This course will focus on the representation of the passions in early modern European literature and political theory. What role do the passions play in the history of mimesis, poetic imitation, and rhetorical figuration? What is the role of the passions in eliciting or frustrating political obligation?  What would it mean to think of the passions as historical? What light do early modern texts on the passions shed on the emergence of the disciplines of political science in the 17th century and of aesthetics in the 18th century?

The subject of this course is the editing of medieval manuscripts. Students will be introduced to the paleography of caroline minuscule, gothic, Burgundian, and cursive hands.  The elements of codicology will be presented, with illustrative examples taken primarily from the manuscript collection of the Bancroft Library. (The course will meet in the Stone Seminar Room of the Bancroft Library.)  This will be followed by instruction in the theory and practice of textual criticism, including stemmatics. The term project will consist of an edition of several folios from a medieval manuscript.

There is no formal list of ‘required texts’: the members of the seminar, in consultation with Professor Weisinger, will select the readings for this class.

The course will be conducted as a workshop in literary translation.  Each student will have a translation project for the semester, which may be from any literature, any historical period, and any genre.  Each week, two of the participants in the seminar will circulate specimens of their work, and the class session will be devoted to discussion of their translations in what will amount to collaborative work.  There are no secondary readings.  Underlying the course is a conviction that translation is an essential activity for any student of literature and especially of comparative literature

This seminar is intended for literature students at all stages of the dissertation writing process, from developing a prospectus to completing the dissertation and preparing a chapter for publication as a scholarly article. We will work against the isolation and competitiveness that often characterize this process and develop best strategies and habits for clear, forceful, and engaging writing. The vast majority of our time will be spent discussing the written work of the seminar members  We will also read and discuss articles that are pertinent to the dissertation project of each member.

This course will undertake a close reading of Kafka’s parables, letters, and short stories as well as The Trial to understand the relationship between literature, law, and justice.  We will consider as well some key commentators on his work, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida.

What does it mean to be born into the legacy of a cultural disaster that one did not experience oneself, but came to know only through the lives of others? How do major historical upheavals impact the generations that follow? What is a “second generation” survivor?

What is sociological knowledge? How do certain novels acquire the resources to produce sociological forms of knowledge?  In particular, what aesthetic practices and what features of novelistic form contribute to this kind of knowledge production?

Teaching is always —or should always be—an experiment, and one can only become a better teacher by reflecting on one’s own (and others’) teaching experiments. This class is designed to encourage participants to reflect critically on their own and others’ attempts to integrate teaching literature and writing. We will pursue this objective by

This seminar reads key works and theoretical concepts related to Japanese visual cultures—film, visual arts, photography, and animation. From silent cinema (and benshi narration) to experimental/ New Wave works and animé, from avant-garde happenings and action art to Fluxus to contemporary internet culture, the seminar locates Japanese visual cultures in relation to central debates in Asian critical arts/film theory and contemporary critical theory.