COL 714 - Universalism: Particularism and the Question of Political Identities
COL 715 - Theories of Space: Benjamin's Arcades Project
COL 716 - Foucault & Deleuze: Power & Desire
COL 719 - Imperial Geographies
COL 720 - Hegel & Schellings Philosophy
COL 722 - Heidegger: Critical Theory
COL 713 - Blank
COL 724 - Romantics: The Case for & Against Nature
COL 726 - The Bible & Literary Criticism
COL 728 - Movements of Black Consciousness in the Twentieth Century: From Negritude to Creolization
COL 730 - Studies in the Novel: Postmodern Fiction
COL 731 - Chronicles of Conquest
COL 732 - Spanish Conquest Chronicle
COL 733 - Language and Culture
COL 734 - The Puritan Tradition
COL 735 - Realities
COL 736 - God and Evil
COL 737 - Balzac
COL 740 - Special Topics: Creative Writing: Fiction
COL 570 - Comparative Feminisms: Italy & France
COL 714 - UNIVERSALISM: PARTICULARISM AND THE QUESTION OF POLITICAL IDENTITIES (top)
Professor Ernesto Laclau
MONDAY REG. #340272 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #312687 (B) CLEMENS 640
The seminar will be divided into three parts. The first will present the genealogy of the notion of 'universal class' in the Hegelo-Marxist tradition and its reformulation in Gramsci and in contemporary theories of hegemony. It will also include a counterposition of Lyotard's approach as one postulating extreme particularism and Habermas' as one advocating a revised form of universalism. An alternative 'hegemonic' approach will be proposed. The second part of the seminar will be devoted to exploring Hegelian dialectics, deconstruction and Lacanian theory as possible candidates to explain the implicit ontology underlying the hegemonic link. The last part of the seminar will concentrate on two historic examples of hegemonic logics: French Jacobinism and British Chartism.
COL 715 - THEORIES OF SPACE: BENJAMIN'S ARCADES PROJECT (top)
Professor Henry Sussman
WED. REG. #460255 (A)
4:00-6:40 REG. #113722 (B) CROSBY 125
The wider aim of this course is to examine the spatial dimension of theoretical models and to explore how these are deployed in productive reading, whether of texts or the urban environment. This rendition of the course will center on a work that may be described both as the reconstitution of a city in prose and a text with all the complexity and flow of a city. Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project is a work of historical Cultural Studies retracing the moves, logistical as well as conceptual, that made Paris truly the "capital of the nineteenth century." The composition and arrangement of the Arcades Project also describe a specific textual architecture and theoretical model of planning and demography. In brief, in its highly distinctive archive of materials and its discursive composition, the work generates its own theoretical model of, among other factors, urbanity, globalization, the experience of High and Late Capitalism, and reading during the epoch of modernism and its aftermath.
Two theoretical models will be invoked as a framework or productive "surround" to Benjamin's Arcades Project: the flow theory of Deleuze and Guattari and the features and capabilities of textuality, as elaborated, say, in Derrida's The Post Card. Strategic selections by Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida will be incorporated into the course.
The primary assignment for the course will be a term project. This may take the form of a term paper, an architectural or planning model, or work in cybernetic or visual media.
COL 716 - FOUCAULT & DELEUZE: POWER & DESIRE (top)
Professor Elizabeth Grosz
MONDAY REG. #272224 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #144525 (B) CLEMENS 640
This is an overview course exploring the writings of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. It is roughly divided into two parts. IN the first part, although we will refer to some of his earlier 'archaeological' writings, we will primarily concentrate on the 'genealogical' writings of Michael Foucault, focusing on Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 An Introduction, and The Use of Pleasure, highlighting Foucault's understanding of regimes of power and knowledge, and their role in the development of modern, disciplinary society. We will them briefly examine the relations between Foucault's? writings and those of Deleuze and Guattari, before turning more specifically to explore the works of Gilles Deleuze, both alone and in collaboration with Felix Guattari. Here we will largely concentrate on Deleuze's readings of Nietzsche, Spinoza and Bergson, as well as some of his more recent texts with Guattari, including A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?. Time permitting, we may then explore various critiques of Foucault and Deleuze, particularly those developed from a feminist perspective.
COL 719 - IMPERIAL GEOGRAPHIES (top)
Professor Shaun Irlam
THURS. REG. #411018 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #268568 (B) CLEMENS 640
The eighteenth century in England witnesses the formation and alignment of the great imperial forces that will shape the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As part of this vast historical process certain peculiarly modern libidinal and phantasmatic geographies are drafted into existence: private property, national territory, cartographic space and the location of the subject. Our object in this course will be to chart these virtual geographies in eighteenth-century topographical poetry and sundry related writings.
This course will undertake readings of what remains the most intractable genre of 18th century literature--that untidy extravagance called the narrative or loco-descriptive poem. Major works by Denham, Dyer, Thomson, and Cowper are seldom read today, and the names of Akenside, Dennis, the Wartons, Smart, Grainger, "Ossian" and Blair are rarely heard. Why not? Poems by these figures, together with the better-known works of Swift, Pope, Collins and Gray, compose an instructive parallel tradition to the English novel.
In an effort to provide some openings, we shall examine the ways that the signifiers of nation, commerce, landscape, gender, geo-politics and empire circulate in these poems to confect an intricate and dense social text. A tributary concern will be the unmaking and remaking of poetic vocabularies in mid-eighteenth-century England, a process which coincides with the unmaking and remaking of affective, and moral subjects.
Edward Said writes of an obligation "to connect [works of art and learning] with the imperial process" (Culture and Imperialism, xiv) and has argued that "cultural forms like to novel...were immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references and experiences" (xii). Similarly, earlier imperial/colonial attitudes, were circulated and mediated through narrative and topographical poems, so that our questions become: How do the geo-political horizons of the world outside Europe cast their shadows across metropolitan eighteenth-century poetry? How are colonial addresses encrypted into the ostensibly domestic landscapes of such national poems as Windsor Forest, The Seasons or The Task? How does the "Empire Write back" in Grainger's poem The Sugar-cane? What are the phantasmatic and imaginary modalities of space in these texts? What are the ideological designs of 18th century pastoral, ekphrastic or Georgic poetry? What developments in technology, aesthetic theory, spatial imagination, literary ideology, ethnography and anthropology facilitate the synthesis of an imperial consciousness and an imperial geography?We shall begin with Virgil's Georgics. Readings will also include some early economic writings (William Petty, Defoe, Adam Smith) as well as texts by Addison, Anne Barbauld, Blake, Collins, Cowper, Grainger, Gray, Mandeveille, Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope Swift, and Tomson.
Requirements: All participants will be expected to make a 20-minute class presentation on one or more of the assigned texts. You will also be required to prepare a short outline of your term paper with a bibliography, and submit a final paper of 18-25 pages.
COL 720 - HEGEL & SCHELLINGS PHILOSOPHY (top)
Professor Ernesto Laclau
TUESDAY REG. #116623 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #242944 (B) CLEMENS 640
The main emphasis of this seminar will be on Schelling's criticism of what he called Hegel's 'negative philosophy' and his own alternative project of a 'positive philosophy'. The seminar will start with a general presentation of the intellectual and historical context of post-Kantian idealism. It will later make a detailed analysis of the points of confrontation between the Hegelian and Schellingian philosophical projects and will conclude with the consequences and projection of that debate for contemporary thought.
COL 722 - HEIDEGGER: CRITICAL THEORY (top)
Professor William Egginton
FRIDAY REG. #423852 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #066086 (B) CLEMENS 640
Martin Heidegger is arguably, alongside Freud and Wittgenstein, among the 20th century's most influential thinkers. Yet contemporary literary studies has often failed to recognize the extent to which its practice owes some of its most basic assumptions to Heidegger's reaching critique of subjectivity. In his own land, Heidegger's thought produced the literary-critical movement of modern hermeneutics, manifested most notably in Gadamer's Truth and Method. In France, Heidegger's philosophy first impacted on the cultural scene in Sartre's existentialism, and later came to be one of the primary inspirations of and simultaneously objects of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction. One of Gilles Deleuze's earliest works, Difference and Repetition, defined itself as a continuation of Heidegger's ontology of difference, and the radical historicism of Michel Foucault has unacknowledged predecessor in Heidegger's contention that Dasein is inseparable from its own history. Jacques Lacan's notion of the subject's relation to death belies some of his later attempts to distance his work from the philosopher; Richard Rorty finds in the Heidegger of Being and Time an antecedent to his own neo-pragmatist thought; and Judith Butler's deconstruction of the sex/gender opposition owes much to Heidegger's account of "facticity." In this seminar, we will read some of the most important texts of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, and then trace the history of their commentary, criticism, and incorporation in the works of each of the above thinkers. In addition we will consider some of the political implications of both the reliance on and disavowal of this controversial thinker's work.
COL 713 - BLANK (top)
Professor Charles Bernstein
THUR. REG. #438042 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #378301 (B) CLEMENS 438
An open-ended forum for discussion of issues of pressing interest to participants. An ongoing theme will be 'the poetics of blank' in its many and shifting senses. There will also be a full roster of seminar visitors, schedule currently being prepared. Confirmed guests include Adrienne Rich and Nick Piombino. For information on the range of issues possible for this course, see the set of seminar syllabi on line at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi.
COL 724 - ROMANTICS: THE CASE FOR & AGAINST NATURE (top)
Professor James Bunn
MONDAY REG. #495303 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #042395 (B) CLEMENS 309
While in this seminar I plan to feature ideas of nature among the English Romantic writers, notably Wordsworth, Coleridge and a bit of Blake. I want to consider a longer view, both forwards and backwards in time. I plan to start with seminars about the history of natural law, natural religion, natural language. These ideas once engulfed all the political boundaries of the Atlantic basin: England, Europe, North America, the Caribbean. I plan to continue with a brief survey of English political theories of an aesthetic landscape (gardens and paintings--including colonialist representations of ideal savages by Benjamin West). Then I want to study with you various political philosophers who attacked natural law, such as Jeremy Bentham in English and the Hegelians in German social theory of mass movements. Then too, I hope to consider briefly one or two of the American Transcendentalists, especially after they read Darwin. So there will be a class on Origin of the Species. Along the way, I plan to fold in some ecological criticism, especially works that feature Wordsworth, Thoreau and John Muir. Finally, I want to pose a question that will pervade the course: where is nature in hermeneutic theories of the social construction of reality?
COL 726 - THE BIBLE & LITERARY CRITICISM (top)
Professor Jill Robbins
WED.12:30-3:10 REG. #251898 (A)
REG. #089527 (B) CLEMENS 309
The course begins with Augustine's treatise on biblical interpretation, On Christian Doctrine. Augustine's dogmatic starting point for interpretation, in which the meaning or end result is given in advance, serves as a contrast to Spinoza's,in which the method is given in advance, and the end result or meaning is what is in question. For this reason Spinoza is generally seen as the originator of modern biblical criticism. In the Theologico-Political Treatise, we will attend especially to Spinoza's reading of the Siniatic theophany and his recoiling from the biblical assertion, "repugnant to reason," that "God is a fire" (Deut. 4:24). Insofar as Spinoza uses this biblical passage to instantiate the difference between literal ad metaphorical meaning and takes it to mean that "God is jealous" (as in Ex. 34:14 where God's "name is Jealous), the passage continues to scandalize. The course concludes with Derrida's reading of the Tower of Babel episode (Gen.11), in which not only is the jealousy of God irreducible and inseparable from the claims of monotheism, but it ultimately destabilizes the distinction between literal and figurative and raises the questions of propriety, the proper and the (im)possibility of translation.
Texts: Augustine On Christian Doctrine (Bobbs-Merrill); Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise (Dover); Derrida, "Les tours de Babel" (xerox); Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses (Shocken).
COL 728 - MOVEMENTS OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: FROM NEGRITUDE TO CREOLIZATION (top)
Professor Carine Mardorossian
TUESDAY REG. #121493 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #355826 (B) CLEMENS 436
Negritude, originally an intellectual movement of Francophone black intellectuals influenced Africans and blacks across the world. Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, the founders of Negritude, introduced the notion of racial pride at a time when a large part of the black world sought to emulate European ways of being and thinking. The movement's anti-assimilationism and emphasis on the resurrection of black values and culture was a crucial step in the decolonizing process of the 1960s.
In this course, we will discuss Negritude's precursors (the Afro-Antillean movement that flourished in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the late 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, Haitian indigenisme) as well as its legacies (such as the ideology of mestizaje). What were the accomplishments of Negritude and what led to its renunciation? We will investigate the reasons why more recent models of oppositional consciousness have distanced themselves from the utopian project of Negritude. We will read works by the proponents of "Antillanite" and 'creolite," two intellectual movements which emerged in 1981 and 1989 respectively in reaction to Aimé Césaire's liberating narrative. The Martinican novelist, essayist and poet Edouard Glissant for instance, was among the first to reject black universalism in favor of a concept of "creolization," i.e. the concrete realities of cross-cultural fertilization.
Our engagement with these various models of cultural identity--from negritude to antillanité and creolité--will allow us to explore the ways in which Caribbean identity in particular has been articulated over the last decades. It will also allow us to intervene in contemporary theoretical debates on postcoloniality since these various paradigms ultimately all share the same anti-assimilationist thrust and the desire to successfully dismantle colonialist discourse and practice.
Readings through which we will address these issues will include Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Edouard Glissant, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Maryse Conde, Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confidant, Roberto Fernandez Retamar as well as critics and theorists such as James Arnold, Homi Bhabha, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Francoise Lionnet, Mireille Rosello.
COL 730 - STUDIES IN THE NOVEL: POSTMODERN FICTION (top)
Professor Joseph Conte
MONDAY REG. #086284 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #067214 (B) CLEMENS 436
In one of the foundational documents of an "anti-foundationalist" postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard argues that the postmodern is an aesthetics of the unpresentable, a form of the sublime, in which new modes of presentation are constantly sought for that which is finally ineffable. Such is the case in the fiction of Kathy Acker, who seeks to arrive at a place, a society in Empire of the Senseless, that exists beyond taboo, that isn't "constructed according to the phallus," that is wholly outside of the patriarchy. The work of Don DeLillo describes the irony of our media ecology, in which the saturation of archived, broadcast, and electronic information miserably fails to explain the iridescent sheen of the Airborne Toxic Disaster in White Noise or the events in Dealy Plaza on November 22, 1963 in Libra. William Gaddis satirizes our continued attachment to elaborate systems that have ceased to conform to empirical observation: the churning of a finance market that bears increasingly little relation to the demands of labor in JR; and the practice of law without recourse to justice in A Frolic of His Own.
Nevertheless, Fredric Jameson has proposed that there has been a "waning of affect," or dedifferentiation, in the expressions of postmodernism, from the visual arts to literature. But the suggestion that postmodern fiction, particularly the brand that has tirelessly sought new modes of presentation, has lapsed into a degree zero of political critique is not borne out by the work we will read. Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and Great Expectations wage a terrorist campaign across the political spectrum, excoriating (and worse) "fascist" anti-pornographers, "empathetic" abortion-providers, and Plaths "Daddy" in any disguise. DeLillo's Underworld recognizes that waste management is the paradigmatic occupation in our disposable consumer economy and that the underclass-human disposability-is the most egregious form of waste.
To supplement the eight novels mentioned here, we will read some excerpts from the statements on postmodern theory by Lyotard, Jameson, and Baudrillard, as well as a number of critical assessments of the fiction by Ellen Friedman, Tom LeClair, Paul Malty, Frank Lentricchia, and others.
Seminar participants who are registered intensively will be required to make a twenty-minute oral presentation and produce a twenty-page research paper.
COL 731 - CHRONICLES OF CONQUEST (top)
Professor Joan Copjec
WED. REG. #110796 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #006562 (B) CLEMENS 436
This seminar, an introduction to the work of Alain Badiou, will focus on his translated texts: Manifesto for Philosophy; Ethics; St. Paul; and The Clamour of Being. We will isolate his central concepts and explore some of the debates that surround his provocation positions. We will also attempt to draw out his "fidelity" to Lacan more extensively than he himself tends to do.
COL 732 - SPANISH CONQUEST CHRONICLE (top)
Professor David Johnson
THURS. REG. #048200 (A)
4:10-6:50 CLEMENS 221
This course focuses on the first one hundred years of Amerindian/European "contact" in the Americas and asks, precisely, what is experience? Is "my" experience, perhaps, not always the experience of the other? And, if so, what does this mean? In short, it is a course about the possibility of identity in the Americas; it might, finally, posit a definition of "Americanicity." Part of our project will be to read colonial texts against 20th-century interpretations of them in order, in part, to expose the work of history. What's at stake, for example, in O'Groman's and Rabasa's insistence that the Americas are "invented"? Or in Todorov's understanding of improvisation and paternity? Or in Clenndinen's particular construction Aztecs? Part of what concerns me in this course is to consider how history might have been written otherwise, indeed, how "history" might not have been "written" at all.
We'll read from among Colón, Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca, Díaz del Castillo, Las Casas, Durán, Sahagún; we'll look at León-Portilla's Visión de los vencidos, and take up Guaman Poma's Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. But we'll also engage recent (and not so recent) reconsideration's of the colonial period: Mignolo's The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Rabasa's Inventing America, O'Gorman's La invención de América, among others. (In Fall 2000 this course will be taught in Spanish.)
COL 733 - LANGUAGE AND CULTURE (top)
Professor Dennis Tedlock
TUESDAY REG. #030857 (A)
3:30-6:10 CLEMENS 540
For students of literature or cultural anthropology, this will be a seminar on everything you wanted to know about linguistics but were afraid to ask. The issues to be considered will include the Sapir-Whorf-Lee hypothesis (as originally formulated and as subsequently imagined), Jakobsonian poetics, the linguistic roots of structuralism, the roots of logocentrism in alphabetic writing (not the voice), orality and literacy, and dialogical vs. monological approaches to language, culture, and the verbal arts. There will be one-page response papers and a term paper or alternative project (to be negotiated).
COL 734 - THE PURITAN TRADITION (top)
Professor Robert Daly
WED. REG. #122369 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #474251 (B) CLEMENS 436
We shall focus on not only the constellation of ideas and habits subsumed under the category of Puritanism, but also the Puritans? characteristic modes of perception and discourse, some of which inform later American literature and culture. We shall consider how tradition works (or does not) in America by focusing on various views of our first two centuries. We shall discuss the historicity of texts and textuality of history, the ways in which writers respond to each other in an extended conversation, the ways in which they reconfigure the past as a toolkit from which they draw in order to act, and the ways in which they tinker, mustering the past and invoking the future on the great palimpsest of America.
Cultural theory, the recent "turn to ethics," the earlier "turn to history," cultural criticism, literary anthropology, rhetorical hermeneutics, trauma theory, ecocriticism, post-analytic philosophy, various historicisms, and any other isms you bring with you or we find useful will be welcome in this seminar. You should feel free, not obligated, to use any lens that helps you and us to understand early American writings.
We shall read, among others, the Iroquois creation allegory, William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Edward Johnson, Nathaniel Ward, Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, John Wise, Mary Rowlandson, Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Edwards, Sarah Kemble Knight, Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, Susanna Haswell Rowson, and Catherine Maria Sedgwick. It seems a lot because it is a lot, but we have done it before, and no one died or went mad.
Each student taking the seminar for full credit will be expected to participate in seminar discussions, give one seminar report (15-20 minutes) on a topic chosen at the first meeting, and to write one research essay (12-24 pages), on a topic of his or her own choosing. This essay should conform to the current freemasonry of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. Each student taking the seminar extensively will be expected to do everything except the research essay.
COL 735 - REALITIES (top)
Professor Bruce Jackson
MONDAY REG. #081938 (A)
3:10-6:10 REG. #260037 (B) CLEMENS 610
There's a watercolor by Charley Russel that depicts a scrawny range cow, ribs poking through where they shouldn't be, its whole body tilted inappropriately forward and the neck and head too close to the ground. The cow is dull brown, the surrounding sky and horizon and land a uniform slate-gray. A fox or maybe a coyote looks up at us in the lower right. Outside the watercolor on the bottom left is a note: "This is the real thing painted the winter of 1886 at the OH ranch. C. M. Russell." Opposite it on the right and in another hand is this: "This picture is Chas Russel's reply to my inquiry as to the condition of my cattle in 1886." There's a signature I can't quite make out.
This seminar is about the attempt to present the world as it is. It is about the claim some documents (writing, painting, photography, film) make to literal truth. All artists, fictive or not, select, edit, frame, present; the techniques are shared but the claims differ. Are some things more "true" than others, and what is that claim about and does it matter and, if it does, how does it matter? What, if anything, does a documentary book tell us that a good novel about the same subject doesn't? What is the truth of personal statements? Is a photograph more valid than a painting? Is a diary more reliable than a memoir and are either more reliable than a novel? Are those comparative questions of any use? How do any of the people who purport to tell us the real get us to trust them and where does that elusive quality called "authority" reside? Is there truth in documents or does it occur in the interaction between document and auditor? If the former, how do we get there? If the latter, what does it have to do with the moment or event or process in time that occasioned it?
In this seminar, we'll look at and talk about still and moving images and various kinds of writing that purport to give us access separable from the documents themselves to the world as it is. Students will each give one brief oral report about a key primary or critical work and will write a term paper.
COL 736 - GOD AND EVIL (top)
Professor Peter Hare
TUESDAY REG. #087592
12:00-2:50 PARK 141
If God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there evil in the world? If he is unlimited in power, he should be able to remove the evil, and if he is unlimited in goodness, he should want to remove it--but he does not. Apparently he is limited in power or goodness, or does not exist at all. This is "the problem of evil" that many have considered a good reason to reject theistic belief.
The book of Job is the earliest presentation of the problem. Philosophers St. Augustine, St. Thomas Acquinas, Leibniz, Hume, and J.S. Mill are some of those who have written extensively on the subject. Such writers as Fyodor Doestoevsky, Albert Camus and Elie Wiesel have also contributed much to the literature. Some indication of the volume of recent literature is given by the fact that 450-page bibliography of publications between 1960 and 1991 was recently published. Professor Hare has been interested in the problem since he and his colleague Edward Maden began preparation for their 1968 book EVIL AND THE CONCEPT OF GOD.
Each student will be expected to give at least one oral report to the seminar. A paper of the type and length appropriate for presentation at a conference will be required. There will be a take-home final exam.
Texts:
Michael Peterson, God and Evil: An Introduction to the Issues
Michael Peterson (ed), The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings
Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert M. Adams (ed), The Problem of Evil
Barry L. Whitney, Theodicy: An Annotated Bibliography on the Problem of Evil
COL 737 - BALZAC (top)
Professor Gérard Bucher
TUESDAY REG. #346370 (A)
4:10-6:10 CLEMENS 221
The purpose of the seminar is to explore, from 1830 to the dawn of Symbolism, in the works of Balzac, Verval, Baudelaire and Villers de I'Isle-Adam the recurrence of some motifs typical of Romanticism. While we will focus in Balzac on the discussion of the notion of value and of sexual identity (Sarrasine), the nature of desire (La peau de chagrin), the challenges of art (Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu), we will examine in Nerval's Aurélia the incidence of melancholy and dream on the individual and on culture at large. We will then assess how some of these motifs were reworked by Baudelaire, particularly in his prose poems (Le spleen de Paris) and also by Villiers de I'Isle-Adam (in two short-stories in which the Romantic fascination for the macabre and the fantastic appears most vividly). The seminar will be taught in French.
COL 740 - SPECIAL TOPICS: CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION (top)
Professor Samuel Delaney
TUESDAY REG. #499807
7:00- 9:40 CLEMENS 436
This graduate creative writing workshop meets for two hours and forty minutes each week. During that time we shall critique works of short fiction as will as sections of longer works written at home.
When, in the light of the weekly critiques, works are rewritten, often we will look at them again.
Each workshop member is required to read all the work submitted, make careful notes on the manuscript's margin, and to come to class and participate in the roundtable discussions.
COL 570 - COMPARATIVE FEMINISMS: ITALY & FRANCE (top)
Professor M.E. Guitérrez
MONDAY REG. #
4:10-6:50
This course will explore the development of feminist thought in Italy and in France, tracing its formation and evolution up to the present. Through the reading and discussion of theoretical, literary and cinematic works we shall address questions concerning subjectivity, language and the body. We will analyze constructions of sexual différance and (re)presentations of the female/male gender in these two social, political and historical contexts. The theoretical framework will be provided by the critical discourses of the French Feminists which had such a profound impact on Italian Feminist groups of the 80s and 90s like Diotima philosophical group. The readings may include, among others, relevant literary works by Italian women writers such as Elsa Morante, Natalia Gingzburg, Dacia Maraini, Sibilla Aleramo, Franca Rame and Ana Maria Ortese, and theoretical texts by Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig. Also we will view three films by Italian Women Film directors: Liliana Cavani, Cristina Comencini and Lina Wertmüller.
N.B. The course and the readings will be in English.
