Comparative Literature Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2018
CPLT 751 1 "Kierkegaard and Job"
Jill Robbins
W 1-4PM
Max 5
[Cross-listed with RLR 700]
Content: How do literary and religious texts pose questions within and to Continental philosophy? In this seminar, we will consider Soren Kierkegaard's phenomenology of mood, his hybrid genre of writing, and the distinctive way in which he deploys biblical texts, such as "the binding of Isaac" (Gn. 22) and the Book of Job, in developing his philosophy of existence. The "trembling" to which the narrator of Fear and Trembling refers is experienced not only by the biblical Abraham, who is in a religious relation to the absolute, and whose orders from God are sealed in secrecy, but also by Kierkegaard's narrator, himself brought to the point of inexpressibility in the face of Abraham's ordeal. In Repetition, the fictional protagonist offers an intensely personal reading of the Book of Job. The book's formulation of the problem of theodicy, the theological justification of suffering, and the example of Job's legendary patience, provide the protagonist with a means of making sense of his broken engagement. The stakes of pseudonymity are vividly put in play in Either/Or's first-person description of aesthetic existence, Judge William's ethical diagnosis of it, and the supplementary text appended to William's letters by an unnamed pastor friend.
Texts: Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton); Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton); Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton); The Wisdom Books, trans. Robert Alter (Schocken); Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, eds. Ree and Chamberlain (Blackwell). Recommended: The Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Oxford)
Particulars: one term paper (25-20pp.) and one in-class presentation.
CPLT 751 3 "Experiments in Scholarly Form"
T 4-7PM
Max 4
[Cross-listed with ANT 585]
Particulars: TBA
Bracht Branham
M 2-5PM
Max 6
[Cross-listed with ENG 789, PHIL 789, & ILA 790]
Texts:
Munia Bhaumik
T 1-4PM
Max 6
Content: This course centers on dispossession (a critical term seeking to account for the loss of land, rights, political membership, incarceration, indefinite detention, life). Dispossession is also a term that has emerged in the last decade as central to critical theory, including studies of slavery, racialization, and sexuality. Conditions of dispossession feature prominently in contemporary queer and feminist scholarship, transnational approaches, as well as critical studies that seek to address mass incarceration and the death penalty, ecological disaster, and the predicament of refugees. Part of the task of our course will be to ask how does dispossession also feature into literary studies, particularly representations of vocalization, figure, textuality, subjection, cruelty, and the body. The course will be of interest to graduate students who seek through their reading and research practices to account for vulnerability: juridical, corporeal, or environmental. In the second half of the course, students will be invited to integrate their areas of specialization into the course readings; for example, students may wish to pursue readings of Caribbean literature, philosophical writings, African-American, disability studies or queer/feminist theory.
Texts:
Particulars: We will also have selected readings from Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar, Edward Said, Eve Sedgewick, and Orlando Patterson.
CPLT 751 6 "Politics in Deconstruction"
Geoffrey Bennington
Th 1-4PM
Max 5
[Cross-listed with FREN 780 & PHIL 789]
Content: Taking its lead from some of Derrida's later work, this course will follow the twin threads of sovereignty and democracy through some of the great texts of political philosophy in the Western tradition. We shall attempt to understand why both of these notions, albeit in rather different ways, pose such problems for that tradition, and give rise to all manner of complications and paradoxes, which are however (or so I shall argue) definitive of the conceptual space of the political as such. We shall wonder why almost all political philosophies are enamored of sovereignty, while almost none has anything very good to say about democracy. We shall consider the possibility of a non-trivial affinity among the political, the rhetorical, the literary and the animal in their constant tendency to exceed conceptual grasp, and also compare our deconstructive approach to these political questions with some other modern and postmodern theories.
Texts: Classical authors to be discussed may include Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Schmitt; more recent theorists to be considered alongside Derrida may include Agamben, Badiou, Foucault, Hardt and Negri, Lyotard, Mouffe and Rancière.
Particulars: TBA
CPLT 751 7 "Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy"
Andrew Mitchell
W 6-9PM
Max ?
[Cross-listed with PHIL 541R]
Content: This course is a close reading of Heidegger's masterwork of the 1930s, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). In conjunction with the Contributions, we will read two other texts by Heidegger from the time of the Contributions' composition: the lecture course Basic Questions of Philosophy and three of Heidegger's "Black Notebooks" referred to in the Contributions.
Texts: Contributions to Philosophy (Indiana UP) Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected "Problems" of "Logic" (Indiana UP) Ponderings II-VI (Indiana UP) Ponderings VII-XI (Indiana UP)
Particulars: TBA
CPLT 751 8 "Foucault"
Lynne Huffer
Th 10AM-1PM
Max 3
[Cross-listed with WGS 589R]
Content: For some decades now, it has been much easier to have a passionate opinion about Michel Foucault than an intelligent reading of him. He is a saint or a demon, a liberator or a desecrator, the heroic promoter of an agenda or the debauched prophet of despair. This seminar will be less concerned to foster impassioned uses of Foucault, or even to analyze his remarkable susceptibility to abuse, than it will be to think with and about some texts that bear his name. We will be particularly concerned with his `ethical and `political texts texts about the consequences of medicalizing madness or normalcy, about the powers coded into the category `sexuality,¿ about ancient or contemporary alternatives to contemporary management of human life. Members of the seminar will be encouraged to connect their readings in Foucault with their own intellectual projects.
Texts:
The seminar will concentrate on texts by Foucault rather than by his interpreters. Common readings will include:
Foucault, History of Madness [1961], tr. Murphy and Khalfa (Routledge 2006)
Foucault, Speech Begins after Death [1968], tr. Bononno (Minnesota 2013)
Foucault, Abnormal [1974-1975], tr. Burchell (Picador 2004)
Foucault, Discipline and Punish [1975], tr. Sheridan (Vintage 1995)
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction [1976], tr. Hurley (Vintage 1990)
Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, tr. Hurley and others (New Press 1997)
Particulars: Beyond thoughtful reading and participation, seminar members will be asked to write two medium-length exercises over the course of the semester.
Elizabeth Goodstein
T 1-4PM
Max 6
Content: In this class, we will explore three very different major German-language modernists hailing from the declining multinational Habsburg empire. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Robert Musil (1880- 1942), and Franz Kafka (1883-1924) were born into a rapidly disappearing world—or, more precisely, into three rather distinct disappearing worlds. Each became a figure of international repute whose innovative works helped define modernism. Most notably in the case of Kafka, these writers are also remembered in ways that have shaped our understanding of modern life and modern subjectivity more broadly.
Texts:
Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
Robert Musil: The Confusions of Young Törless; The Man without Qualities
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigges
Particulars: Evaluation will be based on your attendance and engaged and informed participationin weekly discussions as well as written work, including a substantial final paper.
CPLT 797R 00P Directed Readings
By permission of the Director. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information.
CPLT 798R 000 Supervised Research
For independent research aimed primarily at preparation for graduate exams and dissertation prospectus. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway for more information).
*Must be taken S/U
Content: Variable Credit 1-12
CPLT 799R 000 Dissertation Research
By permission of the Director. Please contact the Program Office (N101 Callaway) for more information.