Graduate Courses

An introduction to the major texts, issues, and methods in the interdisciplinary study of the Renaissance, with an emphasis on northern Europe.

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.

This course introduces key problems and debates in the discipline of Comparative Literature. It examines changing theorizations of comparative method and world literature, from the eighteenth century (Goethe, Madame de Stael, Herder, Marx and Engels) to contemporary debates about translation and World Literature as a pedagogical initiative. It also explores landmark works of literary theory and historiography (Propp, Levi-Strauss, Bakhtin, Barthes, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Kittler), looking particularly at the overlap of formal and contextual methods and of linguistic, aesthetic, cultural, philosophical and political concerns.  This course is required for first and second year Comparative Literature graduate students; participants from related disciplines also welcome. The course is taken pass/fail: no term-paper, but emphasis on wide reading and intense discussion.

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.

In our time, when everyone is suspected of being hypercritical, it is not surprising that the limits of critique, its function, and institutional location are called to question. The idea of “post-critique” has been much discussed in recent years. This course develops critical models, primarily from the German tradition, in order to show the great variety of options available beyond the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Topics include post-critique, the history of critique/criticism, the Romantic concept of critique, traditional vs. critical theory, historicism, philology vs. hermeneutics, science (Wissenschaft) vs. the critique of positivism. Main protagonists include Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Max Weber, Lukács, Husserl, Benjamin, Adorno, Koselleck, Szondi, Gadamer, Gumbrecht, Latour, Felski.

Kirk Wetters kirk.wetters@yale.edu

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.

In this course we read and discuss recent English-language monographs on modern Chinese history. The primary focus is topics that span the Qing to twentieth century and contain international, transnational, and comparative implications. No knowledge of Chinese required; open to undergraduates with permission of the instructor.

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.

This course explores the intersections and points of friction between postcolonial studies and medieval studies. We discuss key debates in postcolonialism and medievalists’ contributions to those debates. We also consider postcolonial scholarship that has remained outside the purview of medieval studies. The overall aim is for students, in their written and oral contributions, to expand the parameters of medieval postcolonialism. Works by critics including Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Leela Gandhi, Lisa Lowe, Robert Young, and Priyamvada Gopal are read alongside medieval romances, crusade and jihād poetry, travel literature, and chronicles.

This interdisciplinary course takes as its starting point Greco-Roman rhetoric as a codified system and explores its relevance for contemporary interpretation of ancient texts. Moving back and forth between rhetoric as a set of norms and rhetoric as a condition of discourse, we engage with contemporary rhetorical studies in Classics and Biblical studies. Topics include rhetoric and narrative, exemplarity and imitation across the literary and spiritual realms, “anti-rhetoricism,” embedded rhetorical performances (e.g., speeches, oratory, etc.), and nonverbal forms of persuasion (e.g., visual, emotional, etc.).