2016-2017

This course will trace the philosophical, juridical, and literary itinerary of modernity’s impossible subject: the person who enslaves himself. From Grotius to Vitoria through Hobbes and Locke up to Mill and beyond, the one thing that modernity’s self-possessive subject cannot will to alienate, sell, or give away is himself. From this perspective, slavery can only be a relation of domination or as a vanishing moment before the enslaved contracts into servitude. In the process of installing this perspective, philosophical modernity foreclosed myriad philosophical and legal traditions of self-enslavement at the precise moment that slavery itself was generalized as the Atlantic world’s foundational mode of political and social relation. This course will explore how this philosophical bracketing of the problem of auto-enslavement enabled Atlantic modernity to bracket slavery itself as an exceptional, pathological condition; we will then explore how the philosophical coding of humans as free by anthropological default affected the social, legal, and political life of the actually enslaved. The first part of this course will track the impossibilization of auto-enslavement in early modern and Enlightenment philosophical texts on international law, political theory, Biblical hermeneutics, and abolitionism. In the second part of this course, we will examine black and white improvisations with the figure of the self-enslaving subject, reading slave narratives, legal texts and cases occasioned by the late legalization of self-enslavement in five antebellum U.S. states, the pro-slavery genre of anti-sentimental literature known as the “anti-Tom,” and more. (18th/19th)

This is a methods class for graduate students. It carefully explores canonical models and examples of close reading (New Criticism, deconstruction) and archival research for the literary discipline. It does so in order to contextualize and understand the emergence of new empirical forms of textual criticism, such as “distant reading.” Students will gain a grasp of the arc of methodological innovations centered on reading and historicism in our discipline, while also getting a strong introduction to the digital humanities. (20th/21st)

This course explores idealism and materialism in nineteenth-century American intellectual and cultural history, charting the growth of Transcendentalism as a revolt against contemporary American society as well as the effect of Transcendentalism on that society. We’ll examine the Americanization of British and Continental idealism, focusing on the reception of Coleridge, Carlyle, Goethe and others; the institutionalization of Transcendentalism around Emerson, including the creation of literary magazines, lecture series, and reform societies; the politics and ethics of Transcendentalism, focusing on Fuller and Thoreau; and the westward expansion of Transcendentalism, including the St. Louis Hegelians and the early writings of Dewey. (18th/19th)

The focus of this course is a close reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost. We will seek to understand the poem as an intervention in the political and theological controversies of its time, but special attention will be given to its participation in England’s Scientific Revolution. Thus this course will serve a secondary purpose as an introduction to the study of literature and science (as undertaken by historians of science, sociologists of science, and critical theorists). We will take brief detours into the works of other poets who similarly understand poetic language as a vehicle for the exploration of the cosmos (Lucretius, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Lucy Hutchinson). (Med/Ren)

A study of the major authors and types of seventeenth-century golden short poetry, with special focus on Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Philips, and Marvell. (Med/Ren)

What happens to literary works whose authors think in more than one language, and allow that excess to be registered in their texts? While in an age of global migrations, multilingual speakers have come to outnumber the number of monolingual speakers, literary studies continue to privilege works aimed at a monolingual audience. This is particularly the case in the United States, where “English-only” attitudes have dominated discourse for over a century. This course instead explores literary works that take up residence in the space between two or more languages, whether national or regional—as well as those that attempt to dodge semantic systems altogether. From modernist collage and transense to contemporary poetry of exile, migration, and diaspora, the works we will study, lodged between tongues, lend nuance and fascination to debates surrounding “global literature” and untranslatability. We will examine the formal and social prompts and repercussions of experiments in polylingualism, barbarism, dialect, creole, and thwarted translation, and will delve into examples of the potential for mixed/new media poetics to accommodate multiple linguistic systems. While it is not at all necessary for students to be fluent in more than one language to take this course, some experience learning or attempting to learn languages beyond English is essential. Texts up for discussion may include George Steiner’s After Babel, Emily Apter’s Against World Literature, Futurist and Zaum poetry, concrete poetry, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Zukofsky’s Poem Beginning “The,” Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Amelia Rosselli’s Diary in Three Tongues and Sleep, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE, Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse, Kamau Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses, Gail Scott’s The Obituary, Edwin Torres’s Popedology of an Ambient Language, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s TwERK, Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky, and pamphlets by Antena. (20th/21st)

This course will consider the ways in which Victorian literature and culture can at once explain and be explained by psychoanalytic theory. Taking works by Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James as our principle points of departure, our course will pursue the “Victorian unconscious” through three lines of questioning: First, we will ask how Victorian literature anticipated the development of psychoanalytic concepts, such as the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality and the symptom. At the same time, we will question whether Freud’s reflections on the psychopathologies of modern culture can in fact help to explain specific structural and social transformations in the 19th century public sphere, like the construction of modern sewer systems, the legal regulation of sexual acts, or the development of obscenity law. Finally, we will interrogate how the unconscious operates as a site of theoretical interest within Marxist and postcolonial critiques of modern imperialism. Our readings of 19th century novels will be complemented by extensive readings in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, Winnicott) and pre-pscyhoanalytic psychiatry (e.g. Esquirol, Tuke, Krafft-Ebing, Charcot, Cotard), as well as relevant works by theorists elaborating and questioning psychoanalytic insights, including George Batailles, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Frederic Jameson, Edward Said, Kaja Silverman, l-berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (18th/19th)

One way of thinking about the novel is as the literary form made possible by the emergence of a distinct arena of social interactions – from flirting to striving for status to solidarity-seeking and beyond – that is captured, albeit vaguely, by the everyday use of the term “scene”. In this course, we will try to define the various elements that distinguish scenes structurally from other settings for action; we will look at some sociological theorizations of different kinds of scenes (Tardieu, Bourdieu, Habermas, Freud, Kenneth Burke, Thrift) in order to try to differentiate various kinds of scenes; and we will ask how novelists – Austen, Flaubert, Musil, Woolf, Kerouac -- have exploited for narrative purposes the power dynamics and the ethical or political possibilities inherent in scenes. (18th/19th)

This course investigates historicist theory and practice, with a focus on the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity. From nineteenth-century Romantic philology to recent practices of anachronism and amateurism, the medieval period has been integral both to defining modernity and to conceiving historical alterity. The course focuses on historicizations of the Middle Ages written in the last two hundred years but includes case studies as well: we will read medieval texts together with varying historicist accounts of them. Topics include philosophy of history, securalization, rationality, validity in historical interpretion, the historicity of the aesthetic, institutionalization of literary study, and the relation of language and literature. Readings are likely to include texts by Augustine, Hegel, Marx, Burkhardt, Huizinga, Blumenberg, Hayden White, Stephen Greenblatt, and Carolyn Dinshaw, among others. (Med/Ren)

Autobiography is a genre course that takes up first the “retrospective prose narrative,” the most familiar form of autobiographical writing, and then moves on to various kinds of life writing from diaries/journals to internet forms and the personal essay.  The writers we will focus on are Augustine and Benjamin Franklin for the classic models of retrospective prose narrative; Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again for an investigation of relational autobiography; the Diary of Alice James and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals; Theresa Cha’s Dictee and Lynn Hejinian’s My Life;  Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia.  We will conclude with student selections of internet autobiography and the personal essay.  The course is research intensive with weekly collaborative projects. (20th/21st)