An introduction to the theory and practice of editing medieval manuscripts written between the eleventh and the sixteenth century.  The primary material will be manuscripts housed in the Bancroft Library, although projects using microfilm and facsimiles of manuscripts found elsewhere may be undertaken.  A systematic introduction to codicology, paleography, and textual criticism will be provided.   The course is intended to give students access to the history of the medieval book, the basic skills for manuscript research, and a familiarity with current issues of interpretation.  Among the to

This course surveys the forms, traditions, and environments of lyric poetry in the European Middle Ages. It will read closely in examples from Latin and the vernacular languages, but it also hopes to ask some broader theoretical and cultural questions about the nature of genre, the material culture of medieval literacy, and the possibilities for literary criticism of past objects of aesthetic value.

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 aspects 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.

A workshop in literary translation.  The class sessions will be devoted to the discussion of samples of translation work-in-progress by members of the group.  We will consider general problems of translation as well as issues that may be specific to translating from a particular language or from a particular period. In keeping with the nature of the projects brought to the class, we will address the practical challenges of translating both poetry and prose.  Some attention will be given to the practice of translation as a tool in the study of literature.

Readings in modern (especially lyric) poetry in relation to major Frankfurt-School texts on aesthetics, criticism, and social theory in relation to 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’ (and, in particular, to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s) overall analyses of modernity, mechanical/technical/tech

This course will serve as an introduction to the poetry of Pindar, especially the epinikia.  We will be concerned with formal issues of genre, structure, performance mode, and occasion, as well as with broader issues of epinikion’s imbrication in various religious, cultural, economic, and ideological systems.  We will survey the various scholarly approaches to Pindaric epinikion since Bundy, and, if time permits, I would like to work on epichoric clusters or dossiers of poems—e.g., Theban odes, Aeginetan odes, odes for Sicilian tyrants.

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?

The purpose of this course is to introduce new GSIs to the theory and practice of teaching Comparative Literature 1A and 1B (and other courses taught by Comp Lit GSI’s).  More generally, the course will help you prepare for a career as a college teacher of literature and for the teaching component of job applications. This course is a 4-unit, S/U class.

Course taught in English

As a literary movement, “Decadence” came into existence by means of an act of cultural re-signification; taking up an epithet meant as an insult, Anatole Baju transformed “decadence” into a rallying cry.  This course will mime this inaugural gesture by grouping together a number of fin-de-siècle (for the most part) writers and intellectuals (including Freud and the sexologists) whose works are, we will suggest, the locus of a series of cultural re-significations.