30C — Major Works of European Literature
Susan Derwin
TR 3:30-4:45pm, Broida Hall 1610
Enroll via discussion section
(Honors students: Enroll in Honors Section listed below: C LIT 30H)
A survey of European literature. Romantic and modern literature from Rousseau to Solzhenitsyn.

30H — HONORS SECTION: Major Works of European Literature
Susan Derwin
R 12:00-12:50pm, HSSB 1233, Enroll: 04457
Seminar course for honors students enrolled in Comparative Literature 30C designed to enrich the large lecture experience and to supplement the weekly seminar meetings. May include additional readings, more intensive study of syllabus selections, and supplemental writings.

33 — African Literatures
Jude Akudinobi
TR 2:00-3:15pm, Phelps 1260
Enroll via discussion section:
M 4:00-4:50pm, SH 1430, Enroll: 04473
W 8:00-8:50am, SH 1430, Enroll:04499
W 6:00-6:50pm, Phelps 3515, Enroll: 04507
M 3:00-3:50pm, PSYCH 1802, Enroll: 04481
Honors section: TBA, Interested students should meet with the professor on the first day of class.
An introduction to the diverse literary traditions of Africa through an examination of selected works. Regional focus on North, West, East, Central, and South African varies.

100 — Introduction of Comparative Literature
Didier Maleuvre
TR 9:30-10:45pm, Phelps 1260, Enroll: 48439
Prerequisite: upper-division standing.
Addresses questions of methodology and also development and debates in the history of literary and critical theory. Topics very from quarter to quarter. This time it is “The Tragic Sense of Life.” Not even the happiest life is exempt from suffering. Every person will experience loss, absence, aging, illness and death. It is not clear whether everything happens for a reason; what is clear, however, that we seek meaning for what occurs. An occurrence of suffering alone isn’t tragic, tragedy arises from the metaphysical ‘why?’ that comes to our lips in the face of suffering. It marks a crisis of significance. Tragedy stages man’s confrontation with life as a whole — with gods, nature, society — outside of a religious or philosophically dogmatic framework. This course will explore how the characters of tragedy throughout the ages have responded to the great dilemmas of human existence: kinship, attachment, duty, love, suffering, death, and the search for significance.

101 — Writers’ Theories
Sydney Levy
TR 4:00-5:15pm, Phelps 1448, Enroll: 48470
Prerequisite: consent of the instructor.
Writers have also something to say about literature: What is it? How do they write it? How are we to read it? What does it mean? What tools do they provide us to analyze it?103 — Going Postal: Epistolary Narratives
Suzanne Braswell
MW 8:00-9:15am, Girvetz 2108, Enroll: 48447
Prerequisite: upper-division standing.
Investigates reappearance of the letter-novel at particular historical moments, and paradoxes built into the letter-form itself. Range of works emphasizing eighteenth- and later twentieth-century novels, likely works by Austen, Goethe, Hoffman, James, Montesquieu, Choderlos de Laclos, Lydia Davis, Pynchon.

107 — Voyages to Unknown
Cynthia Skenazi
TR 3:30-4:45pm, Webb 1100, Enroll: 48454
Prerequisite: Writing 2 and 50.
The impact of the voyages of discovery on late 15th and 16th century Europe. Readings on real and imaginary voyages: Columbus, Cartier, Lery, More, Rabelais, Montaigne.

120 — Chivalry Adventures
Harvey Sharrer
MWF 9:00-9:50am, NH 1111, Enroll: 48462
Prerequisite: upper-division standing.
Arthurian and chivalric fiction from the medieval period to the time of Cervantes. The evolution of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and the rise of new chivalric heroes and modes of fiction.

187 — Strauss and Hofmannstahl
Dolores Hsu
R 1:00-3:30pm, Music 2230, Enroll: 59063
Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.
A course in the collaboration between composer and poet. A study in the operas, the correspondence, and related developments in German music in the early twentieth century.

195 — Junior/Senior Seminar
Susan Derwin
TR 12:30-1:45pm, Phelps 6320, Enroll: 48488
Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.
Selected methodological issues in comparative literature. Topics vary with each instructor.

199 — Independent Studies in Comparative Literature
Staff
1-5 units, Enroll: 04663
Prerequisites: upper-division standing; completion of two upper-division courses in comparative literature. Must have a minimum 3.0 grade-point average for the preceding three quarters. Students are limited to 5 units per quarter and 30 units total in all 98/99/198/199/199AA-ZZ courses combined. Comparative Literature 199 may be repeated for credit to a maximum of 30 units, but only 12 units may be applied toward the major.
Independent studies with any faculty member. To permit study of a subject desired by the student but not covered in course offerings.

200 — The Question of the Humanities
Claudio Fogu
Colin Gardner
T 6:00-8:50pm, Phelps 6320, Enroll: 04572
In 1954, Martin Heidegger addressed ‘the question of technology’ with particular urgency in the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. In the process, however, Heidegger questioned even more radically the humanist tradition of thought that had resulted in a purely instrumental understanding of technology. Within a few years, Theodor W. Adorno would reiterate, from another perspective, the anti-humanist thrust of Heidegger’s critique with these famous words: “Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (Prisms 34). For the ensuing five decades, Adorno and Heidegger’s thought inspired a wave of anti-humanist thinking in Continental European philosophy that has left few intellectual stones unturned.

In this course, professors Fogu and Gardner will guide students in an exploration of recent strands of critical thinking aimed at re-evaluating the place and role of the humanities in contemporary society and academia. The course will explore both philosophical and institutional issues related to the current status of the humanities and will focus in particular on the rise of the ‘arts’ to center stage in the definition of the ‘humanistic.’ Discussions of writing by the likes of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Giorgio Agamben, will be alternated with guest lectures by artists and critics whose work addresses the question of the humanities today.

The course is designed to attract graduate students from all areas in the humanities and social sciences. Requirements for the course are attendance and active participation in seminar discussions and a final paper.

200 — Productions of Truth: Literature, Theory, Politics, and the Arts
Peter Bloom
Elisabeth Weber
TR 4:00-6:50pm, Ellison 1710, Enroll: 04580
This course addresses the construction of truth through discursive and other practices in literature, philosophy, and cinema. We examine its articulation through specific understandings of statehood and citizenship. We will discuss various historical and theoretical foundational works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, Judith Butler, and Colin Dayan. Incarceration and torture will serve as vanishing points in order to grapple with how “truth” is produced and represented. In addition to these foundational reading we will also screen Death by Hanging [Koshikei] (dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1968) and Sátántangó (dir. Bela Tarr. 1994), among other films.

This course is cross-listed in the department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, the Program of Comparative Literature and the department of Film and Media Studies.

Please note: An estimated five sessions will be held on Tuesdays for film screenings. However, seminar participants will have the option to find other means to view the films.

200 — Object Relations
Larry Rickels
R 3:00-5:50pm, Phelps 6320, Enroll: 48421
The seminar will focus on the work of Melanie Klein, its point of departure in Karl Abraham’s reflections on melancholia and its running commentary on (and continuity with) Freud’s “second system.” The delegation of Klein’s thought proceeds via a series of controversies: Klein’s followers were largely guided and contextualized via the contest with the “Anna Freudians” in London in the 1940s, while Klein’s reception today (in the humanities) is inflected by the ambivalent revalorization of her work within French Freud.

237 — Literature and the Sacred
Richard Hecht
R 3:00-5:50pm, HSSB 3030, Enroll: 48496
Course explores theories of the sacred, and its radical otherness, in relation to writing and poetics, in 20th century French and Italian thought. Authors include: Caillois, Bataille, Paulhan, Eco, Ricoeur, Cacciari, Blanchot, Vattimo, Kristiva, Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray. Taught in English.