Introduction to Comparative Literature

This seminar serves as an introduction to upper-division coursework in Comparative Literature, and it takes up an important question as a way to begin exploring what comparative literary study is.  How do American poets, from about 1950 to the present, attempt formally and thematically to engage ethics and politics? While there would be many perspectives from which to embark on this inquiry, we’ll focus on the ways that later-modernist and contemporary American poetry (mostly U.S., but with some attention to Latin American, Caribbean, and Canadian texts) have frequently sought to broach ethics and politics through a very specific dialogue: a dialogue with post-World War II German poetry and poetics. Most specifically, we will consider the powerful, extraordinarily influential and challenging work of the German-language poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) (often called one of Europe’s greatest poets–-perhaps its greatest–-since 1945). Born and raised in Romania (but with German as a foundational language if not a mother-tongue), interned in a Romanian-fascist labor camp during the war, Celan—having lost his parents to the Holocaust–lived most of his postwar life in France. Because Celan composed almost all his most significant poems in German, not the least difficult issue confronting him was how to write poetry in the very language in which the Nazi genocide had just been carried out. His grapplings with that and related problems–-and his experimental development of unprecedented formal means of artistic expression (including a sometimes stripped-down lyric musicality nonetheless breathtaking in its virtuosity and beauty) that could begin to do justice to his given content or “materials” (those materials stemming from and related to “what has happened,” as Celan sometimes referred to the Holocaust)–-led to the creation of a remarkable body of poetry.  It’s often said that Celan’s work pointed the way forward for poetic art while holding onto much in the long history of lyric poetry.

We’ll spend the first few weeks of the seminar considering Celan’s work (and, briefly, that of kindred post-World War II German and European poets, filmmakers, critics, and philosophers).  We’ll then spend the rest of the seminar seeing how American poetry and poetics, starting in the mid-1950s, attempts to understand what Celan is doing in poetry and what he is asking the larger international community of postwar poetry to attempt. Among our questions–-which we’ll see various American poets likewise posing–-will be the degree to which Celan proves “translatable.” We’ll think about the issue of translatability in the literal sense of the translation of his poems into English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.  And we’ll also think about the metaphorical sense of attempted translations of Celan’s poetics, aesthetics, and ethics to American contexts that will involve, among other things, the concerns and claims of the civil rights, feminist, and anti-war movements.  We’ll perhaps see this questioning above all in terms of American poets’ thinking, in their poetry and criticism, about what is shared and what is different in the historical experiences of European anti-semitism and New World slavery and racism: their thinking, in short, about what in Celan’s pathbreaking poetry in the wake of European fascism and genocide can, and cannot, help them as their artistic work develops its own relationships to pressing ethical and political matters. Throughout the course, these questions, considered across different national literatures, will help us pursue and develop our inquiry into just what comparative literature and comparative literary study are.