This introduction to the study of literature in comparative contexts will focus on the essay. We may have come to think of the essay as an academic chore, but at its best, and throughout its long history, the essay form is characterized by curiosity, openness, intimacy, patience, provisionality, paradox, and play. Neither treatise nor memoir, neither exposé nor op-ed, the essay enjoys what Theodor Adorno called a “freedom from identity” that makes it an apt place from which to begin to think seriously about literature’s place in the modern world.

This seminar offers practical support for Graduate Student Instructors beginning to design and teach Reading and Composition (R&C) courses on the UC Berkeley campus. Together and in dialogue with other instructors, we will explore a spectrum of theories and practices related to teaching literature and college composition, while testing and critiquing these against our own expanding experiences as students, writers, and teachers.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

An introduction to Western literary theory from antiquity to the present, focusing on the historical shift from the disciplines of poetics and rhetoric to that of aesthetics, with special attention to the concept of aesthetics and the discourse of the sublime. Readings in Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Longinus, Augustine, Sidney, Erasmus, Kant, Lyotard, Benjamin, and Adorno. The syllabus is designed to be particularly helpful to students in English, but students from other departments are welcome and may write their final paper on a primary text or texts in other languages.

The meetings for this class will follow the Law School schedule.  The first class will meet on Tuesday, Aug. 21.  The last class will meet on Tuesday, Nov. 20.

This seminar (which is cross-listed as Rhetoric 221 and Critical Theory 205) is not an introduction to Theodor W. Adorno’s work; rather, it will involve sustained reading and discussion of Adorno’s last major text, which he was still finishing at the time of his 1969 death: Aesthetic Theory (1970). We will be reading Robert Hullot-Kentor’s English translation of Ästhetische Theorie; though we will sometimes briefly consider the original German text, knowledge of German is not required (though it would of course prove very helpful).

Did the Renaissance have a conception of “literature”?  In this seminar we will study the genesis of modern secular literary culture during the fifteenth,  sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Our focus will be on the changing relationship between imaginative or “fictional” writing and the discourses that border the “literary” and help shape its emerging position center of the public sphere.

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 (and/or plenitude) and prosthesis.  It’s been said that poetry is what is untranslatable, yet one poem often translates another, and many of us only read one another’s languages in translation. As a catch-all concept for whatever “out there” can’t quite be captured in human terms, “Nature” can also be thought of as a language only ever encountered in translation.

What does it mean to be born into the legacy of a cultural disaster that one did not experience oneself, but came to know only through the lives of others? How do major historical upheavals impact the generations that follow? What is a “second generation” survivor?  This course will focus on theories of violence, ethics, and memorial practices, with particular emphasis on World War II in Europe and Asia but with reflections on events from other regions and from more recent times. Which voices dominate, and which are the hardest to hear?

This class will examine the concept of responsibility through selected Modern Greek fiction by writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. We will look at responsibility and its confrontation, evasion and abdication. We will also examine the focus of responsibility toward the self, toward the law, and toward the other.