Discussion of the theory and practice of teaching composition at the college level in a department of comparative literature.  Prerequisites: Appointment as a graduate student instructor or consent of instructor.

Victor Hugo remarked that “a revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real.” Hugo’s words not only fundamentally question what might be called the realist project but also contain a rudimentary yet thought-provoking theory about how sublime historical events come about.

The seminar will consider how different versions of critique are developed within some major figures in Critical Theory. We will consider how Kant formulates the notion of critique in some of his essays and in sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, especially as it seeks to delimit the phenomenal world in which certain kinds of knowledge are restricted. We will then ask in what forms critique reemerges within Hegel’s writings, focusing on the opening chapters of The Phenomenology of Spirit and some of his early essays on sensuous understanding and property.

This course offers an introduction to Renaissance and early modern studies, focusing on debates about secularism as they pertain to four topics: the state, the human, literature, and society. We will read works by Dante, Luther, and Savonarola, Las Casas, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, Ann Halkett, and Giambattista Vico. The course will be co-taught by a historian and literary scholar and the methodological differences between these approaches will be one of the main topics of the seminar.

This comparative seminar in lyric poetry borrows its title from Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), to ask about the relation between poetry and sensory deprivation (or plenitude) and prosthesis.

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 aspects 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.

This seminar is an introduction to graduate study in Comparative Literature for incoming Comparative Literature Ph.D. students.

We will pursue an introduction to Freud’s basic works on the unconscious, dreams, the death drive, sexuality, and symptoms, by considering  the narrative, figurative, and argumentative dimensions of his case studies, his readings on literary and visual art, and his Interpretation of Dreams.   Freud referred to his theory of drives as his own “poetry” and often approached the case study as a story-teller.  Does the literary dimension of Freud’s work contribute to the controversy over whether his claims are ultimately justifiable?

This seminar will be devoted to a careful rereading of Nabokov’s most famous novel. We will consider the critical and ethical debates that have arisen around the book, and we will look at the novel’s transposition to the screen (Nabokov’s screenplay, Kubrick’s classic and Lyne’s recent treatment). We will examine the novel’s relationship to the genre of pornography and to notions of a discursive “body.” The novel will serve us as a focus for an investigation of critical methodologies and their usefulness when applied to a resolutely self-conscious text.

This course is concerned with works of fiction written before or after the seven-year military dictatorship of 1967, a regime marked by various degrees of censorship. These works examine the relationship between established structures (social, historical, religious) and modern worldviews that reflect multiple levels of reality and multiple belief systems. In these novels, whether written before or after the Greek totalitarian regime, the vision of the future is prophetic and frequently apocalyptic.