Graduate Courses

Would there have been a Renaissance without translation? We approach this question by beginning with the first modern treatise on translation, by the Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni, and moving on to consider the role of translation in Florence’s and Tuscany’s growing cultural and political mastery over the peninsula—and in Italy’s cultural domination of Europe. We go on to explore the translation of “medieval” into “early modern” Europe, the translation of visual into verbal material, and the role of gender in the practice of translation. Students engage in their own translation projects as we dedicate the last part of the seminar to the diffusion of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition in early modern Europe.

Jane Tylus jane.tylus@yale.edu

Would there have been a Renaissance without translation? We approach this question by beginning with the first modern treatise on translation, by the Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni, and moving on to consider the role of translation in Florence’s and Tuscany’s growing cultural and political mastery over the peninsula—and in Italy’s cultural domination of Europe. We go on to explore the translation of “medieval” into “early modern” Europe, the translation of visual into verbal material, and the role of gender in the practice of translation. Students engage in their own translation projects as we dedicate the last part of the seminar to the diffusion of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition in early modern Europe.

Books are not only the medium of great literary works. They are also competing commercial products that, in order to be bought and/or read, must attract and retain attention, spark interest, and excite or meet a specific need. This course examines how markets, production techniques, habits, fashions, or advertising practices shape literary production. Drawing from the Beinecke collections, we study a wide range of diverse early modern French books to rethink the way we approach literature in general, from titles to typography, from structure to the very content of a work.

Christophe Schuwey christophe.schuwey@yale.edu

This workshop gathers biweekly, throughout the academic year, to workshop chapters, articles, and prospectuses. It is intended to foster conversations among advanced graduate students across diverse historical and geographic fields. Permission of the instructor is required.

Marta Figlerowicz marta.figlerowicz@yale.edu

This workshop gathers biweekly, throughout the academic year, to workshop chapters, articles, and prospectuses. It is intended to foster conversations among advanced graduate students across diverse historical and geographic fields. Permission of the instructor is required.

A continuing collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory,” that has been running since the fall of 2003. The group, made up of graduate students and faculty from several disciplines, meets regularly to discuss common readings, to develop collective and individual research projects, and to present that research publicly. The general theme for the working group is globalization and culture, with three principal aspects: (1) the globalization of cultural industries and goods, and its consequences for patterns of everyday life as well as for forms of fiction, film, broadcasting, and music; (2) the trajectories of social movements and their relation to patterns of migration, the rise of global cities, the transformation of labor processes, and forms of ethnic, class, and gender conflict; (3) the emergence of and debates within transnational social and cultural theory. The specific focus, projects, and directions of the working group are determined by the interests, expertise, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change.

There are a small number of openings for second-year graduate students. Students interested in participating should contact michael.denning@yale.edu.

This course places the modern Arabic novel in conversation with the west in an effort to uncover both dominant narratives regarding Arab identity, as well as counter narratives that present a challenge to these dominant narratives. We study the tradition of modern Arabic literature, looking specifically to the ways in which the image of the “other” is presented in Arabic narratives as well as the ways in which the image of the Arab is constructed through the others’ literature.

The Danube is Europe’s second longest river: it flows through or borders ten countries, while its watershed covers four more. From ancient Rome to the present, the Danube has served both as a connector and a contested terrain: from its beginnings in the German Black Forest to the Romanian and Ukrainian shores of the Black Sea, the Danube flows through a region that has emerged black and blue from imperial aspirations of domination, hostilities in the wake of the Cold War, and civil war. The southeastern portion of the river constitutes Europe’s Other—the “Barbaropa” within the continent’s own geographic boundaries—and faces the expansion of another super-political entity in the European Union. This seminar turns to the physical, historical, and metaphoric uses of the great river. At a time of tenuous unification in Europe, “Danube studies” seek to remap the region by focusing on the river’s peoples and their cultural imaginaries and interactions from antiquity to the present, exposing the Danube as a quintessential site of cross-cultural engagement. We study the region’s geography and history, engage theoretical paradigms for understanding cultural differences and their negotiation, draw on film theory and cultural studies, and examine transnational cinema, artwork, and literary texts from various Danubian cultural traditions. Through a focus on works of creative and imaginative culture—primarily, on literature and film—the course foregrounds the aesthetic mediation of actual and possible communities, in search of utopian promise even amidst and in the wake of historical atrocities.

Modernism emerged at the height of the imperialist era, and many of its major names were themselves implicated in imperialism, whether as agents of imperialist powers or through family connections. This course explores the role of imperialism in modernist culture and its relationship to exoticism. The approach is multidisciplinary, and the class looks at literary texts, films, and paintings. Works by Camus, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Gauguin, Victor Segalen, Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Viktor Shklovsky, Fritz Lang, E.M. Forster, and Pierre Loti are among those discussed.

This course offers a collections-based introduction to the material culture of the early modern book in print and manuscript, while exploring questions of evidence, canonicity, disciplinary formation, and the social construction of knowledge. Focusing primarily on early modern Britain and Yale’s British collections, the course offers students a detailed understanding of English paleography and bibliography, early modern manuscript and print culture, and the disciplinary histories that have informed the collection and study of early modern British texts.

Course multi titled as HIST614

Instructor: Kathryn James

Cassirer’s philosophy of the “symbolic form”—foundational for the art historical method of iconography as well as structural analysis in literature and art—is reexamined for its validity. Cassirer’s revolutionary concept of function as opposed to substance, developed in the Neo-Kantian context of hermeneutics and modern science, is the point of departure for our new engagement with his work. We center on Cassirer’s theory of form in art and literature and repercussions in Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, Walter Benjamin, George Kubler, and others. Cassirer’s philosophy of myth and the political gives further importance to the “symbolic form.”

An investigation of the connections between the crises of realism and the historical novel, the emergence of high modernism, magical realism, and various forms of postcolonial historical narrative considered in the wider global context of inter-imperial conflict, anti-imperial struggle, and the restructuring of the world capitalist system. The seminar combines literary readings, critical theory, and contemporary studies on “world literature” to explore ruptures and developments in modern fiction and the politics of empire in Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia.

Instructor: Joseph Cleary

Speaking for others (representing others) before a third party (judge or audience) is a basic constellation in Western literature rooted in legal, political, and religious practices. Speaking for others has been an alternative to and can function as reinterpretation of our usual dual idea of communication (Me speaking to You about Something in the world, G.H. Mead). Readings address the history and structure of speaking for others in three major sections: (1) ancient rhetoric and the Christian figure of speaking-for (Christ, the “paraclete”): Aristotle and Quintilian on rhetoric; Aeschylus, Eumenides; the Gospel of St. John; (2) political representation and speaking for others in (early) modern times: Hobbes and Rousseau on representation; Schiller, Don Carlos; Hölderlin, Empedocles; and (3) the critique of speaking for others in contemporary theory and literature: the Deleuze-Foucault debate on advocacy in the public space; Kafka, The Trial and related texts; Celan, The Meridian and related poems; Canetti on literature as art of becoming-the-other.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the upheavals of 1968, this seminar looks at the Latin American cultural and political discourses of liberation throughout the sixties, with an eye on assessing their aftermath and their legacy today. While the language that characterized the foundation of the nation-states in the nineteenth century was emancipation, in the second part of the twentieth century, and particularly around 1968, Latin America embraced the world discourse of liberation. This seminar looks at languages of liberation in an array of disciplines and artistic practices from South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. We explore regional debates that were also inserted in the larger discourse of the anticolonial struggles of the global South. Topics include philosophy of liberation (Dussel), theology of liberation (the 1968 Council of Bishops in Medellín, Colombia), theater of the oppressed (Boal), pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire), cinema of liberation (manifestos of third cinema), the New Song protest movements across the region (from Violeta Parra in Chile to Tropicalismo in Brazil), anticolonialism in the Caribbean (Fanon), anti-neocolonialism (dependency theory, internal colonialism), Indigenous liberation (from the Barbados declarations to the Lacandon Jungle declarations), experimental “boom” literature (Cortázar), etc.

The aim of the course will be to introduce students to the variety of methodologies available to them within the field of literary studies–including older ones such as New Criticism, deconstruction, and new historicism, as well as newer ones like actor-network theory and digital humanities research. We will explore the basic tenets and histories of these methods in a way that is both critical and open-minded, and discuss their comparative advantages and pitfalls. Readings might include work by Rene Wellek, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and many others.

What did happen to race, class, and gender? This course examines the persistence of older theoretical frameworks such as Marxism or feminism in current critical discourse. It also explores new critical keywords—biopolitics, affect, the Anthropocene, and others—that now help structure theoretical debates in the humanities. Intended as a fast-paced, reading-heavy introduction to recent critical theory, the course will help graduate students in literature acquire a better sense of their field of study and reflect upon the methodologies they will use in their dissertation projects. Readings include the work of older theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway, as well as recent ones such as Jasbir Puar, Sianne Ngai, Tiqqun, Paolo Virno, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Course is multi titled as RUSS882/ENGL709

Instructors: Marta Figlerowicz, Ayesha Ramachandran