Comparative Literature Department :: University at Buffalo

COL 580 - Literary Theory I
COL 595 - The Romantic Age
COL 696 - Time and Becoming
COL 717 - Rousseau's Autobiographies
COL 718 - Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Contemporary French Thought
COL 719 - Gramsci and the Socialist Tradition
COL 720 - Theology and Philosophy
COL 721 A - Introduction to Comparative Studies

COL 580 - Literary Theory I (top)

Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Number: 237301
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640

This course will be entirely devoted to clarifying the central concepts and establishing the basic tenets of the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Although the main text of this course will be the early systematic work, Difference and Repetition, frequent excursions will be made into Deleuze's writings on Hume and Spinoza.

COL 595 - The Romantic Age (top)

Professor Henry Sussman

COL 696 - Time and Becoming (top)

Professor Elizabeth Grosz
Registration Number: 469549
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640

This course will explore four related theoretical and conceptual frameworks which each posit the specific set of relations between time and matter - those developed by Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, who form not only an historically continuous strand of materialism, but who also actively engage with the work of each other as predecessors. Each provides an understanding of time as an active and open-ended force, instead of, as is more common in Western thought, the passive counterpart of space; each provides an account of life as the dynamic interaction of matter and time; and each develops an understanding of time which privileges the place of the future rather than the past in time's functioning. In this sense, each must be understood as a theorist of becoming. This course will concentrate on the understanding of time and becoming that each of these thinkers offers to present-day theoretical and political concerns.

COL 717 - Rousseau's Autobiographies (top)

Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) 266500 (Seminar) (B) 262631 (Recitation)
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640

Jean-Jacques Rousseau comments in a sketch for the Confessions, that "without having any status myself, I have known every condition." This remark prompts us to ask: who is this chameleon character? What exactly does the noun "Rousseau" mean? It is a term that has perhaps one of the longest and most intricate definitions in the French lexicon. Within what grammars and rhetorics of motive does it function? What are the legion aliases, pseudonyms and noms-de-plume of this infinitely complex term, synthesized across an enigmatic set of texts that meditate upon the content of the self? What are the modes of alienation from one's proper name of which the autobiographical subject is capable? What are its justifications, its excuses, and its alibis? Each of these terms: the name, the alias, the excuse, the alibi, the pseudonym denote formal structures and sub-genres that turn around questions of identity and difference, resemblance and dissemblance, and compose the drama of Rousseau's autobiographical writings.

This course will be a sustained inquiry into the semblance's and dissemblances of the name 'Rousseau' as it struggles to determine its meaning. It will also offer us the opportunity to reflect on several of the formal characteristics and problematics of autobiography as a genre. We will chart this elaborate and sustained project of self-fashioning as it unfolds across Rousseau's three principal autobiographical writings, The Confessions, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques and Reveries of a Solitary Walker. We shall also read several commentaries on Rousseau that have helped reshape theoretical idioms about his work, autobiography and related literary topics in recent times: Starobinski, Derrida, de Man, Philippe Lejeune among others. Finally, we shall read some of the texts that constitute Rousseau's precursors: St Augustine's Confessions, and selections of Montaigne's Essais.

COL 718 - Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Contemporary French Thought (top)

Professor Ernesto Laclau
Registration Numbers: (A) 005210 (Seminar) (B) 085421 (Recitation)
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640

The first part of this seminar will isolate main themes in the Phenomenology of Spirit (as well as discussing its general logical structure) and explore their influence on contemporary thought (not only philosophical: it will attempt to trace their general cultural impact). The second part will focus on French thought since the 1930's and try to determine patterns of reading of the Phenomenology, both in Hegelian and anti-Hegelian currents. It will start with Kojeve's readings of Hegel, and the main authors to be taken into account will be Sartre, Lacan, Hyppolite, Bataille, Derrida and Deleuze.

COL 719 - Gramsci and the Socialist Tradition (top)

Professor Ernesto Laclau
Registration Numbers: (A) 135171 (Seminar) (B)141191 (Recitation)
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640

The three main aims of this seminar are the following: a) to present the central categories of Gramsci's theoretical intervention as well as to discuss the maininterpretations of his thought; b) to locate these various interpretations within the wider framework of the different approaches to the history of Marxism and (in a more general way) of socialism; c) to discuss the relevance of Gramsci's thought for contemporary issues, such as globalization, pluralization and fragmentation of social identities, problems of articulation, representation and power, and the role of cultural practices in the structuration of political spaces.

COL 720 - Theology and Philosophy (top)

Professor Jill Robbins
Registration Numbers: (A) 238084 (Seminar) (B) 377548 (Recitation)
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640

This seminar will center on the theological dimension of key texts by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. At stake is neither theology as a discourse on the attributes of God nor even the legacy, within contemporary discourse, of Judaism and Christianity as positive religions. We will examine the way in which the question of God is intertwined with two indicants in particular, the thought of the trace and the discourse of the other. Thus to follow out the theological motif in the writings of Derrida and Levinas will require a close study of the very discourses--of difference, alterity, and the ethical--in which the question of God is necessarily embedded. Other topics which are interlaced with theological questions, and which will come into consideration, include the question of being, the subject, community, the proper name, the demonic.

Readings include: Derrida, "How Not to Speak," Given Time, The Gift of Death, "Faith and Knowldege," Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," 'Enigma and Phenomenon," "Experience and Ethics," "The Temptation of Temptation," "God and Philosophy," and supplementary texts by Heidegger ('Phenomenology and Theology"), Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), and Jean-Luc Nancy ("Of Divine Places").

COL 721 A - Introduction to Comparative Studies (top)

Professor Margherita Long
Registration Number: 169886
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640

The course is in two parts.

The first maps some debates on what "Comparative Studies" and "Comparative Literature" have been and should be. What is Comparative? How are two texts from different times or different cultures comparable? Are there neutral terms, terms outside the values of one language or the other, available for comparative study? Readings include: Bernstein, Comparative Literature in a Multicultural age; Said, Orientalism; Spivak, Outside in the teaching machine; Chow, Writing Diaspora; Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Jameson, Postmodernism, or the cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics.

The second focuses on a single critical question, this year: (Anti) Oedipus in East Asian Film. Films by Kurosawa Akira, Zhang Yimou, Ho Hsiao-hsien, Oshii Mamoru and Chris Marker. Readings by: Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, Xudong Zhang, Rey Chow, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, and Ueno Toshiya.

Assignments include one 20- minute class presentation and either two 10- page papers due at the middle and the end of the semester or a final 20-page paper.


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	:: Fall 2001 - Graduate Courses
Graduate Undergraduate Course Archive	COL 580 - Literary Theory I COL 595 - The Romantic Age COL 696 - Time and Becoming COL 717 - Rousseau's Autobiographies COL 718 - Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Contemporary French Thought COL 719 - Gramsci and the Socialist Tradition COL 720 - Theology and Philosophy COL 721 A - Introduction to Comparative Studies COL 580 - Literary Theory I (top) Professor Rodolphe Gasché Registration Number: 237301 Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640 This course will be entirely devoted to clarifying the central concepts and establishing the basic tenets of the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Although the main text of this course will be the early systematic work, Difference and Repetition, frequent excursions will be made into Deleuze's writings on Hume and Spinoza. COL 595 - The Romantic Age (top) Professor Henry Sussman COL 696 - Time and Becoming (top) Professor Elizabeth Grosz Registration Number: 469549 Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640 This course will explore four related theoretical and conceptual frameworks which each posit the specific set of relations between time and matter - those developed by Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, who form not only an historically continuous strand of materialism, but who also actively engage with the work of each other as predecessors. Each provides an understanding of time as an active and open-ended force, instead of, as is more common in Western thought, the passive counterpart of space; each provides an account of life as the dynamic interaction of matter and time; and each develops an understanding of time which privileges the place of the future rather than the past in time's functioning. In this sense, each must be understood as a theorist of becoming. This course will concentrate on the understanding of time and becoming that each of these thinkers offers to present-day theoretical and political concerns. COL 717 - Rousseau's Autobiographies (top) Professor Shaun Irlam Registration Numbers: (A) 266500 (Seminar) (B) 262631 (Recitation) Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640 Jean-Jacques Rousseau comments in a sketch for the Confessions, that "without having any status myself, I have known every condition." This remark prompts us to ask: who is this chameleon character? What exactly does the noun "Rousseau" mean? It is a term that has perhaps one of the longest and most intricate definitions in the French lexicon. Within what grammars and rhetorics of motive does it function? What are the legion aliases, pseudonyms and noms-de-plume of this infinitely complex term, synthesized across an enigmatic set of texts that meditate upon the content of the self? What are the modes of alienation from one's proper name of which the autobiographical subject is capable? What are its justifications, its excuses, and its alibis? Each of these terms: the name, the alias, the excuse, the alibi, the pseudonym denote formal structures and sub-genres that turn around questions of identity and difference, resemblance and dissemblance, and compose the drama of Rousseau's autobiographical writings. This course will be a sustained inquiry into the semblance's and dissemblances of the name 'Rousseau' as it struggles to determine its meaning. It will also offer us the opportunity to reflect on several of the formal characteristics and problematics of autobiography as a genre. We will chart this elaborate and sustained project of self-fashioning as it unfolds across Rousseau's three principal autobiographical writings, The Confessions, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques and Reveries of a Solitary Walker. We shall also read several commentaries on Rousseau that have helped reshape theoretical idioms about his work, autobiography and related literary topics in recent times: Starobinski, Derrida, de Man, Philippe Lejeune among others. Finally, we shall read some of the texts that constitute Rousseau's precursors: St Augustine's Confessions, and selections of Montaigne's Essais. COL 718 - Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Contemporary French Thought (top) Professor Ernesto Laclau Registration Numbers: (A) 005210 (Seminar) (B) 085421 (Recitation) Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640 The first part of this seminar will isolate main themes in the Phenomenology of Spirit (as well as discussing its general logical structure) and explore their influence on contemporary thought (not only philosophical: it will attempt to trace their general cultural impact). The second part will focus on French thought since the 1930's and try to determine patterns of reading of the Phenomenology, both in Hegelian and anti-Hegelian currents. It will start with Kojeve's readings of Hegel, and the main authors to be taken into account will be Sartre, Lacan, Hyppolite, Bataille, Derrida and Deleuze. COL 719 - Gramsci and the Socialist Tradition (top) Professor Ernesto Laclau Registration Numbers: (A) 135171 (Seminar) (B)141191 (Recitation) Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640 The three main aims of this seminar are the following: a) to present the central categories of Gramsci's theoretical intervention as well as to discuss the maininterpretations of his thought; b) to locate these various interpretations within the wider framework of the different approaches to the history of Marxism and (in a more general way) of socialism; c) to discuss the relevance of Gramsci's thought for contemporary issues, such as globalization, pluralization and fragmentation of social identities, problems of articulation, representation and power, and the role of cultural practices in the structuration of political spaces. COL 720 - Theology and Philosophy (top) Professor Jill Robbins Registration Numbers: (A) 238084 (Seminar) (B) 377548 (Recitation) Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640 This seminar will center on the theological dimension of key texts by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. At stake is neither theology as a discourse on the attributes of God nor even the legacy, within contemporary discourse, of Judaism and Christianity as positive religions. We will examine the way in which the question of God is intertwined with two indicants in particular, the thought of the trace and the discourse of the other. Thus to follow out the theological motif in the writings of Derrida and Levinas will require a close study of the very discourses--of difference, alterity, and the ethical--in which the question of God is necessarily embedded. Other topics which are interlaced with theological questions, and which will come into consideration, include the question of being, the subject, community, the proper name, the demonic. Readings include: Derrida, "How Not to Speak," Given Time, The Gift of Death, "Faith and Knowldege," Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," 'Enigma and Phenomenon," "Experience and Ethics," "The Temptation of Temptation," "God and Philosophy," and supplementary texts by Heidegger ('Phenomenology and Theology"), Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), and Jean-Luc Nancy ("Of Divine Places"). COL 721 A - Introduction to Comparative Studies (top) Professor Margherita Long Registration Number: 169886 Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640 The course is in two parts. The first maps some debates on what "Comparative Studies" and "Comparative Literature" have been and should be. What is Comparative? How are two texts from different times or different cultures comparable? Are there neutral terms, terms outside the values of one language or the other, available for comparative study? Readings include: Bernstein, Comparative Literature in a Multicultural age; Said, Orientalism; Spivak, Outside in the teaching machine; Chow, Writing Diaspora; Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Jameson, Postmodernism, or the cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics. The second focuses on a single critical question, this year: (Anti) Oedipus in East Asian Film. Films by Kurosawa Akira, Zhang Yimou, Ho Hsiao-hsien, Oshii Mamoru and Chris Marker. Readings by: Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, Xudong Zhang, Rey Chow, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, and Ueno Toshiya. Assignments include one 20- minute class presentation and either two 10- page papers due at the middle and the end of the semester or a final 20-page paper.
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