Spring 2021 Graduate Courses
Please check Albert for accurate course locations, course modes and meeting patterns.
Spring 2021 Graduate Courses
Advanced Writing Seminar
Instructor: Prof. Garcia
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.
Problems in Poetics
Instructor: Prof. Paul
This course will focus on core texts and theories in the study of poetics from antiquity onwards. After forays into Plato and Aristotle, we will examine texts by Dante, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Pound, Celan, Blanchot and others. Particular attention will be paid to the notions of inspiration, poetic performance, making, doing, the vernacular, address, style and voice.
Major Texts in Critical Theory and Philosophy: The Body in Philosophy.
Instructor: Prof. Bianchi
How can we speak of such an object as the body, and how is the body spoken and written? In Western discourses the body has been alternately disparaged and elevated; it is the site of symptoms, of mortality, of sexuality, of suffering and pleasure, of truth and deception, and an unevenly apportioned vulnerability. In many registers we might say it is both the bearer of surface qualities such as race, gender, or perceived ability, as well as subterranean depth and elusive nature. While “the body” certainly appears as an effect of a vast range of discourses and practices, including poetic, artistic, cultural, scientific, religious, medical, juridical, political and everyday practices, it also has a philosophical history. Without any particular claim to systematicity, genre-fidelity, or comprehensiveness, we will consider the place and signification of the body at a range of Western philosophical and literary sites from antiquity onward. Authors will include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Bataille, Kristeva, Cixous, Wittig, Irigaray, Foucault, Weheliye, Musser.
Concept of Form
Instructor: Prof. Iampolski
The course will focus on the problem of form in culture, in particular fine arts and literature, but will also explore the notion of form in philosophy and science, from Plato to epigenetics. We will study the notion of form in the science of life and its applications to cultural production from Goethe to Humboldt, to Russian formalists. We will pay special attention to formalism in art history -- Riegl, Wolfflin, Clement Greenberg etc.
Topics in African Lit: Negritude, Post Negritude, Black Radical Thought, Glissant
Instructor: Prof. Diawara
The purpose of this course is to explore the historical, political and esthetic contexts, which led to the emergence of Fanon’s seminal texts on decolonization and cultural nationalism (Black Skin White Mask and the Wretched of the earth); Glissant’s theories of Creolization, Relationality and Tout-Monde (Caribbean Discourse, The Poetics of Relation, and The Philosophy of Relation); and Wole Soyinka’s the singularity of African systems of thought (Myth, Literature, and the African World, The Burden of Memory – The Muse of Forgiveness and Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions).
*Counts for Calamegs certificate
Courses taught by Comp Lit Faculty Originating in Other Departments
Theorizing Public Humanities
Professor Gabriela Basterra & Helga Tawil-Souri
Arab Cities in Literature
Professor Halim
COLIT-GA.2956.003 / MEIS-GA 1770-002
Diaries of Modernity: Literature, Journalism, and Theory in Latin America
Professor Dopico
COLIT-GA.2956.002 / SPAN-GA 2968.001
Sponsored by Spanish & Portugese
The Tyrannical Soul: From Plato to Kafka & the Film Strip
Professor Ronell
GERM-GA2912 / COLIT-GA.2912 (7 seats)
Conducted in English
Pressed by contemporary ruthlessness we want to learn from philosophy, literature, film and the arts how to configure the tyrannical temptations of the human frame. The marginalization of Plato's "democratic soul" will lead an investigation into patriarchal crime scenes double-headed by Freud and the Ancients in their effort to manage human waywardness, sadistic excess, incessant trespass and violent slams. Sacher-Masoch, Melanie Klein and Werner Herzog's thinking of the "bad object," destructive drives, masochist politics, and the premises of reparative justice will power our discussions of lawless abandon. Above all, participants will be supplied with materials for their projects and intellectually-pitched aspirations.
Sponsored by German
Crosslisted Courses Originating in Other Departments
Tolstoy’s War and Peace: Theoretical and Historical Contexts
Prof. Lounsbery
RUSSN-GA 1001.001 / COLIT-GA 3610
We will read War and Peace with attention to a wide range of theoretical approaches. Critical readings drawn from Russian Formalism, feminist and queer theory, political theory, genre theory, symbolic geographies, historicism and New Historicism, Marxist analysis, and narratology. Historical readings include Tolstoy’s primary sources and contemporary reviews, as well as secondary texts by Larry Wolff, Dominic Lieven, Alexander Martin, and others. We will also read Andrei Zorin’s new (short) biography of Tolstoy. For those who read Russian, there will be weekly assignments and analyses in the original. However, knowledge of Russian is not required: discussion and all required assignments will be in English. No prerequisites.
Sponsored by Russian & Slavic
Contact: Leydi Roffman
The Italian Stage, 1600-1900 (seminar)
Prof. Eugenio Refini
ITAL-GA 1981.001 / COLIT-GA.1981.001
From the commedia dell'arte and the birth of opera around 1600 to the various 'reforms' of the dramatic arts: Goldoni, Metastasio, spoken drama vs. the opera libretto, neoclassical drama and its romantic developments - Alfieri, Manzoni, Verdi - to conclude with D'Annunzio."
Sponsored by Italian Studies
Contact: Anne Wolff-Lawson
Law, Race, and the Humanities
Professor Hentyle Yapp
ASPP-GT 2016 SEM
This course examines the relationship between law and race, especially as it relates to the production of subjects and how they come to be managed. In addition to engaging case law in the construction and management of race, we will study how the humanities and arts have come to contend with this history. The larger point in doing so is to reflect on the theoretical, methodological, and political ramifications of humanistic discourse and cultural production in how they create specific visions and understandings of the law. As such, we will unpack a set of interlocking questions that ultimately highlight the stakes of placing law, culture, race, and institutional critique together: What notions of justice are achieved through artistic, cultural, and theoretical engagements with the law that exceed the law's capacity? What ideas of institutional critique can such engagements produce beyond merely being resistant to the law or “against” the institution? Most importantly, how does the legacy of liberalism overdetermine the very terms in which we understand these questions? This course will examine theorists like Saidiya Hartman, Jacques Derrida, Lisa Lowe, Janet Halley, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robert Cover, and Cheryl Harris, amongst others.
Marxism and In/Humanism: Race, Queerness, and the Aesthetic
Professor Hentyle Yapp
ASPP- GT 2077 SEM
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, Glen Coulthard, CLR James, Jacques Derrida, Stuart Hall, Shu-mei Shih, Fredric Jameson, Mario Mieli, and Petrus Liu, amongst others.
Tpcs in Lit Theory II: Mother Tongue - Theories of Language and Maternality
Professor Roni Henig
HBRJD-GA 2453/ COLIT-GA 2978
This interdisciplinary seminar navigates between changing conceptualizations of mother tongue from a range of theoretical and cultural perspectives. Considering the maternal in language through the lens of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer thinking, it asks whether mother tongue can be at once the product of ethnocentric ideologies and a form of resistance to cultural hegemonies. The course examines a diverse selection of critical theory alongside works of literature, cinema and art. Class discussions will trace the rise of the mother as a mark of a biological link between na8on and language; explore the sexual politics of language; and focus on accounts of postcolonial linguistic experiences, in which the mother tongue appears to be fleeting and its “possession” is repeatedly questioned.