Spring 2018 Graduate Courses

Instructor: Professor Vatulescu

What do we mean by document, documentary, and fiction? How have these concepts and their relationships changed through time? This course starts by considering the beginnings of documentary in literature, film, and the visual arts, from the controversial coming of the term in 1926. We will explore representative works from the foundational moments in the evolution of documentary-the beginnings of the newsreel, Soviet and Nazi propaganda, American depression-era documentary books, the cinema-verite movement, and the rise of autobiographical/persona documentary films, poetry, and archival art. How has the emergence of this new term and its development affected our other key concepts, document and fiction? What is the relationship between documentary modes and particular media and technologies - print, photography, cinema, video, and digital? Other topics include the role of the artist, indexicality and representation, literature as historical document, fiction in the archives, false documents and forgery, collage, illustration, and other uses of the document in twentieth century art. Critical and theoretical readings by Paula Amad, Eric Barnouw, Roland Barthes, Stella Bruzzi, Jane Gaines, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Johnson, Bill Nichols, Philip Rosen, Vivian Sobchack, Gayatri Spivak, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, Alain Sekula, Sven Spicker, Ann Stoler, Diana Taylor, and others.

Grad students only. Undergrads with permission of instructor.

Instructor: Professor Duffy

This seminar will explore the relationship between the strategies of literary representation and ethnographic writing. We'll read deeply into the literary obsessions of some early practitioners of "modern" ethnography, seeing the residue of Joseph Conrad in the thought of Bronislaw Malinowski and the fleeting and yet indelible link between Jean de Léry's writings and Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques before launching forward into the work of Mary Louise Pratt, Phillipe Bourgois, and others to interrogate the political and theoretical ramifications of a discipline so tied to the affective power of narrative.

Instructor: Professor Paul

This seminar (cross listed with Poetics & Theory) provides an advanced survey of problems in aesthetics. While the principle focus will be aesthetic judgment, we will also have the opportunity to deal with semiotics, image, authority, and critique. Readings may include selections from a range of modern figures including Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Hegel, the Schlegel brothers, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Benjamin, Valéry, Bataille, Wimsatt and Beardsley, Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes, Goodman, and Rancière (texts may vary depending on student interest). One in-class presentation and research paper are required.

Instructor: Manthia Diawara

Edouard Glissant Seminar (Grad.) The class will explore Edouard Glissant's poetics and philosophy from the publication of his seminal text: Le discours Antillais (1981), where he theorized "Creolization" as a movement beyond Negritude and Eurocentrism. This introductory section of the course will focus on Glissant's work with Presence Africaine, and the poets of Negritude in general, and Aime Cesaire, in particular. We will then focus on the evolution of Glissant's "Poe-cept," (see Patrick Chamoiseau), from Creolization to "Relation," beginning with The Poetics of Relation (1990), The class will explore here the relationship between Glissant and Deleuze and Guattari (Mille Plateaux). At issue here will be the concepts--poecepts--of relational identity, rhizomes, and multiplicity, etc. We will devote the final section of the class on Glissant's theory of Tout-Monde (Traite du tout-monde, 1997), where he developed the concepts/poecepts of quakeful thinking, intuitive solidarity, etc.

Instructor: Professors Halim & Sanders

The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to recent exciting developments in Comparative Literature, in which the discipline is harnessing the energies of Area Studies (Middle Eastern Studies, African Studies, and so forth) in order to extend its scope geographically, and deepen its learning, for example through the study of languages and literatures beyond those European tongues that, traditionally, have formed the core of Comp Lit. At the same time, because of the way in which nomenclature relating to “Areas” is evolving, an allied aim is to introduce students to the idea of the “Global South,” a successor to “Third World” and “Developing World” in its broader contemporary use, which Comparative Literature scholars, in their anti-Eurocentric endeavor, are increasingly finding compelling. We shall pursue these aims through a careful reading of relevant theoretical texts, as well as works constituting specific African and Middle Eastern case studies.