CL 212 16741 DUGGAN F 2-5 4406 DWINELLE
Studies in Medieval Literature: The Troubadour Tradition
The course will begin with an introduction to the troubadours, including instruction in Occitan. After reading a representative selection of troubadour poems, the class will move to consideration of the major European lyric traditions that take their inspiration from the troubadours: the trouveres, Minnesang, the Sicilian School, the Dolce Stil Nuovo, and the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amor. Among the topics to be considered are the continuities and discontinuities of genre, the social situation of poetry, the relationship between poetry and music, the mixture of oral and written traditions, and the material remains of medieval lyric.
Required: William Paden, An Introduction to Old Occitan (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1998).
CL 225:1 16744 SCHNAPP M 2-5 6331 DWINELLE
"CROWDS"
This interdisciplinary research seminar is concerned with the rise and fall of the crowd--particularly the revolutionary crowd--in the Western socio-political imaginary between 1789 and the present. It is broadly concerned both with theorizations of the collectivity in works such as Le Bon's The Psychology of Crowds, Sighele's The Criminal Crowd, Freud's writings on mass psychology and Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, and with representations of crowds and masses in works of literature (Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens, Zola, D'Annunzio, Valera, Dublin, Dos Pasos, etc.), art (painting, photography, cartooning, photomontage), and film (Eisenstein, Ruttman, Riefenstahl, Blasetti, Capra, etc.). Though the seminar's focus is on exploring Le Bon's definition of modernity as "the era of crowds," it will also attend to the ways in which modern mass mythologies are informed by premodern precedents (in Greco-Roman and Renaissance political and rhetorical theory, in premodern art and literature) and probe the seeming decline of models of politics founded upon the agency of crowds in post-industrial societies.
(Reading of at least one foreign language is desirable for purposes of the course readings.)
I'm likely to make use of a course reader for a lot of material in the second half of the seminar. But the first half is made up of theoretical readings in English (and therefore works that are readily available). The following are the three works that I would like to order for the seminar, all read during the first three weeks:
- Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd
- Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology
- Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
CL 225:2 16747 BERNSTEIN TH 4-7 321 HAVILAND
Symbolist and Modern Poetry
The entire notion of "canon formation" will be at the foundation of our inquiry during the course of this semester, and we will be studying the ways in which poets and critics have sought to establish the authority of a distinct grouping of authors and literary practices as the central models of modern writing in both the Anglo-American and European Symbolist and Modernist traditions. Although Pound and, to a lesser extent, Stevens are the most prominent of the American poets we will be reading, we will also be focusing on the contributions of other voices from among their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, both in America and Europe. Some of the poets I am hoping we will want to look at closely might include Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Montale, Loy, Lorca, Trakl, Stein, and Ashbery, but it will be up to the class as a whole to determine the degree of attention we will give to any specific figure. Before determining precisely what texts, in addition to The Cantos and several of of the major Stevens poems, we should read together, I want to get a better sense of your different backgrounds, areas of interest, and critical/theoretical perspectives. We have a formidably large number of authors whose works would fit into the logic of the seminar -- a fact that is both the strength and potential danger of our enterprise -- and I want our actual choices to be shaped as the semester progresses by the direction of our meetings and through mutual discussions. Most important of all, I want everyone to come prepared to contribute actively to what undoubtedly will be a very exploratory and unprogrammatic joint venture.
Required texts
- There will be a Course Reader with selected works by: Baudelaire, Rilke, Mallarme, Celan, Montale, Trakl, Stein, Loy, Lorca, and Ashbery
- Ezra Pound, The Cantos, N.Y.: New Directions
- Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1980. paperback
- Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, N.Y.: Random House / Vintage Books, paperback.
- Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, N.Y.: Vintage Books, paperback.
CL 250:1 16750 LIU TH 2-5 4406 DWINELLE
"Literature, Science, and the Bio-politics of the Real"
In recent years, contemporary literary theory and social studies of science have converged or joined forces in an attempt to tackle the bio-politics of the real. This cannot but raise some new, critical questions about old issues, such as mimesis, fetishism, facts, evidence, narrative, the body, and the self, etc. This course explores the ways in which technology has informed and interacted with discursive constructs of the real over the centuries. We will begin with a consideration of Shapin's and Schaffer's argument in Leviathan and the Air Pump that scientific "facts" emerge from their interpolation into scientific practice and discourse rather than from observed experimental results. We will then move to an examination of the tropes of gender and empire that circulate through the sites of scientific knowledge and turn scientific narratives into self-legitimating narratives of modernity. Questions of circulation and simulacra will guide our consideration of media technology-photography, grammophone, film, computer, virtual reality, and contemporary genetic theories.
Requirements: 1) Oral presentation in class on assigned material, 2) Term paper.
Required Texts
- Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation
- Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer
- Donna Haraway. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
- Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
- Martin Heidegger. "The Question Concerning Technology"
- Bruno Latour. Science in Action
- William Pietz. "The Problem of the Fetish" (1-III)
Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
- Paul Rabinow. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory
- Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
- Michael Taussig. Mimesis and Alterity
Recommended Texts
- Susan Buck-Morse, The Dialectic of Seeing
- Michel de Certeau, Heterologies
- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
- Henry Louise Gates, Race, Writing, and Difference
CL 250:2 16753 KAHN W 3-6 7415 DWINELLE
(Rhet. 240g)
Cultural Criticism and the Frankfurt School
An introduction to the major works and themes of the Frankfurt School critics and their followers. We will pay particular attention to Dialectic of Enlightenment. Topics to be discussed include aesthetic theory, the relation between aesthetics and the critique of ideology, and feminist and post-structuralist responses to the Frankfurt School. Readings include works by Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas, Proust, Kafka, Benhabib.
Required texts
- The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Gebhardt and Arato
- Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
- Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
- Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Recommended texts
- Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination
- David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory
CL 252 16756 RUTTENBURG W 3-6 2125 DWINELLE
"Literature, Historiography, and "the Inarticulate"
In this seminar, we will consider the historiographical problem of "the inarticulate," meaning both past events which fail to signify or "speak to" the present, and historical subjects who appear to be "without voice" and thus in some sense beyond the recuperative efforts of the historian. So defined, possible sites of inarticulacy would include the (anonymous, invisible, uncountable, inaudible) "People," the forgotten as well as the remembered, the primitive, the unrepresentable or unspeakable, the child, the woman, the body, the spiritual, the quotidian, the "real," the individual, and the "ahistorical." We will ask how literary texts figure speechlessness and evoke, through the structure and dynamism of narrative, a type of speech from the "Infans" of history.
In order to focus upon and formulate the historiographical problem of that which eludes detection--because it can't be seen or heard, because it fails to provide reliable evidence of its existence or significance--we'll be examining a variety of texts. We will be looking at the problem as expressed by 19th-century historians and authors of historical novels, as well as 20th-century novelists aiming to represent the contemporary historical moment. Additionally, we will read closely a number of contemporary theorists and historians on the question of "the writing of history," including Michel de Certeau, Cornelius Castoriadis, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Carlo Ginzburg, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Dominic LaCapra, Hayden White, and Georg Lukācs.
Course requirements will include active participation in seminar discussions, an oral presentation, and a 20-page seminar paper.
CL 253 16759 NAIMAN TU 3-6 2125 DWINELLE
CL 266 C A N C E L L E D
CL 360B 16801 SOKOLIK F 12-2 123 DWINELLE
