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Fall 2000 Course Offerings: Graduate SeminarsCL 200 16632 KAHN M 2-5 2125 DWINELLECL 200 will focus on the topic of mimesis. We will trace the concept of mimesis from Plato and Aristotle, through the Renaissance (Erasmus, Machiavelli, Sidney) to Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and the Frankfurt School. Topics to be discussed in relation to mimesis include the passions, force and fraud, desire, metaphor, property, contract, and the law. One in class presentation, and the option of two ten page papers or one final paper of 20-25 pages. Required textsPlato, Republic, trans. Cornford Recommended textsTerence Cave, Recognitions CL 201 16635 CASCARDI F 12-1 2125 DWINELLEFirst-year Graduate ProseminarCL 202C 16641 RUTTENBURG W 2-5 3119 DWINELLEThe NovelSince Ian Watt's work on the rise of the novel, it has become customary to consider the genre in tandem with the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony. In this course, we will work to supplement this assumption by considering the significance and implications, first, of the novel's rise to literary preeminence in the "era of democratic revolution," and second, of Mikhail Bakhtin's observations on the novel's polymorphous and polyphonic composition. Secularization will thus be a key theme of this course. With close attention to a novel "cluster" drawn from several national traditions, we will explore the literary-historical juncture of democracy/the novel by looking in a range of theoretical and fictional texts for: theories of political/aesthetic representation of the democratic or revolutionary body; identifications of "the common" as a locus of cultural purity and radical renewal; strategies for identifying "the people" and grafting them into culture; the role of the literary text as trial; figurations of author/character relationships that propose a realignment of their respective authorities vis-à-vis the text, etc. We will scrutinize novelistic subjectivity as embodiment of democratic energies, and particularly the impact of the novelistic representation of subjectivity so conceived on novel form; and explore other ways in which the novel stages notions of "democracy" and grapples with the extra-structural or excessive energies that accompany them. Aside from its theoretical focus, then, the course will also involve an intensive study of the history of the novel and subsequent appropriations. CL 210 WHITTA M 3-6 2525 TOLMAN (day subject to change)"Virginity and Asceticism in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (Studies in Ancient Literature)This seminar will examine late Antique and medieval representations of the virgin body, especially those generated within Christian ascetic practice. In the course of the semester, we will attempt to address a set of fundamental historical, formal and ideological questions: how do pre-Christian and Christian thinkers theorize virginity? What social, ethical, religious and philosophical needs did virginity serve? How did the discourse of virginity configure individual subjects and gender them? What happens to sexuality? What is the (often polemical) relationship of virginity with marriage? Why do Christian ascetics consider themselves "brides of Christ"? What might be said about the economics of virginity, the ways in which the virgin state is viewed as a commodity of exchange? Formalist concerns will include mapping the rhetoric of virginity, its tropes and metaphors, its satellite representations of purity, cleanness, celibacy and chastity, its generic modes and intertextuality. We shall consider the privileged status given to representations of virgin bodies and ask how the discourse of virginity not only configures exemplary individuals, "saints," or "ascetic heroes" worthy of emulation, but becomes itself an exemplary mode of literary representation. Primary readings will include treatises, saints' lives, sermons, rules, confessional narratives, miracle stories, lyric poetry and romance. Required textPeter Brown, THE BODY AND SOCIETY: MEN, WOMEN AND SEXUAL RENUNCIATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY (Columbia Univ. Press) CL 223 16644 FRANCOIS M 3-6 1229 DWINELLE"Studies in the Nineteenth Century: The Aesthetic Imagination"This course compares modes of aesthetic experience and judgment in a selection of texts drawn chiefly from nineteenth-century European and American literature. As we read works that share with Kantian aesthetics a commitment to exploring the cognitive dimensions of non-conceptual experience, we will discuss the following questions: What are the relation- ships between discourses of aesthetic value and other theories of value--economic, moral, religious, veridical? How and why do aestheticism--the pursuit of intense sensory momentary experiences--and asceticism--the renunciation of sensual gratification--become linked within Western aesthetics? How do the texts in question relate desire and judgment, sacrifice and fulfillment? We will explore the ways in which far from escaping an exchange economy, the aesthetic becomes a site for highly charged, asymmetrical exchanges, between form and pleasure, taste and justice, person and object, labor and image. The aesthetic can be defined as the Enlightenment's own critique of enlightenment--the realm in which the suspension of cognitive quests is valued rather than dismissed as ignorance, and in which the order is to play! The literary works studied offer a wide array of alternatives to simply laboring under the tyranny of such imperatives to freedom or pleasure. We will explore their enactments of figurative ways of knowing as well as modes of avoiding and sparing others direct "truths." We will focus on readings in aesthetic philosophy (Kant, Schiller, Marx, Nietzsche, Pater), and on two genres often criticized as rarefied, ahistorical, empty forms: the novel of manners (Lafayette, Goethe, James) and lyric poetry (Keats, Dickinson). Particular attention will therefore be given to the widely divergent temporalities characteristic of each. CL 227 16647 BRITTO TU 3-6 123 DWINELLE"Immigration and Identity in Contemporary Literature"
In this course, we will consider recent texts written by authors attempting to come to terms with the profound psychic ruptures and geographic displacements brought about by the experience of immigration. How do immigrant writers seek to impose meaning upon the confusion of conflicting cultural and linguistic structures? In what ways are their identities defined and deformed by their status as immigrants, and how does the immigrant body function as site of textual signification? What sorts of transformations do concepts of "home" and "nation" undergo in immigrant writing? Over the course of the term, we will study novels, memoirs, stories, film, poetry, and theoretical texts by authors including Agha Shahid Ali, Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Homi Bhabha, Eva Hoffman, Jamaica Kincaid, Julia Kristeva, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, Salman Rusdhie, Nathalie Sarraute, Sembne Ousmane, and Thuong Vuong-Riddick. Readings in English and French. Required texts (a course reader will contain additional material):Agha Shahid Ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas CL 232 16650 MONROE TH 3-6 80 HAAS PAVIn this seminar we will read a select number of Arabic poems, both monorhymed and classical (qasida and qita'), as well as strophic and colloquial (muwassah and zajal), from al-Andalus. We will discuss the contributions to Andalusi poetry made by the literature of the dominant, Arab tradition, as well as the innovations to that tradition that resulted from contacts with the Ibero-Romance substratum. Finally, we will discuss the structure of the poems studied, along with their literary merit. A reading knowledge of either Arabic or a Romance language is required. Participants in the seminar will be requested to contribute analyses of specific poems to the group, and a final, term paper will be expected of each. CL 235 16653 duBOIS TH 3-6 123 DWINELLE"Sappho and Her Afterlife"This seminar will consider the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho. We will read her fragments with great attention, in the context of the poems and performance of her contemporaries. We will look at a variety of recent strategies in the interpretation of Sappho's poetry, at the poetic corpus of the Roman poet Catullus, and at Ovid's rewriting of Sappho as lover. The second half of the course will focus on Sappho as a figure enabling literary, theoretical, and sexual-political discourses of modernity. While we will discuss the Greek text of Sappho's poems in detail, knowledge of ancient Greek is not a requirement of the course. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion and to submit a final paper addressing the themes of the seminar. Required textsSappho and Alcaeus, ed. D. Campbell RecommendedA.M. Bowie, The Poetic Dialect of Sappho and Alcaeus CL 360A 16689 STAFF F 12-2 175 DWINELLE |