What contribution does the study of Romanticism have to make to current critical discourses such as ecocriticism and biopolitics concerned with animal/human divides and the relationship between place, language and politics?  Romanticism was once defined as a turn toward “nature” in response to the industrialization marking Western Europe’s transition to modern capitalism in the early nineteenth century.  Rather than simply resurrecting the idea of Wordsworth and others as “nature” poets, we will carefully examine the relationships between discourse and experience,figure and origin in these

The early modern period has long been recognized as one of enormous transformations in the literature, thought, and culture of Europe.  Many of those have been linked to the emergence of the category of the modern “subject” and have been regarded as playing a formative role in the long history of modernity.  And yet many accounts of the formation of modernity fail to explain the emergence of subjectivity across the many fields in which it is implicated.

How does the discipline of Comparative Literature constitute its object of study in the year 2010? What is its relation to “world literature,” to “transnational studies,” or to “cultural studies”? How does the history of the discipline continue to shape the way we practice it?

In this course, we will address the ways in which 19th century writers of the Americas engaged in discussion of liberal democracy by evoking the world of the senses. The underlying paradigm here is the “civilization versus barbarism” antinomy in which civilization is equated with the realm of reason and barbarism with the realm of the senses. But in the novels, essays, and poetry of the mid-19th, these categories are often confused, and with it, the ways of imagining a pluralistic social space in which bodies come in contact with each other.

Each student must have a translation project to work on during the course of the semester.  This could be anything from a selection of poems or of short stories by one writer or by a few closely related writers to a section of a novel or of an autobiography or a journal.  There is no limitation on the literatures from which students may translate or on the historical period from which the texts to be translated are drawn.  Each week two members of the group will circulate specimens of their work in progress before the class meeting, which will then be devoted to a discussion by the group of

Several fundamental concepts for critical theory are introduced and provoked through Kafka’s writing: the problem of time and history, the human animal, objects and objectification, authority and law, language, theology and progress and their scattered remnants.  In this course, we will focus on the short fiction and parables of Kafka as well as the essays, fragments, and correspondence of critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.

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?

This course is meant as an exploration of Latin and vernacular medieval literary texts dealing with love and desire.  Its title points to its double intention: on the one hand we will study how medieval poems, letters, autobiographies, treatises discover, explore, complicate notions of self and subjectivity; on the other hand we will ask what is at stake when these texts negotiate love and desire – topics that are inextricably related to medieval institutions, social constellations, political practices, spiritualities, gender relations, and ethical norms.