Professor Lawrence Weschler will be in residence at the Townsend Center for the Humanities from January- February to offer a 1-unit, 4-week graduate seminar.

Professor Catherine Malabou will be in residence at the Townsend Center for the Humanities from April 2nd-23rd to offer a 1-unit, 4-week graduate seminar.

The role of national literatures in consolidating the cultural heritage of modern nations is indisputable.

In this seminar we will explore developments in the field of translation studies that have taken it beyond the once common metaphors of fidelity and betrayal, of being faithful or unfaithful to the “original.”  We’ll focus on (mis)translations as symptomatic of the poetic and political dynamics of the negotiations between cultures in a particular historical moment. We’ll discuss a variety of approaches to the theory of translation, from system theory to postcolonial and globalization studies, both by reading critically and by theorizing from the translation practice itself.

This course will offer an overview of the fundamentals of irony and its theoretization from Socrates to the present day. We will examine the history of irony in all its permutations, as well as the various positions irony occupies within rhetoric, ontology, aesthetics, politics, and literary theory.  Above all, we will ask the question of why the seemingly simple matter of irony proves to be such a tenacious problem in Western thought, and why it continues to be a topic of debate and controversy (including repeated calls for and announcements of its “end”) up to today.

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.  In particular, we will look at the ways in which norms constraining and defining genders, sexualities, and literary, political,

What is the difference between poetry and prose? Do they convey the same kind of knowledge or experience? How is this difference represented on the written page? Such questions fascinated writers during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The Middle Ages saw the rise of prose narratives as an alternative to verse romance and lyric, as well as an explosion in vernacular manuscripts, which collected, defined and obsessively categorized literary form.

What are the special resources and pleasures of what is generally if loosely identified as “lyric poetry”?   This seminar will start off with a series of sessions devoted to topics such as space, time, syntax, persona, gender, figure, and ecphrasis, with readings drawn mostly from the European lyric tradition. After spring break, readings and topics will be shaped by students in accordance with their research interests.

[Note: Students enrolling in this senior seminar will be assumed to have had experience with the close reading and the analysis of poetic form, content, and context, and to be at least somewhat familiar with the main lines or moments in American poetry’s 19th-20th C. development, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, through the modernism of  Pound, H.D., Eliot, Stevens, Moore, Hughes, Brooks, et al.]

What is the difference between poetry and prose? Do they convey the same kind of knowledge or experience? How is this difference represented on the written page? Such questions fascinated writers during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The Middle Ages saw the rise of prose narratives as an alternative to verse romance and lyric, as well as an explosion in vernacular manuscripts, which collected, defined and obsessively categorized literary form.