Teaching is always —or should always be—an experiment, and one can only become a better teacher by reflecting on one’s own (and others’) teaching experiments. This class is designed to encourage participants to reflect critically on their own and others’ attempts to integrate teaching literature and writing.

In this course, we will address the ways in which 19th century writers of the Americas engaged in discussion of liberal democracy by evoking the world of the senses.  The underlying paradigm here is the “civilization versus barbarism” antinomy in which civilization is equated with the realm of reason and barbarism, with the realm of the senses. But in the novels, essays, and poetry of the mid-19th, these categories are often confused, and with it, the ways of imagining a pluralistic social space in which bodies come in contact with each other.

This course explores the writings of German-speaking/writing Jews from the emancipation of Jews from European ghettos in the 17th and 18th centuries to their expulsion or extermination during the period of National Socialism. The texts include a variety of perspectives (including social, political, and cultural) and genres (autobiography, memoir, poetry, fictional narratives, dramas, and a range of discursive writings). Although many of these writers are known for a broad spectrum of works, we will concentrate on those texts concerned with Jewish issues.

The German Bertolt Brecht, the Peruvian César Vallejo, and the American Louis Zukofsky exert–within their lifetimes, and within their posthumous reception to this day–special influence on experimental-modernist and marxian (as well as broader Left) traditions of poetry.  Like many artists who come of age early in the 20th century, these poets effectively begin their careers with romantic and symbolist poetics all but second nature to them; they proceed to adopt and extend “advanced” formal and thematic experimentation as intended critique, radicalization, and modernization of  romanticism a

Taught in English; Reading Knowledge of Italian Desirable

Required for all first year graduate students

This course is designed to give all new graduate students a broad view of the department’s faculty, the courses they teach, and their fields of research.  In addition it will introduce students to some practical apspects of the graduate career, issues that pertain to specific fields of research, and questions currently being debated across the profession. The readings for the course will consist of copies of materials by the department’s faculty.

The symbol is one of the most commonly invoked and yet loosely formulated tropes to be employed in literary studies. Unlike other terms of rhetoric, it is also widely invoked in other disciplines, from logic to semiotics to theology.  Derived from the Greek symballein, meaning “to bring together,” it has consistently served to mark the substitution of one object by another. As such, it touches on the basis processes of signification and representation. How is it to be distinguished from other signs, and from related concepts such as image, allegory or myth?

Joyce’s ULYSSES was not only one of the central achievements of modernist fiction but also a watershed novel, representing an ultimate realization of the process of interiorization of narrative that had been evolving in European fiction during the latter part of the nineteenth century. We will devote about half the semester to a close reading, episode by episode, of Joyce’s novel, and then will consider three later novels, in three different national-literary traditions, that in different ways emulate and carry forward Joyce’s precedent.

We will consider philosophical texts that require fictional writing in order to establish their “argument” and fictional texts that make non-argumentative interventions into philosophical matters. We will also consider how and why  such genre distinctions sometimes break down.

This course aims to re-consider Modern Greek poetry within the cultural life of Greece primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has been stated by critics that modern Greek writers, and particularly poets, reconstruct a topos, “a place for Hellenism through their own national literature”(A.