Graduate

This seminar examines the ramifications of catharsis, tedium and other forms of aesthetic response, in other words the relationship between effect and affect in and in response to performance, live, mediated and in reading. Beginning with Aristotle and present day responses to catharsis, we will investigate the kinds of aesthetic response invoked by theories of tragedy (esp Hegel), realism (authority, attachment and estrangement in Lukacs, Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin), as well as theories of pleasure (Barthes,  Derrida, Cixous) and tedium (Heidegger). We will also explore tedium through text and audio of The Hunchback Variations by local playwright Mickle Maher. We will conclude with, the potential and limitations of catharsis as an appropriate response to testimonial narrative in text and film during and after the dictatorship in Chile. An essential part of the discussion will be the problem of translating key theoretical terms, not only from one language to another but also from one theoretical discourse to another.

Open to grad students. Prerequisites: Reading knowledge of French required. A close reading in French of Emmanuel Lvinas's Totalit et Infini. Some supplementary texts will be considered, but primarily as a way of situating Totalit et Infini within the corpus of Lvinas's work and within the history of 20th century European philosophy.

This course will follow a seminar format: students will give reports to orient and initiate discussion of individual poets. In our discussion of poems—and the classes will focus on single poems—the role of musicality, oratory, and vernacular speech will figure prominently. We will be concerned to identify the distinctive features of these poets one by one: Edouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott; Jay Wright, Nathaniel Mackey, Carl Phillips, Thylias Moss, and Elizabeth Alexander. Students will give a formal report on a poet of their choosing, and will write an essay at the end of the quarter.

This seminar will undertake a reconstruction of Nietzsche's aesthetic theory and critical practice as developed across his entire oeuvre , from the Geburt der Tragdie to Der Fall Wagner . Although canonical interpretations of Nietzsche's views (e.g., Simmel, Heidegger, Deleuze, Danto) as well as recent commentary (e.g., Figl, Gerhardt, Nehamus) will be considered as frameworks of interpretation, the primary concern of the seminar will be the close reading of Nietzsche's texts themselves. A particular concern will be the elaboration of Nietzsche's views (much discussed in recent scholarship) on rhetoric and on the relation of philosophical and literary language. (Graduate students only. Reading knowledge of German is required. Limit 20 students).

In this course, we will examine the works of major writers from former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Rumania, Greece, and Turkey from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine how their works grapple with the issues of national identity and their countries' place in the Balkans and in Europe, with the legacies of the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires, with socialism and its demise, with emigration, as well as simply with the modern experience of being. We will compare the conceptual and mythic categories through which these works make sense of the world and argue for and against considering such categories constitutive of an overall Balkan sensibility. The readings will include works by Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andri, Norman Manea, Mesa Selimovi, Danilo Kis, Miroslav Krle a, Ismail Kadare and others.

This course traces the history of Russian debates about gender and sexuality from the 19th through the 21st centuries as registered in literary, visual, political, and material culture. Course topics include: the emergence of Russian women as writers in the 1830s; gender roles and radical politics in the 1860s and 1870s; decadent art and homoeroticism in the 1890s and 1900s; utopian social goals and revolutionary sexualities in the 1920s; shifting Soviet and post-Soviet constructions of gender and sexuality; Russian feminisms and nascent queer movements. Primary texts will include fiction, memoir, poetry, drama, political manifestos, fashion design, posters, paintings, popular song, and cinema. Short secondary readings will provide both theoretical and historical contexts. Discussions will be conducted in English. All texts will be available in both English and Russian.

PQ: Reading knowledge of one modern European language is required; Consent of instructor, outside students will be accepted, with the class size limited to 15 students, as long as the majority of the students are CompLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature. Fulfills the core course requirement for CompLit students. This course, intended for M.A. and Ph.D. students, focuses on theories of poetry proposed by European writers of the 20th century. We will read essays by Mallarme, Valery, Benn, Eliot, Pound, Breton, Ponge, Heidegger, Celan, Bonnefoy, Oulipo writers, Kristeva, and others. Students will give one or two oral reports and write one essay on a poet of their choosing.

PQ: Open to graduate students only. This course will include works by Andrei Bely, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Nabokov. Theoretical sources on intertextuality will include Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Riffaterre, and Lotman.

No prior knowledge of Yiddish is required. All texts will be available in English. Students with reading proficiency in Yiddish are encouraged to read the Yiddish texts in the original. The course will develop a multilingual model for the study of American literature by examining Yiddish and English literature by Jewish writers in America after 1945. Despite the fact that Jewish literature in America exists in several languages, the study of Jewish American literature is overwhelmingly defined by an English-only approach. The main goal of the course is to expand the conception of the field of Jewish American literature from English-only to English-plus. In discussing novels and short stories by bilingual writers such as I.B.Singer and Scholem Asch, we will discuss the permeable borders that existed between American literature in Yiddish and English after 1945. The course will address how the Yiddish literary landscape influenced the resurgence of Jewish American literature in the 1950s and 1960s as represented by the works of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and Bernard Malamud. We will compare literature of the Holocaust by John Hersey, Chaim Grade and I.B.Singer with more recent works in the genre. Finally, we will examine how Dara Horn's In the Image (2002) and Pearl Abraham's The Seventh Beggar (2005) have renewed the engagement with the Yiddish literary tradition among a young generation of Jewish American writers. Primary texts: I.B.Singer, The Shadows on the Hudson (1957-1958); Chaim Grade, My Quarrel With Hersh Rasayner (1952); Sholem Ash, East River (1946); John Hersey, The Wall (1950); Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet (1971) and Something to Remember Me By (1990); Cynthia Ozick, Envy: or, Yiddish in America (1969) and The Shawl (1983); Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1978); Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2000); Pearl Abraham, The Seventh Beggar (2005); Dara Horn, In the Image (2002).

PQ: Open to graduates and undergraduates. This course will include texts by Russian and English authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Poe, H.G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde. Theoretical positions will be examined based on texts by Tzevtan Todorov, Jackson, Traill, Lachmann. All text will be in English.