Graduate Courses

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

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.

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

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.).

This course explores how Japanese literature, cinema, and popular culture have engaged with questions of environment, ecology, pollution, and climate change from the wake of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 to the ongoing Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in the present. Environmental disasters and the slow violence of their aftermath have had an enormous impact on Japanese cultural production, and we examine how these cultural forms seek to negotiate and work through questions of representing the unrepresentable, victimhood and survival, trauma and national memory, uneven development and discrimination, the human and the nonhuman, and climate change’s impact on imagining the future. Special attention is given to the possibilities and limitations of different forms—the novel, poetry, film, manga, anime—that Japanese writers and artists have to think about humans’ relationship with our environment.

Marxist thought has played a major role in the understanding of literary institutions, as well as literary texts. Within Marxist thought, literature always had a unique function in the processes of ideology, class struggles, and the constitution of the subject; material Marxism, cultural Marxism, European Marxism, and neo-Marxism all studied the work of literature as an institution and as both reflection and construction of reality, and of its perception. The aim of this seminar is to acquaint ourselves with Marxist theories of literature in the twentieth century. We start with the very basics of Marxism, focusing especially on the theory of ideology. We then study Lukács’s theory of literature as the basis of the development of Marxist literary theory, followed by the literary theories developed by the Frankfurt School, the materialistic school of Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Belsey, Fredric Jameson, and others. Open to undergraduates. All texts are in English, and no previous knowledge is required.

Marxist thought has played a major role in the understanding of literary institutions, as well as literary texts. Within Marxist thought, literature always had a unique function in the processes of ideology, class struggles, and the constitution of the subject; material Marxism, cultural Marxism, European Marxism, and neo-Marxism all studied the work of literature as an institution and as both reflection and construction of reality, and of its perception. The aim of this seminar is to acquaint ourselves with Marxist theories of literature in the twentieth century. We start with the very basics of Marxism, focusing especially on the theory of ideology. We then study Lukács’s theory of literature as the basis of the development of Marxist literary theory, followed by the literary theories developed by the Frankfurt School, the materialistic school of Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Belsey, Fredric Jameson, and others. All texts are in English, and no previous theoretical knowledge is required.

Marxist thought has played a major role in the understanding of literary institutions, as well as literary texts. Within Marxist thought, literature always had a unique function in the processes of ideology, class struggles, and the constitution of the subject; material Marxism, cultural Marxism, European Marxism, and neo-Marxism all studied the work of literature as an institution and as both reflection and construction of reality, and of its perception. The aim of this seminar is to acquaint ourselves with Marxist theories of literature in the twentieth century. We start with the very basics of Marxism, focusing especially on the theory of ideology. We then study Lukács’s theory of literature as the basis of the development of Marxist literary theory, followed by the literary theories developed by the Frankfurt School, the materialistic school of Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Belsey, Fredric Jameson, and others. Open to undergraduates. All texts are in English, and no previous knowledge is required.

An exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400), brilliant writer and translator. Using modern postcolonial as well as medieval theories of translation, memory, and bilingualism, we investigate how texts in French, Latin, and Italian are transformed, cited, and reinvented in his writings. Some key questions include: What happens to language under the pressure of crosslingual reading practices? What happens to the notion of translation in a multilingual culture? How are ideas of literary history affected by understanding Chaucer’s English in relation to the other more prestigious language worlds in which his poetry was enmeshed? Texts include material in French, Middle English, Latin, and Italian. Proficiency in any one or more of these languages is welcome, but every effort is made to use texts available in modern English translation, so as to include as wide a participation as possible in the course.

Ardis Butterfield ardis.butterfield@yale.edu