Graduate Courses Fall 2005

CL 702: Problems in Comparative Studies
The Problem* of the Comparative
T @ 3:30-6:00 - 382 Van Hise
Professor Mary Layoun
938 Van Hise - 262-9767

An inquiry into the history and the present of the discipline of comparative literature as well as into the poiesis (the ‘making and doing’) of comparative analysis and theory. We’ll read critical, historical, and fictional narratives (and a lyric or two, as well) that take up and enact problematic of ‘the comparative.’

Likely readings:
• ACLA “Report on the Discipline, 2004” – in-progress at: http://www.stanford.edu/~saussy/acla/
• Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose
• Aeschylus: The Persians
• Aristophanes: The Ekklesiazouses
• Aristotle: The Poetics
• Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: Representations of Reality in Western Literature
• Euripides: Medea
• Emile Habiby: The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
• Hayashi Fumiko, selected short stories
• Herodotus: The Persian Wars
• Marx: The 18th Brumaire, The German Ideology & Letters on ‘the Russian Road’ (from Teodor Shanin, ed. Late Marx and the Russian Road)
• Montaigne: "On Cannibals," "On the Education of Children," "On Books," "On Experience"
• Plato: Phaedrus
• Sappho: selected poems
• Gayatri Spivak: Death of a Discipline
• the Bible: “Genesis,” “Book of Ruth,” “Book of Job”; Gospels of John & Luke, letters of Paul
• Selections from the Koran
• Selections from the Manyoshu, Sei Shonagon’s Makura no soshi, Basho’s Oku no hosomichi

* Problem: from the classical Greek, προβάλλειν, to throw out, to put forth

CL777 Literature of Early Modern Europe: Transitions and Cross-Cultural Exchanges
M @ 3:30-6:00 - 951 Van Hise
Professor Chris Livanos

950 Van Hise - 263-3851

This course will begin with Dante’s Divine Comedy as the high point of medieval literature, and to gain an understanding of certain points of medieval thought that Renaissance writers inherited and questioned. We will then turn to Rabelais’ larger-than-life heroes, and discuss why Rabelais would focus on characters who are almost monstrous in order to show us what is quintessentially human. In our study of Gargantua and Pantagruel, we will read Mikhail Bakhtin’s important work on elements of the carnival and popular culture in Rabelais, situating him at the crossroads of medieval and Renaissance thought. We will also discuss responses to Bakhtin as well as a selection of other readings of Rabelais.

In our reading of Don Quijote, in addition to having a good laugh, we will examine the Moorish presence that permeates the novel even though the Moors had long since been expelled from Spain. As we turn to Shakespeare, our laughter will turn to tears, and Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory will help us explore what happened to the idea of Purgatory in the three centuries since Dante.

All texts will be available in translation, but students working in Spanish, French, or Italian are encouraged to read the appropriate texts in the original languages.

Primary Texts:
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes: Don Quijote
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Othello,

Secondary Materials:
Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World
Stephen Greenblatt: Hamlet in Purgatory
Jean-Claude Carron, ed.: François Rabelais: Critical Assesments

CL974 Genre & Mode: Auto-biography or Auto-Text?
R @ 4:00
Próspero Saíz
956 Van Hise - 262-1158

Perhaps all writing, in a general sense, is auto-biographical. Auto-biography may be viewed as a process of self/other creation, as a process of masking and revealing, as a process of remembering or forgetting, as a process of confessing, as a process of linking the unconscious to various forms of memory (memorial, commemorative, monumental), or even as a process of "documentation," in an existing scene of communication. Our task will be to examine and criticize these processes. Thus, we will approach auto-biography as a problematic space of communication. For instance, the law of genre which regulates auto-biography would seem to demand that this space be the only possible field of communication for the writing subject's self-coincidence. Deleuze describes the problem in these words: "It's a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn't at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them... Experimentation on yourself is our only identity."

First, we will be interested in studying if and how the subject of "auto-biography" is differently positioned across the fields of writing (Foucault, Althusser, Lacan). This relates directly to the problem of writing: does the writing subject of auto-biography always try to find a subject-position in order to make itself present to itself (re-presentation) and to others? Second, we will study Derrida's challenge to the notion of subject-positions and the traits that characterize self-presence-e.g., personality, ego, self-identity, consciousness, the unconscious, intentionality, etc., and we will take up the implications of this (re)positioning for auto-biographical writing. For in Derrida the subject's "who" does not occupy the place of its position, and so the "who" absconds or disappears. Third, we will engage the critical and clinical concepts of Deleuze and Guattari by experimenting with some of the following notions: the rhizome, pure immanence and life, the catapulting of "becomings" into affects and percepts, cartographics as opposed to archaelogics, schizo-analysis, and the disintegration of the subject.

Requirements: In addition to the usual seminar requirements, each student will begin writing his or her auto-text, or begin writing the biography of an auto-biographical writer.

Possible TEXTS
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Antonin Artaud, 4 Tests
Eduardo Cadava, ed., Who Comes After the Subject?
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism & Schlzophrenla or A Thousand Plateaus
Franz Kafka, Diaries and Letters
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz and the Reawakening: Two Memoirs
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Reader (short theoretical pieces)

Recommended:
Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge