Emory | Comp Lit | Graduate Program

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2006

CPLT 751 000 Hannah Arendt: History, Politics, Language

Cathy Caruth
Th 1 - 4
Max 10
[Crosslisted with ENG 789 and FREN 780]

Content: This course will explore Arendt's rethinking of politics and of history in the light of 20th century historical catastrophe. We will examine in particular the relation between the beginning and ending of rights, between deception and action, between political origination and "image-making." Arendt will be put in conversation with three major literary and philosophical theorists of language (Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Shoshana Felman) in order to examine the encounter between problems of politics and of language, with attention to the topics of origination, forgetting, lying and testimony.

Texts: Texts by Arendt include selections from The Origins of
Totalitarianism, On Revolution, Eichmann in Jersualem, "Truth and Politics" (from Between Past and Future) and "Lying in Politics," among others. Texts by other authors include Paul de Man, "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater" and "Shelley Disfigured," Jacques Derrida, "History of the Lie" (on Arendt) and Shoshana Felman, "Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust" and "A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law." Readings will also include essays on Arendt by Werner Hamacher and Giorgio Agamben as well as a selection of Arendt scholars.

Particulars: active class participation, a brief presentation and one final paper.

CPLT 751 001 Derrida

Bennington
W 1-4
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 780 and PHIL 789]

Content: The aim of the course is to come to a general understanding of Derrida's thinking since the 1960's. In the first part of the course we shall concentrate on texts from the 60's and early 70's in an endeavour to clarify key Derridean terms such as différance, écriture, dissémination and trace. In the second part we shall explore some more recent developments, especially in the areas of ethics, politics and religion.

CPLT 751 002 Barthes

Candace Lang
M 1 - 4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with FREN 770]

Content: Though generally classified as a literary critic, Barthes 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 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."

CPLT 751 003 Poetics and Cognitive Science

John Johnston
Tu 1 - 4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with ENG 789R]

Content: Until fairly recently, the humanities have mostly ignored developments in contemporary cognitive science. Increasingly, however, researchers on both sides of the assumed cultural divide have found work on the other side to be of great relevance. Literary scholars, for example, have discovered the usefulness of cognitive theories of metaphor like Lakoff and Johnson’s, and that neuroscience has much to contribute to trauma theory. Among other examples, linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has explained why irregular verbs are statistically preponderant in poetry, and evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have argued compellingly from an evolutionary perspective for the functional value of the esthetic response to art and literature. But beyond these scattered examples stands a larger question: How could contemporary theories of mind not be of interest to literary scholars, given that cognitive science is beginning to yield new understandings of consciousness, human memory, emotion, creativity, language and metaphor, and the self ? From the other side, perhaps the distinguished Berkeley neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman put it best when he argued that the humanities constitute the richest database available of the full complexity of human thought, behavior and feeling, and that it therefore cannot be ignored by any science interested in explaining these things. In a recent lecture, after reminding the audience that Plato and Aristotle were the first cognitive theorists, he noted that it was clear from The Prelude and Ulysses that Wordsworth and Joyce knew more about how the human mind works than many of his colleagues.

This course will take up a series of topics in cognitive science as both challenge and theoretical resource for literary study, beginning with “Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach,” an essay by the founder of cognitive science, Herbert Simon. Among the topics to be considered are: the nature of mind/brain, consciousness, memory, metaphor, and evolutionary psychology. Discussion will be based on a selection of short and non-technical readings from books and essays by (in addition to those already mentioned) Antonio R. Damasio, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, Terrence W. Deacon, Christof Koch and others. Interspersed among these selections we will also read several contemporary novels --Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, and Dan Lloyd’s Radiant Cool-- visibly influenced by cognitive science.

Particulars: a short oral report and a seminar essay due at the end of the semester.

CPLT 751 004 Bakhtin on Philosophy, Literature and Criticism

Bracht Branham
Th 2:30 - 5:30
Max 7
[Crosslisted with PHIL 789 and ILA 790]

Content: We will begin with the early, polemical works (written in collaboration with the Bakhtin circle) and their critiques of Marx, Freud, Saussure, and the Russian Formalists (i.e., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, and Freud: A Marxist Critique). I would like to spend most of the semester working through Bakhtin's major studies of Dostoevsky (i.e., Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics) and Rabelais (i.e. Rabelaus and His World). Bahktin reflected extensively on his own methods and those of the human sciences in general (as contrasted with the natural sciences). Does his work provide a useful model for a philosophical approach to literary and cultural criticism? No previous knowledge of Bakhtin is assumed.

CPLT 752 000 Romantic Subjectivities

Deborah White
W 4 - 7
Max 4
[Crosslisted with ENG 730]

Content: This seminar takes as its point of departure the romantic engagement with the problematic status of self-consciousness or, in Geoffrey Hartman’s words, “the link between consciousness and self-consciousness or knowledge and guilt.” At issue are the different ways romantic subjectivity formulates itself as an impossible species of reflexivity—a structure of inwardness that turns (or returns) to itself even as it nonetheless remains subject to an exteriority it can never entirely contain. The reading will focus on two crucial texts of British Romanticism to be explored at length during the semester, Wordsworth’s Prelude and Byron’s Don Juan. The seminar’s reading of these works will also be framed by a small selection of other romantic texts including writings by Kleist, Austen, and Carlyle with additional attention to critical and theoretical writings to be drawn from Althusser, Batten, Benjamin, Butler, Christensen, De Man, Galperin, Hartman, Liu, McGann and Rajan.

CPLT 752 001 20th century American Literature and Extraordinary Experience

Walter Kalaidjian
Th 4 - 7
Max 2
[Crosslisted with ENG 752 and ILA 790]

Content: This seminar will explore literary representations of the relationships among traumatic events, terrorism, delusion, and extraordinary experience generally. We will survey a broad range of major authors, periods, genres, and cultural objects of study from the First and Second World wars through post-9/11 fiction. In addition to reviewing the emergent field of trauma studies, we will focus in particular on the connection between loss and psychosis as theorized by such figures as Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and W. D. Winnicott among others. The seminar will also include film and popular culture in our consideration of emergent forms of mass delusion in the public sphere.

Texts: H.D., Collected Poems; Robert Lowell, Selected Poems; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Ray Young Bear, Black Eagle Child; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel; Patrick McGrath, Spider; Ian McEwan, Saturday; and Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days.

Secondary Readings: excerpts, Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia; W. D. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown”; excerpts, Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses; excerpts, Robert Lindner, The Fifty Minute Hour; excerpts, C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky; excerpts, John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Contact with Aliens; excerpts, Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace .

Particulars: In addition to the readings, assignments will comprise a short response essay, a research paper, and a seminar presentation.

CPLT 753 000 The Work of Memory

Angelika Bammer
W 4 - 7
Max 6
[Crosslisted 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: Course readings will be selected from among the following: 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.

CPLT 753 001 Global Culture and Future of the Humanities

Mikhail Epstein
Tu 4-7
Max 8
[Crosslisted with RUSS 550 and ILA 790]

Content: Is poststructuralism still the dominant trend in the Western humanities or are there new visions and methodologies coming to succeed it in the 21st century? Can we develop new creative strategies for humanstic research? What would be the role of techno-humanities and intellectual technologies in the 21st century? This course will focus on the changing paradigms of the humanities, especially in literary and cultural theory and philosophy. Emphasis will be placed on the issues of intellectual creativity and the development of new ideas in humanistic research. We will explore the new emerging territory of posthuman, or transhuman studies, the concept of "the death of the human" and visions of the "posthuman" age governed by thinking machines and artificial intelligence. Our goal is to understand 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: TBA

Particulars: oral presentations, term paper.

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.






	graduate program handbook courses spring 2007 fall 2006 spring 2006 fall 2005 spring 2005 fall 2004 spring 2004 fall 2003 spring 2003 fall 2002 spring 2002 fall 2001 students admissions Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings Spring 2006 CPLT 751 000 Hannah Arendt: History, Politics, Language Cathy Caruth Th 1 - 4 Max 10 [Crosslisted with ENG 789 and FREN 780] Content: This course will explore Arendt's rethinking of politics and of history in the light of 20th century historical catastrophe. We will examine in particular the relation between the beginning and ending of rights, between deception and action, between political origination and "image-making." Arendt will be put in conversation with three major literary and philosophical theorists of language (Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Shoshana Felman) in order to examine the encounter between problems of politics and of language, with attention to the topics of origination, forgetting, lying and testimony. Texts: Texts by Arendt include selections from The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, Eichmann in Jersualem, "Truth and Politics" (from Between Past and Future) and "Lying in Politics," among others. Texts by other authors include Paul de Man, "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater" and "Shelley Disfigured," Jacques Derrida, "History of the Lie" (on Arendt) and Shoshana Felman, "Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust" and "A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law." Readings will also include essays on Arendt by Werner Hamacher and Giorgio Agamben as well as a selection of Arendt scholars. Particulars: active class participation, a brief presentation and one final paper. CPLT 751 001 Derrida Bennington W 1-4 Max 8 [Crosslisted with FREN 780 and PHIL 789] Content: The aim of the course is to come to a general understanding of Derrida's thinking since the 1960's. In the first part of the course we shall concentrate on texts from the 60's and early 70's in an endeavour to clarify key Derridean terms such as différance, écriture, dissémination and trace. In the second part we shall explore some more recent developments, especially in the areas of ethics, politics and religion. CPLT 751 002 Barthes Candace Lang M 1 - 4 Max 5 [Crosslisted with FREN 770] Content: Though generally classified as a literary critic, Barthes 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 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." CPLT 751 003 Poetics and Cognitive Science John Johnston Tu 1 - 4 Max 5 [Crosslisted with ENG 789R] Content: Until fairly recently, the humanities have mostly ignored developments in contemporary cognitive science. Increasingly, however, researchers on both sides of the assumed cultural divide have found work on the other side to be of great relevance. Literary scholars, for example, have discovered the usefulness of cognitive theories of metaphor like Lakoff and Johnson’s, and that neuroscience has much to contribute to trauma theory. Among other examples, linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has explained why irregular verbs are statistically preponderant in poetry, and evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have argued compellingly from an evolutionary perspective for the functional value of the esthetic response to art and literature. But beyond these scattered examples stands a larger question: How could contemporary theories of mind not be of interest to literary scholars, given that cognitive science is beginning to yield new understandings of consciousness, human memory, emotion, creativity, language and metaphor, and the self ? From the other side, perhaps the distinguished Berkeley neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman put it best when he argued that the humanities constitute the richest database available of the full complexity of human thought, behavior and feeling, and that it therefore cannot be ignored by any science interested in explaining these things. In a recent lecture, after reminding the audience that Plato and Aristotle were the first cognitive theorists, he noted that it was clear from The Prelude and Ulysses that Wordsworth and Joyce knew more about how the human mind works than many of his colleagues. This course will take up a series of topics in cognitive science as both challenge and theoretical resource for literary study, beginning with “Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach,” an essay by the founder of cognitive science, Herbert Simon. Among the topics to be considered are: the nature of mind/brain, consciousness, memory, metaphor, and evolutionary psychology. Discussion will be based on a selection of short and non-technical readings from books and essays by (in addition to those already mentioned) Antonio R. Damasio, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, Terrence W. Deacon, Christof Koch and others. Interspersed among these selections we will also read several contemporary novels --Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, and Dan Lloyd’s Radiant Cool-- visibly influenced by cognitive science. Particulars: a short oral report and a seminar essay due at the end of the semester. CPLT 751 004 Bakhtin on Philosophy, Literature and Criticism Bracht Branham Th 2:30 - 5:30 Max 7 [Crosslisted with PHIL 789 and ILA 790] Content: We will begin with the early, polemical works (written in collaboration with the Bakhtin circle) and their critiques of Marx, Freud, Saussure, and the Russian Formalists (i.e., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, and Freud: A Marxist Critique). I would like to spend most of the semester working through Bakhtin's major studies of Dostoevsky (i.e., Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics) and Rabelais (i.e. Rabelaus and His World). Bahktin reflected extensively on his own methods and those of the human sciences in general (as contrasted with the natural sciences). Does his work provide a useful model for a philosophical approach to literary and cultural criticism? No previous knowledge of Bakhtin is assumed. CPLT 752 000 Romantic Subjectivities Deborah White W 4 - 7 Max 4 [Crosslisted with ENG 730] Content: This seminar takes as its point of departure the romantic engagement with the problematic status of self-consciousness or, in Geoffrey Hartman’s words, “the link between consciousness and self-consciousness or knowledge and guilt.” At issue are the different ways romantic subjectivity formulates itself as an impossible species of reflexivity—a structure of inwardness that turns (or returns) to itself even as it nonetheless remains subject to an exteriority it can never entirely contain. The reading will focus on two crucial texts of British Romanticism to be explored at length during the semester, Wordsworth’s Prelude and Byron’s Don Juan. The seminar’s reading of these works will also be framed by a small selection of other romantic texts including writings by Kleist, Austen, and Carlyle with additional attention to critical and theoretical writings to be drawn from Althusser, Batten, Benjamin, Butler, Christensen, De Man, Galperin, Hartman, Liu, McGann and Rajan. CPLT 752 001 20th century American Literature and Extraordinary Experience Walter Kalaidjian Th 4 - 7 Max 2 [Crosslisted with ENG 752 and ILA 790] Content: This seminar will explore literary representations of the relationships among traumatic events, terrorism, delusion, and extraordinary experience generally. We will survey a broad range of major authors, periods, genres, and cultural objects of study from the First and Second World wars through post-9/11 fiction. In addition to reviewing the emergent field of trauma studies, we will focus in particular on the connection between loss and psychosis as theorized by such figures as Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and W. D. Winnicott among others. The seminar will also include film and popular culture in our consideration of emergent forms of mass delusion in the public sphere. Texts: H.D., Collected Poems; Robert Lowell, Selected Poems; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Ray Young Bear, Black Eagle Child; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel; Patrick McGrath, Spider; Ian McEwan, Saturday; and Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days. Secondary Readings: excerpts, Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia; W. D. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown”; excerpts, Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses; excerpts, Robert Lindner, The Fifty Minute Hour; excerpts, C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky; excerpts, John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Contact with Aliens; excerpts, Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace . Particulars: In addition to the readings, assignments will comprise a short response essay, a research paper, and a seminar presentation. CPLT 753 000 The Work of Memory Angelika Bammer W 4 - 7 Max 6 [Crosslisted 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: Course readings will be selected from among the following: 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. CPLT 753 001 Global Culture and Future of the Humanities Mikhail Epstein Tu 4-7 Max 8 [Crosslisted with RUSS 550 and ILA 790] Content: Is poststructuralism still the dominant trend in the Western humanities or are there new visions and methodologies coming to succeed it in the 21st century? Can we develop new creative strategies for humanstic research? What would be the role of techno-humanities and intellectual technologies in the 21st century? This course will focus on the changing paradigms of the humanities, especially in literary and cultural theory and philosophy. Emphasis will be placed on the issues of intellectual creativity and the development of new ideas in humanistic research. We will explore the new emerging territory of posthuman, or transhuman studies, the concept of "the death of the human" and visions of the "posthuman" age governed by thinking machines and artificial intelligence. Our goal is to understand 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: TBA Particulars: oral presentations, term paper. 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.

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings Spring 2006

Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2006