Issues in Comparative Literature: The Art of Lecture

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.