As a literary movement, “Decadence” came into existence by means of an act of cultural re-signification; taking up an epithet meant as an insult, Anatole Baju transformed “decadence” into a rallying cry.  This course will mime this inaugural gesture by grouping together a number of fin-de-siècle (for the most part) writers and intellectuals (including Freud and the sexologists) whose works are, we will suggest, the locus of a series of cultural re-significations.  In particular, we will look at the ways in which norms constraining and defining genders, sexualities, and literary, political,

What is the difference between poetry and prose? Do they convey the same kind of knowledge or experience? How is this difference represented on the written page? Such questions fascinated writers during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The Middle Ages saw the rise of prose narratives as an alternative to verse romance and lyric, as well as an explosion in vernacular manuscripts, which collected, defined and obsessively categorized literary form.

What are the special resources and pleasures of what is generally if loosely identified as “lyric poetry”?   This seminar will start off with a series of sessions devoted to topics such as space, time, syntax, persona, gender, figure, and ecphrasis, with readings drawn mostly from the European lyric tradition. After spring break, readings and topics will be shaped by students in accordance with their research interests.

The earth—as we know it today—may cease to exist in the future. With this possibility arises the pressing need to rethink nature in the Anthropocene—the era in which human activities have had a significant impact on the earth’s ecosystems, especially since the advent of James Watt’s steam engine in the late 1700s.

How do media shape the way we see, hear, feel, read, and think about ourselves and the world? How do works of art teach us how to think about media? Does the “media turn” in the humanities cause us to rethink our methods of study?

In his recent Antinomies of Realism, Frederic Jameson identifies an unresolvable tension in the realist novel between two impulses. One is familiar enough: it goes under the banner of récit, the tale, the story, or simply “narrative.” It’s characterized by a movement of progress and a temporality organized by past-present-future. The other impulse, which Jameson curiously calls “affect,” is everything that impedes this narrative movement.

In this course we will study medieval and early-modern manuscripts as complex intersections of materiality, aesthetics, politics, and institutionality. In a first part, students will be introduced into the fundamentals of codicology, paleography, and manuscript illumination: a hands-on phase for which we will use real manuscripts from Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. In addition, we will discuss some seminal critical work on the cultural dynamics of manuscripts.

How, in our recent past and contemporary moment, might a groundbreaking body of poetry—radically innovative in form and content, with great international resonance, and widely perceived to have “gone for broke,” as Theodor W. Adorno famously put it—find its poetics taken up by poets and others artists of different languages, cultures, and sociopolitical situations?

A Mini-Course and Residency with Christopher Bollas at the Townsend Center for the Humanities

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.