Undergraduate

The course will discuss the ways in which fiction imagines a multitude of individual cases meant to incite reflection on moral practices.  The topics will include: the distance between the “I” and its life, the birth of moral responsibility, and the role of affection and gratitude.  We will read philosophical texts by Elisabeth Anscombe, Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin, Hans Joas, Charles Larmore, and Candace Vogler, and literary texts by Shakespeare, Balzac, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Carson McCullers, and Sandor Marai.  

The Hebrew Bible is the most important intertextual point of reference in Modern Hebrew literature, a literary tradition that begins with the (sometimes contested) claim to revive the ancient language of the Bible. In this course, we will consider the Bible as a source of vocabulary, figurative language, voice and narrative models in modern Hebrew and Jewish literature, considering the stakes and the implications of such intertextual engagement. Among the topics we will focus on: the concept of language-revival, the figure of the prophet-poet, revisions and counter-versions of key Biblical stories (including the story of creation, the binding of Isaac and the stories of King David), the Song of Songs in Modern Jewish poetry.

Through readings of texts by Goethe, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Musil, and Zadie Smith, this course will examine the range of formal techniques for representing minds during different eras in the history of the European novel. We will ask how different modes of narrating fictional minds reveal underlying (and shifting) models of human subjectivity and how these models, in turn, structure our own reading practices and our interpretation of characters. The literary readings will be supplemented with secondary texts that will introduce students to the tools and concerns of classical narratology as well as to contemporary development in cognitive literary studies. Theoretical authors will include: Gerard Genette, Dorrit Cohn, Erich Auerbach, Monika Fudernik, Mikhail Bakhtin, Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine, and David Lodge.

This course will examine the role and function of both the author and the character by investigating the long exploited narrative device of their encounter within the fictional world. In so doing, we will reflect upon the boundaries of fiction (do they exist ? what is their nature: logical, narratological, ontological ?).  We will read French, Spanish, Italian, and English texts, encompassing a variety of genres and media, from the early modern to contemporary periods.   Authors will include Cervantes, Molière, Fénelon, Bougeant, Pirandello, Caumery, Woody Allen, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Coe.Note: All readings will be offered English, although students may read French, Italian and Spanish texts in their original language.   Students taking the course for French credit must read all French texts in the original language and do written work in French.  Prerequisites:  For FREN, at least two literature level courses (FREN 21700 or above); for Comp Lit, two literature level courses (200-level and above).

"Nothing is funnier then unhappiness" says Nelly in Beckett's Endgame. We shall seek to distinguish between unhappiness, as the subject of poetic works, from unhappiness as it is understood by philosophy, which, I would argue, is precisely as funny as nothing. We shall discuss some famous unhappy families. A Greek tragedy (Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus), a Renaissance tragedy (Shakespeare, Hamlet), a modern theater of the absurd (Beckett: Endgame).

Shakespeare's Hamlet has probably inspired the most criticism of any play in world literature, and it has certainly inspired some of the greatest criticism. This course explores the goals, presuppositions, strengths, and limitations of different kinds of scholarship and criticism by focusing upon the variety of approaches that have been (or in some cases, could be) applied to Shakespeare's play. The course will focus on modern editorial theory and practice; classical and neoclassical discussions of mimesis, plot, and theatrical affect; Romantic, psychoanalytic, and postmodern discussions of Hamlet as character; recent literary historical discussions of sources and genre; new critical, new historicist, and feminist analyses of the play's imagined world; as well as performances and literary adaptations of Hamlet conceived of as interpretations of the play. Students will write several short response papers to the assigned readings as well as a longer paper analyzing and/or applying different critical approaches to Hamlet.

PQ:  reading knowledge of Arabic (namely three years of Arabic at least) is required; students are expected to read the novels as part of their homework assignment.The class studies historical novels and the insights historians might gain from contextualizing and analyzing them. The Arab middle classes were exposed to a variety of newspapers and literary and scientific magazines, which they read at home and in societies and clubs, during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Such readers learned much about national identity, gender relations and Islamic reform from historical novels popularized in the local press.  Some of these novels were read not only by adults, but also by children, and consequently their ideas reached a very large audience. The novels’ writers paid great attention to debates concerning political theory and responded to discourses that were occurring in the public spheres of urban Middle East centers and, concurrently, appropriated and discussed themes debated among Orientalists and Western writers. The class will explore these debates as well as the connections between the novel and other genres in classical Arabic literature which modern novels hybridized and parodied.  It will survey some of the major works in the field, including historical novels by Gurji Zaydan, Farah Antun, Nikola Haddad, and Nagib Mahfuz.

What is lyric poetry? Should the genre be defined by its relationship to song? By the convention of a first-person speaker? By reference to a particular model of the self or the person? By the presence of ambiguity or paradox? By the fact that it resists paraphrase? Or is the lyric ultimately a product of practices and institutions that can and should be historicized? This course will attempt to answer some of these questions by surveying some important modern and contemporary theories of lyric poetry. We will read philosophical and critical work by, among others, Hegel, Wordsworth, J.S. Mill, T.S. Eliot, William Empson, Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man, W.R. Johnson, Allen Grossman, Robert von Hallberg, Susan Stewart, Virginia Jackson, Daniel Tiffany, and Oren Izenberg. We will analyze these texts as arguments, but also test their claims against actual poems. Requirements include a class presentation and a final paper.Current MAPH students and 3rd and 4th years in the College. All others by instructor consent only. THIS COURSE WILL NOW BE HELD ON MW AT 1:30-2:50 FOR THE UPCOMING SPRING 2013 QUARTER.

PQ: One prior philosophy course is strongly recommended. 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.