Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2008

 

CPLT 751 00P Literature and Laughter

S. Felman
M 4-7
Max 9
[Cross-listed with ILA 790(3), FREN 770(3), ENG 789R(3)]

Content: Throughout the centuries, theorists of different disciplines –philosophers, theologians, psychoanalysts, sociologists, literary critics, poets, dramatists and political theorists--have pondered about the significance of laughter. “Of all living creatures only man is endowed with laughter”, Aristotle writes, and this formula enjoyed immense popularity in underscoring both the humanity of laughter and the paradoxical conception of this signifying bodily phenomenon as marking a spiritual privilege of mankind.  For Freud, jokes, wit and humor are always tied up with a struggle and a conflict dramatized in language between sexuality and its civilized inhibition or political repression.  “Laughter,” writes the French poet Charles Baudelaire, with his characteristic combination of sharp—sarcastic--critical acuteness and poetical compassion, “laughter is essentially contradictory; that is to say that it is at once a token of infinite grandeur and an infinite misery. . .It is from the perpetual collision of these two infinites that laughter is struck.”  The course will try to think together about the difference between laughter as satire and laughter as pathos, in reflecting about what triggers laughter (or a smile) in characters, in situations and in linguistic constructions. We will analyze the role of the literary writer as comic dramatist and as ironic storyteller, and explore through literary texts what constitutes a comic perspective in relation to life, to society and to the world.

Texts: Close readings of literary texts by Shakespeare, Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire, Baumarchais, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Beckett.
-- Marginal theoretical and critical texts by Baudelaire, Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin, Felman.

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CPLT 751 W.G. Sebald's work and the trauma of the 20th century: The holocaust as the "Rupture of Civilization"

M. Holdenried
T 1-4
Max 4
[Cross-listed with GER 550(4)]

Content: W.G. Sebald, the German author based in England, with his last work, the novel-like “Austerlitz”, inscribed himself into the recent but highly topical tradition of a literary approach to the trauma of the holocaust. It relates to that trauma in a sophisticated and unique way insofar as the holocaust forms its ever present centre while at the same time remaining within the boundaries of the unspeakable. This paradoxical dealing with the central issue of  \last century's history is supported by means of intermediality, reference to structuralist anthropology, crossovers between fiction and documentary literature.

I would suggest to discuss Sebald’s oeuvre in relation to influences such as Jean Améry’s essayistic writings, Ruth Klüger’s memories of a survivor – “Weiter leben” - and in connection with research on trauma as represented p. ex. at Emory University.

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CPLT 751 Clinical Methods in Psychoanalysis

A. Furman/S. Croft
W 1-2:30
Max 5
[Cross-listed with ILA 790(5) and PSP 761R(5)]

* Permission of instructor required for enrollment

Content:This is the Clinical Methods/Joint Clinical Case Conference offered through the School of Medicine and the GSAS. It is designed for those students with a background in psychoanalysis as a theory of mind and as a method for research who wish to explore the clinical/therapeutic aspects of the endeavor. It is a continuous case seminar designed to allow for an in-depth exploration of psychodynamic material. The course will meet weekly for 1.5 hours and uses as its primary materials actual psychodynamic case material. Relevant journal articles will also be assigned.

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CPLT 751 Plato and the Platonic Tradition

P. Wakefield/K. Corrigan
TTH 10-11:15
Max 2
[Cross-listed with ILA 790(3) and PHIL 789(2)]

Content:This course, team taught by Kevin Corrigan and Peter Wakefield, both of the ILA, will give students a thorough grounding in core dialogues of the vast Platonic corpus (nine dialogues will be studied closely), situating the discussion of the Platonic philosophic and literary achievement in the broader context of Greek and ancient Mediterranean literature, culture, and history (readings include Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Heraclitus). Special focus will be given to literary antecedents and influences on Plato¹s thought and to the Platonic tradition after Plato, especially Plotinus and early Christian writers. Students with strong literary interests beyond philosophy, students in religious, mathematical or other disciplines influenced by Platonic thought, and philosophy students will benefit from this course, which complements offerings from the Philosophy Department.

Particulars: Same as IDS 385: Plato and the Platonic Tradition

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CPLT 751 Life Stories

A. Bammer
M 1-4
Max 5
[Cross-listed with ILA 790(10)]

Content: How does one tell the story of a life—one’s own or someone else’s? Writers, visual artists, and film-makers consistently grapple with this problem; it is the explicit charge of autobiographers, biographers, and many documentarists. It is also a problem for us as scholars. This seminar attempts to explore some of the issues—methodological, conceptual, ethical, psychological, aesthetic—that we as scholars face when we set out to tell life stories. By drawing on a sample of work by creative artists (writers, film-makers, visual artists) and reading it in conjunction with the work of scholars in different fields (literary studies, philosophy, history, anthropology, medicine/health science, law), we will attempt to better understand what the issues are and how we might resolve them in the process and presentation of our work as scholars and creative people. Guest presentations by scholars in different fields working on these issues will expand the work of the seminar into a cross-disciplinary conversation.

Texts: The selection of course materials will remain somewhat fluid, subject to the particular interests of seminar participants. However, course materials will include or select from the following materials:  Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Monica Truong, The Book of Salt; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” (in The Work of Mourning), Agnes Varda, Jacquot; John Berger, A Fortunate Man and selected essays; Alice Kaplan, French Lessons and either The Interpreter or The Collaborator; Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage and Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman;  David MacDougall, Lorang’s Way and Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer;  Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée; Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights and essays by Martha Duncan

Selected essays from the tradition of Western thought from its classical foundations (Plato, Cicero, Aristotle), through the modern to our contemporary post-modern age (Michel de Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, T.W. Adorno, Charles Taylor, Diana Fuss, Judith Butler) will accompany and supplement our discussions.

Particulars: Seminar participants will write two short essays (each c. 10-12 pp.) over the course of the semester: one, an autobiographical reflection on themselves as scholars; the other, either a biographical sketch of a research subject or a review essay of a set of materials on a defined subject.

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CPLT 751 Art and Literature in Post-War France

K. Minturn
Th 1-4
Max 5
[Cross-listed with ARTHIST 775(5)]

Content: This seminar will explore the troubled relationship between art and literature in post-WWII France. We will begin by reconsidering the work of Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Wols, and Alberto Giacometti in the context of the postwar l'épuration (or purge).  The second half of the seminar will be dedicated to the analysis of key texts on art by important French structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers. Finally, we will investigate the relationship between the nouveau roman and the visual arts.

Texts: Readings will include statements by artists as well as texts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Paulhan, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Claude Simon, Denis Hollier, and Hubert Damisch, among others.

Particulars: Weekly discussions, oral presentation and research paper.  Reading knowledge of French is desirable.

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CPLT 751 Derrida Reading Levinas

J. Robbins
W 1-4
Max 10

Content:

Texts:

Particulars:

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CPLT 751 Heidegger and Poetry in the 20th Century

A. Mitchell
TH 1-4
Max 6
[Cross-listed with PHIL 789(6)]

Content: Heidegger’s thinking of language is no accidental addendum to his ontological work, but an essential component to his rethinking of subjectivity and the being of Dasein. Where the tradition posits a subject as zôon logon echon, the animal having reason/speech, Heidegger sees a mortal bound in community to others and exposed to a meaningful world. For Heidegger, language is no possession of a subject, but an opening to that world. In this course we will examine Heidegger’s interpretations of four twentieth-century poets, Stefan George (1868-1933), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Georg Trakl, (1887-1914), and Rene Char (1907-1988). In each case, a week is also devoted to reading the poet’s work on its own, apart from Heidegger’s interpretation. After reviewing the role of language in Being and Time, opening readings examine the tension between traditional language and technological language, as well as the question of how language is able to avoid objectification in addressing the unknown. This course seeks to provide an introduction to Heidegger’s thinking of language and his attempt to articulate a poetics capable of responding to the technological demand for information. Topics include: the economy of the word (George), the degeneration of the animal rationale (Trakl), animality and the Open (Rilke), and the nature of the homeland (Char).
The course concludes with an overture to Celan.

Texts: Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

________. On the Way to Language

________. Off the Beaten Track

________. Heidegger Char: Relation [distributed in class]

Rene Char, Selected Poems

Stefan George, The Star of the Covenant [course reader]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus

Georg Trakl, Selected Poems

Particulars: Students graded on participation, seminar presentation, and term paper.

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CPLT 752 Trauma, Time and History

C. Caruth
Th 1-4
Max 10
[Cross-listed with ENG 789(5), ILA 790(5) and FREN 770(5)]

Content: This course will examine notions of time and history as they emerge over the course of Freud’s work and in later psychoanalytically informed theory.  Freud’s texts, beginning with the very early writings, will be placed in conversation with psychoanalytic and (literary) theoretical readings of Freud in order to consider problems of repetition, erasure, witness and event.  In the latter part of the course we will pay particular attention to traumatic temporality as it informs the conceptualization of war and of political history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

Texts: Authors include Sigmund Freud, Jean Laplanche, Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Robert Lifton, Davoine and Gaudilliére, Shoshana Felman, among others.

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CPLT 752 Aesthetic Theory and Postcolonial Literature: From Plato to Postcolonialism

D. Bahri
W 4-7
Max 4
[Cross-listed with ENG 780R(8)]

Content: This course will focus on theory that places art in a dialectical relation with historical conditions, allowing us to pose the following questions: How do aesthetic considerations contest and moderate the social function of literature? How do we identify the "truth-content" of what novelist Julian Barnes describes as the "beautiful, exact, and well-constructed lies" of art? Finally, how do we learn to see the aesthetic as political and moral without surrendering literature to a transparent and reductive purpose? In an age that treasures scientific reason and demonstrable proofs, teachers of literature increasingly face the challenge of demonstrating to students that literature may be "false," but it is not therefore trivial. Given the growing anxiety over its relevance, uncertainty about its value, and suspicions of the death of literature as a significant social form, this course intends to reactivate the question of literature's multiple ends through examination of a carefully developed set of theoretical readings on aesthetics in philosophy and critical theory from Plato to Postcolonialism.

Texts:Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Bhabha, Said, Spivak, and selected postcolonial novelists

Particulars:The goal of this course is to develop in students an appreciation of the purpose and relevance of literature through an examination of the relationship between aesthetics and worldly reality.

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CPLT 752 The Spanish Comedia: Objects of Legibility, Visibility, and Spectacle

M. Carrión
T 1-4
Max 3
[Cross-listed with SPAN 530(9) and WS 585(3)]

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: what objects were deployed on- and offstage to negotiate evidence (legal, literary, historical), to read people and situations, to become visible, to make scenes?  How does learning about the interactive relationship between objects and the subjects they defined help readers now to better understand seventeenth-century Spain? Discussions will revolve around key objects that constituted signs that defined subjectivity in literature and society: clothes, masks, letters, money, alphabets, drapes, attics, cabinets, tombs, and daggers, among others.  Interpretations of literary texts presented in class will take into account as well 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, legibility, visibility, and the spectacular 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 the interplay of objects and subjects in seventeenth-century Spain, wondering how to regard them as images and data about the past; the visible/hidden representation (legal, aesthetic, and political) of sex, love, and marriage; the influence of the Italian commedia dell’arte and English pageantry on the visibility of objects, and subjects; the legibility of dramatic literature in the playhouse and the printed page; 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; the scrutiny and closing of the theaters; the relathionship of film to theater.

Texts: 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 and 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, such as Plato, “Allegory of the Cave” (Book VI, The Republic; Erickson/Hulse, Early Modern Visual Culture; Juan de Zabaleta, “Cómo presenciar una comedia:” Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations; Susan Sontag, On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, and “Regarding the Torture of Others;” Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945-1990; and Stanley Kauffman, Regarding Film: Criticism and Comment, among others.

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

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CPLT 752 Passion medievales: l'epreuve de l'annulation

C. Nouvet
W 4-7
Max 6
[Cross-listed with FREN 520(12)]

Content: Qu’ils soient poétiques, narratifs, ou autobiographiques, les textes choisis s’articulent tous autour d’une experience de néantisation qui annulle à la fois le sujet et sa langue. “Passion” sera donc à entendre dans son double sens de désir mais aussi et surtout de pâtir: pâtir d’une annulation et écrire à partir d’elle.  Ce pâtir, nous essaierons de le lire d’abord dans ce qu’un poète contemporain, Jacques Roubaud, appelle à juste titre “l’éros mélancolique” de troubadours tels que Guillaume IX, Jauffré Rudel, Raimbaut d’Orange, puis dans les folies et absences qui trouent certains romans de Chrétien de Troyes (Yvain ou le chevalier au lion, Le conte du Graal ou le roman de Perceval), et, enfin, dans la calamité qui ne cesse de ponctuer cette autobiographie de philosophe, et plus précisément de logicien, qu’est L’histoire de mes malheurs d’Abélard. 

Particulars: This course will be conducted in French

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CPLT 752 Politiques du roman au XVIIIe siècle

G. Bennington
T 1-4
Max 6
[Cross-listed with FREN 550(12)]

Content: Nous étudierons le roman français du XVIIIe siècle, et plus particulièrement la figure centrale du monde, et le concept organisateur de la loi.  D’un point de vue ‘politique’ (à définir), nous nous efforcerons de reconstruire la logique et la dynamique internes du monde, et d’en explorer les frontières, là où il touche à ses divers ‘autres’, là où il pose un problème, justement, de lecture.  Dans cette optique nous lirons, entre autres, les Lettres persanes de Montesquieu, Le paysan parvenu de Marivaux, Les égarements du cœur et de l’esprit de Crébillon fils, Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloïse de Rousseau, Jacques le fataliste de Diderot, et Les liaisons dangereuses de Laclos.

Particulars: This course will be conducted in French.

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CPLT 753 00P Introduction to Teaching:  Comparative Literature in the Classroom

D. White
M 9:30-12:30
Max 10

* Permission of instructor required for enrollment

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 seminar will focus on practical aspects of teaching as well as offering some consideration of theoretical questions surrounding pedagogy and controversies that have influenced the academy in recent years.  Our aim will be to achieve a balance between a pragmatic, ‘workshop’ approach and more philosophical reflection on what it means to teach.  Topics covered may include: constructing a syllabus, technology in the classroom and the specific dynamics of teaching writing, poetry, literature in translation, novels, and literary theory. 

Texts: Readings to be made available through electronic reserve and the Comparative Literature Department. They will be drawn from works by (among others) Aronowitz, Barthes, De Man, and Readings.

Particular: Students will have several writing assignments geared to specific demands of teaching:  practice syllabi, paper topics, exam questions etc.  Each student will also offer a short “class” to the rest of the seminar.  

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CPLT 797R 00P  Directed Readings

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

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CPLT 799R 000  Dissertation Research

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