Graduate Courses in Comparative Literature, Fall 2004
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CLT 500 “Methodology”
Sandy Petrey
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This course, "Comparative Literature Methodology," is being offered at a time when all three of the words in its title are the object of heated professional debate. What counts as literature? What should be compared to what else? Which methodologies provide legitimate ways to undertake and pursue comparisons once we determine their object?
The course's purpose will be to discuss how our discipline (Is it a discipline? Is it ours?) got to this point and whether it's a good or bad thing to be here. We'll begin by reading past reports to the American Comparative Literature Association on what American comparatists are supposed to do and not do. Then we'll examine current comparative practices and discuss the intellectual paradigms they might provide. Some of the topics and authors discussed in the latter part of the course will be determined in the early class meetings.
Those early meetings will also decide what types of requirements are suited to a course examining a field in which once-sacrosanct requirements have been dying as fast as pheasants trained to fly in front of Dick Cheney's shotgun. The teacher will get to decide the basis for grades in the course, but he promises to take student opinion into account while doing so.
Wednesday 3:50-6:40 p.m. Melville Library E 4305
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CLT 601.01/EGL 603.02 "Survey
of 20th-Century Critical Theory"
Ira Livingston
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This course will follow some of the main 20th-century strands of European and American literary and cultural theory-- including (but not limited to) structuralism and poststructuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism and queer theory-- considered as informing the evolving project of Cultural Studies. We will start from a kind of "Greatest Hits of Theory" reading list but mobilize it in the direction of less canonical texts, modes and contexts. How does this theoretical legacy equip us to critically engage the worlds in which we move today and toward which we are moving or want to move? What ongoing problematics and what undone theoretical work does it leave for us, and to what extent should it be reconfigured, retrofitted or displaced?
Tuesday 3:50-6:40 p.m. Melville Library E 4305
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CLT 601.02 "Deconstruction and
Criticism"
Hugh Silverman
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Deconstruction is a strategy for reading texts and other social institutions. Criticism is practiced as the literary, aesthetic, cultural, social, religious, legal, or political examination of and commentary on explicit and not-so-explicit modes of presentation and formulation. Deconstruction distinguishes itself from what stands within its domains in order to mark out and formulate the positions and textualities that lie outside its spaces of writing, articulation, and expression.
This seminar will articulate what deconstruction is and how it works. It will also explore ways in which deconstruction offers modes of access to various types of expression and position-taking on many pressing issues of our day. Deconstruction is explicitly contemporary in its temporality and historicity.
The seminar will focus on the writings of Jacques Derrida -- the mastermind behind the practices of deconstruction, but we shall also consider some relevant texts by Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller as well as the theoretical writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Julia Kristeva. The seminar will concern not only literary criticism, but also cultural, aesthetic, institutional, social and political theorical writings.
Readings will include:
Bloom, Hartman, Miller, de Man, Derrida: DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICISM (Continuum)
Derrida: ACTS OF LITERATURE (Routledge)
Derrida: THE TRUTH IN PAINTING (Chicago)
Derrida: OF HOSPITALITY (Stanford)
Derrida: WITHOUT ALIBI (Stanford)
Lyotard: THE DIFFEREND (Minnesota)
Kristeva: STRANGERS TO OURSELVES (Columbia)
Supplementary readings:
Silverman: TEXTUALITIES: BETWEEN HERMENEUTICS AND DECONSTRUCTION (Routledge)
Silverman: INSCRIPTONS: AFTER PHENOMENOLOGY AND STRUCTURALISM (Northwestern)
Silverman (ed) : DERRIDA AND DECONSTRUCTION (Routledge)
Silverman (ed) CULTURAL SEMIOSIS (Routledge)
Silverman (ed) PHILOSOPHY AND DESIRE (Routledge)
Monday 7:00-10:00 p.m. Melville Library E 4305
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CLT 601.03/SPN 509 “Literary
Theory: Contemporary Issues in Critical Theories and Literary Studies”
Román de la Campa
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This course will focus on leading critical issues pertaining to literary and cultural studies today. The initial emphasis will be on clarifying conceptual paradigms as much as possible, outlining their historical evolvement in the 20th Century first, then their spheres of dissemination and contradiction, and finally looking at the ways they can be deployed in analyzing literary and cultural texts (short stories, novels, poems, films, videos, music or other forms). The list of issues and questions will include the following:
History of the Textual Revolution since Romanticism: How does the concept of modern literature unfold through the legacy of textual critiques that derive from Sausurean, formalist, Frankfurt School, reception theory, close reading, structuralist, semiotics, and post-structuralist modes of reading and understanding?
Postmodern, Postcolonial and Subaltern proposals of the past twenty years. Do they offer new points of departure for literary and cultural studies or just a graduate school version of multicultural pluralism? Are the profound differences between the British and Hispanic legacies of colonialism in the Americas highlighted or erased through these discourses? What are the claims of diasporic, post-nationalist and post-humanist forms of writing and reading? What role does feminism play in them?
Culture and New citizenry. Are contemporary subjects susceptible to a powerful aesthetic pull which post-humanistic theories fail to address? Is there such a thing as an aesthetic of globalization? Can it be studied critically? Does literature play a role in it?
Performativity. A look at various notions surrounding this general trope; specifically how it impacts modes of writing and reading, as well as the idea of creativity, autobiography and culture brokering prevalent in the pull towards techno-mediatic globalization.
The final list of writers, critics and theorists is still in progress. It will constitute a selection of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Damiela Eltit, A, Carpentier, Antonio Negri, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Paul de Man, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, J. Derrida, R. Barthes, Walter Benjamin. S. Hall, L. Lowe, R. Chow, Stephen Greenblatt, Theodor Adorno, Nelly Richard, G. Deleuze, Clarice Lispector, Fredric Jameson, Severo Sarduy, W. Wenders, Roger Bartra, Antonio Cornejo Polar, and others.
This course will be taught in Spanish, but nearly all the reading will be available in English as well as Spanish. Students can also write their papers in either language.
Thursday 4:00-7:00 p.m. Melville Library N 3062
CLT 597 Directed Readings, M.A.
CLT 599 Independent Study
CLT 690 Directed Readings
CLT 698 Practicum in Teaching
CLT 699 Dissertation Research: Ph.D. Candidacy
CLT 700 Dissertation Research: Off-Campus - Domestic Student
CLT 701 Dissertation Research: Off-Campus - International Student
Also of Interest:
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EGL 603.1 "Fetishism,
Thing Theory, and Culture"
Adrienne Munich
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The main focus of the course will be to survey contemporary uses of the concept of fetishism in cultural discourse. The seminar also makes connections between current uses of fetishism and thing theory. Fetishism, a notion that originated in early modern trade between Portugal and Africa, was appropriated by two major Victorian theorists, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and the field of anthropology, developing in the Victorian era. The course thus begins with anthropological, Marxist, and psychoanalytic uses of the term and goes on to consider the various ways that the fetish becomes embodied—as commodity, as body part. Its use as a term to describe relationships then takes us to thing theory and material culture. Things have been described in similar terms as fetishes have. We will read the basic theorists of the three kinds of fetishism described above, with some applications of their work in criticism in the humanities. Among the writers about fetishism we consider are William Pietz, Emily Apter, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jean Baudrillard. Then we will read some of the thing theorists, such as Arjun Appaduri, W. T. J. Mitchell, and Bill Brown. We will also read some Victorian and early twentieth-century literary texts and will view a few films to use as case studies. Students will be expected to lead class discussion on some of the readings and will write a seminar paper. Attendance at all the seminar meetings is a requirement of the course.
Thursday 12:50-3:40 p.m.
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MUS 507 "Music, Art, and
Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna"
Joe Auner
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Developments in music, art, and culture in turn-of-the-century Vienna focusing on Wolf, Gustav and Alma Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, Lehar in relationship to figures such as Kraus, Freud, Klimt, Schnitzler, Kokoskcha, Otto Wagner, and Stefan Zweig. Study of ways in which artists and critics have attempted to formulate the connections between music and issues of nation, race, politics. Consideration of Mahler, the thrice-exiled and the tone poet of nature, in the context of the urban sphere and modernization. Readings from those listed above as well as Adorno, Musil, Schorske, and more recent approaches. The course is directed toward graduate students in performance and musicology, but students from other discplines are welcome. Weekly assignments, one 15-20 page paper, presentation.
Tuesday 1:00-4:00 p.m.
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PHI 630 "Continental
Philosophy Merleau-Ponty"
Edward Casey
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An exploration of central themes in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, early and late: the lived body, the life-world, the primacy of perception, the speaking word, sexuality, the visible and the invisible, the fold, and the special status of painting among the arts. Readings from the Phenomenology of Perception and the Visible and the Invisible, along with selected essays. The relationship between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida will be discussed from time to time.
Tuesday 7:00-10:00 p.m. Harriman Hall 249