Robert Musil saw his Vienna as both uniquely itself and “nothing but a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world,” and this seminar will explore how some of the central problems of both literary modernism and of modern political, social, and sexual history can be seen with particular vividness in the Austria of 1900 to 1914. Although its subject might also be called “The Last Days of Imperial Mitteleuropa,” I am not especially concerned with reading the various works for their foreshadowing of the First World War, nor for their relationships to various literary-historical taxonomies (

This seminar will focus on lyrical poetry produced in the margins of the modern European canon in order to call into question static typological theories of genre. The students will compile a multi-lingual anthology of modern lyrical poets marginalized by gender, class, race or language. My own contribution to the readings will include bilingual anthologies of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, and an examination of biblical poetry as an alternative to “classical” models of the lyric.

This course will explore the writings of Walter Benjamin and his interlocutors. We will consider selections from Benjamin‚s writing and correspondence.  Benjamin‚s own modes of reading will provide a guide to understanding topics such as: performance and memory, Surrealism, translation, messianism, and chance.

Required texts include:

Walter Benjamin, Reflections

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing

This course will place a selection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century narratives in dialogue with several theories of fantasy and its relation to ideology. We will begin by examining the two models of fetishism that Slavoj Zizek draws upon in his formulation of the notion of “ideological fantasy”: the logic of fetishism as it is formulated in works by Freud and Octave Mannoni, and the structure of commodity fetishism as it is theorized by Marx.  We will be especially interested in asking how these two fetishisms account for a binding together of knowledge and non-knowledge.

An in-depth comparative study of some of the major European Romantic and early Modernist poets (Keats, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Rilke and Yeats) focusing in particular on their relationship to the theoretical concept and experience of modernity.

Beginning with Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, this course explores the theory and practice of tragedy in seventeenth-century England and France.  Texts include: Shakespeare, Hamlet; Descartes, Passions de l’ âme, Corneille, Le Cid; Hobbes, De Cive and Letter to Davenant; Milton, Samson Agonistes; and Dryden.

W 3-6
2525 Tolman
L. McCarthy

In this seminar, we will combine three inquiries, whose relations we will hope to discover over the course of the semester. One inquiry will be organized around the question: what kinds of things can be said about Henry James’s relation as a novelist to Balzac? (We’ll also take a look at a novel by Zola, another novelist James studied closely.)  Our second inquiry will deal with questions such as: how do Balzac and Zola’s ambitions as novelists relate to the critical tradition of French sociology and anthropology that developed in the late nineteenth century?

(This seminar is a continuation of CL 232 , Fall 2001. New students are encouraged to attend Part II.)

This course will focus on those texts of post-war French Feminism which had the greatest impact on feminist theory in the United States. While trying to account for the particular reception of Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and Wittig in the States, we will also have recourse to the philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions within which and against which these writers tried to imagine feminine desire, difference and writing.

Required texts:

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Helene Cixous, The Newly Born Woman