CPLT 700: Proseminar in Comparative Literature
Taught by Professor Vazsonyi
M 3:00 pm – 3:50 pm

Introduction to the formal study of Comparative Literature and Modern Languages & Literatures. The class will examine four interrelated areas: 1) the nature of literary study at the graduate level; 2) current professional conditions for comparatists and literary scholars; 3) designing a coherent program of study; and 4) writing on a professional level.

Students are expected to do the assigned readings and come to class prepared. Each student will also write a five page analysis of Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” (“Vor dem Gesetz”) in MLA Style. This paper will go through numerous drafts, and will receive criticism both from the instructor and classmates. Although there are only three formal dates for the submission of paper drafts, past experience confirms that turning in weekly drafts yields the best papers. Students will also draft a program of study that will serve as a guide for their future endeavors.

CPLT 703H: Plato and Poststructuralism
LINK TO SYLLABUS
Taught by Professor Miller
M 3:00 pm – 5:45 pm
This course argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the understanding of classical antiquity and its relationship to postmodern philosophical inquiry. In it I concentrate on the works of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. It would, of course, have been possible to choose others. The extent of the influence of antiquity on such luminaries of French postmodern thought as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, and Emmanuel Levinas remains all but unexplored, while more work remains to be done on the feminists: Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous. Yet Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault remain not only three of the most influential exponents of French postmodern thought in the Anglo-American world, but also, as our three opening quotations indicate, they demonstrate a substantial continuity of concern in their approach to the ancient world in general and to Platonic philosophy in particular.

CPLT 750C: Contact Zones: Literature, Power and Representation in the Americas
Taught by Professor Camacho
T 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
The Conquest of America initiated a process of reflecting on the Other, measuring spaces and categorizing bodies that in many ways will define Europe and this continent for centuries to come. This course will explore this process, beginning with the sixteenth century chronicles and ending with the principal concepts of nation building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Emphasis will be placed on the process of mediation and representation of blacks, Amerindians, criollos and latinos in the differente national narratives of the continent. Thus, this course will explore questions of space, time and the construction of subjectivity in the work of authors such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Helen Hunt Jackson, José Martí, Langston Hughes, and Nicolás Guillén.

CPLT 880V [=GERM 780]: The Wagner Industry
Taught by Professor Vazsonyi
W 2:00 pm – 4:45 pm

“Richard Wagner is the most controversial artistic figure of all time”: so opens Frederic Spotts’s acclaimed Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994). To what extent was the controversy manufactured by Wagner himself, in order to establish a distinct persona and maximize his visibility in a crowded field? His success is borne out by the mere fact that, today, there is a 10-year waiting list for tickets to the annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. This course will examine the numerous textual ways – theoretical, journalistic, fictional, occasional, autobiographical – in which Wagner commodified himself as “Wagner” and branded his musical-dramatic works, all with the purpose of establishing a unique niche for himself in the cultural marketplace of the 19th century. His activities resulted in a Wagner “Industry” even during his own lifetime. The discussion will be framed historically within the European context of rising consumerism, and the oppositional avant-garde / “art for art’s sake” movements centered in Paris, and theoretically by applying critiques of the same by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and, more recently, by Pierre Bourdieu, Andreas Huyssen, among others.

Reading knowledge of German is important but not a course requirement. Most but not all course texts are available in English. Class discussion will be conducted in English (German optional)