This course serves as an introduction to the field of Comparative Literature. In the first half of the semester, we will take up the question, “What is literature?” Readings will include Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shlovsky, Tzevtan Todorov, Raymond Williams, Kate Hamburger, Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Gallagher, and others. In the second half of the semester we will ask “What is Comparative Literature?” Readings from Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, Terence Cave, Christopher Prendergast, Gayatri Spivack, Emily Apter, and J. M.

The course will be run as an advanced workshop in literary translation.   Each student will have a translation project that he or she will work on throughout the semester.  There are no restrictions as to language, literary genre, or historical period.  Each week, two students will circulate specimens of their translations via email, and the class will then be devoted to detailed discussion of their work.   Though in the past some participants have aspired to be translators (and three published volumes of translation have so far issued from these seminars), the basic premise of the course i

So-called ‘mystical’ forms of thought and experience have played a major role in the history of modern philosophy and literature from Hegel to Georg Lukàcs, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Derrida, and from Novalis to Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, and John Cage (to name just a few). In this seminar we will read and discuss key texts written by Eckhart of Hochheim (Meister Eckhart), Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Hadewijch of Antwerp, some of the most significant medieval figures in this tradition.

The concept of world literature has existed in the West for approximately two centuries, although it owes its resurgence in popularity to the current post-Cold War era of globalization, as well as to a still ongoing restructuring of the field of Comparative Literature, after the “linguistic turn” in the humanities appeared exhausted. In place of the now traditional model of comparative literature as the rigorous study of predominantly Western national literatures in a given linguistic, historical, civilizational or theoretical frame, we have seen a rise of interest in non-Western literature

Please provide Professor Butler with a one-page application explaining your background and departmental affiliation, why you are interested in taking the course, whether you need the course for your DE in Critical Theory, and whether you are able to work closely in German.

In this seminar, we will read several major 19th and 20th century novels written in French, Russian and English.

The modern era saw an explosion of philosophical (as well as scientific) attempts to understand time as well as poetic and novelistic experimentations with what could be called “literary time.” Literary theorists, working at the intersection of these fields, incorporated both literary and philosophical notions of time in their approaches to literary transmission, plot as a means of organizing time, and varieties of literary temporalities. This course will explore these philosophical, literary and theoretical temporalities, reading modernity through new philosophies of duration, experimental

Discussion of the theory and practice of teaching composition at the college level in a department of comparative literature.  Prerequisites: Appointment as a graduate student instructor or consent of instructor.

Victor Hugo remarked that “a revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real.” Hugo’s words not only fundamentally question what might be called the realist project but also contain a rudimentary yet thought-provoking theory about how sublime historical events come about.