Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2005

CPLT 751 000 Nietzsche Writing Religion

Mark Jordan
M 9:30-12:30
Max 4
[Crosslisted with RLR 725N]

Content: The books of Nietzsche’s trilogy—Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra—enact desires for cultural therapy. Therapy for Europe requires the displacement of Christianity. Nietzsche attacks Christianity by mocking its pretensions to heal, but he displaces it by rewriting the canonical Gospels to show what life-giving Good News would really sound like. This re-writing is Zarathustra. Our main task will be to read this new gospel as part of a trilogy that also features appearances by Dionysus and the triple goddess of Sais. We will glance back to Nietzsche’s first effort to write out gods (in the Birth of Tragedy) and sideways to his summary diatribe against Christianity (the Anti-Christ) and his hymns (Dionysus-Dithyrambs). We will also enlist the aid of a few of Nietzsche’s more cunning readers.

Texts: Beyond the texts by Nietzsche mentioned above, we will read some commentators, including at least Kofman and Klossowski.

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 make two exegetical or critical presentations to the whole seminar. The main written work will be a final essay. There will be no examinations—except for those imposed by the texts themselves.

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CPLT 751 001 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Rudolf Makkreel
W 1-4
Max 4
[Crosslisted with PHIL 518]

Content: An intensive study of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which will trace Kant's transcendental approach as it applies to his analysis of intuition, imagination, understanding, and reason. The nature of synthetic a priori propositions will be examined in terms of mathematical cognition and scientific experience. Finally, we will explore Kant's critique of traditional metaphysics and theology and his views on experience and belief, cognition and knowledge.

Texts: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Guyer and Wood
(Cambridge UP); Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (Yale UP).

Particulars: Final grade will be based on student participation in the seminars and the completion of a twenty page paper.

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CPLT 751 002 Theories of Myth in 20th century & 21st century

Laurie Patton
W 7-10
Max 4
[Crosslisted with RLAR 703M, ILA 790]

Content: Historian of religion Ivan Strenski has characterized the concept of "myth" as "an idiosyncratic oddity of cultural history." This course will take up Strenski's critique, and consider the treatment of myth in a number of intellectual contexts--literary, philosophical, and historical. We will examine, among others, the writings of philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Leszek Kolakowski, and Paul Ricoeur; literary critics Northrop Frye, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Marcel Detienne, and historians of religion Charles Long, Ivan Strenski, Bruce Lincoln, Sam Gill, Wendy Doniger, and Robert Ellwood. Each section of the course will also involve essays from collections of essay on myth published in the last decade, which attempt to break new ground in each of these areas. Special attention will be paid to the following themes: 1) myth as an ontological category; 2) myth as a function of religious experience; 3) the role of myth in the study of literature; 4) the relationships between mythical and historical narratives; and 5) myth as a political category of analysis. Previous work in the modern study of religion, the anthropology of religion, the philosophy of religion, or comparative literature is most helpful.

Texts: Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship; Shlomo Biderman, ed. Myths and Fictions: Their Place in Philosophy and Religion; Schillbrack, Ed. Thinking through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives; Leszek Kolakwoski, The Presence of Myth; Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred : religion, narrative, and imagination; William K. Doty, Mythographies; Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in the Twentieth Century; Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth; Roland Barthes, Mythologies; Marcel Detienne, The Creation of Myth; Sam Gill, Mother Earth; Walter Benjamin, Selections from the Arcades; Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth; Ernst Cassirer, Myth and Language; Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider.

Particulars: Requirements include regular attendance, vigorous participation in class discussion, regular presentations and writing throughout class; one final research paper on a topic of the student's choosing.

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CPLT 751 003 Revolutionary Perversions: 'Literary Sex Acts 1789-1848'

Elissa Marder
W 1-4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with FREN 775]

Content: In this course, we shall examine how representations of “non-normative” sexuality in several major nineteenth-century 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), La Fille aux yeux d’or (Balzac), Mlle de Maupin (Gautier), L’Education sentimentale (Flaubert) and selections from Baudelaire. We shall also discuss paintings by Delacroix, Manet and Courbet. Critical readings may include works by Freud, Marx, Benjamin, Alain Corbin, Thomas Laqueur and others.

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CPLT 751 004 Philosophies of Fiction & Fiction of Philosophy

Josue Harari
Tu 1-4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with FREN 530]

Content: Since the birth of Western rationality, philosophical discourse (with the exception of Nietzshe) has defined the pursuit of knowledge at the exclusion of desire. The purpose of this course is to test and challenge this hypothesis by showing how certain great texts of French literature of the 18th-19th century literary deal -- in more complex and subtle ways -- with this exclusionary relationship. PS. This is not a philosophy course but a course on FRENCH literature focusing on works by Montesquieu, Prevost, Rousseau, Sade and Balzac, among others. Taught in French.

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CPLT 752 000 The Bible & the Law: Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology

Shalom Goldman
M 1-4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with MES 570]

Content: In this seminar we will read three classics of modern thought--"Fear and Trembling", "Moses and Monotheism" and "Purity and Danger"--in conjunction with Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus. We will approach each of the modern works as a response to, and commentary on, the Biblical books to which they are referenced.

Texts: Freud, S., Moses and Monotheism; Douglas, M., Purity and Danger; Kierkegaard, S., Fear and Trembling; Spiegel, S., The Last Trial; Oxford Study Bible; Alter, R. & Kermode, F., The Literary Guide to the Bible; Levinson, J., The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son; and Yerushalmi, Y., Freud's Moses.

Particulars: Participants are expected to submit a weekly response paper of 3-4 pages in length. They are also expected to develop and write a final research paper, as well as student presentation of this paper.

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CPLT 752 001 Romanticism and the Invention of History

Deborah White
Th 10-1
Max 4
[Crosslisted with ENG 730]

Content: This course explores how certain notions of historicism and historicity are set to work by British, French, and German romanticisms. Writing about the historicism of the British romantic period as it prefigures contemporary “new historicism,” James Chandler has described it as “the age of the spirit of the age,” noting the pervasive historical consciousness to which Shelley’s and Hazlitt’s phrase, “the spirit of the age,” testifies—noting, that is, the romantic era’s sense of its own contemporaneity in contradistinction to earlier eras. We will explore that sense of contemporaneity in its relation to the experience and discourse of revolution—that is, to romanticism’s attempts to rewrite and, at times, to cast off at least one version of history, the “ancien regime.” We will consider, too, its relation to romanticism’s seemingly very different attempts to narrativize and re-create the past as an apparent shelter against the shock of revolution and impending futurity (or against “contemporaneity” itself).

Texts: Readings to be drawn from a variety of genres and authors, the latter including Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hölderlin, Novalis, Hazlitt, Scott, Shelley, Hugo, Michelet, and Carlyle. Additional critical and theoretical readings may be drawn from Arendt, Chandler, Derrida, De Man, Hartman, Koselleck, Lukács, McGann, Marx, Szondi, and H. White.

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CPLT 752 002 From Simmel to Adorno

Elizabeth Goodstein
W 1-4
Max 4
[Crosslisted with HIS 585, ILA 790]

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 752 003 Eros and Theologia: Dante's Spiritual Voyage

Guiliana Carugati
W 4-7
Max 15

Content: The course approaches Dante’s oeuvre by privileging the relation between eros and the discourse on God. The original solution elaborated by Dante will be shown to be based on the Neoplatonic tradition - from Proclus to Boethius to Alanus and the Roman de la Rose. The introduction of carnal love at the heart of “theology”, and the opening thereby of a new territory for thought, inaugurates the modern conception, and practice, of poetry. As it strives to situate Dante’s oeuvre in its historical and philosophical context, the course will raise important theoretical issues, such as the relation between philosophy, religious faith, and writing. It will also explore a phenomenon which transcends a specific historical incarnation - the idealization of woman.

Texts: Vita Nuova, selected Rime, Convivio II-III, Commedia. Texts will be read in translation. Students with Italian are encouraged to use and apply it in the course.

Particulars: One research paper and one class presentation based on the paper.

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CPLT 752 004 Francoism: History, Politics, Bio-politics

Tatjana Gajic
W1-4
Max 3
[Crosslisted with SPAN 550]

Content: The purpose of this class is two-fold: to examine critical literature about the specific nature and historical development of Francoism in the Spanish and European context, and to analyze to what extent the concept of bio-politics can contribute to an understanding of Francoism as a phenomenon that pervaded all spheres of life. If we depart from Foucault’s definition of bio-politics as a fusion of politics and life that alters the meaning of both terms—in Foucault’s words, “modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question” --, then is it possible to see Francoism as not just a phase or a necessary evil of Spanish history, but as a conception of politics that simultaneously embarked on altering modern politics and aspired towards a total organization of life? Some topics this class will examine are: the relationship between Francoism and fascism, Francoism and the perpetuation of the logic of war, Francoism and the politics of life and death, Francoism and the oppressed groups (women, children, “reds”). The selection of class materials will balance out literary (including film), historical and critical writings, and will combine texts produced under Francoism with other, recent ones.

Texts: Juan Benet. Herrumbrosas lanzas (I) or Volveras a Región; Camilo José Cela. La colmena; Dulce Chacón. La voz dormida; Agustín Foxa. De Corte a Checa; Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. El testamento de Yarfoz; Juan García Hortelano. El gran momento de Mary Tribune; Critical works by Giorgio Agamben, Hanah Arendt, Carl Schmitt,and historical works by Santos Juliá, Paul Preston, Ismael Saz, Contxa Mir, Julián Casanova and others.

Particulars: Grade will be based on class participation, oral presentation and final essay. Taught in Spanish.

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CPLT 752 005 Silence in Literature, Theater & Aesthetics

Claudia Benthien
W 1-4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with GER 550, ILA 790]

Contents: The graduate seminar examines silence as a literary, aesthetic, and anthropological phenomenon from early modernism to the 20th century. It investigates into (1) the modes and paradoxes of representing "silence" in literay texts and on stage; (2) its rhetoric, performity, and phenomenology; (3) its functions, significations and meanings (e.g. as expression of a crisis of representation, or as a means of oppression). The corpus of texts to be read consists of writings from the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, rhetorics, performance and literary theory.

Texts: Titus Anronicus, Shakespeare; Epicoene or The Silent Woman, B. Johnson; The Marquise of O..., Kleist; The Lord Chandos Letter, Hofmannsthal; The Difficult Man, Hofmannsthal; The Silence of the Sirens, Kafka; Tales from the Vienna Woods, Horvath; Waiting for Godot, Beckett; Silence, N. Sarraute; Renaissance and Baroque emblems on "silentium"; poems from the early Enlightenment -late 20th century; Bergman's movie The Silence; John Cage's essay Lecture on Nothing; and a current Atlanta theater production.

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CPLT 753 000 Teaching of Literature

Dalia Judovitz/Jill Robbins
W 9-12
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. This three hour
seminar will cover both theories of teaching as well as questions of
applied pedagogy. 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.

Text: Selected Readings available on On-line Reserve and Gross Davis, Tools of Teaching.

Particulars: Oral presentations; survey and analyses of teaching resources; preparation, presentation, and critical analysis of a syllabus; and sample class presentation.

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CPLT 753 000 Violent Mirrors: Literary & Cultural Narcissism

Claire Nouvet
Tu 7-10
Max 5
[Crosslisted with FREN 520]

Content: Through the issue of narcissism, we will explore the very status of the self as well as its relation to the other be it one of love,
domination, aggressivity (to the point of murder) or alienation. After
studying the traumatic violence inherent in the constitution of one’s
own self-image (Ovid’s myth of Narcissus), we will explore the ways in
which narcissism frames love in the poetry of the troubadours and the
Roman de la Rose. Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain and Salvador Dali’s
autobiographical texts stage for their part the aggressive component of narcissism, its murderous impulse. As for Nebreda’s photographs, they testify to the radical loss of self that the experience of the mirror
induces in schizophrenia. Finally, cultural narcissism and the
violence that it inflicts upon the other will be studied in a medieval
epic narrative (La Chanson de Roland) and in selected works by Fanon
and Spivak.

Text: Ovid, Narcissus; Guillaume de Lorris, Le roman de la rose;
Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain; La chanson de Roland; Salvador Dali, Le
poème de Narcisse, excerpts from Journal d’un genie, La vie secrète de Salvador Dali; Fanon, Les damnés de la terre; Nebreda; Jean Oury,
Création et schizophrénie.

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CPLT 753 000 Love, Hate, Envy & Gratitude: Objects of Analysis in 20th century Literature

Walter Kalaidjian
Th 4-7
Max 2
[Crosslisted with ENG 789R, ILA 790, WS 585]

Content: What can object relations theory tell us about such primal emotive states as love and hate, envy and gratitude, guilt and reparation? What is the relation between emotion and aesthetic creation, between anxiety and symbolization? What is the difference between objects and persons? How does one discern the trace of the object in literature? How are object relations inflected by sexual, racial, and ethnic difference? Reading at the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis, this course will explore, and seek to answer, such fundamental questions in close readings of major works of twentieth-century American literature.

Text: Primary Texts: Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories, Finca Vigia Edition, The Garden of Eden; Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Robert Lowell, Selected Poems; Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems; Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; Toni Morrison, Sula; Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl; Erica Kates, On the Couch: Great American Stories about Therapy; Patrick McGrath, Spider; David Mamet, House of Games. Secondary Readings: Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Mourning and Melancholia; Juliet Mitchell, ed. The Selected Melanie Klein; Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein; D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality; Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy, and Art; Bernard Burgoyne, ed. The Klein-Lacan Dialogues.

Particulars: Requirements for this seminar include a response paper, a research essay, and a presentation.

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CPLT 753 000 Literature & Psychoanalysis: Texts, Methods, Ethics of Interpretation

Shoshana Felman
M 4-7
Max 4
[Crosslisted with FREN 780P, ENG 789, RLAR 725P]

Content: How has psychoanalysis revolutionized our conception of knowledge and of man? What are the psychoanalytic concepts that inform modern culture? How does psychoanalysis give us tools for understanding and interpreting literary works?  The course will explore these questions through selected readings in psychoanalytic writings. Emphasis on Freud's and Lacan's understanding of the self as well as of society and culture, through an illumination of the relation of desire to repression, of life to death, of fiction to reality, of religion to disillusion.  Among the notions discussed are theories of sexuality, narcissism, identification, dreams, repetition, death drive, mourning, trauma, memory and history.

Text: Authors closely studied include Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Malanie Klein, and others.

Particulars: Two short papers in the course of the semester; orals presentations and ongoing active participation.

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CPLT 753 000 Comedia & the Subject of Performance

Maria Carrion
Tu 1-4
Max 3
[Crosslisted with SPAN 530, WS 585]

Content: This seminar explores the Comedia—the first professional theater of Spain—as discourse, work, and profession. The central research question for the group is: how can one negotiate evidence (legal, literary, historical) with contemporary subject and performance theories to contribute to understanding seventeenth-century Spain? Discussions will revolve around critical reviews of rules of evidence in Spanish law, literature, and history, and they will seek to produce new interpretations of the concepts of theater, subject, and performance
during this period. Class readings of legal and dramatic texts will focus on their multiple capacities to be both cause and effect of each other.

Discussions will consider, but will not be limited to, the much maligned
correspondence of subject and performance theories, and the play of
presence/absence (linguistic, discursive, dramatic, evidentiary) of such
matters in seventeenth-century Spain; the representation (legal, aesthetic, and political) of sex, love, and marriage; 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 the Peninsula; the running of shows and theaters; the printing of the Partes; the different genres (comedia, entremés, 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 mujer 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.

Text: Cervantes, Entremeses; Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, El castigo sin venganza, La dama boba, El caballero de Olmedo, El perro del hortelano; Vélez de Guevara, La serrana de la Vera; Tirso de Molina, Don Gil de las calzas verdes y El burlador de Sevilla; Calderón, El médico de su honra, La dama duende, El gran teatro del mundo, La vida es sueño, and Jácaras; Caro, El Conde Partinuplés; Zayas, La traición en la amistad. Photocopies of 16th- and
17th-century legal documents, as well as relevant theoretical and historical materials.

Particulars: Attendance and class participation (45%), presentations (10%), one research paper (45%). Assignments written in English.

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CPLT 797R Directed Readings

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

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CPLT 799R Dissertation Research

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