Graduate Courses Fall 2009

Comparative Literature 473: Thematics - Modernity & the Lyric
Lecture 001: TR 9:30 - 10:45
Professor Irene Santos

The course will focus on the relevance in the western culture of the various phenomena variously designated as the modern, modernity, modernization, modernism, postmodernism. Each age has its forms of modernity, i. e. its ways of being of its time. Some historical events are easily identifiable as constituting the modernity of a particular age: the “Discoveries,” the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Nationalism, Feminism, Emancipation, Globalization.
The aim of the course is to articulate the supposed gratuitous timelessness of lyric poetry, its “actual present,” as Gertrude Stein would say, with its being of its time. In other words, the objective of the course is to try to understand how different historical events or intellectual movements impact on lyric poetry. We will be looking at key primary and secondary texts of German, English and American Romanticism, French Symbolism, Anglo-American Modernism, the Portuguese Orpheu Movement, and Brazilian Modernism.

Comparative Literature 473: Thematics - Flowers of War
Lecture 002: MWF 11:00
Professor Ernesto Livorni

The course focuses on a few representative poets who worked with the historical avant-garde movements in the years immediately before, during, and after World War I. The course aims at exploring war poetry as well as artistic venues and solutions that the Great War suddenly either made available or forced the poets to explore. Poets include Apollinaire, Pound, Ungaretti, Marinetti, Stramm, Owen, Brooke, Lichtenstein.

Comparative Literature 475 / Poetics and Literary Theory - The Poetics of Cruelty
Professor Max Statkiewicz -
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
Lecture 002 (3 credits): MW 2:30-3:45 / 583 Van Hise

Defending his notion of the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud writes in a letter to Jean Paulhan in 1932: "[t]his Cruelty is a matter of neither sadism nor bloodshed, at least not in any exclusive way. […] The word "cruelty" must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given. And I claim, in doing this, the right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck, in short to return to the etymological origins of speech which, in the midst of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete element." Thus, for the prophet of the modern theater, cruelty is a matter of language, of its innermost essence. Even when (in Seneca's play) Medea's children are murdered on stage against the rules of Aristotelian and Horacian decorum, even when Gloucester's eyes are gouged out on stage (in Shakespeare's King Lear), or Anabella's heart is exposed on the tip of her brother/lover's swo
rd (in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore), the cruelty resides predominately in the language of these poetic works, or perhaps in language as such, the cruelty of which these works are able to reveal. In this course we shall study the interaction between physical, sensuous (aesthetic) cruelty and the cruelty of language, both the language of the dominant ideology and the language of art that exposes it. We shall read the works of some of the authors who marked the two prophets of contemporary art, Nietzsche and Artaud (e.g., Aeschylus, Ford, Sade, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky), as well as the works of those who were marked by them (e.g., Rilke, Genet, Bataille, Beckett, Weiss, Pasolini).

Comparative Literature 702: Problems - Comparative Studies
Professor Mary Layoun -
938 Van Hise - 262-9767
Lecture: T @ 4:00 - 6:30
367 Van Hise

Comparison juxtaposes different texts in an identical present to make similarities and differences visible and from which similarities and
differences to configure a comparative argument. We will attempt to tease out the implications of this thought.

Together we will read, think about, and discuss a range of texts, theoretical and literary.

Additional burning questions of the moment will be duly taken up as well - time, temperament, and temerity permitting.

A likely reading list will include SOME of the following

Descartes: A Discourse on Method, Meditations
Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit
Nietzsche: Birth of Tragedy, Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche contra Wagner, Zarathustra
Marx: The Communist Manifesto, The 18th Brumaire, The German Ideology, Capital v.1
Freud: "Dora," Introductory Lectures, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Three Lectures on the Theory of Sexuality, "The Uncanny," "Wolfman"
selections from the Old & New Testaments
selected works from Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sappho, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes
Larry Gonick: Cartoon History of the Universe, volume 1 & selections from Cartoon History of the Universe, volume 3, Cartoon History of the Modern World.

Comparative Literature 768 / Meets with Law 829-001 (Class number: 87439)
Professor Kaplan -
7103 Law Building
TR 3:30-5:30 / 3250 Law Building

Jurisprudence & the Liberal State

This seminar is concerned primarily with what it means to designate a state liberal. For the most part the object of analysis will be the contemporary United States. When academics call a state liberal, they have to distinguish among various and potentially conflicting meanings of liberal, two of which have different historical antecedents, the economic and the ethical. Further the notion of liberal must contend with historical claims about the nature of republicanism, fact and theory historical and ethical.
We will approach the status of the contemporary situation historically and philosophically. In doing so we will look at classical meanings of the political and the liberal, the first from Aristotle and the second from claims about classical liberal thought from Leo Strauss. We will also reflect on the relationship between the political and the rule of law in legislative and judicial practice. We will also look at a series of concepts that are in contention in contemporary legal thought such as natural law, different arguably from Aristotle, Aquinas and perhaps different again for such twentieth century thinkers like Ernst Bloch and in US jurisprudence Lon Fuller, and Ronald Dworkin.
Liberalism whatever it is in fact is under attack and has been certainly since the fall of Weimar. We will look at Weimar political and legal thinkers and test their contemporary relevance. In undertaking our analyses we will look at the theory outside the state, for example constitutionalism, sovereignty, legality, legitimacy and citizenship among others. While we test the political philosophic positions concerning these terms we will also look at how the last hundred years of  US jurisprudence, the inside of the state as scholars and the judiciary theorized and continue to theorize the law.

Comparative Literature 775 / Meets with Law 940-001 (Class number: 87478)
Professor Kaplan -
7103 Law Building
R 6:00-9:00 / 3226 Law Building

Law, theology & the State

Comparative Literature 974 - Drama
Professor Chris Livanos-
950 Van Hise - 263-3851
Lecture: M 3:30-6:00
286 Van Hise

Classical Greek and Indian Drama

We will study two dramatic traditions that are related through common Indo-European heritage and through cultural contact during the Hellenistic period. The class will discuss different theories regarding the origins of tragedy and comedy in Greek religious festivals. Questions of gender relations and the nature of marital union--as a social institution, as a prelude to sexual relations, and as a spiritual metaphor—will be considered within the different contexts of Greek and Indian culture. After studying several major Greek tragedies, we will discuss different reasons for the absence of tragedy from Indian drama (except perhaps in a few plays by Bhasa). Our theoretical discussions will be guided by our reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and the Sanskrit treatise Natyasastra, attributed to Bharatamuni. We will consider taboos against the depiction of violence on stage in both traditions, as well as the rare instances in which such taboos are violated. Issues of the relative social status of different characters and character types in the Greek plays—including the tragic hero and stock characters of New Comedy—as well as the complex interrelations of different castes in the Indian plays will also be examined in the course. Other topics will include different cultural understandings of fate; the character’s own action (Sanskrit karma ) as a determining force in Indian theater; the influence of Hellenic, Hindu and Buddhist religious thought on theater; and stagecraft as a metaphor for social manipulation and political intrigue. Playwrights will include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander, Kalidasa, Shudraka, Harsha, Vishakhadatta, and Bhasa. All texts will be available in English, and students of Greek and Sanskrit are encouraged to read select passages in the original appropriate to their level of language proficiency.