Comparative Literature

451 College, Rm 202, 432.2760
M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Michael Holquist

Director of Graduate Studies
Cyrus Hamlin (cyrus.hamlin@yale.edu)

Professors
Dudley Andrew, Peter Brooks, Katerina Clark, Shoshana Felman, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Cyrus Hamlin, Benjamin Harshav, Michael Holquist, David Quint

Associate Professor
Ann Gaylin

Assistant Professors
Ala Alryyes, Vilashini Cooppan, Catherine Labio, Pericles Lewis

Fields of Study
The Department of Comparative Literature introduces students to the study and understanding of literature beyond linguistic or national boundaries; the theory, interpretation, and criticism of literature; and its interactions with adjacent fields like history, culture, language, psychology, law, and philosophy. The comparative perspective invites the exploration of such transnational phenomena as literary or cultural periods and trends (Renaissance, Romanticism, Modernism, Postcolonialism) or genres and modes of discourse. Students may specialize in any cultures or languages, to the extent that they are sufficiently covered at Yale. The Ph.D. degree qualifies the candidate to teach Comparative Literature as well as the national literature(s) of her or his specialization.

Special Admissions Requirements
Applicants must hold a B.A. or equivalent degree and should normally have majored in Comparative Literature, English, a classical or foreign literature, or in an interdepartmental major that includes literature. They must be ready to take advanced courses in two foreign literatures upon admission. The GRE General Test is required. A ten- to twenty-page writing sample should be submitted with the application.

Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Students must successfully complete fourteen term courses, including at least seven listed under the departmental heading. The student's overall schedule must fulfill the following requirements: (1) at least one course in medieval or classical European literature, philology, or linguistics (or their equivalents in other cultures); one course in the Renaissance or Baroque (or equivalents); and one course in the modern period; (2) three courses in literary theory or methodology; (3) course work dealing with texts from three literatures, one of which may be English or American. Any course may be counted for several requirements simultaneously.

Languages: Literary proficiency in four languages (including English, at least one other modern language, and one classical or ancient language, such as Latin, Sanskrit, Provencal, or Biblical Hebrew). The fulfillment of this requirement will be demonstrated by a written exam consisting of a translation of a literary or critical text, to be held by the end of the sixth term; or by an equivalent level in the student's course work.

Orals: An oral examination in two parts, to be taken in the third year of studies, demonstrating both the breadth and specialization as well as the comparative scope of the student's acquired knowledge. The first part consists of six topics that include texts from three national literatures and several historical periods (at least one modern and one before the Renaissance). The topics should also include representatives of the three traditional literary genres (poetry, drama, narrative fiction) and one question on theory or criticism. The second part consists of the student's presentation of a topic based on his or her original work.

The Ph.D. dissertation, supervised by a dissertation director (or directors) and approved by the departmental faculty, completes the degree. Its initial step is a dissertation prospectus, to be submitted and approved by the dissertation director and the faculty in the course of the seventh term of study. Admission to candidacy for the Ph.D. is granted after six terms of residence and the completion of all requirements (courses, languages, orals, prospectus) except the dissertation.

Combined Ph.D. Programs

Comparative Literature and Classics
The Department of Comparative Literature also offers, in conjunction with the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures, a combined Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Classics. For further details, see Classics.

Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies
The Department of Comparative Literature also offers, in conjunction with the Renaissance Studies program, a combined Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies. For further details, see Renaissance Studies.

Master's Degrees
M.Phil. See Graduate School requirements. Alternatively, the Department of Comparative Literature offers, in conjunction with the Medieval Studies program, a joint M.Phil. degree. For further details, see Medieval Studies.

Program materials are available upon request to the Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University, PO Box 208299, New Haven CT 06520-8299.

Courses
CPLT 501, Introduction to Renaissance Studies. David Quint [F], Lawrence Manley [Sp]. Tuesday 10.30-12.20 [F], Wednesday 3.30-5.20 [Sp]
An introduction to major texts, issues, bibliography, and methods in the interdisciplinary study of the Renaissance.Emphasis in the first semester on Italy and in the second on northern Europe. Also ENGL 565a/b, RNST 500.

CPLT 511bu, Introduction to Theory of Literature. Paul Fry. Tues/Thurs 11.30-12.20, 1 htba
An examination of concepts and assumptions present in contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning, interpretation, and representation. Critical analysis of formalist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, and feminist approaches to theory and literature. Graduate students meet at same times and are required to do a term paper.

CPLT 515a, Problems in the Theory of Literature. Benjamin Harshav. Thursday 1.30-3.20
Introductory proseminar for all first-year graduate students in Comparative Literature. Critical readings of basic texts in modern literary theory on questions such as the discipline of comparative literature; theory, history, and criticism; interpretation and evaluation; theories of "the language of poetry," narrative, and "fictional worlds"; literature and ideology; periods and genres; postmodernism and feminism.

CPLT 559a, Sexual Textualities in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Leo Lensing. Thursday 3.30-5.20
An investigation of the ways in which discourses on sexuality dominated literary and artistic production within Viennese modernism. Readings and visual analysis of Altenberg, Freud, Hofmannsthal, Klimt, Kokoschka, Kraus, Schiele, Schnitzler, and others. Special attention is given to hybrid forms-Altenberg's "inscribed" photographs, Kokoschka's illustrated texts, Kraus's textual and photographic montages-and to creative and polemical interactions-Schnitzler's and Kraus's critiques of psychoanalysis, Kokoschka's and Schiele's revisions of Klimt, Hofmannsthal's responses to Freud. Readings in German, discussion in English. Also GMAN 692a.

CPLT 650b, Problems in the Study of Early Modern Print Culture: The Abstraction and Materiality of the Text. Abby Zanger. Friday 10.30-12.20
What is a text? A material object, printed, bound, distributed, acquired, and (perhaps?) read? Or is it defined by the series of abstract qualities such as aesthetic excellence, Derridian indecideability, Barthesian readers, or its status as intellectual property? By exploring the nature of the text as understood by French and Anglo-American literary, biographical, and historical notions of print culture, this course reconsiders, via a series of case studies, the now-contested notions of print, authorship, textual property, edition, corpus, censorship, orality, and thus the notion of the text itself. Materials examined are drawn from literature, philosophy, drama, ephemera such as pamphlets, and engraved media such as prints, broadsides, and maps. Figures studied include Shakespeare, Cervantes, Crenne, Montaigne, Descartes, Moliere, Lafayette, and others. Secondary readings include Benjamin, Habermas, Anderson, Chartier, Stallybrass, and Bourdieu.

CPLT 672b, Milton.David Quint. Thursday 1.30-3.20
Milton's poetry and some of his controversial prose, investigating the relation of the poetry to its historical contexts. Focus is on the literary, religious, social, and political forces that shaped Milton's verse.Also ENGL 672b.

CPLT 700a, Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art.Karsten Harries. Tuesday 10.30-12.20
A critical reading of the central text. Special emphasis is placed on its relationship to Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics.Also PHIL 700a.

CPLT 701b, Kant: The Critique of Judgment. Karsten Harries. Tuesday 10.30-12.20
Also PHIL 701b.

CPLT 706bu, The New Map of the World: Vico's Poetic Philosophy. Giuseppe Mazzotta. Tuesday 3.30-5.20
The focus of the seminar is to examine Vico's thought globally and in the historical context of the late Renaissance and the Baroque. Starting with Vico's Autobiography, working to his University Inaugural Orations, On the Study of Methods of Our Time, the seminar delves into his juridical-political texts and submits the second New Science (1744) to a detailed analysis. Some attention is given to Vico's poetic production and the encomia he wrote. The over-arching idea of the seminar is the definition of Vico's new discourse for the modern age. To this end issues such as baroque encyclopedic representations, the heroic imagination, the senses of "discovery," the redefinition of "science," reversal of neo-Aristotelian and neo-Platonic poetics, the crisis of the Renaissance, the role of the myth, etc., figure prominently in the discussions. Taught in English. Also ITAL 700bu.

CPLT 723b, The French Atlantic Triangle and the Literature of the Slave Trade. Christopher L. Miller. Thursday 10.30-12.20
An analysis of the Atlantic world that was created by the slave trade, in its French version, as seen through history, philosophy, and literature from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Readings from Voltaire, the journal of a slave-trading sailor, Rousseau, Madame de Duras, Baron Roger, Merimee, Sue, Cesaire, Sembene, and T. Mandeleau. In English.Also AFAM 854b, AFST 739b, FREN 939b.

CPLT 726a, Postcolonial Readings and Colonial Texts. Rolena Adorno. Thursday 4-6
This course aims to create a dialogue between colonial writings and postcolonial formulations. Works of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Bartolome de las Casas, Guaman Poma de Ayala, and others are examined as texts of their own times and interrogated for their role as emblems of postcolonial discursivity. Each anchors clusters of pertinent theoretical readings, which include Memmi, Appiah, and others. Taught in English. Primary texts in Spanish (some available in English translation); theoretical works in English or Spanish. Also SPAN 825a.

CPLT 730b, Spectres of History. Aleida Assman. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
"The past is not dead, it is not even past." This sentence from Faulkner (which was reused by Christa Wolf as the first sentence of her autobiographical novel Kindheitsmuster) captures well the experience of an ongoing troubled relationship with traumatic experiences of the past. The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to theoretical approaches to trauma from the point of view of different disciplines and to read literary texts that address the impact of various traumas of history. Texts to be discussed: Shakespeare, Hamlet; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Ruth Klueger, weiter leben. Also GMAN 730b.

CPLT 789a, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Shoshana Felman. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
Elie Wiesel has said that our age has invented a new genre, that of testimony. The course looks at various instances of testimony (literary, historical, legal, poetical, political, and psychoanalytic), as part of a general investigation of memory and trauma through narratives of individual and collective limit experiences. In analyzing art's relation both to death and to survival, the course probes (in texts and films) the limits of what can be said and the limits of representation in the face of events whose reality unsettles common sense, defies imagination, and resists assimilation. Topics include the tension between violence and speech, truth and denial, judgement and forgiveness, and the concrete interrelations between language, silence, mourning, injury, identity, and cross-cultural exchange. Also FREN 789a.

CPLT 818au, Opera in Germany: Mozart to Kurt Weill. Cyrus Hamlin. Mon/Wed 1-2.15
Survey of the development of opera in the culture of the German-speaking countries from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Emphasis on the literary and theatrical aspects of these works, with regard to the interaction of text and music and the challenge of performance in the theater. Works considered include Mozart, Die Zauberfloete; Beethoven, Fidelio; Weber, Der Freischuetz; Wagner, Der Fliegende Hollaender, Tannhauser, and Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg; Strauss, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Die Frau ohne Schatten; Berg, Wozzeck; and Weill, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. No knowledge of German or training in music is required. Readings in English; conducted in English.Also GMAN 655a.

CPLT 852a, Literature and Public Life, 1750-1800. David Bromwich. Monday 10.30-12.20
This seminar is about the consolidation and the decline of the English Augustan ideal of public life. We look at some ways in which the study of history, political thought, and the arts were brought into conjunction by the use of such metaphors as "representation," and we discuss the implications of the belief in a public ordering of sentiments and cultivation of feelings. A question asked throughout is what, if anything, connects the eighteenth-century idea of the common good with the emergent idea of "consciousness"?Also ENGL 751a.

CPLT 853a, Word and Image from Lessing to Foucault. Thomas Otten. Thursday 3.30-5.20
A study of the relations-the fictive resemblances and inevitable assimilations-of verbal and visual media in theory from Lessing's Laocooen to Foucault's This is Not a Pipe, along with close analysis of poems and novels by Dryden, Pope, Keats, Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hawthorne, James, Stevens, Ashbery, May Swenson, and Jorie Graham. As that list suggests, the course considers several different kinds of intersections between literature and art: the ecphrastic tradition (passages which describe painting or sculpture), the visual shapes of literary texts, the Kuenstlerroman (the novel tracing an artist's development), and the concept of portraiture. Also ENGL 953a.

CPLT 854b, Magic Realism in the Americas. Vera Kutzinski. Monday 10.30-12.20
This seminar focuses on remappings of the subject within twentieth-century counterrealist writing from different parts of the Americas. Authors include Isabel Allende, Robert Antoni, Erna Brodber, Alejo Carpentier, William Faulkner, Janet Frame, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Wilson Harris, Pauline Melville, Juan Rulfo, and Lawrence Scott. Also AFAM 759b, AMST 767b, ENGL 922b.

CPLT 919b, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov. John MacKay. Monday 1.30-3.20
An examination of all the major cinematic and theoretical works of Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, centering on the period 1925-1945. We consider the films in light of the theories, the filmmakers in light of one another, and Soviet film and theory in light of contemporary developments worldwide. Attention is also paid to the international legacy of these filmmakers, and particularly their reception during the 1960s and 1970s (Godard, Marker, Barthes). No knowledge of Russian required. Also RUSS 747b.

CPLT 934b, The Archive of Popular Front France. Dudley Andrew. Tuesday 3.30-5.20
Taken more as a cultural than as a political movement, the Popular Front names a period during which the French literary establishment found itself-willingly or not-writing for an enlarged audience, and joining or competing with other expressions and practices. I propose labeling these expressions and practices an "archive," for they make available a variety of historical and critical trajectories without privileging one to the exclusion of others. This seminar examines the changing voice of the novel (Celine and Malraux, certainly) in the context of popular fiction. More fundamentally, it looks at the relation of book publishing to journals, radio, cinema, music hall, and the highly publicized expositions of 1931 and 1937. Finally, it considers the status of "disciplines" within and outside the academy and in a highly politicized milieu: history, ethnography, psychoanalysis, criticism, and philosophy all underwent changes during the 1930s that we need to register, if not account for. In addition to common readings each week, participants may expect to screen at least one film per week and rummage in journals of the period. Competency in French is desirable, but not required.

CPLT 977b, Tolstoy, Novelness, and World Literature. Michael Holquist. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
Although he created works in many different genres, Tolstoy is primordially associated with the novel. There are those who think of him as the novelist. And yet Tolstoy himself despised generic thinking in general, and normative concepts of "the novel" in particular. In this seminar we examine some of the contradictions that swirl around the idea of the novel as it is complicated by the case of Tolstoy. We of course read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, as well as some of Tolstoy's short fiction and polemical essays. In addition we examine theoretical speculation about novels that might be helpful in understanding their peculiarity in shaping Tolstoy's achievement. In particular, we meditate questions about the relation between the novel and its complex filiation with concepts of 'Europe.' Readings and discussion in English, but Russian, German, and French texts are read in the original by those having the relevant languages. Also RUSS 673b.

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