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Graduate
Course Descriptions
This course on literary theory will have a strong historical component. We will be tracing out the transformation of key problems in foundational texts ranging from antiquity to the post-modern age, including works by Plato and Aristotle, Longinus, Augustine, Dante, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida (authors represented on the Comparative Literature Theory exam list), leading to our most contemporary concerns with postcoloniality, race, and gender. Our readings will help us to understand the disciplinary and institutional transformation of literary studies in the last few decades. We will look at the production and revision of such issues as text and culture, language and signification, representation, affect and the body, ownership and authority, canonicity, power and ideology, history and nation, and the constitution of the subject. Course requirements: three short papers (7 pages), and one oral report (accompanied by bibliography) as a final project.*
This course takes a number of different areas of Literary Theory and, on the basis of research completed and in progress in both Arabic and Western languages, applies some of the ideas to texts from the Arabic literary tradition. Among these areas are: Evaluation and Interpretation, Structuralism, Metrics, Genre Theory, Narratology, and Orality.
COML 535.401 Christianity and the Late Antique Religious Revolution The
Seminar aims at identifying the different dimensions of the major
transformations of the very idea of religion in the Near East and the
Mediterranean during the first five centuries of the common era. Among
these transformations, which amount to what one can call a religious
revolution, are the deep changes in the perception of the self, the
disappearance of blood sacrifices as a major, public and central
religious ritual, among both Jews and pagans, the development of what
one can call "the scriptural turn", and the new importance of religious
community for the shaping of identity, both personal and collective. We
will focus on the meeting of religious traditions from East and West,
and will seek to identify the role of Christianity in this complex
development. Two books of sources in translation have been ordered for the students: A.D. Lee, Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity and R. Valantasis, Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice
This course considers the relationships of premodern women to writing and to the places of their lives and travels. The relationship of premodern women to territory is particularly tenuous and fraught. Women, particularly aristocrats, were expected to leave their homes and native ground and marry into unfamiliar cultures in foreign landscapes: is homesickness originally a female complaint, before it is taken over by males dreaming of England from their distant colonial postings? Catholic English women, following the Reformation, continued living communally in continental Europe. Here too homesickness is a factor, expressed in their careful conservation of medieval English writings (Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century English anchoress, survives as written and conserved by seventeenth-century English women). Continents were often figured as naked female figures. Tensions at faith frontiers (east and west) were often expressed through conflicts over or within particular female bodies: figures to consider here include saints Dorothea of Montau and Rose of Lima. Women sometimes occupied places, knowingly or not, where earlier generations of women had lived, in quite different cultural and religious circumstances: places such as Wilton and Welbeck. The study of a particular place over time might make an interesting research essay. The question of continuing nun-nostalgia in Protestant cultures might also be raised. So too the question of women and travel: how did Margery Kempe manage to traverse the face of the known world, avoid injury, and return to compose her text? As centuries pass, do women travel less? This
course questions traditional periodizations by shooting the medieval/
Renaissance divide and by considering arguments of advance and decline
for women. Does the rise of the university, for example, bring a
diminution of educational opportunities for women? Is the Middle
Ages to be seen, as some feminist historians have seen it, as a
feminine 'golden age'? Does the coming of the 'Renaissance' reduce
female options to that of marriage or marriage? How do both the
observant and oppositional activities of women shift as we move
from Catholic through Lollard to Protestant cultures? We might consider
here the writings of Protestant Elizabeth I and embroideries of
Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots; other authors might include Anne
Askew, Isabella Whitney (fl. 1567-1573), Mary Herbert (1562-1621),
Elizabeth Cary (1585?-1639), and Rachel Speght (c. 1597-16??). Such
developmental narratives can be challenged by others suggesting
strange resemblances over time, featuring women occupying liminal
places: the anchoress; the pregnant woman. We can thus read Trotula
texts (female-authored gynaecological manuals), a manual for female
recluses (Ancrene Wisse), a mystical text by a woman who uses her
body as a spiritual laboratory (Julian of Norwich) and best-selling
texts by Renaissance women who will not survive pregnancy. We can
match texts from women centuries apart: such as Christine of Markyate
(1096-1160), who defied family expectations of marriage to live
as a recluse, eventually leaving us with an extraordinary lifestory
and a psalter of her own; and Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, a
playwright much reviled by Virginia Woolf who, nonetheless, wrote
several plays imagining all-female academies long before Virginia
penned A Room of One's Own. Assessment will be by one long essay, preceded by a one-page brainstorming abstract earlier in the semester.
The purpose of this course is two-fold: first, to study some of the more important ways in which the Bible was read and interpreted before the modern period; second, to consider the uses to which some contemporary literary theorists have put these ancient modes of interpretation as models and precursors for their own writing. The major portion of the course will be devoted to intensive readings of major ancient exegetes, Jewish and Christian with a view to considering their exegetical approaches historically as well as from the perspective of contemporary critical and hermeneutical theory. Readings of primary sources will be accompanied by secondary readings that will be both historically oriented as well as theoretical, with the latter including Hartman, Kermode, Todorov, and Bloom.
This course examines key themes in visual and verbal art since the 1960s: beauty, reproduction, the model, consumerism, interactivity. Texts will include literary works (M. Shelley, Pynchon, Morrison, Bram, Chevalier); art catalogues (Picasso, Lee Miller, Warhol, Wilke, Dumas); and theoretical articles (Jakobson, Barthes, Baudrillard). Works from the early and late twentieth century will sometimes be paired to help us construct a picture of contemporary culture by understanding its salient differences from modernism. Asignments will be 25 pages of writing (either one long or two shorter papers) and a class presentation. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, students are welcome from English and other national literature departments, Comparative Literature, Art History, Fine Arts, and Women's Studies.
This course examines the scholarly enterprise of "stage-centered analysis" by considering the ways that contemporary theatre artists make theatre events out of older, canonical scripts. What is the relation of script to performance, and of printed text to playhouse script? How do scholars understand and analyze contemporary performance? How does our scholarly understanding of historical performance--both the original performance, and subsequent performance in the intervening centuries--affect contemporary performance and how we write about it? Using Shakespeare and his contemporaries as the test case, we will examine scholarship about playhouses and stage conventions, and theories of early-modern subjectivity, acting, and performativity, and consider these issues as they are manifest in contemporary theatrical theory and practice.
An overview of the German, French, and Anglophone traditions in sociological theory. The major focus will be on the works of Marx and Engels, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, and Mead, and on subsequent developments in these classical schools of theory and research.
A critical examination of recent history and theory in cultural and social anthropology. Topics include structural-functionalism; symbolic anthropology; post-modern theory. Emphasis is on major schools and trends in America, Britain, and France.
Is the novel somehow inherently trans-national? How did the novel escape the confines of the national borders within which it began its modern existence? Why did the quintessential genre of the here and now become cosmopolitan? This course will move between theory of the novel and literary history. On the theory of the novel side, we will consider recent works, in particular the studies by Margaret Doody and Michael McKeon, that suggest in different ways that the romance-novel divide, long held to be absolute, is perhaps a false problem. (We will also look at more "nationalistic" studies, Ian Watt's for example, that respect the romance-novel divide.) On the literary history side, we'll consider what may have been the most significant factor in the regeneration of prose fiction that is known as the birth of the modern novel: the rediscovery, in 17th-century England and France, of the so-called Greek novel. We'll read at least two of the Greek novels that captivated 17th-century readers and altered the course of European prose fiction. The tie that binds these two ways of approaching prose fiction is the question of geography. We'll use the insights found in Franco Moretti's wonderful Atlas of the European Novel to contrast the two dominant geographical models between which the novel alternates: big-world roaming and small-world claustrophobia. Some of the questions that we'll ask include: why is it that some novelists such as Jane Austen systematically construct constricted and constricting universes, worlds in which characters never see the wide world? Why do others-Voltaire, Mary Shelley--move their characters all over the globe, or at least all across Europe? And why do still other novelists (Lafayette) alternate between cosmopolitan fictions and claustrophobic ones? Finally, in what ways does the big world outside always invade even the most confined fictional universes? The course will be taught in English. All reading will be available in English. French titles will also be available in French. Students wishing to take the course for French credit will do the reading and at least some of the writing in French. A note on books: I'll order some copies of Moretti, but students might want to pick one up on Amazon. Ditto for Reardon's anthology of Greek novels. It's a bit dear, but used copies are easily found online. And you can always xerox the novels we'll read from the copy on reserve.
At a time when contemporary culture is markedly engaged in a repudiation of secularism and a return to religious belief, it may be interesting to explore the Enlightenment as a mirror image and origin of our present situation. The Enlightenment has long been understood as a trans-European effort to counter, if not flatly reject religion, superstition, the church, and divinely instituted monarchy. Recent scholarship challenges this conception and urges us to think of the Enlightenment engagement with religion and the Bible as a productive encounter. Enlightenment thinkers and writers in Germany (including members of the Haskalah) presided over an explosion of biblical scholarship, exegesis, interpretation, theologizing, and literary adaptation. As Jonathan Sheehan argues, the Enlightenment did not reject the Bible—the Enlightenment changed it. Topics will include: pietism, gender, and subjectivity; theodicy; the Berlin Haskalah; anti-semitism; Spinozism and radical Enlightenment; translation and exegesis. Authors will include: Lessing, Mendelssohn, Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, Jung-Stilling, Kant, Moritz, and Maimon, as well as new scholarship by Sheehan, David Sorkin, Jeffrey Freedman, Jonathan Hess, and others. French and English Enlightenment texts will also be brought in. Parallel readings in German and English. Discussion in English.
In this advanced seminar, we will consider South African writing from the 1970s to the present. We will track the cultural shifts that accompanied the transition from apartheid to democracy. Readings will include all genres: poetry, drama, short fiction, novels, and essays. The course will also have a strong theoretical component and will therefore be useful to all graduate students with an interest in the relationship between literature and politics. Requirements include an oral presentation on any assigned topic and a final paper, which may or may not be based on the presentation, depending on the student's evolving interests. Texts include: Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema, Woza Albert!; Athol Fugard, Statements, The Port Elizabeth Plays, A Lesson from Aloes, My Children, My Afrika!; Jeremy Cronin, Inside and Out (please order now from exclusivebooks.com in South Africa); Miriam Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan (second-hand copies available from amazon.com); Sindiwe Magona, Mother to Mother, Fatima Dike, So What's New?; Andre Brink, Dry White Season; J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K and Age of Iron; Nadine Gordimer, July's People, None To Accompany Me and selected stories; Mark Behr, The Smell of Apples, Ivan Vladislavic, The Restless Supermarket and selected stories (from exclusivebooks.com); Phaswane Mphe, Our Hillbrow (from exclusivebooks.com); Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying and The Heart of Redness; essays by Albie Sachs, Njabulo Ndebele, Achmat Dangor, Marlene van Niekerk, Achille Mbembe and others.
We will consider a range of theoretical and practical problems connected with the global system of Anglophone cultural production and exchange. A syllabus has yet to be determined, but is likely to include readings drawn from four main areas: 1) the recent history of the English language and the rise of new vernaculars and idiolects, as described by linguists like David Crystal (English as a Global Language) and literary critics like Matthew Hart ("Synthetic Vernaculars") and Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien (Weird English); 2) theories of economic and cultural globalization, including the world systems analysis of Immanuel Wallerstein, the theories of cosmopolitanism advanced by Ullrich Beck and Bruce Robbins, and the debates over nationalism and sovereignty surrounding the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; 3) the formal and institutional aspects of "world fiction" as described by literary critics and sociologists such as Pascale Casanova (World Republic of Letters) and Grahan Huggan (The Postcolonial Exotic); and 4) a range of novels and films that will help us test and refine the broader lines of argument. These may include work by Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Ken Loach (Riff Raff; Bread and Roses), Keri Hulme (the bone people), Lynne Ramsey (Ratcatcher), Jessica Hagedorn (Dogeaters), and Nuruddin Farah (Maps). Check back on September 1st for a final version of the syllabus. Students will make one short (15-minute) and one long (30-minute) oral presentation, as well as writing a full-length term paper.
COML 796.401 Media, Culture and Citizenship: Histories, Debates, Paradigms . |