COMPARATIVE LITERATURE CORE PROGRAM | 2012-2013
Most Comparative Literature courses are taught at the Centre for Comparative Literature, Isabel Bader Theatre, 3rd floor, Linda Hutcheon Seminar Room (BT309).
FALL TERM
COL 1000H FACULTY SEMINAR: THE BASIS OF COMPARISON
Coordinator: Victor Li
Time: Fall Term, Fridays, 2-4:30
This course is a general introduction to the field of comparative literature, to contemporary theory, and to modern approaches to literary texts. It involves the participation of Comparative Literature faculty, discussing their experience comparing different literatures or researching across disciplines or across media. It is taken by all MA and all first-year PhD students and is meant to provide guidance for more advanced work in specific critical domains.
Evaluation:
Class Participation: 15% (includes attendance)
Weekly response papers: 35% (one double-spaced page every week; submitted every week but then 10 of them resubmitted as a file at the end)
Essay: 50% (3000 words, due date to be announced).
The paper should address either an issue involving comparison that came up during the course or the comparative implications of the student’s own research project. The second half of each class will involve the participation of Comparative Literature faculty.
COL 5018H GENDER, AGENCY, AND LIFE WRITING
Instructor: B. Havercroft
Time: Fall term, Tuesdays, 3-5
In this course, we will focus on issues that are situated at the intersection of four major trends in contemporary feminist literary studies : 1) the unprecedented interest in autobiographical writings, sparked by a profusion of the actual publication of such texts and by the development of a large body of criticism dealing with the numerous forms of life writing; 2) the rapid evolution of specifically feminist theories of autobiography (Gilmore, Smith, Watson) over the past twenty years; 3) current feminist theories of agency and subjectivity (Butler, Druxes, Mann); 4) the recent theoretical inquiry into the category of gender (Butler, Robinson, Scott), especially as it is represented in the literary text.
The seminar will begin with a critical study and problematization of the principal concepts outlined in these four theoretical groupings. We will then proceed with close readings of several works of contemporary life writing, drawn from the French, Québécois and German literary contexts, emphasizing the diverse textual strategies by which female autobiographical subjects are constructed and, in turn, make a claim to agency. In many instances, textual subjects merge both fact and fiction in an effort to become subjects-in-process, subjects with multiple facets that challenge Eurocentric theories of the supposedly unified, sovereign autobiographical subject (Gusdorf ), while juxtaposing the personal, the political and the social in their texts. Notions such as the relational self, the writing of trauma and illness, performativity in autobiographical writing, the « death » of the subject and the author, and the problematics of memory (personal, historical, cultural, etc.) will be examined. While the focus will be on various forms of women’s life writing, we will also analyze one male author’s AIDS diary, not simply to further investigate the gendered basis of all writing, but also to examine the particular forms of agency mobilized in autobiographical accounts of illness.
PRIMARY TEXTS
Brossard, Nicole. Journal intime ou voilà donc un manuscrit (Montréal : Les Herbes Rouges, 1998 [1984]).
Desautels, Denise. Ce fauve, le Bonheur (Montréal : L’Hexagone, 1998).
de Duve, Pascal. Cargo vie (Paris : Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, Le livre de poche, 1993).
Ernaux, Annie. La Honte (Paris : Gallimard, 1997). (English translation : Shame).
Wolf, Christa. Kindheitsmuster (Berlin/Weimar : Aufbau Verlag, 1976). (English translation : Patterns of Childhood).
THEORETICAL READINGS
A series of complete bibliographies dealing with the various different theories to be analyzed in this course will be distributed at the first meeting of the seminar. Students are advised to prepare for the course by doing some preliminary readings:
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York : Routledge, 1990).
———. Bodies That Matter : On the Discursive Limits of « Sex » (New York : Routledge, 1993).
———. Excitable Speech : A Politics of the Performative (New York : Routledge, 1997).
Druxes, Helga. Resisting Bodies : The Negociation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction (Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 1996).
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1999).
Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics : A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1994).
Gusdorf, Georges. « Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie », in Günter Reichenkron and Erich Haase (eds.), Formen der Selbstdarstellung : Analekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbstporträts (Berlin : Duncker and Humblot, 1956) : 105-123. (English translation in James Olney, 1980).
Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique (nouvelle edition augmentée) (Paris : Seuil, 1996 [1975]).
Mann, Patricia. Micro-Politics : Agency in a Postfeminist Era (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Olney, James (ed.). Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography : Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1987).
——. « Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance », a/b : Auto/Biography Studies, Vol. 10, no. 1 (spring 1995) : 17-33.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (eds.). Women, Autobiography, Theory : A Reader (Madison : The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
Watson, Julia. « Toward An Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography », in Robert Folkenflik (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography : Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1993) : 57-79.
Evaluation:
Oral presentation: 30%
Research paper: 60%
Participation: 10%
COL 5037H MAGIC PRAGUE-QUESTIONS OF LITERARY CITYSCAPES
Instructor: V. Ambros
Time: Fall term, Wednesdays, 10-12
This class will examine a variety of theoretical approaches to literary cityscapes and apply them to the myth of Magic Prague as launched by A. Ripellino and others and questioned by P. Demetz. A number of aspects connected with Prague will be studied based on texts by Guillaume Apollinaire, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin, Jaroslav Hašek, Bohumil Hrabal, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Readings in English and the original.
RECOMMENDED READING
Barthes, Roland “Semiology and Urbanism” in The Semiotic Challenge. Richard Howard (trans.) New York: Hill and Wang, 1988 <1985>: 191-201.
Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX Jahrhunderts” Illuminationen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977: 170-184.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. London: Picador, 1979.
Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold. Scenes from the Life of a European City. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.
Ellul, Jacques. The Meaning of the City. Grand Rapids Mich: Eerdmans, 1970.
Gelley, Alexander. “City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism.” In Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
Ripellino, Angelo Mario. Magic Prague. Trans. David Newton Marinelli. Ed. M.H.Heim. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia. A Czech History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Squier, Susan Merill. Women Writers and the City. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984
Evaluation:
Oral presentation (20 minutes): 30%
Research paper (20 pages): 60%
Participation: 10%
COL 5044H DISPLACEMENTS: A JOURNEY FROM PETERSBURG TO LOS ANGELES
Instructor: T. Lahusen
Time: Fall term, Tuesdays, 1-3
Starting with the reading of Alexander Radishchev’s A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790) and ending with the discussion of recent theoretical works on place, space, and cultural geography, focusing on Los Angeles and other contemporary polycentric and fragmented urban spaces, the course examines the notion of “displacement,” understood as processes of change in and between places of dwelling, production, and exchange through works of fiction, film, literary/cultural theory, and history. Other places to be visited in our readings, viewings, and discussions are Moscow and Komsomolsk-on Amur, Harbin (China) and Hong Kong, Paris and Detroit.
Readings include: Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge and “Of Other Spaces;” Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project; David Harvey, Between Space and Time; James Scott, Seeing Like a State; Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies; as well as Russian, Chinese, French, and American works of fiction.
Evaluation:
The grade is based on class participation (10%) presentations (25%), reaction papers (25%), and a final research paper (40%).
COL 5056H AUTOBIOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAPHY, NARRATIVITY
Instructor: J. LeBlanc
Time: Fall term, Wednesdays, 12-2
This course will examine the fascinating interrelationships between photographic images and text, portraits and self-portraits, autobiography and biography. An examination of the complementarities and antipathies between photographs and autobiographical narratives will not only deepen our understanding of the complex artifactuality of these apparently referential media, but also put life-writing in a revealing new light. Photographs may serve to document autobiographical texts, to strengthen their rhetorical value, to enhance their truth status and to complement their political reliability. However, as the literary texts studied in this course will show, the introduction of photographic images within specific autobiographical narratives also serves to complexify and confound the historiographic and referential status of these texts. The study of theoretical texts pertaining to autobiography, biography, photography and the relationship between words and images will serve as a basis for our analysis of Barthes, Brossard, Ondaatje and Shields’s autobiographical narratives.
Primary Texts:
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. (English translation)
—. Camera Lucida.
Brossard, Nicole. Mauve Desert.
Duras, M. L’Amant. (English translation) and cinematographic adaptation.
Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family.
—. Billy the Kid.
Theoretical Texts:
* A more detailed theoretical bibliography will be provided.
- Adams, Timothy D. Light Writing and Life Writing. Photography in Autobiography. The University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
- Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981.
- Dubois, Philippe. L’ Acte photographique. Paris: Nathan, 1990.
- Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
- Mitchell, W.J.T. The Languages of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Evaluation: TBA
COL 5099H DISCOURSE AND ICONOGRAPHY OF REVOLUTION
Instructor: M. Nyquist
Time: Fall term, Mondays, 11-2
In this course we will examine literature and visual materials produced in the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century and the American, French and Haitian revolutions of the later eighteenth century. To make this manageable, we will focus on continuities in the appropriation of classical Greek and Roman antityranny ideology and iconography. The following questions will be taken up: How is the political “slavery” of European citizens represented? What connections does this “slavery” have with the abduction, trafficking and enslavement of Africans in the transatlantic triangle? How is revolutionary violence represented? What are the various tyrannies that revolutionary activity is meant to overthrow? Texts will include Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Defense of the English People; Tracts by Levellers, Diggers, et al; Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois; Olympe de Gouges, L’ésclavage des noirs, Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, von Kleist, “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo,” historical documents relating to the French and Haitian Revolutions, and Aimé Césaire, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe.
Evaluation: Evaluation will be based on seminar facilitations (30%) and participation (20%), one shorter (20%) and one longer (30%) essay.
COL 5100H THE LATE BARTHES: NEUTRAL, MOURNING, AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Instructor: J. Ricco
Time: Fall term, Thursdays, 12-2
This seminar examines some of the principal themes in the work of Roland Barthes over what were to be the last three years of his life. Prompted and enabled by the recent publication and translation of his lecture courses at the College de France (in particular The Neutral; and The Preparation of the Novel), and the mourning diary that he kept in the wake of his mother’s death, the course seeks to understand the central importance of the notion of the neutral, the experience of mourning, the evidence of photography, and the notations on homosexual erotics in Barthes’ writing and teaching from his Inaugural Lecture at the College on January 7, 1977 to his seminal book on photography, Camera Lucida. Other texts by Barthes that we will discuss include: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes; and Incidents. In addition, we will read critical works on Barthes by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, D.A. Miller, Diana Knight, Eduardo Cadava, Geoffrey Batchen and others.
Evaluation:
1. Preparation for, and participation in, weekly seminar meetings (10%).
2. Leading 1 class discussion of reading assignment (10%).
3. Weekly critical response papers (15%),
4. Presentation of Research Project (15%).
5. Research paper: approx. 20-25 pages (5,000-6,500 words); fully annotated with bibliography, (50%).
COL 5103H THE BRECHTIAN LEGACY: SIGN, GESTUS AND FEMINIST THEORY
Instructor: P. Kleber
Time: Fall term, Wednesdays, 2-4
The main focus of the course will be the study of Bertolt Brecht’s theory and practice and their relationship to theatre semiotics and feminist theory. We will investigate if Brecht can be seen as one of the first semioticians of theatre and how valid Brecht’s theatre is as a model for “ways of feminist seeing”.
The course will deal with the following tasks:
1.To study Brecht’s theory and put it into a historical context.
2. To examine the implementation of Brecht’s theory on stage as exemplified by the 1957 mise en scène of The Good Person of Szechwan, directed by Benno Besson at the BE. How are Brecht’s theoretical thoughts transferred to the stage? We will have a close look at the model book of this production.
3. To investigate the adequacy of a semiotic approach of analyzing a production.
4. To study the different streams of feminist theatre studies;
5. To test feminist theories as applied to the following Brecht’s plays: Mother Courage, The Mother and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
6. To relate semiotics and feminist theories to Brecht’s theory.
Evaluation:
Class seminars 30%
Short essay 20 %
Research essay 35%
Class participation 15%
JLA 1456H JAPAN AS SEEN BY?: REFERENCE, APPARATUS, OPERATION
Instructor: A. Sakaki
Time: Fall term, Thursdays, 2-4
This course is designed for those who are interested in questioning the premises and ramifications of cross cultural analysis, and in taking “Japan” as a point of significance in the process of inquiry. Whether or not previously exposed to Japanese studies, enrolled participants are expected to contribute to discussions in the classroom and/or on the bulletin board from their own viewpoints, and to reflect upon their respective intellectual positions in reading/writing on the “foreign” or “one’s own” culture. No preceding knowledge
of Japanese language, literature, or history is required. All the required readings are available in English, and discussions are conducted in English.
Most of the sessions consist of both primary and theoretical readings that are supposed to help define the focus and context of discussion. The focal points are selected in order to explore the following topics: travelogue (written in the language of the origin, destination, or both (involving translation)), trade, trans-lingual practices, transposition of humans (e.g., concentration camps), trans-racial relationship/marriage, transvestism played upon the axis of ethnicity, and transgression of sexual norms. The authors of primary
readings (mostly fiction, some plays) are neither Japanologists nor Japanese citizens (though there are authors who are in part or entirely of Japanese ancestry), and, perhaps more importantly, did not write specifically for those who hold a particular interest in knowing about Japan. They did not write in order to educate their readers on Japan or promote an interest in Japan. Nor did they write in Japanese. Instead, some of them wrote in French, others, in English–their respective primary languages which happen to be hegemonic languages of world-wide currency. Our task here is not to determine the level of empirical knowledge that each author possessed prior to writing his/her work that significantly involves “Japan” as they portray it, but to ask what effects “Japan” creates in order to contribute to the production and reception of their works. The question will then lead us also to self-inquiry: Why study “Japan”?
REQUIRED TEXTS
Theoretical readings will be made available in a course packet.
- Barthes, Roland. The Empire of Signs. 1970. Trans. Richard Howard Noonday, 1982.
- Mamet, David. The Spanish Prisoner. In The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy: Two Screenplays. 1996. Vintage, 1999. 3-104.
- Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats. Penguin, 1998.
-Patrick, John. The Teahouse of the August Moon. Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1957.
- Findley, Timothy. The Telling of Lies. Penguin, 1986.
- Mitchell, David. Number 9 Dream. London: Sceptre, 2001.
- Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima Mon Amour. Grove Press, 1961.
- Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. Penguin, 1986.
- Carey, Peter. Wrong about Japan: A Father’s Journey with His Son. Random House Canada, 2005.
Evaluation:
Attendance from Week 2 on (10 sessions) 20%
Classroom and bulletin board discussions 30%
One presentation on a theoretical reading 10%
Two reviews (700-1000 words based upon your choice of two class sessions; due one week after the respective dates chosen) 20%
Term Paper (4000-6000 words; inclusive of the notes and bibliography) 20%
JGC1085H DERRIDA, THE GERMAN, THE JEW
Instructor: W. Goetschel
Time: TBA
Location : TBA Waiting for info from the German Department.
This course addresses Derrida’s philosophical project by exploring the way in which his discussion of German Jewish literature and thought informs his project. The work of philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, critics such as Scholem, and Freud but also literary figures such as Kafka and Celan play a central role in Derrida. Readings include Interpretations at War, Before the Law, Shibboleth, Tours de Babel, Monolingualism, Eyes of the Volcano, Archive Fever, Gift of Death, Abraham, the Other. The course contextualizes Derrida’s thought in the context of his critical engagement with German thought and literature, particularly with German Jewish authors that play a critical role as interlocutors for Derrida. The course seeks to concentrate on the transnational significance of German theory and literature in the context of current critical thought and explores how Derrida can become a crucial ally in theorizing texts and concerns by German and specifically German Jewish authors in a wider context.
Evaluation:
Attendance and participation 10%
Presentation 15%
Term Paper 75%
COL 5106H THE LANGUAGE OF ORIGINS
Instructor: I. Balfour
Time: Fall term, Tuesdays, 11-1
This course addresses a wide range of texts, fictional and non-fictional, that focus on the matter of origins during the Enlightenment and Romanticism and since. Authors may include Defoe, Rousseau, Diderot, Mary Shelley, Freud, and Derrida. The “language of origins” refers here to discourses about origins of all kinds (humanity, society, property, language, self, etc.) but especially to theories of the origins of language per se. Both the Enlightenment and Romanticism focused on origins when organizing the very protocols on which writing was based. Imagining and arguing about origins had profound consequences for thinking and writing about politics (social contract, human rights), history, subjectivity and more. The selected texts on origins will be analyzed with attention to their rhetorics and to the stakes involved in their arguments and stories. Students will be able to write term papers on pertinent texts not on the syllabus (e.g. Vico, Herder, Hamann, Sterne, Hume, Kant, etc.)
Evaluation:
Major paper, 17-20 pages : 60%
Seminar Presentation: 20%
Three short response papers (500 words max.): 10%
Participation: 10%
COL5107H ASIAN DIASPORAS: MIGRATION, MEMORY, IMAGINATION
Instructor: L. Lowe
Location: Innis College, Room IN209 or IN313
Time: Short Course: Monday September 10, 4-6:30 orientation session (could also be held Sept 11 or Sept 13) Tuesday October 9, 4-6:30 Thursday October 11, 4-6:30 Monday October 15, 4-6:30 Tuesday October 16, 4-6:30 Thursday October 18, 4-6:30 Monday October 22, 4-6:30 Tuesday October 23, 4-6:30 Thursday October 25, 4-6:30
STILL WAITING FOR COURSE PROPOSAL TO SEND TO ARTS & SCI.
“Diaspora” is a suggestive framework for considering the displacements and connections of peoples within modern global processes of dislocation through war, colonialism, or labor immigration; it contains the contradictions of the impulse toward cultural unity, on the one hand, and the ruptures of separation and dislocation, on the other hand. The large dispersal of Asian peoples throughout the 19th century was central to the expansion of the global economy; in French and Dutch colonies in the Indian Ocean, Spanish Cuba and Peru, the British West Indies, Hawaii, and the U.S., Asian workers were part of a multiracial workforce that often included African slaves and other forms of unfree labor. “Asian diaspora” also refers to the explosion of migration and immigration from Asia in the second half of the twentieth century, and the retention of affective ties and identifications to the Asian homelands. In both, “diaspora” conveys the paradox of both the maintenance or reinvention of ties to homelands, and the critiques of racial, ethnic, or national essentialisms. This cultural studies seminar emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches drawing from history, literature and anthropology, and considers Asian diasporas in a global framework, but focusing especially on the English-speaking contexts of the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Assigned texts include:
L. Siu and R. Parreñas, eds. Asian Diasporas (Stanford UP, 2007) S. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Stuart Hall Reader, eds. D.Morley and K.-H. Chen,
L. Yun, Introduction, Ch. I, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves of Cuba (Temple UP, 2008)
M.-H.Jung, Introduction, Ch. I, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2006)
G. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War (U Minnesota, 2008)
Y. L.Espiritu, “We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the 25th Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon,’” American Quarterly 58:2 (June 2006): 329-352.
G. Gopinath, Introduction, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Publics (Duke UP, 2005)
C. Reddy, “Asian Diaspora, Neoliberalism, and Family,” Social Text C.-R.Lee, A Gesture Life (Riverhead, 2000)
T. D. T. Lê, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Anchor, 2004)
J. Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner, 1999)
COL 5029H READING CERVANTES
Instructor: S. Rupp
Time: Spring term, Mondays, 1-3
Books and readers are constant preoccupations in Cervantine fiction. This seminar will examine such issues in detail, with a specific focus on Don Quixote. Our point of departure will be a sequential reading of key episodes from both parts of the novel, centering on the literary genres that inform and shape Cervantes’s writing (chivalric and Greek romance, pastoral, epic, picaresque fiction, Renaissance lyric) and on the representation of readers and the reading process in the text. Attention will also be given to literary techniques closely associated with Cervantes: generic mixing, the interplay of narratives and narrative voices, literary parody, the various kinds and uses of irony. Some readings will be drawn from other works of Cervantes, particularly the Exemplary Stories. The interrelated practices of reading and story-telling will be central to our scrutiny of Cervantes’s fiction. Students will be encouraged to consider modern authors as readers of Cervantes and as contributors to the novelistic tradition that he initiates.
Each student will be expected to participate in class discussion and to undertake a limited research project on a topic to be selected in consultation with the instructor, leading to a brief seminar presentation (15 minutes) and to a final essay (12-15 pages).
CORE TEXTS:
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote. Trans. Burton Raffel, ed. Diana de Armas Wilson. New York and London: Norton, 1999.
—. Exemplary Stories. Trans. C. A. Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Evaluation:
Class participation 15%
Research proposal and bibliography 10%
Seminar presentation 15%
Final essay 60%
COL5081H BENJAMIN’S ARCADES PROJECT
Instructor: R. Comay
Time: Spring term, Thursdays, 2-4
This course will be devoted to a close reading of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, his posthumously published, unfinished compendium and montage of fragments, quotations and aphorisms on the urban and architectural culture of Second Empire Paris – “capital of the nineteenth century” and the birthplace of consumer capitalism, where the ambiguities of modernity are registered in dramatically new experiences of space and time. While exploring Benjamin’s reading of the various strands of nineteenth-century material culture – fashion, photography, advertising, lighting, railways, exhibitions, department stores, catacombs, etc. – we will consider the implications of his approach for thinking about history, memory, politics, and visual culture today. Our reading of the Arcades will be supplemented with relevant readings from Baudelaire, Marx, Adorno, Kracauer, Bloch, Aragon, Simmel, and Freud as well as contemporary critical theorists.
Evaluation:
Presentation 25%
Final paper 75%
COL 5101H DIASPORIC CITIES: ITINERANT NARRATIVES OF METROPOLES BY TRAVELLERS AND EXPATRIATES
Instructor: A. Sakaki
Time: Spring term, Thursdays, 10-12
This course will look at six metropoles (Berlin, London, New York, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Paris) from the perspectives of Japanese visitors such as Mori, Natsume, Nagai, Yokomitsu, Gotô, Horie, and from those of natives and immigrants (Benjamin, Conrad, Wharton, Shi, Gogol, Rilke). Those writers’ accounts of cities in the span of time between the late nineteenth century and late twentieth century are inflected by the itineraries of their movement before and after their experience of the cities and by their peripatetic as well as optical experience of urban spaces of varied historical, social, material and geopolitical conditions. They reveal cities not as cartographical spots but as sites in the traffic of bodies and gazes. The readings (all assigned are available in English, with additional materials to be introduced by the instructor) shall be arranged in such a way that participants can compare each city’s literary mediations by variably invested observers. Accompanying theoretical, critical and photographic texts (e.g., Atget, Benjamin, Brandt, Brassaï, Burgin, de Certeau, Doisneau, Maeda, Ronis, Walker) shall define a conceptual framework for each session.
Evaluation:
Class Participation 10% (each week’s performance shall be assessed accumulatively)
Response Papers 15% (the 1st due February 14 or earlier, 5%; the 2nd due March 21 or earlier, 10%)
Oral Presentation 15% (once during the semester)
Term Paper 60% (due April 28)
COL 5096H THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION: HISTORICAL, THEORETICAL AND PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVES
Instructor: M. Revermann
Time: Spring term, Fridays, 1-4
Translation Studies is a young field that has gained considerable momentum over the past 20 or so years (especially with the emergence of Postcolonial Studies). Comparatist by nature, translation is a good a gateway as any into the discipline of Comparative Literature and some of its principal concerns.
This course will combine the historical, theoretical and pragmatic dimension of translation (all of which overlap to a certain extent). On the historical side, there will be detailed and historically contextualized study of some main reflections on the problem of translation (including texts by Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Venuti and Apter) as well as specific broader case studies of the translation history of certain works (including the Bible, Virgil and Sophocles). For the theoretical dimension Munday (2008) will serve as a guide to a critical discussion of particular approaches and models developed by current Translation Studies. The litmus test will be the pragmatic dimension: hands-on, detailed and theoretically informed analyses of specific translations (usually short passages), mostly to be chosen and presented by the seminar participants themselves.
Evaluation:
50% Research paper
20% Participation
30% In-class presentations (including the “journal”, i.e. written statements on the set weekly ‘lead questions’ and written engagement with one or two own lead questions).
COL 5098H IMAGINING STATE FORMATION IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE
Instructor: N. ten Kortenaar
Time: Spring term, Wednesdays, 2-4
This course will look at the ways in which literature from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia has imagined state formation. In the former colonial world, state formation has long posed a problem, both political and imaginative. Decolonization did not restore precolonial political entities nor, with rare exceptions such as Pakistan, invent new ones. Instead successful decolonization almost always retained the economic structure and bureaucratic infrastructure of the colonial territory. We will examine the problem of grounding the nation-state where there had only been a colony.
Topics of concern to us include: political legitimacy; modernity; citizenship and subjecthood; the law; democracy; the social contract; sacrifice; the nature of power; the public and the private; the nature of political representation; alternatives to the nation-state; the international system; the police and the military; national history; print literacy and vehicular languages; the gendered state; the realist novel and the nation-state; education. Authors we will consider may include Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Rushdie, Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi, Kourouma, Labou Tansi. Theorists may include Fradinger, Santner, Schwartz, Mufti, Fanon, Guha, Chattterjee, Scott, Mbembe, Mamdani.
Evaluation:
class participation 10%
class presentation 30%
two medium essays or one long essay 60%
COL 5104H DIALOGUE WITH POSTSTRUCTURALISM
Instructor: Komaromi
Time: Spring term, Fridays, 11-1
This course will look at the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin in its reception over time and across cultures, with an emphasis on its relationship to poststructuralism. We will survey major concepts including “carnival” and “dialogue” in Bakhtin’s works recovered in the 1960s in the USSR. We will consider Julia Kristeva’s translation of Bakhtin’s works for a Western audience as an interesting case of strong misreading. We will find convergence, divergence and polemics between Kristeva’s, Roland Barthes’ and Paul de Man’s poststructural concepts and Bakhtin’s ideas regarding subjectivity and the text. The juxtaposition of Bakhtinian and postructural theory will highlight distinctive features of each. It will also provide an opportunity to consider linear vs. non-linear narratives of filiation in the history of theory’s development in the twentieth century. Readings will include selections from literary works about which these theorists wrote, including works by Balzac, Dostoevsky, Rabelais and Rousseau.
Evaluation:
Participation 15%
Presentations 15%
First Paper 30%
Final Paper 40%
JCD 5102H QUEERING PERFORMANCE: ARTAUD. FASSBINDER. A FEMINIST INVESTIGATION
Instructor: A. Budde
Time: Spring term, Tuesday, 2-4
Location: Drama Centre, 214 College St. Room 330
We will identify practices, strategies and subversive potentials in performance in the artistic and theoretical works of Artaud and Fassbinder that can be adopted, questioned and/or further developed in the current contemporary context as a means of social change and political awareness. The course will address modes of comparativity in the context of gender politics, globalization, and histories of performance practices in film, theatre, television, virtual creation and performance art. We will specifically focus on strategies for productive/alternative appropriations of the political relevance of artistic and conceptual works by male canonical figures such as Artaud and Fassbinder from a feminist and queer perspective. Major concepts of reference will be Queerness, queer violence and the crack/In-Between space not only as a theory of gender identity but also of the performing arts/computer technology/philosophy/post-colonial and globalization studies.
Readings will include critical theory by Sara Ahmed, Teresa DeLauretis, Sue-Ellen Case, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, F.G. Asenjo.
Evaluation:
In-class presentation 20%
Mid-term experimental essay on web blog (2000 words, can also be video or photo essay or self-produced AV documented 5 min. performance piece) 30%
Essay (6000 words) 40%
Class participation 10%
JFC 5105H COLLECTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE: ENCYCLOPEDISM AND TRAVEL LITERATURE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE (1500-1800)
Instructor: A. Motsch
Time: Spring term, Mondays, 11-1
1500-1800 is the first period of modern globalization by the West, of the foundation of colonial empires and of the economic but also scientific exploration of foreign lands. This seminar deals with the intersection of the “encyclopedic movement” and geographical expansions, more particularly the knowledge produced and disseminated about other cultures and “ethnography” in particular. The course seeks to show how the new anthropological knowledge becomes a point of public interest and political disputes and how this development is supported and accompanied by a dynamic book market.
The new ideas and ideals emerging between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment period and their reception are closely linked to the invention of the printing press, the progress in literacy within society, the emergence of a public sphere, and thus the development of an ever increasing market for printed materials and books. Due to political and religious censorship, but also economic considerations, the publishing history and the book trade of the time constitute a quite complex field of inquiry. Books were written in one country, often enough printed in another, only to reappear clandestinely in legitimate or pirated copies on the marketplace for which they were intended, while their authors, editors and printers were censored, went into exile or even to prison. Many works found their readers far away, across political, geographical and ideological divides in copied, translated or abstracted form. The changing worldview of this period is the result of new epistemological forces which seek to establish new paradigms and increasingly attempt to portray the world in encyclopedias, histories, dictionaries as well as other collections of knowledge (curio cabinets and museums). It is this worldview and its epistemological foundation which gives rise to philosophical and political modernity
Evaluation:
Oral presentation/Literature review: 20%
Final Essay (3500-5000 words): 70%
Overall evaluation: 10%