Students are required to take ten graduate level courses (600-level) for grades in their first two years of study. Of the ten graded courses, five must be courses offered by the core faculty in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, including a mandatory pro-seminar on comparative methods and theory for all incoming students in the fall semester of their first year.
Column one has the course number and section. Other columns show the course title, days offered, instructor's name, room number, if the course is cross-referenced with another program, and a option to view additional course information in a pop-up window.
Course # (Section)
Title
Day/Times
Instructor
Room
PosTag(s)
Info
AS.010.681 (01)
Figuration after Formlessness
W 4:30PM - 7:00PM
Schopp, Caroline Lillian
Gilman 177
Figuration after Formlessness AS.010.681 (01)
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.
Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: W 4:30PM - 7:00PM
Instructor: Schopp, Caroline Lillian
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 1/5
PosTag(s): n/a
AS.040.615 (01)
Ovid's Metamorphoses
W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Bennett, Jane; Butler, Shane
Gilman 208
Ovid's Metamorphoses AS.040.615 (01)
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.
Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
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
AS.211.620 (01)
The Aesthetics of Empathy
W 3:30PM - 5:30PM
Jerzak, Katarzyna
Gilman 480
MLL-ENGL
The Aesthetics of Empathy AS.211.620 (01)
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."
Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: W 3:30PM - 5:30PM
Instructor: Jerzak, Katarzyna
Room: Gilman 480
Status: Open
Seats Available: 8/10
PosTag(s): MLL-ENGL
AS.300.611 (01)
Schopenhauer’s ‘The World as Will and Representation’
F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Lisi, Leonardo
Gilman 208
Schopenhauer’s ‘The World as Will and Representation’ AS.300.611 (01)
A close reading of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, one of the most influential works of philosophy in 19th- and 20th-century literature and art.
Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
Room: Gilman 208
Status: Open
Seats Available: 6/15
PosTag(s): n/a
AS.300.804 (01)
Dissertation Research
Marrati, Paola
Dissertation Research AS.300.804 (01)
Discussion of dissertations in progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.
Credits: 10.00 - 20.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Marrati, Paola
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 8/15
PosTag(s): n/a
AS.300.636 (01)
Forms of Moral Community: The Contemporary World Novel
Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Ong, Yi-Ping
Gilman 208
Forms of Moral Community: The Contemporary World Novel AS.300.636 (01)
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?
Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
Room: Gilman 208
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/10
PosTag(s): n/a
AS.300.805 (01)
Literary Pedagogy
Marrati, Paola
Literary Pedagogy AS.300.805 (01)
Teaching Assistant graduate student
Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Marrati, Paola
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/5
PosTag(s): n/a
AS.213.631 (01)
Social Imaginaries and the Public Sphere in European Literature, 1760-1815
F 1:30PM - 3:30PM
Frey, Christiane; Moser, Christian
Gilman 381
MLL-ENGL
Social Imaginaries and the Public Sphere in European Literature, 1760-1815 AS.213.631 (01)
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.
