Paradigms of the European Novel: From the Picaresque Novel to Surrealism, with Defoe, Goethe, Balzac and Kafka in Between

In the wealth of plots, characters, settings and narrative strategies it has generated over the course of three centuries, the European novel has proved to be one of the most inventive and resilient forms of Western literature.  Certain paradigms have predominated from the beginning, two of which will form the center of this course:  the illusion of a “true” story and the bourgeois family as an organizing narrative principle.   Novels include Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Sorrows of Young Werther, Père Goriot, Amerika and Nadja.  Critical texts by major theorists of the novel– Auerbach, Watt, Bakhtin, Moretti.  All readings and discussions in English.

A survey of key concepts of  “Madness” in the 20th century, this course examines inventions and conceptualizations of the “insane” subject in psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, gender theory, and literature. Particular attanetion will be paid to the pathological as a specific way of speaking and writing; what is the reative potential of the irrational subject? And what kind of language do literary texts share with more abstract reflections on the abnormal?

Readings include E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hofmansthal, Schnitzler, Duras, Bernhard, Jelinek, Freud, Foucault, Lacan Cixous, Kristeva, and Deleuze.

FALL 2013 subtitle:

Reading Marx’s critique of capitalism in France and Italy in the 60’s

In the 1960’s, Marxists in the Western World felt the need to “return” to the original writings of Marx, and attempt a reconstruction of Marxism. It was made inevitable and desirable at the same time by the failure of existing socialist regimes and new revolutionary prospects in the capitalist world, by diverging interpretations of the “philosophy of praxis” itself, as well as unexpected results of its intersection with new paradigms of social and textual criticism. In the categories invented in these circumstances originate models of critical theory which are still among the most influential today. This class will compare two of them, which both focused on the philosophical and political dimensions of the “critique of political economy”, as developed in and around Marx’s Capital: that proposed in Italy by the “operaista” school (Tronti, Negri and others), and that proposed in France by Althusser and his group (labeled “structuralist” at the time).

Primary readings will be taken from: Marx (Capital, Grundrisse), Lukacs (History and Class-Consciousness), Tronti (as available in English), Negri (Marx beyond Marx, Revolution retrieved), Althusser (For Marx, Reading Capital, Essays in Self-Criticism).

Application Procedure:

Please send an email to Assistant Director Catherine LaSota by April 30, 2013 with the following information:

name

program and year

relevant courses taken

a couple of sentences explaining interest in the course

Instructor: E. Grimm

With an emphasis on equality and social justice, this course examines and compares significant 19th c./20th c. literary approaches to friendship as intermediary between individualism and communal life. Discussion of culturally formed concepts and attitudes in modern or postcolonial setting. Reading of Dickens, Hesse, Woolf, Ocampo, Puig, Fugard, Emerson, Derrida, Rawls. – E. Grimm

Prerequisites: CPLS BC3001 Intro to Comp. Lit.; completion of intermediate language courses.

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, and Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah. 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 including innovation, the vernacular, and political critique at stake in the tradition. 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.

Instructor: A. Frajlich-Zajac

The course examines the beginnings of the Polish short story in the 19th century and its development through the late 20th century, including exemplary works of major Polish writers of each period. It is also a consideration of the short story form–its generic features, its theoretical premises, and the way these respond to the stylistic and philosophical imperatives of successive periods.

Instructor: M. Humphreys

These two graduate level seminars are designed to introduce students to many of the main questions motivating research in comparative politics. The courses are not designed as exercises in intellectual history, although some “classics” are included. They are also not designed to teach particular approaches or methods in the study of comparative politics, although many such approaches and methods are included in the readings. Instead, they are designed to give students a sense of what we “know” today about the answers to some major questions that animate the subfield and to encourage students to develop the analytical skills, substantive knowledge, and theoretical insights necessary to make their own contributions to comparative politics and political science. Comparative Politics Survey II builds on the topics developed Comparative Politics Survey I, but can easily be taken before taking Comparative Politics Survey I. Topics to be covered in the surveys include among others, institutions, culture, parties, violence, collective action, economic development, bureaucracy, regimes and regime change, the welfare state, corruption and political behavior.

Three canonical figures of 20th-century European drama:  Brecht, Beckett, Muller, 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.

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.