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