Fall 2018 Graduate Courses

Please check ALBERT for course location and meeting pattern.

Instructor: Prof. Zakir Paul

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is a towering yet enigmatic figure in twentieth-century French thought. A lifelong friend of Levinas, he had a major influence on Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Kofman, Nancy and many others. Both his fiction and his criticism played a determining role in how postwar French philosophy was written, especially in its intense concern with the question of writing as such. This course provides an introduction to Blanchot’s literary, critical, and (often polemical) political writings from the 1930s onwards. We will examine his relation to currents of thought from German romanticism and phenomenology to existentialism and deconstruction, placing his writing in conversation with his contemporaries. In addition to reading Blanchot as a thinker of writing, unavowable community, disaster, infinite conversation and literary space, we will track how his fragmentary writing disturbs generic boundaries between criticism and literature, testimony and theory.

 

Instructor: Prof. Jay Garcia

This seminar examines American cultural criticism from the early twentieth century to the present. Beginning with Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America” (1916) and the moment of Young American writing from which it arose, the seminar addresses different phases of criticism, including the emergence of American Studies. Special attention will be given to the comparative and international visions of literary and cultural critics. The last third of the seminar focuses on recent work in American Studies, Black Studies and Native Studies that provide new theorizations of American literary and cultural formation.

Instructor: Prof. Cristina Vatulescu

The first half of a year-long Writing Seminar guides third-year PhD students through the process of preparing and completing their PhD exams and their dissertation prospectus. At the end of the fall semester students take their written exams. In the spring semester they complete their prospectus, submit it to their dissertation advisor, and defend it at the Dissertation Prospectus Meeting. The goal of this seminar is to develop and practice the skills of successful dissertation writing.

 

Instructor: Prof. Andrea Gadberry

This course brings together literary and political works from early modern Europe and the early modern Atlantic world more broadly to reexamine the genealogies that lead up to twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories about the relationship between death and the state from biopower (Foucault) to manhunts (Chamayou) to necropolitics (Mbembe) and thanatopolitics (Esposito) and the figure of homo sacer (Agamben).  As we read early modern works on sovereignty, freedom, and tyranny from thinkers such as Bodin, De las Casas, Vitoria, Hobbes, and Vico alongside more recent critical-theoretical works on state power and death, we will return to classic questions of sovereign power over life and death (or making live and letting die) and the king’s two bodies, but we will also investigate legalized manhunts, burial rites that link aristocratic power to the maintenance of the dead, critiques of slavery and war, and arguments on behalf of tyrannicide. Note: this course fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for Comp Lit majors.

 

Instructor: Prof. Emily Apter 

*Will fulfill writing proseminar (COLIT-GA.1400)*

What justifies comparative work in the humanities today, and over the long and short centuries of Comparative Literature as a discipline?  How has theory taken up the imperatives of civilian politics: penitentiary culture, civil disobedience, academic freedom? What is just translation (particularly in the context of transmedial aesthetics)?   What are the politics of "justicing" in Derrida's sense of positing an aesthetic of rightness based on "the right to" (the right to the university, the right to philosophy, the right to language, the right to safe harbor across the bounds of nation-states)?   How do the laws and psychic injunctions - sovereign will, Sittlichkeit (Hegel, Balibar), the unconscious and lalangue (Freud, Lacan), indifferent or impossible law, (Agamben's karman), microphysics of power (Foucault), paternal law and Antigonik’s law (Butler, Carson), penitentiary culture (Angela Davis), feminist/queer contract (Wittig, Jacqueline Rose, Carol Pateman, Paul Preciado), sexual ontology - inform how we define advanced work in the comparative humanities?

This course will serve as an introductory theory proseminar for graduate students in Comparative Literature, English, and German.

Please see ALBERT for up to date course meeting patterns and locations

Instructor: Prof. Mikhail Iampolski

After the collapse of the USSR, Russian culture was absorbed by the market and quickly lost the ideological and propaganda dimensions as those had been imposed by the Soviet regime. Instead, new trends developed exploring bourgeois lifestyles and new values emerged associated with mass consumption. At the beginning of Putin's rule, the regime was stimulating this process as part of general depolitization. However, in recent years (in particular after the annexation of Crimea), Russian state cultural politics changed to mobilize the depoliticized culture for the task of new imperialist and nationalist propaganda. The past and collective memory became a battleground. On the one hand, it provided an escape from the grim economic and political actuality. On the other hand, the past was de-historicized and transformed into a storage of heroic national myths, a tale of historical heritage for the propagandist to exploit. The course will focus on the deep and traumatic changes affecting Russian culture in recent years and on the changing role of  culture in a new political landscape.

Prof. Ulfers

COLIT-GA 3612

GERM-GA 1512

Topics: Kafka

Wed 6:20-8:20pm

*Sponsored by German

Course description: The course will deal with Kafka’s work largely in the light of the author’s preoccupation with language, particularly with the way this preoccupation affected his writing, indeed provided the topic of it. The point of departure will be the experience of “language crisis” among intellectuals and writers in turn of the century Austria, which led to the radical criticism of conceptual or referential language– already foreshadowed by Nietzsche – of Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others. The course will then show Kafka’s response to this crisis: his insight that conceptual/referential language and oppositional/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 that is constitutive of Kafka’s texts.

 

Profs. Richard Halpern and Wendy Lee

COLIT-GA 2610.001

ENGL-GA 3629.001, GERM-GA 3629

Special Tpcs in Theory: Spinoza, Leibniz, and Theory: Styles of Thought

Mon 10am-12:55pm

*Sponsored by English

Course description: This course will introduce two seventeenth-century thinkers who exerted a profound influence on the subsequent history of philosophy and, later, critical theory. Spinoza and Leibniz offer a study in contrasting philosophical styles: the one was an unrepentant heretic, the other an attempted reconciler of faiths; the one an excommunicant whose intellectual solitude attempted to spin a system largely out of itself, the other a social-climbing courtier and magpie who borrowed (some say, stole) from every intellectual current of his day; the one was accused of atheism, the other God-riddled; the one eschewed rhetoric in the name of geometric proof, the other was aphoristic and self-consciously writerly. This is in part a course about philosophical style and the different kinds of work it does. It is also about the contemporary theoretical legacies of its two principals, especially in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Catherine Malabou. Note: this course fulfills the pre-1800 literature course requirement for Comp Lit majors.

 

Prof. Eva Meyer

COLIT-GA 2610.002

GERM-GA 1112, CINE-GT 3011, PERF-GT 2016, FREN-GA 1191

Face Value: The Theater of Theory

T 12:30-3:10pm

*Sponsored by German

Course description: To accept a text at face value, to literally explore its gestures when it produces and refuses meaning, we need not only to reconsider that the words „theory“ and „theater“ share the same etymological root. From thea, “to see,” the two converge in an act of spectatorship that itself needs to be reconsidered as being both contemplative and active, in a free and indirect way. Starting from Heinrich von Kleist’s seminal text “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking,” this course embarks on a journey into free and indirect speech as a method of thinking, traversing literary and theoretical texts, and films. Questions addressed range from theatricality, translation and transference to heteroglossia and amalgamation waltz. We will analyze texts by Charlotte Salomon, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bachtin, Gilles Deleuze, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Eric Rohmer, Virginia Woolf, Emily Apter and discuss films directed by Danièle Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis, John Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville, among others.

 

Profs. Nicola Cipani and Rebecca Falkoff

COLIT-GA 2917

ITAL-GA 2192.002

Literature and Machines

R 3:30-6:10pm

*Sponsored by Italian

Course description: Machine metaphors and narratives play an important role in modern literature, conveying shifting beliefs and anxieties about the nature of human intention and consciousness, the creative process, the dynamics of desire and gratification, gender roles, the organization of society, the meaning of “nature,” etc. This course explores different manifestations of the machine theme in literature, broadly clustered around the following categories: imaginary machines constituting the centerpiece of narrative plots; machine aesthetic as modernist ideal (e.g. Marinetti’s “identification of man with motor”); and mechanization of the inventive process (text-generating machines). We will read and discuss a selection of works from different periods and cultural contexts (Victorian era, Belle Époque, Futurist period, and Post-war experimental literature), representing a spectrum of affective dispositions and moods, ranging from the dreamy immersion in virtual realities to enlightened machine-assisted awakening, from the obsessive fear of mechanistic dehumanization to the desire of man-machine fusion.

 

Prof. Maria Luisa Ardizzone

COLIT-GA 3323

ITAL-GA 2192.001, MEDI-GA 2300, HIST-GA 2707, EURO-GA 2162, ENGL-GA 2270

Dante as Public Intellectual

M 3:30-6:10pm

*Sponsored by Italian

Course description: A reading of Dante’s Monarchia,the political treatise that Dante wrote during his exile and probably between 1311 and 1312. Assumed by some readers to be a utopian treatise that looks at the restoration of the feudal sacred Roman Empire, and thus at a re-evaluating the role of nobility and its historical meaning, the Monarchia  has as its antecedent the debates on power and sovranity that have been crucial in the medieval time and powerfully active in Dante’s age.

Placed on the Index in 1559 at the time of the Counter-Reformation, Dante’s Monarchia did have a long dispute as its background. It started immediately after the death of the poet, when the Pope John 22 and Cardinal Bertrand of Pujet condemned the book, which, according to Boccaccio, was publicly burnt.  The events of the 14th century, however, did not hinder the reading and interpretation of Dante’s political treatise, at that time already well-known. Around the middle of the 14th century, Cola di Rienzo, the Roman Tribune friend of Petrarch and admirer of Dante, gave his own lecture on the Latin treatise, writing a commentary on it. Later, in the 15th century, Marsilio Ficino, the translator of Plato and leader of the platonic academy of Florence, made a vernacular translation of the treatise. Because the treatise gained to Dante the accuse of being a heretic (as noted by Boccaccio and Bartolo of Sassoferrato), it was not in Italy but in the Protestant Basilea that the Monarchia’s first printed edition appeared in 1559, published by Giovanni Oporinus, a humanistic pseudonym for Johannes Herbst. That Dante’s political work, although rooted in the medieval debates, anticipated in some ways the spirit of Reform is suggested by its troubled reception but also by the work itself. The decision of the Tridentine Concilium to place the Monarchia on the Index—its reception, contents, and theses being responsible for this decision—comes as no surprise. The course rereads Dante’s Monarchia in light of the synchronous political debate and focuses on Dante’s role as philosopher and public intellectual. Great attention will be given to Dante’s source such as Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics and the medieval commentaries on them. Other readings include a selection of Dante’s works in which he discusses political issues, as well as excerpts  from Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Justinian Codex, Augustine, Alfarabi ,Brunetto Latini, Thomas Aquinas, Gratian and the canonists. The course will be in English. *Note: this course fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for Comp Lit majors.

 

Prof. Sarah Kay

COLIT-GA 3954

FREN-GA 2244, MEDI-GA 2200

Troubadour Lyric: Rethinking NatureCulture

W 3:30-6:00pm

*Sponsored by French

Course Description: The portmanteau formation natureculture (or nature-culture) is used by Latour and Haraway, among others, to dismantle what once appeared a foundational opposition that served to demarcate and shore up the category of “the human” vis-à-vis that of “nature.” In modernity, this opposition has been used to drive a wedge between the discourses of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, thereby insinuating a distinct ontology to each of the three. In premodernity in general, however, and in particular in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century culture in which the troubadours composed, all three of these modern discourses fell within a field of “clergie,” however defined, and however received by the corresponding world of the secular laity.

In this class, we will consider how the relationship of nature and culture operates in the lyric production of the troubadours. In their songs, troubadours claim to draw their inspiration from such “natural” elements as breath, air, breeze, natural sounds, bird song, “harmony,” and a love that is in line with nature. Sometimes these features of the natural order appear compatible with, indeed foundational of, such “cultural” elements as the systems of spiritual or social law or other refined and codified formal structures like grammatical, poetic and musical artes, mechanical contrivances, networks of production, or techniques of transmission. But at other times actual behaviors are understood as falling short of ideals incarnated in nature; nature itself can appears as fallen with only humans having the possibility of escaping the limitations afflicting the rest of the physical world;  the non-natural mechanical can appear not as an expression of art and means to harmony but as a debasement. Note: this course fulfills the pre-1800 literature course requirement for Comp Lit majors.

 

Prof. Freed-Thall

COLIT-GA 2956

FREN-GA 2790

Topics: Proust in the World

Thurs 12:30-3:00pm

*Sponsored by French

Course Description: This seminar will examine the modernist, worldly side of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. We’ll consider Proust as a theorist of everyday life: a sociologist of culture, a queer aesthete, a botanical enthusiast, a gambler and stock market speculator, an investigator of media, a translator, a fashion connoisseur, and a tourist. We’ll also be interested in Proust as phenomenologist: a thinker who experiments with the grounds and limits of sensation and perception, exploring a variety of experiences—from states of unconsciousness to heightened, multi-sensory modes of awareness.

We’ll closely read and discuss the first two volumes of the novel (Du côté de chez Swann, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs); selections from later volumes; and innovative critical works by Genette, Sedgwick, Barthes, Merleau-Ponty, Richard, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Rancière, Simon, Ladenson, Lucey, Gallo, and others.