Graduate Courses
CPLT 642: Modern Arabic Poetry and Poetics
Poetry was the preeminent art of the Arab world for much of the twentieth century. Poets served as the region’s public intellectuals, framing and shaping debates about the most urgent events and topics of communal concern. The post-WWII period was also a moment when the very definition of Arabic poetry—formally as well as historically—was subject to important transformations. This course serves as an introduction to the major Arab poets of the postwar period—including Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala’ika, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, and Iman Mersal—as well as central debates about the nature and scope of poetry. Topics include the poetics of exile, “committed literature,” poetry and myth, the dialectic of tradition and modernity, the prose poem, and translation. Primary readings are in Arabic, with occasional secondary readings in English.
Prerequisite: Arabic L5 or higher, or permission of the instructor.
CPLT 644 The Betrayal of the Intellectuals
The target of the seminar is to clarify the concept of the intellectual and its political and literary uses during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The point of departure is Julien Benda’s influential book, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1927). Benda defines two kinds of intellectuals: the particularists, who are specifically committed to country, party, and economic issues—later thought of as the arena of “identity politics”—and the universalists, committed to more general humanist values. What makes one an intellectual? Does becoming an intellectual depend on specific historical, social, cultural, literary, and political conditions? Is being an intellectual a matter of “talking truth to power” in accordance with universalist values? The course looks at a variety of definitions of what constitutes an intellectual, based on approaches such as Benda’s notion of the betrayal of the particularist intellectual, or postcolonial intellectualism. The course then looks at the specificity of intellectualism as it appears in certain contexts through readings from Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Naguib Mahfouz, Frantz Fanon, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Martin Buber, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Toni Morrison.
Open to undergraduates with permission of the instructor.
CPLT 646 Rise of the European Novel
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).
CPLT 646: Rise of the European Novel
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).
CPLT 653: Comparative Creole Literatures: Indian Ocean, North Africa, Caribbean
This course brings the literary and linguistic-political development of Creole literatures in the Indian Ocean, principally Mauritius, into conversation with similar developments in the Caribbean, especially Martinique. We also juxtapose North African literature, where French coexists with literary Arabic and colloquial Arabic.
Instructor: Shawkat Toorawa
CPLT 654: Classics: The Arabic-Islamic World
Arabic-Islamic civilization has produced numerous works that would make it onto almost anyone’s list of wondrous books. In this course, we read a selection of (or from) those books and study the literary and intellectual cultures that produced them in an attempt to deepen and nuance our understanding of Islamic civilization. Readings include the Qur’an, classical Arabic poetry, Jahiz’s epistles, the Maqamat of Hariri, al-Ghazali, the Shahnameh, Leyli ve Mejnun, the Conference of the Birds, the Hang Tuah Epic, Aisha al-Bauniyyah’s Sufi poetry, and much else besides. All readings in translation.
CPLT 655: Medieval Baghdad (And It's "BAD" Boys and Girls)
The founding of the Round City of Baghdad in the mid-8th century by the ascendant ‘Abbasid dynasty (ruled 750–1258) ushered in a period of intense scholarly, administrative and artistic activity. The rulers patronized poets and prose writers and supported translation from Greek, Persian and other languages into Arabic; learned individuals hosted intellectual discussions (and meals and drinking sessions) late into the night at their homes; the literati spent entire nights in bookstores voraciously reading everything they could lay their hands on; theologians and philosophers debated the nature of reality and of God; scientists tested theories in engineering, medicine, and mathematics; and travelers reported their discoveries from China and India. We will read works by and about Baghdadis, including how they overthrew the preceding Umayyad dynasty; how they built the legendary Round City; about the elephant the caliph Harun al-Rashid sent Charlemagne; about the wine-loving court poet Abu Nuwas; Ibn al-Marzuban on why dogs make better friends than most people. We will travel with Baghdadis as they surveyed and traveled in all directions, and read their travel accounts, geographies, and graffiti. We will read about the mystic al-Hallaj and how was drawn and quartered and crucified. And we will enter the world of the singing sensation ‘Arib, who was the lover of some of Baghdad’s most famous men, and of course read stories from the Arabian Nights. We will see how paper, books and writing changed Baghdad, Islamic society, and human knowledge; and how Arab-Islamic society’s contributions changed the world.
CPLT 656 Georg Büchner’s Revolutions
Georg Büchner’s (1813–1837) work is a work across times and places. In Danton’s Death he reenacts the French Revolution, in the pamphlet Hessian Messenger he calls for revolution in German lands. Büchner’s other, simultaneous, revolution is one of language and literature. In the narrative Lenz and the theater play Woyzeck, Büchner turns the Romanticism of his own time upside down, and the two works resurface only ca. 1900 as trailblazers of social naturalism and modernist (postdramatic) theater. Celan, in The Meridian, gives an idiosyncratic account of Büchner’s travel across times and places. This course contextualizes the close reading of Büchner’s work with materials from the French Revolution, early socialists, and Marx; French, German, and British Romanticism; prose and theater ca. 1900 when Büchner is rediscovered; and Celan.
Rüdiger Campe rudiger.campe@yale.edu
Dietrich Thomae dieter.thomae@yale.edu
CPLT 657 Clarice Lispector: The Short Stories
This course is a seminar on the complete short stories of Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), a master of the genre and one of the major authors of twentieth-century Brazil known for existentialism, mysticism, and feminism.
CPLT 657: Clarice Lispector: The Short Stories
This course is a seminar on the complete short stories of Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), a master of the genre and one of the major authors of twentieth-century Brazil known for existentialism, mysticism, and feminism.
CPLT 658 Early Modern Ecologies: Representing Peasants, Animals, Labor, Land
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.
CPLT 658: Early Modern Ecologies: Representing Peasants, Animals, Labor, Land
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.
CPLT 660 Writing Muslims
We read and enjoy the works of Leila Aboulela, Nadia Davids, Aisha Gawad, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Manzu Islam, Sorayya Khan, Laila Lalami, Hisham Matar and others, and such films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Surviving Sabu, and Ae Fond Kiss, paying special attention to articulations of displacement, faith, history, identity, and memory. We try to develop an understanding of how the “diasporic” or “expatriate” Muslim writes herself, her world, and her condition. All material in English.
Prerequisite: Undergraduates need instructor’s permission to register for this course.
CPLT 669: Cervantes and Don Quijote
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.
CPLT 671: Corrupting Seas: Premodern Maritime Ecologies (Archaia Seminar)
Uses the theoretical framework of “corrupting seas” developed by Horden and Purcell as a hermeneutic to investigate the cultural, economic, political, and religious environments of the archaic, ancient and medieval Mediterranean, and similar maritime ecologies. Landscape and natural ecologies play an important but not exclusive role in mapping how diversity and connectivity combined to constitute complex and dynamic environments in the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and South China Sea. The course is connected with Archaia’s Ancient Societies Workshop, which runs its own series of events through the academic year. Students must attend the ASW events in the spring (fall events are optional).
CPLT 672 Milton
This course studies Milton’s poetry and some of his controversial prose. We investigate the relation of the poetry to its historical contexts, focusing on the literary, religious, social, and political forces that shaped Milton’s verse. We survey and assess some of the dominant issues in contemporary Milton studies, examining the types of readings that psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and historicist critics have produced. A brief oral report and a term paper (as well as a prospectus and preliminary bibliography for the term paper) required.
CPLT 672: Milton
This course studies Milton’s poetry and some of his controversial prose. We investigate the relation of the poetry to its historical contexts, focusing on the literary, religious, social, and political forces that shaped Milton’s verse. We survey and assess some of the dominant issues in contemporary Milton studies, examining the types of readings that psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and historicist critics have produced. A brief oral report and a term paper (as well as a prospectus and preliminary bibliography for the term paper) required.
CPLT 673 Golden Age Theater
The development and apogee of the Spanish comedia, as well as contemporary minor subgenres such as the auto sacramental and the entremés. Exploration of how the theater synthesizes post-Garcilaso lyric, the commedia dell’arte, renaissance epic, the romancero, Spanish history, and the European renaissance literary tradition. Works by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Guillén de Castro, Mira de Amescua, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Luis Quiñones de Benavente, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Comparison with English and French theater is encouraged.
CPLT 673: Golden Age Theater
The development and apogee of the Spanish comedia, as well as contemporary minor subgenres such as the auto sacramental and the entremés. Exploration of how the theater synthesizes post-Garcilaso lyric, the commedia dell’arte, renaissance epic, the romancero, Spanish history, and the European renaissance literary tradition. Works by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Guillén de Castro, Mira de Amescua, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Luis Quiñones de Benavente, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Comparison with English and French theater is encouraged.
Course is multi titled as SPAN629
Instructor: Roberto González Echevarría