The aims of this seminar are several fold:  to track the ways in which the goals of “critical theory” were from its earliest days associated with the project of an aesthetic critique; to assess the degree to which critical theory was (or was not) consistent with the major texts of Western aesthetics (Kant, Hegel, etc.); and finally to engage and evaluate the “return” of aesthetics since the 1970’s in light of cultural conceptual challenges to the paradigm of Western Marxism.  We will devote special attention to the problem of reflective judgment, to the nature and limits of materialism, and

This course provides an introduction to the European Renaissance and Reformation from about 1500 through 1700. We will focus in particular on the topic of political theology. Political theology has been the subject of much recent theoretical discussion, in the work of such figures as Claude Lefort and Giorgio Agamben. Yet one of the main texts to analyze the problem of political theology–Carl Schmitt’s 1922 text by that title–locates the modern formulation of this problem in the early modern period.

[Note: “American” will here mean primarily “U.S.”; but the course will also pay significant attention to Canadian and Latin American poetry and criticism.]

This course is designed to give all new graduate students a broad view of the department’s faculty, the courses they teach, and their fields of research. In addition, it will introduce students to some practical aspects of the graduate career, issues that pertain to specific fields of research, and questions currently being debated across the profession. The readings for the course will consist of copies of materials by the department’s faculty.

In this seminar we’ll 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 a negotiation 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.  Participants will ex

Beginning with Plato’s response to the tragic poets, and continuing through the work of figures such as Hegel and Nietzsche, the development of philosophy in the Western tradition has been intimately linked to the fate of tragedy.  Indeed, it could be said that philosophy has always had to contend with tragedy.  What forces have determined the philosophical responses to tragedy?  This seminar will center around constellations of tragedy and philosophy and will concentrate on the question:  what might tragedy know that philosophy seems to suppress?  Special attention will be paid to issues i

We might also call the seminar “What Is Discourse?

Students interested in the class are invited to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet in advance of the first class meeting on January 22.

This course will engage the intersection of a particular historical moment and a particular literary problem.  The moment is the so-called “late Renaissance,” and the literary problem is the question of genre.  The literary culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in Europe has been called “the age of criticism,” because of the proliferation of theoretical writing on poetics and rhetoric which emerged from the great generation of humanist-trained writers that flourished in the mid-1550s.  Central to the new culture of criticism was a sustained and complex reflection on li

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.