This course examines the genealogy and value of the libidinal vocabulary within some of the most urgent debates occurring at the contemporary intersection of political and psychoanalytic thought.

This course will explore the uses, appropriations, and reclamations of Jewish traditional texts in the poetry and prose of the modernist era, particularly in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English literature.  Our theoretical focus will be the ability of intertextual practices to effect change both in the source and the target text and their cultural contexts.  Concentrating on rewritings of the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac (the Akeda, Genesis 22), we will trace the poetic and ideological workings of intertextuality in discursive practices as diverse as allusion, parody, translation, pastic

Readings in modern, and especially modern lyric, poetry (mostly from the U.S., but also from Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa) in relation to major Frankfurt-School texts (on aesthetics, criticism, and social theory) that emphasize the significance of literature (as well as the other arts) in general and poetry above all; special concentration on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and on their development of Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian traditions of aesthetics and critical theory; sustained attention to how and why poetry turns out to be so crucial to the Frankfurters

Taking the theoretical narratives of Freud and Marx as a starting point, this course will examine the links and tensions between Marxian commodity fetishism and Freudian fetishism as they manifest themselves in (mostly) late nineteenth-century literary narrative.  Questions to be addressed will include: the function of detail in realist texts; the gendering of fetishism as a “male perversion” and the possibility of a “female fetishism”; fetishism as a logic that subverts or, alternately, underlies the constitution of sexual difference; the structure of disavowal as a model for understanding

According to Friedrich Schlegel, the nineteenth-century writer, philosopher, and critic, “Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our times.” What is at stake in such a view of the novel?

Even for experienced instructors, teaching is always —or should always be—an experiment, and one can only become a better teacher by reflecting on one’s own (and others’) teaching experiments.  Therefore, this class is designed to encourage participants to reflect critically on their own and others’ attempts to each literature and writing.

This is a writing seminar for advanced graduate students. Preference will be given to students in their third and fourth years. Maximum enrollment: 14. Please review enrollment instructions.

This course surveys key texts of Japanese aesthetic philosophy and critical theory from premodern poetics to superflat and anime.

The course engages original works by Ki no Tsurayuki, Murakami Shikibu, Motoori Norinaga, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Kuki Shūzō, Watsuji Tetsurō (Kyoto School), Yanagita Kunio, Origuchi Shinobu, Lee U-fan (Mono-ha), Nakagami Kenji, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and others, as well as scholarly analysis by Harootunian, Marra, McKnight, Tatehata, LaMarre, Barshay, Oniki, and Ivy.

Photography’s history has typically been told from the vantage point of Europe, with its double invention joining the Burgundy countryside (Joseph Nicéphore Niépce) to an English abbey (William Henry Fox Talbot) and occasionally Alexandria or China (when allowance is made for pre-photographic technologies).  We now know that this history is provincial at best and works both to obscure photography’s other stories of origin and invention and to support its ongoing collusion with techniques of colonization, domination, and power.

The Book of Job has held a central role in defining the project of modernity from the age of Enlightenment until today. What makes the Book of Job such a prominent text in modern literature and thought?  Why has Job’s response to disaster become a touchstone for modern reflections on catastrophic events?  What kind of answer (if at all) can the Voice from the Whirlwind offer in a post-theological age?  How is Job’s social critique translated by modern and postmodern thinkers and writers to address ethical and political concerns?