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Fall 2009

NEW IN 2009:
ONE-CREDIT SEMINARS IN CRITICISM AND THEORY

CMLIT 502: (A) PREMODERN FOUNDATIONS; (B) ALLEGORY AND REPRESENTATION; (C) POSTSTRUCTURALISM’S CLASSIC FIGURES / Mondays, 2:30-5:30

These seminars are part of a yearlong sequence in criticism and theory. Taught by six different professors, these seminars introduce students to the global histories of literary theory and criticism, from the pre-modern (Fall) to contemporary theory networks (Spring). Students wishing to sign up for all three five-week seminars in the Fall
sequence should select CMLIT 502; to sign up for a single 5-week seminar, choose 597A, B, or C (descriptions below).

CMLIT 597A (Djelal Kadir) / Aug 24-Sep 25:

Foundations of comparative criticism and theory through readings from the pre-modern period. The seminar examines formative ideas of our critical/
theoretical discourses in such defining figures as Gorgias of Leontini, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Quintilian, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Thos. Aquinas, Dante, and Vico, among others.

CMLIT 597B (Caroline Eckhardt) / Sep 28-Oct 30:

Allegory and representation from the pre-modern and medieval periods. Texts from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine,, Boethius, Macrobius, Maimonides,
Marie de France, Dante, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Giambattista Giraldi, as well as fables, parables, comic tales, and short stories.

CMLIT 597C (Tom Beebee) / Nov 2-Dec 11:

This course will examine the reanimation and deployment of Western Classical ideas in poststructuralist thought. Examples may include: Barthes’s use of ancient rhetorical theory, Derrida’s reading of Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Foucault’s reinterpretation of Greek “paideia,” and Lacoue-Labarthes’s revisiting of the Longinian sublime.

CMLIT 570: SPECTERS OF COMPARISON
Nergis Erturk (nerturk@psu.edu) / Thursdays, 2:30-5:30

This course examines the comparative logic of capitalist modernity in the works of Marx, Weber, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Mudimbe, and Derrida. Guided by a methodological concern with the ethics and politics of comparative work, it aims to construct a critical intellectual genealogy of the concept and method of “comparison.”

CMLIT 580: MATERIAL TEXTS
Charlotte Eubanks (cde13@psu.edu) / Wednesdays, 2:30-5:30

The “history of the book” has become a major intellectual and transnational undertaking, which brings to the fore questions regarding the birth of the vernacular, the idea of national culture, and the material nature of the written word. This course will introduce students to the major scholars, key terms, and overarching theoretical concerns of
book history, the ontology of the written word, and the sociology of text.

CMLIT 597D: POETICS: INTERNATIONAL LEGACY OF E.A. POE
Djelal Kadir (kadir@psu.edu) / Tuesdays, 2:30-5:30

Few American writers have been as consequential internationally in their influence as Edgar Allan Poe. This seminar explores the reasons for this renown, examines a number of key works by the American master and their avatars in various writers from around the world. The topical focus of the seminar is on the principal bipartite categories in which
Poe divided his own work—horror and detection. Writings from Baudelaire, Borges, Cortázar, Kafka, Tarchetti, Vittorini, Manganelli, Sakutaro, Ranpo, Veríssimo, and Enrique Vila Matas, among others.