GREEK ELEGY AND EPIGRAM
Instructor: David Sider
Monday 5:00-7:40, RAB 003
Close study of ancient Greek texts.
David Sider, Professor of Classics at New York University, writes on Greek poetry and philosophy. His books include /The Fragments of Anaxagoras/ (second edition, Sankt Augustin, 2005), /The Epigrams of Philodemos/ (Oxford, 1997), and /The New Simonides/ (ed. with D. Boedeker; Oxford, 2001).
Language of instruction: English
Readings: primary texts in ancient Greek.
LATIN POETRY OF THE EMPIRE
Instructor: Denis Feeney
Wednesday 1:00-4:20 p.m., 161 East Pyne, Princeton
We shall study the epics of Lucan and Statius (both /Thebaid/ and /Achilleid/) as successors to and competitors with Virgil's /Aeneid/. Main themes will include civil war, history and myth, and the contemporary relevance of epic. The course will devote roughly equal time to close reading of selected passages and overviews of contemporary critical debate on the poems, which have become increasingly central to Latin studies over the last twenty years.
Denis Feeney has written widely on Latin epic, especially in /The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition/ (1991). He has been Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University since 2000.
Language of instruction: English
Readings: primary texts in Latin, secondary texts primarily in English
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
DRAMA: POSTMODERNISM AND PERFORMANCE
Instructor: Elin Diamond
195:603, Wednesday 4:30-7:10. Freilinghuysen A1 CAC
This seminar has two goals. One is to explore the rich record of dramatic postmodernism from the 1950s to the present. We will review texts and concepts of the “historical avant garde,” of the post-war Situationists, and of dramatic modernism, which fed into the pivotal and influential work of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Jean Genet (1910-1986). Each represents (and predicts) a different tendency, the former a poetics of spareness and negation, the latter an exorbitant, ritualized transgressiveness. We will then turn to postmodern rethinking of form, temporality, and identity in the plays of Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Caryl Churchill, Joe Orton, Maria Irene Fornes, Simone Benmussa, Heiner Muller, Sarah Kane, and Suzan-Lori Parks, and such performance artists as Robbie McCauley and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.
The seminar’s second goal is to critique and historicize the meanings/uses of “performance” and “performativity” in recent cultural theory. How do ethnography, ritual investigations, happenings, and racial and gender struggle come together in the 1960s and 1970s to generate contemporary notions of performance and performativity? What are the consequences for dramatic form–especially language? “Postmodernism,” like “performance,” is a contested term. In our seminar we’ll understand it in a periodizing as well as in an aesthetic sense, locating the effects of global changes after WWII--decolonization, the redistribution of labor, the shift in the West toward an image and technology-saturated society--what former Situationist Guy Debord called, in 1967, a “society of the spectacle.”
During the semester these foci will converge. Our plays will speak to, and athwart, theoretical selections by Roach, Butler, Brecht, De Certeau, Foster, among others. We will chart the uncertain shift from modernist interiority/fragmentation to an aesthetics of gesture, behavior, and social agency. We will explore the precarious overlay of body and discourse in relation to new concepts of place, space, and “the everyday.” Throughout the term, our plays/performances and theorists will help us track new ways of performing history and memory, of representing racial and sexual others. Is there, as Hal Foster once put it, a “postmodernism of resistance”?
Elin Diamond is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Unmaking Mimesis : Essays on Feminism and Theater (Routledge: 1997) and Pinter’s Comic Play (Bucknell 1985), and Editor of Performance and Cultural Politics (Routledge, 1996). Her essays on performance and feminist theory have appeared in Theatre Journal, ELH, Discourse, TDR, Modern Drama, Kenyon Review, Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, Art and Cinema, Maska, and in anthologies in the USA, Europe, and India. She is currently writing a new book on Modernism and performance.
Language of instruction: English
Readings: English
RABELAIS: THE GIANT AND HIS DOUBLE
Instructor: François Cornilliat
420:623, Wednesday 4:30-7:10, RAB 105
Duality is everywhere in Rabelais’s “chronicles.” Gargantua’s famous prologue impresses it onto the reader’s mind by distinguishing (seriously or not) appearance from content, funny words from “higher meaning,” bone from marrow. The giant himself gets duplicated, the story of the father (Gargantua) following that of the son (Pantagruel); he meets a friend (Panurge in the case of Pantagruel) who becomes his opposite; the friend in turn splits (thus with Panurge and FrPre Jean) in contrary personas; Panurge cannot decide (in the Tiers livre) whether he should marry or not; Pantagruel ends up visiting (in the Quart livre) a world entirely made of antagonistic forces. As for the commentators of Rabelais, they tend to separate in two camps; the same thing might happen to us during this seminar. Duality proliferates in this work and around this work, which sets it as a necessary condition to reading and friendship, but also as the engine of misunderstanding and war. And then, curiously enough, while Rabelaisian fiction posits duality as the very structure of its invention, it avoids some of its most obvious emblems: for example, there are no women to speak of in Rabelais’s novels. Duality therefore will be our paradoxical reading thread (one that should be distrusted as much as followed) inside the four books’ labyrinth. We will try to understand what triggers, animates, and multiplies these couples of notions, friends, or enemies; and to assess whether, beyond all these doubles, a form of unity might still be envisioned.
The seminar’s goal being to cover all four books, which implies a very steady pace, it is highly recommended that students use the winter break to read or re-read the first two volumes, Pantagruel and Gargantua.
Texts (Make sure to get the following volumes and not others.)
Pantagruel, éd. P. Michel, Folio Classique, 2-07-036387-2.
Gargantua, éd. P. Michel, Folio Classique, 2-07-036773-8.
Le Tiers livre, éd. J. Céard, Le Livre de Poche - BibliothPque Classique, 2-253-90711-1.
Le Quart livre, éd.G. Defaux, Le Livre de Poche-BibliothPque Classique, 2-253-90710-3.
François Cornilliat’s field is 15th- and 16th-century literature, rhetoric, and poetics. Focusing on the relation of poetry and poetics with other forms of discourse, and in particular with the rhetorical culture of the Renaissance, he has worked on the use of verbal ornament in the epideictic verse and prose of the so-called “Grands Rhétoriqueurs,” and on the conception(s) of truth, praise, pleasure, and usefulness developed by later poets from Marot to the Pléiade. He is currently at work on the subject of “poetic failure” in the Renaissance, looking into the ways in which poetry manages or fails to promote itself as a specific art. Finally, he is interested in the problems posed by the ongoing return of rhetoric in the field of literary studies.
Language of instruction: French
Readings: French
THE IDEA OF LITERATURE IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT BOOK
Instructor: Lorraine Piroux
420:646, Thursday 4:30-7:10, RAB 105
Literature is a relatively new concept that does not appear until the end of the18th and the beginning of the 19th century. If the first occurrences of the term are now well-documented, the various formal and theoretical experiments during the Enlightenment that eventually led to the autonomy of the literary deserve to be reexamined. In this seminar, we will explore several texts whose content and form attempt to define the specificity of literary writing including novels, utopias, journalistic writings, essays, but also theoretical and aesthetic treatises. While the idea of an aesthetic proper to the literary is explicit in the theoretical works of Diderot, Condillac or Marmontel, it is no less present in the epistolary fiction of Laclos, the sentimental novels of Bernardin de Saint Pierre or the episodic sheets of the Spectateur français. These latter texts also contribute, perhaps in more subtle ways, to an important reflection on the material, visible, and public nature of writing without which literature, understood in the modern sense, would not have happened.
To guide our discussion, we will focus specifically on a series of key concepts: style, genius, taste, the beautiful, the sublime, originality, fables, enigmas, fiction, the copyright, the book, letters, plagiarism, imitation, belles-lettres and writing. These will help us sketch a composite portrait of the beginnings of Literature.
Texts to be purchased:
***If reading texts in French, please do not substitute with other editions.***
Bernadin de Saint Pierre, Paul et Virginie, Garnier-Flammarion, 1999, 2080700871.
Chartier, Roger, L’ordre des livres, Éditions Alinéa, Paris, 1992, 2740100248. (if out-of-print, you can substitute with the English translation: Chartier, The Order of Books, Stanford UP, 1994, 0804722676.)
Diderot, Denis, Oeuvres esthétiques, Classiques Garnier, 1994. 2100024477.
Graffigny, Françoise de, Lettres d’une Péruvienne, MLA in French, 0873527771.
Laclos, Choderlos de, Les liaisons dangereuses, Garnier-Flammarion, 1997, 2080707582.
Marivaux, Pierre de, Le spectateur français, Editions Alinéa, 1992, 274010037X.
Mercier, Louis Sébastien, L’an 2440, RLve s’il en fut jamais, Editions La Découverte/Poche, 1999, 2707131172.
A selection of texts by Batteux, Condillac, Dubos, Lessing, Malsherbes, Marmontel, and Mercier will be available on electronic reserve.
Prof. Piroux is associate professor of French. Her research and teaching interests include eighteenth-century literature and aesthetics, travel literature, and Ancien Régime print culture. She is the author of Le livre en trompe l’Éil ou le jeu de la dédicace (1998) and the forthcoming : Moins que livre : essai sur l’illisibilité.
Language of instruction: French
Readings: most, but not all, available in English
FRENCH LITERATURE BETWEEN THE WARS
Instructor: Derek Schilling
420:667, Monday 4:30-7:10, RAB 105
The Great War not only cost the lives of 1.5 million soldiers in France but destroyed the humanist ideals on which writers and intellectuals of earlier generations had founded their practice. The idea that history has in and of itself a meaning could no longer be taken for granted. To fill up this postwar void, new discourses appeared which promised liberation by diverse means. For the Surrealists (Breton, Aragon, Éluard), freedom was to be achieved through dream-work and the poetic absolute of love; for the working class and the writers who identify with it (Dabit, Céline, Prévert), it was tied to the sacred communion of the “people”, united in oppression; for other independent spirits (Malraux, Nizan, Sartre), it lay in the cult of action, whether undertaken alone or as part of a group strategy.
In this seminar, by examining a broad cross-section of writings of the 1920s and 1930s (novels, short stories, tracts and manifestoes, poetry), we will see to what extent the call for renewal and liberation is linked to a collective sense of emasculation, acutely felt by French men who came of age during the war. Viewed critically, interwar literature becomes a literature exchanged between men, which must be approached as such.
Discussion will take place in French. Weekly one-page reaction papers are expected of all students, as well as a final 15pp. research paper (in French or in English). Translations of most of the works are readily available in English.
Texts in French:
Barbusse, Henri, Le feu, Autrement, 2746706806
Breton, André, Manifestes du surréalisme, Gallimard/folio essais 2070322793
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Voyage au bout de la nuit, Gallimard/folio plus 207039431X
Cocteau, Jean, Thomas l’imposteur, Gallimard/folio 2070364801
Dabit, EugPne, L’Hôtel du Nord, Gallimard/folio 2070382451
Eluard, Paul, Capitale de la douleur, Gallimard/Poésie 2070300951
Malraux, André, La condition humaine, Gallimard/folio 2070360016
Nizan, Paul, Le cheval de Troie, Gallimard/imaginaire 2070772535
Prévert, Jacques, Paroles, Gallimard/folio 2070367622
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Le mur, Gallimard/folio 2070368785
Additional readings of primary and secondary sources will be made available on electronic reserve for the duration of the seminar.
A graduate of Université Paris VIII and the University of Pennsylvania, Derek Schilling is Assistant Professor of French. His research interests include: 20th century French literature, geopoetics, urban planning, cinema esthetics.
Language of instruction: French
Readings: most are available in English
ISLAM AND THE TEXT IN FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE OF THE MAGHREB
Instructor: Richard Serrano
420:675, Friday 1:10-3:50, RAB 105
In this course, we will explore the relationship between Islamo-Arabic forms of narrative and key texts of littérature maghrebine d'expression française. Among the questions we will pose: Is contemporary literature of the Maghreb (and Djibouti) written in French informed by the region's pre-colonial literary history? Are there specifically Maghrebi narrative forms that find expression in francophone texts? Is the French language adequate to represent lived Maghrebi experience?
Books to purchase:
The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy, Norton, 1990, 0393313670.
Djebar, Assia, Loin de Médine, 2253136727.
Mimouni, Rachid, L'Honneur de la tribu, 2234050553.
Boudjedra, Rachid, La Prise de Gibraltar, 220723407X.
Abdellatif Laâbi, Le Juge de l'ombre, 2729110224.
Waberi, Abdourahman, Le Pays sans ombre, 2842612353.
Marouane, LeVla, Ravisseur, 2266093924.
Kateb Yacine, Nedjma, 2020790386.
To be distributed:
*selections from pre-Islamic poetry
*selections from the hadith and the Sira of the Prophet
*selections from the Maqamat of al-Hamadhani
*selections from Zaghloul Morsy's Gués du temps
Students should also purchase a "translation" of the Qur'an. Recommended (in descending order of preference, no ISBNs given because there are many editions): Thomas Cleary, Régis BlachPre, A.J. Arberry, Kasimirski
Richard Serrano is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature. His research interests are French lyric poetry, Francophone Literature (especially of the Maghreb), Classical Arabic Literature and the Qur'an, and Chinese lyric poetry. His most recent book, Against the Postcolonial: 'Francophone' Writers at the Ends of French Empire appeared with Lexington Books in September 2005. He is currently writing a book about the relationship between the Qur'an and lyric poetry.
Language of instruction: English
Readings: French;
all the texts have been translated into English (except Laâbi and Waberi),
but some are out of print and not easily accessible.
A DELEUZIAN CENTURY? DESIRE AND POST-AESTHETICS
Instructor: Jerry Aline Flieger
420:684, Tuesday 2:15-4:55, RAB 105
Michel Foucault once asserted that the 20th century would come to be known as "the Deleuzian century", and a decade after Deleuze's death, his work continues to grow in influence across disciplines. This course will address three crucial works in the extensive Deleuzian opus, and selections from several others, along with major critical works about Deleuze, in order to assess Deleuze's influence on philosophy, aesthetics, and the social sciences. We will look at Deleuze's understanding of new paradigms such as the rhizome, the molecular unconscious, emergence, and difference as a function of repetition. Theoretical readings will focus on Deleuze's relation to and use of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, poststructuralist thought and feminist theory.
Readings (required):
Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus (any available edition; also known as vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia).
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Minnesota, or any available edition).
Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota; also known as vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia), 0-816-61402-4.
Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, Zone Books, 0-942-29932-9.
Ian Buchanan, ed., A Deleuzian Century?, Duke University Press, 0-822-32392-3.
Alain Badiou, Deleuze, University of Minnesota, 0-816-63140-9.
Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies, Routledge, 0-41-596921-2.
Recommended:
Jerry Aline Flieger, Is Oedipus Online?, MIT, 0-262-56207-3.
Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, 1-557-86565-5.
Ian Buchanan and Clare Colebrook, eds. Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Edinburgh,
0-748-61120-7.
Selections (available in class) from The Logic of Sense, Spinoza, the works on cinema (Time-Image and Movement-Image), philosophical essays on Foucault and Nietzsche, and excerpts from the collaborative work What is Philosophy?
Jerry Aline Flieger is Professor of French, Comparative Literature, and Women's Studies. She teaches twentieth century/contemporary literature and theory, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis and feminist theory, and their intersection with new scientific paradigms. Her most recent book, Is Oedipus Online?: Siting Freud after Freud, is the third volume in Slavoj Zizek's interdisciplinary series Short Circuits (MIT Press, 2005).
Language of instruction: English
Readings: English
*French graduate students may do the readings in French, and will write at least one of the required papers in French
470: 523 Mondays, 4:30 -7:10 p.m. 172 College Avenue seminar room
An in-depth study of the literature and theory of German Romanticism. Works by Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Tieck, Eichendorff, and others. Readings all available in English translation; discussion in English.
Martha Helfer is Associate Professor of German and Chair of the German Department. She has published extensively on German Romantic theory.
Language of instruction: English
Readings: available in English
GERMAN DRAMA FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE PRESENT
Instructor: Nicholas Rennie
470:561 Wednesdays, 4:30 -7:10 p.m. 172 College Avenue Seminar room
Theater has always served to challenge or confirm existing conceptions of the social order. It has continued to do so in a public space, even as reception of narrative and lyric texts found itself restricted increasingly to the private sphere. In German-speaking Europe, drama has used its public role to particular effect in expressing and shaping individual and collective identity (ideas of class, gender, nationhood), memory, historical and economic consciousness, and attitudes toward death. The relative importance of drama and theater performance remains visible today, for instance in the economics of theater production in Germany, and in the widespread ambivalence towards "Hollywood" and the entertainment industry. This course examines these themes in German-language drama and drama theory from the Thirty Years' War to the late 20th century. Primary readings are due to include works by Gryphius, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Hauptmann, Schnitzler, Kaiser, Brecht, Weiss and Handke.
Nicholas Rennie is an Associate Professor & Undergraduate Director of German and affiliate member of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, where he has taught courses on such subjects as the Frankfurt School, German Drama, the literature of chaos and order from Dante to the present, contemporary literary theory, and the wise fool as literary figure and device.
Language of instruction: German
Readings: in German; some secondary works in English
COMMUNION AT THE SIGN OF THE WILD MAN: VIOLENCE AND COMMUNITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN LITERATURE
Instructor: Lynne Tatlock
470: 670 Tuesdays 4:30-7:10 172 College Avenue Seminar Room
Examination of violence as a constituent element in literary evocations of community during a century of political and social upheaval and re-definition of allegiance and national identity. Exploration of the portrayal of violence as endemic in human social formations and as an indication of a community's sickness and health. Also study of the frames (law, ethics, religion) that enable evaluation of violence and violent acts in these literary works. Some additional readings in nineteenth-century social theory, law, history, and literary criticism will help to contextualize the literary treatment of the origins, effects, and definitions of violence as they pertain to war, industrialization, urbanization, state power, colonialism, class, ethnicity, gender, the family, and geography. Attention to publication history and targeted readers, as well as language and other formal aspects of literary representation. Works by Kleist, Heine, Keller, Storm, Raabe, Fontane, Viebig, Ebner-Eschenbach, Wagner, and others.
Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis and will be the Spring 2006 Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of German. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University and her research interests include 17th and 19th century German literature and culture, women's writing, literary translation, literature and medicine, the novel, film, gender, and feminist theory and criticism.
Language of Instruction: English
Readings: in German
STUDY OF EARLY ITALIAN LITERATURE
Instructor: Alessandro Vettori
560:602, Wednesday 4:30-7:10 p.m., Department of Italian, 84 College Ave., Room 204, CAC
A study of thirteenth-century poetry in Italian vernacular. After departing from the Provençal roots of the Sicilian School and the Sweet New Style, the course analyzes the religious matrix of early Italian poetry by focusing on the examples of Francis of Assisi, Iacopone da Todi, and Guittone d'Arezzo (his post-conversion spiritual and moral poems). Rhetorical analysis is accompanied by a thorough thematic and cultural investigation of courtly love, the myth of origins, and nudity as topoi of medieval Italian poetry.
Alessandro Vettori. My research focuses primarily on the rhetoric of religious lyric in the Italian thirteenth century. I view nudity and undressing as a poetic metaphorical rendering of religious conversion in lyrical texts of poets who are also mystics. On the same line, divine love often finds a referent in matrimonial consummation, as taken from the images of the Song of Solomon, one of the most frequently commented and quoted biblical texts in the Middle Ages.
Language of instruction: Italian
Readings: All texts are available in English translation
CLASSICAL TRADITION IN ITALIAN LITERATURE
Instructor: David Marsh
560:611, Thursday 4:30-7:10 p.m., Department of Italian, 84 College Ave. Room 204, CAC
Italian 611 is the second half of a graduate seminar taught in Italian on the classical tradition. Classical texts are read in Italian translation, but trans-literature students may read them in English or other versions. The topics covered include: pastoral poetry, satire, didactic poetry, fable, dialogue, novel and romance, historiography, rhetoric, and (time permitting) the role of the classical tradition in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli.
David Marsh, who studied Comparative Literature at Yale and Harvard, knows a dozen European languages and specializes in the influence of the classical tradition on the Italian Renaissance. His books include The Quattrocento Dialogue, Lucian and the Latins, and he has translated Alberti=s Dinner Pieces, Petrarch=s Invectives, Vico=s New Science, and Paolo Zellini=s Brief History of Infinity.
Language of instruction: Italian
Readings: Most texts available in English translation
ITALIAN LITERATURE OF 17TH & 18TH CENTURY
Instructor: Laura S. White
560:631, Tuesday 4:30-7:10 p.m., Dept. of Italian, 84 College Ave., Room 204, CAC
The course deals with the Italian literary Baroque within the frame of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. It will focus mainly on the theater and the poetry, two different genres but closely related by use of the Ametaphore@ (as expressed in Emanuele Tesauro=s Cannocchiale Aristotelico, the treatise parallel to Boileau=s and Graçian=s). The comedy of Giordano Bruno and the political tragedies of Federico Della Valle will be examined in the light of the political doctrines and the Aristotelian canon of the times. The metaphysical poems of Tommaso Campanella and the lyrics of Gianbattista Marino will be discussed with references to similar counterparts in Europe (i.e. John Donne, Gongora, etc). The course will stress the intercommunication and the crossing of boundaries among the various art forms in this period in the search of the musical, pictorial and evocative values of the poetic Aword@.
Laura S. White is a Professor of Italian. She specializes in Lyric of the XIII Century; Boccaccio, Petrarch, Baroque and Enlightenment. Publications include: books on Boccaccio and the Baroque Theater. Prof. White is presently working on a joint project on the 58 volumes of the Diaries by Venetian Renaissance historian, Marin Sanudo.
Language of instruction: Italian
Most texts are available in English translation
MODERN ITALIAN THEATER
Instructor: Elizabeth Leake
560:656, Monday 4:30-7:10 p.m., Dept. of Italian, 84 College Ave. Room 204, CAC
This course will examine Italian naturalistic and bourgeois theater from its late 19th-century origins to the major works of Verga, D=Annunzio, Giacosa, and Bracco. The Agrotesque@ theater, Pirandello and the contemporary theater from Betti, Fabbri, and De Filippo to Zardi, Squarzina, and Testori.
Elizabeth Leake. Asst. Prof., Dept. of Italian. Specializes in 20th century Italian literature with an interest in psychoanalytic and ideological studies. Her book, The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone, was published by University of Toronto Press in 2002.
Language of instruction: Italian
Readings: Most texts are available in English
CONTEMPORARY SPANISH-AMERICAN NOVEL
Instructor: Jorge Marcone
940:551, Wednesday 4:30-7:10, Carpender Hall 001, DC
The general topic is the unresolved question, in Latin American cultural studies, of nature in literature's interpretation of processes of modernization. The Romance of the Jungle, as a genre, tells the story of a failed "return to nature" performed by subject that, disappointed with the insertion of Latin America into a “world economy,” industrialization, urbanization and centralization, turns towards the wilderness in search of a national or Latin American identity, artistic authenticity, autochthonous development, and overcoming the alienation from nature.
The course’s approach draws mainly from postcolonial critiques of environmentalism and other discourses of nature, the emerging field of the environmental history of Latin America, and reflections across the Humanities on the idea of “ecology” as a paradigm and on the human/non-human opposition. In our discussions we will engage with current debates on the idea of sustainability, a central notion inspiring the environmentalist movement in Latin America. A key question for discussion will be: is it possible to recover an understanding of literature as part of an interaction with nature but without falling into any form of past naturalism, organicist theories of culture and nature, or environmental determinisms?
The selection of readings include: short stories by Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay, 1878-1937); La vorágine (1924, The Vortex) by José Eustasio Rivera (Colombia, 1888-1928); Canaima (1935, Canaima) by Rómulo Gallegos (Venezuela, 1884-1969); and Los pasos perdidos (1953, The Lost Steps) by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba, 1904-1979).
Jorge Marcone's field of specialization is the representation of the natural world, and the ideas of the relationship between the human and non-human worlds underlying those representations in Hispanic culture. This approach is informed by current debates on: (1) the idea of "environmental complexity" as a paradigm for creating transdisciplinary knowledge, (2) sustainable development and alternative paths towards modernization in political ecology and environmental history, (3) the limits or excesses of the thesis of the social construction of nature, (4) the cultural critique to environmentalism as a cultural phenomenom, and (5) cognitive poetics, and the ecology of perception and emotion. His interests include nature in theories of literature, the "novela de la tierra," representations of Amazonia, nature and travel writing, ecology in Post-Avant-garde poetry, global environmentalism in contemporary Hispanic fiction, among others. In the past, Prof. Marcone has published La oralidad escrita. Sobre la reivindicación y re-inscripción del discurso oral (1997), a critique of theories of literacy and orality in Latin American literature and criticism.
Language of instruction: Spanish
Readings: Some readings are available in translation.
SPANISH-AMERICAN THOUGHT FROM PRE-INDEPENDENCE THROUGH MODERNISM
“Lezama in the Origins: The Collective Management of Literary Vocation: Poetics and Politics in Origins and Paradiso”
Instructor: Rafael Castillo Zapata
940:556, Thursday 4:30-7:10, Carpender Hall 001, DC
Beginning with a reading of Paradiso (1960) by Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976) we will try to approach the poetic and political problem of the constitution of a literary vocation: how is the identity of a writer constructed within the context of the collective activity of a literary group?; which social, formal and psychological forces are put in place to organize the relationships between the singular and the communal, between distinction and integration, between leadership and subordination, between originality and reproduction?; in what measure the group experience around the Journal Origenes (1944-1957) acts as a formative device in literary vocation, or as bildungsroman of Lezama Lima’s and his companions stylistic identity?
Paradiso will be approached as an autobiographic and as a testimonial text: fictional memory of a literary adventure that is historically verified. This approximation will be done with the support of selected readings by different authors: Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault, among others. An effort is made for organizing a device of contrasting readings that allows to activate theoretically the fictional and non fictional content of the novel.
Apart from Paradiso and Oppiano Licario, both by Lezama Lima, the following books will be used as basic theoretical readings: by Derrida, Politics of Friendship; by Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; by Kafka, For a Minor Literature. As complementary reading, texts by Lezama Lima compiled by Julio Ortega in El Reino de la Imagen, Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho are recommended, as well as the compilation of texts of the Group Origenes collected by Alfredo Chacon in Poesía y poética del grupo Origenes, Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho.
Rafael Castillo Zapata is a Visiting Professor from Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela. Since 1997 he has researched the construction of stylistic identity and citizenship of three Latin-American authors of the twentieth century: Andrés MariZo Palacio, José Lezama Lima and Salvador Novo. He has published important articles in such national and international journals as Actualidades, Estudios, Communications, Revista de Crítica Latinoamericana, Revista Iberoamericana, Hispamérica. He is the author of Fenomenología del bolero (1990), El semiólogo salvaje (1997) and Un viaje ilustrado (1997).
Language of instruction: Spanish
Readings: Some texts are in Spanish and some in English.
LITERARY THEORY: TEXTUAL ANALYSIS BY JUXTAPOSITION
Instructor: Phillip Rothwell
940:612, Tuesday 4:30-7:10, Carpender Hall 001, DC
In this seminar, we will focus on the techniques and pitfalls of reading theoretical and cultural texts side by side. Core literary works studied will include Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels, Diderot’s The Nun, Eça de Queirós’s Cousin Basil, George Orwell’s 1984, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Theoretical works by Theodor Adorno, Alain Badiou, Max Horkheimer, Jacques Lacan, Herbert Marcuse, Slavoj Zizek, and Alenka Zupančič will structure our discussion.
Phillip Rothwell is an Associate Professor of Portuguese and member of the graduate faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies. He is author of A Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality and Gender in the Work of Mia Couto, and the recently completed monograph entitled A Canon of Empty Fathers: (Ab)Uses of Paternity in Portuguese Narrative. He is currently working on a monograph that analyses the cultural importance of the mobile phone in semi-peripheral societies. He is executive editor of ellipsis: the Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association and contributing co-editor (with Hilary Owen) of Sexual/Textual Empires: Gender and Marginality in Lusophone African Literature.
Language of instruction: English
Readings: All texts are available in English.
Written work by students may be completed in English, Spanish or Portuguese.
EMBODIED CINEMAS: THE PRACTICE OF THE THEORY IN SPANISH AND ARGENTINE CINEMA
Instructor: Susan Martin-Márquez
940:659, Monday 4:30-7:30, Carpender Hall 001, DC;
Film screenings: Monday 7:30-9:30, Ruth Adams Building 001, DC
In this course we will explore cinematic and cultural theories of the body, paying particular attention to the relationship between onscreen bodies and the embodied experience of the film spectator. Some topics to be considered include: gaze theory; “body” genres such as melodrama and horror; “spectacular bodies” and disability studies; trauma theory; and the “haptic,” or tactile/kinesthetic qualities of cinema.
Theoretical readings will be contextualized through the analysis of films produced in Argentina and Spain since the 1950s, by filmmakers such as Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, Leonardo Favio, María Luisa Bemberg, Adolfo Aristaráin, Fernando Solanas, Eliseo Subiela, Lucrecia Martel, Luis BuZuel, Jess Franco, Pilar Miró, Pedro Almodóvar, Julio Medem, Isabel Coixet, and Alejandro Amenábar. We will compare and contrast film production and reception in these two countries, both of which have passed through periods of authoritarian rule—characterized by an emphasis on the disciplining of bodies--since the mid-twentieth century.
Prior exposure to film studies is welcome but not required. Portions of the seminar will be devoted to close textual readings; by the end of the semester, students should feel comfortable with the formal analysis of cinema.
Professor Martin-Márquez specializes in modern Spanish cultural studies, and has published widely on Spanish literature, cinema, and painting. She is particularly interested in gender and postcolonial theory, and cultural memory. Published and in-progress books: Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford, 1999); Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Cultural Mapping of Identity (near-completed book manuscript); Cinema and the Mediation of Everyday Life: An Oral History of Cinema-Going in 1940s and 1950s Spain (collaborative book in progress; forthcoming with Berghahn Books).
Language of instruction: English
Readings: Some supplementary readings will be available in Spanish, but required texts and class discussions will be in English, and all films will be subtitled.