This course seeks to understand how authors and filmmakers in the 20th century communicate the experience of violence to their audiences. We will discuss how fragmentation, montage, language breakdown and other techniques not only depict violence, but reflect that violence in artistic forms. We will also ask what representing violence does to the artistic work. Can the attempt to convey violence become an act of violence in itself?

We will consider texts from Vladimir Mayakovsky, John Dos Passos, Andrei Platonov, Vasiliy Grossman, Allen Ginsberg, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Sorokin, as well as films from Sergei Eisenstein, Alexei Balabanov and Quentin Tarantino. Full course description and syllabus available at readingviolence.weebly.com.

Instructor: L. Knapp

Independent Study (set up for MLS service learning).

In this course, we will explore theories of intertextuality developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Gerard Genette, and Harold Bloom, among others, and discuss why the debates of intertextuality have provoked such a resonance in contemporary literary studies. In addition to the theoretical underpinnings of intertextuality we will examine concepts such as influence, imitation, allusion, and quotation. A series of literary texts will provide text cases for the various theories. We will discuss exemplary applications of each theory (and their limitations) in close readings of Büchner Prize acceptance speeches delivered by Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elfriede Jelinek; poems by Bachmann and Celan; and three seminal novels of the 20th century: Bachmann’s Malina, Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Special attention will be paid to the underlying discourse on memory and trauma in their poetics of intertextuality.

The goals of the course are (1) to provide a solid grounding in the historical development of theories of intertextuality, (2) to provide students with methodological frameworks for critically analyzing literary texts, and (3) to discuss the role intertextuality plays in 20th century cultures of memory.

Please note: Readings and discussions in English. No prerequisites are required.

This course introduces beginning graduate students to the changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, paying special attention to the range of interdisciplinary methods in comparative scholarship. Students are expected to have preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Our objective is to broaden the theoretical foundation of comparative studies to negotiate a conversation between literary studies and social sciences. Weekly readings are devoted to intellectual inquiries that demonstrate strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from a multiplicity of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, architecture, political theory, philosophy, art history, and media studies. Whenever possible, we will invite faculty from the above disciplines and fields to visit our class and share their perspectives on assigned readings. Students are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities and explore fields and disciplines outside their primary focus of study and specific discipline.

This course introduces beginning graduate students to the changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, paying special attention to the range of interdisciplinary methods in comparative scholarship. Students are expected to have preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Our objective is to broaden the theoretical foundation of comparative studies to negotiate a conversation between literary studies and social sciences. Weekly readings are devoted to intellectual inquiries that demonstrate strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from a multiplicity of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, architecture, political theory, philosophy, art history, and media studies. Whenever possible, we will invite faculty from the above disciplines and fields to visit our class and share their perspectives on assigned readings. Students are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities and explore fields and disciplines outside their primary focus of study and specific discipline.

Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics may include: oral, print, and visual culture; epic, novel, and nation; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; sex and gender transformation; the human/inhuman; writing trauma; urban imaginaries; world literature; medical humanities. Open only to students intending to declare a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medicine, Literature, and Society in Spring 2015.

Examines short literary texts and various methodological approaches to interpreting such texts in order to establish a basic familiarity with the study of German literature and culture.

This course is designed to introduce students to the history of emotions. We look at classical and contemporary philosophy and history as well as art and poetry on “the passions” – defined variously as emotions, feelings, physical or non-rational sensations or states of consciousness or affects. We begin by asking what is an emotion, and by considering the various historical and philosophical responses to that question. We then look at a number of key emotions from a similarly eclectic, episodic historical perspective. Among those we look at are such classic affective states as love, pleasure, pain, compassion, anger, and fear and terror, and the rise of later more contemporary ones like stress and anxiety, paranoia and trauma.