CMLT

Our main task in this course is to explore in detail one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. But this novel is also a window onto the entirety of modern European thought and it provides, at the same time, a telling perspective of the crisis of European culture prior to and following on World War I. It is, in Thomas Mann’s formulation, a time-novel: a novel about its time, but also a novel about human being in time. For anyone interested in the configuration of European intellectual life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mann’s great (and challenging) novel is indispensible reading. Lectures will relate Mann’s novel to its great European counterparts (e.g., Proust, Joyce, Musil), to the traditions of European thought from Voltaire to Georg Lukacs, from Schopenhauer to Heidegger, from Marx to Max Weber.

From its inception in ancient Greece tragedy feeds on a transgression. The ideology and economy of kleos (glory) predicates that the male hero seeks the accumulation of excellence and prestige elsewhere, far from home on the battlefield, so that he can reap the fruits of his heroic labor in peace upon his return (nostos). Like Homer’s Odyssey, in which its eponymous hero turns his home into a battlefield when he slays his wife’s suitors, tragedy routinely violates the relegation of violence to a distant place by letting it back into the house (oikos). What makes these tragedies tragic, is then the return of violence into the home. The seminar will trace the contradictory double coding of the house/home in tragedy as a place of refuge and safety as well as a site of unthinkable, because familial violence. We will start by reading a few representative Greek tragedies alongside Aristotle’s Poetics, and will have to skip over Early Modern theater (e.g. Shakespeare and Racine) in order to arrive at Bourgeois tragedy, which conceived itself programmatically as domestic. We will examine French examples of the genre (Diderot) as well their German counterparts (Lessing, Schiller, and), and continue with its latest flowering in Scandinavia (Ibsen, Strindberg). We will conclude with the Beckett’s deconstruction of the domestic tragedy in his Endgame.

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments and a living epic tradition.This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political and anthropological, perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition first-hand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”

This graduate course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of book history and print culture studies, a relatively recent and vibrant field of inquiry within South Asian Studies. The course will explore some of the main theoretical approaches, themes, and methodologies of the history of the book in comparative perspective, and discuss the specific conditions and challenges facing scholars of South Asian book history. Topics include orality and literacy, technologies of scribal and print production, the sociology of texts, authorship and authority, the print “revolution” and knowledge formation under British colonial rule, the legal existence of books, the economy of the book trade, popular print, readership and consumption. We will also engage with the text as material artifact and look at the changing contexts, techniques, and practices of book production in the transition from manuscript to print.

A study of modern French lyric poetry: Tradition and Revolution, Poetry and Politics, the seedbed of Modernism. Desbordes-Valmore, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. Texts will be read in English with reference to the French originals. Close reading, references to poetry in English, and focus on problems in translation. Students with French should read the poems in the original. Class discussion to be conducted in English; critical essays to be written in English. An extra weekly session will be scheduled for discussion in French, for French-speakers.

This seminar will, with a certain intensity of focus, examine two masterpieces of the “sentimental” mode: Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774). Since these novels are both generically self-reflective and, each in its own way, boldly experimental, they are well-suited for an analysis oriented toward the theory of narrative. Comparisons will be drawn to passages in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-8) and Rousseau’s Julie, ou La nouvelle Heloise (1761). We will also take a forward look at Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses (1782), which may be considered the destruction of the form. In addition to fundamental contributions to narratology, works by Roland Barthes (Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse), Albrecht Koschorke (Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts), and James Chandler (An Archeology of Sympathy. The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema) will be important points of reference. As always, Schiller’s Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung will prove indispensable.

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance--the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

In this course we read selections from Antonio Gramsci's Letters and Prison Notebooks side by side with their sources. Gramsci's influential interpretations of the Italian Renaissance, Risorgimento, and Fascism are reviewed testi alla mano with the aim of reassessing some major turning points in Italian intellectual history. Readings and notions introduced include, for the Renaissance, Petrarch (the cosmopolitan intellectual), Savonarola (the disarmed prophet), Machiavelli (the modern prince), and Guicciardini (the particulare); for Italy's long Risorgimento, Vico (living philology), Cuoco (passive revolution), Manzoni (questione della lingua), Gioberti (clericalism), and De Sanctis (the Man of Guicciardini); and Croce (the anti-Croce) and Pirandello (theater and national-popular literature), for Italy's twentieth century.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to Machiavelli’s The Prince in light of his vast and varied literary corpus and European reception. The course includes discussion of Machiavelli as playwright ("The Mandrake"), fiction writer ("Belfagor," "The Golden Ass"), and historian ("Discourses," "Florentine Histories"). We will also closely investigate the emergence of myths surrounding Machiavelli (Machiavellism and anti-Machiavellism) in Italy (Guicciardini, Botero, Boccalini), France (Bodin and Gentillet), Spain (Ribadeneyra), and Northern Europe (Hobbes, Grotius, Spinoza) during the Counter Reformation and beyond.

This course centers on a close reading of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, with some attention to his writings on the history of ancient conceptualizations of sex. How should a history of sexuality take into account scientific theories, social relations of power, and different experiences of the self? We discuss the contrasting descriptions and conceptions of sexual behavior before and after the emergence of a science of sexuality. Other writers influenced by and critical of Foucault are also discussed.