Graduate Courses

This course explores fundamental philosophical questions of the relation between matter and form, life and spirit, necessity and freedom, by proceeding from Aristotle’s analysis of the soul in De Anima and his notion of practical agency in the Nicomachean Ethics. We study Aristotle in conjunction with seminal works by contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers (Korsgaard, Nussbaum, Brague, and McDowell). We in turn pursue the implications of Aristotle’s notion of life by engaging with contemporary philosophical discussions of death that take their point of departure in Epicurus (Nagel, Williams, Scheffler). We conclude by considering Heidegger’s analysis of mortality as pursuing the implications of Aristotle’s notion of the constitutive form of the soul.

The course surveys the essay as a genre of writing and thinking, from Montaigne to Virginia Woolf. Among the authors are Bacon, Hume, Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, Shaw, Gandhi, Sartre. This is a cross-listed graduate seminar in English and Comparative Literature in the Ivy Consortium, taught in alternate weeks at Columbia University and Yale. We test Adorno’s thesis that the essay is the distinctively modern and emancipatory form of writing.

Introductory proseminar for all first- and second-year students in Comparative Literature (and other interested graduate students). An introduction to key problems in the discipline of Comparative Literature, its disciplinary history, and its major theoretical and methodological debates (including philology; Marxist, structuralist, and poststructuralist approaches; world literature; translation). Emphasis on wide reading and intense discussion, in lieu of term paper. Graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory; offered every other year.

“Whoever tells the best story wins,” a recent book addressed to corporate executives tells us. Our culture gives a large importance to what psychologist Jerome Bruner called “the narrative construction of reality.” This seminar studies narrative constructions in both law and literature, asking: how narrative creates human meanings and spurs human actions, how it creates and interprets temporality; how narratives of the past establish legal authority and modes of interpretation, ranging from originalism to textualism to purposivism; how narratives are used to persuade, to win arguments, to produce conviction. The seminar studies cases from such areas as religious rights, affirmative action, Fourth Amendment protections, as well as theories of legal interpretation and literary narratives in an effort to understand the uses of narrative and how they may be analyzed. Open to law students and graduate students in Comparative Literature, English, and other humanities departments. The seminar is for two units (for law students); oral presentations, class participation, and term paper required.

Covers the subject of class and ethnic repression from the third millennium B.C.E. to the mid-second millennium C.E. Analyzes textual, epigraphic, and iconographic sources for slavery, dependency, and genocide in Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Han, Germanic, Angkorian, Vietnamese, Burmese, Malay, Mayan, and Aztec cultures.

Examination of the social injustices of the conservative, post-colonial Maghreb as they are clearly-and intentionally-visible in twentieth-century, contemporary literature of the region. Because of the candid themes of poverty, unemployment, prostitution, drug and alcohol use, corruption, homosexuality, isolation, and rape, much of the literature has been banned in North Africa, finding audiences instead in Europe and North America.

How do we remember and forget? How does memory transform into narrative? Why do we read and write memoirs and autobiography? What can they tell us about the past? How do we analyze the roles of the narrator, the author, and the protagonist? How should we understand the ideological tensions between official historiography and personal reminiscences, especially in twentieth-century Russia? This course aims to answer these questions through close readings of a few cultural celebrities’ memoirs and autobiographical writings that are also widely acknowledged as the best representatives of twentieth-century Russian prose. Along the way, we read literary texts in dialogue with theories of memory, historiography, and narratology. Students acquire the theoretical apparatus that will enable them to analyze the complex ideas, e.g., cultural memory and trauma, historicity and narrativity, and fiction and nonfiction. Students acquire an in-depth knowledge of the major themes of twentieth-century Russian history—e.g., empire, revolution, war, Stalinism, and exilic experience—as well as increased skills in the analysis of literary texts. Students with knowledge of Russian are encouraged to read in the original. All readings are available in English.

Close study of selected novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, with particular attention to the representation of consciousness and the development of the free indirect style. Our reading of fiction is supplemented by narrative theory drawn from James, Wayne Booth, Käte Hamburger, Ann Banfield, Gérard Genette, Dorrit Cohn, and others.

Starting with Kant, the organic is defined as a processual relation of the part and the whole, thereby providing a new model of the individual as a self-contained totality. We explore the implications of this conception in Goethe’s writings on morphology (The Metamorphosis of Plants, “Orphic Primal Words”), the Romantics’ Athenaeum, Hanslick’s On the Beautiful in Music, Oswald Spengler’s cultural morphology, the concept of autopoiesis in Maturana and Varela, Luhmann’s systems theory, and Canguilhem’s critique of the analogy of organic life and society.

How can we speak for others? What does it mean to be spoken for? And what type of agency is evoked by this constellation? The course explores the implications, both productive and problematic, of representation—for agency and subjectivity, for recognition and acknowledgment, for political action, and for the conception of literature and art. Close readings of major literary works, from Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to Kleist and Kafka, is accompanied by theoretical texts, from Arendt’s notion of the Greek polis to the critique of representation by Foucault, Spivak, and others, and debates about the legal representation of nature in the climate crisis.

What does “desire” mean to a Yiddish writer? Desire most commonly refers to sexuality and the erotic life. The object of desire may be a person, but it can also be a thing, an idea, an art form, and more. How does our milieu affect our sense of who or what we desire? Yiddish writers have always been necessarily multicultural, multilingual, transcontinental in knowledge and perspective. They responded to an extraordinarily diverse array of political and social movements including emigration/immigration, various forms of nationalism, socialism, religious belief, and rejection of religious observance. In exploring the short fiction and poetry that address these concerns, we consider authors whose names may be familiar to some (e.g., Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem); we certainly read authors who are largely unknown despite English translations of their work (e.g., Celia Dropkin, Lamed Shapiro, Yankev Glatshteyn, and more). Experimenting with modern literary forms and modern personal and political choices, these authors reveal the remarkable range of Yiddish writing in the twentieth century. All works are read in English translation; no knowledge of Yiddish is required.

This seminar focuses on Edward Said’s reflections on the role and responsibilities of the intellectual, paying particular attention to his writings on Palestine, the politics and culture of the Arab world, and the discourse of expertise. We also examine the reception of Said’s ideas and example among Arab thinkers. Texts include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, After the Last Sky, Representations of the Intellectual, and numerous essays.

This seminar studies transformations of European critical theory in a Latin American context. Taking one exemplary European critical theorist, Walter Benjamin, and one exemplary Latin American intellectual, cultural, and political milieu, Chile, it surveys the conjunctures among them. Critical theory names a cluster of intellectual methods and goals in early 20^th-century Germany, which sees philosophy as too theoretical and Marxism as too untheoretical, and tries to fix the one with the other and visa versa. Later in the century, critical theory travels outward, occupying other discourses, becoming occupied by other histories, contributing to political occupations in systems not forseen in the original movement. We trace two Benjaminian motifs—violence and its relation to the image and critique—as these motifs migrate out of texts by Benjamin into artworks, films, and theoretical texts by Spanish-language thinkers and makers, against the singular backdrop of 20^th-century Chilean political history. What interest us are the readings and misreadings, correspondences and responses, citations and fantastical reconstructions, turn arounds and cul de sacs of a reception and repurposing of critical theory. 

The course will be taught in English, with texts available in both Spanish and English. Some texts will be available in English translation for the very first time.

This seminar is partially funded by a Mellon Foundation program on Critical Theory in the Global South.

A detailed study of Goethe’s 1795/96 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—the first novel of the nineteenth century and the prototypical novel of education (Bildungsroman); engagement with critical and scholarly reception starting with Schiller and Schlegel; theories of the novel and transformations of modern society.

This course interrogates a persistent theme in the literature of the European Renaissance: the love for a much-desired, frequently unobtainable beloved. How and why does love—erotic yearning, sexual passion, unfulfilled desire, religious devotion—become a key subject and metaphor from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? Focusing on two main poetic genres of the Renaissance—the lyric and the epic-romance—we investigate how questions of desire, love, and gendered subjectivity become a potent means for articulating psychological, social, political, philosophic, and spiritual concerns. Engaging with normative views of gender, erotic discourse, and romantic love from a long historical perspective, this course investigates the development of modern poetry and sexuality in conjunction with each other.

In the eighteenth century, the novel became a popular literary form in many parts of Europe. Yet now-standard narratives of its “rise” often offer a temporally and linguistically foreshortened view. This seminar examines key early modern novels in a range of European languages, centered on the dialogue between highly influential eighteenth-century British and French novels (Montesquieu, Defoe, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, Edgeworth). We begin by considering a sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque life history (Lazarillo de Tormes) and Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century secret history of French court intrigue; contemplate a key sentimental Goethe novella; and end with Romantic fiction (an Austen novel, a Kleist novella, Pushkin’s historical novel fragment). These works raise important issues about cultural identity and historical experience, the status of women (including as readers and writers), the nature of society, the vicissitudes of knowledge—and novelistic form. We also examine several major literary-historical accounts of the novel’s generic evolution, audiences, timing, and social function, and historiographical debates about the novel’s rise (contrasting English-language accounts stressing the novel’s putatively British genesis, and alternative accounts sketching a larger European perspective). The course gives special emphasis to the improvisatory, experimental character of early modern novels, as they work to reground fiction in the details and reality of contemporary life. Many epistolary, philosophical, sentimental, and Gothic novels present themselves as collections of “documents”—letters, diaries, travelogues, confessions—carefully assembled, impartially edited, and only incidentally conveying stories as well as information. The seminar explores these novels’ documentary ambitions; their attempt to touch, challenge, and change their readers; and their paradoxical influence on “realist” conventions (from the emergence of omniscient, impersonal narrators to techniques for describing time and place).

In the eighteenth century, the novel became a popular literary form in many parts of Europe. Yet now-standard narratives of its “rise” often offer a temporally and linguistically foreshortened view. This seminar examines key early modern novels in a range of European languages, centered on the dialogue between highly influential eighteenth-century British and French novels (Montesquieu, Defoe, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, Edgeworth). We begin by considering a sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque life history (Lazarillo de Tormes) and Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century secret history of French court intrigue; contemplate a key sentimental Goethe novella; and end with Romantic fiction (an Austen novel, a Kleist novella, Pushkin’s historical novel fragment). These works raise important issues about cultural identity and historical experience, the status of women (including as readers and writers), the nature of society, the vicissitudes of knowledge—and novelistic form. We also examine several major literary-historical accounts of the novel’s generic evolution, audiences, timing, and social function, and historiographical debates about the novel’s rise (contrasting English-language accounts stressing the novel’s putatively British genesis, and alternative accounts sketching a larger European perspective).

The course gives special emphasis to the improvisatory, experimental character of early modern novels, as they work to reground fiction in the details and reality of contemporary life. Many epistolary, philosophical, sentimental, and Gothic novels present themselves as collections of “documents”—letters, diaries, travelogues, confessions—carefully assembled, impartially edited, and only incidentally conveying stories as well as information. The seminar explores these novels’ documentary ambitions; their attempt to touch, challenge, and change their readers; and their paradoxical influence on “realist” conventions (from the emergence of omniscient, impersonal narrators to techniques for describing time and place).

To what extent does writing about the land and depicting landscapes in early modern Europe reflect a new interest in engaging the boundaries between the human and nonhuman? What does it show about the commitment of artists and intellectuals to representing cultures and environments not necessarily their own? And how did writers and artists seek to legitimize their intellectual labors by invoking images of agricultural work? Since antiquity, artists have often chosen to make the countryside and its human and nonhuman denizens symbols of other things: leisure, song, exile, patriotism, erotic sensibilities, anti-urbanism. Early Christianity in turn embraced the desert—and the countryside—as a space for spirituality. We explore these origins and turn to the early modern period, when such interests exploded into poems, novels, plays, and paintings—a period that coincided with new world discoveries and new possibilities for “golden ages” abroad. We read works by Virgil, St. Jerome, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Tasso, Seamus Heaney, and others, and take at least one trip to a local gallery (in New Haven or New York). Finally, we explore recent work in ecocriticism and environmental studies in order to grapple with ancient and early modern understandings of the natural world.

This course dedicates an entire term to a close reading of the two parts of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote de la Mancha. Announcing itself as a “true history,” yet, whose fictional devices clearly shine through, Don Quixote occupies the privileged space of first modern novel where, within its literary fabric(ations), a theory of the novel is devised. Our readings of Don Quixote examine how the classic novel inserts, parodies, and transforms all previous literary and non-literary discourses to ingeniously invent a new narrative form. To contextualize Cervantes and his literary-historic tradition, this seminar also explores questions of erotic and literary desire, the role of madness and mental health, empire and the circulation of material culture and material wealth, the Edenic narrative and ecologies of the natural world, censorship and the Inquisition, the status of representation and performance, translation, as well as the constructions of class, gender, race, and nation. We also study the legacy of Don Quixote and its quixotic narratives through contemporary art, essays, films, novels, science fiction, and television. Taught in Spanish.