202B, #17355, KRONFELD, W 3-6, 129 Barrows
The Lyric: A View from the Margins
This seminar will focus on lyrical poetry produced in the margins of the modern European canon in order to call into question static typological theories of genre. The students will compile a multi-lingual anthology of modern lyrical poets marginalized by gender, class, race or language. My own contribution to the readings will include bilingual anthologies of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, and an examination of biblical poetry as an alternative to "classical" models of the lyric. Through a series of historically and linguistically informed close readings, we will be able to approach both standard and controversial theoretical studies of the lyric with a new critical awareness of the extent to which our paradigm examples affect our notions of genre. How does the view from the margins problematize such western commonplaces of the lyric as the coherence and authority of the lyrical "I," the subject-object divide, the conflation of "lyrical," "subjective" and "feminine," or the lyric's purported freedom -- or flight! -- from history and ideology?
Requirements The seminar group will compile a Reader of modern lyrics as well as relevant cultural and theoretical materials for the participants' different languages of specialization. 1 in-class presentation and 1 seminar paper. COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS WILL BE ENCOURAGED.
Reading List
- The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (bilingual anthology), eds. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse & Khone Shemruk. New York Penguin, 1988. (Out of print; photocopy available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing.)
- The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems (bilingual anthology), eds. Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Tamar Hess, New York Feminist Press, 1999.
- David Lindley, Lyric (Critical Idiom Series); out of print; photocopy available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing.
- Reader I (available first week of classes from Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2015 Shattuck, phone 704-9700). Includes selections from Mark Jeffreys' New Definitions of Lyric, Parker and Hosek, Beyond New Criticism as well as essays by Jonathan Culler, Michael Gluzman, Barbara Johnson, Bonnie Kime-Scott, Victor Li, Dan Miron, Mary Louise Pratt, Celeste Schenck and others.
225, #17356, BERNSTEIN, Tu 3-6, 205 Wheeler
"Modernism and the Imagination in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna"
Robert Musil saw his Vienna as both uniquely itself and “nothing but a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world,” and this seminar will explore how some of the central problems of both literary modernism and of modern political, social, and sexual history can be seen with particular vividness in the Austria of 1900 to 1914. Although its subject might also be called "The Last Days of Imperial Mitteleuropa," I am not especially concerned with reading the various works for their foreshadowing of the First World War, nor for their relationships to various literary-historical taxonomies (e.g., "the Bildungsroman," "the age of suspicion," etc.). Instead, we will be probing a set of related themes across a number of genres whose deeper family resemblance will only emerge as our discussion itself unfolds. The central text of the seminar will be Musil’s Man without Qualities which we will be reading in its incomplete entirety. In addition, there will be a considerable amount of supplementary material available for discussion, depending in part on the particular interests of the class, including, for example, readings from Freud, Kafka, Schoenberg, and Herzl. We will also be listening to music, especially the operas of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg and looking at art from the period. Regular and active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in copious reading are the principal prerequisites for the course.
Texts:
- Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg: Rowholt)) 2 vols. paperback
- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (New York: Vintage ) 2 vols. paperback
- Joseph Roth, Radetzkymarsch (Hamburg: Rowohlt, paperback)
- Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, paperback)
254, #17359, VOLPP, M 2-5, 129 Barrows
“The Novel and Material Culture”
In this seminar, we will examine the multiple ways in which anthropologists, art historians, historians and sociologists as well as scholars of literature have related the interpretation of objects to the interpretation of texts. Topics include the possibilities and limitations of the metaphorical relation of objects and texts, concerns regarding the influence of commodity and gift relations on bonds of human relation, the development of conceptions of intellectual property and of an interest in the idea as thing, the aestheticization of waste. Theoretical writings focus on theories of the gift, the fetish, consumption, and commoditization. Fictional texts include works by James, Twain, Dreiser, Zola, Flaubert, Morrison, Feng Menglong, Li Yu and Cao Xueqin.
258, #17362, CASCARDI, Tu 2-5, 2525 Tolman
“The Anxiety of Aesthetics”
This seminar will focus on the shifting identities of aesthetic theory from
the early modern period to the present day. We will begin with a series
of 18-th century readings and we will proceed through some of the "paradigm"
texts of the 19th and 20th centuries, concluding with some 20-th century
redefinitions of aesthetics in the contemporary period. Among the central
questions of the seminar will be the ongoing identity-crisis of aesthetics
as a discipline, its relationship to practical criticism, its status vis-a-vis
various branches of philosophy, and its ambition to produce a reconciliation
of sense and concept. Principal readings will be drawn from Hume, Burke,
Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno, among others.
There will be ample opportunity for the seminar participants to pursue
independent interests within the framework of the course.
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