Fall 2022 Undergraduate Courses

Prof. Ronell

Nietzsche will be our focus—the “last philosopher” and his offspring of vast intellectual, artistic, historical importance. Nietzsche’s subversive legacy and his takedown of Metaphysics will activate our probing trajectory. In terms of aesthetics and history Nietzsche asks about our relation to drugs, the way we become numb or are propelled by cultural and material stimulants, tranquilizers, hallucinogens, exploring how we measure out doses of meaning in our lives.  In sum, this course aims to engage curious minds in new and lasting ways that help one analyze history, literature, science, law, social collapse, ghostly returns and intersubjective relationships.  The course takes off from the works of Nietzsche that continue to define our world in crucial ways. Their abiding influence on our every move, though often stealth, will become clear during the course of our readings.  It is more necessary than ever to encounter these blockbuster texts, intellectually generative to this day and to analyze outstanding passages by writers under Nietzsche’s influence, grappling with his thought in fascinating ways. These include the contributions of Jacques "deconstruction" Derrida, Marguerite Duras, Kathy Acker, Gilles Deleuze, Freud, Edouard Glissant, Valerie Solanas, and many other contemporary players.  

Prof. Iampolski

Prof. López Seoane

In her seminal analysis of contemporary cinema, Linda Williams introduced the term “body genres” to study melodrama, horror and porn, genres usually dismissed as low brow and that go to extremes in their representation of the body in states of distress and elation. This course deploys her insights to probe and interrogate the artistic genres that have dominated, and shaped, the cultural representation of key moments of Latin American history. Starting with the long cycle initiated by the conquest and closed with political independence (in which the dominant genres are the Epic and the War Film), we will move to a critical assessment of Revolutionary Porn, Latin Melodrama and State Horror as cultural forms that have not only spawned novels, films, paintings and performance, but also affected our understanding of complex social processes, historical conflicts and political trajectories.

Prof. Bianchi

This seminar, limited to senior Comparative Literature majors engaged in writing a Senior Honors Thesis, is designed to be a writing workshop. Students will articulate a thesis topic, research it, write, read, and critique their own (and each other's) work-in-progress. There will be research and writing workshops in collaboration with the library and the Writing Center. One chapter of the thesis (20-25 pages) and a detailed outline (prospectus) and bibliography for the entire thesis are due at the end of the semester. The final thesis (40-60 pages) is due in mid-March of the following year. Permission of the DUS is required to enroll in the course.

Note: these courses do count as core courses toward the Major or Minor

Prof. Todd Foley | COLIT-UA.723.002 /EAST-UA 952-001 | Topics in Chinese Studies: Literary Transformations in Post-Mao China | After the death of Mao Zedong and fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, the ideological stranglehold that had suffocated literary production during the Cultural Revolution gave way to a flourishing of literary exploration and experimentation. This course will look closely at the trajectories, developments, disjunctions, and transformations of literature beginning with the initial post-Mao period and moving through to the present-day. The first part of the course will examine literature from the 1980s, paying close attention to the complex intellectual scene of the “Culture Hot” (wenhua re) and the numerous and diverse schools of literature that arose during this dynamic period. We will then move on to the literature produced after brutal suppression of the 1989 Tian’anmen protests of 1989, which is generally noted for its increased commercialization, popularization, and the death of a “humanistic spirit.” Finally we will look at more recent works of literature produced in the 21st century, examining new genres such as internet literature while revisiting recent productions from earlier major writers, such as Yu Hua and Mo Yan, with whom we began the course. Overall we hope to pursue several overarching, guiding questions: How is literature of the post-Mao period both closely related to and markedly distinct from both the revolutionary May Fourth writing of the early twentieth-century, as well as the Chinese literary tradition in general? What political and theoretical anxieties continue to drive a diverse array of literary activities, and how have these changed over the past four decades? How have changing social and economic conditions both shaped and been reflected in literature? Finally, what can our examination of post-Mao literary transformations tell us about the current state of Chinese society and what the future might hold? Sponsored by EAS | Contact: mehrnaz@nyu.edu

Prof. Todd Foley | EAST-UA 569-001, Topics: Translation through Chinese Literature | Rather than simply taking translation for granted as a necessary condition for accessing Chinese literature in English, this course will foreground the issue of translation and the particular challenges that arise when attempting to convey a Chinese work in English. Our examination will range from general theories of translation to the fraught notion of world literature that inevitably lurks behind literary translation, to the specific historical and ideological conditions that have affected the translation of Chinese literature, to a range of English renderings of a wide array of Chinese texts. Because students will also have the opportunity to produce their critical translations in English, a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese is recommended. Sponsored by EAS | Contact: mehrnaz@nyu.edu

Prof. Vatulescu | CORE-UA 400.100: Texts and Ideas: Arts of Attention | How does art capture,­ hold, and train our attention? How have artists, thinkers, spiritual masters, philosophers, and scientists understood attention across time and cultures? Today, attention and attention disorders have captured scientific and popular thought. Turning their “attention to attention” like never before, scientists identify a variety of attentional capacities and modes as well as a contemporary addiction to “narrow-focus attention.” Predating modern science, literature and the visual arts excelled at describing human attention and complexly engaging it. This course plumbs the rich offerings of many traditions, including writing by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Buddhaghosa, Epictetus, Josef Czapski, Zora Neale Hurston, Kobayashi Issa, Nazik al-Malai’ka, Hisham Matar, Marcel Proust, Wislawa Szymborska, Virginia Woolf, Lu Xun, and films by the Lumiere Brothers, Dziga Vertov, Satyajit Ray, Isaac Julien, and others. These will be paired with readings from cognitive studies, psychology, philosophy, and environmental and disability studies, to help bridge the art/science divide and offer a more multifaceted understanding.How does art capture,­ hold, and train our attention? How have artists, thinkers, spiritual masters, philosophers, and scientists understood attention across time and cultures? Today, attention and attention disorders have captured scientific and popular thought. Turning their “attention to attention” like never before, scientists identify a variety of attentional capacities and modes as well as a contemporary addiction to “narrow-focus attention.” Predating modern science, literature and the visual arts excelled at describing human attention and complexly engaging it. This course plumbs the rich offerings of many traditions, including writing by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Buddhaghosa, Epictetus, Josef Czapski, Zora Neale Hurston, Kobayashi Issa, Nazik al-Malai’ka, Hisham Matar, Marcel Proust, Wislawa Szymborska, Virginia Woolf, Lu Xun, and films by the Lumiere Brothers, Dziga Vertov, Satyajit Ray, Isaac Julien, and others. These will be paired with readings from cognitive studies, psychology, philosophy, and environmental and disability studies, to help bridge the art/science divide and offer a more multifaceted understanding.

Note: these courses do not count as core courses toward the Major or Minor

Prof. Yoon Jeong Oh | EAST-UA 611 : 20th Century Korean Lit In Translation | Sponsored by EAS | Contact Mernaz Tiv

Prof. Vince Renzi COLIT-UA.723.002 /EAST-UA 952-001: Socrates & His Critics | Sponsored by the Department of Classics | Contact Nancy Smith Amer

Prof. Leif Weatherby | COLIT-UA 249.001 /GERM-UA 249: Introduction to Theory: German Media Theory: New and Old | This course is an introduction to "New German Media Theory." It explores the roots and consequences of Friedrich Kittler's approach to media, reaching back to Romanticism and the Enlightenment and forward to the contemporary American and German media theory scenes. Kittler articulated the notion of a "media-technological a priori" that shapes meaning itself and our production of cultural and logistical networks. We will read his books Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone Film Typewriter, along with several essays. Three threads of readings will accompany these books: the roots of Kittler's media theory in poststructuralist thought (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan), the objects of his analysis (Romantic literature (Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann), Enlightenment media theory (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller), Modernism and the analog media, and cybernetics), and the contexts and consequences of his thinking in Germany (with "cultural science" or Kulturwissenschaft: Cornelia Vismann, Bernhard Siegert, among others) and in the US (Alexander Galloway, Wendy Chun). The course provides a deep reading of two influential books in media theory as a vantage point from which to understand both the history of media thinking and the underlying frameworks of contemporary media critiques. Sponsored by the Department of German | Contact Doreen Densky 

Prof Friedrich Ulfers | COLIT-UA 298.002 / GERM-UA 298: Topics in 20th Century Literature: Kafka | Conducted in English | This course considers Kafka’s work largely in light of his preoccupations with language, and particularly with the way this preoccupation affected his writing, indeed provided one of its central topics. Our point of departure will be the experience of a “language crisis” among intellectuals and writers in turn-of-the-century Austria, which led to the radical criticism of conceptual or referential language by Fritz Mauthner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others, but was already foreshadowed by Nietzsche. We will then examine Kafka’s response to this crisis: his insight that conceptual/referential language and opposition/binary involves an abstraction of the “truth” or the “real,” which is only apprehensible in a space of radical undecidability between opposites, demanding a language of irreducible allusiveness, a language this is constitutive of Kafka’s texts. Key topics include: what do the “Kafkaesque,” the “monstrous,” and the “uncanny” mean? What is the “law,” and what is “judgment”? Texts to be read are “The Judgment,” “The Metamorphosis,” “A Country Doctor,” and the novel The Trial. Sponsored by the Department of German. Contact Doreen Densky

Professor Crystal Parikh | COLIT-UA.950.002 / SCA-UA 306: Asian American Literature | Sponsored by the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis Contact: Priscilla Alfaro

Professor Alessandro Barchiesi | CLASS-UA 203 /COLIT-UA 203.001: The Novel in Antiquity | Survey of Greek and Roman narrative fiction in antiquity, its origins and development as a literary genre, and its influence on the tradition of the novel in Western literature. Readings include Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Tale, Lucian’s True History, Petronius’s Satyricon, and Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Concludes with the Gesta Romanorum and the influence of this tradition on later prose, such as Elizabethan prose romance. Sponsored by the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis Contact: Priscilla Alfaro

Professor Liane Feldman | HBRJD-UA 23 /COLIT-UA 800: The Bible as Literature | The Bible  is a complex and fascinating anthology of ancient literature, written by many different people over the course of nearly a thousand years. The focus of this course will be on reading the Bible as literature, and not as a religious or sacred text. In this course, students will be introduced to various strategies for the literary reading and interpretation of biblical texts. The class will engage diverse literary genres from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and consider the biblical writers’ creative deployment of poetic forms, plot devices, and narrative styles. With the guidance of secondary literature that will introduce us to a number of diverse ways to think about the literary interpretation of these texts, we will read parts of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Esther, Ruth, Jonah, and the Gospels, as well as selections from the poetic and wisdom traditions. The goals of this course are twofold: 1) to introduce students to literary forms and styles from one corner of the ancient world, and 2) to enable students to engage with these texts from a new perspective, and examine the ways in which our assumptions about the origins of a text can and do shape our interpretations of it. Sponsored by Hebrew and Judaic Studies. 

Professor Roni Henig COLIT-UA.951/ HBRJD-UA 90 - Monsters and Jewish Modernity | What is a monster? How does it come into being? Why do monsters capture modern imagination and at what historical junctions do they tend to reappear? From the Golem to Frankenstein, monsters have often figured the anxieties, fantasies, and collective distress of the societies from which they hail. Jewish modernity in particular saw the rapid reproduction of monstrous figures as metaphors for the ambivalent state of European Jews vis-à-vis their surrounding societies. Whether an outcast, a dangerous force from within or a defender against external persecutions, monsters totter on the border between imagination and destruction, conveying at once a promise and a threat. This course explores monstrosity as a critical framework through which we may reflect on such issues as belonging, gender, race, abnormality and hybridity. We shall consider the monstrous as it relates to “Jewish questions”, but also as a cultural figure with a life of its own, who recurs across times, languages, and cultures, embodying different states of outsiderness and exception. Sponsored by Hebrew and Judaic Studies.

Professor Geroulanos | COLIT-UA 972/HIST-UA 314: Psychoanalysis: History, Theory, and Politics—from Freud to 2000 | This intensive seminar offers students an advanced understanding of Freud’s thought and the development of psychoanalysis in its cultural, scientific, and political contexts through the end of the twentieth century. As a course in modern intellectual history, it proposes to handle a particular conception of the self, an intellectual movement, the development of psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic concepts in psychiatry and related sciences, the therapeutic practice and the politics of psychoanalysis. The course is structured in three parts. First, we will focus on the thought of Freud and his interlocutors, attending to key texts that demonstrate the development of his psychological and philosophical apparatus, and paying particular attention to his conceptions of the unconscious, sexuality, life, and abnormality. How did sexuality become the basis for a psychiatric treatment aimed at handling conditions that had frequently been handled by, or resulted in, institutionalization? Second, we will study the development of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice in different post-1930 cultural contexts. What were the cultural and subjective underpinnings and implications of psychoanalytic treatment? How did Vienna and Freud’s Judaism play into the picture? How did psychoanalysis relate to other psychiatric and physiological treatments? What were the key tensions in psychoanalytic theory after Freud, and how did Freud and his successors balance the treatment of specific conditions that lacked corporeal explanations, scientific expectations, the philosophical study of human life and sexuality? Third, we will attend carefully to the political commitments of psychoanalysts. From patriarchal and homophobic to revolutionary and feminist movements, psychoanalysis has played key roles. How do we understand its role in arguing against fascism, its postwar conservatism, but also its occasional involvement in anticolonial politics and its frequent invocation by feminists? Perhaps above all, how do we think of the politics of its handling of the patient? On this last, psychoanalysis has been as much celebrated as decried. Thinking historically and conceptually about these questions offers us a way to open up the twentieth century to some of its greatest and trickiest questions. Intellectual curiosity and a readiness to read closely and historically are essential! Advance knowledge of psychoanalysis is not. Sponsored by the Department of History | contact: jackie.menkel@nyu.edu