The seminar will consider how different versions of critique are developed within some major figures in Critical Theory. We will consider how Kant formulates the notion of critique in some of his essays and in sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, especially as it seeks to delimit the phenomenal world in which certain kinds of knowledge are restricted. We will then ask in what forms critique reemerges within Hegel’s writings, focusing on the opening chapters of The Phenomenology of Spirit and some of his early essays on sensuous understanding and property.

This course offers an introduction to Renaissance and early modern studies, focusing on debates about secularism as they pertain to four topics: the state, the human, literature, and society. We will read works by Dante, Luther, and Savonarola, Las Casas, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, Ann Halkett, and Giambattista Vico. The course will be co-taught by a historian and literary scholar and the methodological differences between these approaches will be one of the main topics of the seminar.

This comparative seminar in lyric poetry borrows its title from Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), to ask about the relation between poetry and sensory deprivation (or plenitude) and prosthesis.

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.

This seminar is an introduction to graduate study in Comparative Literature for incoming Comparative Literature Ph.D. students.

Professor Lawrence Weschler will be in residence at the Townsend Center for the Humanities from January- February to offer a 1-unit, 4-week graduate seminar.

Professor Catherine Malabou will be in residence at the Townsend Center for the Humanities from April 2nd-23rd to offer a 1-unit, 4-week graduate seminar.

The role of national literatures in consolidating the cultural heritage of modern nations is indisputable.

In this seminar we will 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 the negotiations 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.

This course will offer an overview of the fundamentals of irony and its theoretization from Socrates to the present day. We will examine the history of irony in all its permutations, as well as the various positions irony occupies within rhetoric, ontology, aesthetics, politics, and literary theory.  Above all, we will ask the question of why the seemingly simple matter of irony proves to be such a tenacious problem in Western thought, and why it continues to be a topic of debate and controversy (including repeated calls for and announcements of its “end”) up to today.