Spring 2020 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 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 Other topics include the role of the artist, indexicality and representation, literature as historical document, “fiction in the archives,” false documents and forgery, collage, illustration, and other uses of the document in twentieth century art.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.

Instructor: Professor Gadberry

“Just as our women put on rouge and diamonds [so do] the women of Florida put on blue and glass beads.” So wrote Jean-François de Saint-Lambert in his entry on “luxury,” or “luxe,” in Diderot and D’Alembert’s famous Encyclopédie. Luxury — routinely portrayed as a feminine vice and often bringing together the violence of nation with the violence of empire (as in the quotation above) — was the object of lively eighteenth-century debates. This course examines these debates in the rich context that produced them; we will read widely across eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, first placing accounts that portray luxury as offering a “publick benefit” alongside satires lampooning the corrupting effects of luxury; second contextualizing our study with works grappling with the birth of aesthetics and the philosophy of taste; and finally, considering how the apparent democracy of luxury conceals a story about the fate of the aristocracy. Our eighteenth-century readings will also lead us to examine accounts of affluence, excess, and aristocracy in twentieth-century sociology, from Weber to Veblen and Tarde.

*This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

 

Instructor: Professor 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, Slavic and East Asian 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 Comparative Literature. 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. The seminar counts as the required introductory course for the projected “Advanced Certificate in Comparative Approaches to the Literatures of Africa, the Middle East, and the Global South.”

 

Instructor: Professor Paul

This seminar will consider aspects of relational thinking from romanticism to present. Taking critiques of Cartesianism as a point of departure, we will examine forms of subjectivity that are not considered independent, or even interdependent, but primarily relational, co-implicated, or entangled. Accounting for the recent interest in and critique of relationality from philosophies of care and friendship (Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault), ethics and psychoanalysis (Levinas, Winnicott, Laplanche, Klein, Bollas), and aesthetics (Bourriaud, Rancière), to postcolonial and queer theory (Glissant, Gandhi; Bersani, Edelman, Sedgwick), we will study a range of literary texts and films that stage crises of non-relation or negate normative relationality in order to invent “new relational modes”. Requirements include one presentation and a final research paper.

 

Topics: Recent French Theory: Trans-ontologies: perceptions, orientations

COLIT-GA 2610.001 / FREN-GA 2890

Professor Apter

Mon 1:00-3:00pm

The seminar will focus on contemporary offshoots of phenomenological theory with emphasis on sensorial perception, logics of sensation, corporeal materiality, modes of existence,  virtual reality, relationality, sexed and gendered orientation, transindividuality, and trans-ontology, militant bodies, the concept of ecosophie, social and biochemical metaphors of toxicity, the life of plants and in a damaged biome.

*Sponsored by French

*Fulfills 20th-century theory requirement

Topics: Translation Studies and Arab Cultures

COLIT-GA 2875 / MEIS-GA 1770-001

Professor Halim

Mon 3:30-6:10pm

This course interrogates the relationship between theoretical concepts produced in Translation Studies—e.g.: “foreignization and domestication” (Lawrence Venuti); “untranslatability” (Barbara Cassin and Emily Apter)—and both scholarship on translation in the Arab context and the practice of translating Arabic literature. In addition to theoretical, historical and literary texts, the course will include guest lectures by translators from Arabic, as well as a workshop component.

*Sponsored by MEIS

*This course fulfills the non-U.S./Western European requirement.

 

 

Arab-Jews and the Writing of Memory

COLIT-GA 1736 / MEIS-GA 1736-001

Tues 4:55-7:35pm

Professor Shohat

The seminar will focus on the writing of Arab-Jewish memory against the backdrop of the dislocation of Jews from Arab/Muslim spaces. The history of colonial partitions and the emergence of competing nationalisms have generated in their take intricate narratives of belonging, where memory is mobilized, performed, and staged from diverse, even opposite perspectives.

*originating in Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies

*This course fulfills the non-U.S./Western European literature/theory requirement.

Early Modern Realisms

COLIT-GA 2956 / GERM-GA 3700

Tues 2:00-4:40pm

Professor Wood

The topic of the seminar is “Realisms”:  the introduction of factual reality, the rhythms of everyday life, sensual and affective experience, and the lay, vernacular point of view into European literature and art.  Realism emerged in the late middle ages before any critical terms were available to analyze and justify it. Realism was defined oppositionally: as prose, not poetry; as the profane, not the sacred; and the vernacular or popular, not the language of learning and authority.  The seminar will interpret primary texts and images produced mainly in the German-speaking lands between about 1400 and 1700, including: saints’ legends, profane legends, vernacular retellings of the Gospel, fables and proverbs, textual and pictorial propaganda of the Protestant Reformation, the realism in the art of Albrecht Dürer and other artists of the period; fictional texts by Hans Sachs, Johann Fischart, and H. J. Ch. von Grimmelshausen; and Schwank or comic literature including Till Eulenspiegel.   More broadly the seminar will address the representation of domesticity, labor, and leisure; portraiture; anecdote and story-telling; “popular culture,” “folklore,” and “folk art”; satire and parody as secularizing forces; exoteric vs. esoteric religion; the boundary between sacred and profane; early genre paintings and prints; autobiography, ego-documents, conversion narratives; the prehistory and form of the novel; proverbs, Kalendergeschichten, novellas; fairy tales, local myths and legends; and vernacular retellings of historical and pagan tales.  The historical material will be framed by critical and theoretical texts of the nineteenth and twentieth century, including Hegel, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Shklovsky, Auerbach, Benjamin, Jolles, Jameson, Rancière. Although the primary focus will be on German material, the course will attempt to accommodate students with interests and language-skills in other European traditions. The visual arts will also be a constant point of reference. Conducted in English.

*originating in German

*This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

Foucault’s Collège de France lectures I

COLIT-GA 2978-001 / CINE-GT 1296

Thurs 12:30-4:30pm

Professor Polan

In 1969, Michel Foucault took up a position as professor of the "History of Systems of Thought" at France's very prestigious Collège de France where one requirement of the appointment was an annual set of lectures open to the public. Over the next 14 years (one off for sabbatical), Foucault gave lectures that sometimes complemented his published books but sometimes took off in other directions. Topics included: the violence of exclusion in systems of thought, the nature of truth-telling in modern culture, the rise of juridical society, the politics of war, governance of populations, the emergence of companionate marriage, the history of neoliberalism, dominant society's relation to those it deems abnormal, and so on. This 2-semester course (Part 1 is not required for registration in Part 2) seeks to approach Foucault through the Collège de France lectures combined with his canonic published texts. In alternate weeks, we will study a lecture-series and key publications with the goal of gaining an overall picture of the contributions of Michel Foucault to contemporary thought.

*originating in Cinema Studies

*This course fulfills the 20th-century literature/theory requirement.

Making an Entrance and Taking the Stage: Protocols of Drama, Film, and Politics

COLIT-GA 2978-002 / GERM-GA 1113

Thurs 12:30-3:10pm

Professor Vogel (spring 2020 Berent Professor)

The seminar explores forms and protocols of making an entrance in past and present. It focuses on the theatrical structure of the moment of appearing and describes the rhetorical devices that create presence on stage. Likewise, it names the disturbances that make this presence precarious. „Entrances“ shall thus be approached from a dual perspective: as energetical instances of triumph and impetus but also as moments of tragic or comic failure. In a first step, we will discuss the political and military protocol of triumph in imperial Rome as a highly influential ceremonial procedure and analyze its formal components. We will then investigate the articulation of entrances in drama concentrating on examples from Aischylos, Shakespeare and French classicism that oscillate between triumph and tragic crisis. Finally, we will trace the art of making an entrance as well as its counter-forces in examples from politics, film and drama of the 20th and 21st centuries. The seminar analyzes how film challenges theatrical entrances, how modern drama minimizes and subverts the act of appearing but also how politics revive the tradition of triumph and its protocols. Materials to be studied include Aischylos's Agamemnon; Shakespeare's Macbeth; Racine's Phedra; Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Breath; films by John Ford and Ernst Lubitsch (among others). Conducted in English.

*originating in German

Florentine Culture in Context, 1250-1600

COLIT-GA 3323 / ITAL-GA 2565

Wed 3:30-6:10pm

Professor Cox

This course offers the opportunity to study some of the key works of late-medieval and Renaissance Florentine literary, intellectual and artistic culture in their social and political contexts, and hence to engage diachronically with the broader theoretical question of the ways in which elite culture is inflected by socioeconomic and political developments. The choice of texts to be studied has been calculated to provide both a sense of the diversity of Florentine culture and its continuities. Besides texts that conventionally fall under the rubric of literature, such as lyric poetry, verse narrative, and drama, the syllabus encompasses chronicles, sermons, and works of political, rhetorical, social, and aesthetic theory. Thematic focuses include civic and family identity; gender and sexuality; and the relationship between language and political power. 

*originating in Italian Studies

*This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

The Sublime: History and Geography of a Rhetorical, Aesthetic, and Ethical Idea

COLIT-GA 3918 / ITAL-GA 2155

Tues 3:30-6:10pm

Professor Ardizzone

The history of the sublime in the West began with the appearance in the 15th century of Francesco Robortello’s translation of the pseudo Longinus treatise On the Sublime. The French translation of Boileau (1674) starts the fortune of the treatise and its dissemination through Europe between the 18th and the 20th centuries. Rather than concentrating on the fortune of the sublime, most recent studies have focused on the origin of this idea by showing that its roots are part of the ancient Greek and Latin Culture, and that although the word itself was not used before the first century BC, the concept existed long before. A basic assumption is that the pseudo Longinus treatise, dated between the second and third century, was not an original work and that it was a product of the Platonism of the time.

The course considers the sources of the sublime in the Greek and Latin rhetoric of grand style. It evaluates the importance of this notion in the biblical theological tradition, as well as in the Neoplatonic and Neoplatonic Christian authors such as Plotinus, the pseudo Dionysius, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Richard of Saint Victor, and others.

Classes will be devoted to reading and discussing texts in the vernacular Italian tradition in both prose and poetry, tracing the making of this idea and its evolution from the first lyric poetry of the 13th century to authors such as Dante, Petrarch, the Platonic school of Florence, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, Galileo, Vico, Leopardi, and Montale.  In this perspective, the course also offers a kind of introduction to the theory of the sublime, as it develops from the 16th century to today, as in the work of Burke, Vico, Kant, Hegel, and Lyotard.

The course will be given in English.

*originating in Italian Studies

*This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

Marx: Romanticism, Capital, Media

COLIT-GA 3925 / GERM-GA 1568

Wed 2:00-4:40pm

Professor Weatherby

Marx’s writing is positioned between German Idealism and Romanticism, political economy in its classical and neoclassical forms, and the problem of machines. This course is organized around a reading of Marx’s Capital, Volume One (nearly in its entirety) with short readings from Idealism and Romanticism (Hegel and Novalis), political economy and economics (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Rosa Luxemburg, Friedrich Hayek), and the philosophy of technology and media theory (Ada Lovelace, Theodor W. Adorno, Stuart Hall, Jean Baudrillard, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Donna Haraway). By focusing on the Idealist/Romanticist underpinnings of Marx’s concept of value, we will be able to track the evolution of the value/capital complex from classicism to neoclassicism. Marx’s long chapters on the machinery question also lay the groundwork for understanding the rise of digital capitalism and neoliberalism (alongside readings from Jodi Dean, Sianne Ngai, and Tiziana Terranova). The close reading of Capital will illuminate the increasingly neuralgic intersection of technology and industry.  Conducted in English.

*originating in German

Leopardi & Italiana Romanticism: Sappho's Last Song around 1800

COLIT-GA 3954 / ITAL-GA 2889

Thurs 12:30-3:15pm

Professor Refini

In 1822, Giacomo Leopardi wrote one of his most outspoken poetical manifestos, the philosophical canzone entitled Ultimo canto di Saffo. Why did Leopardi turn to the Greek poetess Sappho to voice his own concerns about the miserable state of human beings? What did Sappho's tragic fate tell Leopardi about the role of poetry in human life? While these questions are not easy to answer, the poet's treatment of Sappho provides us with a most fruitful lens through which to look at the complex ways in which the poetical culture of Italy developed in the decades around 1800, hanging in the balance between concurrent (and, to some extent, conflicting) trends: indeed, Leopardi's Sappho captures the tension between the permanence of "classicist" poetical forms and the circulation of "romantic" motifs that characterized the peculiar way in which Italy received and responded to European Romanticism. In fact, Leopardi's poem is part of a rich series of texts that, in conjunction with the modern rediscovery of Sappho's poetry, contributed to trigger a veritable "Sappho fever" throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By exploring significant installments of Sappho's afterlife in the period, this seminar aims to introduce students to the "classicist" roots of Italian Romanticism by studying two interrelated topics: namely, the status of the poetess's voice vis-à-vis the poetical uses of her myth; and the relevance of such uses to broader questions about the reception of antiquity within the poetical culture of Italian Romanticism.

*originating in Italian Studies

*This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.