Spring 2002 Course Offerings: Graduate Seminars

CL 202B 16741 WEISINGER W 3-6 2505 TOLMAN

Approaches to Genre: Lyric Poetry

There is no formal list of ‘required texts’: the members of the seminar, in consultation with Professor Weisinger, will select the readings for this class.

CL 212 16744 DUGGAN F 2-5 BANCROFT LIB. (Stone Room)

The subject of this course is the editing of medieval manuscripts. Students will be introduced to the paleography of caroline minuscule, gothic, Burgundian, and cursive hands. The elements of codicology will be presented, with illustrative examples taken primarily from the manuscript collection of the Bancroft Library. (The course will meet in the Stone Seminar Room of the Bancroft Library.) This will be followed by instruction in the theory and practice of textual criticism, including stemmatics. The term project will consist of an edition of several folios from a medieval manuscript. Readings will include studies in medieval literacy and the culture of the book. Students may work on texts in French, Latin, English, Spanish, Italian, or Occitan.

Required texs
  • Bernhard Bischoff. Latin Paleography. Cambridge UP, 1990.
  • Alfred Foulet and Mary B. Speer. On Editing Old French Texts. Regents Press of Kansas, 1979.

CL 215 16747 KAHN W 2-5 2525 TOLMAN

“Politics and the Passions in Early Modern Europe”

This course wil focus on the representation of the passions in early modern European literature and political theory. What role do the passions play in the history of mimesis, poetic imitation, and rhetorical figuration? What is the role of the passions in eliciting or frustrating political obligation? What would it mean to think of the passions as historical? What light do early modern texts on the passions shed on the emergence of the disciplines of political science in the 17th century and of aesthetics in the 18th century? Reading knowledge of French desirable but not absolutely required.

Texts:
  • Machiavelli, The Prince
  • Montaigne, Essays
  • Descartes, Passions of the Soul
  • Hobbes, Leviathan
  • Milton, Samson Agonistes
  • Spinoza, Ethics
  • Hume, Essays
  • Rousseau, Letter to D'Alembert and Discourse on Inequality

    CL 225 16750 WEIL F 2-5 203 WHEELER

    "French Feminism Texts, Pre-texts and Contexts"

    This course will focus on those texts of post-war French Feminism which had the greatest impact on feminist theory in the United States. While trying to account for the particular reception of Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and Wittig in the States, we will also have recourse to the philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions within which and against which these writers tried to imagine feminine desire, difference and writing.

    Required texts
    • Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
    • Helene Cixous, The Newly Born Woman
    • Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman
    •     " This Sex Which Is Not One
    • Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
    •     " About Chinese Women
    • Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind
    • Nicole Brossard, The Aerial Letter
    • Clement-Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred

    CL 232 16753 MONROE TH 2-5 4407 DWINELLE

    Studies in Near Eastern-Western Literary Relations

    (This seminar is a continuation of CL 232 , Fall 2001.
    New students are encouraged to attend Part II.)

    In this class 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 253 16756 LUCEY TU 3-6 2525 TOLMAN

    “Balzac, James, and Genealogies of Critical Practices”
    (Studies in Literary Criticism)

    In this seminar, we will combine three inquiries, whose relations we will hope to discover over the course of the semester. One inquiry will be organized around the question: what kinds of things can be said about Henry James’s relation as a novelist to Balzac? (We’ll also take a look at a novel by Zola, another novelist James studied closely.) Our second inquiry will deal with questions such as: how do Balzac and Zola’s ambitions as novelists relate to the critical tradition of French sociology and anthropology that developed in the late nineteenth century? We will trace that tradition forward as far as thinkers such as Foucault and Bourdieu. Our third inquiry will address Henry James’s place (as a theorist as much as a novelist) within a certain strand of Anglo-American criticism whose interests tend to try to relate the study of fictional character to the study of moral character and ethics. Finally, we’ll look at some examples of recent criticism in the American context that is influenced both by the Anglo-American "moral" or "ethical" current and by the French "sociological" or "cultural" current, and we will wonder how or if such divergent critical practices can be brought into productive relation with each other. (We’ll look at queer literary criticism in particular in this regard.) Novels to be read: Balzac, César Birroteau, Cousin Pons. Zola, L'Assommoir. James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors. Theorists and critics to be read may include Durkheim, Mauss, Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss, Vernant, Foucault, Bourdieu, Arnold, James, Leavis, Trilling, Booth, Nussbaum.

    Required texts
    • Honore de Balzac, Cesar Birotten (Gallimard-Folio and Penguin
    • Balzac, Cousin Pons (Livre de Poche and Penguin)
    • Emile Zola, L’Assomoir (Livre de Poche and Penguin)
    • Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
    • James, The Ambassadors