Fall 2001 Course Offerings: Graduate Seminars

CL 200 16723 SPACKMAN M 3-6 1229 DWINELLE

How does the discipline of Comparative Literature constitute its object of study in the year 2001? What is its relation to "world literature," to "transnational studies," or to "cultural studies"? How does the history of the discipline continue to shape the way we practice it? What is the place of the nation-state in that history, and how might different practices of comparative literature puncture, redraw, or reinforce national borders? How do the institutional histories of the "national languages and literatures" persist in the work of comparatists? In this seminar, we will explore these questions in readings drawn from a wide range of theorists and practitioners of comparative literature, including Erich Auerbach, René Wellek, Leo Spitzer, Fredric Jameson, Paul de Man, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Rey Chow, Kristin Ross, Aijaz Ahmad, Wlad Godzich, Arjun Appadurai, and others.

Requirements: several in-class presentations, a term paper of 20-25 pages.

Required Texts
  • Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
  • Charles Bernheimer, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism
  • Moustafa Bayoumi, ed., The Edward Said Reader
  • Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies
  • also a substantial course reader

CL 201 16726 NAIMAN F 12-1 4104 DWINELLE

CL 202C 16729 McGOWAN TH 2-5 3119 DWINELLE

Theory of the Novel

Our goal in this course will be to gain some familiarity with the critical tradition known as the theory of the novel while also reading seven novels that represent a wide variety of novelistic forms and themes. While every student will read selections from all the theorists, each student will choose one or two theorists to study in depth. The course will be conducted in a seminar fashion, with students leading discussion on the theorists they are concentrating on. Specific topics to be explored will include generic characterizations of the novel form (Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson, and Linda Hutcheon), hybridity and heterogeneity (both in Mikhail Bakhtin and postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha), gender (Nancy Armstrong, Eve Sedgwick, and Virginia Woolf), narratology (Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, and Mieke Bal), and realism (Ian Watt, Walter Benjamin, and George Levine). The novels will be by Laclos, Flaubert, Walter Scott, Kafka, Calvino, Clarice Lispector, and Arundhati Roy. We will constantly move back and forth between theory and the novels, testing each against the other.

Texts
  • Theory of the Novel, ed. by Michael McKeon (Johns Hopkins University Press)
  • Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. by Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (Duke University Press)
  • Laclos, Liaisons Dangereuses
  • Scott, Ivanhoe
  • Flaubert, Sentimental Education
  • Kafka, The Trial
  • Calvino, If on a Winter's Night
  • Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H.
  • Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

CL 212 16732 WHITTA W 3-6 1229 DWINELLE

"Asceticism/Aestheticism: Narrative Form and Ascetic Desire"

The debate within aesthetics on the ethical decisions motivating the production of narrative fiction has been a long and controversial one. From Plato to Derrida, literary narrative has been viewed in European thought as deeply implicated in the ascription of value - ethical, economic, political - to aesthetic form. Through the ascetic disciplining of fiction (as both narrative production and artifact), aesthetic choices are made and performed. This seminar will examine the development of one constitutive narrative form, the novel, within these mutually reinforcing discourses of asceticism and aestheticism. We will examine representative novels (and proto-novels, as well as short narratives) from Hellenistic Greece to the twentieth century (including Achilles Tatius, Apuleius, Athanasius, Augustine, Chrétien de Troyes, Diderot, Richardson, Flaubert, Huysmans, Mann, Kafka) in the light of philosophical and literary thinkers (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, de Sade, Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Barthes, Burke, Foucault, Derrida, Eagleton, Genette, Jameson, Harpham) who have posed the question of the ethical and cultural work performed by aesthetic form.

Required Texts

There will be a course reader containing most of the theoretical material and some of the more obscure novelistic narratives we will read in the seminar. In addition:

  • Geoffrey Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism
  • Apuleius, The Golden Ass
  • Chrétien de Troyes, Eric and Enide
  • Denis Diderot, The Nun
  • Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (abridged edition: Houghton Mifflin)
  • Gustav Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony
  • Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain

CL 225 16735 NAIMAN W 3-6 4406 DWINELLE

"Nabokov After Lolita"

A seminar devoted to a close reading and analysis of Vladimir Nabokov's late novels and their critical reception. Participants will be expected to write a final seminar paper and to make frequent oral presentations devoted to the interpretation of particular chapters. In addition to Nabokov's last five novels, we will read some of his critical work and his translation of Eugene Onegin.

Required Texts
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
      Pale Fire
      Novels 1969-1974 (The Library of America 1-883011-20-5)
  • Lectures on Literature (Harcourt 0156495899)
  • Brian Boyd, Nabokov's Pale Fire (Princeton UP 0691009597)
  • Aleksander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, V. Nabokov, trans. (Princeton UP 0691019053)

CL 232 16738 MONROE TU 3-6 2505 TOLMAN

In 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 240 16741 SAS TH 3-6 2125 DWINELLE

"Memory Acts"

In this seminar we will explore a variety of ways in which memory can be a performative act. Remembrance shapes our identities and the ways we relate to the world, as well as the meanings we attribute to our actions. We will explore many forms of memory in this seminar -- autobiographical, cultural, textual, and theatrical -- and many performatives. One important focus of inquiry will be the postwar generation’s reactions to and examinations of the Holocaust -- not so much in direct representations of the Holocaust as in later attempts to grapple with the impact of these historical events (which some of these writers did not experience in person). We will come to an understanding of important theoretical paradigms of memory, and will broaden our inquiry at the end of the semester to a number of case studies chosen by participants.

We will read works by Agamben, Amichai, Benjamin, Blanchot, Caruth, Celan, Delbo, Freud, Grossman, Hilberg, LaCapra, Rushdie, and Zeami, and we will attend the upcoming presentation of Suzuki Tadashi’s Dionysus.

Assignments may include optional performances.

Required texts
  • Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Translator).
  • Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (Translators).
  • Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster : L'Ecriture Du Desastre. Ann Smock (Translator).
  • Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition. Michael Hamburger (Translator).
  • David Grossman, See Under: Love. Betsy Rosenberg (Translator).
  • Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust : History, Theory, Trauma.
  • Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children.

CL 258 AGAMBEN MW 12-3* 6331 DWINELLE
*six-week seminar from Nov. 5 to Dec. 12

"Thresholds: Philosophy in the Zone of Exception"

The term "Thresholds" names the no-man's land where all political, juridical and philosophical categories enter a zone on indeterminacy, a state of abeyance in which law and life, language and reality, exception and rule, inclusion and exclusion become indistinguishable. The seminar will focus on the analysis of a number of such zones (man-animal; friendship-enmity; civil war; theology-economy, etc.), trying to work out a methodological approach for the political realities of our time. Readings will include texts from Heidegger, Uexküll,Aristotle, Hobbes, Schmitt.

CL 265 16744 MASIELLO TU 3-6 223 WHEELER

"Queering the North-South Axis"

This is an inquiry into the possibility of a queer esthetics running North and South, based on border crossings of genres, languages, and identities. The course will address, first, the ways in which literary genres are disturbed by queer interventions and, second, the way literary language is affected by specific instances of non-congruence between experience and representation. In a third instance, this project will take into account the disparities emphasized by confrontations between any "original" language and its translation, the staging of experiences across borders, and the incongruities resulting from the ways in which theoretical reflections move through the North/South divide. The objective is not simply to assemble a corpus of readings driven by queerness, but to determine how sexuality is inflected in the art of translation, in aesthetic choice, and in the ways in which gender theory travels through and around literary works which are largely about travel and movement. Literary and theoretical texts are drawn from U.S. Latino, Quebecois, and Spanish American writing.

Required texts
  • Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera.
  • Arenas, Reinaldo. El mundo alucinante
  • Bellessi, Diana. Colibrí, lanza relámpagos! (antologia).
  • Brossard, Nicole. Mauve Desert
  •    "   . Le desert mauve. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1987.
  • Castillo, Ana. The Mixquihuala Letters.
  • Lemebel, Pedro. Loco afán.
  • Moreno, Maria. El Affair Skeffington.
  • Múñoz, Elías Miguel. The Greatest Performance.
  • Peri Rossi, Cristina. La nave de los locos.
  • Perlongher, Néstor. Poemas completos.
  • Puig, Manuel. Maldición eterna a quién lea estas páginas.
  • Ramos Otero, Manuel. Cuentos de la mujer del mar.
  •    "   . Libro de la muerte.
  • Rechy, John. City of Night.
  • Sarduy, Severo. Cobra.
  •    "   . Escrito sobre un cuerpo.
Recommended
  • Balderston, Daniel and Donna Guy. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America.
  • Echavarren, Roberto. El arte andrógino.
  • Forastelli, Fabricio. Las marcas del género.
  • Masiello, Francine. The Art of Transition.
  • Muñoz José Esteban. Desidentifications.
  • Perlongher, Nestor. Prosa plebeya.
  •    "   . La prostitución masculina.
  • Quiroga, José. Tropics of Desire.

CL 360A 16780 SOKOLIK F 12-2 233 DWINELLE

This course will be a blend of practical and theoretical approaches to teaching composition. We will read seminal works to establish a common knowledge base in composition studies, and then construct a body of work related to the teaching of Comparative Literature, especially at the 1A/1B levels.

In addition to reading about the theory and practice of teaching writing and literature, we will use the novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino as the basis for developing several assignments. We will also create syllabi, respond to examples of student writing, explore technological tools as they apply to the teaching of literature and writing, and talk about the issues that face students in composition classes.