Winter 2018 Class Schedule: Comparative Literary Studies Program

Winter 2018 Class Schedule

Course	Title	Instructor	Lecture
COMP_LIT 200	Intro to Literary Theory	H. Feinsod	MW 12:30 – 1:50pm
COMP_LIT 200 Intro to Literary Theory This course offers an introduction to key works of criticism and major theories for the study of literature. We will ask questions at the very heart of literary studies: what is literature? What are its uses? How does it employ form to address matters of experience and society? And how are the literatures of the world related across differences of culture, language, history, geography, and media? We will survey debates about these questions in the criticism of the past as well as in recent, cutting-edge theory. We will emphasize the rewards of learning to read critically in relation to social dynamics of race, class, gender and sexuality. We will develop new eyes and ears as readers, looking and listening close-up at the narrative, poetic and dramatic features of literary texts, as well as zooming out to compare larger patterns of cultural representation across time and space. This course serves as an introduction to the major in Comparative Literary Studies, but it is open to all students who are sincere in their enthusiasm and serious in their curiosity about the nature of literary expression.
COMP_LIT 201	Reading World Literature, “Global Spaces of the Novel”	C. Abani	TTh 3:00 – 4:50pm
COMP_LIT 201 Reading World Literature, “Global Spaces of the Novel” "You build bridges across difference to arrive at the universal through describing the particular." - Garth Greenwell Can we think of global novels or a global aesthetic of the novel? Are there movements within the genre of the novel across cultures that can speak to a global sense of the self? As we watch nationalism and a kind of isolationism rise, what does literature offer in charting a common humanity? Are there common tropes such as violence (gender/sexual/wars etc.), or class and political struggles, love and romance, relationships, or a struggle with the dialectics of self and place? Is the novel uniquely situated to explore this because of its inherent dialogic nature, as Bakhtin says? What are the restrictions to the global self in literature - linguistic, economic, access etc.? Of course, to fully explore these would require a monumental reading list and a yearlong conversation, but we can attempt a scaled down dialogue with a reading list, that while not representative in any way of the globe, can provide a diverse base to begin from. The class is part seminar part lecture and all fun, although fair warning - some of these books are challenging in form, style, and content.
COMP_LIT 202-0-20	Interpreting Culture, “Dante’s Divine Comedy”	Christopher Davis	MW 10am - 10:50am
COMP_LIT 202-0-20 Interpreting Culture, “Dante’s Divine Comedy” An introduction to Dante's masterwork on human error, punishment and redemption through a careful reading of the Inferno.
COMP_LIT 202-0-21	Interpreting Culture, “Intro to Russian 20th C Literature”	Nina Gourianova	TuTh 11am - 12:20pm
COMP_LIT 202-0-21 Interpreting Culture, “Intro to Russian 20th C Literature” This course focuses on interconnections between new ideas in literature, culture and politics in the early 20th century. Texts include great Modernist novels Peterburg (1913) by Andrei Bely, Master and Margarita (1940) by Mikhail Bulgakov, and Evgeny Zamiatin's We (1921); poetry by Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Osip Mandelstam. These major works are discussed in the broad Russian and European cultural and historical context.
COMP_LIT 304-0-20	Studies in Theme, “Natural Languages & Green Worlds”	Tristram Wolff	TuTh 11am - 12:20pm
COMP_LIT 304-0-20 Studies in Theme, “Natural Languages & Green Worlds” Utopia, anarchy, pastoral idyll: how have myths of a "green world" spurred us to think that language can sometimes be natural ? or that it can be precisely what separates us from "Nature"? How do our ideas about language impose distinct worlds, with distinct rules, on humans, animals, and the worlds around them? Learning about theories of culture and language alongside literary forms from the pastoral of Shakespearean comedy to Romantic and recent poetry, from ethnographic fieldwork and nature writing to the outlandish imaginary of science fiction, students in this course unearth the unexamined grounds of "green" thought as it appears in literary environments (and as it finds other forms in film, mass media, and the popular imagination). The course will give students a critical introduction to new ideas in what is now being called the "environmental humanities," while offering a broad background on classic literary themes of wilderness, innocence, knowledge, and freedom.
COMP_LIT 312-0-20	Authors and Their Readers, “Proust”	Scott Durham	TuTh 9:30am - 10:50am
COMP_LIT 312-0-20 Authors and Their Readers, “Proust” This course will be devoted to an intense engagement with one of the major figures in the history of literature, Marcel Proust, and to his In Search of Lost Time, which remains a crucial text in the development of modern thought. The focus will be on four volumes of the Search: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Time Regained. We will explore Proust's reinvention of the novel as a form in relation to a number of Proustian problems and themes: his analyses of desire, perversion and sexuality; his reflections on the nature of time and memory; and his exploration of the relationship of art to life. We will also consider Proust's powers as a satirist and critic of ideology, who mercilessly dismantled the individual and collective illusions of his contemporaries.
COMP_LIT 312-0-21	Authors and Their Readers, “Kafka: The Question of the Narrator”	Sam Weber	TuTh 9:30am - 10:50am
COMP_LIT 312-0-21 Authors and Their Readers, “Kafka: The Question of the Narrator” This seminar will be meant both as an introduction to Kafka's writings, especially the shorter fiction. The guiding thread will be the question of the narrator and the role the narrative plays in his work. This may seem obvious, but much Kafka criticism avoids this question either by equating the narrator with the author and focusing on "Kafka," or by regarding the narrative as a means of representing whatever is narrated and focusing on the objects represented. By contrast I want to argue that very often, if not always, the most interesting aspect of his writings is concentrated on the ambiguous figure and discourse of the narrator and the narrative, which doesn't simply tell a story that exists independently of it but that tells us something about the process of story-telling and the different "figures" that are involved in it. In short, Kafka's writings reflect on what they are doing and this reflection makes up a decisive part of their interest. Stories that will be read include: Cares of a Family Man, The Hunter Gracchus, Josefine: Songstress of the Mice People, Before the Law, Building the Great Wall of China, The Problem of the Laws, A Report to the Academy, Up in the Gallery ? among others. Depending on time and interest, some critical texts will be discussed as well, including by Maurice Blanchot ("The Silence of the Sirens"), Jacques Derrida, "Before the Law," Coetzee (on "The Burrow") and Walter Benjamin.
COMP_LIT 313-0-20	Texts and Contexts, “Queering Medieval Romance”	Barbara Newman	MWF 10am - 10:50am
COMP_LIT 313-0-20 Texts and Contexts, “Queering Medieval Romance” Medieval romance famously celebrated "courtly love", the ennobling passion of an aristocratic man for an upper-class woman. But just as deeply ingrained is the ideal of same-sex love between men. And despite, or perhaps because of, the Church's misogynist bias, the culture shows a surprising openness to transgender phenomena. This class will explore two kinds of texts: those in which women masquerade as men, and those in which heterosexual love disrupts or is disrupted by the bonds of male affection. Texts will include Ovid's tale of Iphis and Ianthe, in which two girls fall in love and marry; a pair of transgender saints' lives; and the stunningly postmodern romance of Silence. After our study of ambiguous gender identities, we'll turn to ambiguous desires, reading The Romance of the Rose, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We'll end with Chaucer's "other masterpiece," the magnificent Troilus and Criseyde. Set in ancient Troy, this romance features the bisexual Pandarus, who seems to be in love with both the hero and the heroine. Amis and Amiloun and Troilus and Criseyde will be read in Middle English, the other texts in translation.
COMP_LIT 411	Critical Practices, “Deconstruction: Turn Toward the Absolute”	Sam Weber	M 2pm - 5pm
COMP_LIT 411 Critical Practices, “Deconstruction: Turn Toward the Absolute” This seminar begins a series I have planned that will be devoted to examining the function of certain words in the writings of Derrida, including above all absolute, unconditional, aporia and responsibility. The main text to be read and discussed is the book, Given Time (in French: Donner le temps). It is a very strange and difficult text for many reasons, which probably explains why it has been largely ignored in the Derrida reception. But it is as Derrida himself writes, "a sort of intermediate stage, a moment of passage." From what to what is one of the questions we will be asking. The book goes back to lectures given in 1977-78, but was not published until 1991. It marks Derrida's turn toward the question of "responsibility," another word that will be examined closely. Finally, the book moves from a critical engagement with Marcel Mauss' Essay on the Gift, to Baudelaire's short prose piece, Counterfeit Money (La fausse monnaie). Derrida's essay may be regarded as a "gift" in both the English and the German sense of that word - and therefore demands the give-and-take of an intense engagement. The book comes out of a constant dialogue of Derrida with Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Freud and Lacan, all of whom will be considered during the course of the quarter.
COMP_LIT 413	Comparative Studies in Theme, “Sacred and Profane: Studies in Medieval Cross-over”	Barbara Newman	M 2pm - 5pm
COMP_LIT 413 Comparative Studies in Theme, “Sacred and Profane: Studies in Medieval Cross-over” Medievalists are in the habit of distinguishing sacred from secular texts, but some of the most vibrant and interesting cultural production lay on the borderline, in the terrain of "crossover." Courtly love lyrics could be indistinguishable from devotional poems to the Virgin, while motets interwove liturgical phrases with the melodies of popular songs. Bawdy fabliaux might return with tweaking as miracle stories. Bestiaries, originally a genre of moralized natural science, could be put to erotic or political use. The hybrid genre of hagiographic romance represents virgin martyrs as erotic heroines and the sorcerer Merlin as a parodic saint, while the Grail romances turn chivalry on its head to promote ascetic chastity and Eucharistic piety. What did medieval audiences make of such ambiguities? What textual markers enable us to distinguish respectful homage from tongue-in-cheek parody, or audacious sacrilege from the sincerest form of flattery? In this seminar we will read medieval texts in a range of genres (lyric, romance, beast allegory, pseudohagiography, and mystical dialogue), exploring as many variants of crossover as our brief quarter permits. Middle English works will be read in the original, French texts in translation, but I am happy to offer tutoring in Old and Middle French for those who are proficient in the modern language.
COMP_LIT 414-0-20	Comparative Studies in Genre, "Writing the Revolution"	Jorg Kreienbrock	W 2pm - 5pm
COMP_LIT 414-0-20 Comparative Studies in Genre, "Writing the Revolution" Friedrich Schlegel famously claimed that the French Revolution, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and Fichte's Foundations of the Science of Knowledge represent the great trends of his age. Another term for this age is modernity. This class will follow Schlegel's intuition and reconstruct the precarious relationship between politics, philosophy, and literature which marks a specific notion of revolutionary modernity, i.e. the interruption of historical time in the name of something radically new and different. Paradigmatic for such a rupture is the French Revolution. Its literary representations and philosophical descriptions will be the topic of our discussions. A tentative reading list includes (but is not limited to): Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Holderlin, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Heinrich Heine, Georg Buchner, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt. Although the class will focus mostly on the German tradition it is possible to include other texts, images, films, etc. depending on the particular interests and backgrounds of the participants.
COMP_LIT 481	Studies in Literary Theory, “Historicism: Uses and Abuses”	Harris Feinsod	Tu 2pm - 5pm
COMP_LIT 481 Studies in Literary Theory, “Historicism: Uses and Abuses” This course adapts its title from Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben" ("On the Use and Abuse of History for Life," 1874). Beginning with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about historical materialism and the uses of history and literary history as disciplines (Michelet, Taine, Croce, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Mariátegui, Benjamin and Adorno), we will go on to survey the development and invocations of historicism, new historicism, and post-historicism as approaches to literary study across early modern, romantic, victorian, modern and postcolonial literatures. How does historicism fare in addressing diverse periods? For example, while early modern and Victorian studies have recently seen minor insurgencies against dominant tendencies toward "positivist historicism," some of the most energizing recent work in twentieth-century literary studies has been deeply historicist in inclination. Must we continue to follow Jameson's famous injunction to "always historicize!," or do we rather find ourselves in a "weak" theoretical state of affairs by which "we cannot not historicize?" How do we understand Roland Barthes's claim that "a little formalism turns one away from History, but ? a lot brings one back to it"? What is historicism good for? What are its varieties? Where does it fall short?