University Registration Guidelines Website: http://src.buffalo.edu
March 21, 2008 - Registration begins for Graduate and Professional Schools
April 21, 2008 - Department Force Registrations: Independent Studies, Thesis Guidance, Supervised Readings
COL 710: On Truth-Telling: Plato's Apology and Euripides' The Bacchae
COL 711: Specters of Rwanda, Representing Postcolonial Genocide
COL 712: On Sovereignty, Part 1: Foucault & Agamben
COL
713: Art & Globallization
COL 714: Aesthetic Theory/Experimental Women's Poetry
COL 715: Walter Benjamin and French Literary Modernity
COL 716: Kant's Ethics
PHI 566: Medieval Philosophy
Other Courses
Degree Requirements
COL 710: On Truth-Telling: Plato's Apology and Euripides' The Bacchae (top)
Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Monday, 3:30 – 6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
Registration Numbers: SEM (A) 361835; REC (B) 485118
The seminar concentrates on one Platonic dialogue and one Euripidean tragedy in view of the question of truth-telling [parrhesia]. In both cases truth-telling occurs as a response to charges of atheism and blasphemy, and in both cases the truth-teller resorts to reason. We will address the relation of truth-telling to power, and the manner in which both texts dramatize the scene of a certain passage: the passage of truth-claims from religion to philosophy. In addition, we will read Foucault’s Fearless Speech, which comprises his lectures on parrhesia.
COL 711: Specters of Rwanda, Representing Postcolonial Genocide (top)
Professor Shaun Irlam
Thursday, 12:30 – 3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
Registration Numbers: SEM (A) 000839; REC (B) 029229
On April 6, 1994, a plane crashed into the grounds of the Presidential palace in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, as it approached the airport. The plane had been shot out of the sky by assailants whose identity still remains unknown. On board was the President of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana; he died in his own garden. This assassination was the decisive event that pulled the trigger on the Rwandan genocide -- 100 frenzied days of bloody slaughter that engulfed the nation and left an estimated 800,000 to 1,000 000 Tutsi citizens and Hutu moderates dead. It was the swiftest and deadliest collapse of any postcolonial state in Africa, but the genesis of this small nation’s troubles start with Genesis and the tribe of Ham….
Through a careful selection of the accumulating literature of testimonies, memoirs, histories, fiction, and films about the Rwandan genocide, this course seeks to understand this dark heart of Africa, the ancient ghosts that curse it and the grim lessons it yields that ought to haunt us still. The demons of ethnicity and the revenants of genocide teach us unforgettable lessons about the challenges and pitfalls facing the postcolonial state.
The course will give us an opportunity to examine those nervous conditions we call postcolonial states and to ask why postcolonial theory seems rather ill-equipped to address violent conflict and human rights in contemporary postcolonial nations. We shall also explore the politics of representation and veracity raised by discourses of witness and testimony and also analyse the broader challenges of comprehending and representing histories of trauma through various forms of cultural and creative expression associated with the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Though not a prerequisite, any facility with French will be an advantage.
Documents and media for the course will be selected from the following~
Movies:
Documentaries
Rwandan Nightmare; Forsaken Cries;
Arusha Tapes; Shake Hands with the Devil;
A Republic Gone Mad: 1895-1995;
Gacaca: Living together again in Rwanda?
Feature films
100 Days
Hotel Rwanda
Sometimes in April
Sunday in Kigali
Beyond the Gates
Primary texts to be selected from
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil
Diop, Murambi: the Book of Bones
Courtemanche, Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
Gourevitch, We are Writing to Inform that Tomorrow
Hatzfeld, Machete Season
~~~ Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide--The Survivors Speak
Keane, Season of Blood
Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes
Mamdani,When Victims Become Killers
Monénembo, Tierno. The Oldest Orphan
Tadjo, Veronique. Shadow of Imana
Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter
Secondary Texts:
Agamben, Homo Sacer
Cohen, States of Denial
Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Tetsimony
Des Forges, Alison. Leave None to Tell the Story (selections)
Lacapra, History in Transit
Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition
Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others
COL 712: On Sovereignty, Part 1: Foucault & Agamben (top)
Professor David E. Johnson
Tuesday, 3:30 – 6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
Registration Numbers: SEM (A) 042828; REC (B) 060182
We will begin with Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended” and then proceed to Agamben’s Homo Sacer, State of Exception, Remnants of Auschwitz, Means Without Ends. Time permitting we will read further in the Agamben archive. We will begin by marking out Foucault’s determination of the shift from sovereignty to biopolitics. From here we will follow Agamben’s understanding of the “state of exception” and his conception of sovereignty. We will be concerned with Agamben’s mining of Aristotle’s distinction between actuality and potentiality. We will also attempt to assess both Foucault’s and Agamben’s respective interpretations of Hobbes.
COL 713: Art & Globalization (top)
Professor Krzysztof Ziarek
Wednesday, 3:30 – 6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
Registration Numbers: SEM (A) 227116; REC (B) 037489
The course will address the role and significance of art in the context of globalization. Discourses of globalization tend to focus predominantly on social, economic, and political issues, and when they reflect on contemporary culture, the emphasis falls on either the issues of difference and multiculturalism, on local specificity as a practice of resistance to global culture, or else on the importance of technology and information to contemporary art. Yet what exactly is the relation between technology and art today? Do the apparently conflicting discourses of the “local” and the “global” account sufficiently for the stakes of art in the age of globalization? To help us examine these issues, we will look at several different artistic practices in the 20th and 21st centuries. Marinetti’s Futurist texts will serve the first examples of a globally understood avant-garde artistic practice. In the context of the 20th century avant-garde, we will also examine the work of Aragon, Schwitters, and Tzara. More contemporary artists will likely include Eduardo Kac, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Bill Viola, and Knowbotic Research. We will also read Myung Mi Kim’s bilingual poetry and Saramago’s novel The Cave, a literary exploration of the consequences of globalization. The reading list will include texts by Heidegger, Marcuse, Nancy, and Ranciere, as well as essays on information arts and new media.
COL 714: Aesthetic Theory/Experimental Women's Poetry (top)
Team Taught by:
Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Professor Myung Mi Kim
Wednesday, 12:30 – 3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
Registration Numbers: SEM (A) 498817; REC (B) 247096
This course stages an untimely and experimental encounter between contemporary American women poets and Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Certainly, one of the dimensions of such untimeliness is a historical and cultural disjunction between “Aesthetic Theory”-- a text written in the 60s after Adorno’s departure from America and retrospectively oriented toward European modernism-- and the post-60s experimental American poetry by women. Yet this historical discrepancy confronts us with a more crucial modality of “untimeliness” associated with the occurrence of the artistic or philosophical work: in what sense does the work’s “not belonging” to the “time” of its production enable the very condition of critique, counter-memory and invention?
The issue of temporality is only one aspect of the fundamental question this seminar wants to address; namely, the question about the relation between poetic practice and philosophical aesthetics and the different modes of interpretations each of these discursive formations demands. We believe that this question can be best addressed dialogically; through the engagements between poets and critics–that is one of the reasons we are team-teaching this seminar. We also hope that this encounter will be
unsettling and transformative, that is, that it will open new possibilities of reading aesthetic theory and poetic praxis. Some of the issues we would like to address as the starting point for our discussions are: the practice of immanent critique; the changing stakes of literary experiment and its relation to gender politics and sexuality; the materiality of the work of art, its paradoxical “thing in itself” status and the materiality of embodiment; new possibilities, limitations, and genders of lyrical subjectivity; the aesthetic categories of intensity, constellation and dynamic construction; determinate indetermincy; and finally, the tension between the work of mourning and the work of transformation. We will address these questions against a general background of feminist theory and poetics. The last caveat–the above ‘list’ is by no means exhaustive; on the contrary, we anticipate that other surprising questions will emerge during our discussions as we confront the singularity of the poetic texts and the specificity of Adorno’s prose.
Our readings will include:
-selections from Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory” and “Notes to Literature”;
-selections of poetry by Norma Cole,Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Susan
Howe,Erica Hunt, Haryette Mullen, Leslie Scalapino, and Hannah Weiner,
among others.
Requirements include a seminar research paper, class presentations, participation in class discussion
COL 715: WALTER BENJAMIN AND FRENCH LITERARY MODERNITY (top)
`Professor Henry Sussman
Tuesday, 6:30 - 9:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
Registration Numbers: SEM (A) 473794; REC (B) 068475
Employing Walter Benjamin’s consummate collection of resources on the Second Empire as a framework and backdrop—his The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk)—the course will examine several key moments of 19th and 20th century French literature as embodiments and performances of cultural modernity. Specifically, we will be examining the poetry and art criticism of Charles Baudelaire, exemplary instances of the French 19th-century novel, Proust, Surrealism, and the discourse and emerging medium of cinema.
Materials will be available in French and English; every effort will be made to accommodate the needs and interests of students of French and French speakers.
While we will carefully explore works in all five categories above during class, in the interest of focus, students will be encouraged to specialize in one or at most two of them. Among the literary selections most likely to be in the syllabus is a healthy selection of the following:
--Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal
--Balzac, Le peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin)
--Hugo, Quatre-vingt treize (Ninety-three)
--Zola, Nana
--Proust, Du côté du chez Swann (Swann’s Way)
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (In a Budding Grove)
--Aragon, Le paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant)
--Breton, Nadja
--Surrealist Anthology, “Il y aura une fois”
--Bazin, What is Cinema?, Vol I & one or two indispensable film-screenings
The main piece of coursework will be a standard term paper, in which students will be also encouraged to follow Benjamin’s and the surrealists’ initiatives in exploring typographical formats and possibilities for text-design. In the interest of the best traditions of seminars, there will be a class presentation, whose primary purpose is the sharing of ideas and responses to the material. These are best interspersed throughout the semester.
COL 716: Kant's Ethics (top)
Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Tuesday, 12:30 – 3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
Registration Numbers: SEM (A) 198109; REC (B) 184998
Kant's ethical writing, in particular, "The Critique of Practical Reason," as well as sections from "The Metaphysics of Morals," will be closely read in this seminar. The question, we will pursue, concerns Kant's arguments for a purely formal ethics, his critique of content based, or material ethics, and whether one excludes the other. In this context we will also examine several passages from Max Scheler's "Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values."
PHI 566: Medieval Philosophy
Professor Jorge Gracia
Wednesday, 5:00-6:50pm, Park Hall 141
Registration Number: 453029
This course will concentrate on three issues that were at the core of medieval philosophy: the problem of universals, the problem of individuation, and the problem posed by the relation between faith and reason in knowledge. Other problems, such as the nature of freewill and determinism and the arguments for the existence of God, might also be introduced, but only to illustrate positions taken by authors with respect to the central problems discussed in the course. Readings will be from the central figures in medieval philosophy: Abelard, Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez. Most readings will be from primary sources and will require attention and care because of the technical vocabulary, but they will be relatively brief. There will not be student presentations, but students are expected to participate actively in class discussion. A problems approach to the historical materials will be used to help students acquire both historical and philosophical understandings. Students will have two choices for written work: one take-home exam and one short paper, or two take-home exams.
All sections with individual registration numbers for the COL Independent Studies, Supervised Readings, Thesis Guidance courses are listed on the Student Response Center website:
src@buffalo.edu
OTHER COURSES (top)
COL 600 Independent Study (1 thru
12 credit hours)
COL 650 Supervised Readings (1 thru 6 credit hours)
COL 700 Thesis Guidance (1 thru 16 credit hours)
Courses 600, 650, 700 first require approval from professors, then email COL Graduate Secretary, Mary Ann Carrick (mdcarr@buffalo.edu) to register through the department.
Registration numbers are instructor-specific, COL Graduate Faculty and Associate Faculty have individual course sections.
For University policies and procedures regarding registration dates and avoiding late fees, please check the University Student Response Center website: http://src.buffalo.edu
Comparative Literature Degree Requirements
The Undergraduate Minor (18 Credits)
- COL 301 and 302
- Up to five additional courses
- Two courses may be course you take toward your major
The Undergraduate Major (45 credits; varies)
All Comparative Literature Majors are self-designed and must be approved by
the College of Arts and Sciences Special Major Advisor, as well as by two faculty
advisors from the COL Department. If you are interested in designing a Comparative
Literature Special Major, please consult the COL Director of Undergraduate Studies.
The M.A. (36 credits)
- 27 Credits (9 courses) Intensive (A) Seminars
- 3 Credits of extensive (B) Seminar or Independent Study
- 6 credits Thesis Guidance
- Master's Thesis (approximately 50 -100pages)
The Ph.D. (72 Credits)
- 30 Credits (10 courses) Intensive (A) Seminars
- Orals Examination (upon completion, students can apply for the M.A.)
- Dissertation (approximately 150-300 pages)
- Dissertation Defense
The above information is provided as a guide. Requirements may vary. Please see the
Department Director of Graduate Studies, the Director of Undergraduate Studies, or
your advisor for information tailored to your situation.
