Spring 2023 Graduate Courses

COLIT-GA 2122 / ENGL-GA 2958

Paranoia: Genealogies and Futures

Prof. Sanders

It is no secret that we live in an age of paranoia, our times distinguished by a heightened concern about surveillance that is far from pathological, and a disturbing return, since 2015, to what Richard Hofstadter in 1964 termed “the paranoid style in American politics.” Our seminar is thus an attempt to gain an orientation in these times by engaging in a close and critical reading of texts and sources of theory about paranoia, from Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Freud and Lacan’s readings thereof, to works by Melanie Klein, George Orwell, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, and others. Close attention will also be devoted to documents relating to WikiLeaks and to two of the best known whistleblowers of our time, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. In broader terms, this course is designed as opening the question of the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to the analysis of texts both literary and political in a time of rapidly changing media and communications technology. 

COLIT-GA 2000

Advanced Writing Seminar

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. 

*Department consent required. Only open to Comp Lit PhD students. Please contact Deirdre Collins (drc400@nyu.edu) for a permission code.

COLIT-GA 2890

Studies in Lit Theory: Reading; Theories, Practices, Histories

Prof. Vatulescu

In this course we will explore what reading can be and do by engaging with iconic scenes of reading from a variety of twentieth century and contemporary literary texts (authors may include Rabindranah Tagore, Marcel Proust, Osip Mandel’shtam, Virginia Woolf, Lu Xun, Jósef Czapski, Zora Neale Hurston, Tayeb Salih, Josef Brodsky, Herta Müller, Azar Nafisi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Linda Hogan, and M. NourbeSe Philip). We will consider these texts alongside theories and practices of reading ranging from close to distant reading and much in between: psychoanalytic, paranoid, reparative, deconstructive, against and along the grain readings. We will venture beyond traditional literary studies to learn about cognitive studies perspectives on reading differences (dyslexia, hyperlexia, alexia, synesthesia, etc. ) that have recently transformed our very concept of reading. Last but not least, the course invites students to engage with a hands-on experience of archival reading and offers an introduction to archival theory, methodology, and practice.

*Counts toward 20th c. Theory

COLIT-GA 2953

Major Text in Critical Theory & Philosophy: The Body in Philosophy

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 marked surface, insofar as it is the bearer of qualities such as race, gender, ability, as well as subterranean depth and elusive nature. While “the body” certainly appears as an effect of and object within a vast range of activities, 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 sites from antiquity onward. Authors will include Plato, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Kristeva, Cixous, Wittig, Irigaray, Weheliye, Musser, Jackson.

COLIT-GA 2956 / ENGL-GA 2958.002 / FREN-GA 1191.003

The Third Person

Prof. Paul

Claims to epistemic certainty, political rights, and private property share a linguistic foundation in the first-person. Whether in the Cartesian cogito, the Lockean theory of personhood and appropriation, or Rousseau’s account of property in the Second Discourse, key junctures in Western modernity are reliant on and enabled by linguistic statements couched in the first person: I think therefore I am; this is mine, and so forth. While recent cultural and critical turns have ignited interest in third-person pronouns, much of this scrutiny has taken the form of debates about gender identities rather than number.  This course shifts focus both from the possessive individualism of modernity and contemporary gender trouble in order to think through the philosophic, poetic, and political significance of the third person. The dilation of self away from the “I” lays open the promises and perils of non-identity in times of renewed nationalist and xenophobic identitarianism, as well as the emergence of multiple minoritarian and utopian communities. Figures studied may include George Eliot, Flaubert, James, Woolf, Kafka, Benveniste, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Benjamin, Laplanche, and Simone Weil.

*Counts toward 20th c. Theory and P&T

COLIT-GA 3630 / CEH-GA 1016.002

Topics in African Lit: Literary Archives & Experiments in Reading

Prof. Mushakavanhu


This seminar will explore approaches to archival research in the field of African literature, which can serve as a fascinating laboratory for literary research. Because African literature is multifaceted and multilingual, we will oscillate, at all times, between theory and practice, fundamental ways of looking at the world, through provocative contrasts and unexpected fluidities. In turn, we will also wrestle with the limitations of the archive—the silences, excesses, and (mis)representations—while also engaging with recent scholarship that addresses the methodological, theoretical, and ethical challenges of archival research in relation to the geopolitics of the black diaspora, Africa’s place in its imaginaries, and ask questions around black intellectual histories and their relationship to the archive. While ‘Africa’ is our primary locus, we are looking to contribute to dialogues across the Black Atlantic as well as intellectual geographies such as the Caribbean, the United States and Europe. Each week there will be selected creative and critical readings.

*7 week accelerated course 1/23/23 - 3/20/23

COLIT-GA 3954 / POET-GA 2002

Topics in Poetics: Criticism and Truth

Prof. Gadberry

This seminar takes its name from Roland Barthes’s 1966 work (and Jonathan Kramnick’s 2021 essay of the same name) to examine the relationship between literary criticism and truth. What relationship does literary criticism have (or owe) to truth, sincerity, or authenticity, and how does literary-critical method account for this obligation or justify its absence? And just what is “reading” or “literary criticism” anyway?  Does or how does criticism produce knowledge or make meaning? On what basis might we distinguish “good” from “bad” literary criticism, and how might we differentiate literary-critical or critical-theoretical judgments from aesthetic or moral judgments? To think about these questions, we will examine literary-critical fights of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries (among them, the Barthes-Picard debate of the 1960s; the ongoing “method wars” of critique and post-critique, of suspicious and symptomatic reading against mere “description” or surface reading, of “innocent” vs. “guilty” reading) alongside literary works that illuminate these debates. We will also consider the relationship of literary criticism to the truth claims of extra-disciplinary modes of reading, interpretation, and pattern recognition, both philosophical and popular. (How and when, for instance, is the practice of reading, of writing, literary-criticism, distinct from or perilously near to the conspiracy theory, to apophenia, the "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness”?) 

*Counts toward 20th c. Theory and P&T

Courses taught by Comp Lit faculty originating in other departments

What is Sexual Being? Philosophy, Sexual Politics and French Feminist Theory

Prof. Apter

FREN-GA 2890 / COLIT-GA 1990

This course will review pivotal texts in the history of French feminism (Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Gisèle Halimi, Michelle Perrot) in relation to more recent works on gender and sexuality by Irigaray (L’oubli de l’air, J’aime à toi), Anne Garréta (Pas un jour), Jean-Luc Nancy and Adèle Van Reeth (La Jouissance), Catherine Malabou (Le plaisir effacé: Clitoris et pensée ), Elsa Dorlin (Se défendre: une philosophie de la violence) ; Manon Garcia (On ne naît pas soumise, on le devient), Mona Chollet (Sorcières : La puissance invaincue des femmes), Paul Preciado (Je suis un monstre qui vous parle), Jack Halberstam (Trans : A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability), Françoise Vergès (Un féminisme décolonial), and activist manifestos hailing from Ni Putes Ni Insoumises, #Balance Ton Porc, Femen and Parti des Indigènes de la République (Houria Bouteldja).

Through-lines will be traced between second and third-wave/contemporary feminism with special focus on themes of sexual ontology (how “to be” in sex, does philosophy have a sex? What is clitoral (versus phallic) philosophy?); erogenous zones, corporeal materialism and the plasticity of embodiment; the politics of abortion and the right to bodily autonomy; non-possessive, nonbinary desire (jouissance), sexual violence and the art of feminist self-defense, sexed grammar and social harming. Prerequisite: An advanced reading knowledge of French. Requirements: an oral exposé on one of the readings and a 14-15 page paper (or approved group project, such as a film or set of interviews). Option to write in French or English.

*Originating in Dept. of French

 

Criticism, Critique, & Crisis: Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, and Heidegger on Aggrieved Being

Prof. Ronnell

GERM-GA 2900 / COLIT-GA 2917

The course explores the ravages of ingratitude and the hold of addictive lures on the entangled levels of philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature. Readings include Jean-Luc Nancy on community and “shattered love” as well as Sarah Kofman on despotic throes of Being and Derrida on spectral lament. *taught in English

*Originating in Dept of German

 

Black Preformance: Violence

Prof. Moten

PERF-GT 2231 / COLIT-GA 2453

This seminar begins with a reading of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon and Emmanuel Levinas on violence. Their work will be seen against the backdrop of work by Allen Feldman, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Hortense Spillers. The lens, and the general question of attitude through which this focus is to be achieved, is provided by Walter Benjamin’s Kritik der Gewalt ("Critique of Violence") and a selection of the vast criticism of that work beginning with Werner Hamacher’s indispensable text, “Afformative, Strike.” But what if the lens itself comes most clearly into focus when it is framed by some work of W. E. B. Du Bois that anticipates (John Brown), accompanies (Darkwater) and follows (Black Reconstruction in America) Benjamin’s text. This palimpsestic approach will require some considerations of angles and angels. We'll attempt to keep topographical faith with the texts, reading closely and slowly in concert, so that we can see if the preformative force of black study makes precise (lyrical, analytical, phenomenological, sociological, physical) descriptions of violence a bit more possible. We’ll talk a little about the discourse of violence in black popular music, especially blues and trap music, which allows us to begin to try to sharpen a distinction between violence and brutality. We might talk about the entanglement of violence and love (we could begin, for instance, with thinking through the character Viole[n]t in Morrison's Jazz. We might talk about violence, love and jazz. We’ll think about violence as something like an "anthological" condition. (Imagine "anthological" being said by my friend and mentor from Marseille, Marielle Pelissero, so that it all but sounds like “ontological,” thereby resonating an alternative both to ontological and to "para-ontological" as Nahum Chandler uses it, perhaps both in and against and independent of the grain of a certain infamous German philosopher named Oskar Becker. Maybe we can work through all that in a way that tries to understand the irreducible "relation," as we see it, of being and individuation). We might also look at certain brutal uses/reductions of violence in black studies, and to think, in a way that isn't directed towards indicting anybody, about what it means when the murder and premature death that is visited upon working class black people is treated by bourgeois academics, such as ourselves, as if they were microaggressions directed against us. Maybe we can talk about the difference between black artists and thinkers being tired of seeing images of the execution of black people and working-class black people being tired of being executed. Maybe we can speak about this in terms of the problematic of unrest and to consider unrest, which is blackness as the anthological condition, as a response to the brutality that responds to it. What's at stake when the lumpen intellectuality of black study is folded into the academic enterprise of black studies? We should ask this question not from outside of black studies, and not against any of its practitioners but from within it, as a loving and devoted violation of it by its practitioners.

*Originating in Dept. of Performance Studies

 

Theories of Space and Arab Cities in Literature

Prof. Halim

MEIS-GA 1770.002 / COLIT-GA 2956.002

TBD

*Originating in Dept. of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

 

Critique of Post-Mao Chinese Culture: 1978-2018

 Xudong Zhang

EAST-GA 2707.004 / COLIT-GA 2956.003 / INTRL-GA 1731.010

The seminar is organized around critical readings of the cultural, artistic, legal and political texts, and discourses which laid the social and ideological foundation of the Opening and Reform years, or the New Era. The paradigm-setting interventions and heightened creativities with epochal implications to be scrutinized include (but not limited to) the “Kantian intervention” articulated by Li Zehou’s A Critique of Critical Philosophy published in 1979; the CCP’s “Resolution” on historical problems with its centrality in a mixed evaluation of Mao and total repudiation of the Cultural Revolution; the “Constitutional Moment” that followed, culminating in the issuing of the 1982 Constitution as an expression of the new social-political consensus on economic development and social stability. The initial breaking with the past and embracing the new were accompanied by unprecedented vitality in literary and artistic productivity. The three or four decades that followed will be examined, critiqued and periodized in national as well as global contexts, and with a historical hindsight possible only with an “end” or endpoint in 2018 or 2022.

*Originating in the Dept. of East Asian Studies

 

Crosslisted courses originating in other departments

Modern German Drama: Political Theatre

Prof. Robinson

GERM-GA 1520.001 / COLIT-GA 2453.002

This seminar is devoted to modern political theater in the double sense of the phrase. Theater has long provided a privileged medium for reflecting on politics, while political theory has in turn been informed by theatrical devices and models of representation. Reading plays and works of political thought in parallel, we will explore the transformation of the modern political scene from the French Revolution to the Anthropocene. Topics to be discussed include revolution and states of emergency, biopolitics and political nature, conceptions of agency (juridical, administrative, more than human), theatricality and performativity, representation vs participation, post-dramatic theater, the politics of refusal, in/visibilization, infrastructure.

Bracketed with discussions of Oedipus and Antigone, the reception of which so fundamentally informed modern political theater, the seminar focuses on a largely German archive of theatrical work – from Kleist and Schiller to Büchner and Brecht to Özdamar and Jelinek – that is political insofar as it challenges still prevalent views of the political scene. Readings from the history of political thought include Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Schmitt, Fanon, Luxemburg, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, Butler, Honig, Stengers, and Latour. These will be supplemented with a selection of contemporary scholarship corresponding to student interest and the direction of discussion. We will consult texts in the original, but readings and discussion will be in English – no German language skills are required. For the final research papers, seminar participants will be invited to write on an aspect of political theater relevant to their own work and field of study.

 

Confession in German Thought: Of Guilt, Creed and Pride

GERM-GA 2912 / COLIT-GA 2978

Prof. Büttgen

Contemporary theory has made confession an object for thought, problematizing both the subjectivation of subjects through the recognition of their sins (Foucault, The Confessions of the Flesh; Derrida, Circumfession) and the power of declarative statements in politics (Derrida, The University without Condition; Balibar, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism). On the other hand, the ambiguity of confession, as confession of sins and confession of faith, has been a major issue in German thought, from Aufklärung onwards. Our inquiry will start from the question ‘What should I confess?’ (which sins and what faith?), as the question underlying all reflection especially on religion and politics on German-speaking soil. We will read and contextualize the German discussion on Bekenntnis, in an attempt to shed a new light on confession, forgiveness, and self-reliance in contemporary debates. An inquiry on the power of confession will provide insights into the conditions of possibility of theoretical production in a culture that has been deeply confessionalized, i.e. overdetermined by the confessional divide since the Reformation. This divide has in turn had a radical effect on the thought of confession itself, crossing the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and law. Readings will include texts by Lessing (Adam Neuser), Kant (« Was ist Aufklärung ? »), Goethe (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), Hegel (Phänomenologie des Geistes), Rosenzweig (Der Stern der Erlösung), Balibar, Derrida, Foucault.

 

The Early Modern Ecumenopolis: From Ptolemy to Latour

FREN-GA 2390 / COLIT-GA 3323

Prof. Usher

At the intersection of early modern studies and the Environmental Humanities, this seminar will ask questions about the ecological stakes of how literature and cartography apprehend the planet on — and with — which with live. On the early modern side of things, we will be exploring evolutions in cartography, such as the invention of the first terrestrial globes, globe gores, the re-discovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia, the “discovery” of the New World (and its subsequent disruption of a tripartite view of the whole), alongside a host of literary texts from the period, including Rabelais, Montaigne, Léry, and Ronsard. On the Environmental Humanities side, we will explore recent works by (and about) Bruno Latour, especially his Face à Gaïa, Où atterrir?, Où suis-je?, his edited volume on Critical Zones, and his recent theatrical spectacles created in dialogue with Frédérique Aït-Touati (Inside, Moving Earths, Viral), as well as Patrice Maniglier’s recent Le philosophe, la terre et le virus: Bruno Latour expliqué par l’actualité. The seminar will be of particular use to graduate students wishing to work on either the early modern period and/or theoretical approaches to questions of ecology. Students will be encouraged throughout to relate the seminar to their own ongoing research. The seminar will be conducted in English. A reading knowledge of French is highly desirable, though a majority of readings are available in English translation.

NB. Students considering this seminar might wish to see Latour and Aït-Touati’s trilogy Inside, Moving Earths, Viral at New York’s FIAF on October 27 or 28, 2022. Details here: https://fiaf.org/event/2022-ctl-terrestrial-trilogy/

 

How to do Things With Concepts: Methods in Interdisciplinary Intellectual History

HIST-GA 1527 / COLIT-GA 3612

Prof. Geroulanos

The purpose of this course is to study the sciences through which "the human '' came to be conceived as a plastic object available for study, diagnosis, experimentation, representation, and transformation. These will include psychology (including industrial psychology and ethnopsychology), social hygiene and population science, statistics, anthropology, eugenics, cybernetics, and neo-behaviorism—our goal is to provide at once an introduction to these sciences and their overlap and, at the same time, to think about their conceptual underpinnings and governmental (in a broad sense) effects. At stake, in a sense, are the ways that the sciences have waged war, often with state support, both on a certain understanding of human nature as placid and static and also on actual subjects and citizens through the intent of transforming them. Their partisans did so by conceiving themselves as bearers of truth and architects of its organization: they could improve radically on society by identifying and tackling ostensibly profound social and natural problems.

 

Mother Tongue: Theories of Language and Maternality

HBRJD-GA 2520 / COLIT-GA 2610

Prof. Henig

How does the maternal figure in language? Is “mother” a contained otherness that operates within the symbolic order? Is it a biological fiction that perpetuates nationalist exclusions? Does it bear a generative capacity? Mother tongue, a metaphorical notion of 19th century national imagination, is a deeply charged ethnocentric concept. At the same time, the range of affects and attachments that the mother tongue entails cannot be denied. 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 nation and language; explore the sexual politics of language; and focus on a set of accounts of diasporic and postcolonial linguistic experiences, in which the mother tongue appears to be fleeting and its “possession” is repeatedly questioned.