The course will be run as an advanced workshop in literary translation.   Each student will have a translation project that he or she will work on throughout the semester.  There are no restrictions as to language, literary genre, or historical period.  Each week, two students will circulate specimens of their translations via email, and the class will then be devoted to detailed discussion of their work.   Though in the past some participants have aspired to be translators (and three published volumes of translation have so far issued from these seminars), the basic premise of the course i

So-called ‘mystical’ forms of thought and experience have played a major role in the history of modern philosophy and literature from Hegel to Georg Lukàcs, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Derrida, and from Novalis to Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, and John Cage (to name just a few). In this seminar we will read and discuss key texts written by Eckhart of Hochheim (Meister Eckhart), Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Hadewijch of Antwerp, some of the most significant medieval figures in this tradition.

The concept of world literature has existed in the West for approximately two centuries, although it owes its resurgence in popularity to the current post-Cold War era of globalization, as well as to a still ongoing restructuring of the field of Comparative Literature, after the “linguistic turn” in the humanities appeared exhausted. In place of the now traditional model of comparative literature as the rigorous study of predominantly Western national literatures in a given linguistic, historical, civilizational or theoretical frame, we have seen a rise of interest in non-Western literature

Please provide Professor Butler with a one-page application explaining your background and departmental affiliation, why you are interested in taking the course, whether you need the course for your DE in Critical Theory, and whether you are able to work closely in German.

In this seminar, we will read several major 19th and 20th century novels written in French, Russian and English.

The modern era saw an explosion of philosophical (as well as scientific) attempts to understand time as well as poetic and novelistic experimentations with what could be called “literary time.” Literary theorists, working at the intersection of these fields, incorporated both literary and philosophical notions of time in their approaches to literary transmission, plot as a means of organizing time, and varieties of literary temporalities. This course will explore these philosophical, literary and theoretical temporalities, reading modernity through new philosophies of duration, experimental

In Georg Lukács’s seminal 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” he identified narration and description as distinctive modes of the novel, each appropriate to a different form of society under a different period of capitalism. Although Lukács was not the first to distinguish between narration and description, his essay was decisive in entrenching this opposition and, moreover, in denigrating the latter: whereas narration is the dramatic mode of writers and characters who are active participants, description is the tedious mode of passive observers.

This senior seminar will offer students an introductory overview, as well as in-depth engagement with, the work in aesthetics, literary theory, and criticism developed by the Frankfurt School.  “The Frankfurt School” was the term eventually coined to identify a core group of intellectuals working in and around the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), founded in 1923 and affiliated to this day (except for its exile during and in the immediate aftermath of the National Socialist/Nazi regime) with the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt. The Institute’s foun

This course will examine the work of Greek intellectuals (philosophers and literary writers) who, as adults, in moments of Greek historical and political crises, left Greece and emigrated to other European countries. The primary corpus of the work of these authors was written in the languages of their adopted countries, thus, allowing them to make major contributions to the specific intellectual life of those countries and to European letters in general.