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Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2007
CPLT 751 000 The Limit Experience: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille
Jill Robbins
W 1 - 4
Max 10
[Crosslisted with RLTS 755]
Content:
Texts:
CPLT 751 001 The Philosophy and Literature of Cynicism: Ancient and Modern
Branham
Tu 1-4
Max 10
[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 placeEurope. 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.
Texts: D. R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism (CityplaceCambridge 1937) rpt. Ares Pub. CityplaceChicago 0890053650; R. B. Branham and M. O. Goulet-Caze, eds., The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (CityplaceBerkeley 1996) 0520216458; and Diogenes Laertius, Loeb Classical Library vol. II (Cambridge, Mass. 1970) 0674992040.
CPLT 751 002 New Media Vision and Theory
John Johnston
W 1 - 4
Max 10
[Crosslisted with ENG 789R]
Content: New Media Studies takes as its object the media made possible and supported by digital computers and global, computer-mediated networks. This course will focus on some of the key figures, central concepts and important arguments that have shaped and defined this huge and booming new academic field. Readings selected from both early visionaries and contemporary theorists will bring into play a range of perspectives --technological, esthetic, social, economic and political. In addition to the readings, we will consider archival and contemporary material on the Internet pertinent to the relationship between media technology and media aesthetics. I have listed topics and authors below, but the exact selection will reflect student interests.
Topics and themes: The computer as simulation machine and meta-medium, remediation, interactivity, interface, database versus narrative, hacker culture and cyber-feminism, collective intelligence, the open source and free software movements, hypertext fiction and poetry, net art, the Internet and the law, real time and virtual space, disembodiment.
Visionaries and theorists: Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, J. C. Licklider, Ted Nelson, Donna Haraway, Robert Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, Brenda Laurel, Lev Manovich, Jean Baudrillard, Friedrick Kittler, Sadie Plant, Pierre Levy, Paul Virilio, J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Lawrence Lessig, and Ellen Ullman.
In addition, the exploration of cultural and critical perspectives on software theory, Web sites, blogging and social network sites, gaming, virtual cinema and other digital practices will be encouraged.
Texts: Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort (editors), The New Media Reader; and Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media.
Particulars: an oral presentation and a seminar paper or digital project.
CPLT 751 003 Godard/Barthes
Karla Oeler
F 10-1, screenings W 8-10
Max 6
[Crosslisted with FILM 501 and FREN 770]
Content: This course will consider two keyfigures in postwar French culture, Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard,who, despite their similarities, are seldom studied together.
Texts: Films will include: Breathless (1960), My Life to Live (1962), Weekend (1967) Tout va bien (1972), Contempt (1963), Histoire(s) du cinema (1989-1998), and JLG/JLG Autoportrait du decembre (1995). Texts will include: The Pleasure of the Text (1973), S/Z (1970), Mythologies (1957) and Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975).
Particulars: Course requirements are: attendance and participation in seminar, ability to attend all screenings of Histoire(s) du cinema, a seminar presentation of 30-40 minutes, and a research paper.
CPLT 751 004 Theories and Ethnographies of Pleasure and Suffering
Michael Moon
Tu 1-4
Max 5
[Crosslisted with ILA 790]
Content: We shall examine a number of formative texts (literary, philosophical, ethnographic) in the conceptualization of pleasure and suffering in modernity, as well as some recent texts (literary, theoretical, cinematic) that take the exposition of pleasurable and/or painful experience as their project.
Texts: Whitman, Baudelaire, Dickinson, selected poems; Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs; Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty; Foucault, History of Sexuality; Malinowski, Field Notebooks; Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [sections on “pain in the bodies of others”]; Veena Das, essays on language, narrative, ethnography, and the long-term effects of social suffering.
Particulars: Members of the class will pursue a research project on some aspect of the topic of pleasure and/or suffering, to be determined in consultation with the instructor, on which they will present an interim research report during the course of the semester and then present, near the end of term, as a critical or theoretical essay and/or a curatorial project.
CPLT 751 005 From Simmel to Adorno
Elizabeth Goodstein
Th 1 - 4
Max 4
[Crosslisted with ILA 790 and PHIL 789]
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.
CPLT 751 006 Other to Oneself: Precarious Identifications
Claire Nouvet
W 6-9
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 770]
Content: What is a self? Can it ever be self-identical? Or is it from the very beginning open to otherness, alien to itself? We will trace this “otherness” as constitutive of the self by focusing on the following issues: 1) the emergence of the ego through an alienating process of identification 2) the suicidal and murderous quality of the desire for self-identity and its inherent failure 3) the sexual other as traumatic intrusion 4) the resistance of the post-colonial subject 5) the therapist as the “horrified other”.
Texts: Breuer and Freud: Studies on Hysteria (“Elizabeth”); Freud: On Narcissism, “Emma” in Project for a Scientific Psychology Part II “Psychopathology”; Lacan: “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Écrits; Merleau-Ponty: “The Child’s Relations with Others” in Primacy of Perception; Laplanche: selections from “Essays on Otherness”; Spivak: “Echo” in the Spivak Reader; Dali: The Secret Life of Salvador Dali; Ovid: “Narcissus” in Metamorphoses [book three]; Guillaume de Lorris; Romance of the Rose; Chrétien de Troyes: Yvain; and Davoine and Gaudillière History Beyond Trauma.
CPLT 751 007 La Littérature et le mal. Sexualité, féminité, bestialité, de Baudelaire à Michelet (taught in French)
Serge Margel
F 1-4
Max 8
[Crosslisted with FREN 775]
Content: La question qui va nous occuper durant ce cours concerne les figures de l'animalité. Non pas seulement les différentes sortes d'animaux qui forment le bestiaire de la littérature, mais surtout cette notion abstraite d'animalité, cette idéalité ni homme ni dieu, mi-homme mi-dieu, cette forme hybride, qui permet au récit poétique et littéraire, du XIXe siècle en particulier, de parler, de questionner, de s'approprier ou d'identifier sa propre écriture. La sexualité sera au coeur du problème, et tout spécialement la sexualité féminine, telle qu'en parlent Baudelaire ou Michelet.
Texts : Charles Baudelaire, Les fleures du mal, Les paradis artificiels, Le Spleen de Paris; Jules Michelet, La Sorcière, La Femme, L'Amour. — Roland Barthes, Michelet par lui-même; Jean-Pierre Richard, Poésie et profondeur.
CPLT 751 008 Introduction to Psychoanalytic Studies
Dean Robert Paul/Beth Seelig
Th 9-12
Max 6
[Crosslisted with PSP 760 and ILA 790]
Content: This course is intended to give a graduate student in any relevant department a grounding in the history and fundamental concepts of clinical, theoretical, and applied psychoanalysis. It aims to make an overview of the diverse scope of the field of psychoanalysis thought readily available to any interested graduate student, and to provide the necessary groundwork for further explanation. This course is required for every student pursuing a Minor Certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies, but is open to all students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
CPLT 751 009 Cultural Production of the Global Americas
Dierdra Reber
W 1-4
Max 3
[Crosslisted with SPAN 560]
Content: Globalization is too new and current--and too fraught with questions of the global distribution of power--to have yielded a theoretical consensus regarding its nature. Culture and economics are at the center of two critical sets of debates. The first interrogates their degrees of continuity versus discontinuity. In other words: is global culture different than the postmodern, and is post-Soviet neoliberalism different than modernist capitalism, or does each simply represent one more variation in a qualitatively unified diachronic story? The second debate concerns the degree of homogeneity versus heterogeneity in the manifestation(s) of global culture and neoliberalism. Is global culture “centrist” and monolithic, imposing itself on the world’s “periphery” through economic and military force? Or is the “center-periphery” formulation of dependency theory outmoded—should we rather think of globalization in the plural, as an eclectic and locally determined set of cultures and economic systems? In the most simple of terms: is there something qualitatively different about cultural and economic global life, and are its manifestations vertical and arborescent or horizontal and rhizomatic?
These questions are particularly relevant for the study of the global Americas, in which North and South persist in a relationship of uneven economic might and, ostensibly, patent cultural difference. Indeed, Latin America tends to view the U.S. as its imperialist and decidedly un-neighborly neighbor to the north, while the mainstream U.S. tends to view Latin America as a mass of undeveloped countries seeking to infiltrate and destabilize its workforce, language, racial composition, and cultural status quo. On the other hand, cultural production across that ideologically-reified divide reveals striking similarities in epistemological approach, representational strategy, and aesthetic concern.
This course situates itself along this very fault line of tension between the local and the global--between particularism and universalism. It is conceived as a workshop to generate critical thought around such persistent cultural topoi as empire, bodies, testimony and truth, money and revolution, animals, food, love and emotion, technology and genetics, immigration and cultural conflict, visuality, materiality, and product consumption in view of the broader theoretical questions that surround globalization as a phenomenon. We will keep one foot in the aesthetic (e.g., film, literature, television, print and digital media) and the other in the theoretical (e.g., cultural theory, cognitive psychology, political and economic theory) as we grapple with our cultural present. The syllabus will be finalized in consultation with the students to tailor our study to reflect most closely our collective interests. Class discussion will be conducted in English.
Texts may include: Arjun Appadurai, Globalization (2001); Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006); Cielo Latini, Abzurdah (2006); Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (2006); Diamela Eltit, Puño y letra (2005); Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005); Ariel Levy, Female Chauvanist Pigs: Is Raunch Culture the New Women's Liberation? (2005); Luis López Nieves, El corazón de Voltaire (2005); Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Madeleine Is Sleeping (2004); Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man ([1989] 1993); Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2003); Rita Indiana Hernández, La estrategia de Chochueca (2003); Fernando Vallejo, Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallegos acceptance speech (2003); Néstor García Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadanos. Conflictos multiculturales de la globalización (1995); Latinoamericanos buscando lugar en este siglo (2002); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002); Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject" (2001); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (2000); Paul Ekman, edition of Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1998); Jacques Derrida, "And Say the Animal Responded?" (1997); "The Animal that Therefore I Am" (1999); José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (1997); Junot Díaz, Drown (1997); Antonio José Ponte, Las comidas profundas (1997); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995); Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (1991); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991); Alberto Fuguet, Mala onda (1991).
Films may include: Larry Charles and Sascha Baron Cohen, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan ( USA, 2006); Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga, Babel ( USA, 2006); Robert Rodríguez and Frank Miller, Sin City ( USA, 2005); Brad Anderson, The Machinist ( Spain, 2004); Albertina Carri, Los rubios ( Argentina, 2004); Fernando Solanas, Memoria del saqueo ( Argentina, 2004); Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ( USA, 2004); Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, The Corporation ( USA, 2003); Jorge Furtado, O homem que copiava ( Brazil, 2003); Carlos Reygadas, Japón ( Mexico, 2002); Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, The Matrix ( USA, 1999); John Sayles, Lone Star ( USA, 1996).
Particulars: Students are expected to contribute to the final formulation of the syllabus, participate actively in class discussion, write short weekly critical position papers, and produce a final paper or exam.
CPLT 751 010 The Hermeneutics of Suspicion -- Franz Kafka
Erdmann Waniek
M 3-6
Max 4
[Crosslisted with GER 550 and JS 730]
Content: "Kafkaesque" has entered the language, and Kafka's work is a touchstone of 20th-century literature and thought. Iconic as it has become it is almost buried by interpretations and appropriations. Narrated psychoanalysis, a one-way street to hell, a reluctant theologian, trauma as life--these are some of the (sub-)titles of works on Kafka, and indeed, this author, with his love of parable, invites easy labeling and generalizing speculation, but it is, with him perhaps more so than with most writers, at the very sentence and word level that he is richest und most rewarding. In an exercise of both narrow focus and wide horizon the course will try to read his texts as freshly and without preconceptions as possible by paying attention to his linguistic and aesthetic means and strategies (e.g. repetition, revision and reversal; metamorphosis and the fantastic), while acknowledging the broader topics (e.g. notions of guilt and justice; Bible and Jewish identity; relation to his father; portrayal of women; the act of writing etc) and placing him in the literary tradition between precursors such as Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Gogol, and Robert Walser, and successors such as Borges, Beckett and Bernhard (... and Sebald).
Texts: The Complete Stories; one of the novels; excerpts from the letters and diaries. Selected secondary literature.
Particulars: Class facilitations; one short paper; one final paper.
CPLT 751 00P Studies in Renaissance Literature: Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene
Jonathan Goldberg
Tu 1-4
Max 4
[Crosslisted with ENG 710R]
Content: Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene (books 1 through 3) will be the focus of this course, and the aim will be to situate it within the history of sexuality, and to explore as well relationships between sexuality and various forms of materiality, particularly philosophical materiality, but also bodily practices including those associated with various forms of classical and Christian ascesis. Along with Spenser we will read auxiliary texts, sources and analogues; some literary criticism; writing by some theorists, including Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, especially his later texts in the history of sexuality.
Texts: Spenser, Faerie Queene; Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life; Michel Foucault, Use of Pleasure, Care of the Self; Hannah Arendt, Love and St. Augustine.
Particulars: A class presentation and a seminar paper will be required.
CPLT 753 000 Teaching of Literature
Dalia Judovitz
Tu 9-12
Max 10
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.
CPLT 753 001 The Spanish Picaresque. Race, Gender, and Performance (taught in Spanish)
Maria Carrion
Max: 3
Tu 1-4
[Cross-listed with SPAN 530S and WS 585]
Content: An inquiry into the canonic categories of the Spanish Picaresque (literary genre, discourse, or style; cultural form; phenomenon; tradition), as well as its role in the origins of the novel, its dissemination throughout Europe and the Americas until the twentieth century. Issues of race, gender, and performance will be taken into account to problematize conventional elements of the Spanish Picaresque, such as hunger; prostitution; corporal punishment; representation of subjectivity through violent, sexual, or delinquent acts; physical and social nomadism; and lawlessness. The first seven weeks of the course will be devoted to studying the Spanish Picaresque as a product and producer of polemics concerning Renaissance and Baroque poetics, the sociedad estamental, grammar and language theories and practices, and questions of religious / racial orthodoxy and heterodoxy. In the remaining time, the course will be driven by students' interests in the origins and dissemination of the Picaresque in the Middle East, Germany, France, England, and the Americas. Class discussions will be motivated by theoretical and practical questions concerning the elaboration of a literary canon (politics, economics, the Law, genre, translation, and current debates on the Spanish Picaresque), and their intersection with issues of race, gender, performance. In Spanish.
Texts: Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina. Anónimo, Lazarillo de Tormes. Teresa de Jesús, El libro de la vida. Juan de la Cruz, Subida al Monte Carmelo. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, La hija de la Celestina. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache. Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares. Francisco López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina. Luis Vélez de Guevara, El diablo cojuelo. Francisco de Quevedo, El Buscón llamado Don Pablos. al-Hamadhani, Maqamat. H. Grimmelhausen, The Adventourous Simplicissimus. Lesage, Histoire de Gil Blas. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones. Concolorcorvo, Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes. William Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Juan Francisco Manzano, Autobiografía de un esclavo.
Films:
El pícaro (Fernando Fernán Gómez), Las pícaras (Juan José Millán & Enrique Llovet), Santa Teresa de Jesús (Josefina Molina y Víctor García de la Concha), El rey pasmado (Imanol Uribe), El perro del hortelano (Pilar Miró), Dangerous Beauty (Marshall Herskovitz), Stage Beauty (Richard Eyre), Moll Flanders (Pen Densham), Tom Jones (Tony Richardson), Hareb minel hub (Ezzel Dine Zulficar), Unchained Memories (Ed Bell), Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco (Hector Babenco), Entre tinieblas (Pedro Almodóvar), ¡Vampiros en La Habana! (Juan Padrón), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott).
Particulars:
Attendance and class participation (40%), weekly reaction papers (20%), and one research paper (possibly substituted by a final exam in consultation with Professor Carrión) (40%)
CPLT 797R Directed Readings
By Permission of the Director of Graduate Studies. Please contact Alian Teach in the Comparative Literature office (N101 Callaway) for more information.
CPLT 799R Dissertation Research
By Permission of the Director of Graduate Studies. Please contact Alian Teach in the Comparative Literature office (N101 Callaway) for more information.