Fall 2020 Graduate Courses

Instructor: Prof. Garcia

This seminar considers US literature and cultural formation as virtual objects. Concentrating on how US, UK and German traditions of American Studies have created those objects, the seminar brings together both well-known interventions from the twentieth century and recent work from each tradition. The influence of Black Radical Tradition theory, black feminist thought and affect theory, among other areas, will enter into the exploration of contemporary American Studies.

Instructor: Prof. Basterra

Please contact tara.hardy@nyu.edu for a permission code. This first semester of the year long Advanced Writing Seminar is designed to guide third year Comp Lit 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: Prof. Gadberry

This course considers the problem of mimesis along two axes: the first, a more distant, historical one, in which the question of mimesis animates debates about the literary and the political which we will trace from antiquity into early modernity, and, the second, a more recent and familiar one, in which mimesis becomes a founding problem of the discipline of comparative literature (as in Auerbach’s famous tome of that name, among many other works). We will complicate our inquiry into mimesis’s deep history and into its particular disciplinary force for literary studies, however, by looking into a rival account of mimesis that emerges in close temporal proximity to Auerbach’s: namely, the sociological accounts of the “laws of imitation” (Gabriel Tarde) and of social emulation (Thorstein Veblen), among others. Doing so will permit us to think about mimesis in/and modernity and about literary studies and its politics today.

Instructor: Prof. Bianchi

In the face of the rising popularity of “new materialisms,” this class examines the emergence of the notion of “matter” in classical antiquity. In short, matter, from the Latin ‘materia’ (related to mater, mother) is transmitted from Aristotle’s Greek innovation hulê (literally, wood). We will undertake close readings of key ancient primary texts, including various Presocratics, Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and Generation of Animals, and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, tracing the discourses of materiality that arise in concert with tropes of sex and gender. The guiding question here is: what can matter’s genealogical ties to the feminine tell us about the materialization of bodies and genders? At the same time, we will attend to the topographies and texture of ancient thinking about nature and materiality more broadly. Alongside a narrative of “emergence” we will also consider hermeneutic questions – what are the ethico-political stakes of a “retrieval” of antiquity and what is the nature of our relationship to these distant texts? Why “return” to antiquity and what role might a reappraisal of classical texts play in contemporary theorizing? While ancient texts are undoubtedly “good to think with,” are they capable of displacing modernity’s epistemological discourses in favor of ontological or material questions, and what would be gained or lost by this? To what ends is it possible to trace a genealogy or counter-genealogy of Western thought? And how does a consideration of ancient modes of thought help to enrich contemporary discourses of matter and gender? To help orient our study we will draw on contemporary thinkers including Irigaray, Kristeva, Loraux, Sallis, Cavarero, as well as critically engaging Bachofen’s 19th century conception of Mutterrecht. Some background knowledge of psychoanalytic theory is advised, as is knowledge of Greek, however all readings will be in translation.

Instructor: Prof. Zhang

This course focuses on Fredric Jameson’s writings from the early 1990s to the present.  The key concepts and discourses to be discussed include postmodernism, globalization, modernity and singularity; allegory and realism.  The students are expected to be reasonably familiar with theoretical and critical premises in the earlier works of Jameson such as Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious.

Instructor: Prof. Dopico

“The Caribbean,” as David Scott has argued, “is not merely modern…. it is modern in a fundamentally inaugural way.” What does it mean to think of the Caribbean as an inaugural imaginary?  And what does the Caribbean mean in a post-colonial, post-socialist, post-revolutionary age? A long host of thinkers, writers and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth century have insisted on the centrality of the Caribbean as root and rhizome in our understanding of modernity and its elements: enlightenment and capital, race and empire, sovereignty and simulation, culture and nation, and, most romantically, or tragically, revolution. But to think the Caribbean adequately one has to think beyond the dialectics of roots and rhizome, beyond the poetics of relation, archipelago and diaspora.  This demands too that we read beyond the tragic and monumental tropes of the Caribbean and read instead minor forms and minor keys. Thinking and reading the Caribbean requires not only linguistic and theoretical fluencies, but a capacity to read deep contexts and contingencies within apparent economies of cultural and material scarcity. It requires the capacity to engage the master paradigms of modernity and simultaneously engage the more slippery problems of temporality, contingency, misunderstanding, as well as the violent and demoralizing mechanisms of domination, transaction and subordination. This course considers key texts and works of the Caribbean archipelago and reads them comparatively and sometimes against the grain of their national, regional and postcolonial inscriptions. We will read major cultural works and lesser-known expressions, major literary works and alongside minor or forgotten forms.  We will consider how the cultural monuments of the Caribbean have occluded collective politics, aesthetic experiments, insurgent movements and ephemeral forms. We counter pose the monumentality of literature to the epistemologies and historical consciousness of other cultural practices, aiming both for the contrapuntal and the counterintuitive. How, for example, have we come to understand the Haitian Revolution or the Cuban Revolution within grand narratives and what would it mean to read in them not epic, tragic destinies but more banal parables about modernity —destinies consonant with other forms of communal politics, other orders of transaction and betrayal, from Paris, to Prague, from Berlin to Grenada? Comparative questions abound: What does it mean to read a history of revolution and civil rights in the Caribbean nineteenth century? What is the specificity of Caribbean race theory? What is the distance between a history of literature and a history of print culture in the Caribbean? How does literature compete with visual aesthetics?  How do we “read” Aponte’s lost book or desacralize Walcott’s Omeros? How does Patrick Chamoiseau destroy the postcolonial novel? How does Dulce María Loynaz precede Sebald by half a century? Why is Virgilio Piñera like Franz Kafka? We will also ask about discursive notions of the Caribbean: what and whether the reparative poetics of relation and antillanité hold.  We will engage the divisions between Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean studies and trace cultural and theoretical genealogies and segregations, asking if the Caribbean has a common culture beyond the major tropic/al conceits that artists and scholars have used to bind literary production. We will ask, in the tradition of Edward Said, whether, like the East,  “Caribbeanism” becomes a career, what the field might mean, and how it exists. What is the place of the Caribbean in the conceptions and political destinies of the American hemisphere or the Global South? The syllabus is will include selections from major canonical Caribbean texts (Casal, Hostos, James, Métraux, Césaire, Price Mars, Mañach, Marinello, Ortiz, Cabrera, Walcott, Brathwaite, Lamming),  theorists and historians of the Caribbean (James, Cesaire, Glissant, Moreno Fraginals, Benítez Rojo, Trouillot, Scott), twentieth century literature (Carpentier, Burgos, Loynaz, Lezama, Rodríguez Juliá, Piñera, Walcott) through to the post-colonial Caribbean Anglophone corpus and onto contemporary writers from Rita Indiana Hernández to Marlon James. We will pay special attention to breaking postcolonial linguistic segregations, but also be mindful of the operations and problem of genre, print culture, journal, performance, and the pedagogies of civil society.  We will consider the formation of Caribbean Studies as a field and think of the ways that journals from Orígenes and Tropiques, to Callaloo and Small Axe transform critical, artistic and activist interventions on the Caribbean, and translate to intellectual practices in the academy.

Instructor: Prof. Ronell

The course explores key moments in Derrida’s work to which scholars in the Humanities routinely turn. Our range of motion will be vast but specific, covering his most enduring reflections and rerouting of university culture. Some of the themes involve poetic, technological, archival, institutional, hermeneutic, political, poetic, psychoanalytic, and medial contributions for which Derrida’s writing is responsible and continues to agitate. Each class will be dedicated to one fold of the oeuvre including mourning disorder (Antigone and Hegel), addiction (from “Plato’s Pharmacy” to the “Rhetoric of Drugs”), the logic of spectral politics and violence (Benjamin and Marx), parricidal standoff (Kafka, Plath, Jelinek), the gift (Baudelaire, Celan, Poe), sexual difference/gender (Cixous, Halberstam, Solanas,), love (Lorca, Lispector, Nancy) as well as sessions on Heidegger, Bataille, Cixous, Dufourmantelle, Levinas, Blanchot, Hamacher. Derrida’s preoccupation with aporias in forgiveness and hospitality, sovereignty and stupidity, will round off the vital encounter with his thought.

Instructor: Prof. Sanders

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was probably the most influential theorist of decolonization in the twentieth century. With works ranging in subject matter from the long-term psychical effects of slavery in the Antilles, to a critique of Négritude, to a strategizing of the revolutionary war in Algeria in the early 1960s, Fanon’s thought has remaining compelling. In recent years it has inspired the South African campus movements #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall—which draw on an earlier moment, when Fanon was taken up in the early 1970s by Steve Biko and fellow Black Consciousness intellectuals. And, of course, Fanon remains essential reading in postcolonial and Global South studies.

The recently published volume, Alienation and Freedom (2018), edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa, has given readers of Fanon access to a broader range of Fanon’s writings, including his unpublished plays, disciplinary psychiatric publications, and occasional journalism. In this seminar we will make use of the texts assembled and translated in Alienation and Freedom to gain a fuller understanding of Fanon’s major published works, Black Skin, White Masks; The Wretched of the Earth; A Dying Colonialism; and Toward the African Revolution. We will also read some of Fanon’s key literary and philosophical interlocutors, including Senghor, Césaire, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and Lacan, as well as attending to the adaptation of Fanon by Black Consciousness and #RMF and #FMF, and to feminist and queer critiques of Fanon’s theories. Secondary texts will include works by Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, David Macey, Isaac Julien, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting.