Painting and Subjectivity
AS.010.632 (01)

Readings from a range of theoretically and philosophically interesting texts on painting and the visual arts. Among our authors: Cavell, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Nancy, Lyotard.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

Happy and Unhappy Words: Austin, Wittgenstein, and Cavell
AS.300.638 (01)

This seminar studies how words help shaping the world we inhabit and how the power and limits of language affect the possibility of living in a shared world in the works of Austin, Wittgenstein, Cavell and others.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

How to Read Proust?
AS.300.601 (01)

Given the difficulty of his prose, closely and patiently would seem the best way to read Proust, but who has time – time to read a book that, ironically, begins with “Longtemps” and ends with “le temps”? This course will offer for critical examination surgically selected passages of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a training ground for the (lost?) art of close reading and as entry points into wide-ranging aspects of literary criticism and theory. Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor. Taught in English. Knowledge of French is desirable, but not required.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 17/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Theory and Praxis of Modern Tragedy
AS.300.619 (01)

This course will examine the philosophy and drama of modern tragedy through the close reading and comparison of a number of key works. We will study plays by Shakespeare (Hamlet and King Lear), de la Barca (Life is a Dream), Racine (Phèdre), Hölderlin (Death of Empedocles), and Ibsen (Master Builder and Hedda Gabler) in conjunction with philosophical writings by Pascal, Leopardi, Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger and Cavell. Course is open to open to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

The Critical Unconscious
AS.211.777 (01)

Criticism in the 21st century has tended to relegate psychoanalysis to a dustbin of fads that proliferated at the end of the prior century but that today are of interest only to balkanized cliques of devotees. Bucking this trend, this seminar will examine the intellectual history and abiding influence of psychoanalysis’s key critical concept: the unconscious. Basing our discussions on in-depth readings from key thinkers in the analytic tradition such as Freud, Lacan, and Klein, as well as the post-analytic philosophical tradition, including Zizek, Butler, Laclau and Mouffe, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jameson, we will work to distill an understanding of the unconscious as essential to the practice of criticism tout court, and as inhering even in those discourses that have sought most stridently to distance themselves from it. Seminar discussions will take place in English; readings will be available in the original as well as in translation.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/20
• PosTag(s): GRLL-ENGL

Independent Study Field Exam
AS.300.802 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Ricardo Piglia, Borges, Derrida and Argentina's Eighteenth Century
AS.215.613 (01)

A voice in Piglia’s Artificial Respiration claims that Argentina did not have an eighteenth century or the Eighteenth Century. Besides Piglia’s palimpsest novel, we’ll study a handful of texts by Borges. Passages from Leopoldo Marechal’s Adan Buenosayres, and Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign Volume Two, in reference to Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Taught in English.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): GRLL-ENGL

Literature and Truth: Forgery and Fakes
AS.211.606 (01)

Forgery is an eternal problem. It is a literary tradition in its own right, with connections to politics, Classics, religion, philosophy, and literary theory. Spurious writings impinge on social and political realities to a degree rarely confronted by criticism. This course offers a reading of the sort traditionally reserved for canonical works of poetry and prose fiction, spotlighting forgery’s imaginative vitality and its sinister impact on scholarship. Students will study manuscripts and incunabula drawn from JHU’s Bibliotheca Fictiva, the world’s premier collection of literary forgeries.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): GRLL-ENGL, GRLL-ITAL

Independent Study Field Exam
AS.300.802 (04)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.300.804 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literary Pedagogics
AS.300.806 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a