2006-2007

In this course, we will look at the works of the major nineteenth century writers and poets from the Balkans. We will examine how their works grapple with the issues of national identity, with the emergence of their nations from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and with their countries? place in the Balkans and in Europe. We will map our work on two major axes: syntagmatic difference-how each work develops its own rules of reading-and paradigmatic similarity-how working through the difference, one uncovers systematic correlations in the ways the texts go about structuring their universe. We will pay attention to the historical context and will investigate the main philosophical categories through which these works make sense of the world. It is the hope of the instructor that by the end of the course, these older foreign texts will no longer seem impenetrable and strange because we will have learnt to understand the power and beauty with which these texts speak.

As a genre the manifesto provides a unique opportunity for studying the political and aesthetic movements of modernity. It thrives on a culture of crisis by articulating demands, galvanizing public opinion, and dividing the body politic. This class will study the politics, poetics, and geography of the manifesto form between 1870 and 1930. Readings will include symbolist, futurist, dada, and surrealist manifestoes. Additional texts by Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Leon Trotsky, Hugo Ball, Andre Breton, Kazimir Malevich, Wyndham Lewis, Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov. Films by Rene Clair, Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Luis Bunuel.

Course meets the critical/intellectual methods course requirement for students majoring in Comparative Literature. This course covers the Celtic tradition, Old and Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and a late text from Scotland. Texts include: from Old English, Beowulf; from Irish, The Battle of Moytura and the Tain, and two of the immrana or voyages that concern Bran Son of Ferbal and Mael Duin; from Anglo-Norman French, The Lays of Marie de France; from Welsh, The Four Branches from the Mabinogion; from Middle English, selections from The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and from Scotland, Dunbar.

This course examines the Jewish literary world's relation to the figure of Jesus from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. We study the transformations of Jesus through close readings of major works, both prose fiction and poetry, by Yiddish and Hebrew writers (e.g., Uri Zvi Greenberg, H. Leivick, Jacob Glatstein, S. Y. Agnon, Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Bistritzki, A. A. Kabak, Haim Hazaz, Zalman Shneior, Yigal Mosenzon, Avot Yeshurun, Nathan Zach, Yona Wallach, Yoel Hoffmann). Classes conducted in English, but students with knowledge of Hebrew are encouraged to read texts in the original.

This course is an exploration of twentieth century Hebrew poetry and prose written by women. Through close reading of major works (in translation) by writers such as Dvora Baron, Elisheva, Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Rachel Blubstein, Ester Ra'ab, Lea Goldberg, Amalia Kahana- Carmon, Dalia Rabikovitch, Yona Wallach, and Orli Castel-Bloom, the course traces changes in themes and style and studies the emergence and the development of a woman's voice in modern Hebrew literature. Texts in English.

In this seminar, we read Kierkegaard's novellas, literary criticism, and aesthetic theory. Topics of discussion include irony, repetition, observation, history, and authorship.

This seminar will analyze the concepts of space, place, and landscape across the media (painting, photography, cinema, sculpture, architecture, and garden design, as well as poetic and literary renderings of setting, and virtual media-scapes). Key theoretical readings from a variety of disciplines, including geography, art history, literature, and philosophy will be included: Foucault's Of Other Spaces, Michel de Certeau's concept of heterotopia; Heidegger's Art and Space; Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space; Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space; David Harvey's Geography of Difference; Raymond Williams's The Country and the City; Mitchell, Landscape and Power. Topics for discussion will include the concept of the picturesque and the rise of landscape painting in Europe; the landscape garden; place, memory, and identity; sacred sites and holy lands; regional, global, and national landscapes; embodiment and the gendering of space; the genius of place; literary and textual space. Course requirements: 2 oral presentations: one on a place (or representation of a place); the other on a critical or theoretical text. Final paper. Consent of Instructor Required: Submit a statement of your proposed seminar project to wjtm@uchicago.edu by 9/22/06 indicating what specific aspect of space, place, and landscape you would like to explore, and what particular theoretical resources and archives you intend to develop. Statements should be one page single-spaced, and be accompanied by a short list of the texts you regard as most crucial to your research. Indicate what department and what level you are in.

PQ: Reading knowledge of one modern European language is required. 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.

The seminar will examine the Yiddish writer Scholem-Aleichem's work as a prime example of the diasporic imagination in modern Jewish culture. The writer's greatest achievement was his monologues, oral narrative performances such as Tevye the Dairyman, the Railroad Stories and Menakhem Mendel. These key texts will be discussed in the context of Russian Jewry's crisis and transformation at the turn of the twentieth century. Scholem-Aleichem's political development will be traced in his relationship to the two dominant ideologies in Jewish Eastern Europe prior to World War I: Socialism and Zionism. Finally, Scholem-Aleichem's encounter with America during his visit in 1905-1906 and his immigration in 1914 will be discussed in connection with his play writing for the Yiddish stage and cinema. The course will delineate Scholem-Aleichem's unique literary universe and style, the pivotal expression of classic Yiddish fiction that remains one of the most original expressions of the diasporic imagination in modern Jewish culture. No prior knowledge of Yiddish is required. All readings will be in English. Students wanting to study the primary material in the original languages (Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian) are encouraged to do so.

A number of philosophers have recently proposed a new way of approaching ethics (and of reconceiving the task of philosophy) that focuses on exercises of self-transformation and ideals of moral perfection (sometimes conceived of as forms of wisdom). A distinctive set of notions, such as spiritual exercises, practices of the self, ways of life, the aesthetics of existence, the care of the self, conversion, and moral exemplarity, is meant to displace the picture of morality as primarily a code of good conduct. We shall study three contemporary authors who are central to reviving this way of thinking about ethical practice - Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, and Stanley Cavell. Their work will be read against the background of some classic texts in the history of philosophy in an attempt to uncover the historical tradition and the contemporary significance of this conception of the moral life.