This course aims to provide the linguistic skills and the historical and cultural perspectives necessary for advanced work on Old English. There will be regular exercises and midterm and final examinations. A second quarter of Old English focusing on Beowulf will be offered to interested students in Spring Quarter 2017 as a reading course. Undergraduate: (C, E) Graduate: (Med/Ren)
This course investigates the trope of endangerment in Romantic poetry, where it is used to interpret and respond to the sense of rupture that prevailed during a period that's been called “the age of revolutions.” We’ll examine how our primary texts draw analogies between historical, environmental, and civilizational decline (rural depopulation, the “westering” of civilization, millennialism, the extinction of the human species) and narratives of psychological and affective endangerment that give rise to literary preoccupations with aging, the waning of creativity and wonder, and the problem of passionate existence (it wears you out). If world and mind are both endangered, what modes of survival can literature imagine? (C, F)
A course devoted to reading in full a small number of Romanticism’s important long narrative poems: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Byron’s Don Juan, and Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. We’ll think about the conventions and aims of epic poetry and we’ll ask how (and why) these works reinvent a very old genre. (C, F)
This course is an experiment that seeks to develop some significant relation between assemblage understood as an artistic practice that came to thrive in the 20th century, and assemblage deployed as an analytic—a master trope within various fields (archaeology, anthropology, human geography, urban and social theory). Tracking the different uses of the term entails a particular complication: the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of agencement has been translated (by Brian Massumi and others) as assemblage in what has come to called, in the 21st century, “assemblage theory.” Thus assemblage as an artistic practice bears no genealogical relation to assemblage theory. But what if it did? You could say that the experiment of the course proceeds as if to effect a faux genealogy. It does so in order to ask how the literary, visual, and plastic arts art might be re-thought in light of a conceptual enterprise outside aesthetics; to ask how this art might move us to recalibrate the conceptual enterprise; and to ask how a specific work of art, mediated by those questions, might become a theoretical enterprise of its own (prompting questions about the epistemological or ontological status of individuals, objects, spaces, &c.). Our collective task will be to compile a lexicon with which to address the formed/formless character of assemblage as a literary practice, and to think through an analytical practice that helps to animate this literature. The course will be conceptually rangy. An historical center of gravity will be provided by “The Art of Assemblage,” an exhibition that MoMA held in 1961, and by William Carlos William’s “compiled” epic, Paterson (the last fragments of which he typed in 1961), by William Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy, and by the early poetry of John Ashberry. We will also engage the visual and plastic arts of the post-war era (work by Joseph Cornell, Lee Bonetcou, and Louise Nevelson for instance, and above all by Robert Rauschenberg—his “combines”). How do you apprehend the distinction between organic and inorganic form? The course will also move backwards, forwards, and sideways: backwards to T.S. Eliot, by Ezra Pound, and earlier work by Williams, and to the collage, montage, and assemblage techniques of the modernists; forwards to some urban design concepts, and to recent installation work; and sideways to conceptual ambitions that relate to those within assemblage theory (e.g., Cyborg Theory, Actor-Network Theory). (20th/21st)
Debt has become a paramount topic of discussion and controversy in recent times, fuelled by the financial crisis of 2008 and the different episodes of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, above all involving Greece. This has produced a great deal of commentaries, economic analyses, and journalistic polemics from all sides of the political spectrum. Yet despite this profusion of discourse, it still proves difficult to seize the exact contours of the problem. Debt affects both the most isolated individuals and the most powerful states, it is equally a matter of “cold” economic rationality and the “hottest” emotions and moral judgments, it appears at once as the most empirical thing with the hardest material consequences and as a mysterious, ethereal, abstract, and purely speculative entity (the unreal product of financial “speculation”). The concept of indebtedness not only characterizes an increasingly universal economic predicament, but also defines a form of subjectivity central to our present condition. This seminar will examine the problem of debt by first looking at how different approaches to it—economic, anthropological, and psychodynamic—were formed by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and then reading more contemporary authors on the theme, including Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Graeber, and Lazzarato.
J.M Coetzee is perhaps South Africa’s best-known novelist, not to mention an immensely popular figure in the contemporary world literary canon. But is Coetzee the South African author the same as Coetzee the giant of world literature? In what way does his place in South African literary history inform his reception as an essential part of global literary culture? This course puts Coetzee’s major novels in conversation with some of his key essays and criticism in order to provide students an intensive introduction of his broad and complex body of work. But it also brings Coetzee’s many different writings into dialogue with both some of the scholarship on his oeuvre and recent work on globalization and the production of world literature in order to examine the difference between Coetzee the South African novelist and Coetzee the world literary master. The wager of the course is that a close engagement with Coetzee and his career can develop key insights into the production and circulation of world literature in English as it exists today. (B, H)
Speculative fiction (SF) has long been a key part of African diasporic literary and cultural production. More recently, however, a wide range of African writers and directors have turned to the resources of science fiction and fantasy in order to come to terms with the continent’s changing place in contemporary global modernity. This course examines the place of contemporary African and diasporic science fiction and fantasy within a longer history of both African literature and global SF, asking what the turn to SF offers contemporary African cultural production, and what reading AfroSF can tell us about the shape of our global present. Course materials will include short stories and films by Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, Sofia Samatar, Deji Olokutun, Efe Okogu, Waniu Kahiu, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel Delany and others. (B)
In this course, we will study poetry “in the abstract.” We will study various efforts on the part of philosophers, literary critics, and poets themselves to formulate theories of poetic discourse. We will examine a range of historical attempts to conceptualize poetry as a particular kind of language practice, from Aristotle to Adorno and beyond. But we will also question the very project of thinking about “poetics” as opposed to “poetry” or “poems.” Is it possible to theorize the art form without doing violence to the particularity—and peculiarity—of individual poems themselves? (20th/21st)
This course involves first and foremost a sustained look at literary history—an aspect of our field that we often take for granted, deem to be narrow and outmoded as a way of thinking about literature, or displace in favor of theorizing about or historicizing texts. But what is literary history a history of? Master works? The development of national literatures? The coming to voice of subordinated groups? The evolution, emergence, and obsolescence of genres? Or perhaps an account of the effect of broader socioeconomic forces on literary production? Does literary history have a theory? And what is the relation of literary history to practical criticism?
This course will consider the vexed status of the human—and of the corresponding terms, humanism and humanity—in midcentury anticolonial thought and postwar antiracist discourse. Our way into this question will be some of the various attempts, after World War Two, to reconstitute “humanity” as a political and moral constituency, both in literature and philosophy but also in the work of institutions such as the UN and UNESCO. We will examine these textual and historical scenes alongside a close consideration of midcentury anticolonial prose concerned with the enduring violence of fascism, slavery, and empire, and the attenuated hopes and false promises of liberal humanism, but invested too in the trope of “humanity” and in the refiguration of radical new humanisms. (20th/21st)
