Past Course Descriptions
Spring 2009
CLS 202: Interpreting Culture
Instructor: Jorge Coronado
Lecture: TTh 3:30-4:40, Kresge 2-415
Discussion Section: F 1:00-1:50 or 2:00-2:50, Crowe 1-125
This course will examine cultural production and the ways in which we learn to talk about it. As such, we will consider culture in its high, low, media, mass and popular manifestations through a variety of theoretical and disciplinary vantage points, including but not limited to anthropology, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and cultural studies (in its British, American, and/or Latin American varieties). We will be especially attentive to the geopolitical location and displacement of culture, that is, to how culture is understood and deployed differently at various global sites. In their status as interfaces for the experience of culture, institutions such as the museum, journalism, and the university, among others, will be considered. We will take some of our examples for study from literature, music, the internet, tv, video, ‘high’ art, film, photography, and performance. Students will be asked to engage actively in the analysis of cultural objects as well as the theories that surround them.
CLS 211: Topics in Genre: What is Lyric Poetry?
Instructor: Clare Cavanagh
Lecture: MW 11:00-11:50, 555 Clark B01
Discussion Section: F 11:00-11:50 or 12:00-12:50, Crowe 1-125
What is lyric poetry? What are its roots, and what are its possibilities today? How does it stand in relation to the countless other varieties of rhymed and/or rhythmic language—hymns, pop songs, advertising slogans, campaign mottoes, bumper stickers, and so on—that surround us in our daily life? We will explore these and many other questions by way of examining lyrics past and present, from psalms and hymns to epitaphs, elegies, ballads, and love poems. This course will emphasize the varieties of lyric, both in English originals and in translation, with particular attention to the meanings of poetic form and the nature of poetic translation. The course will be conducted through a combination of lecture and discussion. Daily attendance is expected. There will be a series of daily, ungraded, exercises and brief evaluations along with 4 short graded assignments stressing close reading and critical thinking and a longer take-home assignment at the term’s end.
Required texts (at Norris Bookstore):
Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology
Babette Deutsch, Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms
Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, tr. Stanislaw Baranczak, Clare Cavanagh
A coursepack with required readings will also be available at Quartet Copies later this week
CLS 271-4: Japanese Literature in Translation: Contemporary Japanese Women Writers
Instructor: Phyllis Lyons
TTh 11:00-12:20, Kresge 4-365
Few women writers are included in standard lists of the major canonical writers of the modern Japanese literary tradition. But especially since the 1960s, women make up a significant proportion of the most interesting contemporary writers. This course, in a sense a parallel to CLS 271-3 (Modern Japanese Literature), introduces a number of these newer creative voices, many of whom have won the major literary prizes in the past several decades. These more recent writers, and other writers from the late 19th and through the 20th centuries, show women meeting--sometimes triumphantly, often with great difficulty--the challenges of a changing social order with its changes in personal relationships between men and women.
Prerequisites: All readings in English translation.
Evaluation Method: Participation in class discussion; two short papers (4 pp.); one long final paper (10-12 pp.)
Reading: Birnbaum, Rabbits, Crabs, Etc.
Lippit and Selden, Contemporary Japanese Women Writers
Enchi, Masks
Tsushima, Child of Fortune
Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Course packet (Quartet Copies)
CLS 274-1: Chinese Literature in Translation:
Early and Medieval Chinese Lit
Instructor: Bruce Knickerbocker
MW 3:00-4:20, Kresge 2-435
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 familiarity 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 279: Modern Jewish Literature in Translation
Instructor: Marcia B. Gealy
MWF 10:00-10:50, Kresge 2-315
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 301: Practices of Reading: Asian American Literature/Literary Theory
Instructor: Susannah Gottlieb
TTh 11:00-12:20, Crowe 1-125
The content of a literary text can never be divorced from its form. A radical statement of this interdependence of form and content can be found in Hegel’s dialectical proposition, “form is content” -- or, in Marshall McCluhan’s updated version: “the medium is the message.” Some literary traditions -- Asian American among them -- have been interpreted primarily from the perspective of their putative content; the specificity of historical experience tends to determine the direction of analysis. In this class, however, we will pay as much attention to the formal features of literary texts as to the historical worlds from which they spring. Alongside representative examples of Asian American experiments in genre, we will read critical writings that elucidate their modes of expression. We will also examine the manner in which the literary works under discussion challenge -- and even subvert -- the theories that help to explain them. The theoretical programs we will study include structuralism, narratology, rhetorical reading, and queer theory; among the critics we will read are Vladimir Propp, William Empson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Judith Butler. The literary texts will probably include works by Jessica Hagedorn, Darrell Lum, Joy Kogawa, Chang-Rae Lee, Gish Jen, and John Okada.
CLS 311: Theory and Practice of Poetry Translation
Instructor: Reginald Gibbons
TTh 2:00-3:20, Crowe 1-125
This is the "gateway" course for the new CLS concentration in Translation Studies. It is a combination of seminar and workshop. Together we will translate four poems and study theoretical approaches to literary translation and brief accounts of translation practice. The practice of translation gives us valuable understanding of poetry and poetics, language difference, and ways of reading poetry. Theoretical essays broaden our sense of the linguistic, aesthetic, cultural and even ethical issues involved in the practice of translation. Working both individually and collaboratively, students will translate four short poems from four different languages and will produce a final portfolio containing revised translations and a research paper on literary translation.
CLS 390: Topics in Comparative Literature:
Self Writing Through the Centuries
Instructor: Marcus Moseley
TTh 12:30-1:50, Crowe 1-125
In the present course we shall trace the history of self-writing from antiquity to the present day. Authors to be analyze d include Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, Roland Barthes, Maxine Hong-Kingston. Alongside the primary texts we shall be reading and discussing theoretical explorations of self-representation.
CLS 398: Senior Seminar
Instructor: Robert Ryder
W 10:00-11:50, Crowe 1-125
This seminar is designed as a forum for the independent development and completion of a substantive scholarly paper in the field of Comparative Literature. The paper must involve either the study of literary texts from different literary traditions or the study of literature in relation to other media, other arts, or other disciplines. To this end, a number of short written assignments will be required, including an abstract, an outline of the paper project and an annotated bibliography. The bulk of the coursework will be in the form of an oral presentation (15 minutes; 7-8 pages) and the senior paper (12-15 pages). The in-class oral presentation is designed to be a practice run for the Senior CLS Colloquium, which will be held at the end of the quarter. The colloquium requires that all students give a revised fifteen-minute presentation to a number of CLS graduate students, who will also be in attendance.
CLS 410: Theories of Literature
Instructor: Peter Fenves
M 2:00-4:30, Crowe 1-125
This seminar serves as an introduction to a variety of contemporary literary and critical theories. The course is organized as four two-week units under the following headings: structuralist linguistics and poetics; phenomenology and ontology; ideology and the unconscious; deconstruction and disciplines. Readings include Saussure, Jakobson, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Irigaray, Foucault, Derrida, and de Man.
Prerequisites: None
Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion.
Evaluation Method: Students will be graded on the basis of an oral presentation and a seminar paper.
CLS 414: Studies in Genre: The Novel Balzac and James
Instructor: Michal P. Ginsburg
W 3:00-5:30, Crowe 1-125
Balzac and James have often been coupled together in spite of the rather glaring differences between them, partially because of the admiration James expressed for the French novelist. In this course we will study some of the works of these two novelists in order to explore those features they are said to share (realism, melodrama). Against the background of these similarities we will examine the differences between them in order to better understand the different literary traditions within which they operate.
One feature that is common to both authors is that they write very long novels, even by 19th century standards. Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions) is considered by most critics the paradigmatic Balzacian novel; it is very long. The Tragic Muse does not have the same status within the Jamesian corpus but the novels that lend themselves best to a comparison with Balzac are those of the “middle period”: The Tragic Muse, The Princess Casamassima, and The Bostonians. Since The Tragic Muse is explicitly a novel about representation it is the obvious one for us to read; unfortunately, it is also quite long. Students are therefore encouraged to do some of the reading before the beginning of the course.
In order to get a sense of the variety of modes within the corpus of each author will read at least some of the following novels (all relatively short); final decision on which texts we will read will be made according to students’ interests:
Balzac, La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin)
Balzac, Le Lys dans la vallée (The Lily of the Valley)
James, The Sacred Fount
James, The Awkward Age
We will also read Balzac’s novella “Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu” (“The Unknown Masterpiece”) and its rewriting by James in “The Madonna of the Future”.
Students can read Balzac’s texts either in the French original or in translation.
CLS 412: Literary Studies Colloquium
Instructor: Anna Glazova
T 2:00-5:00, Crowe 1-125
In this seminar, we will be focusing our attention on works of theorists and poets central to the field of comparative literary studies and critical theory. In our discussions, we will approach the texts closely and indicate the most striking points in their structure. Students are invited to work on their individual interests in respect to the readings. The texts will include Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying in in an Extramoral Sense," Roman Jacobson's "Two Types of Aphasia," Sigmund Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and Individual Talent," William Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," Erich Auerbach's "Figura," William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (excerpts), Paul De Man's "The Rethoric of Temporality," and Jacques Lacan's "The Mirror-Stage."
CLS 413: Comparative Studies in Theme: French Marx
Instructor: Christopher Bush
W 3:30-6:00, Kresge 2-420
This course offers an intellectual-historical survey of twentieth-century French Marxisms, with an emphasis on those tendencies and thinkers that have been especially important for literary criticism and theory. Our readings will trace the persistent reinvention of Marx and Marxism in relation to an array of cultural movements and historical developments, including existentialism, structuralism, anti-colonialism, and consumerism. While our corpus will be primarily theoretical and critical, we will also consider several literary and cinematic texts. Authors will include Sartre, Althusser, Baudrillard, Debord, and Kristeva.
CLS 481: Studies in Literary Theory: The Uncanny
Instructor: Sam Weber
M 3:30-6:30, Kresge 2-500
This seminar will study three theories of the Uncanny (in German: das Unheimliche), as articulated by Freud, Heidegger and Derrida. Through a reading of texts by these three authors, as well as the literary texts to which they refer, a certain number of questions will be explored. These will include:
1. The relation of the Uncanny to history
2. Its relation to language
3. Its relation to literature.
CLS 487: Studies in Literature and the Arts: The European Avant-Garde
Instructor: Rainer Rumold
F 3:30-6:30, Kresge 2-500
If, in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man from 1794, play is identified as the model for the ideal and idea of the freedom of man in the wake of the French Revolution, what has happened to this experience for Johann Huizinga to understand war as a form of ‘game’ (in Homo Ludens) and for Herbert Marcuse to coin the term “One-Dimensional Man” in 1964 to describe the bankruptcy of creativity in the industrial-capitalist western society? What is the relationship between the freedom of play, central to modern aesthetics and artistic practices, and the stringent order of ritual, deemed indispensable to social cohesion by anthropologists, sociologists but also, more disturbingly, aestheticized by totalitarian regimes during the 1930s and 40s?
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will look at playful techniques and practices from Dada carnivals (in the wake of Nietzsche) to Surrealist games from Expressionism to the Bauhaus. We will interrogate the extent to which these avant-garde art forms, their manifestoes and performances respond to the crisis of play and creativity in modern European society. We find (with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris) this crisis manifested in terms of form always already threatened by dissolution (in the extreme as Bataille’s informe), whereas Walter Benjamin’s essays on toys and puppet theatre propose a revolutionary decision. On the other hand, we will trace a surplus valuation of form and its emphasis on stasis that characterizes conservative mindsets and reaches from the Stefan George Circle, via Gottfried Benn to totalitarian ritual.
Winter 2009
CLS 411: Critical Practices
Instructor: Samuel Weber
T 2:00-5:00, Crowe 1-125
This course will survey some of the major critical contributions to literary theory from Plato and Aristotle to Derrida and Fanon. Works, chosen largely from the CLS reading list, will be drawn from the following authors, listed in chronological order: Plato, Aristotle (Weber); Dante (Will West); Kant (Weber); Schiller-Hegel (Fenves); Saussure, Benjamin (Weber); Lukacs (Kreienbrock); Derrida (Bush). A more detailed schedule will be made available later in the quarter.
CLS 413: Comparative Studies in Theme: The German Realist Novel in its International Context
Instructor: Helmut Muller-Sievers
M 3:30–6:00, Kresge 2-500
The primary goal of this course is to develop a formally differentiated and culturally rich understanding of 19th century literary realism, and of the history and philosophy of the novel more generally. To this purpose we will read some of the relevant theoretical and historiographical texts, and familiarize ourselves with the important novels of the French, English, Russian, and North American tradition.
In a second step we will address the startling fact that German writers lagged behind their international counterparts by about fifty years—if they ever caught up at all. What can account for this delay? How come the culture that had experienced such an outburst of literary creativity around 1800 falls practically silent during much of the 19th century? Drawing on theoretical and historical arguments in our reading some of the primary texts (by Raabe, Freytag, Storm, Fontane et al.), we will explore a variety of answers.
Students can ‘use’ this course in various ways: those less interested in the intricacies of the German canon can work on deepening their knowledge of primary texts in their respective fields; some may want to familiarize themselves with debates in cultural and media criticism, structuralism, narratology and philosophical aesthetics; others still may want to concentrate on Austrian or Swiss writers (Stifter, Meyer, Keller, etc.).
Secondary literature includes texts by Genette, Barthes, Auerbach, Brooks, Jameson, Moretti, Benjamin, Lukacs, et al.
Students are encouraged to familiarize themselves before the quarter with at least one of the path-breaking novels in the French (Balzac’s Père Goriot, e.g.) and in the English tradition (Dickens’ Pickwick Papers or David Copperfield).
CLS 481: Topics in Theory: Studies in French Philosophy: Biopolitics, Immunities and Auto-Immunities
Instructor: Penelope Deustcher
W 5:00–8:00, Kresge 2-345
This course focuses on a number of critical responses to Foucauldian biopolitics which have arisen in the context of feminist theory, recent Italian philosophy, Michel Foucault’s /College de France/ lectures; and deconstructive philosophy. Familiarity with Foucault’s /History of Sexuality/ vol 1 is presupposed. (FYI: Two preliminary 300 level lectures on History of Sexuality vol 1 are offered for anybody who might find this a useful refresher or introduction, dates 28 Oct and 4 November , Tues 5.-6.20, contact me if interested). Terms on which we focus are: immunity, auto-immunity, the society that must be defended, negative and positive biopolitics and precarious life. Texts to be considered will include material from Foucault’s History of Sexuality 1; Society Must be Defended; Security, Territory; and Population; Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy; Donna Haraway’s Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies; Judith Butler's Precarious Life; and Jacques Derrida’s Rogues and Philosophy in a Time of Terror.
CLS 488: Towards a Literary Informatics
Instructor: Martin Muller
W 2:00-5:00, Annenberg G31
Because there have always been too many books to read, there have always been techniques of "not-reading" or of getting some knowledge about books that you should know something about but could not possibly read even if you wanted to. Information technology has made this problem worse and better. While there is a lot more stuff, there are powerful ways of getting at it. Some of them go beyond the idea that digital technology has faster ways of delivering books to readers. Texts become digital objects that are decomposed into quasi-molecular parts and can be recombined or analyzed in various ways. These are new ways of "not-reading" or "distant reading" as Franco Moretti has called it more politely.
What implications do changes in text technology have for Literary Studies? Are new kinds of research potential generated when primary literary texts become manipulable digital objects as if they were DNA sequences in some cultural genome? In the Life Sciences bioinformatics has become an essential ancillary disciplinary. Should there be a Literary Informatics? What would it look like?
This seminar explores these questions through a mixture of hands-on and reflective work. The starting point is the opposition of encoding and decoding. The book is a device that encodes information for decoding by human readers who bring a vast amount of tacit knowledge to the task of making sense of the underdetermined symbols on the printed page. "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich" is a phrase that a competent reader immediately recognizes as a stylistic gesture of a particular kind. A computer cannot "read" this or any other phrase, but in a properly encoded corpus it can within minutes retrieve most instances of the "three adjective rule" from hundreds of millions of words. Putting the dumb but fast machine in the service of the smart but slow reader is the secret to a successful literary informatics.
In the first third of the seminar we will focus on questions of text encoding. You will take part in a three-day workshop on text encoding conducted by Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman from the Women Writers Project at Brown University. Flanders and Bauman have long been associated with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the standards setting body for digital texts in the humanities.
The second part of the seminar will focus on decoding or the analytical operations that are enabled by large-scale archives of systematically encoded digital texts. The major materials will come from the MONK project, which will offer a testbed for "not-reading" strategies across a document space of some 1,200 texts from the mid-sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, including some 300 Elizabethan/Jacobean plays and ~600 British and American novels from 1780-1900.
In the third part of the seminar, participants will develop and report on a project of their own, which may come from the encoding or decoding phase of the seminar or combine the two in some fashion.
Fall 2008
CLS 410: Theories of Literature
Instructor: 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
Instructor: 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.
