Fall 2020 Course Schedule
fall 2020 Course Schedule
*The Fall 2020 course schedule is subject to change. Please check CAESAR for all up to date course information, including day/times, course descriptions, and mode of instruction.
fall 2020 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2020
COMP_LIT 202-0-21: 20th C Russian 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 211-0-20: Theme of Faust
"To sell one's soul," "to strike a bargain with the devil," or even "to beat the devil at his own game"—these expressions and similar ones continue to enjoy undiminished popularity. For more than five-hundred years the legend of Faust has served as means to express the daring and danger of pursuing an aspiration even if it comes at the cost of one's "soul." The specter of a "Faustian bargain" often appears when narratives identify individuals whose inordinate achievements are both destructive and self-destructive. The theme of Faust provides a perspective in which one must thus reflect on the highest and lowest values. Dr. Faustus has undergone many mutations since he first appeared in central Europe around the early sixteenth century. This class will be begin with a question at the foundation of the Faust legend: what is our "soul" worth? While examining this and kindred questions about the nature of the moral self, the class will continually reflect on what we are doing when we evaluate a work of art in relation to the moral culture of its "time" or "period." In addition to listening to some musical compositions and reading some shorter texts, we will examine the earliest versions of Faust, which derives from the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation and then proceed to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's great drama of cosmic knowledge and sexual seduction, Faust I, followed by selections from its strange sequel Faust II, in which Faust invents paper money and then becomes a real-estate developer or social-engineer who wants to reorganize the very nature of our planet. We will ask what Goethe, near the end of his life, gave to "world literature" (a term of his own invention) when he presented his final version of Faust as a man committed to a total terrestrial transformation that inadvertently destroys innocent lives. As a conclusion to our analysis of Goethe's Faust, we will read two very different kinds of poetic responses, Paul Celan's "Death Fugue" and Carol Ann Duffy's "Mrs. Faust." And in the final two weeks of the class we will view three versions of the Faust legend for our times: Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate from the 1990s, Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls from the 2000s, and Danny Boyle's Yesterday from 2019.
COMP_LIT 301-0-20: Greek and Roman Drama
2,500 years after the birth of Athenian drama, classical tragedy and comedy continues to inspire and beguile us. In this course, we will read several masterpieces of Greek and Roman tragedy and comedy, as well as adaptations of these plays for the modern and contemporary stage. Throughout, we will examine how classical drama related to its original cultural contexts, how it addresses fundamental questions about human societies and relationships, why these plays continue to provoke reflection, and how audiences experienced and continue to experience classical drama. All readings will be in translation, and as part of the course we will also attend a dramatic performance.
COMP_LIT 302-0-20: Environmental Cultures in East Asia
This course is dedicated to the study of environment and culture in east Asia, particularly in China. China is often imagined both as a site of localized environmental ruination that prefigures imminent global collapse and as a source of contamination and contagion that easily cross national borders. Particularly in the Global North, China has become a focal point for ambient ecoanxieties that are shadowed by longer histories of perceived racial, cultural, and economic threat. It is easy (and essential) to critique the demonization of China; the challenge lies in disentangling the imagined from the very real and present dangers that country’s environmental and public health problems pose at home and abroad. This course confronts that challenge by approaching our current environmental crises not as scientific issues with technological solutions, but as crises of culture and urgent objects of representation. How we imagine and depict our uncertain future has a direct impacts on how we act in the present. Course materials will include secondary scholarship from the field of the environmental humanities as well as works of speculative fiction, contemporary visual art, documentary photography, and film.
COMP_LIT 302-0-21: Learning to Walk: Experiments in Exteriority
While enduring the spring 2020 stay-at-home orders, a simple walk outdoors on the public way emerged for many who were able as a rare form of freedom or escape in a world suddenly bereft of common interior spaces. This course investigates the literature and phenomena of ambulation: its history, its great poets, its social and cultural meanings, and some practices that organize mobile attention to exterior space. Our readings will range from Thoreau’s praise of “sauntering” to the French avant-garde’s collective practice of the urban “drift” in small cadres of two or three, from urbanist Jane Jacobs’s descriptions of the city’s “sidewalk ballet” to Sunaura Taylor’s meditations on the meaning of the walk for the differently-abled, and from Welsh writer Iain Sinclair’s “psychogeographical” rambles around the margins of London to Jamaican writer Garnette Cadogan’s searing account of walking while Black. Just as importantly, we’ll adopt these writers’ practices of attention in our own appreciation of local exteriors, gaining immersive knowledge of the landscapes and built environments on Northwestern’s campus; the situation of Evanston and Chicagoland; or, alternatively, whatever remote diaspora in which we find ourselves in fall 2020.
This course is “rain or shine” as well as “hybrid”: for those on campus, we’ll uphold good public health practices by holding a combination of zoom courses to discuss readings but also several class sessions *outdoors and on the move.* Students taking the course remotely will be able to virtually join the outdoor sessions via zoom. If we must go entirely remote due to unforeseen outbreaks, some of our focus on local Northwestern and Evanston will be rerouted to sharing virtual walks with one another wherever we end up. Readings may include one or two novels such as Teju Cole’s Open City; essays by Friedrich Engels, Henry David Thoreau, Guy Debord, Jane Jacobs, Iain Sinclair, Rebecca Solnit, and Garnette Cadogan; poems by Charles Baudelaire, Harryette Mullen, Frank O’Hara and Arun Kolatkar; conceptual art by Francis Alÿs, Erica van Horne, and Helen Mirra; a film by Agnès Varda; and various archival documents on Northwestern campus history such as architectural master plans. *All readings will be made available in digital formats. Required: good walking shoes, a raincoat, cellular access to join group zoom calls when we are outdoors ... and maybe a selfie stick?!
COMP_LIT 305-0-1: Tarvosky Film
In this course, we will review major films of Tarkovsky and of Russian and non-Russian directors whose work is related to his (Eisenstein, Wenders, Bergman, Kurosawa).
COMP_LIT 305-0-2: Rhythm in Art and Philosophy
Whether you are breathing, dancing, or thinking, your activity is marked by a certain rhythm. Rhythm stands at the cusp between body and mind, movement and memory, experience of the self and interaction with others. This course will attend to diverse and at times contradictory notions of rhythm as they have emerged in modern and contemporary Western art and philosophy. After a brief and yet crucial return to ancient Greek philosophy (Plato and the Pre-Socratics), we will focus on Soviet avant-garde cinema (Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov), Italian Neorealism (Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini), Jean-Luc Godard's recent films, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophy. We will devote particular attention to the role that rhythm has played in shaping our understanding of the relation between aesthetic experience and political life: What is the relation between rhythm and power? How do different ideas of rhythm in artistic practice relate to different ideas of society and order? In addition to the aforementioned bodies of work, we will consider contributions from the fields of psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and feminist/queer theory.
COMP_LIT 383-0-20: Gramsci for the Present
This course explores the continued centrality of Antonio Gramsci's thought to contemporary discussions of politics and culture. Arguably the most influential post-Marxist political thinker not only in Europe, but also in India and Latin America, Gramsci's ideas have been crucial when it comes to establishing the fields of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Subaltern Studies. In his eyes, a cultural strategy was a necessary element of the political struggle of the left (an intuition disconcertingly coopted by the right in more recent times). We may well ask, however, is culture in itself sufficient to articulate a political struggle? How did Gramsci define culture in his times and how do we? We will analyze in particular eight "traveling concepts" from the Prison Notebooks: Subaltern, Hegemony, Passive Revolution, Organic Intellectual, Education, National-Popular, The Southern Question, and Americanism/Fordism. We will examine these notions in their original historical context while also exploring the current horizon in which they have proven to be productive in very different geopolitical arenas.
COMP_LIT 398
This seminar is designed as a forum for the independent development and completion of a substantive scholarly paper in the field of Comparative Literature. The paper must involve either the study of literary texts from different literary traditions or the study of literature in relation to other media, other arts, or other disciplines. To this end, a number of short written assignments will be required, including an abstract, an annotated bibliography (using bibliographical software), and a formal project outline. The bulk of the coursework will comprise the senior paper itself (12-15 pages) and an oral presentation of the project to the class. The latter assignment will serve as a dress-rehearsal for the Senior CLS Colloquium, which will be held at the end of the quarter. The colloquium allows (and requires) all students to present their projects to the entire CLS community, including faculty and graduate students who will be in attendance (Fall 2020: colloquium will be held virtually).
COMP_LIT 410-0-20: Recounting the Plague: In and Around Literature
This seminar will in many ways be an experiment: it will combine both my annual Paris Program in Critical Theory seminar with seminars for incoming graduate students in CLS and German. This is made possible by the fact that the seminar will be held virtually, via Zoom, and thus can accommodate students living in disparate locations - as long as the time difference is not too great. In case of a student living in a time-zone that would make it impractical to participate directly in the seminar, the course can be recorded and thus viewed "asynchronously" - although this will preclude direct discussion, which I hope will be an integral part of the experience.
The seminar itself proposes to read a certain number of texts, from the Bible and Thucydides, to more recent writings by Artaud and Camus, articulating different attitudes toward and experiences of "plagues". Although the idea of this course arose before Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan in early January of 2020, the impact of the current pandemic obviously will impact the discussion of previous ones. The focus, not meant to be exclusive but to provide a certain continuity, will be on the manner in which such experiences are articulated in narrative form, whether as founding myths, historical accounts, theatrical, poetical and critical discourses. Although the emphasis will be on more or less direct depictions of plagues, the process of re-counting will emerge as perhaps the decisive medium in which this experience is articulated and transmitted. It is a medium that in which the usual opposition of "fiction" and "reality" is no longer decisive. Instead I propose the notion of a "frictional" text, in order to do justice to the reality of "fictions" and the fictionality of what is usually presented as "real".
In August Prof. Weber will distribute digital versions of almost all the text being discussed in class, with additional recommendations for hard cover versions for those who prefer working with the print medium, as well as suggested secondary readings.
COMP_LIT 414-0-21: Hemispheric Literature and Politics
The geopolitical relationships between the United States and Latin America have left profound marks on the literary histories of the hemisphere. After brief consideration of early twentieth-century geopolitical contexts (dollar diplomacy, assigned sovereignties, and the Good Neighbor policy), this course will focus primarily on the period after 1973: interventions in Chile and Argentina; 1980s inflammation of civil conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama; 1990s neoliberalization policies such as NAFTA; regimes of Caribbean disaster capitalism in the climate emergencies of the 21st century; and the demise of the “pink tide” and the prospects for reemergence of an anti-imperial left in the U.S. This course explores these shared histories, especially through recent works of literary and cultural theory, poetry, memoir, poet’s prose, and literary magazines (made available digitally). The course has three goals: a broad introduction to hemispheric studies as a framework for both U.S. and Latin American cultural studies; a practicum in the construction of a comparative literary historical and political context; a survey of tendencies in U.S., Latino/a/x, and Latin American poetries since 1970. Authors and critics may include Cecilia Vicuña, Roberto Tejada, Raúl Zurita, Carolyn Forché, C.D. Wright, Roque Dalton, Margaret Randall, Ernesto Cardenal, Mark Nowak, Urayoán Noel, Claire Fox, Greg Grandin, Diana Taylor, Edgar Garcia, and others. Magazines will include El corno emplumado, Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, and XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics.
COMP_LIT 487-0-20: Print Culture: Authors, Abdelkebir Khatibi
*this course will be taught in French
This course is dedicated to the influential work of the Moroccan writer and thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi, with particular emphasis on the question of language. A novelist, poet, philosopher and essayist, Khatibi's nuanced and often quite challenging thought and writing have enriched the work of scholars in literary studies, philosophy, postcolonial/decolonial theory, poststructuralist theory and political thought well beyond the Maghreb. Yet, very few have attended to the diversity of his corpus. While his exemplary novel, Amour bilingue is perhaps his best-known work, he is the author of a large body of novels, drama and poetry. A trained sociologist, his writing in this field engages with diverse visual, textual and artistic cultural spheres from North Africa, Europe and Asia, offering us a critical vocabulary and much needed methodology in our approach to studying these areas of cultural production. The author of two biographies where the question of biography as a necessity and as a genre is theorized, Khatibi invites us to dwell on this practice both broadly and contextually. Furthermore, he is one of the most imaginative and provocative interpreters of the Islamic artistic, philosophical and theological traditions.
Khatibi was consistently in dialogue with broad philosophical and literary traditions across the world. His dialogues with Jacques Derrida have been registered in a number of texts by both thinkers, but these by no means limit his wide-ranging intellectual contacts and conversations. While the course is built around Khatibi's novels and theoretical writings, students will be invited to explore in their research projects for the class the broader corpus of his work and its intellectual connections in ways that will be most promising and relevant for their own thinking and research interests.
COMP_LIT 488-0-1: Studies in French Philosophy - Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics
This course offers an introduction to biopolitics, "necropolitics" and "thanatopolitics" as intersectional terms in contemporary critical theory. In this context, intersectional takes on two meanings. On the one hand, it refers to the interrelations of race, gender, sexuality, class, poverty, health, immigration status, ability, and national "exceptionalism". On the other, it refers to the intersections of forms of power: including sovereign, disciplinary, governmental, securitizing, negative, andproductive, bio-, necro- and thanato-political. A prerequisite of the course is a basic foundation in Foucauldian theory, in particular Discipline and Punish and the first volume of History of Sexuality. Through one third of the course, students will consolidate this foundation through study of a group of Foucault's College de France lecture relevant to this period:, reading excerpts from Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population, Psychiatric Power, and Abnormal. The remainder of the course is devoted to the critical engagement with, and transformation of the biopolitical problematic in a range of contemporary critical theorists working in race, gender and sexuality studies, including Mbembe, Hartman, Wright, and Puar.
COMP_LIT 488-0-2: Unethical Media
In recent years, the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have challenged how scholars approach moral questions surrounding the works, artists or genres they select for syllabi and exhibitions. Yet as this debate around the ethics of pedagogy has grown, there has been less discussion about how we treat these same works in research contexts. What does it mean to feel conflicted about picking a novel, theorist, film or image for a syllabus, but relatively unconflicted about focusing on that same material in an article or talk at a professional meeting?
This is a class about what happens when good media scholars study bad things, highlighting how this practice has in fact always been a key part of critique. It is often by running up against theory that a media work becomes "ethical" or "unethical" in the first place. Moreover, the question of how to engage with "unethical objects" motivates a whole array of critical argumentative comportments - it shows us how to canonize, how to excuse, how to politicize, even how to love or hate - and in this way the question of ethics helps us to assume the identity of a scholar. More deeply, these engagements organize and the category of the problematic itself, making it recognizable to a discipline and its members.
To gain perspective on this process, our class will look at the intersection of contemporary theory and moral philosophy, along with films, photographs, graphic novels and radio dramas dealing with issues of aesthetic distance, visual violence, cancel culture, scholarly privilege, disgrace, and the ethical representation of sexualized and racialized bodies. Theorists will include: Chinua Achebe, Elizabeth Anscombe, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Immanuel Kant, José Esteban Muñoz, and Linda Williams. Students will also be asked to present objects they find intellectually compelling but ethically challenging. This class is meant to be especially beneficial for students who find themselves at an impasse about how to behave toward their objects of doctoral research and seek tools to help them move forward as well as a community of discussion.
Some questions will include: What ethical approach is fitting for research that isn't fitting for teaching? How does morality shape how we cancel, celebrate, highlight, hatewatch or sequester works of art, literature and media? How does what we choose to research reflect privilege, and what shape should scholarship take to recognize that? Where does the legitimacy of the researcher toward an object come from, how is it recognized? What languages to scholars deploy in talking about - and often excusing - their moral discomforts, in formal terms? What sort of moral and affective duties spin out of our relationship with our research objects, and how are these both pre-structured and contingent?
Films to be studied include:
Jonathan Demme, The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Anna Biller, The Love Witch (2016)
Nao Bustamante, Neapolitan (2003)
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, A Screaming Man (2010)
Kelly Reichardt, Night Moves (2014)
Alfred Hitchcock, Marnie (1964)
Spike Lee, Bamboozled (2000)
Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing (2014)
Jane Gillooly, A Suitcase of Love and Shame (2013)
COMP_LIT 488-0-3: Society and Its Discontents
*Class discussion will be predominantly in French.
This seminar considers the intersections of literature and social commentary in Renaissance France and Europe. The 16th century saw the heights of humanism and the progression to what we now call early modernity. Focusing on the works of Rabelais and Montaigne who exemplify these two moments, we will consider the interactions between literature and society, politics and intellectual and religious culture. What literary techniques make up the central engines of social commentary? How do texts construct a self and others as vehicles for critique? How do laughter, skepticism and vituperation enable and/or challenge critical interpretation? Examining the tools with which literature probes the world, we will also read works by Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, Etienne de la Boétie, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli and others.
In addition to our early modern texts, this class will also include discussion of issues and best practices in academic research and the profession.
COMP_LIT 488-0-4: Trauma, Politics, and the Uses of Memory
Trauma Studies has become an integral interpretative paradigm for critical theorists, politicians, activists and the popular media alike, where it functions as a diagnostic tool that articulates specif- ic relationships between violence, vulnerability, and late capitalist modernity. Initially embedded in a psychoanalytic framework, the paradigm of trauma attempted to capture the violence wrought by modernity, primarily in the context of twentieth century Western Europe. Seismic upheavals caused by forms of totalitarian govern- ment and Western colonial rule, and subsequent attempts of de- colonization, ask us to rethink trauma as a decidedly internation- al phenomena and a transmutable category that exceeds national boundaries, even as it is at times mobilized by the nation state as cause for new acts of violence.
Critical approaches to trauma will be considered through a transna- tional approach to memory and politics, as we seek to understand the universalist appeal of this model of subjectivity in cultural con- texts that overlap, contrast, and challenge one another, even when ostensibly speaking the same critical language. We will examine a range of archives and media: film, testimonio, biography, novels, poetry, memorials, and photography.