(CLASSICS)
5550 LIT 517B/73622
Greek Wisdom Literature
Martin Bloomer
TH 5:00 – 6:15
In this course we will read samples of one of the oldest and most
enduring forms of literature, wisdom or sapiential literature.
The wise man instructs his audience through fables, proverbs,
traditional tales, and accounts of the universe in the right way
to live. The texts read in Greek range from the archaic period
(Hesiod) to collections of wise sayings from the Hellenistic period,
the Life of Aesop, Lucian’s account of a trip to the moon,
and the Wisdom of Ben Sirach. The Near Eastern origins and the
Jewish and Christian traditions will also be considered (in translation
and some in the original Greek).
5573 LIT 522/73616
Roman Comedy
Catherine Schlegel
TH 3:30 – 4:45
This advanced course introduces students to Latin comic drama.
Comic plays were a popular attraction at Roman religious festivals,
and Rome produced two outstanding comic writers of completely
opposite temperament, the boisterous and broad Plautus, and the
wry and elegant Terence. Both continue to influence Western dramatic
forms. Readings from Plautus and Terence reveal the conventions
of comic drama and its use as a distinctive instrument to reflect
upon the concerns of Roman life.
6370 LIT 652/73650 (May be used to fulfill the Philosophy
requirement)
Hermeneutics, Deconstruction and Medieval Thought
Stephen Gersh
The aims of this course are both methodological
and historical. The methodological part will consist of an introduction
to hermeneutics (in a broad sense) as theorized and/or practiced
in certain areas of modern continental philosophy. After a brief
look at the crucial innovations of Husserl, we shall study carefully
chosen extracts (in English translation) of Heidegger: Being and
Time and What is Called Thinking, Gadamer: Truth and Method, and
Derrida: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination
in order to illuminate the different (even opposing) ways in which
the idea of "hermeneutics" can develop. This general
discussion will be combined with specific consideration of the
themes of allegory and negativity. The historical part of the
course will concentrate on late ancient, patristic, and early
medieval readings (Origen: On First Principles, Augustine: On
Christian Teaching, Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Proclus:
Commentary on Plato's Timaeus). Here, we shall attempt to advance
our comprehension of ancient literature by 1. looking for parallels
with modern hermeneutic techniques, 2. applying the modern techniques
in test cases. The course is intended to be relatively open-ended
i.e. students will be expected to think about the way in which
these discussions are internally coherent and also relate to their
own areas of interest (which may be elsewhere in philosophy, theology,
or literature (Latin or vernacular)). Requirement: one final essay
of ca. 20 pp.
(ENGLISH) (May Fullfill the Literature
requirement)
681 LIT 543/73728
Ricardian Poetry
Robert Meyer-Lee
M 1:30-4:15
Does the poetry written between the years 1360 and 1400 have any
necessary relation to the monarch who reigned during the second
half of this period? Or, more important, does this poetry share
discernable formal and thematic qualities? Does it possess, collectively,
a self-consciousness of its place in literary history? Although
these questions must remain open, few would dispute that during
these years there occurred a remarkable burst of thematically
sophisticated, formally innovative, and aesthetically powerful
vernacular poetry-the first such sustained poetic excellence in
English since the Anglo-Saxon period. In this seminar we will
read closely representative works of three of this period's major
poets: at minimum, the "C" version of Langland's Piers
Plowman, Chaucer's dream visions, and the Pearl-Poet's Pearl and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will seek to contextualize
these works in their social, political, economic, religious, and
literary histories, and at the same time to theorize their aesthetic
response to these histories. Some time will be devoted to becoming
acquainted with the extensive secondary work on these poems, and
students will be expected to complete a substantial research paper
as well as smaller projects.
6679 LIT 544/73729
Them 'n' Us: Geography and Identity in Anglo-Saxon England
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe
TH 9:30-10:45
This course seeks to explore the structures of identity through
which Anglo-Saxons recognized themselves and others. We will focus
primarily on Old English writings that explore the larger category
of the "not-us" and "our" relation to it:
translations of Orosius's history, Bede's history, the Letter
of Alexander to Aristotle, Wonders of the East, Apollonius of
Tyre, portions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other texts. We
will be looking particularly at the ways in which Anglo-Saxons
peopled the category of "other" and, conversely, imagined
themselves. Topics for analysis will include contemporary approaches
to identity, ethnicity in early England and the difficulties posed
for us by analytic terms deriving from nineteenth- (and twentieth-)
century nationalism, Anglo-Saxon geographic imaginings, contemporary
maps, notions of borders (within and without England), foreigners
(and laws relating to them), and Anglo-Saxon "orientalism."
Prerequisite: An introductory course in Old English or permission
of the instructor.
Requirements: A short, exploratory paper, a final paper (with
an eye to publication), a midterm (ungraded but evaluated), two
oral presentations.
6684 LIT 555 E/73754
Fantastic in the 18th Century: Science Fiction & Gothic
Margaret Doody
W 1:30-4:15
The eighteenth century (or "The Long Eighteenth Century")
has long been known as "The Age of Reason"; it seems
time to look at this period as also "The Age of the Fantastic."
Much thought is carried on through the medium of the unrealistic
imaginary, and what might be called the spiritual grotesque. The
fantastic meets a need to imagine societies that do not yet exist,
approaches to aesthetic, social and moral standards not bound
to follow currently dominant or traditionally respectable roads
to suppositious fulfillment. Drama is always fantastic--so Corneille
indicates in his meta-theatrical comedy L'Illusion comique.
Fantasy is a staple of satire (as in The Rape of the Lock,
The Dunciad, Gulliver's Travels and Candide (all
on our reading list). The fantastic runs through many genres,
however, and clusters about and within the visual arts. New modes
of writing partly invented in the seventeenth and eighteenth century
include science fiction; we will read some early examples of the
production of alternative worlds: Margaret Cavendish's Blazing
World; Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyages to the Moon and Sun,
and Paltock's Peter Wilkins, considering these in relation
to a well-known antique precursor Vera Historia (True
Story) by one of the 18th century's favorite comic authors,
Lucian.
An under-inspected area of our period is mystic literature, or
speculative religious writings, seeking to illuminate the mind
and the soul. Such writings, overt if unorthodox enlighteners,
seem from the time of Paracelsus in the mid 16th century to have
a deep connection with scientific and social thinking. We will
look at a couple of texts by the mystic Jakob Boehme (d. 1624),
and at extracts of Paracelsus and of Rosicrucian and anti- Rosicrucian
works, including Villars' Le comte de Gabalis, drawn
on by Pope for The Rape of the Lock. We shall examine
the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), an important influence
upon European and American culture. Such works deeply affect as
well as reflect ideas of the self, and of human community and
relationships.
The rise of the "Gothic" will be studied in this religious
or quasi-religious context. English Gothic material by authors
like M.G. "Monk Lewis" and Ann Radcliffe will be mingled
with some material by non-English writers, such as Schiller (with
his short story The Ghost-seer [Der Geisterseher]), and
Goethe. We will also look into the rise of new or freshly redesigned
"traditional" works like Oriental tales and fairy stories.
Such tales are not only being translated or transcribed but freshly
designed, and newly created, as we can see, for example, in Frances
Sheridan's Nourjahad. A new genre appears at the turn
of the new century, the fantasy story written expressly for children,
with appealing non-realistic illustrations, like William Roscoe's
The Butterfly's Ball and The Grasshopper's Feast,
and Catherine Ann Turner Dorset's The Peacock "at Home"
(1807).
We shall read one substantial "realistic"
work, Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814), examining
this novel in light of these various traditions other than the
realistic at work within it.
Book List:
The Blazing World and Other Writings
ed Kate Lilley
Penguin Classics
ISBN 0140433724
Swift
Gulliver’s Travels
ed Robert DeMaria
ISBN 0141439491
Voltaire Candide, Micromégas
in Candide
trans. Donald Frame
signet
ISBN 0451524268
Voltaire, Candide (optional)
(Original language)
Gallimard
ISBN 2070389065
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Laocoon : An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry
trans Edward A. McCormick
Johns Hopkins UP pb.
ISBN 0801831398
Friedrich von Schiller
The Ghost-seer
Hesperus Press
ISBN 1843910349
Charles Perrault (optional)
Contes de Perrault
Hachette
ISBN 2011552346
Charles Perrault
Perrault’s Fairy Tales
Dover
ISBN 0486223116
Oriental Tales
ed. Robert L. Mack
Oxford World’s Classics
ISBN 0192827642
Arabian Night’s Entertainments
ed. Robert L. Mack
Oxford World’s Classics
ISBN 00192834797
William Beckford
Vathek
ed. Roger Lonsdale
Oxford University Press
ISBN 0192836560
6685 LIT 558/73755
Global Romanticisms
Greg Kucich
T 3:30-6:00
Some of the most enduring stereotypes of British Romanticism involve
the cultivation of solitary genius, the return to a pristine Nature,
and the celebration of local, often rural community. Compelling
as these cultural ideals may seem, they have been complicated
and ultimately enriched by recent scholarship that situates the
cultural productions of literary Romanticism within the larger
geopolitical frameworks of their historical epoch -- such as Britain's
colonial enterprise, the Napoleonic wars, worldwide commercial
systems, the slave trade and abolition movement, travel and exploration,
missionary evangelicanism, transatlantic networks of political
and economic exchange, the collision of regional environments,
global feminism. To become alert to the interaction of these global
forces with the period's literary activity is to develop a new,
complex appreciation of multiple forms of "Romanticism"
operating and clashing together in relation to rapidly changing,
increasingly interconnected world developments. Building on the
new scholarly fascination with such larger maps of "Romanticism,"
this seminar will explore the intersections of the local, the
national, and the global in well-known canonical works of romantic
era literature as well as a considerable number of lesser-known
writings. Authors to be considered will include Blake, Wordsworth,
Wollstonecraft, Equiano, Southey, Inchbald, Coleridge, Baillie,
More, Austen, Scott, Hays, Owenson, Byron, Hunt, MW and PB Shelley,
Keats, Hemans. Concentration will range generically across fiction,
drama, poetry, journalism, biography, travel writing, historiography,
educational and religious writing, memoirs, political prose. Particular
concentration will center on women writers and movements toward
global feminisms. Readings and discussion will also attend theoretically
to recent work on nationalism, colonialism, cosmopolitanism, and
globalization. Students will produce a book review and a substantial
research paper.
683 LIT 562/73806
Milton
Stephen Fallon
TH 12:30-1:45
Milton is a paradoxical figure: a religious writer constantly
at odds with religious establishments, a republican political
theorist finally mistrustful of the people, a celebrant of virginity
who matured into one of the great singers of erotic love and sexuality.
History has treated Milton paradoxically as well. A radical figure,
pushed to the margins in his own time, he has come to be seen
by many as the voice of establishment authority. In this course
we will study the length and breadth of Milton's career, looking
for keys to these paradoxes.
Perhaps more than any other English author, Milton is present
in his works; we will pay close attention his self-representations.
We will test the possibility that the dissonances in the early
self-representations bear fruit in the creative tensions of the
mature poetry. We will pay attention to the high level of control
Milton exerts over his texts and his readers, and at the same
time we will explore what happens when that control slips.
While we pursue these questions, we will not neglect the main
reason generations have returned to Milton: his astonishing skill
as a writer. Often readers come to him from a sense of duty and
leave with a surprised delight in the beauty and power of his
texts.
We will read widely in Milton's poetry, with special emphasis
on Comus, "Lycidas," Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes. We will study also several of his prose
works (e.g., The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica,
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and The Readie and Easie
Way).
690 LIT 569 E/73808
Beckett and Blanchot (T)
Kevin Hart
TH 11:00-12:15
This seminar will develop a close reading of the later work of
two major twentieth-century writers: Samuel Beckett and Maurice
Blanchot. We will begin with the "second trilogy" by
Beckett: Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said and Worstward Ho and fold
into our discussion texts from the same period. We will then consider
several récits by Blanchot, including Death Sentence and
The Instant of My Death. Blanchot's critical work, including his
reflections on Beckett, will be of pressing concern throughout
the seminar. We will read sections from The Infinite Conversation
and the later fragmentary work, The Step Not Beyond and The Writing
of the Disaster. Students taking this seminar should have a reading
knowledge of French.
6678 LIT 579E/73854
Postmodern Narrative
James Collins
MW 1:30-2:45
In this course we will begin by focusing on the emergence of postmodernism
in the sixties and then trace its evolution through the nineties.
Initially, our primary concern will be the conflicted conceptualization
of the term, i.e. just what did postmodern mean in terms of a
narrative practice and in terms of a "cultural condition".
Once we have established some operating definitions, and become
familiar with some of the narratives that were first called postmodern
(Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, Scott's Blade Runner, etc.) we will
begin to discuss the novels and films which became synonymous
with postmodern textuality in the eighties (Rushdie's Midnight's
Children, Barnes' A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, Winterson's
Sexing the Cherry, Auster's Moon Palace. etc.) In the last third
of the course we will turn to more recent narratives which expand
our understanding of the term, particularly in regard to the increasingly
complicated relationships between literary, film and television
cultures (Ondaatje's The English Patient, Tarantino's Pulp Fiction,
Wallace's The Girl With Curious Hair, Amis' The Information).
In addition to these titles there will be a substantial course
packet that will include relevant theoretical material.
5772 ENGL 586
Fictions of the Public Sphere in U.S. Literature and Culture
Glenn Hendler
M 6:30-9:00
Using and critiquing concepts of the public sphere from the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries as well as from recent critical theory
and cultural studies scholarship, this course will explore the
history of the gendered and racialized distinctions between public
and private, domesticity and the market, reason and sentimentality,
in U.S. literature and culture before 1900. Several historical
problems will structure our theoretical, critical, and literary
readings, including: the development of domestic ideology; the
rise of social movements such as temperance, feminism, and abolition;
and the role of popular literary forms in the development and
critique of both working-class politics and imperialist ideology.
Central issues in many of our readings will be the politics of
represented emotion, especially the key sentimental concept of
sympathy, and the varying ways in which the reading and writing
of literature were meant to prepare citizens -- especially boys
and men -- for participation in politics, economic exchange, and
civil society. Authors read will include some of the following:
Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Charles Brockden Brown, Ned
Buntline, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Webster Foster,
Benjamin Franklin, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Jacobs, Henry
James, George Lippard, John Rollin Ridge, Maria Amparo Ruiz de
Burton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Metta Victor, Frank
Webb, and Walt Whitman.
6692 ENGL 594B
Roots and Routes: Cultures and Letters of the Black Atlantic
Ivy Wilson
MW 4:30-5:45
This graduate seminar "Roots and Routes" explores transnational
regional or global historical formations that coalesce around
the circum-Atlantic. It uses two global phenomena, the Atlantic
slave trade and colonialism, as pretexts to interrogating subaltern
consciousnesses that ostensibly function both against and in conjunction
with more readily accepted aspects of modernity. Theorists include
Gilroy, Hall, Condé, Hegel, Aravamudan, Rediker and Linebaugh,
Marx, among others. Literature may include works by Derek Walcott,
Zadie Smith, Olaudah Equiano, Nella Larsen, Aimé Cesairé,
Michelle Cliff, Cristina García, among others.
6396 LIT 653/73652
English Historical Writing
Julia Marvin
M 1:30 - 4:15
This course, designed for (but by no means limited to) students
of history or literature, will make a selective, chronological
survey of the varieties of historical writing in England from
its beginnings to the rise of vernacular historiography in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We will examine a range of
works--among them broad histories, annals, monastic chronicles,
and royal lives--in Latin, English, and Anglo-Norman, going beyond
what modern scholars have often deemed "historical"
to include vernacular verse works such as the Bruts of Wace and
Layamon and later vernacular chronicles such as the prose Brut.
Among other things, we will investigate what their and their arguments,
and how they sought to endow their own texts with authority. The
course will also serve as an introduction to modern scholarly
work on medieval historiography. In the interests of time, we
will read mostly in modern English translation, but students will
write a research paper on one of the works studies (or another
of their choosing) and so should be comfortable with at least
one of the literary languages if medieval England. Students who
already have a strong interest in a particular historical text
or writer are encourages to contact me as soon as possible.
(FRENCH)
2196 ROFR 500 (take as audit only)
French Graduate Reading
V. Toumayan
This one semester, intensive study of French grammar and syntax
is intended for graduate students working in the Humanities or
Sciences, who are interested in acquiring intermediate level reading
proficiency in French. In addition to the translation exercises
and practice reading passages incorporated into French for Reading
(Sandberg, and Tathum), student participants will be required
to work with scholarly texts pertinent to their field of research.
Those students who successfully complete all class and examination
requirements will receive departmental certification of their
reading proficiency. No prior knowledge of French is assumed.
LIT 550F/73752
L'utopie Et La Dystopie Au 18e Siècle: Les Rêves
Et Les Revers Des Philosophes
Utopia And Dystopia In The 18th Century: Hopes And Fears In The
Age Of Enlightenment
J. Douthwaite
TH 5:00 – 6:15
If there were only the world of facts, how boring life would be!
Most visible during moments of intellectual questioning, utopian
thinking transforms reality to anticipate what has not yet been.
The Enlightenment and revolutionary era provide an ideal context
for the study of utopian literature and its dark alter-ego, the
dystopian world of roman noir and gothic fiction. With a base
in stylistics and genre studies, this course embraces an interdisciplinary
approach that places literary works in the historical context
of the tumultuous years 1759-1798. Attentive to the wide-ranging
impact of the philosophes abroad, we will also study works by
two English authors. We will read Walpole’s gothic novel,
The Castle of Otranto and Stoppard’s play, Arcadia (which
artfully superposes 18th-century preoccupations on a 20th-century
setting), in preparation for the April 2005 performance of Arcadia
on campus. Works to study include: Voltaire, Candide; Cazotte,
Le Diable amoureux; Restif de la Bretonne, La découverte
australe par un homme-volant; Diderot, Supplément au voyage
de Bougainville; Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire;
Révéroni Saint-Cyr, Pauliska, ou la perversité
moderne.
6701 LIT 551 F/73753
De L'existentialisme À L'éthique / From
Existentialism To Ethics
A. Toumayan
W 3: 30 – 6:00
This course will examine the elaboration of the humanist doctrines
of Camus, Malraux and Sartre. It will then focus on the systematic
challenges to this humanism, by Beckett, Blanchot, Genet and more
particularly Levinas.
6147 LIT 561F/73752
Don Juan: A Modern Myth and its Avatars
L. MacKenzie
M 3:30 – 6:00
Using Molière’s play as point of departure, the myth
of unfettered erotic hunger and its tragic consequences will be
examined in its literary, operatic, cinematographic, and philosophical
iterations. Among the works to be studied: Molière: “Dom
Juan”; Prévost: Manon Lescaut; Mérimée:
Carmen; Laclos; Les liaisons dangereuses; Shaw: “Man and
Superman”; Mozart: Don Giovanni; Bizet: Carmen; Puccini:
Manon Lescaut; Kierkegaard: “the immediate Erotic Stages
or the Musical Erotic”; Films: “Don Juan de Marco”;
“Carmen Jones”; “Dangerous Liaisons”;
“Don Juan (or if Don Juan were a woman).”
(GERMAN)
5833 LIT 571G/73857
20th German Prose & Poetry
Vera Profit
MW 1:30-3:00 PM
Readings from German 20th C. Literature (1900's to 1970's) including
poetry, short story, novel and drama. Including: Rilke, Die Weise
von Leibe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke; Kafka, Der Landartzt,
Durrenmatt, Der Richter und sein Henker; Borchert, Draussen vor
der Tur.
5852 LIT 572G/73858
Modern German Short Story
Albert Wimmer
TH 12:30 – 2:45
The German short story and other forms of prose from the “Stunde
Null” in 1945 to the 1990s. Authors range from the East
and West German writers of the immediate postwar era to the most
recent commentators on issues of politics, society gender and
aesthetics.
(IRISH)
6689 LIT 563/73807
Re-Thinking Race: Irishness, Whiteness And Postcolonialism
Luke Gibbons
W 6:30-9:00
This seminar will discuss issues of race and representation in
relation to Irish literature and culture. The threat presented
by the Irish to colonial civility had less to do with visibility
than with other components of racial theory, as the Celt, provided
an ominous template for the concept of doomed race, and other
modes of cultural contagion. The semester will begin by examining
the Ossianic controversy, the romantic novel in Ireland (Edgeworth,
Morgan) gaelic Gothic (Maturin, Stoker), and Arnoldian Celticism.
Attitudes to race during the emergence of Irish nationalism and
the Literary Revival will be analysed, with particular emphasis
on Joyce's understanding of race and modernity, whether in the
form of colonial stereotypes or anti-semitism. The final part
of the semester will address questions of race in the Ireland
of the Celtic Tiger, looking particularly at representations of
immigration in contemporary Irish film and literature.
5759 ENGL 571
Modern Irish Drama & Revolutionary Politics
Susan Harris
TH 2:00-3:15
This course will investigate the relationship between the drama
produced by the Abbey Theater movement during the first decades
of this century and the political struggle for Irish independence
that was taking place at the same time. As part of this project,
we will examine not only the plays but the responses they provoked
when they were first performed, reading the texts of the plays
alongside the reviews they generated and the debates that were
taking place at the time in the nationalist press. We will be
paying particular attention to the relationship between national
and sexual politics, and how representations of gender--and audience
responses to them--mediated it. We will also use our study of
these plays and their historical, political, cultural and critical
context to interrogate the development and definition of Irish
studies itself as a discipline. Students have the option of producing
either one seminar paper or two conference-length papers, and
will also be responsible for at least two in-class presentations.
Texts: The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama
and Prose. Ed. Richard J. Finneran; Modern Irish Drama. (Norton
anthology.) Ed. John Harrington; The Aran Islands. J. M. Synge;
The Complete Plays. J. M. Synge; Plays 2. Sean O'Casey; and Course
packet containing contextual materials, available in 301 O'Shaughnessy
6686 LIT 574E/73853
Modernism and the Four Nations: England, Ireland, Scotland,
Wales
Mary Burgess Smyth
H 6:30-9:00
This seminar examines the geographies and locations of British
and Irish literary modernism. We will pay particular attention
to the ways in which (especially in Scotland and Wales) modernist
writers engaged with, and frequently drove, efforts to renew national
identity as against an idea of "Britishness". We will
also be exploring what Franco Moretti calls the "literary
geography" of some rather more familiar English and Irish
modernist texts, and will try to get some sense of how these regional
or more precisely national movements interacted with each other.
This is a wide-ranging course that will involve a lot of reading
in all genres. Some of the writers whose work we will read are:
Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Hugh MacDiarmid,
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Edwin and Willa Muir, Neil Gunn, James Joyce,
Elizabeth Bowen, Denis Johnston, Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke,
Dylan Thomas, David Jones, Saunders Lewis, Menna Elfyn and Rhys
Davies. Some of the critical/ theoretical material we will read
includes work by David Harvey, Robert Crawford, Seamus Deane,
Cairns Craig and Franco Moretti. Students will present on a number
of occasions, and will work towards a final research paper, on
which they will receive input from other seminar members.
6687 LIT 595/73884
Gender and Writing (T)
Maud Ellmann
H 3:30-6:00
This course focuses on the seventy years between 1871 (the publication
of George Eliot's Middlemarch) and 1941 (the publication of Virginia
Woolf's Between the Acts), a period of upheaval in gender relations
that also witnessed the emergence of the modern professional woman
writer. We will examine changing images of women of the period
-- the New Woman, the Suffragette, the vamp, the lesbian, the
hysteric, the typist -- in conjunction with changing images of
men: the shell-shocked veteran, the "invert," the obsessional
compulsive. Since this period also witnessed the birth of psychoanalysis,
we will study Freud's works both as responses to their historical
context and as (cannon) fodder for gender theory today. The course
will concentrate on Irish and British authors of the period (e.g.
George Eliot, Dickens, Gissing, Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein,
H.D., Mina Loy, Joyce, Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen), and on recent
theorists of gender and sexuality such as Jacques Lacan, Julia
Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler.
After some introductory sessions at the beginning of the semester,
the class will take the form of student presentations and discussion.
At each class students will either participate in presentations
or submit a short position paper (1 page), addressing issues raised
by the previous week's reading. A final paper of 15-20 pages is
due at the end of the semester.
(ITALIAN)
6144 LIT 535I/73563
History of the Italian Language
Theodore Cachey
M 3:30 – 6:00
An advanced introduction to the history of the Italian language
from Le origini to the High Renaissance with special emphasis
on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio during the medieval period and
Bembo, Castiglione, and Machiavelli for the Renaissance.
6725 LIT 570I/73851
Modern Italian Novel
John Welle
H 12:30 – 3:00
This course offers an in-depth study of the Italian novel and
literary criticism from the postwar decades. Through the bi-thematic
lens of the myth and reality, representations of history, selfhood,
and national identity are explored.
(SPANISH)
ROSP 524
Cervantes: Don Quijote
E. Juarez
TH 2:00 – 3:15
A close reading of Cervantes’ novel in relation to the prose
tradition of the Renaissance: novella, the pastoral romance, the
romance of chivalry, the humanist dialogue, and the picaresque
novel. We will also pay attention to the historical, social and
cultural context of the work. Graduate students are required to
read additional critical works. The term paper (15 pages for graduates)
will be on a topic individually agreed upon and discussed by each
student with the instructor. (crosslisted ROSP 424).
6150 LIT 560E/73758
Literature Translation Spanish: Theory & Practice
Ben Heller
TH 12:30 – 1:45
This seminar will focus on Translation history and Theory, from
Benjamin to Borges to Jakobson, Steiner, and Spivak, considering
the semiotic, political and cultural implications. We will also
explore various problematic aspects of literary translation through
exercises (translating from the major Romance languages in English
and vice versa) discussed in workshop fashion.
6149 LIT 575E/73852
Literature of the Hispanic Caribbean
T. Anderson
T 3:30-6:00
This course offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Special attention is
given to questions of national identity and to the themes of moral,
social, and political decay. Critical and theoretical works accompany
the reading of primary texts on a number of related topics. Authors
studied in this course include Gabriel García Márquez,
Luis Rafael Sánchez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo
Arenas, Rosario Ferré, Juan Bosch, and others.
6148 LIT578E/73760
20th Century Spanish Narrative: One-Hundred Years Of The
Spanish Self-Conscious Novel
S. Amago
H 3:30-6:00
This seminar traces the development of the Spanish self-conscious
novel over the course of the last hundred years, beginning with
Miguel de Unamuno’s Modernist classic, Niebla, through to
the present day. We shall examine the fundamental shifts in literary
self-consciousness as it has developed and changed through the
postmodern works of the 1980s and 1990s. The course shall conclude
with an examination of recent theoretical discussions of narrative
and its relation to the formation and understanding of human consciousness.
Other Spanish novels to be discussed include Carmen Martín
Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás, Juan José Millás’s
Dos mujeres en Praga and Rosa Montero’s La hija del caníbal.
Attention shall also be paid to the manifestations of narrative
self-consciousness outside of Spain, including the North American
and European cultural contexts. The course shall be conducted
predominantly in Spanish. In addition to the weekly readings and
active class participation, students shall write one article-length
paper, a series of brief reaction papers and lead a class discussion.
(PHILOSOPHY)
PHIL 527
Boethius: An Introduction
Gersh
TH 12:30-1:45
This course will attempt a study of Boethius, one of the foundational
figures of medieval culture, in an interdisciplinary and open-ended
manner. Our approach will be interdisciplinary in that we shall
simultaneously study philosophical-theological and literary subject
matter and simultaneously apply philosophical-theological and
literary methods. It will be open-ended in that students will
be expected to react creatively to the topics under review in
terms of their own independent studies and research (e.g., in
connecting Latin and vernacular materials). During the course
we shall read a broad selection of passages in Latin and in English
translation drawn from Boethius's work in the fields of science
(arithmetic, music), logic, and theology. Part of the course will
be devoted to a close study of De Consolatione Philosophiae. We
shall study Boethius as reading intertextually the Greek philosophers
Plato and Aristotle and the Greek scientists Nicomachus and Ptolemy,
without forgetting the Latin theology of Augustine. Turning from
Boethius to Boethius in quotation marks and Boethius "under
erasure," we shall study Boethius read intertextually by
glossators, commentators, and other writers from the eighth to
the fourteenth century. Requirement: one final essay (ca. 20 pp.)
6100 Phil 648
Philosophical Arguments
Gutting
M 3:00 - 5:30
This course will be built around close readings of some classic
papers in major areas of recent analytic philosophy.
The idea of the course is to read the assigned articles
very closely (no more than 10-20 pages per class), with a view
to discovering and analyzing the modes of argument whereby the
authors try to establish their conclusions. We will, you might
say, treat the essays as case-studies in our effort to learn something
about the way analytic philosophers think and argue. We will also
explore the suggestion that argumentation plays only a minor role
and that, in fact, the conclusions of analytic philosophers often
depend more on intuition than on argument.
The course is for anyone wanting to get a bit of
distance on analytic philosophy and ask questions about just what
it is doing and how successful it is. It will also be valuable
for anyone wanting an overview of recent analytic work.
Reading List
Quine,"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
Kripke, Naming and Necessity (selections)
Gettier, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"
Goldman, "What Is Justified Belief?"
Lewis, "Elusive Knowledge"
Rawls, A Theory of Justice (selections)
Hare, "Rawls' Theory of Justice"
Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (selections)
Taylor, "Cross Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate"
Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (selections)
Perry, "The Zombie Argument"
Jackson, "What Mary Didn't Know"
Dennett, "What RoboMary Knows"
Plantinga, The Free Will Defense"
DeRose, "Plantinga, Presumption, Possibility, and the Problem
of Evil"
6370 LIT 652/73806 (May fulfill the Philosophy requirement)
Hermeneutics, Deconstruction and Medieval Thought (T)
Stephen Gersh
TH 2:00-3:15
The aims of this course are both methodological and historical.
The methodological part will consist of an introduction to hermeneutics
(in a broad sense) as theorized and/or practiced in certain areas
of modern continental philosophy. After a brief look at the crucial
innovations of Husserl, we shall study carefully chosen extracts
(in English translation) of Heidegger: Being and Time and What
is Called Thinking, Gadamer: Truth and Method, and Derrida: Of
Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination in order to
illuminate the different (even opposing) ways in which the idea
of "hermeneutics" can develop. This general discussion
will be combined with specific consideration of the themes of
allegory and negativity. The historical part of the course will
concentrate on late ancient, patristic, and early medieval readings
(Origen: On First Principles, Augustine: On Christian Teaching,
Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Proclus: Commentary on Plato's
Timaeus). Here, we shall attempt to advance our comprehension
of ancient literature by 1) looking for parallels with modern
hermeneutic techniques, and 2) applying the modern techniques
in test cases. The course is intended to be relatively open-ended,
i.e. students will be expected to think about the way in which
these discussions are internally coherent and also relate to their
own areas of interest (which may be elsewhere in philosophy, theology,
or literature [Latin or vernacular]). Requirement: one final essay
of ca. 20 pp.
Courses will be scheduled on the following days:
M = Monday
T = Tuesday
W = Wednesday
H = Thursday
F = Friday
TH = Tuesday & Thursday
Please note: this listing of courses may change
for various reasons.
