (or set of issues), concept (or set of concepts), or approach related to the work of memory as represented in one (or some) of the works we will engage with.

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CPLT 752R 000 Telling Muslim Lives: Biography, Hagiography, Autobiography and history in Islam

Newby
W 1-4
Max
[Cross-listed with MESAS 570R, HIST 585 and RLAR 738]

Content: One of the earliest, most prominent and durative genres of historical writing among Muslims has been the genre of biography. Through primary sources in translation and secondary scholarship, this seminar will examine the ways in which Muslims have told about the lives of Muslims, including themselves, from the time of the beginnings of Islam to the present. It will start with the Sacred Biographies of Muhammad, look at the encyclopedic biographies of the generations immediately after Muhammad, the lives of saints, lawyers, poets and politicians, and end with the modern versions of those biographies and autobiographies and the influences on their formation.

 

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CPLT 752R 001 End of Neoliberal Empire? The Revolutionary 60s in Our Global Field of Vision

Reber
W 1-4
Max 5
[Cross-listed with SPAN 560 and FILM 503]

Content: Cultural production in 1960s Latin America universally denounced the plunder of a continent.  García Márquez playfully imagined nature itself being sold back as a ‘technological invention’ to a Latin America foundationally estranged from its own resources when Melquíades brings ice to Macondo in Cien años de soledad.  In “La estética del hambre,” Glauber Rocha characterizes, far less playfully, the history of Latin America as one in which the entire continent itself is passed from one colonizer to the next, a vision that assumes sinister proportions in Terra em transe, where the invisible “Explint”—Company of International Exploitation—buys the political future of Brazil, much as Julio García Espinosa figures an American clad in a Hawaiian shirt as the ‘back-door’ owner of the Latin American land-owning elite in Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin.  This is the thesis that Che Guevara intones from the Bolivian jungle, urging Latin America to rise up as “one, two, many Vietnams” in order to stem the extractive neoimperialist flow out of what Eduardo Galeano bitterly denounces as “the open veins of Latin America.”  Then this utopia was violently “disarmed” (Castañeda 1994) and left for dead. Suddenly, after a long hiatus defined by Reaganomics and the Washington Consensus, the “idea of the 60s” has returned to the forefront of the global psyche of the Americas and beyond: Walter Salles’s Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005), and Emilio Estevez’s Bobby (2006) have brought Che Guevara, Bob Dylan, and Robert F. Kennedy back to the big screen (Salles’s On the Road has Beat Generation and 60s precursor Jack Kerouac scheduled for 2009), while soulful British singing sensation Amy Winehouse has so successfully resurrected the beehive hairdo as to inspire Karl Lagerfeld’s 2007 haute couture line for Chanel (“Amy is the new Brigitte [Bardot]”), two years after the Gap rolled out a kindred “Summer of 1969” clothing line. But this “idea of the 60s” is not solely aesthetic; the wave of leftist presidencies of Chávez, Lula (with tropicalista Gilberto Gil as Minister of Culture), Tabaré Vásquez, Bachelet, Morales, García, and Kirschner has brought back the idea of revolution, just as Obama has evoked the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the U.S. war in Iraq has brought back the idea of Vietnam.  (For its part, the Pentagon held an in-house screening in 2003 of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 Battle of Algiers as a refresher course on guerrilla warfare). We will read the reemergence of the idea of the 60s in the context of the two major hemispheric crises that have marked the twenty-first century in the Americas: 9/11 and the Argentine economic collapse of December 2001.  The first resuscitated the critique of U.S. imperialism; the second resuscitated the will to anti-imperialist resistance.  Now that critics—and economic analysts—warn that the end of neoliberalism (as imperialism) might be near, might we claim that we are returning discursively to the 60s in search of an anti-imperialist political aesthetic?  If we are, in fact, at the end of neoliberal capitalism as we have known it, are we gravitating to the point in time just before its brutal imposition, a time “when the left thought paradise was just around the corner” (La Nación 1997)?  In order to hazard answers to these questions, we will focus particularly on the aesthetic definition of social dissidence in the New Latin American Cinema of the 60s and its recent “new new” avatars, which rework the concept of revolution for the global age.

Texts: Films include:
New Latin American Cinema:
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Glauber Rocha
Santiago Álvarez
Julio García Espinosa
Fernando “Pino” Solanas
Miguel Littín

“Neoliberal” cinema:
Fernando “Pino” Solanas
Walter Salles
Martin Scorsese
Steven Soderbergh
Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein
Alfonso Cuarón

Critical readings:
Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Glauber Rocha, Julio García Espinosa, Naomi Klein, Greg Grandin, Alexander Bloom, Jorge Volpi, Abel Prieto

Particulars: Class discussion will be in English, with two weekly film screenings outside of class.  Short weekly analysis papers and intensive writing workshop on final research project in the last weeks of class.

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CPLT 760 000 Global Culture and the Future of the Humanities

Epstein
T 4-7
Max 6
[Cross-listed with ILA 790 and GRAD 700r]

Content: This course will explore the role and changing paradigms of the humanities in the 20th and 21st cc. (mostly literary and cultural studies and philosophy). Emphasis will be placed on the issues of creativity as they pertain to the development of new ideas in the humanities and the change of scholarly paradigms. We will also discuss contemporary challenges to the concept of the humanities from various theoretical perspectives, such as the poststructuralist notion of "the death of the human" and visions of the "posthuman" age governed by thinking machines and artificial intelligence. The course will examine how new informational technologies radically change, both in a defiant and enhancing manner, the profession of the humanist, the traditional concepts of text and knowledge, the methods of scholarship, and the ethos of the intellectual community. Finally, we shall outline the prospects for the new intellectual technologies necessary for the survival and enhancement of humanistic professions in the 21st century.

Texts: Hofstadter, Douglas R., and Dennett, Daniel C. The Mind's I. Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul.  Basic Books, 2001.
Wilson, Edward O.  Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Random House, 1999.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetrics, Literature, and Informatics. The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005.
Koestler, Arthur The Act of Creation. Arkana, Penguin, 1989.
Smith, Roger. The Norton History of the Human Sciences. W.W.Norton & Company. 1997.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
Berry, Ellen, and Epstein, Mikhail.  Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication.  Palgrave Macmillan. 1999.

Particulars: Class attendance and participation (40%), oral presentations (20%), term paper (40%).

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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 797R 01P  Directed Readings

[Cross-listed with SPAN 597R]

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

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CPLT 798R 000  Supervised Research

For independent research aimed primarily at preparation for graduate exams and dissertation prospectus. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway for more information).

*Must be taken S/U

Content: Variable Credit 1-12

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CPLT 799R 000   Dissertation Research

Faculty

*Must be taken S/U

Content: Variable Credit 1-12