CMLT

This course explores crises of placelessness and displacement as modern and contemporary verse has attempted to map them: from modernist cosmopolitan collage to poetry of exile, migration, and diaspora, the work we will study, lodged between tongues, gives traction to discourse surrounding the abstraction of space in globalizing contexts. We will examine the formal and social prompts and repercussions of experiments in polylingualism, dialect, creole, barbarism, and thwarted translation; we will delve ultimately into some examples of poetic reckoning with the transformation of the site of reading, in the form of new media, installation and otherwise ambient poetics. Poets to include William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Amelia Rosselli, Andrea Zanzotto, Paul Celan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Pamela Lu, Etel Adnan, M. Nourbese Philip, C.S. Giscombe, Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Caroline Bergvall. Readings in geography, aesthetics, translation by David Harvey, James Clifford, Marc Auge, Rem Koolhaas, Timothy Morton, Toni Morrison, Lucy Lippard, Juliana Spahr, others.

Required of fourth-year students who are majoring in CMLT. This workshop begins in Autumn Quarter and continues through the middle of Spring Quarter. While the BA workshop meets in all three quarters, it counts as a one-quarter course credit. Students may register for the course in any of the three quarters of their fourth year. A grade for the course is assigned in the Spring Quarter, based partly on participation in the workshop and partly on the quality of the BA paper. Attendance at each class section required.

This course focuses on The Exemplary Novels (1613) and Don Quijote, Part II (1615) from the point of view of calendared feasts. To the recently instituted Gregorian calendar, the novel superimposes at least three other time maps. First, the Julian calendar with its many feasts as depicted in Ovid's Fasti ; second, the celestial movement through the twelve signs of the zodiac as represented by Hercules' twelve labors; and third, the Egyptian lunar calendar that leads to the knight's defeat. This meandering through calendars creates an instability and sense of unease that recalls the changes in mapping that are taking place with the discovery of America and the change to a heliocentric cosmos. The Novelas show an inordinate interest in feasts while, as Don Quixote proceeds, a kind of dilatio takes place, as Don Quixote diverts his route over and over again from his destination (Zaragoza and the feast of St. George). Time then becomes a subjective phenomenon that affects both the reader and the characters. We examine Cervantes's novel through the lenses of Ovid's Fasti and Apuleius' Golden Ass . Maps and paintings of the period are also examined. Classes taught in English. Students in Spanish and REMS read the text in the original language and write their papers in Spanish.

This course analyzes the complex concept of demonology according to early modern European culture from a theological, historical, philosophical, and literary point of view. The term demon in the Renaissance encompasses a vast variety of meanings. Demons are hybrids. They are both the Christian devils, but also synonyms for classical deities, and Neo-Platonic spiritual beings. As far as Christian theology is concerned, we read selections from Augustine's and Thomas Aquinas's treatises, some complex exorcisms written in Italy, and a new recent translation of the infamous Malleus maleficarum , the most important treatise on witch-hunt. We pay close attention to the historical evolution of the so-called witch-craze in Europe through a selection of the best secondary literature on this subject, with special emphasis on Michel de Certeau's The Possession at Loudun . We also study how major Italian and Spanish women mystics, such as Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi and Teresa of Avila, approach the issue of demonic temptation and possession. As far as Renaissance Neo-Platonic philosophy is concerned, we read selections from Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Theology and Girolamo Cardano's mesmerizing autobiography. We also investigate the connection between demonology and melancholy through a close reading of the initial section of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Cervantes's short story The Glass Graduate (El licenciado Vidriera) . Classes conducted in English.

PQ: Two literary Chinese courses. This course introduces Han dynasty historiography and its relation to the Chinese literary tradition. Through close readings of the Shiji and Hanshu , we explore a range of prose and poetic forms and consider traditional and comparative methods of interpretation.

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 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. Classes conducted in English. Students who are majoring or minoring in Italian do all work in Italian.

For some, fairy tales count as sacred tales meant to enchant rather than to edify. For others, they are cautionary tales, replete with obvious moral lessons. Critics have come to apply all sorts of literary approaches to fairy tale texts, ranging from stylistic analyses to psychoanalytical and feminist readings. For the purposes of this course, we assume that these critics are correct in their contention that fairy tales contain essential underlying meanings. We conduct our own readings of fairy tales from the German Brothers Grimm, the Norwegians, Asbjørnsen and Moe, and the Dane, Hans Christian Andersen. We rely on our own critical skills as well as on selected secondary readings. All work in English.

The first part of this course is designed as an overview of some major theories of narrative. We will focus on structuralist approaches such as those of Roland Barthes and Grard Genette's, but also discuss texts such as Benjamin's analysis of the narrator, Bakhtin's theory of polyphony, and new approaches to narratology in the field of cognitive poetics. In the second part, we will analyze literary examples taken especially from German and French literature from the 18th to the 20th century. A special emphasis will lie on different narrative representations of consciousness, in free indirect speech (Flaubert), the stream of consciousness (Joyce), or narrative styles that try to render more visual forms of consciousness (Musil). Finally, we will consider some experimental forms of narrative from the later 20th century (Queneau, Perec, D. Grossman).

Since the 1970s, Mikhail Bakhtin's work has had an enthusiastic reception in the Western academe. In spite of – or, arguably, as a result of – its wide dissemination, it has also suffered much from reductionist readings. In this seminar, we will read Bakhtin's major works, seeking to restore them to the intellectual context of the Russian school of historical poetics. In addition, we will discuss primary texts that provided the impetus for Bakhtin's theories (Petronius, Plutarch, Dostoyevsky). All readings in English.

The imagination of how life will or might be is central to many definitions of literature that consider it as a form of social practice. In this course we will discuss how diverse dimensions of the future—as hope, anxiety, plan, as possibility or fear of transformation—shape the literary imagination. Our focus will be on Chinese fictional narratives and theories of literature of the 20th century, with particular attention to the periods of transition to and away from socialism, but we will also look at concepts of timeliness and untimeliness in critical and narrative theory elsewhere. Overall, our aim will be to explore how the function and fate of literature has been imagined in relation to other cultural, political, and social practices, an issue that inevitably emerges every time one tries to pin down the problem of Chinese literary modernity itself. In the second part of the course students will be asked to work on their own projects on texts, films, or other media of their choice. Readings may include Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, Mao Zedong, Zhou Yang, Li Tuo, Ge Fei, Mo Yan, E. Bloch, J. Derrida, G. Morson, F. Jameson, M. Bakhtin.