Spring 2007 Course Descriptions, Comparative Literary Studies Program, Northwestern University

Course Offerings Fall 2008

CLS 207 Introduction to Critical Theory

Peter Fenves (TTh 12:00-1:20)

Critiques correspond to crises. Critical theory seeks to ground criticism in a systematic manner and to disclose the various dimensions of the crisis to which any critical impulse responds. This course introduces students to a wide variety of forms and disciplines in which efforts at criticism and perceptions of crises have given rise to critical theory. Beginning with the development of aesthetic criticism in the eighteenth-century, the course proceeds to analyze the multiple uses of the term "critique" in late eighteenth-century German writing, with particular emphasis on Kant and his Romantic descendants. The course then investigates the beginnings of radical social and moral critique: Marx's "critique of political economy" and Nietzsche's "genealogy of morals" will be the principal points of discussion. During the early years of the twentieth century, influenced by Freud's revolutionary theories of psychic and social formations, critical theory developed such prominence that a school of thinkers named themselves in its honor, and the course will thus read selected works written by members official and unofficial of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, with particular attention given to the work of Walter Benjamin. The course will conclude with an examination of some of the various attempts to rethink and put into question the terms in which critical theory has traditionally been cast, including the very terms critique and crises. Throughout the class, we will continually return to a few poems of Baudelaire, as we consider the relation between the tradition of critical theory and the problem of specifically literary criticism.

CLS 211-0 What is Lyric Poetry?

Cavanagh Clare (MWF 11:00-11:50)

Lyric poetry has existed in practically every literary culture from ancient times until today. What is the basic lyric impulse? How is lyric related to music, to visual art, and to other literary forms? How can lyrics from a variety of national traditions and time periods be compared? This course attempts to examine lyric poetry as a constant and ever-growing international literary tradition, to account for the variety of its forms and uses, and to introduce students to some of the world’s most moving literary works.

CLS 271-1 Classical Japanese Literature in Translation

Phyllis Lyons (TTH 11:00-12:20)

This course deals with Japanese literature between the eighth and fourteenth centuries and examines the development, flowering, and maturation of one of the world's great traditions, which established standards for Japanese aesthetic values that still hold true today. This course will investigate the brilliant adaptation of the imported Chinese written script to fit the needs of an already rich oral tradition, the growth of native poetic forms, diaries, and fiction, culminating in what is perhaps the world's earliest great novel, The Tale of Genji, and the literature of sorrow and disillusionment that arose in response to growing internecine warfare from the 11th century on. Also included will be some of the plays of the No theater that deal with themes from the earlier classic literature.

CLS 274- Introduction to Early and Medieval Chinese Literature

Bruce Knickerbocker (MW 3:00-4:20)

As an introduction to the outlines of Chinese literature from its ancient roots to its “modern” flowering in the Song dynasty (A.D. 960), this course aims to provide insight into the humanistic Chinese tradition. We will work through masterpieces of prose and poetry in a roughly chronological manner. These include lyrical masterworks in the various poetic modes, fiction from early strange and supernatural Daoist-inspired stories to adventurous and sensual medieval tales, as well as exemplary essays, parables and jokes, vivid historical writings, and profound philosophical pieces. Close readings of texts will enable you to gain intimacy and familiarilty with this long and rich literary tradition and, more importantly, will also equip you with the skills to interpret and reconstruct traditions though reading texts, composing papers and designing presentations. Although it is impossible to cover all ancient, early and medieval Chinese literature in one quarter, you will leave the course with an enhanced sense of the richness and the wonder of this literature, a basic blueprint of China's literary development, and hopefully an interest in roaming through it further. Conducted in English.

CLS 278-0: Modern Hebrew Literature: Challenges of Jewish Modernity

Marcus G Moseley (TTH 11:00-12:20)

This course traces the emergence of a Modern Hebrew literature in Europe. Tracing this literature to its origins, we consider the writings of the Hasidic leader, Nahman of Bratslav, and the writings of Hebrew Enlightenment figures in late 18th Century Berlin. We then trace the flowering of this literature in 19th and early 20th century Eastern Europe. The course includes analyses of various genres: the essay, poetry, short story, novel and autobiography. No prior knowledge of Jewish history or literature is required. All texts are in English translation.

CLS 279-0: Modern Jewish Literature: An Introduction

Marcia B. Gealy (MWF 10:00-10:50)

The purpose of this course is to study selected works of modern Jewish literature in the context of their historical background. We will focus on certain themes and stories in the Bible and in Jewish folklore as well as on particular events and movements in European, American, and Israeli history as a way of better understanding this literature. Though most of this literature dates from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual and religious currents such as the Enlightenment, Jewish Mysticism, Zionism, and Socialism will help us to understand the literature in its changing historical and social context. Thus while some writers saw modern Jewish literature as a means of educating the masses to modern secular needs, others saw it as a means of reshaping older forms and religious values, while still others saw it as a means of reflecting timeless humanistic concerns. Among the writers we will read are Sholom Aleichem, I.B. Singer, Henry Roth, B. Malamud, Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, A.B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz.

CLS 383 Special Topics in Theory

Ernesto Laclau (MW 9:30-11:00)

The aim of this seminar is to describe the main stages which have defined what can be called the structuralist/poststructuralist tradition. It will start with an analysis of the early linguistic structural model to be found in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his successors of the Prague and Copenhagen schools, and will later describe thegeneralization of the structuralist approach in anthropology (Levi-Stauss) and semiology (Barthes, Kristeva). The second part of the seminar will concentrate on what can be called the transition to a post-structuralist phase. The main authors to be addressed are Derrida (deconstruction and the logic of difference), Lacan (psychoanalysis), Foucault (from archaelogy to genealogy) and the later Barthes (the blurring of the denotation/connotation distinction). Throughout the course the theoretical categories will be illustrated with examples coming from political, sociological and artistic field

CLS 390-0 Topics in Comparative Literature: Dreams and Interpretation from Artemidorus to Freud

Anna Glazova (TTH 12:30-2:00)

Sigmund Freud once said that dreams were "the royal road to the understanding of unconscious mental processes." Freud discovers that certain psychic structures and patterns in dreams are not manifest in the waking consciousness and shows that the interpretation of dreams can be used for a better understanding of the unconscious. Freud explains that dreams are closely connected to our repressed desires in the waking state and analyses the content of dreams as a manifestation of our wishes. While dreams can be considered to be manifestations of desires, there is also a parallel desire of the waking mind: the desire to interpret dreams in relation to "reality." The interpretation of dreams has fascinated many authors and thinkers, from Artemidorus, the Ancient Greek philosopher who provides us with the first extensive guide explaining hidden messages of dreams, to Jacques Lacan, who criticizes Freud and shows that a dream can express the desire to resist being interpreted. In this seminar, we will ask ourselves, how do our desires affect our dreams and, in contrast, how does our wish for interpretation change the content of our dreams? Readings include Artemidorus's Oneirocritica, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Lacan's "Direction of Treatment," Nikolai Gogol's "The Portrait," Edgar Allan Poe's "The Premature Burial," and E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Mesmerist."

This seminar can be taken as fulfillment of the CLS requirement for a course that represents an approach to literature and culture.

CLS 410 Theories of Literature

Scott Durham (W 7:00-9:00)

This introductory course on problems in contemporary critical theory will begin by focusing on critique of ideology in the Marxist tradition (with particular attention to Althusser, Jameson and related thinkers). We will then discuss how the relationships between discursive, institutional and aesthetic practices and their pragmatic effects are rethought in the writings of such thinkers as Foucault, Lyotard and Deleuze. While the primary focus of the course will be on theoretical texts, these texts will also be considered in dialogue with literary and cinematic works.

CLS 414-0: Comparative Studies in Genre : Versions of the Self

Marcus G Moseley (T 2:00-4:50)

This course traces the discourse surrounding writings of the self. We begin by taking account of what autobiographers write of their own writing within autobiography, focusing especially upon Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau and Michel Leiris. The course proceeds with a survey of some of the most influential essays on this topic written in the last half-century. Reading of critical literature is accompanied throughout by illustrations taken from autobiographical texts.

Course Offerings Summer 2008

Comp Lit 313: Eros and Literature

Instructor: Julia Ng

TTh 1:00-3:15 (7/1/08-8/14/08)

The trademark of erotic literature is its explicit display of sexual activity. Yet textual erotic imagery has traditionally been seen as less pernicious than visual erotic images because of the "less explicit" manner in which the written word goes about displaying its content. By dint of the same verbal "coyness," however, the distinction between legal, "erotic" literature and illegal, "obscene" pornography has also been drawn on the perceived literary merit of the former. The inscription of eros thus presents a peculiarly topical problem for literature: if the boundaries of "literariness" are co-extensive with the boundaries of what is considered "legal" and "decent," how is literature not complicit with a kind of "pornography"-that which exposes artistic value, the "private," or what would today be called "freedom of expression," to public sanction and state persecution? This seminar will examine literary works selected from several centuries and cultures that have privileged the language of sexual acts as the topos in which to negotiate the conflicted borders between such commonplaces as the private and the public realms, sex, gender, agency and state authority. Touching upon the early history of erotic literature in sexual instruction, libertine propaganda and political satire, this course will afford students glimpses into the development of a manner of speaking indiscreetly that, by the end of the twentieth century, becomes a means of political opposition with its own set of unresolved contradictions.All texts are in English translation, and include: Ovid, Ars Amatoria; Boccaccio, Decameron; Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels; Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom; Goethe, Roman Elegies; Esterházy, A Little Hungarian Pornography

Comp. Lit. 375: Murder – Homicide in Literature and Film

Instructor: Joel Morris

M 2:00-5:00 (6/23/08-8/11/08)

From Cain’s murder of Abel to Hamlet’s staging a murderous “play-within-the-play,” from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to the CSI television series, murder has not only been an object of moral and philosophical—and eventually psychological and criminological—investigation, but has elicited inquiries into matters of its own representation and artistic representation more broadly. Beginning with Thomas de Quincey’s semi-satirical essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” this class will explore the curious union of murder and aesthetics in texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Colette, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, and Patrick Süskind and in the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang.

Comp Lit 390: Topics in Comparative Literature: Postmodern Cinema

Instructor: Scott Durham

W 6:30-9:30 (6/25/08-8/13/08)

This course explores the place of film in postmodern culture. It examines how postmodern filmmakers have reinvented the aesthetic and narrative forms of film as well as the how their films have contested the dominant culture of postmodernity from a variety of ideological and aesthetic perspectives. The course begins by providing the conceptual and historical background of postmodernism through analysis of a number of key films from the 1960s and 1970s. Interrelated themes in films by such directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Jacques Tati, Ridley Scott, and Chris Marker include the new experiences of urban space characteristic of postmodern culture; the new cultural forms associated with the triumph of consumerism; and the emergence of a new global culture of the image. Students then explore current debates about the nature and limits of postmodernism - the place of dystopian and utopian fantasy in postmodernity, the possibilities of and alternatives to realist representation of postmodern experience, and the representation of new forms of sexual and ethnic identity and the intertwining of individual and collective histories in an age of globalization - through discussions of cinematic works by directors from Europe, the Americas, and Asia, including Gianni Amelio, Patricio Guzman, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Todd Haynes, Antonia Bird, Quentin Tarantino, Isaac Julien, Raoul Ruiz, and Tsai Ming-Liang.



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		Course Offerings Fall 2008 CLS 207 Introduction to Critical Theory Peter Fenves (TTh 12:00-1:20) Critiques correspond to crises. Critical theory seeks to ground criticism in a systematic manner and to disclose the various dimensions of the crisis to which any critical impulse responds. This course introduces students to a wide variety of forms and disciplines in which efforts at criticism and perceptions of crises have given rise to critical theory. Beginning with the development of aesthetic criticism in the eighteenth-century, the course proceeds to analyze the multiple uses of the term "critique" in late eighteenth-century German writing, with particular emphasis on Kant and his Romantic descendants. The course then investigates the beginnings of radical social and moral critique: Marx's "critique of political economy" and Nietzsche's "genealogy of morals" will be the principal points of discussion. During the early years of the twentieth century, influenced by Freud's revolutionary theories of psychic and social formations, critical theory developed such prominence that a school of thinkers named themselves in its honor, and the course will thus read selected works written by members official and unofficial of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, with particular attention given to the work of Walter Benjamin. The course will conclude with an examination of some of the various attempts to rethink and put into question the terms in which critical theory has traditionally been cast, including the very terms critique and crises. Throughout the class, we will continually return to a few poems of Baudelaire, as we consider the relation between the tradition of critical theory and the problem of specifically literary criticism. CLS 211-0 What is Lyric Poetry? Cavanagh Clare (MWF 11:00-11:50) Lyric poetry has existed in practically every literary culture from ancient times until today. What is the basic lyric impulse? How is lyric related to music, to visual art, and to other literary forms? How can lyrics from a variety of national traditions and time periods be compared? This course attempts to examine lyric poetry as a constant and ever-growing international literary tradition, to account for the variety of its forms and uses, and to introduce students to some of the world’s most moving literary works. CLS 271-1 Classical Japanese Literature in Translation Phyllis Lyons (TTH 11:00-12:20) This course deals with Japanese literature between the eighth and fourteenth centuries and examines the development, flowering, and maturation of one of the world's great traditions, which established standards for Japanese aesthetic values that still hold true today. This course will investigate the brilliant adaptation of the imported Chinese written script to fit the needs of an already rich oral tradition, the growth of native poetic forms, diaries, and fiction, culminating in what is perhaps the world's earliest great novel, The Tale of Genji, and the literature of sorrow and disillusionment that arose in response to growing internecine warfare from the 11th century on. Also included will be some of the plays of the No theater that deal with themes from the earlier classic literature. CLS 274- Introduction to Early and Medieval Chinese Literature Bruce Knickerbocker (MW 3:00-4:20) As an introduction to the outlines of Chinese literature from its ancient roots to its “modern” flowering in the Song dynasty (A.D. 960), this course aims to provide insight into the humanistic Chinese tradition. We will work through masterpieces of prose and poetry in a roughly chronological manner. These include lyrical masterworks in the various poetic modes, fiction from early strange and supernatural Daoist-inspired stories to adventurous and sensual medieval tales, as well as exemplary essays, parables and jokes, vivid historical writings, and profound philosophical pieces. Close readings of texts will enable you to gain intimacy and familiarilty with this long and rich literary tradition and, more importantly, will also equip you with the skills to interpret and reconstruct traditions though reading texts, composing papers and designing presentations. Although it is impossible to cover all ancient, early and medieval Chinese literature in one quarter, you will leave the course with an enhanced sense of the richness and the wonder of this literature, a basic blueprint of China's literary development, and hopefully an interest in roaming through it further. Conducted in English. CLS 278-0: Modern Hebrew Literature: Challenges of Jewish Modernity Marcus G Moseley (TTH 11:00-12:20) This course traces the emergence of a Modern Hebrew literature in Europe. Tracing this literature to its origins, we consider the writings of the Hasidic leader, Nahman of Bratslav, and the writings of Hebrew Enlightenment figures in late 18th Century Berlin. We then trace the flowering of this literature in 19th and early 20th century Eastern Europe. The course includes analyses of various genres: the essay, poetry, short story, novel and autobiography. No prior knowledge of Jewish history or literature is required. All texts are in English translation. CLS 279-0: Modern Jewish Literature: An Introduction Marcia B. Gealy (MWF 10:00-10:50) The purpose of this course is to study selected works of modern Jewish literature in the context of their historical background. We will focus on certain themes and stories in the Bible and in Jewish folklore as well as on particular events and movements in European, American, and Israeli history as a way of better understanding this literature. Though most of this literature dates from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual and religious currents such as the Enlightenment, Jewish Mysticism, Zionism, and Socialism will help us to understand the literature in its changing historical and social context. Thus while some writers saw modern Jewish literature as a means of educating the masses to modern secular needs, others saw it as a means of reshaping older forms and religious values, while still others saw it as a means of reflecting timeless humanistic concerns. Among the writers we will read are Sholom Aleichem, I.B. Singer, Henry Roth, B. Malamud, Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, A.B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz. CLS 383 Special Topics in Theory Ernesto Laclau (MW 9:30-11:00) The aim of this seminar is to describe the main stages which have defined what can be called the structuralist/poststructuralist tradition. It will start with an analysis of the early linguistic structural model to be found in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his successors of the Prague and Copenhagen schools, and will later describe thegeneralization of the structuralist approach in anthropology (Levi-Stauss) and semiology (Barthes, Kristeva). The second part of the seminar will concentrate on what can be called the transition to a post-structuralist phase. The main authors to be addressed are Derrida (deconstruction and the logic of difference), Lacan (psychoanalysis), Foucault (from archaelogy to genealogy) and the later Barthes (the blurring of the denotation/connotation distinction). Throughout the course the theoretical categories will be illustrated with examples coming from political, sociological and artistic field CLS 390-0 Topics in Comparative Literature: Dreams and Interpretation from Artemidorus to Freud Anna Glazova (TTH 12:30-2:00) Sigmund Freud once said that dreams were "the royal road to the understanding of unconscious mental processes." Freud discovers that certain psychic structures and patterns in dreams are not manifest in the waking consciousness and shows that the interpretation of dreams can be used for a better understanding of the unconscious. Freud explains that dreams are closely connected to our repressed desires in the waking state and analyses the content of dreams as a manifestation of our wishes. While dreams can be considered to be manifestations of desires, there is also a parallel desire of the waking mind: the desire to interpret dreams in relation to "reality." The interpretation of dreams has fascinated many authors and thinkers, from Artemidorus, the Ancient Greek philosopher who provides us with the first extensive guide explaining hidden messages of dreams, to Jacques Lacan, who criticizes Freud and shows that a dream can express the desire to resist being interpreted. In this seminar, we will ask ourselves, how do our desires affect our dreams and, in contrast, how does our wish for interpretation change the content of our dreams? Readings include Artemidorus's Oneirocritica, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Lacan's "Direction of Treatment," Nikolai Gogol's "The Portrait," Edgar Allan Poe's "The Premature Burial," and E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Mesmerist." This seminar can be taken as fulfillment of the CLS requirement for a course that represents an approach to literature and culture. CLS 410 Theories of Literature Scott Durham (W 7:00-9:00) This introductory course on problems in contemporary critical theory will begin by focusing on critique of ideology in the Marxist tradition (with particular attention to Althusser, Jameson and related thinkers). We will then discuss how the relationships between discursive, institutional and aesthetic practices and their pragmatic effects are rethought in the writings of such thinkers as Foucault, Lyotard and Deleuze. While the primary focus of the course will be on theoretical texts, these texts will also be considered in dialogue with literary and cinematic works. CLS 414-0: Comparative Studies in Genre : Versions of the Self Marcus G Moseley (T 2:00-4:50) This course traces the discourse surrounding writings of the self. We begin by taking account of what autobiographers write of their own writing within autobiography, focusing especially upon Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau and Michel Leiris. The course proceeds with a survey of some of the most influential essays on this topic written in the last half-century. Reading of critical literature is accompanied throughout by illustrations taken from autobiographical texts. Course Offerings Summer 2008 Comp Lit 313: Eros and Literature Instructor: Julia Ng TTh 1:00-3:15 (7/1/08-8/14/08) The trademark of erotic literature is its explicit display of sexual activity. Yet textual erotic imagery has traditionally been seen as less pernicious than visual erotic images because of the "less explicit" manner in which the written word goes about displaying its content. By dint of the same verbal "coyness," however, the distinction between legal, "erotic" literature and illegal, "obscene" pornography has also been drawn on the perceived literary merit of the former. The inscription of eros thus presents a peculiarly topical problem for literature: if the boundaries of "literariness" are co-extensive with the boundaries of what is considered "legal" and "decent," how is literature not complicit with a kind of "pornography"-that which exposes artistic value, the "private," or what would today be called "freedom of expression," to public sanction and state persecution? This seminar will examine literary works selected from several centuries and cultures that have privileged the language of sexual acts as the topos in which to negotiate the conflicted borders between such commonplaces as the private and the public realms, sex, gender, agency and state authority. Touching upon the early history of erotic literature in sexual instruction, libertine propaganda and political satire, this course will afford students glimpses into the development of a manner of speaking indiscreetly that, by the end of the twentieth century, becomes a means of political opposition with its own set of unresolved contradictions.All texts are in English translation, and include: Ovid, Ars Amatoria; Boccaccio, Decameron; Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels; Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom; Goethe, Roman Elegies; Esterházy, A Little Hungarian Pornography Comp. Lit. 375: Murder – Homicide in Literature and Film Instructor: Joel Morris M 2:00-5:00 (6/23/08-8/11/08) From Cain’s murder of Abel to Hamlet’s staging a murderous “play-within-the-play,” from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to the CSI television series, murder has not only been an object of moral and philosophical—and eventually psychological and criminological—investigation, but has elicited inquiries into matters of its own representation and artistic representation more broadly. Beginning with Thomas de Quincey’s semi-satirical essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” this class will explore the curious union of murder and aesthetics in texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Colette, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, and Patrick Süskind and in the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. Comp Lit 390: Topics in Comparative Literature: Postmodern Cinema Instructor: Scott Durham W 6:30-9:30 (6/25/08-8/13/08) This course explores the place of film in postmodern culture. It examines how postmodern filmmakers have reinvented the aesthetic and narrative forms of film as well as the how their films have contested the dominant culture of postmodernity from a variety of ideological and aesthetic perspectives. The course begins by providing the conceptual and historical background of postmodernism through analysis of a number of key films from the 1960s and 1970s. Interrelated themes in films by such directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Jacques Tati, Ridley Scott, and Chris Marker include the new experiences of urban space characteristic of postmodern culture; the new cultural forms associated with the triumph of consumerism; and the emergence of a new global culture of the image. Students then explore current debates about the nature and limits of postmodernism - the place of dystopian and utopian fantasy in postmodernity, the possibilities of and alternatives to realist representation of postmodern experience, and the representation of new forms of sexual and ethnic identity and the intertwining of individual and collective histories in an age of globalization - through discussions of cinematic works by directors from Europe, the Americas, and Asia, including Gianni Amelio, Patricio Guzman, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Todd Haynes, Antonia Bird, Quentin Tarantino, Isaac Julien, Raoul Ruiz, and Tsai Ming-Liang.