An introduction to Western literary theory from antiquity to the present, focusing on the historical shift from the disciplines of poetics and rhetoric to that of aesthetics, with special attention to the concept of aesthetics and the discourse of the sublime. Readings in Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Longinus, Augustine, Sidney, Erasmus, Kant, Lyotard, Benjamin, and Adorno. The syllabus is designed to be particularly helpful to students in English, but students from other departments are welcome and may write their final paper on a primary text or texts in other languages.

The meetings for this class will follow the Law School schedule.  The first class will meet on Tuesday, Aug. 21.  The last class will meet on Tuesday, Nov. 20.

This seminar (which is cross-listed as Rhetoric 221 and Critical Theory 205) is not an introduction to Theodor W. Adorno’s work; rather, it will involve sustained reading and discussion of Adorno’s last major text, which he was still finishing at the time of his 1969 death: Aesthetic Theory (1970). We will be reading Robert Hullot-Kentor’s English translation of Ästhetische Theorie; though we will sometimes briefly consider the original German text, knowledge of German is not required (though it would of course prove very helpful).

Did the Renaissance have a conception of “literature”?  In this seminar we will study the genesis of modern secular literary culture during the fifteenth,  sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Our focus will be on the changing relationship between imaginative or “fictional” writing and the discourses that border the “literary” and help shape its emerging position center of the public sphere.

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 (and/or plenitude) and prosthesis.  It’s been said that poetry is what is untranslatable, yet one poem often translates another, and many of us only read one another’s languages in translation. As a catch-all concept for whatever “out there” can’t quite be captured in human terms, “Nature” can also be thought of as a language only ever encountered in translation.

The Land-as-Woman is one of the most deeply rooted metaphorical systems in both Middle-Eastern and Western cultures, used to support the discourses of colonialism and nationalism throughout history, most notably the conquest of the Americas. The metaphor has its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where the male prophet-poet, ventriloquizing a male God, addresses Zion as his beloved – but more often as his unfaithful – wife. The nation’s monotheism is figured as a woman’s monogamy; its idolatry - as adultery and whoredom (zenut).

This course will examine a selection of travel narratives within the context of contemporary postcolonial theory and “mobility studies.” Throughout the course, we will be acquainting ourselves with recent theoretical work on travel, Orientalism, and mobility in both the early modern and modern periods.

We will read key texts from the history of German theater, focusing first on the period from the Baroque to the Sturm und Drang, then on a few significant post-1945 plays. We will do so with an eye to the history of affect and expression, especially in relation to questions of performance, theatricality and melodrama. This historical focus will help us to reflect also a consideration ofon the complexity of modernist and postmodernist imperatives to dispense with bourgeois forms of subjectivity—understood as hypostases of the self and ideals of mastery or continuity.

Humanities scholars increasingly feel pressure to justify the “usefulness” of their scholarship and pursue “pragmatic” ends. This course draws on a different tradition of use and pragmatism, namely the field of linguistic anthropology and its relationship to literature and the sociology of culture. Drawing from these fields, our course will strive to understand how literary texts can function as rich analytical archives of social practices and ritual.