Graduate Courses Spring 2007

CL 768: Dialogue between Poetry and Thought?
MW @ 2:30-3:45 / 579 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz
Ph: (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise

The status of the word "dialogue" is ambiguous in the history of literature, and it shares, to some extent, in the ambiguity of logos. In fact, this is what both Socrates and later Aristotle call dialogue, a mode and a genre: a (Socratikos) logos. Dialogue is associated with Plato's dialectic and with Aristotle's theory of argumentation. In Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, this fact facilitates the thesis that it was Euripides' emphasis on dialogue that ruined Greek tragedy. We shall re-examine the notion of the Socratic dialogue and its hermeneutic appropriateness in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Dialogue, however, is not only a genre or a mode but also a questioning of the separation of genres. There is a notion of the dialogue between genres, combining the elements of different genres and modes. It is this dialogical exchange that we shall study in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his reading of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. We shall then take up Heidegger's call for a dialogue between poetry and thought, and look at his own, as well as his followers' (Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe), examples of such a dialogue. We shall also discuss some limit-cases, such as the dialogue principle of Buber, the face-to-face encounter of Levinas, and the intertextuality of Kristeva. Finally, we shall consider dialogue as a poetic principle in the work of Mandelstam ("there is no lyric poetry without dialogue") and Celan ("A poem, being an instance of language, [is] essentially dialogue").

Readings may include the following:

Literary texts:

Sophocles: Antigone
Friedrich Hölderlin: "The Ister," "The Rhine," "Mnemosyne," "The Journey," "At the Source of the Danube" "In beautiful blue …," "Remarks on Oedipus and Antigone "
Alexander Pushkin: Eugene Onegin
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground
Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poems and Prose
Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems
Georg Trakl: "A Winter Evening," "Sebastian in Dream," "Springtime of the Soul," "Ghostly Twilight," "To One who Died Young"
Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems
Paul Celan: Collected Prose, Selected Poems
Robert Frost: "West-running Brook," "Home Burial," "The Fear"

Philosophical/critical texts:

Plato: Phaedrus and Ion
Andrea W. Nightingale: The Dialogue of Genres
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy: " Le dialogue des genres"
Genette: "Frontiers of Narrative"
Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought, On the Way to Language, Hölderlin's Hymn "Ister"
Jean-Luc Nancy: "Sharing Voices"
H.-G. Gadamer: selections from Truth and Method, Gadamer on Celan

CL822: Seminar in Translation
R 3:30-6:00 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Próspero Saíz

956 Van Hise - 262-1158

The seminar will first briefly examine the "history" and "poetics" of translation as set forth in Willis Barnstone's THE POETICS OF TRANSLATION. Then we will consider the implications of seminal literary theory for the translation of poetic/literary texts. These are some of the problems we will address: the affirmation (or not) of the identity--the self-same repeatability--of a given language or text(s); the incompleteness (perhaps the none translatable) of translation; babel and the idea of pure or ideal language; gender and "metaphorics" in the text; cultural difference and translation as trans-location; interference of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real in the translation act; erotics of transfer in the language relationship.

Throughout the semester the seminar will stay focused on problems of the BORDER AND LIMIT OF TRANSLATION. This means that we will have to be vigilant as to why/how borders are protected, since their limits may be constituted as: separate territories, countries, nations, states, cultures, languages, bodies, subjects; separations between disciplines or domains of knowledge and discourses; and separate concepts or terms which may ultimately intersect with and over-determine all other limits.

In addition to a seminar translation project, students will be required to experiment, in a variety of textual fields, with three brief translations of their own. These exercises will be conducted in the spirit of a translation workshop.

TEXTS:

Willis Barnstone, THE POETICS OF TRANSLATION
Paul de Man, RESISTANCE TO THEORY
Joseph F. Graham, editor, DIFFERENCE IN TRANSLATION
Lawrence Venuti, editor, RETHINKING TRANSLATION, DISCOURSE, SUBJECTIVITY, IDEOLOGY
Benjamin Hollander, editor, TRANSLATING TRADITION, PAUL CELAN IN FRANCE

READER (some possible texts):

Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator"
Helene Cixous, selections from THE HELENE CIXOUS READER
Jacques Derrida, "Shibboleth"
Betty Roitman, "Sacred Language and Open Text"
Kuki Shuzo, "The artistic expression of IKI"