The focus of this seminar is the cultural topos of the land as woman and its rearticulations in diverse poetic traditions.

This course will explore the writings of Walter Benjamin and his interlocutors. We will consider selections from Benjamin’s writings and correspondence.  Benjamin’s own modes of reading will provide a guide to understanding topics such as: paradoxical temporalities, Surrealism, translation, urban space, visual cultures and the image, Marxism and psychoanalysis, messianism, and chance encounters.

Knowledge of German or French is welcome (and will be incorporated into discussion) but is not required.

Texts

Walter Benjamin, Reflections

Despite the fact that three shadow plays written in Egypt by the Iraqi author, Ibn Daniyal (d.710/1310) have been known for some time, first in manuscript, and then in a woefully inadequate edition from which two-thirds of the text was expurgated, it has become accepted wisdom that there is no theater in medieval Arabic literature.  A more recent edition of the shadow plays now makes it possible to rectify this negative judgment and to assess the value and significance of the surviving texts.

In this course we will read a selection of literary texts produced within the past thirty years, all of which foreground the movement of individuals or communities across national borders.   Reading this literature alongside theoretical texts, we will discuss a number of interrelated questions, including but not limited to the following: how do contemporary immigrant writers attempt to come to terms with the profound historical ruptures and geographic displacements brought about by the experience of transnational movement?

Although a number of important studies have reopened the question of the German-Jewish dialogue (such as those by Klaus Berghahn, George Mosse, Paul Mendes-Flohr, and, most recently, Jonathan Hess), the “place” of Jews and Jewish thought within German modernism is still contested ground.  This is partly due to Gershom Scholem’s famous critique that the German-Jewish dialogue never took place. This course will begin by reassessing and, ultimately, rejecting Scholem’s position in favor of alternative models for studying the cultural histories and geographies of German/Jewish modernism.

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.

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.

We will read two seminal works of literary criticism and theory from the mid-twentieth century, one that follows the evolution of Western literature from antiquity to modernist fiction (Auerbach’s Mimesis), the other that puts forth a series of far-reaching propositions about language, literature, and the course of literary history (Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination).  We will try to see in what ways these two works might provide valuable perspectives for the study of literature and in what ways they involve assumptions that could be qualified or challenged.

This seminar will focus on the shifting identities of aesthetic theory from the early modern period to the present day. We will begin with a series of 18-th century readings and we will proceed through some of the “paradigm” texts of the 19th and 20th centuries, concluding with some 20-th century redefinitions of aesthetics in the contemporary period.

In this seminar, we will examine the multiple ways in which anthropologists, art historians, historians and sociologists as well as scholars of literature have related the interpretation of objects to the interpretation of texts.  Topics include the possibilities and limitations of the metaphorical relation of objects and texts, concerns regarding the influence of commodity and gift relations on bonds of human relation, the development of conceptions of intellectual property and of an interest in the idea as thing, the aestheticization of waste.