PLEASE NOTE: This course may be taken as a one-unit course (CC 17392), meeting in four consecutive sessions with Beatriz Sarlo on Nov. 9, 16, 23, 30, or as a two-unit course (CC 17395) meeting a total of eight sessions, 4 with Francine Masiello and 4 with Beatriz Sarlo.

Literature and urban civilization have long been intimately connected. Our seminar seeks to explore their connection as it relates to the emergence and global spread of the modern and contemporary city. How has the spatial and social organization of the modern city informed the thematic and formal choices writers make?

Focusing on the history of iconoclasm, images, practices of figuration, and the imagination, this course will trace key aspects of the literary and intellectual history from the 16th to the 17th century. Readings will include key texts by Luther and the radical reformers; Ignatius of Loyola and his influence; the figure of the fool; the emblem tradition; as well as representatives of 17th century baroque drama, poetry, and mysticism. A final reading list will depend on the interests of the group of participants and will be established at the first meeting.

Much has been written on Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern vernacular love poetry, and the rich scholarly criticism on Latin love elegy, Troubadour lyrics, German Minnesang, or Petrarcism ranges from more traditional philological, literary, and formalist approaches to fascinating uses of gender criticism and psychoanalytic thought.  Much less critical light, however, has been shed on the Medieval Latin side – i.e.

What is sociological knowledge? What are social facts and social forms and what kind of existence do they have? How do certain novels acquire the resources to produce sociological forms of knowledge, to encourage sociological forms of attention?  In particular, what aesthetic practices and what features of novelistic form contribute to this kind of knowledge production?

This seminar will focus on lyrical poetry produced in the margins – or outside — of the modern Anglo-European canon in order to call into question static typological theories of genre, as well as the majoritarian, heteronormative or Eurocentric set of biases behind contemporary attacks on the lyric as solipsistic, apolitical “personal expression.” Participants will draw on their own cultural and linguistic specialties to help us compile a multi-lingual course Reader of modern lyrical poetry decentered by ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, class, place or language.

This course serves as an introduction to the field of Comparative Literature. In the first half of the semester, we will take up the question, “What is literature?” Readings will include Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shlovsky, Tzevtan Todorov, Raymond Williams, Kate Hamburger, Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Gallagher, and others. In the second half of the semester we will ask “What is Comparative Literature?” Readings from Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, Terence Cave, Christopher Prendergast, Gayatri Spivack, Emily Apter, and J. M.

This course will explore the history of the idea of human rights and the role of literature in depicting human rights abuses and in advancing human rights claims, with a particular focus on twentieth-century literature. How does literature contribute to the invention of the concept of human rights? How do the authors talk about human dignity? What issues do they identify as central in their discussions of social justice? What narrative strategies do the authors employ to represent violence without sensationalizing it or turning the reader into a voyeur?

“Well – what remains to be written after that?” wondered Virginia Woolf in a 1922 letter about Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-volume work, In Search of Lost Time. Chronicling everything from the strangeness of kissing to the casual cruelties of snobbery, Proust’s novel conducts a vast and searching inquiry into the nooks and crannies of human experience.