Global Arc

The course aims to trace the origins of the first person in the Western literary tradition through the lens of confession, both as discourse and sacrament. By examining a series of texts that date from the late 12th century till the late 14th century, the course will consider how authors staged (oftentimes false) confessions in a bid to test the relation between the first person and truth as well as to claim a novel authority for fiction. By pairing medieval literary and theological texts with contemporary criticism, the course will try to understand how this period paved the way for our understanding of the first person and its discourses.

In this seminar we will explore the dark side of the Enlightenment, sometimes also called, The Age of Reason. The English, German, French and American fictions we will read are shockingly willing to challenge all our pieties and inhibitions, particular with respect to the most intimate and the most sacred relations of our lives. How it is possible, we will ask, that the age that brought us liberty, equality, and fraternity also brought us such gleefully conspicuous cruelty, terror, and vice? How is it possible that philosophical texts both expose and indulge such qualities?

Literary texts from two or more national cultures will be viewed in a historical perspective of a specific period (the Renaissance or the Enlightenment) or a significant event (the French Revolution or World War I) or a social phenomenon (the Industrial Revolution). The mutual relationship between the image of the world created by writers and the impact of writers upon the world they reflect.

Relationships between conceptions of literary form and developments in intellectual history, spanning different genres and cultural traditions. Some examples: modernism in the context of 20th-century ideological conditions; the rise of the novel traced through philosophies of the 18th and 19th centuries.

This course invites students to consider not just what poems mean but how they mean¿and how that ¿how¿ complicates, challenges, obscures, enlivens, or collides with the task of translation. We will look at forms of poetry that challenge the limits of the translatable, as well as radical translation methods that expand our notion of what translation is. Examples include poems written in made-up languages; unstable texts; homophonic and visual translation; erasure poetics; and multilingual poems. Exploring the places where poetry and translation meet (or diverge), we will put traditional concepts of originality and derivation to the test.

An examination of selected works of European literature, chiefly around the turn of the 20th century, that provoke distinctive "forms of (literary) excitement." Topics will include decadence, ecstasy, ekphrasis, self-mirroring, asceticism, sadomasochism, dandyism, epiphany, and l'art pour l'art. One three-hour seminar.

Studies in the international exchange of literary forms and ideas, intellectual and artistic movements. The topic will be drawn from among the following or others similar in scope: the literature of exile, the avant-garde, formalism and structuralism, Byronic hero and antihero, literary relations between East and West, surrealism and its legacy, the international response to individual writers.

The course will deal with a theme, author, or problem in comparative literature studies.

"Zen and Performance" will explore the links between Zen practice and monastic life on the one hand, and several Japanese arts on the other (specifically: ink painting, Noh drama, Shakuhachi performance, tea ceremony, linked verse composition, etc.).

What is a literary character? The class aims to question and go beyond the idea that 'characters' in fiction are psychologically real entities whose function is to provoke empathy or moral judgment. What does it mean to 'identify' with a literary character? What alternatives are there to identification? The class will take transhistorical and comparative literary examples that cover various permutations (e.g. allegory, psychological realism, narration/focalization), and cover philosophically inflected theories of character from Aristotle to Roland Barthes.