Graduate Courses Fall 2004
CL475 Poetics @ Literary Theory: Narrative Theory
Lect. TR - 11:00-12:15 / 382 Van Hise
Disc. R - 1:20 / 140 Van Hise
Professor Keith Cohen
An investigation of the theory of narrative carried out on two fronts: first, a charting of the development of the novel from bourgeois upstart to postmodernist poseur; and secondly, a look at the evolution of theorizing about the novel, from its tentative beginnings with Henry James to several systematic versions of narratology (Genette, Cohan & Shires), passing by reader-oriented analyses and ideology critiques (Jameson). I have tried to match historical essays with contemporary theory, grouping them around each of the five narratives chosen. So, for instance, in the case of Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or [Girl with the Golden Eyes], we read historical essays by Lukacs and Watt, a formal analysis by R. Fernandez (written in the 1920s) and a Freudian post-structuralist analysis by Shoshana Felman
Among the problematics of narrative theory to be addressed are: récit / histoire (or narrative / diegesis), temporal articulations, perspective and distance, reader affectivity, subject positioning, “production” of meaning and gender specificity. Tentative assignments: one midterm exam, several short papers or oral presentations, and the option of a final paper or final exam. Graduate students will be required to conduct research on a specially developed topic, which will become the basis for their final paper (not an option in their case). Some reading knowledge of French or Spanish is required for Comp. Lit. majors, since a part of their written work will be based on texts in the original language. (For possible exceptions to this, and for any further information, please contact me at lkcohen@wisc.edu)
Required texts:
Balzac, La Fille aux yeux d'or (Livre de Poche; trans. in History of the Thirteen, Viking Penguin)
Flaubert, Madame Bovary, (Classiques Garnier; trans. Ballantine)
James, "The Tree of Knowledge" (reader)
Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Gallimard or other; trans. Random)
García Márquez, Crónica de une muerte anunciada (Ed. Sudamericana; trans. Ballantine)
Walker, The Color Purple (Pocket)
Reader of photocopied texts: essays by H. James, R. Fernandez, G. Prince, M. Bakhtin, G. Lukács, W. Iser, S. Fish, S. Felman.
Barthes, S/Z (Noonday/Farrar Strauss)
Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Cornell)
Lovell, Consuming Fiction (Verso)
Genette, Narrative Discourse (Cornell)
Cohan & Shires, Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (Routledge)
Note: some readings will be found on reserve in Helen C. White Library
CL 768 Literature and Ideas: Idea of Naming
M @ 3:30-6:00 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Max Statkiewicz
Ph (608) 262-7862 - 958 Van Hise
mstatkiewicz@facstaff.wisc.edu
"Man gave names to all the animals, in the beginning . . ." Naming certainly belongs to the very nature of human being. But what exactly is to name? Just to provide a thing, a being with a mark, a sign? Heidegger suggests that "we have become very slovenly and mechanical in our understanding and use of signs." Is not, on the other hand, modern semiotics and structural linguistics a model of rigor in the domain of the human sciences. Yes, but at what cost? The principle of the arbitrariness of signs and of their link to the world takes out all mystery from the event of naming and justifies Heidegger's reference to mechanical procedure. We shall trace the origin of this view of language in Plato's Cratylus. But we shall insist on the other view, which can also be traced to Plato's dialogue. This other, Cratylian, "alchemical," mimological, tradition will be rediscovered with the help of Genette's unjustly neglected book Mimologics.
Tentative Reading List:
Homer, Odyssey
Hesiod, Theogony
Plato, Cratylus
Genette, Mimologics: Voyage en Cratylie
Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose
Proust, Swan's Way
Heidegger, On the Way to Language
Derrida, Of the Name, The Ear of the Other
Levinas, Proper Names
Saramago, All the Names
Course Reader
CL779 Mulitiple Ethnicities, Multiple Peripheries
T @ 3:30-6:00 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Keith Cohen
One of the most politically charged of literary situations of the late 20th century is that of the poet and novelist whose ethnicity is hybrid and whose nationality, due to colonialism, has become problematized. Such a writer is thus multiply at the margins. In the Caribbean, for example, the three languages that predominate officially are also the site of subtle and not-so-subtle subversion: official Spanish morphs into the spoken language of an oppressed minority group in Guillén’s, and an Anglophone poet’s persona fears he will be accused of “killing ‘de Queen’s English.” Using the Caribbean as a trampoline into this complex field, we will study texts also that treat the Philippines, North Africa, and parts of Latin America.
Main (tentative) texts
Guillén - selected poetry
Césaire - selected poetry, plays
Brathwaite - selected poetry
Walcott - selection poetry, plays
E. Danticat, Eyes, Breath, Memory
Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
M. Condé, La traversée du mangrove
Hagedorn, Dogeaters
Djebar, L’amour la fantasia
Glissant, selected prose and poetry
CL 822: Seminar in Translation
R @ 3:30 - 6:00 / 951 Van Hise Hall
Professor Saiz - psaiz@facstaff.wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 262-1158
Although CL 822 will briefly examine the history of translation, the focus of our seminar will be on the implications of modern literary theory for the translation of literary texts, stressing the following problems:
gender and “metaphorics” in the text;
erotics of transfer in the language relationship;
cultural difference and transfer;
interference of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real in the transfer.
Questions that will mark points of departure include:
*the affirmation (or not) of the identity (the self-same repeatability) of a given language or “text”;
*untranslatability or the incompleteness of translation;
*the shibboleth effect;
*babel and pure or ideal language;
*the idiom of “literature”;
*the pluri-logic of aporia.
* translation itself–what are its borders and how are they protected, since limits may be constituted as:
a. separate territories, countries, nations, states, cultures, languages, bodies, subjects;
b. separations between disciplines or domains of discourse;
c. concepts or terms which ultimately intersect and overdetermine all other limits;
TEXTS:
Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice
Lawrence Venuti, editor, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology
Seminar Reader