What would an art history of modernism look like that sought not to overcome or eliminate painterly figuration, but to attend to displaced and disparaged figures in it? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 warning about a “return to figuration” in European painting, figuration has been linked with questionable, if not highly suspect, aesthetic and political values – from nostalgia to repression. Buchloh inherits this this view from the historical avantgardes, which sought to counter conventions of figuration by developing disparate strategies of abstraction. And it is this view of figuration that guides both formalist and social art histories: For both share an anxiety about the authoritative figure of the human form. This seminar invites an alternative perspective on the artistic project of figuration. We look at modern and contemporary practices of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrogressive or authoritarian. These practices suggest ways of thinking the figure without an appeal to its coherent visibility or sovereign standing. We will read broadly in the contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black thought, and critical disability studies that share this investment (e.g. Butler, Cavarero, Garland-Thomson, Halberstam, Hartman, Honig, Sharpe, Wynter). We will critically reconsider Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’ project Formless: A User’s Guide, along with the turn of the twenty-first century debates about abjection, feminism, and “body art” it engaged. Artists under discussion include Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, Kara Walker, and Hannah Wilke, amongst others. For the final research paper, graduate students are encouraged to bring their own archives to the questions addressed in the seminar.

• Days/Times: W 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Schopp, Caroline Lillian
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

A study of the Roman poet Ovid’s timeless tale of change, explored in relationship to the philosophical Daoism of Zhuangzi and to recent critical and philosophical concepts such as becoming, transformation, autopoeisis.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Bennett, Jane; Butler, Shane
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

I feel, therefore I am: beginning with Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See (1749) and Rousseau’s Letter to M. D'Alembert on Spectacles (1758), the seminar will explore connections between various aspects of neurophysiological, bodily perception and their representations in culture. We will then consider the origins of the term Einfühlung in Robert Vischer's and Theodor Lipps’ seminal works. Embodied perception that informs Heinrich Wölfflin's Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture (1886) is also the focus of several of Georg Simmel’s essays. We shall discuss the environment as an extension of the self in Charles Baudelaire’s “The Swan” and in Andrzej Leder’s “Psychoanalysis of a Cityscape. A Case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: The City of Warsaw.” Aby Warburg’s notion of Pathosformeln will allow us to see the link between pathos and empathy. Finally we will read Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry and Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, whose narrator announces: “I write with my body."

• Days/Times: W 3:30PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Jerzak, Katarzyna El?bieta
• Room: Gilman 480
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/10
• PosTag(s): MLL-ENGL

We will examine the contribution of (post-)Enlightenment literature to the evolution of a modern social imaginary. First we will acquaint ourselves with some theoretical approaches to the concept of the social imaginary (Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor, Albrecht Koschorke). We will then read selected texts from European literature (from Rousseau and Ferguson to Lessing, Schiller, Kleist, Novalis and Fichte, among others) that are characteristic of the formation of a modern social imaginary at the epochal threshold between the 18th and 19th centuries. We will attend to the interface of social self-conceptions and the public sphere.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 3:30PM
• Instructor: Frey, Christiane; Moser, Christian
• Room: Gilman 381
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): MLL-ENGL

A close reading of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, one of the most influential works of philosophy in 19th- and 20th-century literature and art.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Discussion of dissertations in progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Teaching Assistant graduate student

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 17/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 19/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

What is a vulnerable image? The Latin vulnus points us in two directions: toward the relational vulnerability arising from the sight of wounds and the action of wounding; and toward the raw disclosure of the body's interior. This seminar, team-taught so as to bring the perspectives of the modern and the long premodern era into dialogue, attends to vulnerable images in both senses: we will consider not only works that picture vulnerable subjects, but images that, in their vibrant materiality or through their use and circulation, themselves become vulnerable. Across both domains we will examine what is arguably their shared capacity: to make viewers aware of their own vulnerability, and to provoke a range of responses, from the "tragic" emotions of pity and fear, to horror and disgust, compassion and care, pleasure and pain. Each week involves the critical juxtaposition of artworks and texts drawn from modern and contemporary culture with those from the long premodern past. Topics include pain as spectacle and perceptions of pain; care, attention, and maternal inclination; the vulnerability of gendered and racialized bodies; representations of torture, punishment, and war; laughter and grotesque humor; the subjects and objects of iconoclasm; material decompositions and forms of fragility. Readings run the gamut from Aristotle to Arendt, Freud to Butler, Warburg to Hartman, Sontag to Scarry.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Merback, Mitchell; Schopp, Caroline Lillian
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/13
• PosTag(s): n/a

This seminar introduces feminist film theory, queer film theory, and decolonial film strategies, analyzing and following their practical implementations in documentary, fiction films, and animation films. The films will be chosen from different global film traditions from East Asia to Latin America, Western Africa, Europe and North America. We will also invite several filmmakers into the classroom to discuss their practical strategies and how they are informed by specific theoretical approaches.

• Days/Times: F 2:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Wegenstein, Bernadette
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This graduate-level course will explore the material topographies of literature, both real and imagined, engaging the landscapes, geographies, and environments of literary works both as a vital dimension of the text and as contributions to 'cultural ecology'. We will explore how topography may be engaged not as mere background or setting for literary situations, but as a dynamic and vital dimension thereof, and how the human experiences evoked can be radically recontextualized and engaged through environmental attention to the text. We will read theoretical and philosophical works on geography and topography in literature along with environmental literary theory in approaching literary works by writers from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries. Readings may include works by Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Thoreau, Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Brecht, Woolf, Borges, and other writers from the late 18th through 20th centuries. Discussions will invite phenomenological, de- or post-colonial, and ecological perspectives.

• Days/Times: T 3:30PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

A dive into the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes (among a few others), exploring American modernism’s aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations. How do these texts’ formal ambitions engage with philosophical thinking as well as social concerns and political theorizing? Writing assignments: two short presentation papers and either two 10-12 pages papers or one, multi-drafted, 20-25-page seminar paper.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This seminar aims at providing a survey of some fundamental concepts and problems that shape modern and contemporary debates in philosophy, literary studies, and the humanities at large. This term we will study different notions of existence, language, truth, power, otherness, race, gender, and reality. This course serves as the proseminar in methods and theory for graduate students in Comparative Thought and Literature but is open to students in all departments.

• Days/Times: Th 2:00PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/25
• PosTag(s): n/a

Composer Matthew Aucoin has recently called opera “the impossible art.” Its impossibility feels particularly acute today, as it is buffeted by competing media, genres, and attention. Yet since 2000, opera has never seemed as vibrant, with composers new and old continuing to engage with its "generative impossibilities,” using a variety of literary genres as their sources. This class considers central opera examples from the past twenty years, looking at compositions by such creators as Thomas Adès, Unsuk Chin, Missy Mazzoli, Terence Blanchard, and György Kurtág, among others. These composers and their performers and critics engage with a variety of literary genres including novels, short stories, memoirs, and plays, as well as different media, chief among them film. They address opera’s tangled history and its possible roles in our contemporary world, asking questions about race, class, ideology, the environment, politics, and identity. This class will do the same, asking what opera today is capable of doing that other genres (musical and otherwise) cannot. How can—and does--opera speak to the present moment? The class will spend time developing a theoretical and practical vocabulary for considering both literary texts and how best to listen to, watch, and analyze opera. No musical background is required.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Schmelz, Peter John
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Bennett, Jane
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hashimoto, Satoru
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Teaching Assistant graduate student

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Marrati, Paola
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Graduate Research

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Bennett, Jane
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a