What is sociological knowledge? How do certain novels acquire the resources to produce sociological forms of knowledge? In particular, what aesthetic practices and what features of novelistic form contribute to this kind of knowledge production? What critical frameworks allow us to perceive this aspect of the representational work that novels do?

Required for all first year graduate students

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 apspects 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 designed as an introduction to graduate study in Comparative Literature. The readings and discussions consider theoretical models central to the discipline and their influential critiques.

This course is designed to question the conventional critical categories with which we have learned to speak about literature at the close of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

This course is conceived as an advanced workshop in literary translation, founded on the assumption that the practice of translation is fundamental to the study of literature. Each student should have a semester-long translation project (a collection of poems or stories, part of a novel, a long poem, a memoir, etc.). There are no restrictions as to languages translated or periods from which the texts are taken. Each week the class will discuss samples from two of these projects in progress.

The seminar will examine Brazilian Concrete poetry in its international, intermedial, and historical contexts. We will analyze the “verbivocovisual” poems of the “Noigandres” group and their theoretical foundations as elaborated primarily by Décio Pignatari and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos.  The particular characteristics of these poems will be determined by comparing them with those produced by the other leading figures of the international Concrete Poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s.

This Ph.D. seminar will reconsider some classic, highly influential texts within Marxian thought that virtually take for granted–or at least take extraordinarily seriously–the existence, and the importance to critical thought and agency–of a distinct mode of human experience and activity known as the aesthetic. Though our readings will engage various arts and cultural practices, they will emphasize literary art.

The Sacred has become a key term in recent debates in a number of disciplines. However, what is at its core is often astonishingly undefined, open and ambivalent. Important theories of the Sacred have been articulated in the 20th century by Otto, Eliade, Caillois, Benjamin, Bataille, Auerbach, Feigel, Girard, Ricoeur, Smith, Agamben. In this course we will discuss a range of medieval and early modern images and texts in order to understand the notion of the sacred – in the past and today. Starting with medieval concepts of the sacred we will also explore modern theories of the sacred.

The seminar will be devoted to consideration of archaic Greek choral poetry as embedded in its ritual and religious contexts (focusing mainly on Pindar’s epinikia, but possibly also including some compositions of Alkman, Simonides, and Bacchylides).  My starting point is the reflection that monodic lyric (e.g., Sappho, Alkaios, Anakreon), although it does not really conform to post-Romantic models of the privacy and subjectivity of lyric voice, is still much more accessible to a style of reading informed by post-Romantic assumptions.  Archaic choral lyric, in contrast, is often difficult, o