Winter

Euripides' Bacchae was probably the last play Euripides finished and is certainly one of the latest plays of the three great 5th century Athenian tragedians. Unusually among Greek tragedies, it takes as its subject a myth about the god of tragedy himself, Dionysus; and explores the relations between city and cult, rationality and religious fervor, man and woman, among other issues; it has always played a central role in interpretations of Euripides and of Greek tragedy in general. The seminar will work through the text closely, examining its philological problems and the history of scholarship but also considering its literary, religious, political, anthropological, and other dimensions. Some attention will also be given to the reception of the play in art and literature and to modern stagings and films. While knowledge of ancient Greek is not indispensable, students planning to take the course who do not know Greek should get in touch with the professor beforehand.

Walter Benjamin is not recognized as one of the most  seminal thinkers of the 20th century and has proved very influential in a number of disciplines. The seminar will provide a survey across his whole career and through the variety of fields in which he wrote, placing the emphasis on his literary criticism but also including discussion of his writings in philosophy, political thought, religion, autobiography, and other areas. Knowledge of German is not indispensable but would be welcome. Open to ug by consent.

This course will examine some of the literary traditions emerging out of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan focusing on different regional representations. In addition we will explore popular culture through film and the arts. Through an examination of Persian, Balochi, Sindhi, Pashto, Urdu, Punjabi short stories, poems, and novels we will explore the influences of regional languages on each other and examine the contemporary place of regional languages and literatures in a world of national and global literatures. How do the different regional literary traditions fit in with the idea of a national literature and a national language? How have the modern nation states of Pakistan and Afghanistan attempted to promote language, literature and particular cultures? What is the historical connection between the state and the arts in the region? What role does literature and popular culture play in the consolidation of regional, national and global identities? We will cover a wide range of materials in this course, ranging from oral and literary narratives of resistance, to Sufism, to the short story and novel, to truck art, cinematic currents in the region and global representations of the region in film. We will combine primary literary readings in translation (or in the original languages for those with the linguistic skills) with historical and/or theoretical readings and viewing of films. One of the main themes of this course will be the role of literature and the arts in making available to us a wide range of emotions dealing with tragedy, war, displacement, political instability, and regional, and national identities.

As the study of relations among the world's literary and other expressive,traditions, comparative literature confronts a host of questions. What do,works from different times and places have in common? How can we meaningfully assess their differences? How do we account for systematic and extra-systemic features of literature? Is translation ever adequate? This course offers consideration of these and related issues through influential critical examples. This course is the first of a two-quarter sequence required for all majors in Comparative Literature.

This course will examine one of the central concepts of comparative literature: mimesis (imitation). We will investigate traditional theoretical and historical debates concerning literary and visual mimesis as well as more recent discussions of its relation to non-western and colonial contexts. Readings will include Aristotle, Auerbach, Butler, Spivak, and Taussig. Students are encouraged to write final papers on their own research topics while engaging with issues discussed through the course.

This course examines the relation between historicity and the literary, using Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) as the primary example.  The Shiji is arguably the most influential Chinese work of historiography, and we will also explore its interdisciplinary and international afterlife.  Particular attention will be paid to notions of the immaterial (the unreal, the fictional, the spiritual, the theoretical), the exotic (the non-Chinese, the foreign), and the universal, in traditional Chinese historiography and poetics, in modern archaeology, and in critical theory.  Students without classical Chinese reading knowledge are welcome to join and to write their final papers on comparative topics.

This course introduces undergraduates to some of the fundamental conceptual issues raised by novels: how are novels formally unified (if they are)? What are the ideological presuppositions inherent in a novelistic view? What ethical practices do novels encourage? What makes a character in a novel distinct from character in other fictive systems? Readings include Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Dickens, Great Expectations; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Critics covered include Lukacs, Bakhtin,  Watt, Jameson, McKeon, D.A. Miller, Woloch, Moretti, and others.

This seminar will explore historicism as a theoretical problem in the study of literature. Our particular foci will be the development of historicism as a distinctly modern hermeneutic mode from the 18th c. to the 20th c.; its relation to organicism, aestheticism, and evolutionism; the rise of comparative literature alongside other "comparative disciplines" on a historicist-empiricist basis in the second half of the 19th century; literary methodologies that profess a version of historicism (Historical Poetics, (Neo)-Marxism, New Historicism). Critics discussed will include Johann von Herder, Alexander Veselovsky, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Fredric Jameson, Reinhart Koselleck, and Carlo Ginzburg.

Immerse yourself in the magic world of vampires and dragons, bagpipes and uneven beats, quick-step circle dance. This course give an introduction to Balkan folklore from anthropological, historical/political, and performative perspectives. We become acquainted with folk tales, lyric and epic songs, music, and dance. The work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who developed their theory of oral composition through work among epic singers in the Balkans, helps us understand folk tradition as a dynamic process – how is oral tradition transmitted, preserved, changed, forgotten? how do illiterate singers learn their long narrative poems, how do musicians learn to play? We consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. The historical/political part will survey the emergence of folklore studies as a discipline as well as the ways it has served in the formation and propagation of the nation in the Balkans. The class will also experience this living tradition first hand through our in-class workshop with the Chicago based dance ensemble “Balkanski igri.” The Annual Balkan Folklore Spring Festival will be held in March at the International House.

How and why do national identities provoke the deep emotional attachments that they do? In this course we try to understand these emotional attachments by examining the narrative of loss and redemption through which most nations in the Balkans retell their Ottoman past. We begin by considering the mythic temporality of the Romantic national narrative while focusing on specific national literary texts where the national past is retold through the formula of original wholeness, foreign invasion, Passion, and Salvation. We then proceed to unpack the structural role of the different elements of that narrative. With the help of Žižek’s theory of the subject as constituted by trauma, we think about the national fixation on the trauma of loss, and the role of trauma in the formation of national consciousness. Specific theme inquiries involve the figure of the Janissary as self and other, brotherhood and fratricide, and the writing of the national trauma on the individual physical body. Special attention is given to the general aesthetic of victimhood, the casting of the victimized national self as the object of the “other’s perverse desire.” With the help of Freud, Žižek and Kant we consider the transformation of national victimhood into the sublimity of the national self. The main primary texts include Petar Njegoš’ Mountain Wreath (Serbia and Montenegro), Ismail Kadare’s The Castle (Albania), Anton Donchev’s Time of Parting (Bulgaria).