Ph.D. Comparative Literature

AAS 522 Publishing Articles in Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (also

COM 522

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ENG 504

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GSS 503

) In this interdisciplinary class, students of race and gender read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

CLA 513 Ancient Literary Criticism (also

COM 516

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HLS 513

) Study of a selection of critical texts, such as the following: Plato, Republic and Phaedrus; Aristotle, Poetics and Rhetoric; "Longinus," On the Sublime; Cicero, De oratore, etc.; Horace, De arte poetica; and Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria.

CLA 529 Topics in the Hellenic Tradition (also

HLS 529

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COM 527

) An interdisciplinary seminar devoted to the study of aspects of the post-classical Greek literary and cultural tradition, including modern Greek literature, and its relation to classical literature and civilization.

COM 500 Comparative Literature Graduate Pedagogy Seminar Discussion, exploration, and refinement of critical skills in teaching literature. Topics covered include: setting goals for the classroom, starting and facilitating discussion, and grading. Wider professional issues, such as developing a statement of teaching philosophy, the appropriate use of technology in the classroom, designing syllabi, using translations, and preparing a teaching dossier, will be discussed.

COM 513 Topics in Literature and Philosophy (also

MOD 580

) Chance and contingency were long thought to lie outside the realm of knowledge. Then there arose new means for measuring probabilities of the most varied kinds. This seminar will explore the conditions and occurrence of that shift, as well as its consequences, as they are reflected in a few literary and philosophical works.

COM 521 Introduction to Comparative Literature This course provides a general introduction to the theory and methods of comparative literature, with an emphasis on issues of interdisciplinarity. We consider the relationship of comparative literature to fields of study extending beyond the literary: aesthetics; semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism. The aim is to discover within and among these diverse and formidable fields some promising avenues for comparative literary research.

COM 530 Comparative Poetics of Passing: Race, Ethnicity, Sexuality (also

ENG 520

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GSS 530

) The expansion of race theory from the Americas into the global scene invites a cross-cultural approach to the fluidity of identity. This seminar investigates fiction and film from the African American, Jewish American, LGBTQ, and Israeli-Palestinian contexts to broadly explore how society constructs and deconstructs race, ethnicity, and gender. It focuses on representations of passing and reverse passing as well as doubled/split identities for a wide-ranging, comparative discussion of the political and the psychological dynamics of identity and selfhood.

COM 534 How does History Appear? Critical Aesthetics, Lessing through Benjamin The study of literary and aesthetic theory and the production of critical theory from the relationship between them. Readings primarily in Lessing, Diderot, Baudelaire, Benjamin.

COM 535 Contemporary Critical Theories (also

ENG 528

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GER 536

) Criticism as an applied art and as an autonomous discipline. Exploration of its place in intellectual history and a theoretical analysis of its basic assumptions. [Topics vary each year.]

COM 536 Topics in Critical Theory A course exploring some of the critical modes of inquiry at work in the practice and theory of different human activities, including: language, literature, philosophical reflection, aesthetic form, epistemology, historical and social formation. Topics may include: dialectical thought, concrete experience and abstraction, differential value, sensation and intellectual mediation; temporal experience, graphic and architectural form; line and figure; historicity; origins of language and society; political and cultural theory. See current course listings for specific topic(s) when course is offered.

COM 537 Imaginary Worlds: Early Modern Science Fiction (also

ENG 537

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HOS 537

) Science fiction (SF) writing may seem a definitively modern phenomenon, but it has a rich and varied history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this course, we examine early modern SF not only a vehicle for popularizing the new philosophy of the "scientific revolution," but as a space for the interrogation of competing beliefs about the relationships between humankind and the cosmos, knowledge and belief, or public and private living. Through early modern SF, we explore the self-consciously literary and poetic ways in which early modern natural philosophers worked through their ideas. No "two cultures" here.

COM 542 Women and Liberation: Feminist Poetics and Politics in the Americas (1960s to the present) (also

GSS 542

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SPO 556

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ENG 542

) This course aims to explore different forms that the question of liberation has taken in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 1960s, the course touches upon different philosophical concepts and poetic figures that have shaped the language of women's struggles (intersectionality, black and third world feminism, subalternity and feminist epistemologies, capitalist accumulation and "witch"-hunting, (re)transmission of knowledge).

COM 543 Topics in Medieval Literature (also

FRE 543

) Comparative studies in selected Latin and vernacular texts of the European Middle Ages, especially, but not exclusively, from the period 1250-1400. The seminar intends to provide an introduction to the methods of literary research in the medieval period.

COM 547 The Renaissance (also

ENG 530

) A study of selected major genres and modes of Renaissance literature, such as pastoral, satire, romance, picaresque, confession, lyric, epic, comedy, and tragedy. Attention is given to important cultural, social, and intellectual currents affecting their development, such as Christian Humanism, Reformation and Counter Reformation, mysticism, neo-Platonism, and skepticism. Representative works from various national literatures are chosen for close analysis.

COM 553 The Eighteenth Century in Europe (also

ENG 546

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GSS 553

) A consideration of the primary topoi and defining oppositions of Enlightenment thought. Texts and specific focus vary from year to year.

COM 555 Realism and Symbolism Readings in all genres and theoretical pronouncements of two principal movements of the later 19th century to explore their origins and dynamics and to analyze their relationship to romanticism and to the rise of scientific thinking. Topics may focus on selected authors or on broader perspectives, but the interrelationship among the arts is emphasized.

COM 559 Constraint in Modern European Fiction & Poetry (also

FRE 558

) A study of 20th century writing in European languages relying to some degree on the principle of constraint or 'strict form'. Queneau, Calvino, Mathews, Perec, Roubaud and other members of Oulipo will constitute the central focus, but depending on students' linguistic competences works by e.g., Harig, Kharms, Nabokov, Cortazar may be included. Attention is focused on underlying principles as well as on practice and product.

COM 560 The Novel and Romance Major types of written fiction from the Greek romance to 18th-century novels, including non-Western texts; the cultural background of written fiction; and romance (ancient, medieval, and baroque), the picaresque novel, the psychological novella, and early realist fiction are studied.

COM 563 Studies in Forms of Narrative A systematic analysis of narrative forms through the close examination of particular texts. At various times the following is considered: the prose romance, the picaresque, the thesis novel, the novel of manners, the stream-of-consciousness novel, the nouveau roman, and shorter forms of fiction.

COM 565 Studies in Forms of Poetry (also

ENG 544

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FRE 565

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GER 565

) This seminar explores the intricate relations of poetry to history and memory in the troubled 20th century. Individual poets are closely studied for their intrinsic interest but also for their (known and still to be discovered) connections with each other. The poets are Eugenio Montale, René Char, Paul Celan, and Anne Carson, but other writers will also be called on from time to time. Questions of war and resistance are important, and above all the course attends to what one might think of as the fate of language under pressure.

COM 572 Introduction to Critical Theory Through a comparative focus on the concepts of dialectics and difference, we read some of the formative theoretical, critical and philosophical works which continue to ground interdisciplinary critical theory today. Focal works by Lukacs, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, de Man, Arendt, and Benjamin are included among the texts we read.

COM 581 Topics in Non-Western and General Literature (also

EAS 589

) By examining one or more literatures of the Near East or East Asia, and by referring to Western examples as well, the course raises literary issues that cannot be aired through the study of Western literature alone. Emphasis in any given year falls on Arabic, Persian, Chinese, or Japanese literature viewed in a comparative context.

COM 585 Arts of Imitation A study of the arts of imitation, ranging from literal translation to interpretative adaptation.

EAS 594 Seeing the Interior: Cinema, Media, Inverse Visuality (also

COM 594

) From the invention of microscope, X-ray, representations of biological contagion and virus, to surveillance camera, the world is increasingly mediated and constituted by visual technologies and new forms of visualities that collapse the boundary between visibility and invisibility. This seminar explores visual representations of the interior and their mediating roles in larger historical and social processes of colonialism, modernization, urbanization, and global capitalism in the East Asian and global context. Readings intersect cinema and media studies, globalization, urban studies, theories of the body, and science and medical studies.

ENG 566 Studies in the English Novel (also

COM 570

) Selected 20th-century English novelists, considered in terms of critical theory, technique, and form.

ENG 568 Criticism and Theory (also

COM 568

) A study in the major texts in criticism and theory. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Shelley, Derrida, and Foucault, among others. Topics include mimesis, structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and new historicism.

ENG 573 Problems in Literary Study (also

AAS 573

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COM 573

) An examination of selected issues or texts that offer radical challenges to the profession of literary study today. Intended for students in all periods of specialization.

FRE 526 Seminar in 19th- and 20th-Century French Literature (also

COM 525

) Treatment of either the works of an individual writer or a broad topic, such as the impact on literature of other forms of intellectual or artistic activity, including philosophy, the visual arts, history, and psychology.

FRE 583 Seminar in Romance Linguistics and/or Literary Theory (also

COM 583

) An examination of either the intersection of linguistic and literary analysis as illustrated by the Romance languages or the theoretical foundations of literary study.

GER 525 Studies in German Film (also

MOD 510

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COM 524

) Course explores movements in German cinema, with attention given to the cultural and ideological contexts as well as recent debates in contemporary film theory. Attention may focus on such pivotal topics as Weimar or the New German cinema, issues in German film theory, questions of film and Nazi culture, or avant-garde cinema, and on genres such as the "Heimatfilm," the "Street Film," and works by women and minority filmmakers.

HUM 597 Humanistic Perspectives on History and Society (also

COM 597

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ENG 593

) In this seminar we locate Spinoza and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) in the exciting currents of seventeenth-century philosophy, theology, biblical scholarship and exegesis. Resituating Spinoza in Golden Age Holland we examine the resources and relevant controversies that shaped the Tractatus, with an eye to common concerns and traditions: the legacies of humanism and Reformation in the Netherlands, for instance, the larger worlds of his friends, as well as the vibrant Jewish community in Golden Age Amsterdam and the varieties of Christian lay piety that fall broadly under the banner of "the Radical Reformation."

MUS 515 Topics in the History of Opera (also

COM 517

) Critical, historical, and analytic studies of music, language, and drama in the European operatic tradition are studied.

PHI 510 German Philosophy since Kant (also

COM 510

) Course topics vary from year to year.

PHI 516 Special Topics in the History of Philosophy (also

COM 512

) An intensive study of selected philosophers or philosophical movements in the history of philosophy.

PHI 530 Philosophy of Art (also

COM 531

) The course gives a systematic examination of philosophical problems related to art criticism.

SLA 527 Mimesis: Narrative and Image (also

COM 526

) . Drawing on pivotal moments in Russian literary history, this course explores the dynamic exchanges between visual and textual media from medieval Russia to Pushkin to Moscow Conceptualism