Graduate Courses 2009 - 2010

Fall Courses
Spring Courses

Fall 2009

CPLT 515a, Proseminar in Comparative Literature.
Haun Saussy
T 9:25-11:15
Introductory proseminar for all first-year graduate students in Comparative Literature (and other interested persons). Critical readings of formative texts in the theory and practice of the discipline, from the late eighteenth century to the present. Topics to be covered include the nature of literature; translation; national identities and identities beyond the nation; interpretation and evaluation; the humanities and the human; media. The course is taken for a grade of Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory.

CPLT 519a, Bilingualism.
Haun Saussy
Th 3:30-5:20
The possibility that a text may be written or read in two or more different languages simultaneously opens a set of productive difficulties for translation, interpretation, sociolinguistics, genre study, and allied disciplines. Working with examples from antiquity to the present in a variety of languages, we try to get at the implications of this problem. Readings from Weinreich, Ferguson, Saussure, Derrida, de Man, Deleuze, Khatibi, and from Augustine, Montaigne, Folengo, Bunyan, Tsvetaeva, Kafka, Joyce, Nabokov, and Celan. (Graduate course; letter grade only.)

CPLT 523a, Adventures in Literacy.
Michael Holquist
T 1:30-3:20
This course is an experiment combining literature, cognitive science, and linguistics. It is an attempt to understand the fundamental difference between speaking and other forms of inscribing information (writing, digitalization, etc.) through a study of the history and neuroscience of the act of reading. Since the subject of the course is militantly interdisciplinary, the seminar brings in frequent guests from departments across the university, including cognitive scientists from Haskins Laboratory. Texts include literary texts (Kafka, Poe, Gogol, Proust), classics in linguistics, and recent work being done on the study of literacy's effects on the brain using fMRI imaging. Students have the opportunity to do their own research under the directorship of eminent experts in relevant fields. A course for graduate students and advanced Yale undergraduates.

CPLT 536a/GMAN 536a, Around Kafka.
Henry Sussman
T 3:30-5:20
A course treating Kafka as a distinctive and indispensable Imaginary as well as a particular author, mutating into a plethora of adaptations, whether by Beckett, Bernhard, Welles, Murakami, or Pamuk, and into the graphic novel as well.

CPLT 541a/PHIL 708a, Poetics I: Theory of the Work of Literature.
Benjamin Harshav
M 1:30-3:20
The course presents a comprehensive theory of works of literature as the highest sign-complexes in human culture. From rhythm and sound patterns through metaphor and fictional worlds to genre and representation, a work of literature combines elements of structure with a network of necessary and possible or contradictory constructs. The seminar develops a conceptual network for the descriptive analysis of individual works of poetry and fiction. The theory focuses on questions of fictionality and art in language, yet goes beyond linguistics and philosophy of language, on the one hand, and narratology, on the other. It is grounded in close readings of poems and narrative texts by Kafka, Joyce, Eliot, Dostoevsky, and others.

CPLT 542a/CLSS 837a, Ancient Literary Criticism.
Kirk Freudenburg
W 2:30-4:20
This course takes a "thematic" approach to literary criticism in antiquity, with special emphasis on the culture(s) of criticism in the Roman world. The home base for the course is the literary-theoretical and rhetorical works of selected Roman authors, especially Cicero (Brutus, Orator), Varro, Horace, and Seneca. The larger historical picture is filled in by looking both backward to Greek sources, especially to Plato and Aristotle, and forward to Quintilian, Tacitus, Longinus, and others. Weekly discussions center on topics that arise from the theoretical pronouncements and debates of ancient writers, as well as from the actual practices (and meta-linguistic commentaries) of the poets themselves. Topics include theories of imitation in antiquity; theories of style (order, structure, metaphor, language, word choice, etc.); definitions of a "poem" and of the poet's place in society; genre theory and canon formation (especially in Rome); what grammarians do and how they structure modes of evaluation.

CPLT 571a/RUSS 675a, Promised Lands: Slavery, Literature and Modernity in Russia and the United States.
John MacKay
T 3:30-5:20
Close, comparative, contextualized examination of literary and other forms of cultural production associated with U.S. slavery and Russian serfdom. Special attention is paid to the relation between bondage and national, cultural, and personal identity, the role of bondage in definitions of "aesthetic experience" in the pre- and post-emancipation periods, the relation between literacy and the literary, literature of protest in the two countries, and connections between geographical and subjective space within cultures of enslavement. We examine works by Pushkin, Aksakov, Gogol, Simms, Cooper, Crevecoeur, Radishchev, Karamzin, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Kennedy and the "plantation novelists," Stowe, Melville, Turgenev, slave and serf autobiographers, freedman's textbooks, Fet, Lanier, Page, Chesnutt, and Bunin; historical treatments by Kolchin, Genovese and others; theoretical works by Said, Jameson, Saidiya Hartman, Bakhtin and others. Requirements: in-class presentations; research paper. No knowledge of Russian required.

CPLT 578a/ENGL 984a/PHIL 711a, Metapragmatics and Textual Culture.
Michael Warner
T 1:30-3:20
An introduction to theoretical issues of textual analysis, and the difference between structuralist and metapragmatic approaches to language and culture. We review debates over performativity, the langue/parole distinction, indexicality and metaindexicality, and the nature of text. We then see how these traditions for analyzing the social dimensions of language inflect various attempts to theorize modern forms of discourse and power - including the public sphere, concepts of genre and media, religion, and the practice of criticism itself.

CPLT 598a/ENGL 971a, Moderns, 1914-1926.
Pericles Lewis
Th 9:25-11:15
An intensive research-oriented course on British literature, 1914-1926, with some attention to European, Irish, and American influences. Major figures to be considered include Joyce, Lawrence, Shaw, O'Casey, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Strachey, Woolf, and Forster. Students pursue group research projects on poetry, drama, the novel, or intellectual history. The final syllabus depends on student interests.

CPLT 674a/SPAN 660a, Cervantes: Don Quijote.
Roberto González Echevarría
W 3:30-5:20
A close reading of Cervantes's masterpiece with emphasis on its significance for modern fiction. The relationship of author, characters, and reader; reality and fantasy in fiction; literary imitation vs. literary invention. Conducted in English.

CPLT 698a/PHIL 704a, Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics.
Karsten Harries
M 1:30-3:20

CPLT 708a/ITAL 560a, Age of Disenchantment.
Giuseppe Mazzotta
T 3:30-5:20
This course focuses on the literary debates, theological arguments, and scientific shifts taking place between the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1437) and the Council of Trent and beyond, by reading key texts by Valla, Cusa, Pulci, Luther, Erasmus, Ariosto, Campanella, Bruno, Galileo, and Bellarmino. It examines issues such as crisis of belief, the authority of the past, the emergence of freedom, new aesthetics, and the effort to a new theological language for modern times.

CPLT 756a/ENGL 728a, Defoe, Sterne, Scott.
Ala Alryyes
W 3:30-5:20
Readings of fiction and other prose works of three authors who seminally contributed to the development of the poetics of the novel, setting up modes of fabulation that had a lasting influence on European and world fiction. Focus on how Defoe, Sterne, and Walter Scott negotiated boundaries between fiction and "reality" - crossing disciplines and complicating such categories as persons, things, description, knowledge, science, rhetoric, history, nation - and also on how their writings have proven a fundamental influence on our own critical and theoretical approaches and systems.

CPLT 783a/GMAN 660a, Transformation of the Classical Elegy by Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke.
Rainer Nägele
W 3:30-5:20
This course is open to both graduate and qualified undergraduate students with a reading knowledge of German. The seminar concentrates on Goethe's Römische Elegien, some of the major elegies of Hölderlin, and Rilke's Duino elegies.

CPLT 784a/GMAN 647a/PHIL 607a, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.
Rainer Nägele
Th 1:30-3:20
This course is open to both graduate and qualified undergraduate students with a reading knowledge of German. The seminar concentrates on Adorno's Ästhetische Theorie and its position within the Frankfurt School and in the literary and philosophical discussion of postwar Germany.

CPLT 840a/FILM 840a/RUSS 712a/HSAR 687a/GMAN 652a, Moscow/Berlin: Leftist Avant-Gardes and Interwar Modernism.
Katerina Clark, Katie Trumpener
W 1:30-3:20
From 1918 to the mid-1930s, Moscow and Berlin both became central gathering points for left-wing modernists. Although each city developed its own modes of modernism, they did so in sustained dialogue, given massive Russian emigration to Berlin after 1918, the Weimar obsession with early Soviet aesthetics (and cinema), intellectuals visiting in both directions, and the large-scale emigration of German leftists to the Soviet Union after 1933. The final week or two of the course will end by considering the shaping influence of Soviet intellectuals (and German emigrants returning from Moscow) on East Berlin "late modernism" of the 1940s and 50s. Centered on literature and film, the course also considers a wide array of art forms (including painting, photography, architecture, music, and aesthetic theory). Works by modernists such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Kosintsev, Trauberg, Alexandrov, Shklovsky, Nabokov, Babel, Tretiakov, Mayakovsky, El Lissitsky, Rodchenko, Malevich, Tatlin, Shostakovich, Lukacs, Benjamin, Brecht, Richter, Ruttmann, Dudow, Beckmann, Schwitters, Grosz, Heartfield, Döblin, Moholy-Nagy, van der Rohe, Weill, Krenek, Eisler, Busch. Texts are available in English translation; knowledge of Russian and/or German still very helpful. Where able, students should read texts in the original. At the first meeting, students help shape the final syllabus.

CPLT 899a/FREN 893a, Realism and Naturalism.
Maurice Samuels
W 9:25-11:15
This seminar interrogates the nineteenth-century French Realist and Naturalist novel in light of various efforts to define its practice. How does theory constitute Realism as a category or object? How does Realism articulate the aims of theory? And how did nineteenth-century Realist and Naturalist textual practices intersect with other discourses besides the literary? Novelists to be studied include Balzac, Stendhal, Sand, Flaubert, and Zola. Theorists to be studied include Auerbach, Barthes, Girard, Jameson, and Lukács. Some attention is also paid to Realist painting. Taught in English but reading knowledge of French required.

CPLT 900a, Directed Reading.
Faculty

CPLT 901a, Individual Research.
Faculty

CPLT 903a/FILM 625a, Media and the Logic of Repetition.
Francesco Casetti
T 1:30-3:20
An analysis of such common practices as adaptation, remake, prequel, sequel, quotation that operate in film, above all, but also in fiction, television, painting, and in every art. Examples are taken from various media, as repetition is examined from the point of view of semiotics (Barthes, Eco), cultural history (Benjamin), and philosophy (Deleuze).

CPLT 924b, Readings in Hebrew Poetry.
Benjamin Harshav
T 1:30-3:20
Modernism in Hebrew poetry: close readings of the poetry of Nathan Alterman, Lea Goldberg, Nathan Zach, Yona Volakh, Avot Yeshurun. Advanced undergraduate course, open to graduate students. Prerequisite: a high level of reading Hebrew texts in poetry and criticism, and permission of instructor.

CPLT 987a/FREN 949a/AFST 949a/AFAM 805a, Novel, Film, and History in French Africa.
Christopher L. Miller
Th 1:30-3:20
African history as represented in historiography, novels, and films. Limited to French and Francophone Africa. Themes include empire and epic; orality and literacy; the slave trade; contact, conquest, and resistance; the Congo Free State; the role of colonial intermediaries; the two world wars; decolonization and neocolonialism; and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Reading knowledge of French required.

Spring 2010

CPLT 511b, Introduction to Theory of Literature.
Haun Saussy
TTh 11:35-12:25
An examination of concepts and assumptions active in contemporary views of literature, with their history. Shifting definitions of "literary theory"; accounts of meaning, interpretation, and representation; examinations of historicist, formalist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, and media-centered approaches to theory and literature.

CPLT 520b/ENGL 969b/WGSS 776b, Narratives of Formation.
Barry McCrea
M 9:25-11:15
An examination of models of personal progress and maturation in a variety of narratives and periods. We read theoretical, anthropological, and psychoanalytic texts in conjunction with primary material. All non-English language texts are available in translation. Authors might include some of the following: Mme de Lafayette, anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes, Dickens, Balzac, Musil, Wilde, James, Forster, Chandler, Bechdel.

CPLT 535b/GMAN 561b, Literary Ethics: Isak Dinesen and W. G. Sebald.
Carol Jacobs
M 1:30-3:20
We concentrate on the prose works of Isak Dinesen and W. G. Sebald. In reading these singularly popular writers, we think through how literature and ethics redefine one another, the way in which the performance of the work of art and, specifically, reflections on the nature of language and representability, demand a rethinking of conscience and moral gesture.

CPLT 570b/RUSS 748b, Marxist Theory.
John MacKay
M 7:00-8:50 p.m.
Not a survey class, this course examines selected methodologies of social-historical interpretation in the humanities (primarily literature, moving image media, photography, music, art history) that stem from or emerge out of the Marxist tradition. Problems to be discussed include periodization, base and superstructure, reification and commodification, and alternative cultural practices. We may discuss works by (among others) members of the Frankfurt School, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Franco Moretti, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancičre, and members of the October group. Regular writing assignments and in-class reports; open to interested undergraduates.

CPLT 625b/GMAN 673b, Advocates and Representatives.
Rüdiger Campe
W 3:30-5:20
In contradistinction to our familiar thinking on communication as two parties speaking about the world, the course develops a triangular scene in which one person speaks on behalf of another person before a third party. This is the model of communication in law (in the idea of advocacy), religions (in the idea of intercession) and politics (in the idea of representation). Readings are taken from ancient rhetoric (Aristotle, Quintilian), Jewish and religious texts (on the "paraclete" or helper), as well as modern social and literary theory (Parsons, Derrida). We also examine selected scenes from ancient and modern drama as well as paradigmatic works by Kafka, Canetti, and Celan.

CPLT 633b, Picture Book to Graphic Novel.
Katie Trumpener
MW 2:30-3:45
The first half of this course surveys the history of the picture book, from the early modern period to the late twentieth century, considering the Anglo-American tradition within a broader European context; the second half considers its relationship first to the comic strip and comic book, then to the contemporary graphic novel, which repeatedly adapt picture book formats and techniques in their attempt to meditate on childhood, family history, and historical experience. Organized historically, thematically and generically, the course focuses throughout on the complex relationship between image and narrative, format and address.

CPLT 672b/ENGL 672b, Milton.
David Quint
Th 9:25-11:15
A study of Milton's poetry and some of his controversial prose. We investigate the relation of the poetry to Milton's literary tradition and historical contexts, focusing on issues of genre and on the religious, social and political forces that shaped Milton's writing.

CPLT 697b/ENGL 929b/ AFAM 835b/AMST 822b, The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans.
Joseph Roach
T 1:30-3:20
An exploration of the sources of creative inspiration that writers find in NOLA, including its cultural mystique, its colonial history, its troubled assimilation into Anglo-North America, its tortured racial politics, its natural and built environment, its spirit-world practices, its raucous festive life, its eccentric characters, its food, its music, its predisposition to catastrophe, and its capacity for re-invention and survival.

CPLT 733b/FREN 820b/HSAR 576b, The Age of the Cathedral.
R. Howard Bloch
W 3:30-5:20
A study of the culture and architectural monuments of the High Middle Ages with accompanying historical and literary works. Emphasis upon Saint-Denis, Notre-Dame, Chartres. Readings include Abelard, Suger, Rutebeuf, Saint Bernard, Joinville, Thibaut de Champagne, Guibert de Nogent, William of Saint-Thierry, Aelred of Rivaulx, the "Miracles de Notre Dame de Chartres," "La Queste del Saint Graal." Discussion of romanesque and gothic, the rise of communes, urban and economic renewal, intellectual life of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Paris, trades and guilds, the economics and industry of cathedral building, sculpture and stained glass, Crusade against the Albigensians and in the Middle East, sainthood and kingship, expansion of the royal domain, the growth of the judicial state and parliament, monasticism, mysticism, relics, the ancillary architectural arts - tapestry and textiles, liturgical objects and garments, metalwork, woodwork, iron work, and the fate of such objects after the Revolution of 1789 and restoration in the nineteenth century.

CPLT 734b/FREN 930b, Fact and Fiction in the Archives.
Alice Kaplan
M 3:30-5:20
The turn to archival research in French literary studies; theoretical and personal essays on the archive (Derrida, Davis, Farge, Coeuré), and fiction that includes archival digging as part of a larger investment in memory. Focus on postwar literature and theory. Includes some practical work.

CPLT 900b, Directed Reading.
Faculty

CPLT 901b, Individual Research.
Faculty

CPLT 902b/FILM 718b/GMAN 636b, Theatricality in Film.
Brigitte Peucker
T 3:30-5:20; screening M 7
This course examines the multiple implications of theatricality in and for the cinema: theatricality as excess; the appropriation of theatrical modes for film; theatricality as modernist self-reflexivity; performance and the relation of theatricality to subjectivity (performing the self); ritual and re-enactment in film; theatricality and the real; the material image. Readings by Arnheim, Bazin, Bateson, Barthes, Bell, Butler, Cavell, Egginton, Fried, Mitry, and others. Films by von Sternberg, Bergman, Hitchcock, Fassbinder, Haneke, Pabst, Wilder, Greenaway, von Trier, Kiarostami, Kubrick.

CPLT 942b/SPAN 912b, The Borges Effect.
Roberto González Echevarría
W 3:30-5:20
Since the publication of Ficciones in 1944 and especially since achieving worldwide acclaim after receiving ex-aequo with Samuel Beckett the Formentor Prize in 1961, Jorge Luis Borges has become one of the most influential modern writers. He is a recognizable and often acknowledged presence in the work of novelists and short-story writers, as well as in that of philosophers and literary theorists. There is a Borges "effect," which can be perceived in John Barth, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and in Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gerard Genette, and Jacques Derrida, among others. That effect is also projected retrospectively in Borges's particular way of reading classics like Homer, Dante, and Cervantes. An elegant, playfully ironic skepticism, together with a fondness for aporias, enigmas, puzzles, labyrinths as well as for minor genres such as the detective story are the most recognizable components of Borges's style and thought. Taken together these components suggest theories about writing and reading. We read closely Borges's most influential stories, such as "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote," and "The Garden of Forking Paths," as well as his essays on Homer, Dante, and Cervantes. We then follow his track in the writers mentioned. Class discussions in English and readings in English or the French, Spanish, or Italian originals.

CPLT 946b, The Arabic Novel in Translation.
Ala Alryyes
T 3:30-5:20
Study of a select set of modern Arabic novels in translation. We read works by Haykal, Mahfouz, Jabra, Salih, Khoury, al-Shaykh, and al-Ghitani because they are exceptionally good and because their themes and forms mirror and diverge from those of the Western novel, suggesting alternative approaches to narrative and literary theory and the poetics of translation. These novels fictionalize distinctive Arab modern themes such as the persistence of orality and the vexed relation between dialect and formal language; the clash between tradition and modernity; the chasm between ordinary lives and official history; defeat and exile; patriarchy and gender questions. Yet the seminar's guiding principle is that literature includes culture and politics, and not vice versa. In addition to novels, the seminar examines a number of important films and plays, focusing on the portrayal of alternative political representations.

CPLT 989b/FREN 943b/AFAM 851b, Creole Identities and Fictions.
Christopher L. Miller
Th 1:30-3:20
Focusing on the French and English Caribbean, this course analyzes the quintessential but ambiguous American condition: that of the "Creole." Encompassing all non-native cultures, this term is inseparable from issues of race and slavery. Readings of historical and literary texts: Moreau de Saint-Méry, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Madame de Staël, Charlotte Brontë (and reinventions of Wuthering Heights by Jean Rhys and Maryse Condé), the Créolistes of Martinique. Attention to Louisiana and to the Haitian Revolution. Reading knowledge of French required.

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