The course will be conducted as a workshop in literary translation.  Each student will have a translation project for the semester, which may be from any literature, any historical period, and any genre.  Each week, two of the participants in the seminar will circulate specimens of their work, and the class session will be devoted to discussion of their translations in what will amount to collaborative work.  There are no secondary readings.  Underlying the course is a conviction that translation is an essential activity for any student of literature and especially of comparative literature

This seminar is intended for literature students at all stages of the dissertation writing process, from developing a prospectus to completing the dissertation and preparing a chapter for publication as a scholarly article. We will work against the isolation and competitiveness that often characterize this process and develop best strategies and habits for clear, forceful, and engaging writing. The vast majority of our time will be spent discussing the written work of the seminar members  We will also read and discuss articles that are pertinent to the dissertation project of each member.

This course will undertake a close reading of Kafka’s parables, letters, and short stories as well as The Trial to understand the relationship between literature, law, and justice.  We will consider as well some key commentators on his work, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida.

What does it mean to be born into the legacy of a cultural disaster that one did not experience oneself, but came to know only through the lives of others? How do major historical upheavals impact the generations that follow? What is a “second generation” survivor?

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?

Enlightenment notions of reason and critique have been at the center of contemporary theoretical debate about secularization, aesthetics, and democratic politics. In this course, we will trace these debates to some of the canonical texts of the European Enlightenment, focusing on the dialectic between Enlightenment reason and its others: madness, materialism, and religious enthusiasm. In addition, we will consider the relationship between Enlightenment and cosmopolitanism, as well as Enlightenment debates about gender, colonialism, and race.

Why NOT put those two schools together: Frankfurt, New York?

Introduction to literary criticism and theory with an emphasis on comparative, translingual approaches. We begin with questions of mimesis  and early definitions of “world literature,” and move on to consider critical/political thought in times of crisis, technology and virtuality, approaches to temporality, “high” theory and New Criticism, the interventions of psychoanalysis, queer theory, and postcolonial criticism, ending with  more recent works on affect theory and contemporary interventions.

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.