Bob Dylan has named the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as one of his major sources of inspiration.   In this seminar we will explore the connections between these two important writers.  First we will read carefully through the poetry and letters of Rimbaud, one of the most original and powerful of modern poets.

This course is designed to question the conventional critical categories with which we have learned to speak about literature at the close of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

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.

The seminar will examine Brazilian Concrete poetry in its international, intermedial, and historical contexts. We will analyze the “verbivocovisual” poems of the “Noigandres” group and their theoretical foundations as elaborated primarily by Décio Pignatari and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos.  The particular characteristics of these poems will be determined by comparing them with those produced by the other leading figures of the international Concrete Poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s.

The Sacred has become a key term in recent debates in a number of disciplines. However, what is at its core is often astonishingly undefined, open and ambivalent. Important theories of the Sacred have been articulated in the 20th century by Otto, Eliade, Caillois, Benjamin, Bataille, Auerbach, Feigel, Girard, Ricoeur, Smith, Agamben. In this course we will discuss a range of medieval and early modern images and texts in order to understand the notion of the sacred – in the past and today. Starting with medieval concepts of the sacred we will also explore modern theories of the sacred.

The seminar will be devoted to consideration of archaic Greek choral poetry as embedded in its ritual and religious contexts (focusing mainly on Pindar’s epinikia, but possibly also including some compositions of Alkman, Simonides, and Bacchylides).  My starting point is the reflection that monodic lyric (e.g., Sappho, Alkaios, Anakreon), although it does not really conform to post-Romantic models of the privacy and subjectivity of lyric voice, is still much more accessible to a style of reading informed by post-Romantic assumptions.  Archaic choral lyric, in contrast, is often difficult, o

The genre of autobiography is often assumed to offer faithful mimetic representations of individual life stories. In the West, it is generally thought to be characterized by a post-enlightenment sense of interiority or self-reflexion, considered a requirement of the genre. Through a survey of the genre’s central critical texts and examples of life-writing from both the Western and Arabic literary traditions this course will examine the biases we have when reading texts that offer a different portrait of selfhood than that found in the Western canon.

Literature has always been linked to fantasy and magic, even as it has sought to imitate or approximate reality.

In this senior seminar, we will examine our assumptions regarding the study of fictional character. Long-ingrained habits have trained us not to speak of characters as though they were implied people.  We will look at the history of the taboo on reading fictional characters in this way as it develops in twentieth century criticism, asking why a conception of character as an aesthetic instrument came to predominate and why a conception of a literary character as “full person” stubbornly adheres in even the most sophisticated writing on character.

In 1844 the American sculptor Hiram Powers unveiled, in Boston, his nude statue, the first full scale American nude, by the title “The Greek Slave”. The fictional identity given to the subject, as stated in the pamphlet accompanying the tour of the statue in 1848, was that of a beautiful young Greek woman chained to a column, completely naked, ready to be sold in the Ottoman slave market.