Graduate Courses

A detailed and contextualized reading of Cervantes’s masterpiece conducted entirely in Spanish. The study of this iconic text familiarizes students with its literary and cultural values and Cervantes’s language.

A detailed and contextualized reading of Cervantes’s masterpiece conducted entirely in Spanish. The study of this iconic text familiarizes students with its literary and cultural values and Cervantes’s language.

Course multi titled as SPAN660/SPAN302

Instructor: Roberto González Echevarría

A study of major modern narrative works in Latin America from the independence and post-independence period in the nineteenth century to the age of drug trafficking and the AIDS epidemic today.  The course will begin with the Cuban Cirilo Villaverde’s antislavery novel Cecilia Valdés (1880), move on to the regionalist classic Doña Bárbara (1929) by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos, and the dictator novel El señor presidente (1946) by the Guatamalan Miguel Ángel Asturias; it will peak with Gabriel García Márquez´s total novel Cien años de soledad (1967), and wind up with the Colombian´s Fernando Vallejo´s La virgen de los sicarios (1994) and the Mexican Mario Bellatin´s Salón de Belleza (2009). The course will follow the thematics of the law, particularly Roman Law, and the way in which the characters are controlled or driven by civil and criminal law issues that constitute the plots of the novels. In Spanish, open to graduates.

Covers ballet, opera, theater, mass spectacle, and film. Theory of the performing arts, including selections from the writings of some of the most famous Russian directors, such as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Balanchine. Their major productions and some of the major Russian plays of the twentieth century (e.g., by Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and contemporary dramatists). No knowledge of Russian required. Students taking the course for credit in Comparative Literature can write their papers on texts in other languages.

Covers ballet, opera, theater, mass spectacle, and film. Theory of the performing arts, including selections from the writings of some of the most famous Russian directors, such as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Balanchine. Their major productions and some of the major Russian plays of the twentieth century (e.g., by Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and contemporary dramatists).

No knowledge of Russian required. Students taking the course for credit in Comparative Literature can write their papers on texts in other languages.

A broad introduction to the history of the Jews from biblical beginnings until the European Reformation and the Ottoman Empire. Focus on the formative period of classical rabbinic Judaism and on the symbiotic relationships among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jewish society and culture in its biblical, rabbinic, and medieval settings.

Course multi titled as ER&M219/RLST773/HIST596/JDST761/HIST219/JDST200/MMES149/RLST148

Instructor: Ivan Marcus

This course looks at Renaissance epic poetry in relationship to classical models and as a continuing generic tradition. It examines epic type scenes, formal strategies, and poetic architecture. It looks at themes of exile and imperial foundations, aristocratic ideology, and the role of gender. The main readings are drawn from Vergil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Bellum civile, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

David Quint david.quint@yale.edu

This course will look at Renaissance epic poetry in relationship to classical models and as a continuing generic tradition.   It will examine epic type scenes, formal strategies and poetic architecture.  It will look at themes of exile and imperial foundations, the role of gender and of aristocratic ideology.  The main readings will be drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s De bello civile, Dante’s Purgatorio, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Camões, Os Lusiadas, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Exploration of the nature of Jewish identity through a literary prism, focusing on novels, stories, poetry, and homilies. Study of texts written over a three thousand year period by Jews living in the Middle East, Europe, and America, from biblical writings through modern works composed by Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, as well as Israeli literature. Special attention given to the role of gender, minority identities, and the idea of nationalism. Taught in translation, readings in English.

This course investigates the theological aspects of modern political ideologies. It takes its title from the controversial work of the German political thinker Carl Schmitt, who argued that theological assumptions stood behind the veneer of secular politics. Concepts such as sovereignty, citizenship, universalism, law, and the state of exception have been said to have their provenance in Jewish and Christian concepts of God, election, Messiah, the commandment, and antinomianism. In recent years the study of the theological origins of political concepts has become important for both those seeking to critique the neutrality of certain western-democratic institutions as well as those hoping to better understand the relationship between religion and politics. Subjects covered in the course include sovereignty, universalism, law, election, commandment, messianism, and nationalism. Readings focus on the work of modern political thinkers such as Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, and Bruno Bauer, whose normative works assumed a direct relationship between the political and the theological, as well as those who have theorized the very idea of political-theology, such as Martin Buber, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Daniel Boyarin, and Giorgio Agamben.

This course investigates the theological aspects of modern political ideologies. Subjects include sovereignty, universalism, law, election, commandment, and messianism. Primary readings include Carl Schmitt, Martin Buber, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Daniel Boyarin, and Giorgio Agamben.

This course studies thoroughly the theory of allegory (Fletcher, Auerbach, Benjamin, de Man, Gadamer). These theories are applied in analyzing literary and cultural texts from the Bible to the twenty-first century. All readings are in English.

The course is dedicated to three interrelated interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone, which present divergent accounts of the central conflict of the tragedy and of the ethical character of its heroine’s act of burying her brother Polyneices, against the edict of the ruler of Thebes, her uncle Creon. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel conceives of Antigone as embodying the natural (or “divine”) law of the family that opposes the instituted (or “human”) law of the polis. According to Hegel, both laws represent legitimate ethical claims, which is why their violent confrontation marks the demise of the very concept and reality of (ancient) ethical life. Both Jacques Lacan (in Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis) and Judith Butler (in Antigone’s Claim) develop their readings of Sophocles’ tragedy in critical debate with Hegel’s influential interpretation. While Lacan holds that Antigone does not represent first and foremost the unwritten laws of kinship relations but rather an ethical subject whose action reveals the essential connection between desire and death, Butler insists against Hegel and Lacan that Antigone should be understood neither as an embodiment of the “divine laws” of the family nor of the “symbolical” law of desire. To the contrary, Antigone’s own troubled family history suggests that she is the very figure of a critical destitution of the normativity of kinship relations. The course aims at both understanding and discussing the controversial constellation of these three approaches to Sophocles’ tragedy. Three questions are at the center of the debate: What does Antigone stand for? How should we conceive of the central conflict of the tragedy? And how should we conceptualize the ethical character of Antigone’s act to bury her brother? Particular emphasis is put on three insights that Antigone articulates: the tragic irony of ethical life; the deep ambiguity of individual autonomy; and the paradoxes of the normativity of kinship relations and the gender identities that lie within it.