The course involves practical engagement in literary translation.   Each member of the group will have a translation project for the semester, which can be poetry or prose, in any genre, from any language, and from any historical period.  Every week two of the participants will circulate specimens of the their projects, and we will spend the afternoon discussing their work, raising questions and proposing solutions in a collaborative spirit.   The course is conceived in the conviction that the process of translation is central to literary studies.  There is no other activity that compels th

How are we to understand “East” and “West” as objects of study, as discursive constructs that have apparently congealed into self-evident geographical realities?

We will study this dilemma in two ways:

(a) as a theoretical problem, starting with the problem of crosscultural comparison, before examining the history of East/West literary studies beginning with the birth of comparative philology and linguistics in the late 18th century and ending with more recent polemics on world literature in the wake of Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, and world-systems theory

and

The history of Western literary theory is often told in terms of the concept of mimesis. But there is another, equally powerful, anti-mimetic strand to this history, and that is the critique of mimesis as a form of idolatry. In this course, we will explore this critique from the prohibition against images in the Hebrew bible up through modern attacks on mimesis as inherently ideological.  Our main literary texts in the first half of the semester will be taken from Reformation England, when there was a fierce debate about the harmful power of images and the necessity of iconoclasm.

Baroque culture is the first instance in the West of a “global” cultural movement. It also offers the first example of an artistic moment that is truly interdisciplinary. In this seminar we will study the emergence and development of Baroque literature and thought, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, from Rome to Mexico.  Our approach will have two aspects. On the one hand, we will want to identify and study certain key features of Baroque culture, across languages, continents, and media, working out, as it were, a kind of topography of culture and politics.

So-called ‘mystical’ forms of thought and experience have played a major role in the history of medieval theology and spirituality.  They also were of importance to modern authors from Hegel to Georg Lukàcs, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Derrida; and from Novalis to Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, to John Cage (to name just a few).  In this seminar we will read and discuss medieval key texts written by Ps.

In this seminar we will read Horace’s complete works, partly in translation and partly in Latin (the proportions will vary from student to student), in roughly chronological order, possibly spending some extra time with the Odes (but this will depend on the interests of the group).  The goal is to familiarize students with an exceptionally influential body of poetry (and with some of the major trends in the scholarship) and to open up a space for exploring what one might want to make of Horace now.  Thus while the basic trajectory of the class will be set at the outset, the topics for and d

In this senior seminar, we will revisit an age-old problem in the study of fiction:  how do readers become involved in the lives of literary characters? In particular, we will ask how the representation of thought and feeling influence our conception of fictional character.  Primary texts include Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Henry James, What Maisie Knew; Virginia Woolf, Mrs.

In this senior seminar, we will revisit an age-old problem in the study of fiction:  how do readers become involved in the lives of literary characters? In particular, we will ask how the representation of thought and feeling influence our conception of fictional character.  Primary texts include Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Henry James, What Maisie Knew; Virginia Woolf, Mrs.

In this course we will study the relationship between obsession and identity, personal and/or national. Obsession according to Merriam Webster Dictionaryis: “ A persistent disturbing preoccupation with someone or something or with an often unreasonable idea or feeling” and the Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing and Allied Health: “A recurrent persistent thought, image or impulse that is unwanted and distressing (ego-dystonic) that comes involuntarily to the mind despite attempts to ignore or suppress it.”

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works.The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored.