This course examines psychoanalytic movements that are viewed either as post-Freudian in theory or as emerging after Freud’s time. The course begins by considering the ways Freud’s cultural and historical surround, as well as the wartime diaspora of the European psychoanalytic community, shaped Freudian and post-Freudian thought. It then focuses on significant schools and theories of psychoanalysis that were developed from the mid 20th century to the present. Through readings of key texts and selected case studies, it explores theorists’ challenges to classical thought and technique, and their reconfigurations, modernizations, and total rejections of central Freudian ideas. The course concludes by looking at contemporary theorists’ moves to integrate notions of culture, concepts of trauma, and findings from neuroscience and attachment research into the psychoanalytic frame.

Instructor: Nikolas Kakkoufa

This course takes C. P. Cavafy’s oeuvre as a departure point in order to discuss desire and the ways it is tied with a variety of topics. We will employ a number of methodological tools to examine key topics in Cavafy’s work such as eros, power, history, and gender. How can we define desire and how is desire staged, thematized, or transmitted through poetry? How does a gay poet write about desired bodies at the beginning of the previous century? What is Cavafy’s contribution to the formation of gay identities in the twentieth century? How do we understand the poet’s desire for an archive? How important is the city for activating desire? How do we trace a poet’s afterlife and how does the desire poetry transmits to readers transform through time? How does literature of the past address present concerns? These are some of the questions that we will examine during this course.

Prerequisites: the instructor’s permission. This course will examine texts by writers from the Spanish, French, and English-speaking Caribbean whose work has been in some way marked by exile, emigration and colonial migration. Additionally, the course will investigate the impact of displacement and transculturation on the production of new cultural subjects, the articulation of alternative definitions of nationhood, citizenship and/or sovereignty, and the contradictions of literary reception in metropolitan capitals. Among the writers that the course will engage with are Reinaldo Arenas, Piri Thomas, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, V.S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Instructor: Nolan T. Gear

Virginia Woolf famously opined that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” In this class, we will drag the clock back to 1895 (or thereabouts), when the first moving images were successfully projected: an event singularly plural, as it occurred near-contemporaneously in Germany, France, England, and New Jersey. What we (tenuously) call Modernism has been revised many times over, with ever more elastic parameters proposed for period, place, and idiom. But only recently have scholars such as Laura Marcus and David Trotter begun to think of the cinema as essentially constitutive of, rather than merely adjacent to, the new grammars, styles, and ambitions of literary modernism. In short: those we call Modernists were also the first generation of moviegoers, yet little has been done with this extraordinary historical fact. In addition to analyses of critical films (at least one per week), we will take “the cinematic” as an invitation, puzzle, problem, and principle for writers of the early twentieth century. Some, like Richardson and H.D., exuberantly lauded and incorporated film. Some, like Woolf, had greater caution, ambivalence, sometimes disdain. Taking the cinematic as both dispositif and inclination, both system and idea, we will be examining the implicit and explicit engagements writers staged with the vocabulary, syntax, and atmosphere of cinema – while familiarizing ourselves with filmmakers such as Eisenstein, Chaplin, Méliès, and Micheaux. We will be asking questions big and small, concrete and abstract. How do close-ups and soft focus, montage and tracking, the ticket-vendor and the nickelodeon surface or remain submerged in literature of the era? What brought people to the movies, and what kept them in their seats? Who wrote about the cinema first, and why? What ethical imperatives did warfare, routinization, and other aspects of modernity pose for filmmakers? How did race and racism impact the production and reception of cinema? How did femininity and feminism, queers and queerness, immigrants and immigration alter audiences and expectations? How did novelists and poets make use of the movies while investigating interiority, authenticity, desire, and perception?

This course studies the effects and strategies of the cold war on Arab writing, education, arts and translation, and the counter movement in Arab culture to have its own identities. As the cold war functioned and still functions on a global scale, thematic and methodological comparisons are drawn with Latin America, India and Africa.

A seminar on the theory and practice of translation from the perspective of comparative diaspora studies, drawing on the key scholarship on diaspora that has emerged over the past two decades focusing on the central issue of language in relation to migration, uprooting, and imagined community. Rather than foregrounding a single case study, the syllabus is organized around the proposition that any consideration of diaspora requires a consideration of comparative and overlapping diasporas, and as a consequence a confrontation with multilingualism, creolization and the problem of translation. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to a practicum, in which we will conduct an intensive workshop around the translation projects of the student participants.

Same as CPLS 6111 GR

A seminar on the theory and practice of translation from the perspective of comparative diaspora studies, drawing on the key scholarship on diaspora that has emerged over the past two decades focusing on the central issue of language in relation to migration, uprooting, and imagined community. Rather than foregrounding a single case study, the syllabus is organized around the proposition that any consideration of diaspora requires a consideration of comparative and overlapping diasporas, and as a consequence a confrontation with multilingualism, creolization and the problem of translation. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to a practicum, in which we will conduct an intensive workshop around the translation projects of the student participants.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the explosion of Romanticism: a sweeping cultural movement that developed alongside—and deeply impacted—revolutions in politics, philosophy, industry, and the arts. Romanticism not only spanned multiple media (literature, visual art, music), but also was in essential ways a trans-national phenomenon, with rich cultural cross-pollinations among a number of countries and languages. This course will introduce literary Romanticism as what William Hazlitt called “the spirit of the age,” primarily in the comparative contexts of Great Britain, Germany, and France. We will explore similar themes and concerns in some of the major writers in these traditions, and also ask what makes each “Romanticism” singular to its time and place. One particular thread for our inquiry will concern how writers confronted crisis and creativity in the religious sphere during a time of political upheaval. From the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a “new mythology,” to William Blake’s “Bible of Hell,” to Mary Shelley’s “modern Prometheus” and Victor Hugo’s wrestling with God and Satan, what new gods come to the fore in Romanticism, and what is their legacy today? While our main focus will remain on Britain, Germany, and France, we will also glance at contemporaneous Romantic currents in Italy, India, and the United States. All readings will be provided in English translation, but students with reading knowledge of French and/or German are encouraged to read texts in the original languages.