This seminar provides an introduction to one of the key works of European modernism, Robert Musil’s unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities. Starting with two shorter narrative texts and the first chapters of the novel, we will focus on Musil’s modernist prose style. We will then move on to his understanding of the ‘essayistic novel’ and its engagement with science and psychology; psychiatry, the law, and morality; questions of perception and affect; the role of gender, sexuality, and violence; and the desire for “other states” of experience.

Literature and Critical Theory

Why study literature and culture? What is comparative literature? What approaches have been prominent in literary and cultural  studies historically and how can we continue to draw from them today?  Where are the humanities disciplines going in this new and strange era?

This new one-unit course for graduate students is meant to serve a number of purposes. It will support the formation of graduate communities across cohorts; create a forum for the exchange of intellectual work and enable students to improve their writing in a collaborative setting; seek to connect students with the professional development resources and support they might need; and offer an opportunity to address questions of what we do and could do in Comparative Literature today.

Beauty: a topic both ubiquitous and perplexing. This Townsend Center Collaborative Research Seminar approaches beauty from multiple disciplines and through a wide variety of materials: literature, the visual and performative arts, aesthetic theory, philosophy, and religion. Our aim is to investigate the value and function that has been assigned to beauty in different humanist contexts, to explore possible bases of commonality and influence, and to consider whether beauty has or should be a key critical term for contemporary scholarship.

This course focuses on contemporary novels written by Indigenous authors of New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific Islands, the United States, and Canada (with supplemental poems, short stories, and films) with an emphasis on how Indigenous aesthetics and epistemologies influence the novel form. Each of the texts in this course draws upon Indigenous literary canons, languages, and practices, while addressing problems related to colonization, such as ecological destruction, militarization, displacement, and genocide.

This course will explore the history and theory of tragedy in antiquity and the early modern period, with special attention to affect theory. Our main theoretical text with be Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, but we will also read works by Aristotle, Descartes, Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Hume; and tragedies by Euripides, Lohenstein, Shakespeare, Calderon, Corneille, Racine, and Milton. Secondary reading in Vernant, Vidal Naquet, Lacoue-Labarthe, Szondi and others.

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.

In her landmark study, Reading in Detail, Naomi Schor argues that the detail has traditionally been devalued in Western aesthetics, gendered feminine through an association with the everyday, the domestic, or the ornamental.

Linguistic anthropologists think about language ideologies as representing, in the words of Paul Kroskrity, “the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group.” Arguably, readers and writers of novels form groups of this kind in different times and places. Occasionally novelists attempt to innovate regarding “the perception of language and discourse” that a novel communicates to readers. Flaubert might be one example of this.