The course will concentrate on two enduring 20th-century works of comparative theory and criticism, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and M.M. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, which will be read in conjunction with two ancient books and one modern novel, the Odyssey, Genesis, and Joyce’s Ulysses.

Discussion of the theory and practive of teaching compostiion at the college level in a department of comparative literature.

This course focuses on prominent and controversial works of Japanese cinema and visual culture, from female impersonators in early cinema to action art and photography, and from genre films of the 60s-70s to the most contemporary theories of sexuality and anime.

In this course we will consider a variety of written (and one or two cinematic) narratives, largely produced in the last decades of the twentieth century, all of which foreground the movement of individuals or communities across cultural, linguistic, and national borders.  In dialogue with a selection of theoretical texts, we will discuss a series of interrelated questions, including but not limited to the following: how do “dislocated” narratives attempt to come to terms with the historical ruptures and geographic displacements brought about by the experience of transnational movement?  Ho

“To say one thing, to mean another”: allegory, allegorical exegesis, and allegorical literature are omnipresent in the history of Western literature and thought – and often reduced to a single (or simple) dynamics. But this simplicity is deceptive: the “allegorical mode” is protean, always in transit, and entails many – literary, cultural, and theoretical – complexities.

This seminar will take up the intersections of lyric and history in two different ways. First, we will investigate the history of the lyric genre and consider both the continuities and discontinuities within what has been labeled “lyric” in different periods, literatures, cultures. What are the advantages and disadvantages of thinking of these disparate forms as manifestations of a common genre?

In this seminar we’ll be investigating a number of different topics, all of which will somehow, if we are lucky, meet up by the end of the semester:  What happens when you think of sexuality sociologically, as a set of categories and social forms that circulate through space and time?

So-called ‘mystical’ forms of thought have played a major role in the history of modern philosophy and literature from Hegel to Lukàcs, Heidegger, Bataille, and Derrida, and from Novalis to Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, and John Cage (to name just a few).

(Note: Although this seminar emphasizes the fundamental importance of 19th- and 20th-century poetry and poetics to the development of Frankfurt School aesthetics, criticism, and theory, as well as the role of later 20th- and now 21st-century poetry in more recent contributions to Frankfurt-oriented criticism, the course can serve also–e.g., for those taking it as a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory elective–as a survey of some of the major texts in Frankfurt aesthetic, literary, and cultural theory more generally, provided students are willing actively to study and engage with mode