This course is conceived as an advanced workshop in literary translation, founded on the assumption that the practice of translation is fundamental to the study of literature. Each student should have a semester-long translation project (a collection of poems or stories, part of a novel, a long poem, a memoir, etc.). There are no restrictions as to languages translated or periods from which the texts are taken. Each week the class will discuss samples from two of these projects in progress.

How ought we to think about the relation between the literary and the material? What is at stake in considering the roles that objects play in texts?  In this seminar, we will examine the ways in which anthropologists, art historians and sociologists as well as scholars of literature have related the interpretation of objects to the interpretation of texts.

This course examines the genealogy and value of the libidinal vocabulary within some of the most urgent debates occurring at the contemporary intersection of political and psychoanalytic thought.

This course will explore the uses, appropriations, and reclamations of Jewish traditional texts in the poetry and prose of the modernist era, particularly in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English literature.  Our theoretical focus will be the ability of intertextual practices to effect change both in the source and the target text and their cultural contexts.  Concentrating on rewritings of the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac (the Akeda, Genesis 22), we will trace the poetic and ideological workings of intertextuality in discursive practices as diverse as allusion, parody, translation, pastic

Readings in modern, and especially modern lyric, poetry (mostly from the U.S., but also from Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa) in relation to major Frankfurt-School texts (on aesthetics, criticism, and social theory) that emphasize the significance of literature (as well as the other arts) in general and poetry above all; special concentration on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and on their development of Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian traditions of aesthetics and critical theory; sustained attention to how and why poetry turns out to be so crucial to the Frankfurters

Taking the theoretical narratives of Freud and Marx as a starting point, this course will examine the links and tensions between Marxian commodity fetishism and Freudian fetishism as they manifest themselves in (mostly) late nineteenth-century literary narrative.  Questions to be addressed will include: the function of detail in realist texts; the gendering of fetishism as a “male perversion” and the possibility of a “female fetishism”; fetishism as a logic that subverts or, alternately, underlies the constitution of sexual difference; the structure of disavowal as a model for understanding

Is it time to abandon “the Westphalian label” of territorial states as the main actors on the global stage? The question is justifiable at a moment when corporate and civic, religious and secular, as well as academic “globalizers” all around see the trans-nation as the only real present and the only possible future political form (this in spite of a neo-Westphalian attention to ensuring ‘national security’ around the world).

According to Friedrich Schlegel, the nineteenth-century writer, philosopher, and critic, “Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our times.” What is at stake in such a view of the novel?

The course will focus on Arthurian romance in medieval French, Welsh, and English literatures.  The figure of Arthur—his image and social function—will be examined in the three cultural contexts with special attention devoted to how his reception in each culture reflects the concerns of that particular milieu.

When James Joyce (citing Wilde) wrote that the “cracked lookingglass of a servant” was a symbol of Irish art, he pointed to a condition that was to mark culture throughout the colonial world.  In his meditations on cultural politics and the estheticizing dimensions of language that might answer metropolitan powers, Joyce supplied a rich field for future inquiry by Latin American writers; his legacy is most notably felt among intellectuals in Buenos Aires.