Fall 2003 Course Offerings: Graduate Seminars

CL 200, #17347, SAS, TH 3-6, Location TBA

"Gender, Power, and Memory: Approaches to Comparative Literature"

This seminar will provide an introduction to some important theoretical concepts in comparative literature and critical theory. Readings and topics for discussion will include gender studies (Cixous, Sedgwick, Butler); approaches to "the city" (de Certeau, Benjamin); nostalgia, trauma, and memory (Freud, Felman, Caruth, Boym); and performance studies (Phelan, Patraka); questions of power and subjection (Foucault, Hegel, Bhabha, Fanon, Karatani), and theories of capital and the image (Barthes, Jameson). Fundamental questions will include issues of subjectivity and its limits/crises, mimesis, "translations," and nationalism. We will question some of our basic assumptions about comparative studies and use these texts as a forum for discovering new possibilities.

Readings

A reader will be available at Metro Publishing (on Bancroft) with selections from Benjamin, Boym, Caruth, Cixous, deCerteau, Felman, Foucault, Hegel, Patraka, Phelan, and others.
Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Bhabha, The Location of Culture
Butler, The Psychic Life of Power
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Karatani, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

CL 201, #17350, NAIMAN, F 12-1, 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 215, #17353, T. HAMPTON, W 2-5, 2062 VLSB
Cross-listed with Fr 220, Italian 215

"Imagining the Mediterranean in Renaissance Europe"

Our understanding of the Renaissance is conventionally shaped by two mythical events located at opposite ends of the Mediterranean: the fall of Constantinople in the east, in 1453, and the westward departure of Columbus in 1492. In this seminar we will investigate the space between these two originary scenes. Our project will be both to study the representation of the Mediterranean itself, as a space inscribed by different genres and discourses, and to consider the shifting interplay between an emerging Europe and the lands and peoples which face it in Africa and Asia Minor. Literary texts by such authors as Virgil, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Tasso, Calderón, Montaigne, and Rabelais will be read in conjunction with traveler’s tales, history writing, diplomatic reports, and examples of early ethnography. Our reading list will be fairly tightly structured at first so as to get through a certain amount of important material. However, we will try to move fairly quickly to a “workshop” format in which students develop their own research and writing projects by building on our common reading.

CL 232, #17356, MONROE, TU 3-6, 106 MULFORD

"The Shadow Plays of Ibn Daniyal"

Despite the fact that three shadow plays written in Egypt by the Iraqi author, Ibn Daniyal (d.710/1310) have been known for some time, first in manuscript, and then in a woefully inadequate edition from which two-thirds of the text was expurgated, it has become accepted wisdom that there is no theater in medieval Arabic literature. A more recent edition of the shadow plays now makes it possible to rectify this negative judgment and to assess the value and significance of the surviving texts.

This seminar will concentrate on a close reading of the Arabic text in order to determine its meaning and significance. Parallels will be drawn between the Arabic shadow theater and dramatic forms that preceded and followed it, such as the mimes of Herondas, and the commedia dell’ arte. Attention will also be devoted to the depiction of certain characters, inherited by the Arabs from Antiquity, such as the miles gloriosus, or bequeathed by them to Europe, such as the procuress Umm Rashid, and her putative Spanish descendants, Trotaconventos and Celestina.

A reading knowledge of Arabic, plus a term paper are required.

Textbook:

Three Shadow Plays by Muhammad Ibn Daniyal, ed. By the late Paul Kahle with a critical apparatus by Derek Hopwood. E.J. Gibb Memorial, New Series No. 32 (Gibb Memorial Trust: Cambridge, 1992).

CL 235, #17358, OLIENSIS, W 1-4, 308C DOE LIB
Cross-listed with Classics 239

"Psychoanalysis & Antiquity"

This year, the seminar will provide a forum for an exploration of the intersections of psychoanalysis and classical literature (chiefly, but not exclusively, Latin poetry). We will consider psychoanalysis both as a reading practice and as a set of stories about the construction of identity, in particular sexual identity.

Weekly readings will include psychoanalytic theory (especially Freud and Lacan), psychoanalytically inflected literary theory & criticism, and selected classical texts (especially Catullus and Ovid). The syllabus can be tailored to suit the interests of the class, and students are encouraged to contact the professor (eolien@socrates) if there are particular works of theory or literature they would like to see included.

Sample weekly topics (& readings): dreams, symptoms, signifiers (Freud, from Interpretation of Dreams; Laplanche & Leclaire, from "The Unconscious"; Riffaterre, "The Intertextual Unconscious"); trauma & repetition (Freud, from "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"; Brooks, "Freud's Masterplot"; Quint, from Epic and Empire); negation (Freud "On Negation"; Orlando, from Toward A Freudian Theory of Literature; Casali, from "On 'Reading More' in Ovid"); the phallus & sexual difference, I (Freud, from Sexuality and the Psychology of Love; Lacan, "The Meaning of the Phallus"; Butler, "The Lesbian Phallus"; selections from Ovid, Metamorphoses); the phallus & sexual difference, II (Freud, "The Ego & the Id"; Mitchell, introduction to Feminine Sexuality; Butler, "Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix"; selections from Catullus and Ovid).

Reading knowledge of Latin would be helpful but is not required; all texts will be available in translation.

CL 250, #17359, LUCEY, F 2-5, 211 DWINELLE
NOTE NEW TIME AND LOCATION

"Theories of the First Person"

Drawing on work from linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, we will try to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of what the use of the first person might mean, both in literature and in life. We will spend half of each seminar on theoretical reading. The other half will be spent on the close reading of one volume of Proust’s Recherche. Through our collaborative reading of Sodom and Gomorrah we will study intently the consequences of Proust’s use of the first person. Theoretical readings from Mauss, Goffman, Benveniste, Banfield, Peirce, Jakobson, Silverstein, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu. Reading knowledge of French is not required, although it might come in handy. Previous acquaintance with Proust is not at all necessary, although you are certainly welcome to read the earlier (and later!) volumes of the Recherche ahead of time.

Readings include:

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books
Other readings will be made available in a course reader or via library reserves.

CL 360A, #17395, S. HERBOLD, W 12-1 and F 12-2, 140 BARROWS

"Those Who Can, Teach"

The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate student instructors to the theory and practice of teaching Comparative Literature, and especially the 1A-1B sequence.. More generally, the course will help students prepare for careers as college teachers of literature and for the teaching component of job applications.

We will begin by reflecting on our philosophies and goals in teaching literature and writing. The first two-thirds of the course will then focus on practical issues, such as lecturing, leading discussions, teaching writing, grading papers, designing syllabi and writing assignments, and working with students individually and in small groups. The last third of the course will be devoted to more philosophical issues, such as diversity, literacy, canonicity, and the relation between traditional modes of teaching literature and cultural studies. Each week we will read a group of articles by experienced scholars and teachers and evaluate how their perspectives can inform our practice. We will also make time to talk about how your classes are going and share suggestions on how to improve teaching skills.

Course Requirements:

Participants will be asked to do brief-in class presentations and write and hand in brief writing assignments regularly. Attendance is also required.

Required Texts:

Stephen D. Brookfield, The Skillful Teacher (Jossey-Bass, 1991) ISBN 0-7879-5605-8
Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill, Discussion as a Way of Teaching (Jossey-Bass, 1999) ISBN 0-7879-4458-0
Course Reader, available at Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way