Fall 2019 Graduate Courses

Please check ALBERT for accurate course locations and meeting patterns.

Instructor: Professor Apter

The 2019 proseminar has three principal objectives: 1) draw on translation to map (highly selectively) important critical debates and problems in Comp Lit’s disciplinary history;  2) think about what a language is, and what it means to work translingually and cross-culturally (the politics of translation); and 3) experiment with translational praxis as a way of thinking, writing and theorizing.

Requirements: one short oral presentation and the option of two 7-8 page papers or one 15-18 page paper.  

Instructor: Professor Vatulescu

This first semester of the year long Advanced Writing Seminar is designed to guide third year PhD students in the process of preparing for their comprehensive exams and starting to articulate a dissertation prospectus. Workshop style, the seminar aims to provide a supportive and stimulating intellectual community that responds to work in progress.

Instructor: Professor Garcia

What was the culture concept? This seminar explores several theoretical traditions that have relied in different ways upon what Raymond Williams called “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” What intellectual passions has the culture concept activated? How does tracking the career of the culture concept offer ways to rethink twentieth-century criticism? Readings familiarize participants with interventions from a range of fields on the limits of the culture concept and address many subtopics, including the emergence of cultural studies and recent debates about the dominance of historicist and culturalist paradigms in literary studies. 

Instructor: Professor Paul

This course provides an advanced survey of problems in modern aesthetics from Kant to present. While the main focus is on literary and aesthetic experience, we will also have the opportunity to deal with semiotics, image, authority, and critique. In addition to active participation in discussion, an in-class presentation and one final research paper (15-20 pages) are required. Translations of most readings are available at the NYU bookstore. Other texts will be made available on the class website.

Instructor: Professor Gadberry

This course traces the natural sympathies of Renaissance hermeticism into the affinities, harmonies, and analogies of Enlightenment philosophy and literature. Though we often look to the scientific revolution as a foundation of Enlightenment reason, this course examines an earlier strand of Renaissance thought anticipating Enlightenment (and, in the case of Goethe, Romantic) concepts of affinity that hold the main function that Renaissance sympathies did before them: namely, to explain what accounts for attraction or bonds between phenomena in nature, what characterizes  relationships that are correlated but not causal, what explains those things that simply “go with” each other. Our investigation will trace the fate of sympathy and affinity from Renaissance hermeticism to Romantic affinity, asking along the way how such correlation without causation might be a problem for art and the emergent discourse of aesthetics. We will place our earlier texts in conversation with twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates on mereology and aesthetics, on “elective affinities,” and on the literary problem of “form and explanation.”

Instructor: Professor Zhang

Based on a close reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics in its entirety (using mainly Knox’s translation), this seminar has as its task the re-examination of the mutual relevance between this text and contemporary literary-cultural criticism in global context. Our key concerns include the relationship between collective forms of life and their representation; artistic productivity and its socioeconomic conditions of possibility; literature and art as a form of knowledge and self-knowledge; and the relationship between aesthetics and legal-political philosophy.  While we expect to devote a significant chunk of class time to an“intrinsic”study of Hegel’s philosophy of art as an integral part of his system, thus occasionally extend our inquiry into contact with Phenomenology, Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of World History as well, the question concerning the sensual and appearance (Schein) will also be approached “extrinsically,”that is, in relation to the rational and the actual (so to speak) as well as their historical, often political, entanglement.

Topics: Contemporary Chinese Literature & Film: 1978-2018

Professor Zhang

COLIT-GA 2956.001

EAST-GA 2702-002

Sponsored by EAS

This seminar examines the development of Chinese literature in the so-called "Opening and Reforms Era" (1978-) with a focus on fiction, including its film adaptation and, when applicable, its ripple effect in everyday life and in the arena of intellectual political debates and campaigns.  We will interrogate this period's obsession with formal innovation; its active participation in the profound change in the collective moral orientation and value system; and its ever deepening dialogue with world literature as well as with various native traditions (ranging from classical to folkloric to revolutionary).   Of particular interest will be the close analysis of the radical expansion of narrative, representational and allegorical capacity vis-a-vis the historical reality of contemporary China. Major phenomena and authors to be analyzed include the Misty Poetry movement; the "Literature of Reflections" (fansi wenxue); the Search for Roots movement; the "Avant-Garde" or "Experimental" fiction; and, last but not least, the persistence or recurrence of realism throughout these decades.  Roughly following a literary-historical chronology of Post-Mao Chinese development of literature, art and intellectual discourse, the seminar is nonetheless analytical and critical in nature, bent on explicating the formal-structural complexity of literary-cinematic texts in their own socioeconomic contexts.  The seminar will be co-taught with Su Tong, Global Distinguished Writer/Scholar in Residence at NYU China House for Fall 2019.   

Unsettled Scores: Theories of Grievance, Stuckness, and Boundary Troubles

Professor Ronell

COLIT-GA 2453

GERM-GA 2912

Sponsored by German

Taught in English. This course explores the literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and political theories of straightjacketed existence.  Is the stagnation of being a temptation or a necessity? How are we confined within a grievance culture--by whom, to what purpose? Do we have enough agency to pull out of the psychic stalls or political stagnation fueled by misgivings and faltering assumptions? How does fiction manage these questions and reconfigure our being-toward-death? Are growing accounts of ethical failure and mounting injustice at all survivable? We shall also analyze different aspects of penitentiary culture or what Michel Foucault calls "the carceral subject"--effects of incarceration whether material or imaginary, corporeal and psychic. To what extent do boundaries protect or limit the possibility of experience? How have we secretly internalized penitentiary structures? By the end of the course, the thinking organized around limits, frontiers, and different forms of lockdown, will offer boundless interpretive possibilities and a new freedom for understanding movement and its inhibitors. Our start-up text will be Heinrich v. Kleist's famous work on the making of a terrorist, Michael Kohlhaas, whose exemplary demise in the face of inequity drives him to political despair. One of our sticking points will involve Kleist's circumscription of a feminized zone of counter-memory. To frame our work, we will lean heavily on Lyotard's theories of dispute (The Différend) and explore Derrida's thought on justice and the mystical foundations of authority ("Force of Law," on Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence). Prepare to be blown away!

Problems in Critical Theory: Theodor W. Adorno: Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and Ethics

Professor de Vries

COLIT-GA 2610-002

GERM-GA 1112

Tuesdays 12:35-3:15pm

Sponsored by German

This seminar will consist in a systematic investigation of Theodor W. Adorno’s central philosophical works in light of their contemporary critical reception and their contribution to current debates on epistemological skepticism, minimal metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. Readings will include passages from Adorno’s contributions to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, his programmatic introduction to Against Epistemology, selections from Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory. We will also draw on some of the more recently published lecture courses, accompanying and elucidating the major works. Required and recommended readings will include relevant selections from Wittgenstein, Habermas, Honneth, Putnam, McDowell, Butler, Gordon, and others. Taught in English.

Origins of German Critical Thought II: Fiction(s) and Reality

Prof. Gabriel

COLIT-GA 2601

GERM-GA 1116

Wednesdays, 2:00-4:40pm

Course description: It is a widespread perception in contemporary culture, literary theory and philosophy that the boundary between the fictional and the real is somehow particularly difficult to draw. Against this impression, recent theoretical trends associated with the labels “New Realism” and “Speculative Realism” argue for a primacy of the real over its fictional mediation and potential distortion and promise to overcome the panfictionalist stance of “postmodern” social and literary theory.

This seminar will critically explore this landscape. We will set out from some classical panfictionalist proposals (Nietzsche, Vaihinger, Derrida) in order to investigate the prospects for a New Realism with respect to the domain of the fictional. In this regard, the seminar will be devoted to recent philosophical, narratological and sociological realist accounts of fictional objects and the various roles they actually play in the context of the imaginative self-representation of the allegedly post-truth zeitgeist which haunts the humanities and social sciences alike. Taught in English.

*Sponsored by German

Dante’s Inferno

Prof. Ardizzone

COLIT-GA 2875

ITAL-GA 2310

Tuesdays, 3:30-6:10pm

Casa Italiana Library (203)

Course description: The course is conceived as a re-reading of Dante’s Inferno. We will start with a general introduction to Dante’s Commedia in order to orient the students to an understanding of Dante’s masterpiece and the Inferno as part of it. Inferno  is the first cantica of the Divine Comedy, a very long poem traditionally judged to be one of the most important in Western culture. At the center of the poem is the human being, his condition in the after life and his punishment or reward. Taken literally, the theme is the state of the souls after the death. But allegorically, the true subject is moral life and thus the torments of the sins themselves or the enjoyment of a happy and saintly life. In the Inferno Dante represents the passions and vices of the human beings  and the punishment that God’s justice inflicts upon the sinners. Hell is the place of eternal damnation. The course will provide a fresh approach to the Inferno with a focus on the problem of evil as represented  in the Commedia. We will investigate Dante’s dramatization of  the ontology of human beings and their inclination to materiality and materialism, which the poet considers the source of evil. The course includes an introduction to Dante’s first work, the Vita Nuova, and a reading of sections of his treatises: On Vernacular Speech and Convivio. The course will be conducted in English. Reading knowledge of Italian is not  required.

*Sponsored by Italian

*Fulfills pre-1800 req

Ariadne’s Echo: Reception and Intertextuality Across Artistic Media

Prof. Refini

COLIT-GA 3918

ITAL-GA 2192

Mondays 3:30-6:10pm

Casa Italiana Library (203)

Course description: Abandoned by Theseus, Ariadne lamenting on the shore of Naxos embodies one of the most powerful tropes in literature and the arts. The fate of the heroine who helped Theseus out of the labyrinth became itself a thread (indeed, an inexhaustible series of threads) running across the ages and populating the imagination of poets, painters, composers. After exploring in detail the classical sources that canonized Ariadne’s myth (e.g., Catullus, Ovid, Philostratus), we will turn to the reception of Ariadne in literature and music (Ludovico Ariosto, Giambattista Marino, Ottavio Rinuccini and Claudio Monteverdi, Franz Joseph Haydn, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vernon Lee, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Richard Strauss and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal). The analysis of the various case studies will focus on the rhetorical and poetical devices used by poets and composers to reenact the vocal features of Ariadne’s lament. More precisely, we will consider the ways in which the ‘acoustic’ image of the heroine’s echo conveys intertextual discourses about the dynamics of reception across artistic mediums and genres. As such, the seminar aims to illustrate the pivotal role played by the poetical – and specifically operatic – Italian tradition as a particularly productive site for the modern reverberation of Ariadne’s voice. Indeed, we will see how the Baroque appropriation of the myth in poetry and music remains active as a filter through which to cut through the layers of reception that separate modern audiences from the heroine’s prototypical lament.

*Sponsored by Italian