Archive of Previous Seminars
Fall 2007
CMLIT 503– COMPARATIVE CRITICISM II: THE THEORY CANON
This course studies the history of criticism and theory from the 18th to the 21st century. Readings and class discussions will focus on the major conceptual problems tackled by the foundational intellectuals who have come to form the body of thought we now know as “theory.” In addition to studying key concepts in critical thought (aesthetics, ideology, materialism, dialectic, hegemony, deconstruction, power, etc), this course will examine how these concepts shape the work of literary, cultural, and aesthetic criticism.
This course studies the history of criticism and theory from the 18th to the 21st century. Readings and class discussions will focus on the major conceptual problems tackled by the foundational intellectuals who have come to form the body of thought we now know as “theory.” In addition to studying key concepts in critical thought (aesthetics, ideology, materialism, dialectic, hegemony, deconstruction, power, etc), this course will examine how these concepts shape the work of literary, cultural, and aesthetic criticism.
Why are certain theorists more significant than others? To what extent does the work of theorists—whether philosophers like Hegel and Derrida; psychoanalysts like Freud, Lacan, Fanon, and Kristeva; literary scholars like Barthes, Cixous, and Butler; or political thinkers like Marx and Gramsci— determine the possibilities for the study of literature and culture? These theorists form a canon, to the extent that the terms and concepts they use form part of the lingua franca of literary and cultural studies. Yet whereas the issue of canonicity has often been discussed in the field of literature during the past 30 years, it is rarely discussed in the field of literary criticism and critical theory.
This course aims to open up new avenues in contemporary thought by studying the canonicity of “theorists” and their ideas. To this end, this course will ask how issues of aesthetics in the works of these thinkers relate to their ideas about morality, history, politics, and epistemology. What other genealogies become possible? How do we articulate the conceptual stakes of our own work as scholars and intellectuals?
Readings may include texts by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, Benjamin, Beauvoir, Lacan, Fanon, Foucault, Kristeva, Gramsci, Derrida, Barthes, Irigaray, Cixous, Butler, Spivak, and Deleuze.
CMLIT 505-PARALLEL CONSTRUCTIONS, MULTIPLE ORIGINS: AMERICAN SELF-DEFINITIONS, NORTH AND SOUTH
This course will offer a transhistorical and transnational exploration, from the Colonial period to the present, of claims of American distinction--exception and particularity--in both the U.S. and Latin America. Sometimes the claims are made vis-à-vis Europe, sometimes in a providential and religious context, sometimes in a nationalistic vein. We will concentrate on four threads: (1) picaresque and empire, with examples from the late Colonial and early Republic periods (writers such as Concolorcorvo, Brackenridge, Lizardi, Twain) as well as the 20th century “Road” genre; (2) discourses of 17th century aesthetics and the 20th century “neobaroque” (such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Lezama Lima, Sarduy); (3) anarchy and the “negative sublime” in modernity (such as Nathanael West, Roberto Arlt); (4) the erotics of the New World (such as Nabokov, Neruda). Students without Spanish are welcome: class discussion will be in English, and all readings will be available in translation.
CMLIT 580- CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY PERFORMATIVITY
From the development of performative linguistics in the early decades of the 1900s, to the fusion of theatre and anthropology in the 1970s, to the more recent establishment of formal academic departments of Performance Studies, notions of “performance,” “the performative,” and “performativity” have comprised one of the most rapidly growing fields of literary inquiry over the past century. Scholars, authors, performers and activists have sought to apply new theories of performativity to issues as varied as hate speech, oral literature, medieval spirituality, reader response, gender and race identity, writing aesthetics, textual studies and indeed drama. This seminar will explore the three major origins of performance studies: theatre, linguistics, and anthropology—though not necessarily in that order. One recurrent topic of conversation will be the nature of performance studies: Is it a methodology? A hermeneutic? A theme or mode of inquiry? A theory (or set of theories)? Simply a cluster of related questions? Though our focus will be on ‘straight theory,’ we will also be considering various non-Western concepts.
Spring 2007
CMLIT 505– THEORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND SHAKESPEARE STUDIES
For many reasons, Shakespearean texts have been used as test cases in continuing philosophical and theoretical debates over the nature of the humanistic enterprise. New Historicism is only one of the most notable examples. This graduate seminar examines the dynamics of literary criticism, concentrating on important philosophical developments.
The seminar focuses on major philosophers' engagement with literary works, including Hegel, Karl Marx, and Derrida. In addition to theoretical texts, we will work with a group of core primary texts.
A second focus is the relationship between philosophy and theory. We will trace the tensions between literary criticism and cultural criticism, and between Shakespeare studies and "Shakespeare" studies, following the development of authorship theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, feminism, Cultural Materialism, Postcolonial Studies, New Historicism, Presentism, as well as the bourgeoning field of critical race studies propelled by a renewed awareness of the importance of religion and travel in the period and in our post-9/11 world.
There will be ample opportunity to relate the course to any of your prior or developing interests. Seminar members are encouraged to contribute to the reading list. Most of the readings will be available online in English and the original languages.
CMLIT 521: FOUNDING NARRATIVES OF THE AMERICAS
This graduate research seminar will examine a number of seminal narratives that define America as textual, contextual, national, transnational, and continental phenomenon.
Our purpose is to trace and seek a fuller understanding of the genesis of American narratives by re-evaluating the processes of "worlding" the New World and the modes that narrate cultural forms and textual significance said to be distinctly peculiar to the Americas. We shall scrutinize, comparatively and contrapuntally those distinctions and claims of particularity.
For the most part, we shall be reading narrations that emanate from axiomatic paradigms that inevitably founder on historical contingencies. The seminar will focus on the dialectical histories and narratives that issue from processes of cultural formations and national self-fashioning in the contexts of the Americas.
Requirements and Procedures
1. Preparation of weekly assigned readings on the syllabus. Each student is expected to prepare readings from more than one language area from among the weekly assignments. Preparation should entail the reading and writing of a precis (minimum of half page, typed) of each chosen item. Also, at least one item from "Secondary readings" should be read for each week. The reading preparation should serve as basis for each student's contribution to the discussion during the seminar sessions. This preparations, as well as regular attendance, are expected of all seminarians.
2. A mid-term oral presentation and a final oral presentation (15 minutes each) are required of all seminarians. Those regularly registered will use these presentations in developing their mid-term and final papers. The mid-term paper should be between 10 and 15 pages and the final paper between 20 and 25 pages, prepared in typescript form for publication (MLA Handbook Style). Auditors, while expected to
read some of the materials assigned for each seminar session, are not required to submit finished papers, though papers submitted by any auditor will be duly read and critiqued.
3. The seminar will be conducted in English, though the official languages of the seminar are English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French and written work may be submitted in any of these languages. Oral presentations should be in English, since this is the language all the seminarians have in common.
4. For those enrolled for a grade, the final grade will be based on weekly preparation and contribution to the seminar (20%), mid-term and end-term oral presentations (30%), mid-term paper (20%), final term paper (30%).
5. A master copy of the materials will be placed on reserve (complete volumes), and/or available outside N436 Burrowes copy for your own files (excerpted materials).
CMLIT 589- TECHNOLOGY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION
This graduate level survey course explores the theoretical and pedagogical implications of Internet-based communication and multimedia in a wide array of language education contexts. Course activities include experimentation with established and emerging Internet communication and composition tools (e.g., wikis, blogs, podcasting, and chat) and readings of relevant research drawing from second language acquisition, communication theory, descriptive linguistics, cultural studies, poststructuralism, and educational theories of development (the latter primarily in the form of sociocultural and activity theoretical research). Participants will be expected to exit this course with a broad knowledge of educational uses of technology and will have the opportunity, through a variety of course activities, to focus on specific empirical, theoretical, and/or pedagogical contexts that relate to their academic and professional specializations.
CMLIT 597A BLACK PARIS
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar focuses on the history of African, Caribbean, and African-American people in Paris. It includes both the role of
the city within the writing, art, and thought of the African Diaspora as well as the impact of Paris’s black population on French cultural and political life
from the 18th century to the present. The seminar is open to graduate students from any field as well as to undergraduate students in the Schreyer Honors College. The only pre-requisite is a reading Knowledge of French.
Co-taught by professors of French and Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature, and History, and drawing on the expertise of visiting scholars
from France and this country, the seminar will introduce students to major issues in transnational writing, art, music, and thought; colonial and post-
colonial history and theory; integration, citizenship, and identity; histories of slavery, abolitionism, and revolution; theories of race and colonialism;
cosmopolitanism, pan-Africanism, Negritude, and creÌoliteÌ; migration during World War I and World War II, and developments in jazz and modernist
literature.
The Black Paris Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar is sponsored by the Department of French and Francophone Studies, the Department of
Comparative Literature, the Department of History, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy.
Fall 2006
CMLIT 501 PROSEMINAR IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
What is the current shape of the discipline of Comparative Literature? This course considers both practical matters, such as research techniques; and theoretical concerns, such as the nature and assumptions of literary study as undertaken from a variety of comparative perspectives. Together, we will (1) read the discipline, looking at Comparative Literature as a field of teaching, research, and study: (2) consider a sampling of theoretical and critical approaches to the study of literature as international cultural production; (3) become acquainted with some of the tools, conventions, and expectations of comparative scholarship; and theorists; and (4) practice research design and several forms of professional writing. This course is required of first-semester graduate students in Comparative Literature, and recommended for students taking a minor in Comparative Literature or seeking a graduate-level introduction to the field.
CMLIT 502 COMPARATIVE CRITICISM I
This seminar welcomes students from all disciplines who are interested in the foundations and applications (or “mis-applications”) of literary and aesthetic theory. This course fulfills a requirement for doctoral students in Comparative Literature, and also counts towards the Doctoral Minor in Literary Theory, Criticism, and Aesthetics. The seminar compares “classical” theoretical and critical approaches to literary and aesthetic concepts such as inspiration, mimesis, rhetoric, semiotics, allegoresis, the sublime, decorum, and taste. In the West, the period of “classical” theory and criticism extends from the Greeks through Immanuel Kant. However, we will also consider writings outside this period and outside the western tradition which have a bearing on the topics enumerated above. We will stress these critical approaches from a primarily practical and comparative standpoint, although historical context will be considered. Critics and theorists to be considered include Aristotle, Augustine, Corneille, Ibn Rushd, Lu Ki, Plato, Pisan, Soyinka, and Zeami, among others. The seminar will also allow students to consider these critical approaches as tools for discussing “post-classical” or modern texts and artworks. In addition to theory, students will read and discuss short literary works as an exercise in determining the value, if any, of theory in the reader’s approach to a text. In an individualized context, students will discuss and investigate applications of theory to their own areas of interest and expertise.
CMLIT 504 /ENGLISH 515 ESSAYISM
We'll consider the essay as form, anti-form, and nostalgia for form; as genre, anti-genre, and law of genre; as constellation, piece work, defacement, life writing, art de faire, Bruchstück, sur-vivre. The first half of each class session will meet as a seminar, working from a reader of articles and book chapters (and time permitting, a film screening); the second half will meet as a colloquium and workshop, discussing one seminar member's work in progress in any form of nonfiction prose (literary, critical, or scholarly). This course should be useful to both M.F.A. candidates working in literary forms of nonfiction prose and to M.A./Ph.D candidates in literature with interests in genre studies, rhetoric, poetics, literary and critical theory, or philosophy and literature. Requirements: One presentation on course readings; one presentation of work in progress, for your colloquium/workshop session; final project (a piece of literary or critical nonfiction written for submission to a journal, or a researched scholarly article on a topic related to the course theme and readings; in either case, of publishable length and quality); a short talk based on the final project, for presentation during the final class session. Students who have the relevant language skills should read certain works in French or German as appropriate. Readings may include Adorno, "The Essay as Form," Derrida, "The Law of Genre," Fish, "Georgics of the Mind," Guillory, "The Memo and Modernity," Lukacs, "On the Nature and Form of the Essay," Lyotard, "The Postmodern Explained," and chapters or extracts from Agamben, The Idea of Prose, Atkins, Estranging the Familiar, Barthes, Roland Barthes by RolandBarthes, Benjamin, One-Way Street, BensmaÔa, The Barthes Effect, Blanchot, The Writing of theDisaster, Burgard, Idioms of Uncertainty, de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit, Fredman, Poets' Prose, Harrison, Essayism, Heilker, The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form, McCarthy, Crossing Boundaries, McFarland, Romantic Cruxes, Musil, The Man withoutQualities, Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, Smith, Contingencies of Value, Snyder, Prospectsof Power, Wells, Sweet Reason, Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure.
CMLIT 580/ ENGL 582 THEORY AGAINST THEORY
A rash of recent scholarship and journalism presents the death of theory as both an allegory and a symptom of a frightening set of historical conditions: fiscal and ideological crises in the academic humanities, as well as the more general demise of liberalism in the contemporary global environment. Yet are current intellectual and political conditions so dire as to disrupt the very possibility for thought altogether? This course proposes instead that the forms of intellectual inquiry we know as “Theory” have always faced conditions of crisis. In fact, rather than thinking of crisis as the occasion for theory's death, its decay, or its dissolution, we will explore the extent to which theory's crises have provided its generative force. That is, we will study how theory's uneasy synthesis of unorthodox political philosophy, revisionist psychoanalysis, and avant- garde writing derives historically from moments of debate—about the epistemological and ethical stakes of intellectual discourse; about the boundaries between the humanistic and scientific disciplines; and about the relationships between the individual subject, the work of art, and the political world. This class will historicize some of the major questions in literary and cultural theory by studying some key debates between theorists. These debates may include: Marx and Proudhon, Engels and Duhring; Washington and Du Bois; Pound, Riding, Leavis; surrealists and existentialists on the question of political writing; Althusser and E.P. Thompson; Césaire, Depestre, Senghor; French and American feminism (Cixous, Irigaray, Beauvoir; MacKinnon, Friedan, Dworkin); Barthes and Picard; Lyotard and Habermas; the new pragmatists "Against Theory”; and the Sokal affair. Students are encouraged to suggest readings and discussion topics that draw upon their own historical periods and geographical regions of interest.
CMLIT 597A GLOBAL COUNTER-CINEMA
Beginning with the work of Luis Bunuel, Sergei Eisenstein, and the Italian Neo-Realists, and moving on to counter-cinema from the United States, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, this course considers the various ways that filmmakers have used cinema as a form of political and artistic engagement. The term "counter-cinema" typically refers to films that challenge the predominant influence and conventions of mainstream Hollywood cinema and instead offer contrastive ideological and aesthetic positions. This course will take an even broader view of the concept of “counter-cinema” in order to teach films and film theories from a wide comparative context and to explore the early film movements that influenced the later development of “Third Cinema” and global counter-cinema. The course examines the social, historical, ideological, and aesthetic aspects of these films and will provide students with an introduction to the core concepts of film theory and film analysis. It will cultivate a comparative appreciation of local frameworks of knowledge and also of theoretical developments in film and media studies, such as those associated with Third Cinema, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, revolutionary cinema, feminism, and globalization. The seminar will benefit from a series of guest speakers, including the Academy Award winning documentary director, Barbara Trent.
Fall 2005
CMLIT 501 PROSEMINAR IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
What is the current shape of the discipline of Comparative Literature? This course considers both practical matters, such as research techniques; and theoretical concerns, such as the nature and assumptions of literary study as undertaken from a variety of comparative perspectives. Together, we will (1) “read” the discipline, looking at Comparative Literature as a field of teaching, research, and study: (2) consider a sampling of theorists and the place of theory with in comparative literature; and (3) read a sampling of journal-articles and book-chapters dealing with concepts in comparative study; and (4) practice several forms of professional writing. This course is required of first-semester graduate students in Comparative Literature, and recommended for students taking a minor in Comparative Literature or seeking a graduate-level introduction to the field.
CMLIT 504 THEORIES AND POLITICS OF ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEARE TO BRECHT
This graduate seminar examines the phenomenon of adaptation across the Anglo-European, African and Asian traditions, beginning with an overview of adaptation as a historical and colonial practice and concluding with contemporary case studies. While an emphasis is placed on the global and historical perspective on Shakespearean adaptations and the history of performances of Shakespeare's plays, seminar members are encouraged to contribute to the reading list. Specifically, the seminar considers both cross-cultural and cross-genre adaptations: that is, adaptations of dramas and literary texts into different artistic media such as theatre and film. We will discuss issues of authority, authenticity, (post)colonial displacement, representations of difference, adaptation as imitation or intervention, the migration of meanings associated with literary works, race and gender in translation, Orientalism and Occidentalism, as well as theatrical and cinematic re-presentations of cultural texts. A number of critical responses to adaptation are studied in class: Foucault, Derrida (The Ear of the Other), Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud, Edward Said, Brecht, Roland Barthes, and Alan Sinfield. Our texts include Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Brecth's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine, Ong Keng Sen's pan-Asian Lear, Kurosawa's Ran, Branagh's Hamlet, and John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize. The forces of globalization, war and terrorism, as well as commodity culture place special pressures on the (re)production of literary and dramatic works. As a result, canonical texts are often repositioned. As established interpretations are being displaced, new ideologies are foregrounded. We will discuss how adaptations adapt the past and alter the present and how performances produce and manipulate ideologies and allegories. The seminar is of special interest to graduate students in Comparative Literature, English, Theatre, German, Asian Studies, Film Studies, Women’s Studies and History.
CMLIT 570 MORPHOLOGIES OF POSTMODERNISM
The seminar will trace some of the more common versions of the history of Postmodernism––its aesthetic, social, and ideological facets––and examine the phenomenon in its relationship to other "Posts-" (post-structuralism, post-colonialism, the post-human). We shall consider Postmodernism as: ••epochal term (as what might come after Modernism) ••philosophical concept (extensive of thought, interruptive of order, disruptive of reason) ••post-historical historiographic episteme (making history after the end of history) ••futurity and ideological regression (if Modernism is the avant-garde, is what comes after, Postmodernism, the rearguard?) ••discursive agency of empire and imperial repertoire ••political paradox (emancipatory and oppressive) ••cultural contradiction (popular and elitist, revitalizing and exhausting, progressive and regressive) ••post-utopian construct (heterotopic instrument of post-industrial teletechnologies in cybernetics, communications, weaponry, and prosthetics) ••vehicle for global capital and commodification of culture ••critique and instrument of globalization and neo-colonialism ••literary complex and poetic value of cultural transformation (this is where most of our illustrative prooftexts accompanying the critical readings will originate)
CMLIT 580/ ENGL 582 THEORY AGAINST THEORY
A rash of recent scholarship and journalism presents the death of theory as both an allegory and a symptom of a frightening set of historical conditions: fiscal and ideological crises in the academic humanities, as well as the more general demise of liberalism in the contemporary global environment. Yet are current intellectual and political conditions so dire as to disrupt the very possibility for thought altogether? This course proposes instead that the forms of intellectual inquiry we know as "Theory" have always faced conditions of crisis. In fact, rather than thinking of crisis as the occasion for theory's death, its decay, or its dissolution, we will explore the extent to which theory's crises have provided its generative force. That is, we will study how theory's uneasy synthesis of unorthodox political philosophy, revisionist psychoanalysis, and avant-garde writing derives historically from moments of debate - about the epistemological and ethical stakes of intellectual discourse; about the boundaries between the humanistic and scientific disciplines; and about the relationships between the individual subject, the work of art, and the political world. This class will historicize some of the major questions in literary and cultural theory by studying some key debates between theorists. These debates may include: Marx and Proudhon, Engels and Duhring; Washington and Du Bois; Pound, Riding, Leavis; surrealists and existentialists on the question of political writing; Althusser and E. P. Thompson; Césaire, Depestre, Senghor; French and American feminism (Cixous, Irigaray, Beauvoir; MacKinnon, Friedan, Dworkin); Barthes and Picard; Lyotard and Habermas; the new pragmatists "Against Theory"; and the Sokal affair. Students are encouraged to suggest readings and discussion topics that draw upon their own historical periods and geographical regions of interest.
Fall 2004
CMLIT 501 PROMSEMINAR IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
What is the current shape of the discipline of Comparative Literature? This course considers both practical matters, such as research techniques; and theoretical concerns, such as the nature and assumptions of literary study as undertaken from a variety of comparative perspectives. Together, we will (1) “read” the discipline, looking at Comparative Literature as a field of teaching, research, and study: (2) consider a sampling of theorists and the place of theory with in comparative literature; and (3) read a sampling of journal-articles and book-chapters dealing with concepts in comparative study; and (4) practice several forms of professional writing. This course is required of first-semester graduate students in Comparative Literature, and recommended for students taking a minor in Comparative Literature or seeking a graduate-level introduction to the field.
CMLIT 502 COMPARATIVE CRITICISM I
This seminar welcomes students from all disciplines who are interested in the foundations and applications (or “mis-applications”) of literary and aesthetic theory. This course fulfills a requirement for doctoral students in Comparative Literature, and also counts towards the Doctoral Minor in Literary Theory, Criticism, and Aesthetics. The seminar compares “classical” theoretical and critical approaches to literary and aesthetic concepts such as inspiration, mimesis, rhetoric, semiotics, allegoresis, the sublime, decorum, and taste. “Classical” in this context means that literature is not yet considered autonomous in relation to other social sub-systems. In the West, the period of “classical” theory and criticism extends from the Greeks through Immanuel Kant. However, we will also consider writings outside this period which have a bearing on the topics enumerated above. We will stress these critical approaches from a primarily practical and comparative standpoint, although historical context will be considered. Critics and theorists to be considered include Aristotle, Augustine, Boileau, Ibn Rushd, Lu Ki, Plato, Pisan, Soyinka, and Zeami, among others. The seminar will also allow students to consider these critical approaches as tools for discussing “post-classical” or modern texts and artworks. In addition to theory, students will read and discuss short literary works as an exercise in determining the value, if any, of theory in the reader’s approach to a text. In an individualized context, students will discuss and investigate applications of theory to their own areas of interest and expertise.
CMLIT 505 MEDIEVAL STUDIES: THE EARLY BOOK IN ENGLAND
This course will address book production in medieval England, with some ventures into the beginning of the early modern period. Part seminar, part workshop, the course will consider ways in which book production intersects with broader social issues of literacy and readership, the circulation of ideas, and the preservation and transmission of the past. Insofar as the acts of writing and reading represented specialized crafts, who had access to these powerful abilities? We will combine hands-on how-to practice in paleography (the reading of medieval manuscripts) with a broader consideration of issues such as literacy, the act of reading, book production and consumption, etc. We will concentrate on manuscripts, but some of the issues cross the border into the world of print. In medieval England, books were written (and read) in several languages, and in multiple formats. For example, to expand or question the definition of "a book" we will glance at the Bayeux Tapestry, now available in a splendid CD-ROM version. This cultural document combines text, visual images, and a display function in a way not usually characteristic of books, but it is nevertheless a text-bearing material object that records and interprets a narrative event important to both British and continental cultural history. Rather than undertaking a detailed survey of the development of ancient and medieval handwriting and book production, we'll begin near the end of the period of manuscript culture, with relatively accessible late-medieval texts. We’ll read selections from chronicles , romances (including Arthurian texts), a few lyrics, and two or three medieval plays. We'll consider topics such as whether women served as scribes, when the practice of reading silently (rather than aloud) was developed, how the London book trade operated, who owned books, and, to borrow a phrase from the title of a recent book, "the ethics of reading in a manuscript culture." Course expectations include several brief exercises, such as using traditional and electronic resources to find information about manuscripts, and a longer project to be presented orally and then written up in the format of a journal article. Text: Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994). Other items are in the Library on Reserve (R), in the non-circulating area of the Arts and Humanities Library (A&H), or in Rare Books and Special Collections.
CMLIT 522 COMPARATIVE SEMINAR IN CRITICAL THEORY “ORIENTALISM AND VISUAL CULTURE: HISTORY, THEORY, PROSPECTS”
This seminar will investigate the discourse of Orientalism, the post-colonial critique of Orientalism as "white mythology," and the implications of both for the discipline of art history. Because Orientalism(s) have historically involved the production of particular theories, images, and forms of understanding that vary according to time, place, and gender, we will consider diverse expressions of Orientalism (in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States) as articulated by both men and women through painting, architecture, sculpture, film, art collecting/display, and scholarship. The heart of the course will be an examination of the historical vicissitudes of Orientalism and their relationship to an ever-shifting and expanding Orient; the critique of Orientalism by Edward Said and others; and the varied responses to this critique. While instances of Arabism and Islamophobia will be addressed, we will track changing conceptions of the Orient as applied not only to West Asia and North Africa, but also India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Asian-Americans, the "Oriental Woman," and the notion of "Yellow Peril." In querying Orientalism's reliance on ontological and epistemological distinctions between categories of "Orient" and "Occident," we will need to develop a sensitivity to Occidentalism, as well as Orientalism, and the complexities that arise with the appropriation and deployment of Orientalism by- and in- the so-called Orient itself. Ultimately we must ask what becomes of these categories in an era characterized by both globalization and a potential "Clash of Civilizations." To what extent is our knowledge of what has been called the "Orient" embedded in a hegemonic discourse, and what are our alternatives?
CMLIT 570 REHEARSALS OF MODERNISM
Modernism has been the most persistent and internationally the most ubiquitous cultural movement since the latter part of the nineteenth century. It has also been the least monolithic cultural movement, in spite of its hegemonic impetus, when viewed comparatively in a global, international context and across inter-artistic and transdisciplinary lines. Despite its persistence, its programmatic agendas, its virulent manifestos, its apocalyptic zeal, and modernity's vocation for mastery, Modernism as aesthetic and cultural movement has remained an open, process oriented, self-transgressive, and self-succeeding performative rehearsal. This seminar will explore and reassess the ironies, conundrums, aporias, paradoxes, and the self-defying and self-engendering strategies of Modernism's relentless movement and self-justification. We shall pursue this re-assessment through a series of theoretical texts and literary works--in prose, but principally poetry--, across cultural contexts, international traditions, and linguistic frontiers. The seminar will interrogate Modernism's self-serving impulses that would cast world history and all cultural movements as prolepses, or as typological fulfillments and sidereal orbits, of its own problematic centrality, thus giving us Pre-modernism, Early Modernism, High Modernism, Post-modernism, and Preposterous Modernity.
Spring 2004
CMLIT 503 Comparative Criticism II: The literatures of theory
The focus of this seminar is on the relationship of criticism to theory and their connection to literature. The work of the seminar consists in tracing the genesis of key critical formations and theoretical discourses with exemplary works of literature that illustrate, underwrite, or contest the theoretical forms that would be imputed, applied, or affiliated to them. Theories, therefore, will be read in concert and/or in counterpoint to the literary texts in which those theoretical constructs purportedly have their genesis, sanction, or instantiation. The chronological scope of the seminar is mandated by departmental curricular design to extend from 1800 forward. The seminar will touch on the most significant theoretical paradigms of this period, aiming, for the most part, to examine texts that theorize and interrogate the very notion of theory and critical formations. While the seminar readings are designed to cover the formative, and now canonical, texts of the theoretical enterprise, this constellation of texts is aimed at examining the theoretical enterprise itself through an evolving critique of theorization and formative canonicity, thereby constantly probing the line between critique and criticism. SEMINAR GOALS 1. Familiarize seminar participants with a number of seminal texts of theoretical discourse and academic scholarship since 1800. 2. Hone the critical and theoretical skills of the seminar participants so that they may become conversant with the scholarly and pedagogical practices of literary study and enabled to negotiate the field of comparative discourses critically and productively. 3. Offer a practicum in the critique of theoretical formations and for the deployment of theory for the reading of literary texts.
CMLIT 522 Comparative Seminar in Asian Literatures
This course concentrates on the diverse literatures of Asia in comparative perspective. Topics may include the origins of Asian literatures, literature from oral sources, literary periods and genres, ethnicity and identity, the writer and society, the emergence of women writers, relations with European literatures, and the evolution of theories of literary criticism in and about Asia. The Spring 2004 offering is entitled “Transnational Literatures of the Asian Diaspora.” This seminar will comparatively investigate the cultural situations (e.g. marginality, postcolonialism, and nomadic subjectivity) and writings of transnational authors who represent various aspects of the Asian diaspora. These authors are of Asian descent but live and write in countries or cultures other than that of their origin or heritage. Further, we will analyze the desire for return, as some diasporic writers have attempted to live in, or return to, their culture of heritage. Material in the course will include novels by writers of Japanese descent, such as the Japanese-Americans (nikkeijin) Ruth Ozeki and Lois Ann Yamashita; Minako Oba, who lived for many years in Alaska; Norma Field, who came to the U.S. in her late teens; Yoko Tawada, who has been living in Germany for more than two decades; and Kazuo Ishiguero who went to England at the age five; also, writers of Korean descent, such as the Japanese-Koreans Yi Yan Ji and Miri Yu; the Chinese-Americans Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. We will add other readings as suggested by the members of the seminar. Although the writers mentioned above are recent, we can also include earlier material, such as the body of work called “Angel Island Poetry” (poems written on the walls of their California detention cells by people arriving from China). Students interested in the novel as a genre, ethnicity, and cultural identities, as well as students focusing on Asia and the Asian diaspora, may benefit from this course. Grades will be based on participation, oral presentations, and a term paper in journal-article format. Some of our readings were originally written in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or other languages, and those who can read the works in the original are urged to do so, but students who have no training in languages other than English may read the works in translation. The course will be conducted in English.
CMLIT 523 Comparative Seminar in African Literatures
The offering focuses on women writers. We will seek answers to a variety of questions. What are African women writers saying in their novels? How is their writing distinctive from that of their male counterparts? What is the significance of place of expression for these writers? What is the relationship between the oral tradition and contemporary novels by women? What is the future for these writers, both in Africa and outside the continent? In addition to novels by Ama Ata Aidoo (Changes), Lauretta Ngcobo (And They Didn’t Die), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions), Calixthe Beyala (Your Name Shall Be Tanga), Assia Djebar (Fantasia), and Fatima Mernissi (Dreams of Trespass), we will contextualize our analyses with written and oral texts composed or narrarated originally in African languages during the 19th and 20th centuries.
CMLIT 521 Queering the Americas
This seminar investigates the production, representation, and consumption of homosexuality in the Americas from roughly 1960 to the present. We will think about, historicize, and analyze, that is, how homosexuality is produced, lived, and represented in diverse geographical, political, and social milieus. We will look for similarities as well as differences in these productions to better understand the relationships among sexual, political, national, transnational, and cultural communities. All of these matters will, of course, be connected to how subjects construct identities, the effects and effectivtiy of these identities, and the discourses through which they are shaped. In addition, to the required texts, I will make secondary materials available through regular and electronic reserves.
Fall 2003
CMLIT 501 PROMSEMINAR IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
What is the current shape of the discipline of Comparative Literature? This course considers both practical matters, such as research techniques; and theoretical concerns, such as the nature and assumptions of literary study as undertaken from a variety of comparative perspectives. Together, we will (1) “read” the discipline, looking at Comparative Literature as a field of teaching, research, and study: (2) consider a sampling of theorists and the place of theory within comparative literature; and (3) read a sampling of journal-articles and book-chapters dealing with concepts in comparative study; and (4) practice several forms of professional writing. This course is required of first-semester graduate students in Comparative Literature, and recommended for students taking a minor in Comparative Literature or seeking a graduate-level introduction to the field.
CMLIT 502 COMPARATIVE CRITICISM I
This seminar welcomes students from all disciplines who are interested in the foundations and applications (or “mis-applications”) of literary and aesthetic theory. This course fulfills a requirement for doctoral students in Comparative Literature, and also counts towards the Doctoral Minor in Literary Theory, Criticism, and Aesthetics. The seminar compares “classical” theoretical and critical approaches to literary and aesthetic concepts such as inspiration, mimesis, rhetoric, semiotics, allegoresis, the sublime, decorum, and taste. “Classical” in this context means that literature is not yet considered autonomous in relation to other social sub-systems. In the West, the period of “classical” theory and criticism extends from the Greeks through Immanuel Kant. However, we will also consider writings outside this period which have a bearing on the topics enumerated above. We will stress these critical approaches from a primarily practical and comparative standpoint, although historical context will be considered. Critics and theorists to be considered include Aristotle, Augustine, Boileau, Ibn Rushd, Lu Ki, Plato, Pisan, Soyinka, and Zeami, among others. The seminar will also allow students to consider these critical approaches as tools for discussing “post-classical” or modern texts and artworks. In addition to theory, students will read and discuss short literary works as an exercise in determining the value, if any, of theory in the reader’s approach to a text. In an individualized context, students will discuss and investigate applications of theory to their own areas of interest and expertise.
CMLIT 570 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE: ABSOLUTE AMERICA
This seminar will trace the formation of American public discourse to its textual/literary foundations. From its originary Ishmaelite fate (the ostracism to the ends of the earth for murder at the heart of the Vineland Sagas, Columbus's jail-bird crew, the Puritan divines as outcasts from an irredeemable world) to its current crusader/jihadic obsession, America defines itself through emphatic disambiguations of history, language, and geography. Ahab-like, it pursues formative parameters that de-define complexity through reductively pragmatic expediencies (as with Columbus's obsessive, post-apocalyptic New World and New Earth, as with New England's foundational Zionism in a New Canaan, its avatars instituted as official government policy and imperial imaginary, now more resonant than ever at the heart of fundamentalist Neo-conservatism in a New World Order). We shall examine whether this fundamentalist anxiety might be a compensatory gesture for the originary Ishmaelite fate of castoffs perennially clamoring for re-integration into the mainline genealogical history as the chosen people. In their insistent regularity, those serviceable simplicities of self-identity reify, essentialize, and globalize cultural pluralities into manageable objects of appropriation, capital, and hegemony. Might the current discursive/ideological New World Order as "One World," with a shrill univocity steeped in the absolutism of terror, be a historic correlative of this perennial monadic syndrome? Could the current terroristic summons that stridently disallows any critique, deflection, difference, deviation, or divergence from the manic chase of other, equally aberrant jihadic monisms represent yet another episode in the anxious history of predictably recurrent exceptional events? Having imploded into the mirror reflection of its pursued object, U. S. American subject agency now lives, yet again, as collective cultural self-reduction. In doing so, might it be enacting, once more, its regular oscillation between the primal errand of its Ishmaelite (self-)ostracism from the Old World, on the one hand, and the Ahab-like obsession of a furious quest as a rage for a one-world new order, on the other? The readings and deliberations of this seminar will deal with the textual genesis, cultural contradictions, and discursive morphology of America's anxious absolutism in literary, historiographic, and ideological constructs as literature and as public discourse. Readings in English, Spanish, and Portuguese will be included, with the Spanish and Portuguese items available in translation.
CMLIT 589 Technology in Foreign Language Education: an overview
This course explores the uses of Internet information and communication tools (ICTs) in the arena of language education. We will focus on technologies used in language education from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including, but not limited to, second language acquisition, communication theory, linguistics, cultural studies, post structuralism, and educational theories of development (the latter primarily in the form of sociocultural and activity theoretical research). Graduate students interested in carrying out independent research projects based on their area of specialization are specifically encouraged to participate.
CMLIT 597a narratives of the hebrew bible: LITERATURE, HISTORY, ARCHAEOLOGY, TRANSLATION
This seminar is broadly interdisciplinary, in the spirit of Penn State’s Sawyer Seminar Project (funded by the Mellon Foundation) on cultural interchange in the Mediterranean world. Using the Hebrew Bible as our main text, the course will include readings on topics such as the intersections between Biblical narrative and archaeology, Biblical Hebrew as an ancient Mediterranean language, the textual development and cultural transmission of the Bible through many centuries, the relations between Biblical narrative and later literary texts in several languages, especially translations, and the capacity of language to convey multiple layers of meaning. Readings will be available in English, and there is no language prerequisite for this course. However, students with knowledge of Hebrew equivalent to 1-2 years’ college instruction may participate in a tutorial to read Biblical passages in the original. There will be supplemental meetings in the first half of the semester, fewer meetings in the second half. Student responsibilities will include two short reports (or translation exercises for those in the Hebrew tutorial) and a seminar paper on any approved topic related to Biblical narrative.
Spring 2003
CMLIT 503 -- COMPARATIVE CRITICISM II: THE LITERATURES OF THEORY
The course will provide an overview of Idealist aesthetics and its nineteenth-century critics as prelude to an examination of late twentieth-century theories of subjectivity. We will discuss how theories of art from the eighteenth century continue to inform critical debates in the present. Our discussion will move from definitions of the artwork as an autonomous entity to post-modern gender theory. To that end, we will begin with an introduction to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the German Idealist tradition that surrounds Kant's definitions of the beautiful and the sublime. Selections from Hegel, Schiller, and Goethe, as well writings by Coleridge and Wordsworth, will allow us to understand broadly the Romantic work of art. Modernist critics such as Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Freud will expand the concept of subjectivity while providing us with a new vocabulary of criticism. Feminist critiques of the literary canon and its ongoing re-evaluation of psychoanalysis will allow us to formulate more precisely gendered theories of cultural production. Works by Virginia Woolf, Monique Wittig, Laura Mulvey, Luce Irigary and Judith Butler will be read in relation to post-structuralist epistemology of the artwork. We will read essays by Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser, as well as selections from Derrida (Of Grammatology, Dissemination) and Foucault (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality). Finally, these critiques of Idealism will be read in relation to a late twentieth-century defense of Kant and Hegel, namely Theodor Adorno's essay on Beckett's Endgame. Students will be asked to write two short, eight-page papers and give one class presentation.
CMLIT 523 – POOLING MEMORIES ACROSS THE ATLANTIC : MIGRANCY, DIASPORIC IDENTITIES, AND THE AFRICAN IMAGINATION
Using a wide range of theoretical works by thinkers of/on the Global South, and creative works by African writers, this seminar will examine the various kinds of subjectivities that are produced by the experience of diaspora and migrancy. It will seek to understand how the dynamics of an increasingly inter-connected, borderless, globalized landscape have occasioned a radical remapping of concepts like home, roots, location, space and, even, culture. The seminar also examines the identity formations that emerge out of the disconnection between migrant subjects' conceptualization of the metropolitan space and the realities they confront on arrival. We will also consider the role of nostalgia and discourses of return. Theoretical Approaches: Four theoretical perspectives will form our discussions: traditional paradigms of diasporic discourse, postcolonial paradigms, representations of diasporic space in immigrant discourse, and exile. Traditional Paradigms: We shall discuss seminal essays by Brent Hayes Edwards, George Shepperson, Arlene Torres, and Norma Whitten. One class will be devoted to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic and critical responses to it. Postcolonial Paradigms : Texts by Arjun Appadurai, Masao Miyoshi, Iain Chambers, and Mary Louise Pratt will inform our discussions in this rubric. Representations of Space: We will discuss chapters from Salman' Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands and Caryl Phillip's The European Tribe. Exile: We will discuss essays on literature and exile by Edward Said, Wole Soyinka, Achille Mbembe, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Migrancy and African Fiction: We will apply theoretical insights from the above array to a study of trans-national, immigrant fiction by the following African novelists: Sembene Ousmane, Armah Darko, Biyi Bandele Thomas, Alika Mokkedem, and Buchi Emecheta. Course requirements will include a review essay devoted to theoretical work on any aspect of the Black diasporic experience, an essay on the African novels above, class presentations, and a final seminar paper.
CMLIT 580 CULTURAL STUDIES AND CRITICAL THEORY
This seminar will address our emergent interdisciplinary field of inquiry, i. e. Cultural Studies, and its crucial relationship to modern intellectual traditions of critical theory in philosophy, aesthetics, and literary criticism. The topics to be covered include theory and methodology; politics and ideology in cultural and aesthetic domains; modernity/alternative modernity and postmodernity; media and popular culture; class, race, gender, and ethnicity. A wide variety of contemporary theories, from postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism to neo- or post-marxisms, will be surveyed in the course, with a focus on the central theoretical concepts or "key words." At the beginning, a selected body of seminal theoretical works will be scrutinized, including works (excerpts and full-length) by Marx, Adorno, Benjamin, Gramsci, Mao, and Althusser, among others. Theories will then be tested, validated, or refuted by applying them to practices of contemporary life, interpreting current cultural "texts" in literature, the arts, and media across linguistic and geopolitical boundaries. Assignments include one presentation (15-20 minutes), two short book reports (3-5 pages each), and a final paper, which either analyzes multi-media texts (either verbal or audio-visual), or makes a critique of certain theoretical issues. The presentation may start in the beginning weeks, and can be related to the final paper.
Fall 2002
CMLIT 501 PROSEMINAR IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
What's the current shape of the discipline of Comparative Literature? This course considers both practical matters, such as research techniques; and theoretical concerns, such as the nature and assumptions of literary study as undertaken from a variety of comparative perspectives. Together, we will (1) "read" the discipline, looking at the traditions of Comparative Literature as a field of teaching, research, and study, and at what's happening in Comparative Literature now; (2) consider a sampling of theorists and the place of theory within comparative literature; and (3) read a sampling of journal-articles and book-chapters dealing with issues in comparative study, such as canon formation, the nature of genre, the importance of translation, the validity of conventional periodizations of literature, questions that arise when literature is compared to other forms such as film or the visual arts, and challenges encountered in juxtaposing familiar with less familiar literatures. The course will acquaint students with research tools ranging from traditional library collections to databases and other electronic resources, provide practice in several forms of professional writing, and involve students in the overall process of professionalization in this discipline. This course is required of first-semester graduate students in Comparative Literature, and recommended for students taking a minor in Comparative Literature or seeking a graduate-level introduction to the field.
CMLIT 506 CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF ASIA: IMAGES OF WOMEN, FEMINIZING IMAGES
This course will look at representations of Asia, particularly East Asia, through studies of human geography, history, media, art, film and literature, both produced in and read across East and West. With a focus on images of women and feminizing images, we will consider orientalist approaches and recent re-positionings in terms of topics as diverse as Asian women's reproductive rights in recent law-making, women film directors, media from the avant-garde to anime, and texts as diverse as NGO newsletters and performance art, as well as short stories and other literary works. The corpus of images of Asia will include those produced for and by East Asians, and will be studied in local as well as comparative and global contexts. Primary texts will include films by Zhang Yi Mou, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Mamoru Oshii, women directors such as Tanaka Kinuyo and scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, performance art by Yoko Ono, literature by Shimada, Mizumura Minae, Ohara Mariko, Can Xue, short stories by Korean, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese writers, etc. Supplementary readings will include postcolonial studies of Chinese film by Rey Chow, Japanese film by Livia Monnet, Sandra Buckley, feminist approaches to Japanese visual culture, modernity by Lydia Liu, theoretical applications to topics of Asia and visuality by Thomas Lamarre, and Alexandra Monroe on Korean film and art, as well as feminist, visual theory, and postcolonial writings by Spivak, Pollock, Harding, Sinha, etc. This seminar is an interdisciplinary venture that will be either co-taught or/and will include several resident as well as off-campus experts for lectures and discussion.
CMLIT 510 SEMINAR IN LITERARY TRANSLATION
Is literary translation doomed to being “la Belle infidèle” – beautiful but faithless (or faithful only if ugly)? Does the translator of a poem transmit it, or create it anew? Is there any aspect of human communication that cannot be called translation? These and other unanswerable questions will preoccupy this seminar, which looks at three different ways in which translation can affect literary studies: The practical. Nearly every comparatist, and many writers and scholars who do not necessarily define themselves as comparatists, will undertake translation at some point or another: for publication as an independent text; as part of a scholarly work; or for teaching purposes. What are the problems which commonly arise in literary translation? (Continued) The theoretical. Do the problems encountered in the act of translation admit of formalization? What underlying ideas of language and communication – and literariness – are implied in (un) translatability? The critical/historical. How has translation extended or altered the cultural life of literary texts? What effects have reliance on, or rejection of, translated texts had on particular cultures? In the course of the seminar, we will study and discuss translation theorists such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Vladimir Nabokov, George Steiner, and Jacques Derrida. Course requirements include a review essay devoted to a theoretical work on translation, a short translation of a literary text, and a seminar paper in the form of a journal article, which may be related to any of the three aspects of literary translation outlined above.
CMLIT 543 WORLDING AMERICA: GLOBAL REFLECTIONS
In collaboration with PSU Americanists (a graduate-student initiated working group) and a number of internationally recognized Americanists from the U.S. and abroad, we shall consider the textual, discursive, and institutional possibilities of "Worlding America," or reflecting upon America in a global context. The seminar readings will come principally from texts on America (hemispherically defined) written by authors from outside America. A comparative and contrastive juxtaposition of American self-imaging, and the portrayal of America by non-American authors, will also be pursued. The seminar will begin with early colonial texts and extend to current treatments of America in a post-911 global context. The main goal of the seminar is to reconsider the textual corpus that has figured and that could help us re-configure and refocus the discourse on America as a hemispheric and global phenomenon taken as object, not merely as the subject agency of globalization. We shall examine the worlding of America in counterpoint to the Americanizing of the world. We know the two processes are dialectically enmeshed, and this mutual interpellation will be the focus of our scrutiny and discussion. The work of our seminar will be featured through a panel or roundtable at the first world congress of the International American Studies Association next spring.
CMLIT 597A CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO
This seminar, jointly taught by a Chaucerian and an Italianist, will examine the works of two major writers--Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio--who stand at a point of transition from the medieval world to modernity. At one time or another, each has been claimed as distinctly medieval or modern, though we now regard both of them as late-medieval poets who combine learned and courtly traditions with popular and mercantile contexts. Boccaccio is the literary source whom Chaucer nowhere names, but borrows from extensively to compose his major works; he is the figure Chaucer reads and rewrites in order to invent his own versions of antiquity and modernity. Our readings will focus on several pairs of texts: Boccaccio’s Teseida and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the frame and novelle from the Decameron and their counterparts in the Canterbury Tales. We will even look at one case where Chaucer and Boccaccio both rewrite Boccaccio (Menedon’s story from the Filocolo as revised in Decameron X.5 and the Franklin’s Tale). In reading these texts, our interest is not confined to sources and influences. Boccaccio devises several literary programs (classical imitation, mercantile epic, encyclopedic learning) and invents a peculiar genre (the glossorial poetic self-commentary), and we will analyze his achievement in its own right. We will also examine the critical commentary that has developed around each author and analyze the ways they have been read against one another (from, say, Dryden’s appraisal of them as the writers of “Novels” to contemporary intertextual and historicist approaches). The seminar will require two short papers, a 20-minute conference presentation, and a final article-length paper (15-20 pages). English translations exist for all the texts we plan to read. Knowledge of middle English or Italian is not a prerequisite, though we will offer several sessions designed to help people work through Boccaccio’s Italian and Chaucer’s English, depending on their interests and fields.
Spring 2002
CMLIT 503 COMPARATIVE CRITICISM II: THE LITERATURES OF THEORY
This is a research and reading seminar whose focus will be on the relationship of criticism to theory and their connection to literature. The members of the seminar will trace the genesis of key critical formations and theoretical discourses in the literatures from which they emanate. Those critical and theoretical discourses will then be read in concert and/or counterpoint to the literary texts that engendered them. The work of this seminar will thus focus on the relationships between theory and literature, transdisciplinary discourses, and theoretical and critical approaches that have engendered our current discursive formations and pedagogical focii. The chronological scope of the seminar's work will span the period from 1800 to the present and will focus on the most significant paradigms in the field during this period.
CMLIT 522 TRANSNATIONAL LITERATURES OF THE ASIAN DIASPORA
This seminar will investigate the cultural situations (e.g. marginality, postcolonialism, and nomadic subjectivity) and writings of transnational authors who represent various aspects of the Asian diaspora. These writers are of Asian descent but live and write in countries or cultures other than that of their origin or heritage. Further, we will analyze the desire for return, as some diasporic writers have attempted to live in, or return to, their culture of heritage. Material in the course will include novels by writers of Japanese heritage, such as the Japanese-Americans (nikkeijin) Ruth Ozeki and Lois Ann Yamashita; Minako Oba, who lived for many years in Alaska; Norma Field, who came to the U.S. in her late teens; Yoko Tawada, who has been living in Germany for more than two decades; and Kazuo Ishiguro, who went to England at the age five; also, writers of Korean heritage, such as the Japanese-Koreans Yi Yan Ji and Miri Yu; and writers of Chinese heritage, such as the Chinese-Americans Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. We will add other readings as suggested by the members of the seminar. Although the writers mentioned above are recent, we can also include earlier material, such as the body of work called "Angel Island Poetry" (poems written on the walls of their California detention cells by people arriving from China). Students interested in the novel as a genre, ethnicity, and cultural identities, as well as students focusing on Asia and the Asian diaspora, may benefit from this course. Grades will be based on participation, oral presentations, and a term paper in journal-article format. Some of our readings were originally written in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or other languages, and those who can read the works in the original are urged to do so, but students who have no training in languages other than English may read the works in translation. The course will be conducted in English.
CMLIT 543 SUBJECTS OF EMPIRES: THEORIES AND CONTEXTS FROM THE AMERICAS
"Subjects of Empire" theorizes imperial subjection through its expression in literary and critical texts from various locations in the Americas. Taking established theories of the subject as a point of departure, we will attempt to pull a theory of American imperial subjection from literary and critical texts. One of the goals of the seminar is for students to practice reading theory in relation to a variety of genres, including poetry, essay, autobiography, novel, and manifesto. Whereas studies of American imperialism often import theories of British and French empire, we will pursue theory from the Americas as it emerges in literary and critical works from the mid-19th century to the mid-twentieth century. As the subject of American empire defines itself through relations of difference within and without its boundaries, our readings will include representations of and responses to territorial expansion, exclusion, annexation, transplantation and enslavement, insurrection, exploitative working conditions, and assimilation. Reading knowledge of Spanish, Portuguese, French or of other languages is welcome, but not a prerequisite. Students are required to make one oral presentation and have the option of writing either short weekly position papers or one term paper. Readings may include Martin Delany, D.F. Sarmiento, José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, W.E.B. DuBois, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Oswald de Andrade, Zitkala-Sa, Sui Sin Far, Roque Dalton, C.L.R. James, Jesus Colón, José María Arguedas and Gabriela Mistral. Our theoretical readings may draw on Louis Althusser, Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Ana Lydia Vega, Edouard Glissant, Roberto Schwarz, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said and Angel Rama.
CMLIT 570 CONTEMPORARY LIT, CYBER CULTURE(S) AND POST-HUMANISM(S)
This seminar explores the impact of cybernetics and of information technologies on literature and culture around the globe. Surfing between fiction, hypermedia, and theory, we will visit as many of the fractalized progeny of mecha and orga - cyborgs, cyberfeminists, cyberpunks, cyberqueers, and so on - as time permits. Predecessors in cybernetic fiction may include: J. L. Borges; Italo Calvino; Milorad Pavic; and William Burroughs. Scriptors of hypermedia may include: Mamoru Oshii; Michael Joyce; Talan Memmott; Stuart Moulthrop; and Oulipo. Theorists may include: Jean Baudrillard; Donna Haraway; N. Katherine Hayles; Douglas Hofstadter; Humberto Maturana; Marie-Laure Ryan; and Paul Virilio. In true seminar style, participants will bear major responsibility for investigating developments and perhaps providing texts in languages other than English, as well as for sharing their research and creative projects with the group.
CMLIT 589 TECHNOLOGY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION
This course will acquaint graduate students with the principles and practices concerning the use of technology in foreign language education. Its main focus will be to explore the connection between Second Language Acquisition theories and the implementation of current Internet and multimedia technologies. Open to students of any specialization, this course aims to cover the essentials that language educators need. Only basic prior technical experience is required (i.e., email and World Wide Web).
Fall 2001
CMLIT 501 PROSEMINAR IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
This course considers both practical matters, such as research techniques, and theoretical concerns, such as the nature and assumptions of literary study as undertaken from a variety of comparative perspectives. Together, we will (1) "read" the discipline, looking at the traditions of Comparative Literature as a field of teaching, research, and study, and at what's happening in Comparative Literature now; (2) consider a sampling of theorists and the place of theory within comparative literature; and (3) read a sampling of journal-articles and book-chapters dealing with issues in comparative study, such as canon formation, the nature of genre, the importance of translation, the validity of conventional periodizations of literature, questions that arise when literature is compared to other forms such as film or the visual arts, and challenges encountered in juxtaposing familiar with less familiar literatures. The course will acquaint students with research tools ranging from traditional library collections to databases and other electronic resources, provide practice in several forms of professional writing, and involve students in the overall process of professionalization in this discipline. This course is required of first-semester graduate students in Comparative Literature, and recommended for students taking a minor in Comparative Literature or seeking a graduate-level introduction to the field.
CMLIT 502 COMPARATIVE CRITICISM I
This seminar welcomes students from all disciplines who are interested in the foundations and applications (or "misapplications") of literary and aesthetic theory. This course fulfills a requirement for doctoral students in Comparative Literature, and also counts towards the Doctoral Minor in Literary Theory, Criticism, and Aesthetics. This seminar compares "classical" theoretical and critical approaches to literary and aesthetic concepts such as inspiration, mimesis, rhetoric, semiotics, allegoresis, the sublime, decorum, and taste. "Classical" in this context means that literature is not yet considered autonomous in relation to other social sub-systems. In the West, the period of "classical" theory and criticism extends from the Greeks through Immanuel Kant. However, we will also consider writings outside this period which have a bearing on the topics enumerated above. This course will stress these critical approaches from a primarily practical and comparative standpoint, although historical context will be considered. Critics and theorists to be considered include Aristotle, Augustine, Boileau, Ibn Rushd, Lu Ki, Plato, Pisan, Soyinka, and Zeami, among others. This course will also allow students to consider these critical approaches as tools for discussing "post-classical" or modern texts and artworks. In addition to theory, students will read and discuss short literary works as an exercise in determining the value, if any, of theory in the reader's approach to a text. In an individualized context, students will discuss and investigate applications of theory to their own areas of interest and expertise.
CMLIT 505 LOVE AND DESIRE IN ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES
This seminar will examine the representation of love and desire in a group of texts ranging from classical Antiquity to the late Middle Ages. We will study how poets and writers in these historical periods portray and distinguish love and desire, how literary and social narratives develop around those terms, and how values and meanings emerge from them. Ovid’s Art of Love and Amores and St. Augustine’s Confessions will be our starting points, which is to say that we will begin with the competing literary and philosophical traditions that significantly shape the discourse of desire in these periods. We will read Alan of Lille's De planctu naturae (famous for its equation of bad grammar and homosexuality), Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, the Roman de la rose (which announces that it contains all the art of love), Dante's Vita Nuova, Chaucer’s poetry, and portions from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. We will also look at some of the Lais of Marie de France and at the writings of medieval secular and religious women. Besides these primary texts, the course will include modern theorists such as Girard, Sedgwick, Lacan, Butler, and Kristeva, who have defined many of our modern interpretive categories for desire. The primary texts will be read in a bilingual format. The seminar will require several short writing assignments, a 20-minute conference-style presentation, and a final article-length paper (15-20 pages) growing out of the presentation.
CMLIT 521 INTER-AMERICAN LITERATURE: RETHINKING AMERICA
With the collaboration of an international team of distinguished practitioners of American Studies, this seminar aims to interrogate the multiplicity of America as literary, historical, geographic, and cultural phenomenon. Our project of "re-thinking" entails a reconsideration of America (U.S. and non-U.S.) as national, plural, transnational, and international / hemispheric agency in a global context. America rethought from the outside is also America rethinking from within. As a diverse team of Americanists engaged in this process, we aim to re-read America through a number of key texts that examine, critically and reflectively, the genesis, morphology, ascendancy, and hegemonic historical phases of America in the world. We will re-examine American culture as a globally repercussive and locally self-reinforcing site of national and post-national discourse, and as an international narrative formation. In the process, the trans-disciplinary field of American Studies itself will undergo a reassessment, as will its geographical purview, scholarly and pedagogical practices, discursive parameters, and performative role in the study and critique of America. In revisioning these professional acts, we examine how they might be defining and re-inscribing, as well as critically considerate of their object. The seminar, cross-listed as Comparative Literature, English, and Spanish, is a project of the Center for Global Studies at Penn State and a collaborative endeavor with the International American Studies Association.
CMLIT 523 WOMEN WRITERS FROM AFRICA
Focusing on selected works by women writers from Africa, we will seek answers to a variety of questions. What are women writers saying in their novels? How is their writing distinctive from that of their male counterparts? What is the significance of place of expression for these writers? What is the relationship between the oral tradition and contemporary novels by women? What is the future for these writers, both in Africa and outside the continent? In addition to novels by Ama Ata Aidoo (Changes), Lauretta Ngcobo (And They Didn't Die), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions), Calixthe Beyala (Your Name Shall Be Tanga), Assia Djebar (Fantasia), and Fatima Mernissi (Dreams of Trespass), we will contextualize our analyses with written and oral texts composed or narrarated originally in African languages during the 19th and 20th centuries
phone: 814.863.0589 | fax: 814.863.8882 | email: cmlit@psu.edu
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