Autumn

How does one go from being a subject of the King to becoming a citizen? From where does one acquire the language to think of equality? In the late eighteenth century, many revolutionary Spaniards and Spanish Americans travelled throughout the Atlantic world seeking to make the philosophy of equality a reality and gain independence of the Spanish colonies. They travelled to and from Europe and Spanish America; and on to New Orleans, Charleston, DC, Philadelphia, and New York. Through their voyages, these individuals would bring this new political language of rights to the places they visited, imbibing of this political philosophy by reading and through conversations and discussions. They produced, as well, a plethora of publications and writings that circulated throughout the Atlantic world. Through lecture and class discussion, we'll learn of these individuals, their circuits of travel, and their desire to create a modern world. Our focus will be on the communities, individuals, and texts that were published and circulated in what is today the United States. We'll begin with the late eighteenth century and work our way through the nineteenth century. The course will be interdisciplinary. Lecture, discussion, and most of the readings will be in English. Spanish and French reading skills will be useful.

This seminar will be organized around the idea that the practice of improvisation is not at all limited to the artistic domain, but is a ubiquitous practice of everyday life, a primary method of exchange in any interaction. Improvisation is, in effect, a certain kind of orientation or attitude towards oneself, others, and the world. Combining philosophical, ethnographic, musicological, and technological modes of analysis and creation, this seminar aims at the presentation of new models of intelligibility, agency, expression, and social responsibility that can inform the theory and practice of real-time musical analysis, leading to new and more effective interactive technologies as well.

PQ: 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 Spanish. Fulfills the core course requirement for CompLit students. Students who wish to take this course but have already taken a Comparative Literature core course may take this course with permission of the instructor. During the early modern age, writing had a strong visual component. Poets and playwrights utilized the sense of sight since it was the highest of the Platonic senses and a mnemonic key to lead spectators to remember vividly what they had read or heard, long before spectacle plays were in fashion. One important technique for visualization was ekphrasis, the description of an art work within a text. For this purpose, playwrights often turned to the mythological canvases of the Italian Renaissance along with the portraits of great rulers and images of battle. The seminar will examine the uses of art onstage: mnemonic, mimetic, political, religious comic, tragic, lyric and licentious. It will also delve into different forms of ekphrasis from the notional to the dramatic and from the fragmented to the reversed. Although the course will focus on Spanish plays of the early modern period, it will also include dramas by Terence and Tacone; Euripides and Racine. Numerous Italian Renaissance and Spanish Baroque paintings will be discussed.

This course is not simply about contemporary South Africa, and the novels of Coetzee but also about the manner in which the public confession of past sins was and continues to be a critical point of reference for the ways in which political transition and justice are imagined. We read Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians , Foe , The Life and Times of Michael K , and Disgrace , and the volume of essays, Giving Offence . We also read Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground , Yvette Christiaanse's novel, Unconfessed , and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem . We consider the playtext Malora by Yael Farber. The two films we study are Alain Resnais's groundbreaking Hiroshima Mon Amour and Christopher Nolan's recent psychological thriller, Memento . Theoretical readings include works from Freud, Derrida, and Foucault.

This seminar will discuss and evaluate efforts to conceptualize modernism in the arts from the eighteenth century to the present. Modernism is widely thought to challenge traditional notions of aesthetic success (theories of perfection, the beautiful, harmony, etc.) and by doing so to raise large philosophical questions about perception, experience, language and the modern condition itself. Who first understood this massive change in aesthetic practices? Who best understood why it occurred? Is there such a thing as modernist philosophy? Did modernism end? Of what significance is that fact? Readings will include a range of philosophical and critical texts by, among others, Fr. Schlegel, Hegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Cavell, Clark, and Fried.

PQ: Open to undergrads with consent of instructor. The idea of this class consists in reading European and US poets – including one of the major modernist Russian poets, Osip Mandelstam, Spanish giant Antonio Machado, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and our contemporary, Seamus Heaney from Ireland – in the context of their historic situation. We'll be looking both at the political and cultural context of their writing and try to combine interest in what's absolutely specific for each single writer with the concern for conditions underlying his/her creative endeavor. Students will be asked to actively participate in the class discussions and to write a final paper addressing the issues relevant to the course content. Books: Inger Christensen: Alphabet ; Seamus Heaney: Poems Essays ; August Kleinzahler: Green Sees Things in Waves ; Osip Mandelstam: Poems Essays ; Czeslaw Milosz: Poems The Witness of Poetry ; Don Paterson: The Eyes [Versions of Antonio Machado] ; Tadeusz Rozewicz: New Poems .

Gottfried Benn, Elizabeth Bishop, Durs Grünbein, Zbigniew Herbert, C. K. Williams are three generations of Modernism in poetry: Benn as one of the grandfathers, Bishop and Herbert as representatives of the middle generation, and C. K. Williams and Grünbein as grandchildren. The idea of the class is to read poems closely and to discuss them in the class. Discussion section arranged for students who are majoring in German. All work in English.

This two-course sequence examines discursive practices in a number of literary and cinematic works from the South East corner of Europe through which identities in the region become defined by two distinct others: the barbaric, demonic Ottoman and the civilized Western European.

This course is designed as an overview of major cinematic works from Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Rumania, former Yugoslavia and Turkey. While the main criterion for selection is the artistic quality of the work, the main issues under consideration are those of identity, gender, the poignant relation with the Western World, memories of conflict and violence, and socialism and its disintegration and subsequent emigration. We compare the conceptual categories through which these films make sense of the world, especially the sense of humor with which they come to terms with that world. Directors whose work we examine include Vulchanov and Andonova (Bulgaria); Kusturica, Makavejev, and Grlic (Former Yugoslavia); Guney (Turkey); Boulmetis (Greece); and Manchevski (Macedonia).

PQ: Prior or concurrent enrollment in CMST 10100. This is the first part of a two-quarter course. Taking these courses in sequence is strongly recommended but not required. This course introduces what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological. We also discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.