Spring 2019 Graduate Courses

Please check ALBERT for course location and meeting pattern.

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 coining of the term in 1926. We will explore representative works from foundational moments in the evolution of documentary—the beginnings of the newsreel, Soviet and Nazi propaganda, American depression era documentary books, the cinéma-vérité movement, and the rise of autobiographical/personal 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 Other topics include the role of the artist, indexicality and representation, literature as historical document, “fiction in the archives,” false documents and forgery, collage, illustration, and other uses of the document in twentieth century art.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, Alan Sekula, Sven Spieker, Ann Stoler, Diana Taylor, and others.  This semester’s special topics are 1) word/image relations and 2) the archive. Theoretical forays around and into the archive will be complemented by hands-on research in the Tamiment archive or in an archive of your choice.

Grad students only. Undergrads with permission of instructor.

Instructor: Professor Sanders

This 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 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: Professor 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: Professor Paul

This seminar examines varieties of temporal experience in modern philosophy, poetry, prose, the history of science, and cinema. We will study how conflicts of interpretation over temporal experience—and on the nature and limits of lived, chronological, narrative and historic time—led to some of the most enduring psychic and stylistic shifts in modernity. From Bergson, Einstein and Freud to Chaplin, Woolf, and Senghor, time becomes one of the central concerns of modernism in literature and critical theory.

Instructor: Professor Halim

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.

 

Origins of German Critical Thought II: Heidegger, Being and Time (Division II): The Hermeneutics and Poetics of Temporality

Prof. deVries

POET-GA 2002

GERM-GA 1116

Tues 2:00-4:40pm

Sponsored and housed by German

Course Description: Starting with a recapitulation of its Introduction and Division One, this seminar will offer an integral reading of the controversial Division Two of Martin Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) against the background of its historical, theological, and philosophical origins and context as well as in view of its immediate reception at the time. The seminar further aims to bring not only phenomenological,  hermeneutic, and deconstructive, but also analytic, epistemological, and pragmatist methods, arguments and perspectives to bear upon the more recent reception and undiminished significance of this modern classic.

 

Tpcs in Lit Theory II: The Interwar Central European Novel

Prof. George

COLIT-GA 2453

GERM-GA 1919

EURO-GA 1919

Thurs 3:30-6:10pm

Sponsored by German

The history of literary modernism in Central Europe is one narrated almost exclusively from the center, through its German-speaking authors: Kafka, Kraus, Musil, and Roth. In point of fact, the literary marketplace of Austria-Hungary was just as diverse as the empire itself—a vast multinational superpower that encompassed over a dozen present-day nations. After 1918, cultures once subject to foreign rule from a distant center and considered “peripheral” in the imperial context became new nuclei of independent nations. What happens to “minor literatures” (Deleuze and Guattari)—and formerly “minor” authors—when they become central to the cultural politics of successor states? Interwar novels did not simply represent the remnants of empire, but also served to produce post-imperial order in a newly reorganized Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to some German-language classics, this course embarks from the former imperial margins and treats novels originally written in Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Rumanian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian. 

 

Tpcs in Amer Lit: On Gendered Thought: Feminisms in the Americas

Professor Fiol-Matta

COLIT-GA 2838

SPAN-GA 2967.001

*Sponsored and housed by Spanish & Portuguese

Course description: Is Latin American feminism different from other feminisms, whether in North America, Europe, or other regions in the Global South? What has been its impact on Latinx and other US feminisms? This course will consider such questions through an initial examination of the forgotten/rejected feminisms of the 1980s, such as that of the Chilean, Julieta Kirkwood. It will then review the present-day return to 1970s feminist thinkers and to socialist feminisms of the 1970s (for example, in the contemporary feminist insurgency of May 2018 in Chile). We will devote most of the course to a sustained analysis of contemporary forms of gendered thought, responding to pivots like #niunamenos, movements against disaster capitalism, digital activism, and indigenous feminism. We will interrogate the allocation of certain feminist knots of concern to specific Latin American regions or countries; the social subject designated by the signifier “woman,” while not discounting it; the binary understandings of gender which are in evidence in full force with the turn to the right, the reaffirmation of the nationalist family and cis separatist movements which proclaim themselves as feminist; and regional rejections of certain feminist and queer keywords (seen in linguistic alterations like “cuir” or “cuerpa”). The thread will be an intensive consideration of gender and knowledge grounded in what cultural theorist Nelly Richard refers to as the “disordering of the sign of woman.” Readings might include theoretical, critical, and artistic texts by Julieta Kirkwood, Rosario Castellanos, Marta Lamas, Nelly Richard, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sayak Valencia, and Verónica Gago, Diamela Eltit, Rita Indiana Hernández, Cristina Rivera Garza, Domitila Barrios, Jean Franco, Susana Draper, and Macarena Gómez Barris, as well as global feminist theory and criticism. Students may work comparatively within their areas of research. Reading knowledge of Spanish is recommended but not required for the course, which will be conducted in English.

 

Topic in Lit & Mod Cult: Arte, Activismo y Academia

Prof. Belausteguigoitia

COLIT-GA 2917

LATC-GA 1014

Tues 1:55-4:55pm

KJCC 404W

Sponsored by LATC and housed in CLACS

Please contact the professor directly for a course description.

 

Topics in Renaissance Lit: Paradiso

Prof. Cornish

COLIT-GA 3323

ITAL-GA 2312.001

Wed 12:30-3:15pm

CASA 306

Sponsored by Italian

Course Description: A rereading of Dante’s Paradiso that focuses on the interaction between the medieval mystical- theological culture and the encyclopedia of secular learning as it takes place in the Commedia.  Dante utilizes the philosophical and scientific knowledge of his time, but relives it in light of the evangelical message. A text of the Christian "paideia" par excellence, Paradiso, is also an extraordinary modern work.  Organized on the patrimony of values formulated by western monastic culture, by the Christian ascetic practice of the desert, the Paradiso is a journey towards awareness, in which knowledge implies the mystical rediscovery of the self.

All these themes will be investigated in the course along with the central issue of the Commedia as a discourse about the "other world" which implies the unveiling of the meaning of "this world". Dante’s Paradise will be read in light of Dante’s minor works.

 

Tpcs in Intellectual and Cultu: Walter Benjamin: Language, Nature, History

Prof. Friedlander (German Visiting Professor)

COLIT-GA 3612

GERM-GA 1341

Thurs. 12:30-3:10pm

Sponsored by German

Course Description: The seminar will be devoted to investigate the dependence between three fundamental terms - ‘language’, ‘nature’ and ‘history’ - in Benjamin’s thought. We will begin with a consideration of Benjamin’s early account of language (in ‘On Language as such and on the Language of Man’) and attempt to articulate his vision of human language as the medium through which we conceive of the convergence of Nature (World), Man and God. We will pursue the account of the ‘life’ in language, or the idea of living language in Benjamin, through a consideration of his ‘Task of the Translator’ and pay particular attention to the historical dimension of language identified in the “afterlife” of literary works. In further attempting to articulate the natural dimension of the human, we will consider Benjamin’s account of love and the erotic, (primarily through a reading of the place of fantasy, fate and the mythical in his essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’). We will consider more generally how Benjamin relates himself to Goethe’s account of art and nature, as well as how he takes his historical concept of ‘origin’ to be a transposition of Goethe’s account of Ur-phenomenal nature. We will conclude with a consideration of the Passagenwerk as Benjamin’s radical translation of Goethe’s framework “from the pagan context of nature … into the Jewish context of history.”

 

Topics: Taste: History, Theory, Case Studies

Prof. Lounsbery

COLIT-GA 2956

RUSSN-GA 1001

Tues 6:20-8:20pm

Sponsored by Russian and Slavic Studies

Course Description: When and how did it become possible to possess what we call taste? What theories have been advanced to explain, defend, and critique taste as a phenomenon? What can we learn from “bad” taste (kitsch, camp, vulgarity, Russian poshlost’)? Primary texts by Pushkin, Hawthorne, Flaubert, Proust, Wharton, Wilde, Nabokov, Zoshchenko, Tolstoya, and others; theoretical readings ranging from Kant and Hume to Adorno, Arnold, Simmel, Benjamin, Greenberg, Bourdieu, Schor, Boym, Alpers, and Ngai. Film, visual arts, fashion, and music will also be considered. Topics to include connoisseurship, class, taste vs. aesthetics, gendered tastes, bohemianism, dandyism, details and femininity, minorness, the slavery/luxury nexus, “white trash,” and Russian “sovok.”

 

Sp Tpcs: Boccaccio

Prof. Ardizzone

COLIT-GA 2965

ITAL-GA 2331

Tues 3:30-6:10pm

Sponsored by Italian Studies

Course Description: This course is devoted to the reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Boccaccio (1313-1373) is the most important Italian prose writer, and the Decameron is his chef-d’oeuvre.

During the plague of 1348, seven young ladies and three young men decide to leave Florence and to go to live on the Fiesole’s hills. In the splendid framework of the 14th century Tuscan landscape, the “brigata” enjoys a natural life and spends its time in conversations interspersed with dancing and chanting. Every day during the hours in which the weather is hottest, they meet in a small wood and tell each other ten stories.

The book thus consists of one hundred stories, in which imagination and criticism of established values play a crucial role. These stories inaugurate a new way of considering human beings and their passions, goals, vices, and virtues.

This course will focus on the classical medieval background of The Decameron and on the new elements of the culture of humanism which enter to interact and supersede the old models and ideas. This new sense of the past, a past revisited with a critical eye in order to build new ethical values for a new society, is one of the topics that will be introduced and discussed.

The course will also provide students with an avenue for investigating the problems of historical knowledge and guide them in developing critical tools and research skills. To that effect, the class discussion will focus on how to move from narrative to problems and from problems to narrative.

 

Special Tpcs in Theory: Marxism and In/Humanism: Race, Queerness, & the Aesthetic

Prof. Yapp

COLIT-GA 2610.001

ASPP-GT 2077

Tues 3:30-6:15pm

Sponsored by Art & Public Policy (Tisch)

Course Description: Following ongoing critiques of liberal humanism from critical race, Afro-pessimist, transnational, queer, and feminist studies, what alternative political projects or visions might now inform our practices and work? What should follow after we question the grounds of modernity, liberalism, and materialism? This class seeks to examine one critical possibility: Marxism, particularly Marxist humanism. Although we will define this political project, we will also question its limits. The legacy of humanism in both liberalism and Marxism becomes a problem when placed alongside recent critiques around the subhuman and inhuman. In particular, what is the figure of the human for Marxist humanism? And how does such a figure sit with and/or against the liberal subject, person, and Man that has come under critique by queer inhumanism (with a focus on objects, animals, and environmental relations), along with the larger ontological turn coming from Black studies, Afro-pessimism, trans and queer theories, and new materialism? This class examines 1) differing notions of the human and subject as informed by liberalism and Marxist humanism, 2) the political limits and possibilities of Marxist humanism, and 3) the history and the continued mediation of Marxism alongside discourses of race, the transnational, disability, queerness, sexuality, and gender. In addition, we will situate how the aesthetic has engaged these larger questions. This course will examine theorists like Sylvia Wynter, Raya Dunayevskaya, Cedric Robinson, Silvia Federici, CLR James, Jacques Derrida, Stuart Hall, Shu-mei Shih, Fredric Jameson, Mario Mieli, and Petrus Liu, amongst others.

 

Topics in Translation: The Arab, the Jew, and the Arab-Jew: Contested Genealogies

Prof. Shohat

COLIT-GA 2875

MEIS-GA 1700.003

Tues 4:55-7:35pm

 

 

This seminar will offer a genealogical reading of the gradual splitting of the Semitic figure into “Arab” and “Jew,” and its ramifications for contemporary discourses about origins, homeland, exile, return. Despite their shared classification under the Orientalist rubric of “the Oriental” or “the Semite,” the notions of “Arab” and “Jew” came to occupy opposite places within the East-versus-West binary. Examining shifting Orientalist discourses in the wake of the Enlightenment and colonialism, the course traces contemporary depictions of the Arab/Jewish divide – and the ambiguous position of the Arab-Jew within it – back to crucial shifts in 19th century representations. In what ways have racial tropes intersected with religious identities in the Middle East / North Africa, especially with Muslims and Jews? Discourses embedded in racial sciences, ethno-national identity, linguistic families, archeological strata, and genetics have all been mobilized to generate originary maps of belonging. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will examine Orientalist philological texts, historical novels, travel narratives, and visual culture through a contemporary postcolonial critical lens. Some of the readings will include: Benjamin Disraeli, Ernest Renan, G. W. F. Hegel Sigmund Freud, Albert Hourani, Maxime Rodinson, Edward Said, Nissim Rejwan, Shlomo Sand, and Nadia Abu al-Haj.