Comparative Literature

Courses

CPLT 515a, Proseminar in Comparative Literature  Katie Trumpener

Introductory proseminar for all first- and second-year students in Comparative Literature (and other interested graduate students). An introduction to key problems in the discipline of Comparative Literature, its disciplinary history, and its major theoretical and methodological debates (including philology; Marxist, structuralist, and poststructuralist approaches; world literature; translation). Emphasis on wide reading and intense discussion, in lieu of term paper. Graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory; offered every other year.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 554b / ENGL 827b, Novel Minds: The Representation of Consciousness from Austen to Woolf  Ruth Yeazell

Close study of selected novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, with particular attention to the representation of consciousness and the development of the free indirect style. Our reading of fiction is supplemented by narrative theory drawn from James, Wayne Booth, Käte Hamburger, Ann Banfield, Gérard Genette, Dorrit Cohn, and others.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 556a / CLSS 877a / RLST 613a, Rhetorics of the Ancient World  Michal Beth Dinkler and Irene Peirano

This interdisciplinary course takes as its starting point Greco-Roman rhetoric as a codified system and explores its relevance for contemporary interpretation of ancient texts. Moving back and forth between rhetoric as a set of norms and rhetoric as a condition of discourse, we engage with contemporary rhetorical studies in Classics and Biblical studies. Topics include rhetoric and narrative, exemplarity and imitation across the literary and spiritual realms, “anti-rhetoricism,” embedded rhetorical performances (e.g., speeches, oratory, etc.), and nonverbal forms of persuasion (e.g., visual, emotional, etc.).
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 558a / EALL 593a / EAST 554, Hiroshima to Fukushima: Ecology and Culture in Japan  Stephen Poland

This course explores how Japanese literature, cinema, and popular culture have engaged with questions of environment, ecology, pollution, and climate change from the wake of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 to the ongoing Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in the present. Environmental disasters and the slow violence of their aftermath have had an enormous impact on Japanese cultural production, and we examine how these cultural forms seek to negotiate and work through questions of representing the unrepresentable, victimhood and survival, trauma and national memory, uneven development and discrimination, the human and the nonhuman, and climate change’s impact on imagining the future. Special attention is given to the possibilities and limitations of different forms—the novel, poetry, film, manga, anime—that Japanese writers and artists have to think about humans’ relationship with our environment.
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

CPLT 562b / GMAN 654b, Living Form: Organicism in Society and Aesthetics  Kirk Wetters

Starting with Kant, the organic is defined as a processual relation of the part and the whole, thereby providing a new model of the individual as a self-contained totality. We explore the implications of this conception in Goethe’s writings on morphology (The Metamorphosis of Plants, “Orphic Primal Words”), the Romantics’ Athenaeum, Hanslick’s On the Beautiful in Music, Oswald Spengler’s cultural morphology, the concept of autopoiesis in Maturana and Varela, Luhmann’s systems theory, and Canguilhem’s critique of the analogy of organic life and society.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 622a / AMST 622a and AMST 623b, Working Group on Globalization and Culture  Michael Denning

A continuing yearlong collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory.” The group, drawing on several disciplines, meets regularly to discuss common readings, develop collective and individual research projects, and present that research publicly. The general theme for the working group is globalization and culture, with three principal aspects: (1) the globalization of cultural industries and goods, and its consequences for patterns of everyday life as well as for forms of fiction, film, broadcasting, and music; (2) the trajectories of social movements and their relation to patterns of migration, the rise of global cities, the transformation of labor processes, and forms of ethnic, class, and gender conflict; (3) the emergence of and debates within transnational social and cultural theory. The specific focus, projects, and directions of the working group are determined by the interests, expertise, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change. There are a small number of openings for second-year graduate students. Students interested in participating should contact
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 642b / NELC 616b, Modern Arabic Poetry and Poetics  Robyn Creswell

Poetry was the preeminent art of the Arab world for much of the twentieth century. Poets served as the region’s public intellectuals, framing and shaping debates about the most urgent events and topics of communal concern. The post-WWII period was also a moment when the very definition of Arabic poetry—formally as well as historically—was subject to important transformations. This course serves as an introduction to the major Arab poets of the postwar period—including Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala’ika, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, and Iman Mersal—as well as central debates about the nature and scope of poetry. Topics include the poetics of exile, “committed literature,” poetry and myth, the dialectic of tradition and modernity, the prose poem, and translation. Primary readings are in Arabic, with occasional secondary readings in English. Prerequisite: Arabic L5 or higher, or permission of the instructor.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 655a / MDVL 662a / NELC 615a, Medieval Baghdad  Shawkat Toorawa

The founding of Baghdad in the mid-eighth-century by the ascendant ’Abbasid dynasty (ruled 750–1258) ushered in a period of intense scholarly, administrative, and artistic activity. The rulers patronized poets and prose writers and supported translation from Greek, Persian, and other languages into Arabic; learned individuals hosted intellectual discussions (and meals and drinking sessions) late into the night at their homes; the literati spent entire nights in bookstores voraciously reading everything they could lay their hands on; theologians and philosophers debated the nature of reality and of God; scientists tested theories in engineering, medicine, and mathematics; and travelers reported their discoveries from China and India. We read works by and about Baghdadis, including how they overthrew the preceding Umayyad dynasty and how they built the legendary Round City. We read travel accounts, geographies, and graffiti; and we read tales from the Arabian Nights. We see how paper, books, and writing changed Baghdad, Islamic society, and human knowledge; and how Arab-Islamic society’s contributions changed the world.
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

CPLT 672b / ENGL 672b, Milton  David Quint

This course studies Milton’s poetry and some of his controversial prose. We investigate the relation of the poetry to its historical contexts, focusing on the literary, religious, social, and political forces that shaped Milton’s verse. We survey and assess some of the dominant issues in contemporary Milton studies, examining the types of readings that psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and historicist critics have produced. A brief oral report and a term paper (as well as a prospectus and preliminary bibliography for the term paper) required.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 676a / SPAN 688a, Law and Literature in Modern Latin America  Roberto González Echevarría

A study of major modern narrative works in Latin America from the independence and post-independence period in the nineteenth century to the age of drug trafficking and the AIDS epidemic today. The course begins with the Cuban Cirilo Villaverde’s antislavery novel Cecilia Valdés (1880); moves on to the regionalist classic Doña Bárbara (1929) by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos and the dictator novel El señor presidente (1946) by the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias; peaks with Gabriel García Márquez’s total novel Cien años de soledad (1967); and ends with the Colombian Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios (1994) and the Mexican Mario Bellatin’s Salón de belleza (2009). The course follows the thematics of the law, particularly Roman Law, and the way in which the characters are controlled or driven by civil and criminal law issues that constitute the plots of the novels. In Spanish.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 677b / RUSS 699b, The Performing Arts in Twentieth-Century Russia  Katerina Clark

Covers ballet, opera, theater, mass spectacle, and film. Theory of the performing arts, including selections from the writings of some of the most famous Russian directors, such as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Balanchine. Their major productions and some of the major Russian plays of the twentieth century (e.g., by Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and contemporary dramatists). No knowledge of Russian required. Students taking the course for credit in Comparative Literature can write their papers on texts in other languages.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 679b / JDST 686b, Major Modern Jewish Poets  Peter Cole

This course introduces students to a diverse group of modern Jewish poets, from Gertrude Stein, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, and Adrienne Rich to Muriel Rukeyser, Yehuda Amichai, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Leonard Cohen, and others. Writing in English, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and French, these poets gave seminal expression to Jewish life in a variety of modes and permutations, and in the process produced poems of lasting and universal value. The class explores work as art and considers pressing questions of cultural, historical, and political context. All readings are in English. Permission of the instructor required.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 684a / ENGL 574a / ITAL 720a / RNST 684a, Renaissance Epic  Jane Tylus and David Quint

This course looks at Renaissance epic poetry in relationship to classical models and as a continuing generic tradition. It examines epic type scenes, formal strategies, and poetic architecture. It looks at themes of exile and imperial foundations, aristocratic ideology, and the role of gender. The main readings are drawn from Vergil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s De bello civili, Dante’s Purgatorio, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
M 2:30pm-4:20pm

CPLT 688a / JDST 842a / RLST 775a, Political Theology  Hannan Hever

This course investigates the theological aspects of modern political ideologies. Subjects include sovereignty, universalism, law, election, commandment, and messianism. Primary readings include Carl Schmitt, Martin Buber, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Daniel Boyarin, and Giorgio Agamben.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 699b / GMAN 603 / PHIL 602, Heidegger’s Being and Time  Martin Hägglund

A systematic, chapter-by-chapter study of Heidegger’s Being and Time, arguably the most important work of philosophy of the twentieth century. All the major themes of the book are addressed in detail, with a particular emphasis on care, time, death, and the meaning of being.
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

CPLT 704a / GMAN 682a, Antigone after Hegel: The Ambiguities of Ethical Life and Action  Dirk Setton

The course is dedicated to three interrelated interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone, which present divergent accounts of the central conflict of the tragedy and of the ethical character of its heroine’s act of burying her brother Polyneices, against the edict of the ruler of Thebes, her uncle Creon. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel conceives of Antigone as embodying the natural (or “divine”) law of the family that opposes the instituted (or “human”) law of the polis. According to Hegel, both laws represent legitimate ethical claims, which is why their violent confrontation marks the demise of the very concept and reality of (ancient) ethical life. Both Jacques Lacan (in Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis) and Judith Butler (in Antigone’s Claim) develop their readings of Sophocles’ tragedy in critical debate with Hegel’s influential interpretation. While Lacan holds that Antigone does not represent first and foremost the unwritten laws of kinship relations but rather an ethical subject whose action reveals the essential connection between desire and death, Butler insists against Hegel and Lacan that Antigone should be understood neither as an embodiment of the “divine laws” of the family nor of the “symbolical” law of desire. To the contrary, Antigone’s own troubled family history suggests that she is the very figure of a critical destitution of the normativity of kinship relations. The course aims at both understanding and discussing the controversial constellation of these three approaches to Sophocles’ tragedy. Three questions are at the center of the debate: What does Antigone stand for? How should we conceive of the central conflict of the tragedy? And how should we conceptualize the ethical character of Antigone’s act to bury her brother? Particular emphasis is put on three insights that Antigone articulates: the tragic irony of ethical life; the deep ambiguity of individual autonomy; and the paradoxes of the normativity of kinship relations and the gender identities that lie within it.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 708a, Age of Disenchantment  Giuseppe Mazzotta

This course focuses on the literary debates, theological arguments, and scientific shifts taking place between the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1437–38) and the Council of Trent and beyond, by reading key texts by Valla, Cusa, Pulci, Luther, Erasmus, Ariosto, Campanella, Bruno, Galileo, and Bellarmino. It examines issues such as crisis of belief, the authority of the past, the emergence of freedom, new aesthetics, and the effort to create a new theological language for modern times.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 715b / ITAL 940b, 1492: Before and After: Geographical and Linguistic Itineraries  Jane Tylus

Not simply the date of Columbus’s landing, 1492 also marks Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death, the banishment of Jews from Spain and Sicily, the election of a Borgia pope—Alexander VI, celebrated by Machiavelli—and the birth of Pietro Aretino. We briefly consider the shared cultural and religious history of Italy and Spain, even as most of our attention will be focused on Italy’s role as precursor: the Florentine Vespucci was the first to use the phrase “nuovo mondo,” and Columbus was inspired by the stories of Marco Polo and travels of Italian pilgrims to the Holy Land. We start with Columbus and his contemporary Savonarola and move into the “new worlds” of the early sixteenth century as represented by four topics: the rise of print; the burgeoning pastoral genre; the (brief) reaffirmation of the Florentine republic with cameo appearances by Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Machiavelli; and the otherworldly (but also very much of this world) romance of Ariosto. We spend time in the Beinecke Library with maps, Savonarola’s sermons, and early sixteenth-century Sienese pastoral plays, and also spend an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Renaissance paintings. In English.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 735b / AFST 885b / FREN 885b, Modern French Poetry in the Maghreb  Thomas Connolly

A survey of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry written in French by authors from North Africa, including works by Amrouche, Sénac, Khaïr-Eddine, Laâbi, Nissaboury, Djaout, Jabès, Farès, Ben Jelloun, Meddeb, Acherchour, Negrouche, Dib, and Bekri. Readings in French, discussion in English. Prerequisite: reading knowledge of French.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 782b / GMAN 742b, Being a Person  Rüdiger Campe and Katrin Truestedt

The course explores the notion of personhood as a context for contemporary debates on human, animal, and environmental rights. The social and legal notion of a “person” in modernity has been deeply informed by how “persons” are formed and performed on stage and in narration, and vice versa. Readings focus on two areas: (1) basic texts on the history of the notion of “person” and “character” in legal, poetical, and philosophical contexts from Hobbes to contemporary debates in environmental law; (2) the performance of personhood on the stage and the narrative evocation of a new modern character in the rise of the modern novel. Gender, race, and social class are of relevance throughout, as well as the question of being a nonperson (a witch, a monster, an outcast). With the opening cases of Shakespeare’s Tempest and Goethe’s Werther, we discuss what it means to appear as a person on stage and as a character in a novel. We pursue the discussion into modernity with modernist and contemporary narratives and how they test the limits and conditions of individual personhood (Woolf, Kafka, Handke, Sebald). We end with contemporary post-migrant theater (Jelinek, Ronen) and ecopoetics (Spahr).
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 788a / GMAN 571a, Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities: The End of the Novel  Rüdiger Campe

Musil’s unfinished, gigantic novel Man without Qualities (published 1930–33) is one of the quintessential modernist (interwar) European novels. Close (i.e., selective) reading of the novel is introduced by examples from Musil’s earlier highly experimental narratives (Unions; The Blackbird), and it is accompanied by looking into Musil’s widespread scientific and sociolegal interests, which are relevant for the novel (statistics and probability; the Vienna Circle and the modern science of philosophy; theories of accountability and the case study; Wagner and Romantic music; the theory of the image in the age of cinema). Taking as its point of departure the intertwining of essayistic writing and narration that characterizes Man without Qualities, the reading centers on the self-theorization of the novel and, even more fundamental, the question of prose as literary form and method of notation. Readings in English or German. Discussions in English.
F 10:30am-12pm