Graduate

The concept of “modernism” embraces a number of artistic trends and movements that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe (and beyond) and continued well into the twentieth century. The task of the seminar is to exfoliate core features of that concept by examining works of literature and visual art that are understood as “modernist” as well as works of criticism and philosophical contributions devoted to understanding what modernism is. As the seminar title indicates, the work of Rainer Maria Rilke will be an important point of reference. We will study his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as well as selected poems and essays. Since Paris is the locus of (much of) Rilke’s novel, we will look back to Baudelaire, especially his essay The Painter of Modern Life, while considering his much-discussed poem À une passante (To a passerby) along with relevant commentaries. Moreover, the fact that Rilke worked on the novel during a period when he was also deeply engaged with Cezanne’s painting affords an opportunity to consider certain paintings by Cézanne. Here we will be guided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay Cezanne’s Doubt, Robert Pippin’s study After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (2014), and T.J. Clark’s recent book If these Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022). The course is conceived as a participatory (discussion-intensive) seminar, conducted at a graduate level. English translations will be provided for works in French and German, but seminar discussions will be dotted by references to the original works. Participation by interested undergraduates who have done advanced work in the arts and/or philosophy is possible but requires permission from the instructor.

Friedrich Nietzsche was as much a critic (of literature, art, music, culture) as he was a philosopher, and the purpose of this seminar is to bring out the conception of criticism that unfolds across his work. Doing so will require some comparisons: with the Enlightenment (Lessing) and Romantic (esp. the Schlegel brothers) conceptions of criticism, but also with notions of criticism advanced, for example, by the New Critics, by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and in contemporary work on aesthetics. Our main focus, however, will be on pertinent writings by Nietzsche, including the early essay on “Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense,” Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, relevant aphorisms from Human, All Too Human, Dawn, Joyful Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and Twilight of the Idols, concluding with Case of Wagner. The topic of criticism in Nietzsche is not separable, of course, from the core themes of Nietzsche’s work and the seminar may therefore be considered as one avenue of approach to Nietzsche’s overall achievement. Major positions in the boundless secondary literature on Nietzsche will be considered. This course is open to graduate students. Advanced undergraduate students with a special interest in the topic may be admitted only after consultation with the instructor.

This course navigates the global refugee, exilic, expatriate and émigré crises and experiences as modes of displacement that permeate modern and contemporary literature. Using a comparative approach, this course offers a sustained and nuanced examination of the notion of displacement in most of its forms as represented by many canonical literary works produced by writers of various nations. This course compares the historical, socio-political, economic, cultural and national motives behind the experiences of displacement discussed throughout the course. The main topics covered in this course are: Loss, Alienation and Disorientation, Displacement and Gender Crossing, Displacement and Imperialistic Gestures, Displacement and Mobility, Displacement and Self-fashioning, Acts of Departure: Roots and Routes, Home-Abroad Dichotomy, Displacement, Memory and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination, Displacement and Individual/ National Identity, Abjection and Assimilation, Cross-Cultural Psychology and Dialogical Acculturation, The Crisis of Acceptance and Belonging, Biopolitics and Zoopolitics, The American Dream and Otherness.

Did Asian American literature exist before Asian America? How do we access the enslaved and indentured lives that archives have little to tell us about? Can we reimagine the unheard lives of Asian diasporas historically perceived as “diseased,” inscrutable, and undesirable? What kind of interracial violence and intimacies did they form with Afro-diasporic and indigenous peoples under Spanish and British colonial occupations? To answer these questions, this course turns to the pre-twentieth-century history of Asian diasporas in the Americas, principally in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru. We will closely examine archival sources (inventory records, legal documents, lyrics, spiritual biography, etc.) on two historical trends of forced migration—the early modern transpacific trade of chino slaves and the nineteenth century coolie trafficking of Chinese and Indian laborers—and reflect on the constitutive limits of the archives. In addition, we will read anti-racist, feminist, and queer reimaginations of the Asian-diasporic past by contemporary authors and artists such as David Dabydeen, Michelle Mohabeer and Patricia Powell, etc. These primary sources will be supplemented by theoretical readings on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and Afro-Asian solidarity.

This course analyzes a range of Palestinian life narratives produced by authors based in different places, both in Palestine and the diaspora, united in a common cause and a desire to speak out, thereby circulating their works as a form of Palestinian testimony. This course sees these writers conversing with each other, each attempting to represent their own personal experience but also responding to the broader context of ongoing Palestinian dispossession, making this integral to the snapshot of experience they want to narrate. This course shows that such texts, individually meaningful but also conversant with wider concerns and messages of solidarity and advocacy, are ideal components of contemporary Palestinian literature that position itself as future-orientated, and expresses a desire to combat the international community’s failure to acknowledge Palestinian rights for justice and self-determination. This course contends that contemporary Palestinian life writing goes beyond narrating the specifics of the conflict in order to reflect on central questions of dignity, justice, and solidarity at the time Palestine is still a place that is not fully recognized. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to read and discuss texts in the original language (Arabic).

Ideas of justice are not self-evident truths but constructed through a variety of practices. This course will explore how the language of human rights, which scholars have called the moral lingua franca of our time, is constructed and circulated through aesthetic representation (such as literature, painting, and film), the law, HRNGOs, and public intellectual debates in the 20th and 21st centuries. Throughout the course, we will ask: How are ideas of human rights produced, transformed, or troubled by aesthetic production? What kinds of aesthetic and political claims can we stake in the name of human rights? And what might alternative visions of justice look like? We will discover how literature and visual art help both constitute and reflect the social and political truths by which we live, as well as how these seemingly obvious truths produce a variety of normative assumptions about what constitutes justice. Works will include texts by Ernst Bloch, Richard Wright, Kwame Nkrumah, Rigoberta Menchú, Leon Golub, Jacobo Timerman, and Ai Weiwei. Texts can be read in the English translation or original.

This workshop will focus on literature as a tool to explore tragic and traumatic events in history, such as wars, genocides, and natural disasters, among others. Through different examples, we will review different poetic and narrative forms that delve into historical and personal memory, remembering, reflecting, and analyzing events that have marked the lives of individuals, communities, and nations. We will discuss how writing can be an effective way of coping with the painful burden of history, helping to heal the wounds of the past, as well as to reflect on the ways in which literature can serve as a way of preserving the memory of the victims of these tragic events, allowing their stories to be told, remembered and honored in order to bring us a little closer to reparation and justice.

Religions, like all cultural phenomena, are akin to organic beings: they change, grow and adapt, absorb and assimilate what they encounter, become transformed constantly in relation to challenges and opportunities – and sometimes react against them. This course will focus on one example of religious-cultural-philosophical adaptation and change through a study of the medieval translation of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works into Hebrew during the 12th-15th centuries. We will focus on the translations themselves and translation technique, but principally on what was translated and why, when and where, by whom and for whom. All this with an added emphasis on the result: how did Judaism and Jewish culture change through translation – in all its forms – during the high middle ages.

The Fortunoff Archive at Yale, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem are just a few of the repositories of audiovisual Holocaust testimonies throughout the world. As these testimonies come to be all that remains of the generations of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, how are researchers approaching them? In this class we will explore four distinct discourses and their approaches to testimony: Historical, Literary, Cinematic, and Photographic. Our final projects will be an analysis of a testimony from one of the above-named archives that incorporates all four perspectives. 

This interdisciplinary course will synthesize ethnographic and literary discourses to consider the ways in which the culture of the Jewish “shtetl,” the small towns and villages in eastern Europe where Jewish culture thrived for nearly a millennium, has been represented in the United States after the Holocaust, from the 1940s to the present day. We will read a wide variety of materials within the field of anthropology as well as Jewish literatures and cultures to tease out the concept of “salvage poetics” or a literary poetics that has been forged in popular attempts to bridge dramatically different historical moments, different geographic locations, and different cultures across the abyss of the Holocaust.