Comparative Literature Department :: University at Buffalo

COL 721 - Philosophy and Religion
COL 719 - Imagining the Nation: Early Moderity in Britain, 1688-1742
COL 716 - Borges & Philosophy
COL 715 - The Modern Lyric
COL 717 - Beyond Humanism and Anti-Humanism: Agamben, Derrida, Heidegger
COL 718 - Modernism, Mourning, and Utopia
COL 720 - Politics of 20th-Century Literature and Language

COL 721 - PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION (top)

Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Numbers: (A) 257770 (B) 407443
Tuesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640

Focusing mainly on two works by the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka - Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History and Plato and Europe - as well as on Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death , we will be concerned with the role of religion in Western philosophical thought. Our guiding question will be: is possible to dissociate Western philosophy (and by extension also of Europe whose origin is Greek, radically from the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic heritage in Europe as many philosophers in the phenomenological tradition have held.

Requirements: term paper (12-15 pages)

COL 719 - IMAGINING THE NATION: EARLY MODERITY IN BRITAIN, 1688-1742 (top)

Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) 340589 (B) 495507
Tuesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640

Through a synthesis of literary, theoretical, historical and political texts, we shall read some of the phantasmatic modes of early eighteenth-century English society, arguably the first society in history to undergo what has come to be recognized as capitalist modernity; as Tom Nairn comments in The Break-Up of Britain , The most important single aspect of the United Kingdom state is its developmental priority. It was the first state-form of an industrialized nation. Covering approximately the period from the Glorious Revolution (1688) to the end of the Walpole administration (1742), we shall examine some of the processes involved in synthesizing this modern nation-state. In particular, through selected writings of Defoe, Locke, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Addison and Steele, Thomson, Young and others, the course will attempt to lay hold of the phantasmatic and imaginary modellings of the emergent society. This will oblige us to focus on the function of Credit and the modalities of a credit-consciousness, the creation of the National Debt as an instrument of power and source of national anxiety, and contemporary theories of the Imagination In 1697, Defoe diagnoses a symptomatic dilemma when he remarks on the Despicable Title of a Projector but then, assimilating Inventions and Projections, notes, too, the general Projecting Humour of the Nation ( Essay on Projects ). We shall attempt to determine what modes of subjectivity and temporality such a credit-based and future-mortgaged society was likely to require, and what forms of imagined community were or became available to conceive it. In addition, it will be imperative for us to attend to the phantasmatic modellings of Britain's place as a nation within the international arena as it set about consolidating what was to become the First British Empire, which endured until 1776. Again, the role of the Imagination was central to mediating between exoticist fantasies and geo-political realities.

Texts: Addison & Steele, The Spectator (selections); Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Review (selections), The True-Born Englishman, Moll Flanders, Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain; John Gay, Trivia; John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government; Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters; Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest; Rape of the Lock; Moral Essays ; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels.

COL 716 - BORGES & PHILOSOPHY (top)

Professor David Johnson
Registration Numbers: (A) 208679 (B) 075167
Wednesday, 3:30-6:10; Clemens 640

In this seminar we will explore Jorge Luis Borges' prose writings in relation to philosophy. Our interest is not to decide whether or not Borges or the Borgesian text should be called either philosophy or literature; indeed, our point of departure is that Borges practices a particular kind of thinking, one that is both rigorous and, in its remarkable precision, impossible to discipline. That is, it is perhaps neither philosophy nor literature. We will read Borges alongside but also in the interstices of important philosophers and fundamental philosophical problems, including the work of Paul, Locke, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, Nancy, and Derrida (among others) and questions of time, identity, the name of god, and the political (among others).

The seminar will conclude with a one-day symposium on Borges and philosophy.

Requirements: presentation (Ph.D. students), and seminar paper (15-25 pages)

COL 715 - THE MODERN LYRIC (top)

Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Registration Numbers: (A) 178376 (B) 224873
Monday, 3:30-6:10; 640 Clemens

This seminar will focus on several modern European poets and the theories of language that they explicitly or implicitly generated. We will address the notions of hermeticism and negativity with which modern poetry is associated, and which translate into various theorizations of absence, inversion, turning, and disfiguration in modern lyric theory. The emphasis will be primarily on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Rilke, but figures such as Mallarmé, Valéry, Yeats, and Seferis will be integrated in our study. Other readings may include essays by Heidegger, Blanchot, and Hans-Jost Frey.

Requirements: Presentation and a term paper

COL 717 - BEYOND HUMANISM AND ANTI-HUMANISM: AGAMBEN, DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER (top)

Professor Krzysztof Ziarek
Registration Numbers:(A) 150227 (B) 375739
Monday 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

Working with texts by Heidegger, Agamben, and Derrida, we will examine in this course the possibility of rethinking the human: beyond the debates about humanism and anti-humanism. While Heidegger's notion of Dasein is often discussed in terms of the critiques of the subject in modernity, it is less frequently seen as a critique of the very notion of the human, as Letter on Humanism implies. Heidegger's recasting of the human being into Dasein will serve as the reference point of the course. It will allow us to explore the possibility of thinking the human otherwise than in terms of humanism, and to see how this critique reformulates the relations between the human, the world, the animal, the thing, and thinking. The reformulation of these relations also entails a rethinking of alterity, so that it is no longer restricted to the notion of a human other. The reading list will include: Agamben's The Open, Derrida's Differance and The Ends of Man, and a series of texts by Heidegger: sections from Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy, and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, "Letter on Humanism," "...Poetically Man Dwells...", "The Thing."

COL 718 - MODERNISM, MOURNING, AND UTOPIA (top)

Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Registrations Numbers: (A) 288619 (B) 040008
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640

COL 720 - POLITICS OF 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE (top)

Professor Henry Sussman
Registration Numbers (A) 070640 (B) 260924
Thursday 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

I suspect that we'll never overcome the difficulty and complexity of the ultimate question driving this course: What is the relation between politics and literature? On first glance, this issue should not be daunting; in their referential dimension, works of literature can hardly avoid the political and ideological formations comprising a segment of their overall cultural surround. But a number of ancillary questions, all impenetrable, emerge from this simple relationship of mutual encompassing or implication. What is the relationship between political components of the artwork and other elements? What is the relationships between literary expression and prevailing ideologies? Confirmation? Reduction? Cooption? Translation? Allegory? Transference? Distortion? Dissimulation? The evasion of censorship? An intimate tango that breaks apart at a certain point? Is close cultural exegesis, in its mindfulness and appeal to thought, political in its own right? If so, how?

As we mutually process a sequence of readings held together by explicitly systematic attempts (whether in philosophy, socio-cultural criticism, psychology, or literature) to delineate and dramatize the role of the political, we need to keep our eyes on that broader prize: the meditation into the rapport between the political and the literary. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, socio-political and administrative as well as cultural, the 19 th century was the heyday of systematic inquiries and efforts to open the gates of knowledge and illumination, and it seems that German culture had geared itself up as systematically as any other to undertake this labor on a broadband of frequencies. The course will not be long underway before we take up the inevitable interconnection between the inquiry into the political dimensions of literature and systems of theory. (We presuppose to some degree that political aspirations entail systematic dimensions and spheres of endeavor.)

In this brief context, the program of readings will perhaps make sense: Marxian readings indicative both of the earlier parameters of the project and its mature delivery (Capital, I); Derrida's surprisingly sentimental evocation of Marx as an ongoing site of critique, and as an instance of the abyssal scene of representation, in Specters of Marx; extension of Marxian inquiries into value, labor, and reproduction made by Baudrillard and Laclau. The counterthrust of the course consists in the literary instances serving as an arena for the relevance of the other readings. In this latter respect, Joyce's Ulysses, Brecht's drama (as exemplified by The Threepenny Opera and St. Joan of the Stockyards) and Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz rush to the fore, as does Kafka's Amerika (Der Verschollene) the overarching inquiry into the political.

We will be dealing as well with the status of language as a political issue. This is pivotal in approaching Irish literature as well as in analyzing hotspots in the world that have numbered Quebec and the Mideast.

Requirements: Students will be expected to produce the standard seminar essay; they will be encouraged to apply their thoughts to tangible political situations and discourses.


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	:: Spring 2005 - Graduate Courses
Graduate Undergraduate Course Archive	COL 721 - Philosophy and Religion COL 719 - Imagining the Nation: Early Moderity in Britain, 1688-1742 COL 716 - Borges & Philosophy COL 715 - The Modern Lyric COL 717 - Beyond Humanism and Anti-Humanism: Agamben, Derrida, Heidegger COL 718 - Modernism, Mourning, and Utopia COL 720 - Politics of 20th-Century Literature and Language COL 721 - PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION (top) Professor Rodolphe Gasché Registration Numbers: (A) 257770 (B) 407443 Tuesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640 Focusing mainly on two works by the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka - Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History and Plato and Europe - as well as on Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death , we will be concerned with the role of religion in Western philosophical thought. Our guiding question will be: is possible to dissociate Western philosophy (and by extension also of Europe whose origin is Greek, radically from the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic heritage in Europe as many philosophers in the phenomenological tradition have held. Requirements: term paper (12-15 pages) COL 719 - IMAGINING THE NATION: EARLY MODERITY IN BRITAIN, 1688-1742 (top) Professor Shaun Irlam Registration Numbers: (A) 340589 (B) 495507 Tuesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640 Through a synthesis of literary, theoretical, historical and political texts, we shall read some of the phantasmatic modes of early eighteenth-century English society, arguably the first society in history to undergo what has come to be recognized as capitalist modernity; as Tom Nairn comments in The Break-Up of Britain , The most important single aspect of the United Kingdom state is its developmental priority. It was the first state-form of an industrialized nation. Covering approximately the period from the Glorious Revolution (1688) to the end of the Walpole administration (1742), we shall examine some of the processes involved in synthesizing this modern nation-state. In particular, through selected writings of Defoe, Locke, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Addison and Steele, Thomson, Young and others, the course will attempt to lay hold of the phantasmatic and imaginary modellings of the emergent society. This will oblige us to focus on the function of Credit and the modalities of a credit-consciousness, the creation of the National Debt as an instrument of power and source of national anxiety, and contemporary theories of the Imagination In 1697, Defoe diagnoses a symptomatic dilemma when he remarks on the Despicable Title of a Projector but then, assimilating Inventions and Projections, notes, too, the general Projecting Humour of the Nation ( Essay on Projects ). We shall attempt to determine what modes of subjectivity and temporality such a credit-based and future-mortgaged society was likely to require, and what forms of imagined community were or became available to conceive it. In addition, it will be imperative for us to attend to the phantasmatic modellings of Britain's place as a nation within the international arena as it set about consolidating what was to become the First British Empire, which endured until 1776. Again, the role of the Imagination was central to mediating between exoticist fantasies and geo-political realities. Texts: Addison & Steele, The Spectator (selections); Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Review (selections), The True-Born Englishman, Moll Flanders, Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain; John Gay, Trivia; John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government; Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters; Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest; Rape of the Lock; Moral Essays ; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels. COL 716 - BORGES & PHILOSOPHY (top) Professor David Johnson Registration Numbers: (A) 208679 (B) 075167 Wednesday, 3:30-6:10; Clemens 640 In this seminar we will explore Jorge Luis Borges' prose writings in relation to philosophy. Our interest is not to decide whether or not Borges or the Borgesian text should be called either philosophy or literature; indeed, our point of departure is that Borges practices a particular kind of thinking, one that is both rigorous and, in its remarkable precision, impossible to discipline. That is, it is perhaps neither philosophy nor literature. We will read Borges alongside but also in the interstices of important philosophers and fundamental philosophical problems, including the work of Paul, Locke, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, Nancy, and Derrida (among others) and questions of time, identity, the name of god, and the political (among others). The seminar will conclude with a one-day symposium on Borges and philosophy. Requirements: presentation (Ph.D. students), and seminar paper (15-25 pages) COL 715 - THE MODERN LYRIC (top) Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Registration Numbers: (A) 178376 (B) 224873 Monday, 3:30-6:10; 640 Clemens This seminar will focus on several modern European poets and the theories of language that they explicitly or implicitly generated. We will address the notions of hermeticism and negativity with which modern poetry is associated, and which translate into various theorizations of absence, inversion, turning, and disfiguration in modern lyric theory. The emphasis will be primarily on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Rilke, but figures such as Mallarmé, Valéry, Yeats, and Seferis will be integrated in our study. Other readings may include essays by Heidegger, Blanchot, and Hans-Jost Frey. Requirements: Presentation and a term paper COL 717 - BEYOND HUMANISM AND ANTI-HUMANISM: AGAMBEN, DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER (top) Professor Krzysztof Ziarek Registration Numbers:(A) 150227 (B) 375739 Monday 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 Working with texts by Heidegger, Agamben, and Derrida, we will examine in this course the possibility of rethinking the human: beyond the debates about humanism and anti-humanism. While Heidegger's notion of Dasein is often discussed in terms of the critiques of the subject in modernity, it is less frequently seen as a critique of the very notion of the human, as Letter on Humanism implies. Heidegger's recasting of the human being into Dasein will serve as the reference point of the course. It will allow us to explore the possibility of thinking the human otherwise than in terms of humanism, and to see how this critique reformulates the relations between the human, the world, the animal, the thing, and thinking. The reformulation of these relations also entails a rethinking of alterity, so that it is no longer restricted to the notion of a human other. The reading list will include: Agamben's The Open, Derrida's Differance and The Ends of Man, and a series of texts by Heidegger: sections from Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy, and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, "Letter on Humanism," "...Poetically Man Dwells...", "The Thing." COL 718 - MODERNISM, MOURNING, AND UTOPIA (top) Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek Registrations Numbers: (A) 288619 (B) 040008 Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640 COL 720 - POLITICS OF 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE (top) Professor Henry Sussman Registration Numbers (A) 070640 (B) 260924 Thursday 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 I suspect that we'll never overcome the difficulty and complexity of the ultimate question driving this course: What is the relation between politics and literature? On first glance, this issue should not be daunting; in their referential dimension, works of literature can hardly avoid the political and ideological formations comprising a segment of their overall cultural surround. But a number of ancillary questions, all impenetrable, emerge from this simple relationship of mutual encompassing or implication. What is the relationship between political components of the artwork and other elements? What is the relationships between literary expression and prevailing ideologies? Confirmation? Reduction? Cooption? Translation? Allegory? Transference? Distortion? Dissimulation? The evasion of censorship? An intimate tango that breaks apart at a certain point? Is close cultural exegesis, in its mindfulness and appeal to thought, political in its own right? If so, how? As we mutually process a sequence of readings held together by explicitly systematic attempts (whether in philosophy, socio-cultural criticism, psychology, or literature) to delineate and dramatize the role of the political, we need to keep our eyes on that broader prize: the meditation into the rapport between the political and the literary. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, socio-political and administrative as well as cultural, the 19 th century was the heyday of systematic inquiries and efforts to open the gates of knowledge and illumination, and it seems that German culture had geared itself up as systematically as any other to undertake this labor on a broadband of frequencies. The course will not be long underway before we take up the inevitable interconnection between the inquiry into the political dimensions of literature and systems of theory. (We presuppose to some degree that political aspirations entail systematic dimensions and spheres of endeavor.) In this brief context, the program of readings will perhaps make sense: Marxian readings indicative both of the earlier parameters of the project and its mature delivery (Capital, I); Derrida's surprisingly sentimental evocation of Marx as an ongoing site of critique, and as an instance of the abyssal scene of representation, in Specters of Marx; extension of Marxian inquiries into value, labor, and reproduction made by Baudrillard and Laclau. The counterthrust of the course consists in the literary instances serving as an arena for the relevance of the other readings. In this latter respect, Joyce's Ulysses, Brecht's drama (as exemplified by The Threepenny Opera and St. Joan of the Stockyards) and Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz rush to the fore, as does Kafka's Amerika (Der Verschollene) the overarching inquiry into the political. We will be dealing as well with the status of language as a political issue. This is pivotal in approaching Irish literature as well as in analyzing hotspots in the world that have numbered Quebec and the Mideast. Requirements: Students will be expected to produce the standard seminar essay; they will be encouraged to apply their thoughts to tangible political situations and discourses.
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	Department of Comparative Literature \| 638 Clemens Hall \| Buffalo, NY 14260-4610 Telephone: 716.645.2066 \| Fax: 716.645.5979 \| Email: complit@buffalo.edu © College of Arts and Sciences 2005. All rights reserved. This website is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences web team. Inquiries or comments about this website should be directed to the College of Arts and Sciences webmaster.