Please note that CPLS V3900 and G4900 are not the same course. An introduction to changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, giving special attention to the stakes of interdisciplinary method in comparative scholarship. We will investigate the debates around comparativism in a number of fields, and our discussions will focus on rubrics of inquiry that combine strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from multiple disciplinary formations: e.g. postcolonial studies, cultural studies, media studies, urban studies, globalization studies, feminism, translation studies. Enrollment is limited and the seminar is designed for grad students working toward a degree in Comparative Literature and Society. Students are expected to have a preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. PLEASE NOTE: This course is required for ICLS graduate students, and priority will be given to these students. Please contact the ICLS office for more information, at (212) 854-4541.

Please note that CPLS V3900 and G4900 are not the same course.Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literary and cultural study. Emphasis on comparative literature as a discipline, its relationship to theoretical currents, and to interdisciplinary areas of study. Topics include narrative and nation; subjectivity and identities; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; oral, print, and visual culture; globalization. Open only to students intending to declare a major in Comparative Literature and Society in spring 2011.

Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literary and cultural study. Emphasis on comparative literature as a discipline, its relationship to theoretical currents, and to interdisciplinary areas of study. Topics include narrative and nation; subjectivity and identities; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; oral, print, and visual culture; globalization. This course is required for students intending to declare a major in Comparative Literature and Society in spring 2012.

In contemporary debates in higher education, the lecture is commonly disparaged as a way of teaching that is inherently monologic, static and hierarchical. In graduate programs, we very seldom discuss lecturing — much less learn how to do it well — and yet it is something almost all of us will be expected to do. This seminar on the lecture will consider a genealogy of the method in the history of the Western university, but the focus of our discussions will be the politics of the lecture as pedagogical practice: Can the lecture be critical and self-reflexive? Can it be dialogic and interactive? What does it mean to think about a lecture as a performance rather than simply the conveyance of information and argument — that is, to consider what J.L. Austin once termed “the accompaniments of the utterance” to be just as crucial as its “content” to its implications as a form? Is the lecture a literary genre, and if so, what are its protocols, its modes of circulation, and its formal characteristics? The syllabus will include a variety of examples, from classic American written lectures by Emerson and William James to the work of poststructuralist theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, and Judith Butler. We will pay particular attention to literary experiments with the lecture, from Gertrude Stein and e.e. cummings to John Cage, David Antin, Anne Carson, and J. M. Coetzee. But we will also consider the role of lecture in political organizing (with figures such as C. L. R. James and Angela Davis); music, theater and dance (Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Spalding Gray, Bill T. Jones, Jerôme Bel); art history (John Berger); and science (Richard Feynman). Whenever possible, we will supplement texts or transcriptions with audio or video recordings, with the aim of establishing a vocabulary for the analysis of lectures as performance.

*See English Department website for application instructions

Instructor: J. Pemberton

This course explores the possibilities of ethnography of sound by attending to a range of listening encounters: in urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from histories of audible pasts and resonances of auditory cultural spaces; through repeated listenings in the age of electronic reproduction and at the limits of listening with experimental music. Sound, noise, voice, reverberation, and silence, from von Helmholtz to John Cage and beyond: the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual, for an extended moment, in pursuit of sonorous objects and cultural sonorities.

Instructor’s Permission Required.

This course will consider a few of the many works of literature, cinema, philosophy, and historiography that have responded to the Algerian War of Independence of 1954-62. Areas of study will include: the Algerian war and the emergence of Algerian literature; the War and the ‘École d’Alger’; the public debate over torture and human rights; the Algerian war as a precursor of 1968; Memory/commemoration of the war in Algeria and in France; gender in/and the Algerian war; the Algerian War in French/Algerian/colonial historiography, and violence and memory in the first, second, and third Algerian wars (1830-1954-1991).

Instructor: A. Mac Adam

The history of irrational love as embodied in literary and non-literary texts throughout the Western tradition. Readings include the Bible, Greek, Roman, Medieval, and modern texts.

Instructor: R. Bauman

Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings include novels, historical studies, and film criticism.