Courses Offered 2006-07

Courses Offered 2005-06

Past Special Topics Courses

GRADUATE COURSES:

Fall 2006

FRANZ KAFKA – Comp Lit 200
Professor Wolf Kittler

The focus of the seminar will be on the three fragmentary novels, on which Kafka’s posthumous fame is based. However, since all of this author’s writings form an intricate rhizome, we will have to read collateral material: letters, diary entries, sketches, more fragments, and samples from the small portion of his work which he published during his lifetime.

Questions to be discussed will include the following: What is the relation between Kafka’s writing and his work as an accident insurance lawyer? What are the conditions of writing within a legal system, an office space, and a public sphere that are constantly being transformed by the intrusion of new technical devices such as the type writer, the phonograph, the copying machine, the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, the combustion engine, and the light bulb? Class discussions in English.

ON WIT AND JOKE – Comp Lit 200
Professor Bettine Menke

The seminar deals with the rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics of wit (as well as puns and jokes). It also touches on the pragmatics of joking, the Freudian ‘economy of the joke’ and the social aspects of jokes. Both literary and theoretical texts from the 18th to the 20th century will be read (all required readings are available in English).

Writings by German Romantic Jean Paul and by Sigmund Freud mark the temporal parameters for the seminar. This is the period when wit –which in Renaissance concettismo and mannerism (ingenio) had been defined as the “margin of rhetoric” or as a “para–rhetoric” –, drops out of the field of poetics. It ended up either being subsumed under the aesthetic of the “genius”, or it was completely excluded from the new discipline of aesthetics that emerged during the second half of the 18th century.

During this period, a change occurs in the meaning of wit. If previously wit had designated a faculty, it now came to suggest a certain use of language and the specific form of that use. Freud summarized this development as a change from the kind of wit you can have to the joke that you make (in German, the same word is used for both wit and joke: Witz). The Freudian theory of jokes represents the anachronistic focal point for the analysis of the phenomenon of wit around 1800. Freud displaced the theory of wit from semantics to pragmatics. He also established an intermediary space for the gift between the teller and the listener of the joke. Class discussions in English.

Spring 2006

WALTER BENJAMIN – Comp Lit 200
Professor Elisabeth Weber

Close readings and discussions of one of the most influential critical voices of 20th Century European thought. The class will focus on some seminal texts, among others, Benjamin’s famous essays on language and translation, some of his analyses of literary texts of the 19th and 20th centuries, his “Critique of Violence”, the “Theses on the concept of history,” and “The work of art in the era of technical reproductability.” Secondary sources include texts by Wolf Kittler, Rainer Nägele, Jacques Derrida, Carol Jacobs and others.

Two readers will be available for purchase: One with the original texts in German and one with the English translations. Class discussions in English.

THE BAROQUE: ART, CULTURE AND MODERNITY – Comp Lit 200
Professors Jon Snyder and Robert Williams

The literary and artistic styles we call the Baroque are associated with the emergence of the first planetary culture — extending from Mexico City to St. Petersburg, from Prague to Goa to Lima — and arguably represent the first expression of artistic modernism. In an era of extraordinary scientific discoveries and cross-cultural encounters, as well as of unprecedented social and political upheaval in Europe, new practices of representation and new explorations of the limits of representation, including the narration of extremes of sensual and spiritual experience, appear in the works of artists and writers as diverse as Caravaggio, Cervantes, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Molière, Gracián, Bernini, Borromini, Rubens, Marino, Racine, Donne and Monteverdi. The modernist themes of the Baroque—the double, the Other, the mirror, the vacuum, publicity versus privacy, estrangement and disillusionment, the nonmimetic and the anamorphic—find considerable traction in the twentieth century and beyond. In this seminar we will examine the art, literature and culture of the Baroque in the perspective suggested specifically by its relation to modernity, grounded especially in such aesthetic categories as wit, genius, illusion, imagination, and the je ne sais quoi, which elude easy definition but which aim to capture “the immense subtlety of things” (Leibniz) and the mysterious “consonance” (Gracián) that exists between them and us.

Critical and theoretical texts will include Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama; Gilles Deleuze, The Fold; Mieke Bal, selected essays; Octavio Paz, Sor Juana; Michel de Certeau, Heterologies and The Mystic Fable; Louis Marin, On Representation and Sublime Poussin; José Antonio Maravall, The Culture of the Baroque.

Among others, we will read in translation all or some of Cervantes, Don Quixote; Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom; Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale; Bacon, Essays; Galileo, Starry Messenger; Scala, Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte; Bernini, The Impresario; Molière, Tartuffe and Scapino; Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream; Accetto, On Honest Dissimulation; Monteverdi, The Return of Ulysses; Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise; and Leibniz, selected essays. In addition, we will devote several sessions to the Baroque visual arts, particularly painting and sculpture.

IMPROVISATION: BAROQUE TO DIGITAL – Comp Lit 200
Professors Jocelyn Holland and Sydney Lévy

Improvisation is as old, if not older, than civilization and permeates our everyday lives, our organizations and our arts. Yet, we don’t know much about it. While we recognize it readily, we don’t know its limits, we don’t know what factors go into it, let alone what mechanisms produce it. The ambition of this seminar is to lay the groundwork for a theory of improvisation. Both the content and the structure of the seminar will be multi-faceted. We will examine works of literature, music, drama, art and digital art from the baroque period to the present. To help us in our approach we will read essays in literary theory, cognition, chaos theory and philosophy. Some of the authors we will consider are Kleist, Goethe, Pirandello, Proust, the Surrealists, Beckett, Perec, Echenoz as well as a number of theoretical works from various disciplines. The seminar will also host a number of guests who will talk to us of their experience as improvisers or who will give a lecture on a topic that will help us understand improvisation.

MEDIA HISTORY THEORY – Comp Lit 236
Professors William Warner and Lisa Parks

The course interweaves a study of the emergence of several kinds of twentieth century media including radio, film, television, and the internet, with key texts of media theory including Benjamin, Adorno, MdLuhan, Debord, Hall, and others.

Winter 2006

VISUALITY AND TEXT IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS - Comp Lit 200
Professors Ann Adams and Jeanette Peterson

Understandings of vision – the perception of imagery whether produced by objects in the material world, by evocative texts, by memory, dreams, or religious experience – underwent radical transformation from the late fifteenth through the middle of the eighteenth centuries. Moreover, European explorers, colonizers, and missionaries who brought their own understandings of sight to the Americas had a substantial impact upon local conceptions; these were, in turn, modified by indigenous modalities of seeing. This seminar problematizes the myth of objectivity generated by European optical theory, using case studies from a rich field of visual culture and texts about sight and the social use of images.

This course explores the social construction of visuality, including a historiography of beliefs and theories about the mechanics of seeing in both the old world and the new. We will also compare and contrast these issues through such themes as the sacred gaze or “inner eye,” the political uses of these constructions, ritual-centered visuality, and the synaesthetic component of sight as differently understood in Europe and Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

TRAUMA AND NARRATIVE – Comp Lit 594
Professor Susan Derwin

This is course about narrative responses to experiences of individual and collective trauma: genocide, war, imperialist incursion, sexual violation. The seminar will begin with an exploration of the nature of trauma through readings in psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural criticism. While the Holocaust will be a central point of reference and examination, we will also study writings that address trauma in post-WWI and post-colonial contexts. Readings will include works by Achebe, Agamben, Amery, Carr, Delbo, Caruth, Freud, LaCapra, Kertesz, Levi, Morrison, Sebald.

DADA – Comp Lit 200
Professor Sven Spieker

“DADA is beautiful like the night, who cradles the young day in her arms.” (Hans Arp)

“DADA speaks with you, it is everything, it envelops everything, it belongs to every religion, can be neither victory or defeat, it lives in space and not in time.” (Francis Picabia)

“Dada is the sun, Dada is the egg. Dada is the Police of the Police.” (Richard Huelsenbeck)

This seminar examines the phenomenon of Dadaism (DADA LITERATURE-DADA ART-DADA-LIFE) in the more general context of the European Avant-gardes. Dadaists read and looked at include Max Ernst, T. Tsara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and others.

…Marcel Duchamp… Stops in Berlin, Hannover, Köln, Paris, Zürich….

Fall 2005

BACK TO FRANKFURT SCHOOL - Comp Lit 200
Professor Larry Rickels

Topics include The Case of California, quarrels with Habermas, Benjamin’s ghosts, and the merger proposals between Marxism and psychoanalysis.

COLONIAL DISCOURSE AND POST-COLONIAL THEORY - Comp Lit 200
Professor Colin Gardner

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.

30A — Major Works of European Literature: Classical
James Donelan
SESSION A: June 23 - Aug 1
MTW 11:00-12:25, Psych 1920
Section R 2:00-3:20, Phelps 1420, Enroll: 01289
Section R 12:30-1:50, Phelps 1440, Enroll: 01297
A survey of European literature. Classical and medieval literature from Homer to Dante.

30B — Major Works of European Literature: Renaissance
James Donelan
SESSION B: Aug 4 - Sept 12
MTW 12:30-1:55, Phelps 3515
R 11:00-12:20, Phelps 1445, Enroll: 01313
R 12:30-1:50, Phelps 1445, Enroll: 01321
A survey of European literature. Renaissance and Neoclassical literature from Petrarch to Diderot.

30C — Major Works of European Literature: Modern
Linda Kick
SESSION B: Aug 4 - Sept 12
MTWR 3:30-4:45, Girvetz 1119, Enroll: 01339
A survey of European literature. Romantic and modern literature from Rousseau to Solzhenitsyn.

31 — Major Works of Asian Literatures
Yan Liang
SESSION B: Aug 4 - Sept 12
MWF 3:30-4:50, Phelps 1444, Enroll: 05495
DAn introduction to the diverse literary traditions of Asia through an examination of selected works. Regional focus on East, South, and Southeast Asia varies.

34 — Literature of the Americas
Danielle La France
SESSION A: June 23 - August 1
MTWR 2:00-3:30pm, Girvetz 2119, Enroll: 01347
An introduction to the diverse literary traditions of the Americas through an examination of selected works. Regional focus on North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America varies.

113 — Trauma, Memory, Historiography
Elisabeth Weber
SESSION D: June 23 - July 11
MTWR 2:00-4:05pm, HSSB 1215, Enroll: 15487
Prerequisite: upper-division standing.
How do individuals, communities, cultures, nations remember and/or forget, preserve and/or erase traumatic events?

122A — Holocaust Representations
Susan Derwin
SESSION D: June 23 - July 11
MT RF 2:00-4:05, Girvetz 2128, Enroll: 01370
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. Same course as German 116A.
Close reading of post-Holocaust literature. Taught in English.

186A — The Zombie: Colonialism, Literature, Film, and Theory
Kieran Murphy
SESSION A: June 23 - Aug 1
MWF 5:00-7:05pm, HSSB 1210, Enroll: 17335
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. From box-office smash hits to fantastic literature, from an anthropological puzzle to a philosophical concept, the zombie begs the questions: where does it come from, how did it come into being? The course will investigate the appearance of zombies in literature and film and will examine historical and social context of this phenomenon.

186B — Minority Literature
Mary Seliger
SESSION A: June 23 - Aug 1
MTWR 9:30-10:35, HSSB 3201, Enroll: 15537
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. This course will explore American literature by looking at narrative strategies and genres employed by twentieth century writers of minority literature. We will concentrate on literary expression in the context of minority experiences and identities meeting at the crossroads of American history and legal culture. We will examine three landmark Supreme Court cases when evaluating how do the law and the literature engage in a dialogue with each other? Through an examination of the geographical constructs of space and place, we will also explore issues of race, assimilation, identity, and national belonging by making a comparative examination of representative works of Asian American literature, African American literature, Chicano literature, and Native American literature. Representative texts that we will read include Place: A Short Introduction, Farewell to Manzanar, Native Son, …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Tracks, and Ceremony.