Even for experienced instructors, teaching is always —or should always be—an experiment, and one can only become a better teacher by reflecting on one’s own (and others’) teaching experiments.  Therefore, this class is designed to encourage participants to reflect critically on their own and others’ attempts to each literature and writing.

This is a writing seminar for advanced graduate students. Preference will be given to students in their third and fourth years. Maximum enrollment: 14. Please review enrollment instructions.

This course surveys key texts of Japanese aesthetic philosophy and critical theory from premodern poetics to superflat and anime.

The course engages original works by Ki no Tsurayuki, Murakami Shikibu, Motoori Norinaga, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Kuki Shūzō, Watsuji Tetsurō (Kyoto School), Yanagita Kunio, Origuchi Shinobu, Lee U-fan (Mono-ha), Nakagami Kenji, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and others, as well as scholarly analysis by Harootunian, Marra, McKnight, Tatehata, LaMarre, Barshay, Oniki, and Ivy.

Photography’s history has typically been told from the vantage point of Europe, with its double invention joining the Burgundy countryside (Joseph Nicéphore Niépce) to an English abbey (William Henry Fox Talbot) and occasionally Alexandria or China (when allowance is made for pre-photographic technologies).  We now know that this history is provincial at best and works both to obscure photography’s other stories of origin and invention and to support its ongoing collusion with techniques of colonization, domination, and power.

The Book of Job has held a central role in defining the project of modernity from the age of Enlightenment until today. What makes the Book of Job such a prominent text in modern literature and thought?  Why has Job’s response to disaster become a touchstone for modern reflections on catastrophic events?  What kind of answer (if at all) can the Voice from the Whirlwind offer in a post-theological age?  How is Job’s social critique translated by modern and postmodern thinkers and writers to address ethical and political concerns?

An introduction to the theory and practice of editing medieval manuscripts written between the eleventh and the sixteenth century.  The primary material will be manuscripts housed in the Bancroft Library, although projects using microfilm and facsimiles of manuscripts found elsewhere may be undertaken.  A systematic introduction to codicology, paleography, and textual criticism will be provided.   The course is intended to give students access to the history of the medieval book, the basic skills for manuscript research, and a familiarity with current issues of interpretation.  Among the to

This course surveys the forms, traditions, and environments of lyric poetry in the European Middle Ages. It will read closely in examples from Latin and the vernacular languages, but it also hopes to ask some broader theoretical and cultural questions about the nature of genre, the material culture of medieval literacy, and the possibilities for literary criticism of past objects of aesthetic value.

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.

This course is designed for graduate students in Comparative Literature and will be open  to a limited number of students outside of that department.  We will consider the critical dimension of literary criticism, beginning with some readings in Kant and then focusing for most of the semester on Walter Benjamin’s early writings (1913-1926), and some of his subsequent works on aesthetics, focusing on his understanding of  “critical violence” and the “critique of violence.”   We will read some texts by Kafka and Brecht as well  Benjamin’s correspondence with Adorno to understand the relation

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sin, my soul.  Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo.  Lee.  Ta”