Fall 2002 Course Offerings: Graduate Seminars

CL 200, #17338, Robert Alter, Th 3:00-6:00, 201 Giannini

The course will investigate a series of theoretical and critical issues underlying the study of comparative literature, literary history, and the nature of literary expression. The focus for discussions will be a reader of mainly theoretical texts that deal with such topics as the relation between literature and social, political, and psychological realities, the organizing principles of literature as a formal system, and literary history and critical methodology. In conjunction with these readings, we will consider five works of fiction spanning more than a century and three continents that grapple with the phenomenon of political violence.

Texts:

Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education (Penguin)
Fyodor Dostoevski, The Devils (Oxford World Classics)
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Penguin)
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (Vintage)
Amos Oz, The Hill of Evil Counsel (Harcourt Brace, Harvest Books)

CL 201, #17341, Eric Naiman, F 12:00-1:00, 4104 Dwinelle

Comparative Literature Proseminar

This course is designed to give all new graduate students a broad view of the department’s faculty, the courses they teach, and their fields of research. In addition, it will introduce students to some practical aspects of the graduate career, issues that pertain to specific fields of research, and questions currently being debated across the profession. The readings for the course will consist of copies of materials by the department’s faculty.

CL 223, #17341, Eric Naiman, W 3:00-6:00, 2505 Tolman

Lessons in Dread: Terror in Literature, Ideology and History

We will begin with a reading of some of the canonical texts in the tradition of the Gothic novel and will explore critical theories surrounding the genre's genesis, evolution and persistence as a narrative form. The course will pivot around a reading of Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, during which we will discuss the implications of serialization and urbanization for the genre. We will then trace the impact of Sue's fabulously popular feuilleton on ideology theory and the novel, examining in particular the responses of Marx and Dostoevskii. Finally, we will examine several instances of the Gothic novel's "evolution" in the twentieth century, including its deployment in the service of self-conscious metafiction and ideological propaganda for the "masses."

Texts will include most of the following:

Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Lewis, The Monk
Freud, "The Uncanny",
Collins, The Woman in White
Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
Sue, The Mysteries of Paris
Marx, The German Ideology
Derrida, Specters of Marx
Stirner, The Ego and His Own
Dostoevskii, Crime and Punishment
Kollontai, "The Worker's Opposition," Vasilisa Malygina
Nabokov, The Defense

CL 227, #17346, Candace Slater, Tu 3:00-6:00, 337 LeConte

"Jungle Novels, Rain Forest Romances: Reinventing the Tropics, or Beyond the Steamy Veil"

(cross-listed with Spanish 280 and Portuguese 275)

This seminar uses one very important contemporary novel by an Amazonian author-Milton Hatoum's Dois Irmãos (The Brothers) as a focus for a series of much larger questions about the representation of the tropics and the place of "regionalist" fiction in contemporary Latin America. In beginning with, and periodically returning to, this single work of fiction, we will be able to provide a coherent point of entry for broader esthetic and political questions surrounding images of tropical places in general and the Amazon in particular. The course will be greatly enriched by the on-campus presence of Milton Hatoum during the month of October.

Hatoum's writing both draws on and emphatically rejects the tradition of the "jungle novel" (novela de la selva) represented by writers such as José Eustacio Rivera, Alberto Rangel, and Alejo Carpentier. The Brothers looks to international authors such as Conrad, Faulkner and Flaubert and to Brazilian classics such as Machado de Assis and as Euclides da Cunha (about whom Hatoum is presently writing. ) The novel's simultaneous focus on the Amazon and literary sophistication raises the equestion of just what the terms "regionalist fiction" and "popular tradition" have come to mean for Latin American writers at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The course will be conducted in English (and Spanish, and Portuguese depending on the students), and papers can be done in any one of these languages. Students should have a reading knowledge of either Spanish or Portuguese. The majority of the texts are available as well in English for those who need or want a back-up.

Required Texts

(Other selections will be available in the course reader.)

Milton Hatoum. Dois Irmãos (The Brothers).
Machado de Assis. Esaú e Jacó (Esau and Jacob).
Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness.
José Eustacio Rivera. La vorágine (The Vortex).
Alejo Carpentier. Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps).
V.S. Naipul. A House for Mr. Biswas.

CL 232, #17347, James Monroe, Tu 3:00-6:00, 211 Dwinelle

The Zajal Verse of Ibn Quzmán

This seminar will study the poetry of Ibn Quzmán, a major twelfth-century Andalusí Arabic poet. It will investigate the debt he owes to the Medieval Romance tradition of Western Europe, as well as to the Arabic tradition, of Eastern origin, and of which he was an integral part. The seminar will focus on the interplay between these two traditions, and attempt to evaluate the poet’s production on the basis of literary criteria derived from both cultures. A basic reading knowledge of Arabic is required, as is a final, research paper. Texts to be read and analyzed will be distributed as hand-outs as the course progresses.

CL 240, #17350, Harsha Ram, F 3:00-6:00, 205 Dwinelle

The Futurist Avant-garde

(cross-listed with Slavic 287)

Futurism was the earliest of the various artistic movements associated with the historical avant-garde. The range of national, collective as well as individual manifestations of futurist literature have led some critics to speak of "futurisms" in the plural. While genuinely international in scope, futurism is generally associated the two countries where it was most evident, Italy and Russia.

Our concern will be to chart the striking continuities as well as the real divergences in poetic, rhetorical and semantic strategy found in the various futurist currents of these two nations. In doing so, our first concern will be the texts themselves, more specifically the connection between verbal experimentation and futurist theories of language. In their early phase, each futurist current asserted the radical self-sufficiency of the poetic function, and any study of futurist literature must necessarily attend to the textures of linguistic play, semantic subversion, and literary innovation. Yet it is a curious fact that while both the Italians and the Russians initially insisted upon the autonomy of language (what Russians would call "the word as such" and the Italians "words in freedom"), both ultimately subordinated literary form, in complex ways, to semantics and ideological content. We will thus also be exploring the ways in which the formal specificities of futurist texts became related to wider historical and political issues. Why, for example, did futurism in the case of Italy as well as Russia constitute the most sustained national response on the part of poets and artists to the liberatory promise and authoritarian impulse of modern revolution? Given that the rhetoric of each futurist movement partly anticipated, then frequently mirrored and corroborated, at a varying critical distance, the political programmes of the regimes that emerged in their respective states, how then did Italian futurism come to align itself with fascism while Russian futurism claimed the mantle of socialism? Why did Italy and Russia, regions that embraced industrial modernization so belatedly, generate an artistic movement typified by a militant advocacy of modernity, and a radical rupture with tradition?

We will be reading selected poems, manifestos, novels, journals and experimental plays by a series of futurist writers from Italy and Russia, examining them both for their formal literary properties and for the broader questions they raise about the relationship between radical modernism and the project of revolutionary modernity. In the case of Italy we will be focusing on the dominant figure of Filippo Marinetti, but also looking at the lesser-known contributions of the Florentine futurist writers Giovanni Papini, Ardengo Soffici and Aldo Palazzeschi, associated with the journal Lacerba. In the case of Russia we will be examining the legacy of the two towering figures of Russian futurist poetry Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Maiakovskii, but also acknowledging the alternative path taken by Aleksei Kruchenykh and other members of the radically experimental group "41 degrees." References will also be made to pre-futurist French writing of the symbolist period. Although students will be encouraged to read the texts in the original where possible, the weekly Friday seminar will be working primarily with English translations. Further sessions will be scheduled regularly to discuss the texts in their original language.

CL 258, #17353, Judith Butler, Tu 2:00-5:00, 203 Wheeler

Theories of the Subject: Psychoanalysis, Ethics, Philosophy

In this course we will consider divergent theories that account for the emergence of the subject, focusing on the work of Michel Foucault, Jean Laplanche, and Emanuel Levinas. We will consider how, in particular, a subject is said to come into language, how it is formed from primary impressions, and what implications this has not only for a theory of agency, but for the possibility of giving an account of oneself. We will consider how theories that assert that the subject is opaque to itself, not fully able to ground itself, nevertheless establish conditions for ethical reflection and conduct.

Texts include:

Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, Seduction, Translation, Drives
Michel Foucault, Care of the Self, The Use of Pleasure, "The Subject and Power," "What is Critique," and Religion and Culture (edited volume)
Emanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings (Indiana University Press), Outside the Subject (Stanford University Press)
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
selected readings from Freud and Merleau-Ponty.