This course examines practices of literary plagiarism, piracy, kidnapping, cultural appropriation, forgery, and other disparaged textual activities to consider their implication in the power/knowledge complex of (neo)imperial international relations under current capitalist copyright and intellectual property regimes that constitute the so-called “World Republic of Letters.”…..

Instructor: David Wills

(Seminar). Modernism can find its roots anywhere from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the turn of the 20th century; and it finds them differently depending on whether one refers to “modernism” or “modernity.” For the purposes of this class, modernism’s beginning will be situated in about the middle of the nineteenth century, in Baudelaire’s use of the neologism modernité to describe the new urban (and colonialist) sensibility that emerged in the Paris of the time, and more particularly in the seismic poetic shifts that then began to take place. And although many versions or trajectories of poetic modernism can be traced, we will attempt to follow a series of lines that tie the French version of it to the emergence of diverse American voices. Poets to be discussed will include Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Ponge, Crane, Hughes, Eliot, Moore, Stevens and Williams. Application instructions: E-mail Aaron Robertson (ar3488@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.

This course will focus on twentieth century poetry written by authors of African descent in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The readings will allow us to cover some of the most significant poetry written during the major black literary movements of the century, including the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and the Black Arts movement. In particular, the course will be designed around a selection of books of poetry by black writers, such as Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew, Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn, Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. We will thus spend a substantial amount of time reading each poet in depth, as well as discussing various strategies for constructing a book of poetry: thematic or chronological arrangements, extended formal structures (suites, series, or montages), historical poetry, attempts to imitate another medium (particularly black music) in writing, etc. We will use the readings to consider approaches to the theorization of a diasporic poetics, as well as to discuss the key issues at stake in the tradition including innovation, the vernacular, and political critique. Other authors covered may include Gwendolyn Brooks, Nicolás Guillén, Christopher Okigbo, Amiri Baraka, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen. Requirements: weekly response papers, a 5-7 pg. midterm paper and a 9-12 pg. final paper.

Note: This class is taught in German and many of the readings are in German

Four figures of 20th-century European drama:  Brecht, Beckett, Mueller, and Jelinek.  The politics of dramatic form explored in terms of a text/performance dialectic as well as in close consideration of historical context.  Other plays, 20th century European.

Four figures of 20th-century European drama:  Brecht, Beckett, Mueller, and Jelinek.  The politics of dramatic form explored in terms of a text/performance dialectic as well as in close consideration of historical context.  Other plays, 20th century European. This course is taught in German and most readings are in German.

Undergraduates will be admitted with instructor’s permission.

How is ideology transmitted as performance? This course explores that question by examining a series of performances and performance genres developed and disseminated in mid-twentieth-century Europe, and by contextualizing them within a number of theoretical perspectives. The main focus of the seminar is on the 1930s and 1940s in both the Third Reich and the Eastern Bloc. The seminar will take in a wide range of “performances,” including both those marked as aesthetic (theatre, film, art exhibitions), as well as considering the politically motivated aesthetics of trials, political rallies, the performance of race and of progress, and of course the cult of staging political leaders like Hitler and Stalin as well. In the course of the semester, students will read widely in the literature of political and performance theory, as well as engaging with a range of primary materials: films, documentaries, plays, newsreels, mass spectacles, dance, etc.

Instructor: Mary McLeod

This seminar explores the relation between space, power, and politics in the urban environment from the Enlightenment period to the present.  In contrast to some Marxist approaches that see architecture primarily as an ideological reflection of dominant economic forces, this seminar investigates how power is actually produced and embodied in the physical environment.  In other words, space and architecture are seen as active participants in the structuring of our daily lives and relations, not merely as passive reflections of political and economic institutions.  Two theorists will be critical to this exploration:  the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre and the philosopher/historian Michel Foucault.  Lefebvre’s work, which draws heavily on both Marxism (especially Marx’s early writings on alienation) and existentialism, introduced the notion of daily life as a critical political construct.  Lefebvre saw the city and architecture as integrally contributing to power relations, and viewed the urban festival as an important strategy in overcoming the monotony of what he called “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”  Foucault, on the other hand, rejects Lefebvre’s humanism and emphasis on subjectivity in his analysis of the relation between space, power, and social institutions.  Both theorists, however, share a skepticism towards Enlightenment rationality, and both attempt to counter the traditional Marxist/Hegelian emphasis on historical time by placing a new importance on space.  The writings of more recent theorists (such as Marshall Berman, Michel de Certeau, Teresa Caldeira, Mike Davis, Guy Debord, Andreas Huyssen, Rem Koolhaas, Elizabeth Wilson, and Douglas Spencer) will also be examined with regard to issues concerning the politics of space

Instructor: Yuri Shevchuk

The course will discuss how filmmaking has been used as an instrument of power and imperial domination in the Soviet Union as well as on post-Soviet space since 1991. A body of selected films by Soviet and post-Soviet directors which exemplify the function of filmmaking as a tool of appropriation of the colonized, their cultural and political subordination by the Soviet center will be examined in terms of postcolonial theories. The course will focus both on Russian cinema and often overlooked work of Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, Armenian, etc. national film schools and how they participated in the communist project of fostering a «new historic community of the Soviet people» as well as resisted it by generating, in hidden and, since 1991, overt and increasingly assertive ways their own counter-narratives. Close attention will be paid to the new Russian film as it re-invents itself within the post-Soviet imperial momentum projected on the former Soviet colonies.

The course will discuss how filmmaking has been used as an instrument of power and imperial domination in the Soviet Union as well as on post-Soviet space since 1991. A body of selected films by Soviet and post-Soviet directors which exemplify the function of filmmaking as a tool of appropriation of the colonized, their cultural and political subordination by the Soviet center will be examined in terms of postcolonial theories. The course will focus both on Russian cinema and often overlooked work of Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, Armenian, etc. national film schools and how they participated in the communist project of fostering a «new historic community of the Soviet people» as well as resisted it by generating, in hidden and, since 1991, overt and increasingly assertive ways their own counter-narratives. Close attention will be paid to the new Russian film as it re-invents itself within the post-Soviet imperial momentum projected on the former Soviet colonies.

A survey of postwar Czech fiction and drama. Knowledge of Czech not necessary. Parallel reading lists available in translation and in the original.