Comp. Lit. 79500: Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 cr.,
Prof. Aciman (90410)
Comp. Lit. 79800: Independent Studies, Variable credit up to 6,
Staff
Comp. Lit. 80100: Literature and Personal Memory
GC: Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 4 cr.,
Prof. Ender (90415)
Comp. Lit. 80900: The Material Culture of Privacy
GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 4 cr.,
Prof. Elsky (crosslisted with RSCP 72100) (90417)
Comp. Lit. 85000: Phenomenology and Existentialism: Philosophy, Literature, Critique
GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., 3 cr.,
Prof. Crapanzano (crosslisted with Anthro. 80900) (90419)
Comp. Lit. 85500: Bilingual/Polyglot Writers
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 4 cr.,
Prof. Beaujour (90422)
Comp. Lit. 86200: Seminar in Theatre Theory and Criticism: European Avant-Garde 1890-1918: Symbolism
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 cr.,
Prof. Gerould (crosslisted with Theat. 80300) (90423)
Comp. Lit. 86500: Neorealism and Beyond: The Golden Age of Italian Cinema, 1945-1975
GC: M, 2:00-5:00 p.m., 4 cr.,
Profs. Lombardi/Dickstein (crosslisted with FSCP 81000, Art 89500, Eng. 87400) (90425)
Comp. Lit. 88300: Writing Lives/Framing Life
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 cr.,
Prof. Paulicelli (crosslisted with WSCP 81000) (90427)
Comp. Lit. 89000: Deconstruction: Its Roots and Ramifications
GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 4 cr.,
Prof. Brenkman (90428)
Comp. Lit. 89100: History of Literary Theory and Criticism I
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 cr.,
Prof. Aciman (90429)
Comp. Lit. 89800: Independent Studies, Variable credit up to 6,
Staff
Comp. Lit. 90000: Dissertation Supervision
GC: 1 cr,
Staff
CL 80101 - European Renaissance Literature: Chivalric Romance/Epic
NYU: Th, 3:30-6:10 p.m., 4 cr.,
Prof. Daniel Javitch (90432)
CL 80102 - Studies in Italian Culture: Italian Cinema in Fascist Era
NYU: M, 3:30-6:10 p.m., 4 cr.,
Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat (90434)
CL 80103 - Topics in Italian Literature: Dante’s Prose Works
NYU: W, 3:30-6:10 p.m., 4 cr.,
Prof. Maria Luise Ardizzone (90437)
CL 80104: Studies in Medieval Culture: Memory, Emblem, Picture
NYU: T, 3:30-6:10 p.m., 4 cr.,
Profs. Lina Bolzoni/Mary Carruthers
Comp. Lit. 79500 - Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism. Prof. Aciman
By addressing some of the fundamental aspects of Comparative Literature, this course will guide students through the discipline by offering mini-seminars focusing on a host of critical methodologies ranging from the practice of literary history down to some of the more recent theoretical approaches. This course will also introduce and explore the strengths and weaknesses of many critical strategies.
Comp. Lit. 80100 - Literature and Personal Memory
Prof. Ender
How do we construct memories? What are they made of? What is that mental construct we call a memory? In an age of fascination with autobiography, an age intensely vested in personal testimonies, it seems particularly important to develop a sophisticated and accurate a model of personal remembrance. Building on the hypothesis that key writers provide us with experiments and protocols for remembrance, this course will analyze memory in a cross-section of literary texts of the nineteenth and twentieth century, while relating these findings to modern psychological, psychonanalytic and philosophical conceptions of memory. Texts: Balzac ("Adieu", "Le Colonel Chabert"), Baudelaire (selections from Les Fleurs du Mal), Nerval ("Sylvie"), George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss , excerpts), Proust (Du côté de chez Swann, selections from Le temps retrouvé), Woolf (Moments of Being), Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), Annie Ernaux (La honte), Georges Perec (W ou le souvenir d'enfance) , as well as essays by Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Benjamin, Barthes (Camera Lucida), De Man, and others. Selections as well as critical essays will be available as a course package. While the course is taught in English, students are encouraged to read the primary texts in the original whenever possible. Prerequisites: regular attendance and active participation, one brief in-class presentation of your research topic, one research essay.
Comp. Lit. 80900 - The Material Culture of Privacy
Prof. Elsky
This is a cross-disciplinary course that investigates how the ideal of privacy and its artistic representation in the early modern period can be understood in relation to early modern material culture. The core theme of the course will be the historical differentiation between public and private realms and their material embodiment in interior architectural spaces, mostly domestic. The course will be a combination of social and material history, architectural history, visual representation, and literature. The course will be structured as follows: theory and methodology of investigating early modern material culture, including works by art historians, historians, and literary scholars; the emergence of privacy as a practice and ideal from the perspective of cultural and material history; the embodiment of the ideal of privacy in the new architecture and interior design of the period (readings will include primary sources as well current scholarship on early modern architecture); visual (Italian and Dutch painting and prints) and literary (English, Italian, French) representation of private spaces.
Comp. Lit. 85000 - Phenomenology and Existentialism: Philosophy, Literature, Critique
Prof. Crapanzano
This seminar will be devoted to readings in the philosophy, literature, the human sciences and literary criticism influenced by plenomenology and existentialism. We will consider such questions as intentionality of Consciousness, the priority of consciousness over existence or existence over consciousness, other minds, being/Being, nonbeing, bad faith, guilt, freedom, commitment, ethical responsibility, care, and despair. We will relate Existentialism and phenomenology to individualism, nihilism, war, and revolution. Particular attention will be given to the problem of language in phenomenological description and existential hermeneutics. Readings will include selections from Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, Binswanger, Jaspers, and Camus as well as (but not limited to) works by Blanchot, Sartre, Camus, Robbe-Grillet and Ionesco. They will also include critical writings by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Poulet, and the Geneva group. Students will be encouraged to consider the relationship between phenomenology and existentialism and film, social and cultural description, and the early writings of Post-structuralists like Foucault and Derrida
Comp. Lit. 85500 - Bilingual/Polyglot Writers
Prof. Beaujour
While it is not unusual for a writer to be a bilingual, it is still rare for a major modern writer to be bilingual or polyglot as a writer and to create a body of work of more or less equal weight in more than one language. Most monolinguals have a visceral belief in the identity of language and self. They find disturbing and anomalous a modern poet or novelist who defines himself in one language and then either switches entirely to another one or continues to alternate with some periodicity between the two. Certainly, being a bilingual writer confronts an artist with painful difficulties: neuro-physiological, and emotional as well as problems of linguistic choice and resistance. All these factors have significant impact on the form and language of the works. Translation and self-translation also pose difficult problems for the bilingual writer.
While each bilingual writer's development is idiosyncratic, it is possible to maintain that bilingual writers, even working in different languages, have more in common with each other than they do with monolingual writers of any of the languages which they master--or which master them. Among other problems, we will address the question of whether or not this hypothesis can be supported.
This course will concentrate on modern writers who are bilingual in the strict sense, as noted above : Ariel Dorfman (Spanish/English), Nabokov (Russian/English) , Beckett (English/ French), Brodsky (Russian /English), and Nancy Huston (English/French) and possibly Kundera (Czech/French), but we will also read short texts by some who have written only in one language, which is not their first (Hoffman (Polish/English), Rodriguez (Spanish/English), etc.) We will look briefly at one or two writers who have decided to write books in mixed or macaronic language, as well as writers who have decided to forge a new language out of their ethnic linguistic practice (e.g. Anzaldua (Spanglish), and those who deliberately combine several languages in the same work (e.g.: Federman (French/English)).
The initial classes will be devoted to an introduction to general problems of bilingualism as they apply to writers: the bilingual brain and problems of language storage and access, psycho-social aspects of bilingualism, and particularly the situation of bilinguals in voluntary or involuntary exile, "identity issues" and questions of "code switching," the process of switching (permanently or for a length of time) from writing in one language to writing in another.
The first work we shall consider together in detail will be Ariel Dorfman's Going South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey, which introduces in exceptionally clear form major questions of identity, imagery, and structure that we will see frequently in other texts. We will then spend some time on the career of Vladimir Nabokov, including a discussion of problems of translation and self translation. The central texts here will be PNIN and Speak, Memory!
We will then read several brief works by Beckett and selections from The Unnamable, followed by Lost North and Limbes/Limbo: Homage to Samuel Beckett , two brief works by Nancy Houston, We will read Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, several essays by Richard Rodriguez and finish with a discussion of Joseph Brodsky.
If the class is small, there will be student presentations that will become the basis of the final paper. If a student prefers, the final paper may, however, focus on a problem of bilingual writing, rather than a specific author. The final paper may also consider pre-modern practices of bilingual writing.
Comp. Lit. 86200 - Seminar in Theatre Theory and Criticism:
European Avant-Garde 1890-1918
Prof. Gerould
Starting with Mallarmé, Villiers de l'Isle Adam's Axel, and Maeterlinck's early plays, the seminar will focus on Symbolism (and its early variant Decadence)-- particularly in theatre, but also with emphasis on developments in poetry and fiction--as the first international avant-garde to challenge the reigning principles of realism and naturalism and as a pivotal stage in the evolution of modernism, despite its apparently anti-modern stance. Restoring to the drama its perennial concerns with the supernatural and the spiritual, the Symbolist poets forged an innovative theatrical language essentially musical and pictorial in nature that appealed to a new generation of directors and designers who rose to dominance in the independent theatre movement. The seminar will examine the philosophical bases of Symbolism in the theoretical writings of Maeterlinck, Jarry, Strindberg, Yeats, Meyerhold, Briusov, Bely, Sologub, Blok, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Evreinov, and Mici?nski, and trace the expansion of the movement--in both theory and practice--throughout Europe, with special attention to Russia, Ireland, and Poland and to the political dimensions of its aesthetic. Plays to be read include Ibsen's Master Builder, Strindberg's To Damascus, Hauptmann's Sunken Bell, Madame Rachilde's Crystal Spider, Chekhov's Seagull, Jarry's Caesar AntiChrist, Yeats's Shadowy Waters, and Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy. Aspects of the movement to be studied include the avant-garde theatres themselves, their functions and their audiences, the role of journals and publications devoted to Symbolist art, and the growing importance of women writers and artists. The seminar will explore fin-de-siPcle sensibilities, changing conceptions of sexuality, the ideal of the androgyne, apocalyptic anxieties, and millenarium expectations, as reflected in the symbolist world view. Assessment will be made of the contributions of mysticism, gnosticism, Eastern religions, and occult philosophy as well the revival of interest in the Middle Ages. The seminar will finally consider the offshoots of Symbolism in the emerging avant-gardes of Futurism and Expressionism and also take into account its lasting impact outside of Europe and beyond its own time frame. The seminar will be interdisciplinary in its consideration of the relationships between the new drama circa 1900 and the other arts of music, dance, opera, sculpture, and painting (Redon, Khnopff, Moreau, Kubin, Munch, Vrubel', Wyspia?nski, and Ensor will be viewed). Connections to the popular arts and popular culture, including puppetry, pantomime, the cult of Pierrot, and cabaret, will be made in an attempt to chart the interplay between high and low. As epitaphs for the period, the seminar will conclude with Andreyev's Requiem and Kraus's Last Days of Mankind.
Comp. Lit. 86500 - Neorelaism and Beyond:
The Golden Age of Italian Cinema, 1945-1975
Profs. Lombardi/Dickstein
This course will examine the flowering of Italian cinema after World War II and its transformation in the 1960s by focusing on the best work of five leading directors, Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, and Fellini. It will explore the historical, social, and theoretical roots of Neorealism and the different ways each of these directors participated in this movement and were in turn influenced by it. The course will begin with documentary-style films they made within the ambit of Neorealism, such as Rossellini's Rome - Open City and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, and then show some of the directions they took in their later work, which focused less on the harsh lives of the poor and more on the malaise of the middle class, and was often more personal, more psychological, more historical, more operatic, or more theatrical. There will be readings by theorists of Neorealism, such as Zavattini and Lizzani, and by sympathetic critics in other countries, including André Bazin and James Agee. The course will conclude by exploring the work of important younger directors who first emerged in the 1960s, including Pasolini, Olmi, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, and Scola. Course requirements: Students will be expected to see the film(s) to be discussed between classes, to deliver an oral report, and to research and submit a term paper.
Comp. Lit. 88300 - Writing Lives/Framing Life
Prof. Paulicelli
The seminar will examine the relationship between writing as an art form and as a craft that narrates the twists and turns of the self, whether that of authors, narrators or characters. Special attention will be given to the styles and techniques of the literary texts considered, especially those of authors like Alberto Savinio, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo Levi, Italo Calvino who have been involved in painting, cinema, literature, criticism and so have pushed the act of writing to its limit. In addition, the course will examine issues pertaining to different genres such as autobiography, the historical novel and the essay. The seminar will also address theoretical questions that bear on the narrative of the self, the formal boundaries of a literary genre, its language, tradition and the various forms in which the genre, the self and the world have been re-written and re-framed. The course will also investigate the complex relationship between writing and memory, language and representation in the works of Anna Banti, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Vincenzo Consolo, Natalia Ginzburg and Clara Sereni.
Comp. Lit. 89000 - Deconstruction: Its Roots and Ramifications
Prof. Brenkman
The work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man marked a new convergence of American and European criticism, significantly transformed the landscape of literary studies, prompted numerous debates, and has left a controversial legacy in contemporary literary and aesthetic theory. This seminar will be devoted to the sources and consequences of deconstruction. We will examine the genealogy of deconstructive criticism in the American New Criticism and the Geneva School, in Nietzsche and Heidegger, in Benjamin, and in the avatars of romanticism in European literature and thought. Early texts by Derrida and de Man's writings, from early to late, will be the principal focus. The innovations in strategies of reading and in approaches to figurative language in literary texts will be explored in order to evaluate deconstruction's contribution to critical methods. The impact of deconstruction--whether as influence or agon--will allow participants in the seminar to probe its ramifications for the new historicism, the later Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, queer theory, and post-Marxism. Principal texts will be Derrida's Of Grammatology and Dissemination and de Man's Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, and The Rhetoric of Romanticism as well as some later essays.
Comp. Lit. 89100 - History of Literary Theory and Criticism I
Prof. Aciman
A study of the development of thought about literature in the classical, the medieval, and the early modern periods. With readings from Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus to Dante, Sidney, Boileau and Dryden, this course will examine the history and evolution of such fundamental terms as truth, beauty, nature and artifact with which pre-Romantic Western critics have attempted to understand the literary work of art. This course will also explore the legacy and limitations of these and other terms and their impact on criticism today.