This course will explore the seminal work of Walter Benjamin and trace the development of his theory from the 1920s through his last writings of 1940. A prolific literary and cultural critic, Benjamin developed most of his theoretical concepts through readings of authors such as Goethe, Hölderlin, Kafka, and Baudelaire. In the first part of the semester, “Benjamin as a reader,” we will discuss the most influential of these texts against the backdrop of their primary sources. In the second part of the term, we will focus on Benjamin’s legacy. To explore the actuality of Benjamin’s media theory, his conception of language and translation as well as his thoughts on violence, we will focus on some of his most prominent readers: Theodor W. Adorno, Paul de Man, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben.

Dialectical approach to reading and thinking about the history of dramatic theatre in the west, interrogating the ways poetry inflects, and is inflected by, the material dynamics of performance. We will undertake careful study of the practices of performance, and of the sociocultural, economic, political, and aesthetic conditions animating representative plays of the Western tradition from the late eighteenth century to today; course will also emphasize development of important critical concepts for the analysis of drama, theatre, and performance. Specific attention will be given to the ideology of realism and naturalism, the development of epic theatre, the theatre of cruelty, postcolonial performance, and the continuing invention of dramatic forms (theatre of the absurd, speechplays, postdramatic theatre), as well as to the political and theoretical impact of race, gender, sexuality in modern performance culture. Writing: 2-3 papers; Reading: 1-2 plays, critical and historical reading per week; final examination.

P. Cavafy, a poet of the Greek Diaspora in Alexandria, had a profound influence on writers such as E.M. Forster, Marguerite Yourcenar, and James Merrill as well as artists such David Hockney and Duane Michaels. By examining Cavafy’s work in all its permutations (as criticism, translation, adaptation), this course introduces students to a wide range of critical approaches used in Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, and Translation Studies. The Cavafy case becomes an experimental ground for different kinds of critical methods, those that engage social-historical issues such as sexuality, diaspora, postcoloniality as well as linguistic issues such as multilingualism, translation and media. How does this poet “at a slight angle to the universe” challenge contemporary theories of gender and literature as national institution? How can studying a canonical author open up our theories and practices of translation? To what extent are translations and adaptations hermeneutic acts? What do they tell us about the receiving culture as well as the source culture? What will our own translation project be? Though this course presupposes no knowledge of Greek, students wanting to read Cavafy in the original are encouraged to take the 1-credit directed reading tutorial offered simultaneously.

Instructor: J. Peters

*See English Department website for application instructions

This course investigates both representations of law in performance, film, and other media, and legal events as, themselves, media performances.  In so doing, it explores the impact of film and other media on the shaping of law, and the way in which media attempt to rewrite law, offering an alternative sphere of judgment.  Reading a number of theoretical and historical texts, and viewing films, television episodes, and other media texts, we will look at the ways in which the legal subject is both produced and understood through media texts, looking at how these are crucial to ideas about intention, the “reasonable man,” and the normal (cultural, sexual, violent normalities…).  We will look at the performance of policing, the trial, punishment, and torture (both live and reflected through media).  Along the way, we will look at the way in which film and other media inflect such substantive issues as the nature of murder and culpability, freedom of speech, sex offence, the cultural defense, justice after atrocity.  The course will offer a theoretical foundation for thinking about the intersection of law and media, bringing legal, film, performance, and media theory into conversation with one another.  More generally, the course will serve as a vehicle for interrogating “law and literature” and “law and media” as sub-disciplines, and for developing techniques for the interpretation of visual, filmed, and live “texts.”

This class will look at major developments in experimental, innovative, and avant-garde poetry and poetics from 1950 to the present, paying attention to parallel developments in the visual arts. Surrealism, Constructivism, Black Mountain, Minimalism, Conceptualism, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Flarf.

This class will look at major developments in experimental, innovative, and avant-garde poetry and poetics from 1950 to the present, paying attention to parallel developments in the visual arts. Surrealism, Constructivism, Black Mountain, Minimalism, Conceptualism, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Flarf.

Instructor: L. Venuti

A deep immersion in the theory and practice of translation with a focus on translating into English. The first half of the course is devoted to discussing readings in the history of translation theory while translating brief practical exercises; in the second half, translation projects are submitted to the class for critical discussion. The foreign texts for these projects, chosen in consultation with the instructor, will be humanistic, not only literature as conventionally defined (prose fiction and poetry, memoir and travel writing), but also the gamut of text types in the human sciences, including philosophy, history, and ethnography. The aim is not just to translate, but to think deeply about translating, to develop writing practices by drawing on the resources of theory, past and present, and by examining translations written by professionals. Entry to the class  is by permission of the instructor through an email interview: LVenuti@temple.edu

Instructor: J. Moya

Explores the historical development of anarchism as a working-class, youth, and artistic movement in Europe, North and Latin America, the Middle East, India, Japan, and China from the 1850s to the present. Examines anarchism both as an ideology and as a set of cultural and political practices.

Instructor: Z. Nauruzbayeva

Art has been understood and conceptualized in a variety of ways.In Western public culture, art has been commonly regarded in terms of autonomous creativity and individual genius. In former socialist countries, the state emphasized the social obligations of the artist to the collective good. Anthropologists challenged these understandings of art as an activity separate from the everyday life by providing accounts of contexts where creativity is intrinsically connected to ritual life, and artifacts are an expression of the connection to the land and ancestry. In light of trade, colonialism, and more recently, economic globalization, there has been a lot of traffic in people and commodities between these aesthetic and socioeconomic regimes-also the subject of prolific anthropological inquiry. This course offers an exploration of all these discussions, and support an understanding of art as embedded in its surrounding social context rather than existing as a universal self-standing category.

To examine anthropological explanation as a passage from the known to the unknown that problematizes the known as well as leaving some kernel of the strange, the exotic, and the unfamiliar a mystery and does not reduce everything to an explanation. How might we master the need for mastery? What happens after we have problematized the known? Readings: accounts of fieldwork, select ethnography, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Brecht, Benjamin, Bataille. General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL).