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Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2002
CPLT 551 000 Topics in German Literature: German Modernism
Maximilian Aue
TH 1:00-4:00
Max 5
[Crosslisted with GER 550]
Content: It has been argued - and shall be taken as the heuristic starting point of this course - that German literary modernism can be defined as the reaction of German writers to Friedrich Nietzsche, most of it occurring after his death in 1900. Nietzsche's attempt to better understand the irrational, for instance, or his disregard for and breaking up of closed metaphysical systems find clear expression in the "aestheticist" and "expressionist" directions of early 20th century German literature. By carefully reading and analyzing selected texts from this period, we shall attempt to gain an insight into the variety of its thematic concerns and the richness of its formal imagination which have left their mark on literature and art to this day.
Texts: Final selection has not been made, but will include works by writers such as Gottfried Benn, Hermann Broch, Alfred Döblin, Stefan George, Hermann Hesse, Hugo. v. Hofmannsthal, Frans Kafka, Georg Kaiser, Else Lasker-Schüler, Thomas Mann, Christian Morgenstern, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank Wedekind.
Particulars: Active class participation; 1-2 seminar reports on primary (and selected secondary) literature; final term paper.
CPLT 751 000 Language of Allegory
Giuliana Carugati
F 1:00-4:00
Max 15
Content: Viewed in its long history, allegory reveals itself not as a peculiar, charmingly antiquated design of language, but, rather, as an inclusive term whose meaning points in the direction of the historicity of language. "We understand differently if we understand at all" , says Gadamer, and perhaps the ancients didn't think otherwise. From Paul and Augustine to the Chatrians to Dante and Boccaccio, allegory's path delimits our tradition as it moves away from the sacrality of the Bible to the ""unfoundedness" of the words of the poets.
Texts: Plato, Timaeus; Macrobius, In somnium Scipionis; Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae; Martianus Capella, De nuptiis (I-II); Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia; Alain of Lille, Anticlaudianus; Dante, Convivio, Letter to Cangrande; Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium (XIV-XV)
CPLT 751 001 Philosophy of the Cynic: Ancient and Modern
Bracht Branham
W 1:00-4:00
Max 5
[Crosslisted with PHIL 789]
Content: The purpose of this seminar is to investigate the origins and nature of the Cynic movement in antiquity and its reception in Renaissance and modern Europe. We will focus initially on the primary sources for the Dog-philosophers (e.g., Diogenes Laertius, Lucian, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, et al.), the most influential figures in the movement (Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, Menippus) and the peculiar place of the Cynics within Greek culture (including its role in the invention of Stoicism). The rest of the course will be devoted to exploring the ideological, literary and cultural ramifications of Cynicism in a variety of contexts from the Renaissance to the twentieth century: 1) the response to Cynicism in the works of the Renaissance Humanists, Diderot, Nietzsche and Foucault; 2)Cynic literary forms such as Menippean satire, satiric dialogue and aphorism; and 3) the Cynic philosophy of laughter will provide central points of reference. In general we will be asking: What made Cynicism the most influential branch of the Socratic tradition in antiquity? Why has it become an object of contemporary interest in Nietzsche, Sloterdijk and Foucault? No previous knowledge of Greek philosophy is required. Greek, Latin, French, German or Italian is useful, but the basic texts are available in bilingual editions. D. R. Dudley's A History of Cynicism (recently re-issued in paperback by Ariel) provides a good introduction to the ancient traditions.
CPLT 751 002 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Trauma
Cathy Caruth
Th 1:00-4:00
Max 10
[Crosslisted with ENG 789, PHIL 789, PSYC 770]
Content: This course examines the notion and experience of trauma from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Beginning with the conceptual breakthroughs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will explore the ways in which trauma has unsettled our concepts of experience, time, memory and language and how this enigma has affected the theories and practices of psychoanalysis, neurobiology, psychology, philosophy and literary theory. Invited speakers include faculty from psychiatry (including neuroscience), Psychology, Comparative Literature, and the Psychoanalytic Institute.
CPLT 751 003 Pierre Bourdieu
Cindy Patton
W 7:00-10:00
Max 4
[Crosslisted with WS 585, ILA 790]
Content: Intensive reading of works by Pierre Bourdieu and advanced critical writing about Bourdieu’s theory and methods. Students will conduct a literature review of Bourdieu’s legacy within a field of their choosing, will write an exegesis of critical Bourdieun concepts relevant to their own work, and produce a research plan for a project that would employ the methods developed by Bourdieu.
Particulars: Students must have previous coursework in post-structural theory. Permission of instructor required.
CPLT 751 004 Medieval Art as a Bible for the Poor
Elizabeth Pastan
W 9:00-12:00
Max 4
[Crosslisted with HART 739]
Content: This seminar examines the implications of Pope Gregory I's statement, "What Scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant," (Letter to Serenus of Marseille, c. 600 CE). Frequently cited throughout the Middle Ages, Gregory's statement became the standard defense of figural painting and sculpture, a rationalization for the expense of art making, and an implicit argument about the power of images. In this course, we will explore the both textual tradition and image cycles that could be construed as affirming or contradicting it. Other issues to be considered include: how one "reads" a medieval image, recent scholarship on the varieties and kinds of literacy, and the discrepancies or slippage between the intentions of a patron and meanings imparted to beholders. Case studies are focused on, but not limited to, arts of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, a period corresponding to the explosion of imagery in cathedrals, treasury arts and manuscript illuminations.
Texts: Reserve readings.
Particulars: Weekly seminar discussions, seminar presentations, and one research paper based on a particular case study.
CPLT 751 005 Textual Intimacies: Narratives of Self Exploration
Patrick Garlinger
T 1:00-4:00
Max 2
[Crosslisted with SPAN 550]
Content: What is the function of confession? What role does narrative play in confession? What sort of intimacy is established with the reader in producing a written confession of one's secrets and desires? These questions will guide our readings in this seminar as we examine the role of confession in Spanish narrative of the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century. The course will examine the shifting function of confession as a religious practice to exonerate the subject from sin to its function as a form of ideological subjection with a fundamental connection to sexuality, its relationship to psychoanalytic practice, the legal discourses around confession, and its contemporary role as a form of public therapy. Given the seminar's focus on confession as a textual practice, emphasis will be placed on the specific strategies of written confession: its relation to genres such as autobiography, the mémoir, and letter writing; the scripted use of speech acts and performativity; and the struggle for discursive authority and power in confession. Close attention will be paid to the ethical role of response and responsibility on the part of readers of confessional narratives.
Texts: Rosa Chacel, La confesión; Joseph Blanco White, The Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White; Juan Valera, Pepita Jiménez; Ramón del Valle Inclán, Sonata de otoño; Camilo José Cela, La familia de Pascual Duarte; Miguel Delibes, Cinco horas con Mario; Carme Riera, Cuestión de amor propio; Carmen Martín Gaite, Nubosidad variable; Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco; Jorge Semprún, La escritura o la vida; Lluís Fernández, Una prudente distancia. Supplementary readings from Augustine, Rousseau, de Man, Foucault, Freud, Levinas, Brooks, Tambling.
Particulars: Evaluation is based on a research paper or exam, seminar participation, and oral presentations.
CPLT 751 006 Affect and Muted Writing: Lyotard
Claire Nouvet
Th 1:00-4:00
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 520]
Content: Mutic-- a neologism, coined by Jean-Francois Lyotard, for that which is without voice, inaudible, inarticulate, an intractable remainder. The questions that will concern us are the following: is a mutic writing possible? or do writing (in its extended sense of ‘inscription’) and the mutic mutually exclude each other? We will approach these questions via Lyotard’s own writings, lending an ear to his description of the "differend" in terms of a "wrong" that can find no expression, his subsequent retractions of some of the central claims of The Differend’s "philosophy of phrases" in the course of his re-thinking of silence, affect and Nachträglichkeit in his later works, especially his re-readings of the case of Emma discussed by Freud. [Taught in English; most readings available in translation]
Texts: Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend,(excerpts) "Prescription" "Voix" in Lectures d’Enfance Postmodern Fables "Emma", ‘La phrase-affect", "c’est-à-dire le supplice (Une glose de L’Expérience intérieure) in Misère de la philosophie The Confession of Augustine Sigmund Freud, "A Project for a Scientific Psychology" (On reserve)
Particulars: one class presentation and a final paper.
CPLT 751 007 Literature and the Real
Walter Kalaidjian
T 7:00-10:00
Max 3
[Crosslisted with ENG 789, WS 585]
Content: This seminar will consider the resources and limits of the emerging field of comparative trauma studies and its implications for narrative theory. Psychoanalytic approaches to trauma stemming from Lacanian theory have evolved in productive tension throughout the 1900s with social, cultural, and new historicist emphases on the ethicopolitical stakes of giving primary testimony and bearing secondary, intellectual witness to extremity. Competing models of what constitutes the "Real," its mode of address, narrative inscription, and ethical force will be considered through readings across the genres of survivor videotape testimony, poetry, fiction, reportage, memoir, docudrama, and film. Topics of discussion will include seduction theory and domestic abuse narratives, the literature of genocide, war reportage and fiction, as well as illness memoirs.
Texts: Carolivia Herron, Thereafter Johnnie; Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres; Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood; Sharon Olds, Satan Says; Paul Monette, Elie Wiesel, The Forgotton; Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; Peter Balakian, The Black Dog of Fate Dyer's Thistle; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Principles of Psschoanalysis; Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; Trihn T. Minh-ha, Surname Viet, Given Name Nam; Alfred Hitchock, Vertigo; Craig Lucas, Longtime Companion; Russel Banks, The Sweet Hereafter; Atom Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter.
CPLT 751 008 Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Politics and Literature
Cindy Willet
F 10:00-1:00
Max 3
[Crosslisted with PHIL 769, WS 585]
Content: We will examine conceptions of human nature and the political visions that these conceptions sustain in literature, film, and political philosophy. Among some of the more prominent themes are autonomy and other conceptions of subjectivity and freedom, relational conceptions of the self, and the significance of race, sexuality and gender for democratic theory.
Texts: Susan Bordo (especially her discussions of American film), Nancy Fraser, Patricia Hill Collins, Iris Young, Judith Butler, John Rawls, Cornel West, Michael Walzer, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf and others.
Particulars: Seminar presentations, discussion, and one term paper.
CPLT 751 009 Theological Problems: Negative Theology
Mark Jordan
T 9:00-12:00
Max 4
[Crosslisted with RLTS 710C]
Content: Catholic theology claims a long tradition of “negative theology,” of theological writing that describes or registers how unspeakable divine truths are. This seminar will be concerned to trace the constitution of that tradition, the ways in which it has been ignored, and the 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 early modernity. The second part of the seminar will turn to contemporary appropriations and modifications of the tradition.
Texts: The first part of the seminar will consider works by Ps-Dionysus, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, and Pascal. The second part of the seminar will consider at least works by von Balthasar, Rahner, Klossowski, Kristeva, 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 five short exercises of about five pages each. The topics for the exercises will be both interpretive and constructive. There will be no examinations.
CPLT 751 010 Exhibiting Cultures / Performing Cultures
Ivan Karp
W 1:00-4:00
Max 4
[Crosslisted with ILA 790]
Content: This graduate seminar examines a number of processes and issues involved in creating and experiencing exhibitions about art and culture. Though the course emphasizes museum venues, we may also consider other forms of cultural display, such as festivals, world fairs, and theme parks. Topics will include the history of such displays and display institutions, relations between museums and communities, differences among different types of museums, the multiple roles and perspectives that come together in creating cultural displays, and the diverse communicative processes involved experiencing and interpreting cultural displays.
Texts: Bennett, T. The Birth of the Museum; Duncan, C. Civilizing Rituals; Karp, I. & S. Lavine Exhibiting Cultures; Karp, C. Kreamer, & S. Lavine Museums and Communities; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. Destination Culture; Kurin, R. Reflections of a Culture Broker; Sherman, D. and Rogoff, I. Museum Culture
CPLT 751 011 French Hegel
Geoffrey Bennington
T 4:30-7:30
Max 8
[Crosslisted with Fren 780]
Content: This course will aim to identify and analyze the formation of a 'French Hegel' in the work of some major twentieth-century French thinkers. We shall begin from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as influentially if questionably read by Alexandre Kojève in the lectures that are published as Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, and follow the traces and effects of this reading in Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot. In the second part of the course we shall consider the more general re-readings of Hegel proposed by Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy. No prior knowledge of Hegel's (or indeed any other) philosophy is presupposed by the course, and all primary texts will be available in English as well as French.
CPLT 752 000 The Face of the Other: The Master Slave Dialectic from Homer to Levinas
Kevin Corrigan
W 9:00-12:00
Max 15
Content: The influence of Hegel's Msater-Slave Dialectic (in the context of the while phenomenology of Spirit) has proved decisive for the modern world. It not only provoked the profound reactions of such diverse thinkers as Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, De Beauvoir (as well as Irigaray, Cixous etc. ) and Sartre, but it also left an equally deep mark upon the history of the 20th century (particularly in Germany and Russia) and has influenced the works of major contemporary critical theorists. This course will take Hegel as its starting point and examine the problem of otherness both diachronically and synchronically, going back first to explore some of the roots of the problem in the Ancient Medieval and Renaissance Worlds and then tracing the subsequent heritage of this dialectic in particular, in the literature, philosophy, critical theory., feminist theory, and theology of the modern and contemporary periods. The aim of this course will be to have students explore the rich diversity and yet fine balance of the problem in terms both of the various strategies of power and of the inversion, correspondingly, of power and apparent weakness.
CPLT 752 001 Subject Stages: Marriage, Comedia, and the Law
Maria Carrion
F 1:00-4:00
Max 3
[Crosslisted with SPAN 530]
Content: In its more general and elementary level, "Subject Stages" considers the Comedia--or professional theater of this period--as discourse and industria, and it will seek to highlight the double dimension of this theater as a product of the culture of this society, and of being one of the most culturally productive phenomenon of the times. Discussions will consider, but will not be limited to, the conception of the Comedia and its relationship to earlier manifestations of theater in Spain; the influence of the Italian commedia dell'arte and English pageantry on the professionalization of theater in Spain; the running of shows and theaters; the printing of the Partes; the different genres (comedia, entremes, loa, auto sacramental), theater and metatheater; the concept of spectacle and spectatorship; the political theater in the corrales and the spectacular, also political court stages; masculinity, the jujer varonil, and the mujer esquiva; the staging of race and gender; the debates about the (un)lawfulness of theatrical theories and practices; and the scrutiny and closing of the theaters.
Texts: Cervantes, Entremeses; Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, Peribanez, y el Comendador de Ocana, El castigo sin venganza, La dama boba, El caballero de Olmedo, El perro del hortelano; Velez de Guevara, Reinar despues de morir; Tirso de Molina, Don Gil de las calzas verdes y El burlador de Sevilla; Ruiz de Alarcon, Las paredes oyen; Calderon, El medico de su honra, Los empenos de un acaso, El pintor de su deshonra, La dama duende, El gran teatro del mundo, El gran mercado del mundo, La vida es sueno; Caro, El Conde Partinuples y Valor, agravio y mujer; Zayas, La traicion en la amistad; de la Cruz, Los empenos de una casa. Photocopies of 16th and 17th-century legal documents, as well as relevant theoretical and historical materials.
Particulars: Attendance and class participation (45%), class presentations (10%), and one research paper (possibly substituted by a final exam in consultation with Professor Carrion and the Director of Graduate Studies, Prof. Stolley) (45%).
CPLT 752 002 Language Loyalty in Anglo-Hispanic Writing
Perez-Firmat Gustavo
W 1:00-4:00
Max 2
[Crosslisted with SPAN 560]
Content: Through a consideration of the poetics and practice of bilingualism, latent and overt, in selected Spanish, Spanish-American and Latino writers, the seminar will seek to understand the intellectual, political and erotic ties that bind individuals to their languages. Lema del curso: "Somos a través de un idioma que es nuestro siendo extranjero" (Juan Marinello).
Texts: Authors to be discussed include: George Santayana (selections), Pedro Salinas (Aprecio y defensa del lenguaje), Luis Cernuda (Variaciones sobre tema mexicano), Calvert Casey (selections), María Luisa Bombal (La última niebla, House of Mist), Richard Rodríguez (Hunger of Memory), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Holy Smoke), Orlando González Esteva (Elogio del garabato), José Kozer (selections), Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Cincuenta lecciones de exilio y desexilio). Secondary readings from: Ovid (Tristia, Ex Ponto), Leonard Forster (The Poet's Tongues), Jacques Derrida (Monolingualism of the Other), Uriel Weinrich (Languages in Contact), Claudio Guillén (El sol de los desterrados), Benjamin Lee Whorf (selections), George Steiner (After Babel, Extraterritorial), James Clifford (Routes).
Particulars: Students will be asked to write a final paper and give oral reports.
CPLT 752 003 Rapts/Enraptures
Yvan Bamps
W 1:00-4:00
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 530]
Content: Love's initial and fatal rapture (when a chance look at the object of one's desire irrevocably wounds and marks the lover's heart and memory) is at the center of early modern French literary endeavors. This course proposes to explore the significance of these representations, and the meaning behind such literary common place through a close reading of both Renaissance and some more contemporary discourses on love and of love. Always lived through the delay of memory and, hence, never experienced as a present, the initial rapt (as we will attempt to see) represent the singular and initial moment when "I" comes to exist and to speak, and therefore to write. We will explore the imaginary born out of such inaugural scenes in novels, novellas and in poetry as well as in the visual representation of the Valois dynasty as they shape the beginnings of a modern French literature and culture.
Texts: Possible texts will include Marguerite de Navarre, L'heptameron; Louise Labe, Debat de folie et d'amour and Sonnets; ronsard, Les amours; Marguerite Duras, Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein; Pascal, Discours sur la condition des grands and Le memorial; critical readings from Barthes, Freud, Caruth, Marin, De Certeau, Derrida.
CPLT 752 004 Guilty Consciences
Candace Lang
T 1:00-4:00
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 775]
Content: What is guilt? And how is it intimately associated with the impulse to narrate? These are the questions to be explored in this course, through the study of critical and literary works in which the origin of the notion of the "guilty conscience" is related to an apparently universal human urge to account for one's actions by recounting them in an explanatory narrative. That is, we will seek to understand how narrative functions in a moral economy based on the need to "redeem" oneself by "paying" for one's presumed transgressions by considering the manner in which guilt is either theorized or exercised in a variety of texts.
Texts: Freud, Totem and Taboo; Reik, Myth and Guilt, Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (selections); Foucault, Technologies of the Self (selections); Augustine, Confessions (selections); Gide, L'Immoraliste; Camus, La Chute; Sartre, Les mots; from L'Etre et le Neant (selections); Robbe-Grillet, Le Miroir qui revient.
Particulars: Course taught in French; readings in English and French. Class presentations, paper required.
CPLT 752 005 The Word of God: Romanticism Reason and Modern Theology
Walt Lowe
W 7:00-10:00
Max 4
[Crosslisted with RLTS 710S]
Content: The course examines ways in which aspects of romanticism, esp. as represented by William. Blake and other English poets of his time, has informed theology in the modern period. Lines of connection will be drawn from romanticism through existentialism to postmodernism, particularly deconstruction. Theological appropriations of romanticism will be examined critically on the basis of their ability to sustain a "twofold vision" or indeterminacy. Particular attention to the role of apocalyptic in Christianity, revolutionary romanticism and postmodernity. Emphasis upon the effort to do creative theological reflection of whatever varietyin light of the seminar's findings.
Text: Readings are to include W. Blake, F. Schleiermacher, S. Kierkegaard, K. Barth, P. Tillich, E. Levinas and J. Derrida. Some modifications may be made in this list; please feel free to contact the instructor at wlowe@emory.edu.
Particulars: Participants will lead portions of discussion and write a final paper of 15-20 pages.
CPLT 752 006 Special Topics in History: Medieval Texts
Steve White
W 1:00-4:00
Max 6
[Crosslisted with HIST 585]
Content: Designed for students working in any area of Medieval Studies, this course provides an introduction to the study of various kinds of texts produced between c.900 and c.1250 in Latin and Old French (e.g. monastic and royal charters; saints' lives; miracle stories; royal biographies; oaths of fidelity; family histories; letter collections, prose and verse histories, and customals) that historians have traditionally treated as distinct types of "sources" of historical evidence. Weekly discussions will consider different strategies for reading texts of each type; critically examine conventional ways of fitting them into fixed typologies of "historical sources; and address questions about literacy, texts as symbolic objects, and relationships between "historical" and "literary" texts. Texts will be read in Latin, Old French, and/or modern English translations, depending on availability and on language skills of individual students.
Particulars: Course requirements: Regular class participation; weekly reports or short papers; a final paper (c.20 typed pages).
CPLT 752 007 Studies in Renaissance Literature: Lyric and Ecstasy: Donne, Crashaw, Milton
Rick Rambuss
T 1:00-4:00
Max 5
[Crosslisted with ENG 710]
Content: This course examines ecstatic souls and ecstatic bodies in the lyric poetry of three disparate Renaissance writers: John Donne, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton. We will consider lyric form not only as an apposite representational medium for rendering ecstatic experience-both religious and erotic-but also how lyric poetry may itself function as a stimulus or trigger for ecstasy. In treating the varieties of ecstatic experience, this course will also attend to the varieties of seventeenth- century English religious experience: Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Puritan.
Texts: In addition to the poetry of Donne, Crashaw, and Milton, the course will also engage theoretical work by Bataille, Foucault, and others.
Particulars: Seminar paper; seminar presentation; critical biography.
CPLT 753W 000 Teaching of Literature
Angelika Bammer
M 9:00-12:00
Max 15
Content: A seminar in pedagogy that meets the requirement of the graduate School's TATTO program for graduate students in Comparative Literature, this course prepares graduate students to teach comparative literature to undergraduates, particularly in Emory's Literature 110, Literature 201 and Literature 202. Two hours of seminar in the spring of the student's first year in the program are followed by two hours of workshop the following fall or spring when the student begins teaching at Emory. Topics covered in discussion include: teaching poetry, teaching literature in translation, teaching novels, teaching literary theory, and teaching film. More general issues such as the use of technology in and around the classroom, the authority of a literary canon in the college curriculum, the teaching of writing through the study of literature will be addressed as well.
Texts: No required text; in-class handouts.
Particulars: Oral presentations; survey and analyses of teaching resources; preparation, presentation, and critical analysis of a syllabus.
CPLT 797R Directed Readings
By Permission of the Director of Graduate Studies. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information.
CPLT 799R Dissertation Research
By Permission of the Director of Graduate Studies. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information.
For students interested in other comparative classes please see also:
English 730 Romantic Agencies
Deborah Elise White
Content: "Action" and "agency" are terms that have traditionally posed special problems for romanticism. Hazlitt's semi-serious verdict, "We are an age of talkers and not of doers," hints at the historical crisis of consciousness and self-consciousness that seems to overtake romantic writers as they attempt to position themselves and their works as, precisely, agents on the fields of public and private transformation. This seminar will examine these problems with special attention to the romantics' heightened sense of the tension between action and intention -- and its apparent reflection in the tension between action and representation. We will consider how multiple and contradictory figures of agency inhabit romantic texts as they both stage and reflect on their own status as acts of representation or even representative acts -- at once "talkers...and doers." In exploring these problems we will read texts of all genres with readings drawn from novels, poems, plays, philosophical essays, and political polemics. Authors to include Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Austen, Kleist, and Marx with some contemporary critical readings drawn from Christensen, De Man, Hartman, and Rajan. (The Kleist and Marx texts will be made available in English; reading knowledge of German is useful, but certainly not required.)