Spring 2003 Course Offerings: Graduate Seminars

202A, #17338, DUGGAN, F 2-5, 129 BARROWS

210, #17341, McCARTHY, W 3-6, 2525 TOLMAN

"The Gendered Voice in Ancient Lyric and Elegy"

This seminar will use Latin lyric and elegy as a specific test case in which to explore the complex relations between these poetic genres and their social context. Latin lyric and elegy can be seen as descendants of the Greek use of these genres in specific social and ritual contexts (e.g. the symposium) and yet also as precursors of the later forms that come to be called 'lyric', forms which emphasize the immediacy of the voice and the interior life of the speaker, rather than engagement with a social context. We can further sharpen this investigation by focusing on gender as a particular form of the social which, because it is naturalized to a very high degree, tends to be brought into even the most hermetic lyric. Among the topics we will consider are the gendering of speakers and addressees, homo- and heterosexuality within the symposium, the relation of literacy to orality, and the use of Sappho as a key figure for this literary tradition. The seminar will focus on Latin lyric and elegy, but will include related Greek poetry and some selected studies of reception by English-speaking authors (e.g. Pound and Propertius); there will also be opportunities for students to design projects centering on other literatures within the framework of the seminar.

Most readings will be in a xeroxed reader; I have ordered as recommended texts Wickham/Garrod's OCT text of Horace and David Ferry's translation of the Odes.

215, #17344, V. KAHN, W 3-6, 321 HAVILAND

“Tragedy and Trauerspiel”

Beginning with Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, this course explores the theory and practice of tragedy in seventeenth-century England and France. Texts include: Shakespeare, Hamlet; Descartes, Passions de l' âme, Corneille, Le Cid; Hobbes, De Cive and Letter to Davenant; Milton, Samson Agonistes; and Dryden. Topics to be discussed include the relationship of early modern tragedy to a crisis in notions of political sovereignty; revenge tragedy and the martyr drama; the relevance of Cartesian physiology and Hobbesian psychology to the development of tragedy. Secondary readings in early modern theories of tragedy.

223, #17347, FRANCOIS, TU 3-6, 2505 TOLMAN

Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Lyric and Modernity

An in-depth comparative study of some of the major European Romantic and early Modernist poets (Keats, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Rilke and Yeats) focusing in particular on their relationship to the theoretical concept and experience of modernity.

We will try to avoid overly rigid or predetermined understandings of terms such as “romanticism” and “modernism” by focusing instead on each poet’s responses to the changes represented by urbanization, the rationalization of time and space, and the advent of mass culture in the age of mechanical reproduction; we will attempt to understand the changing roles--messianic, consolatory, critical, representative-- assigned the figure of the “solitary” poet and “autonomous” work of art during the age of print capital and European colonialism. As we supplement our readings of the poetry with major texts from contemporary European aesthetic philosophy, we will give particular attention to the construction of “Western” and “modern” art as the dialectical fulfillment and negation of “other”--lost, past or pre-modern--ideals.

Most crucially, however, we will want to ask what happens when we read together poets together who, in different ways, push the limits of language as an expressive medium, and are passionately engaged by the relations of the verbal to the visual arts, of visionary to sensory experience, of memory to imagination, and of language to violence. Tracing the meeting of stone and flesh, of the carnal and the sacred in their poetry, we will compare recurring figures of poetry as prayer, poetry as transgression, and poetry as bearing witness to limit-experiences.

Time permitting, room will be made for students’ interests in other poets of the period.

Reading List

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal and Petits Poèmes en Prose
Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems
Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments
John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poetry
Course Reader (including a selection of Yeats’s poems and critical essays by Abrams, Poe, Benjamin, Brook, Culler, Cameron, de Man, and others).

225, #17350, SPACKMAN, TH 3-6, 115 BARROWS

“Ideological Fantasy at the Fin-de-Siècle”

This course will place a selection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century narratives in dialogue with several theories of fantasy and its relation to ideology. We will begin by examining the two models of fetishism that Slavoj Zizek draws upon in his formulation of the notion of “ideological fantasy”: the logic of fetishism as it is formulated in works by Freud and Octave Mannoni, and the structure of commodity fetishism as it is theorized by Marx. We will be especially interested in asking how these two fetishisms account for a binding together of knowledge and non-knowledge. We will look as well at several alternative models of fantasy, especially Freud’s essay “A Child is Being Beaten,” before we turn to a selection of literary texts that stage fantasies understood in a more traditional sense. These are, in shorthand, the anti-democratic fantasy of D‚Annunzio’s Le vergini delle rocce, the Orientalist fantasy of Flaubert’s Salammbô, the fantasies that link Satanism and same-sex desire in Huysmans’s Là-bas, the racializing fantasies of H. Rider Haggard’s She and Rachilde’s La jongleuse, the art of masochistic fantasy in Sacher Masoch’s Venus im Pelz, the fantasy that underlies the splitting character and portrait in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the parthenogenetic fantasy of F. T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste. To what extent are the theoretical models of “ideological fantasy” able to account for the ideological work performed by these narratives? To what extent may the Marxian and Freudian logics of fetishism themselves be said to share in identifiably “fin de siècle” fantasies? Requirements: one oral presentation; one 20-25 page seminar paper.

The following texts will be available in English at the campus bookstore. I recommend that you order original language versions through the internet, e.g. from alapage.com for French books, and internetbookshop.it for Italian ones.

Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love
Marx, Capital
Slavoj ›iñek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty
Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô
J. K. Huysmans, Là-bas
Rachilde, La jongleuse (The Juggler)
H. Rider Haggard, She
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
F. T. Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist)

A reader containing selected critical essays, (including Mannoni’s “Je sais bien, mais quand même” and Laplanche and Pontalis‚ “Fantasy and the Originas of Sexuality”) will also be available at ICLP, as will the out of print English translation of D'Annunzio.

240, #17353, SAS, M 3-6, 129 BARROWS

“Reading Walter Benjamin”

This course will explore the writings of Walter Benjamin and his interlocutors. We will consider selections from Benjamin‚s writing and correspondence. Benjamin‚s own modes of reading will provide a guide to understanding topics such as: performance and memory, Surrealism, translation, messianism, and chance.

Required texts include:

Walter Benjamin, Reflections
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing
Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution
and seletions from Baudelaire, Brecht, Breton, Adorno, Scholem, and Szondi.