Introduction to Comparative Literature

[PLEASE NOTE: This “introduction or gateway to the advanced study at the core of the comparative literature major” is expressly designed for students in, entering, or intending to enter the Comparative Literature Department’s major and/or students majoring in other literature departments, or in closely related areas within the humanities.  This seminar is UNSUITABLE FOR STUDENTS OUTSIDE THE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE MAJOR AND/OR CLOSELY RELATED LITERARY/HUMANITIES MAJORS due to the seminar’s intense literary and literary-critical specificity; it is NOT designed to meet the needs of students seeking to satisfy either general or area requirements of the University or of the College of Letters and Science.]

This seminar takes up a very big 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? An otherwise impossibly large field of inquiry will be delimited by our emphasis on something at the heart of this seminar’s status as a gateway or introduction to the advanced work undertaken in the Comparative Literature major: the process and experience of comparison itself. For while there would be many perspectives from which to approach American poetry’s ethical-political commitments during the last five decades, this particular seminar will 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 very difficult 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 astonishing development of unprecedented formal means of artistic expression (not least, a severely attenuated lyric musicality nonetheless breathtaking in its virtuosity and beauty) that could begin to do justice to his given 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 that broke new ground while holding on to much in the history of lyric poetry.

We will 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 will 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 postwar poetry to attempt. Among our questions–-which we will see various American poets likewise posing–-will be the degree to which Celan proves translatable (in the literal sense of the translation of his poems into English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.; and in the metaphorical sense of attempted translations of his poetics, aesthetics, and ethics to American contexts that will involve, among other things, the concerns and claims of the civil rights, anti-colonialist, feminist, and anti-war movements–-and we will 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 will help us pursue and develop our inquiry into just what comparative literature and comparative literary study are.

(Additional Note: All texts originally written in German, French, Spanish, etc., will be read in, and our discussions will be based on, English translations; but we will almost always also have available, in facing-page editions or xeroxes/photocopies/PDFs, the original-language text for reference and comparison. Students will not be required to read German–-or French or Spanish–-though ability to read in those languages will of course add greatly to students’ encounters with the poems and translations originally made in those languages.)