Current Graduate Courses
ENG 522/COM 523The Renaissance in EnglandComparative case studies of the relationship between different political states in early modern Europe and the kinds of literature produced within them between c. 1500 and c. 1700. The focus begins with English literature but places it in an international context. How did different polities shape the written across the continent during the period that sees the rise of several powerful nation states (Spain, France, the Dutch Republic, England) and European expansion in America and Asia?
COM 534Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Theory:This seminar examines how literary and aesthetic theory intersect and supplement each other, and how critical theory is generated by the relationship between them. The authors we study, Lessing, Diderot, Baudelaire and Benjamin, all reflect on that relationship in considering the identity and effectivity of the "Image."
CHV 538/COM 538Church State ScriptureAn inquiry into the relation of the reading and interpretation of scripture to laws, whether derived from texts held to be sacred or designed to regulate their effects, and to Law as an idea and an ethos in which we live. Explores the interpretation of fundamental texts from three major religious traditions-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-and legal texts that derive from them or comment on them, as well as laws conceived to police, regulate, or accommodate religion; also the ways in which literature dramatizes the role of law, and of Law, in its discovery of the limits to human action.
NES 540/COM 540Studies in Later Persian LiteratureCourse acquaints students with the literature of the second great classical language of Islam and its legacy of epics, chronicles, lyric poems, mystical writings and imaginative tales from the traditional Persian-speaking world - including not only from present-day Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan but also from Anatolia, Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent. Continuation of NES-539. Treats the literature from 1200 to 1800.
COM 545First Person SingularA study of first person narratives, chosen largely from Romantic and post-Romantic fiction, including at least one not in the first person, and a large selection from Proust, to whom we will devote four weeks. (French-language texts may be read in translation by students from Departments other than Comparative Literature.)
ENG 568/COM 568Criticism and TheoryA broad overview of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Starting with some foundational texts (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche), course is structured around three inter-linked analytics to read across diverse interventions in critical theory: Structure (Saussure, Althusser, Marx, Derrida, Foucault), Subjectivity (Freud, Lacan, Butler, Fanon, Spivak, Bourdieu), and the twin problematics of Aesthetics/Politics (Adorno, Benjamin, Jameson, Said, Buck-Morss). Among the issues addressed are language and authorship, ideology and the state, sexuality and performance, sovereignty and power.
COM 581Topics in Non-Western and General LiteraIntensive study of key texts in postcolonial theory and literature. Examination how literary representations of postcoloniality supplement theoretical conceptualizations of it, and vice versa. Attention is paid to the regional specificity of postcolonial situations, the formation of anti-colonial vanguards, and questions of translation.
FRE 583/COM 582Romance Linguistics and Literary TheorySeminar focuses on tensions between and within historiographical, testimonial, literary, and theoretical texts pertaining to the Holocaust.
