The purpose of this course is to introduce new GSIs to the theory and practice of teaching Comparative Literature 1A and 1B (and other courses taught by Comp Lit GSI’s).  More generally, the course will help you prepare for a career as a college teacher of literature and for the teaching component of job applications. This course is a 4-unit, S/U class.

Course taught in English

As a literary movement, “Decadence” came into existence by means of an act of cultural re-signification; taking up an epithet meant as an insult, Anatole Baju transformed “decadence” into a rallying cry.  This course will mime this inaugural gesture by grouping together a number of fin-de-siècle (for the most part) writers and intellectuals (including Freud and the sexologists) whose works are, we will suggest, the locus of a series of cultural re-significations.

“What are these verses good for?”-Du Bellay

This course is designed to give all new graduate students a broad view of the department’s faculty, the courses they teach, and their fields of research. In addition, it will introduce students to some practical aspects of the graduate career, issues that pertain to specific fields of research, and questions currently being debated across the profession. The readings for the course will consist of copies of materials by the department’s faculty.

Critics have recently revisited the discipline of comparative literature by offering reflections on the evolution of the field along with thoughts about the political, ethical, and esthetic dimensions of literary inquiry.  Gayatri Spivak, for example, announces the death of the discipline; Edward Said, in a posthumously published book, spoke of the need for a democratic criticism; Susan Stewart makes formalist claims for poetry as a way to reach an intersubjective alliance among readers; Azar Nafisi, in her best seller, makes a claim for the literature as a training ground for empathy.

An introduction to the genre of tragedy, focussing on ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the modern period. We will read primary texts and works of literary theory. The course will focus on the following questions: How has the idea of tragedy changed from antiquity to the present? What is the role of the passions in the conception of tragedy?  Why is there a conflict between tragedy and philosophy in ancient Greece, and are there modern equivalents of this conflict? Why is tragedy central to the development of the Western idea of mimesis or imitation?

This course will consider literary writings related to war, its losses, and the task of mourning. We will read works by Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, W.G. Sebald, Paul Celan, Mahmoud Darwisch, Jorge Semprun and Jimaica Kincaid along with selected theoretical essays by Freud, Benjamin, and Weil. We will concentrate on whether writing becomes a venue for mourning and reparation, how it registers without resolving loss, and how the task of literature is altered in the aftermath of destruction.

This is an introduction into twentieth century Greek literature. This course aims to familiarize the student with some of the important prose, poetry and drama of twentieth century Greece placed in its historical and cultural context.  There will be the following required texts: Roderick Beaton’s An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, Oxford University Press 1994, Richard Clogg’s A Concise History of Modern Greece, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

In an age of progress, rationality and useful machines, what place was there for the ecstatic poet? Readings chiefly from Emily Dickinson, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, with an early 20th-century point of comparison in Rainer Maria Rilke. These were linguistic and poetic innovators of the first order, exact writers, sure of the supreme importance of the poetic vocation. Writing in an era unsympathetic to that intense commitment, each became an artist of withdrawal and transcendence, both eccentric and central to the history of lyric poetry after Romanticism.