Fall 2021 Course Schedule
fall 2021 Course Schedule
*The Fall 2021 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 2021 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2021
COMP_LIT 202-0-20: 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 begin with a question at the foundation of the Faust legend: what is a “soul,” and what is worth? While examining these and kindred questions about the nature of the self, the class will continually reflect on what we are doing when we evaluate a work of art in relation to the 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, beginning with the story of the bluesman Robert Johnson, as represented in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl?, followed by Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls and concluding with Danny Boyle’s Yesterday.
COMP_LIT 202-0-21: The "New" Latin American Narrative
So, what's "new" about the New Latin American Narrative? The course approaches this question by considering several key trends in Latin American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels, short fiction, and testimonial writing & film, we will study representative works from the so-called pre-Boom, Boom, and post-Boom decades (1940s-50s, 1960s-70s & beyond). Although the new narrative is often identified with the Boom era--when Latin American literature "exploded" onto the world stage--and with Boom novels, we will take a broader view to consider the diverse types of narrative representing “new” currents in the region. Primary materials will be selected from writers such as Borges, Cortázar, Donoso, Ferré, Fuentes, García Márquez, Menchú, Puig, Rulfo, Shua, or Valenzuela.
COMP_LIT 211-0-20: What is Lyric Poetry
The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. Theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process.
COMP_LIT 211-0-20: Introduction to Poetry
The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. Theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process.
COMP_LIT 300-0-20: Jewish Graphic Narratives on the Holocaust
This course will examine graphic narratives in the context of global Jewish culture of the last century, focusing on how they have represented the Holocaust as history and memory over time. We will look at the historical and aesthetic development of graphic narrative art in relation to the representation of the Holocaust. To this end, we will scrutinize: (1) Jewish graphic narratives produced during World War II, such as Will Eisner’s Spirit. The Tale of the Dictator’s Reform (1941) and Horst Rosenthal’s Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp (1942); (2) 1st generation Jewish American graphic narratives representing the Holocaust, in particular Bernie Krigstein and Al Feldstein’s “Master Race” (1955) and Will Eisner’s To the Heart of the Storm (1991); (3) the post-1980s development of (auto)biographic graphic narratives about World War II by the 1.5 generation of Jewish Americans (Miriam Katin’ We Are on our Own and Letting It Go), the second generation (Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Martin Lemelman’s Mendel’s Daughter and Two Cents Plain) and the third (plus) generation (Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, Leela Corman’s “The Book of the Dead” and “The Blood Road”, Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters); (4) contemporary non-Jewish (auto)biographic graphic narratives focusing on perpetrators and Holocaust memory: Nora Krug’s Belonging. A German Reckons with History and Home (2018). In our class discussions, we will assess the ways in which Jewish artists have utilized the possibilities of graphic narratives to explore the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish identity and historical experiences and we will also consider the impact of gender and perpetrators’ actions on Holocaust representation. We will also examine the dynamics of Holocaust representation in the case of artists that have published multiple graphic narratives concentrating on the Holocaust. We will pay particular attention to how and why different generations of artists use similar or distinct forms of Holocaust construction and what topics they primarily broach.
COMP_LIT 383-0-20: Studies in French Philosophy: Foucault
This course offers an overview of the work of one of the most influential late-twentieth-century French philosophers, Michel Foucault. Focusing on his studies of madness, sex, the medical gaze, prisons and other disciplinary institutions, the search for truth, knowledge, and liberation, students will gain an understanding of Foucault's most important concepts - concepts that over the last four decades have become central categories of inquiry and critique in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. These include archaeology, discipline, biopolitics, power-knowledge, resistance, governmentality, and genealogy. The course is reading intensive. In addition to weekly excerpts, you should plan to read two of Foucault's major texts throughout the quarter.
COMP_LIT 410-0-20: Theory Sequence
This course adapts its title from Friedrich Nietzsche’s untimely meditation “On the Use and Disadvantage 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, we will survey the development and invocations of historicism as an approach to literary study across colonial, imperial, modernist, postcolonial, and environmental episodes in literary history. How does historicism fare in addressing diverse periods? For example, while British Victorian studies recently faced critiques of dominant tendencies toward “positivist historicism,” some of the most energizing work in postcolonial literary studies has been deeply historicist in inclination. How has climate change provoked new visions of historical time crossing the traditional periods? 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? Readings may include works by G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hayden White, Susan Buck-Morss, Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Saidiya Hartman, Reinhart Koselleck, Sianne Ngai, Michael Denning, Sylvia Wynter, Lisa Lowe, Michel-Rolph Troiullot, and/or Dipesh Chakrabarty. We will also watch a film TBD and look at a novel or poems to be selected by the class.
This course serves as a required pro-seminar for students in Comparative Literary Studies and English, and we will therefore emphasize a common project of the “literary humanities.” In addition to the usual weekly seminar session, students should plan for biweekly Friday noon sections in which guest faculty introduce University resources and professional topics.
COMP_LIT 481-0-20: Studies in Literature and Cultural Criticism - "Visualizing Radicalism"
RUSSIAN FORMALISM. This seminar will examine the school and theory of Russian Formalism, which influenced and informed many developments in the XX century literary and art theory, from Prague Linguistic Circle through Structuralism and Semiotics. Along with the detailed study of the critical and theoretical essays by such adherents of Formalism as Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, et al., we will be exploring the major works of Russian modernism and avant-garde in literature and film through the methodological approach of Formalist theory. Special focus on the issues of Formalism and Marxism, Formalism and History, and the interconnections between culture and politics of the time. Discussion and presentations in English.
COMP_LIT 487-0-20: What is Lyric Poetry?
"What is poetry anyway?/More than one rickety answer/has tumbled since that question first was raised./But I just keep on not knowing," Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska confesses in a late poem. Is the lyric intensely private? Inherently social? Intrinsically apolitical? Fundamentally untranslatable? How does, or doesn't, it straddle the boundaries between "high" and popular culture? We will examine multiple, conflicting theories and practices of lyric poetry across cultures and centuries in this course, with particular emphasis on ways that recent Eastern European poetry in translation both shapes and complicates contemporary anglophone critical and poetic traditions.
COMP_LIT 487-0-21: Psychoanalysis and Cinema
What can psychoanalysis teach us about race, sexuality, and coloniality today? And how does film mediate these questions? This course will approach these problems through close readings of texts at the intersection of feminist psychoanalytic film theory, postcolonial theory, Black studies, and ethnic studies. While feminist film theory and psychoanalysis have had a robust intellectual encounter, both fields of study have been criticized for their lack of engagement with problems of colonial violence. In this seminar, we will explore what possibilities exist within these fields to address these absences. We will do so through a close attention to film's formal politics and its mediation of racial and sexual difference. Throughout, we will engage with a broad range of world cinema to test the utility of concepts beyond the boundaries of classical Hollywood. Assignments will include two short reading responses and a final paper.
In addition to key texts from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, course readings can include: Joan Copjec, Frantz Fanon, Ranjana Khanna, Homay King, David Marriott, Todd McGowan, Kaja Silverman, Kalpana Seshadri, Hortense Spillers, and Slavoj žižek.
Films can include the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Steve McQueen, Todd Haynes, Wong Kar Wai, Spike Lee, Larissa Sansour, Claire Denis, Lucretia Martel, David Lynch, and Federico Fellini among others.
COMP_LIT 488-0-20: Community in Question
One of the many questions raised by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, concerns the notion of. "community" and more specifically, its relation to the kinds of separation and "distancing" imposed by it. This course seeks to respond to this situation by returning to a discussion started in the 1980s, mainly in France, about the continuing relevance or irrelevance of the notion of "community," and related words, including "communism," "communion," "communication." One of the distinctive aspects of the French discussion was that the notion of literature and more generally writing played an important role. The seminar proposes to return to the discussion between Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot concerning the notion of "community," and its relation to "literature" (Nancy even writes of "literary communism"). Nancy continued to reflect on the possible relevance of this notion in the following decades, including his experience of the recent pandemic. At the core of the discussion is the question of what can form the basis of the "common" that is the root of all "community" as well as of the other words mentioned, and to what extent it necessarily implies an irreducible dimension of separation -- of which the experience of reading and writing “literary texts" might be an exemplary instance.