Comparative Literature Department :: University at Buffalo

COL 722: Humanism and the Task of Thinking
COL 712: Postcolonial Theory and its Discontents
COL 681: Bible: Paul's Promise
COL 705: The Romantic Sublime
COL 708: Poetry, Philosophy, Language
COL 713: Theories of Mourning / Future of Theory
COL 707: Identification and the Social Bond
COL 710: Introduction to Rhetorical Analysis

COL 722: HUMANISM AND THE TASK OF THINKING (top)

Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Numbers: (A) 236606 (B) 162914
Tuesday, 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

Through a close reading of Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," we will seek to expand on the basic tenets of Heidegger's thought. Apart from questions about Being, thinking, science, humanism, language, and so forth, we will also elaborate on Heidegger's understanding of the East/West divide, the relation of self and other, the specificity of other than Western beginnings. We will also read "A Dialogue on Language" in this seminar.

Requirements: term paper (12-15 pages).

COL 712: POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS (top)

Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) 200320 (B) 183124
Monday, 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

The angel of postcolonial history seems to have left in its wake a boulevard of broken dreams. Just as the wave of decolonizations in the 1960s once appeared to hold so much promise for nations of the Third World, so the nascent discourse of postcolonial theory promised a way forward. In recent years, however, Marxists, humanists, even postcolonial theorists have attacked postcolonial theory on a number of significant issues. If recent obituaries are any sign of the future, postcolonial theory may soon occupy an unmarked grave.

There currently appears to be a vogue among its critics (they are legion and growing) to impute inordinate degrees of stupidity to postcolonial theorists on several accounts. Indeed, even scholars loosely congregated in the field of postcolonial theory vie to be fiercest in their denunciations of the intellectual pretensions of postcolonial theory. This is surely the legible mark of a crisis in the discourse and the moment to revisit the accomplishments and objectives of postcolonial theory. How does postcolonial theory position itself in relationship to postmodernism and globalization? Is the European imperial problematic around which postcolonial theory was initially organized no longer relevant? Hardt and Negri's recent work Empire suggests that there is life in the imperial paradigm yet.

Others have charged that postcolonial theory is nothing more than intellectual colonialism or that it is merely an ideological mask for global capitalism. What are the roots of the recent assault on postcolonial theory? What is the source of postcolonial theory's recent crisis of self-hatred? What precisely is postcoloniality? Who is FOR postcolonial theory? Who's afraid of postcolonial theory? The gloves are off!

Through a set of readings from "classic" postcolonial texts such as Said's Orientalism as well as recent critiques, we will examine what is currently at stake in this field and whether it has a future.

Texts: Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory; Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture; Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other; Gaurav Desai, Subject to Colonialism; Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism; Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Edward Said, Orientalism; Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason; J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace.

Miscellaneous recent essays and selections by Parry, McClintock, Dirlik, Prakash, Shohat.

COL 681: BIBLE: PAUL'S PROMISE (top)

Professor David Johnson
Registration Numbers: (A) 265689
Tuesday, 6:30-9:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

We will read Paul's letters in order to think about the structure of the promise, the law, justice, and the community of believers. We will also read 20th-century reconsiderations of Paul, including those of Heidegger, Taubes, Boyarin, Badiou, Zizek, and Agamben.

Requirements: seminar paper (15-25 pages).

COL 705: THE ROMANTIC SUBLIME (top)

Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Registration Numbers: (A) 097969 (B) 263814
Thursday, 3:30-6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

This seminar will focus on the philosophical and literary thinking of the sublime in English and German Romanticism. We will examine the relation of the sublime to nature and aesthetics, as well as the ways in which this figure informs and delimits modern theories of subjectivity and ethics.

Readings will include Longinus's Peri Hypsous, Kant's sections on the Analytic of the Beautiful and the Sublime in the Third Critique and his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and writings by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Kleist, and Novalis.

Requirements: Seminar participation, oral presentation, term paper.

COL 708: POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, LANGUAGE (top)

Professor Krzysztof Ziarek
Registration Numbers:(A) 024804 (B) 485414
Monday 3:30-6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

This course will explore the relation between 20th century philosophical and poetic approaches to language and thought. The starting point of our explorations will be Heidegger?s notion of ?poetic thinking,? which we will examine in a dialogue with avant-garde poetry. In several texts, Heidegger characterizes the new, non-metaphysical, thinking he seeks as ?poetic.? At the same time, he proposes to initiate this way of thinking in the context of what he calls ?thoughtful poetry?. This dialogue between poetry and thinking pivots on a decisive transformation of language and of our relation to it. As Heidegger puts it, ?In order to think back to the essence of language, in order to reiterate what is its own, we need a transformation of language, a transformation we can neither compel nor concoct. The transformation does not result from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases. The transformation touches on our relation to language.? We will explore this notion of transformation through the prism of avant-garde poetics, in order to see whether and in what way such a transformation is at stake in experimental writings.

Readings will include texts by Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Susan Howe, Paul Celan, as well as Heidegger?s "What Is Called Thinking?" and his essays on language and poetry.

COL 713: THEORIES OF MOURNING / FUTURE OF THEORY (top)

Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Registrations Numbers: (A) 444175 (B) 444971
Wednesday 3:30-6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

In this course we will explore the tension between commemorative and transformative functions of modern aesthetics in the context of theories of mourning and utopia, on the one hand, and the politics of race and gender, on the other. By reading selected works of Adorno and Bloch, we will examine how modern art negotiates its own precarious social status in modernity (which Hegel famously diagnosed as ?the death of art?) by bearing witness to the catastrophic history of modernity, and by mobilizing transformative possibilities of aesthetics in resistance to that history. We will also ask in what sense the aesthetic tasks of mourning and that of inventing the new converge and diverge with the politics of gender, race, and sexuality. We will then examine the psychoanalytical, poststructuralist, and feminist revisions of mourning and melancholia (Freud, Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler) which not only problematize the role of mourning in the formation of gender identity, subjectivity, and alterity, but also call into question its status as ?work.? By engaging aspects of race and postcolonial theory (in particular, Paul Gilroy?s ?Postcolonial Melancholia?), we will ask in what sense art bears witness not only to the unmourned losses of the destructive history of colonialism but also to the transformative possibilities of resistance.

We will explore the questions of the future of theory in the context of active engagements with the selective lectures and presentations of COL lecture series (usually held on Thursdays, at 1 o?clock) and the Humanities Institute conference, ?New Futures,? tentatively scheduled for the last weekend in October. The participants of the seminar will be required to attend at least three lectures and the conference in place of regular seminar meetings. If there are potential conflicts between the lectures and your other seminars, we will find creative solutions to these scheduling dilemmas.

Requirements: class presentations, active participation in class discussions, research paper, in-class presentation of research.

COL 707: IDENTIFICATION AND THE SOCIAL BOND (top)

Professors Ernesto Laclau & Joan Copjec
Registration Numbers (A) 042668 (B1) 375182
Wednesday 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

This seminar takes Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego as its central text. We will read the text carefully in an attempt to determine in what the process of identification consists. How does it permit the individual subject to perceive herself not only as unique, but also as a member of a group? How is it that identification with others is constitutive of one's own identity?

Professor Laclau will lead the discussions of Freud's precursors and contemporaries in an effort to isolate psychoanalysis's specific contribution to the theory of group identity. Here we will examine the phenomena of hysteria, studied by Janet and Charcot prior to Freud, and that of "mental contagion" as defined by the sociologists of Freud's time.

Professor Copjec will lead the discussions of theories since Freud: Balibar, Ranciere, Agamben, and Lacan, most likely. The focus of this part of the seminar will be the relation between identification and the "emotional tie." Freud makes some provocative remarks on the subject, but they have not been sufficiently followed up. Our reflections on affect and identification will lead us back to our discussions of hysteria and mental contagion and, time permitting, to the theory of the "state of exception."

COL 710: INTRODUCTION TO RHETORICAL ANALYSIS (top)

Professor Ernesto Laclau
Registration Numbers (A) 040075 (B) 213278
Tuesday, 3:30-6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640

This seminar has a double aim. The first is to provide a description of both the main moments in the history of Rhetoric and of the main subjects to be found in both ancient and modern Rhetoric (figures, argumentation, types of conviction brought about by extra-logical means, etc). The second is to see the relation between Rhetoric and Philosophy in contemporary thought. Issues such as the structure of naming, of affective cathexis, of condensation and displacement as constitutive of meaning will be studied. The main references will be deconstruction, Heideggerian philosophy, Lacanian theory and the theory of hegemony. The aim of the whole seminar is to show how the whole field of classical ontology can be recast in rhetorical terms, and in what way this project diverges from other contemporary attempts at reformulating ontology in a post ontotheological era.

Other Courses
COL 700 Thesis Guidance (1 thru 16 credit hours)
COL 600 Independent Study (1 thru 12 credit hours)
COL 650 Supervised Readings (1 thru 6 credit hours)

Permission of instructor is required for registration in Thesis Guidance, Independent Study, or Supervised Readings.

Registration numbers are instructor-specific.


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	:: Fall 2005 - Graduate Courses
Graduate Undergraduate Course Archive	COL 722: Humanism and the Task of Thinking COL 712: Postcolonial Theory and its Discontents COL 681: Bible: Paul's Promise COL 705: The Romantic Sublime COL 708: Poetry, Philosophy, Language COL 713: Theories of Mourning / Future of Theory COL 707: Identification and the Social Bond COL 710: Introduction to Rhetorical Analysis COL 722: HUMANISM AND THE TASK OF THINKING (top) Professor Rodolphe Gasché Registration Numbers: (A) 236606 (B) 162914 Tuesday, 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 Through a close reading of Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," we will seek to expand on the basic tenets of Heidegger's thought. Apart from questions about Being, thinking, science, humanism, language, and so forth, we will also elaborate on Heidegger's understanding of the East/West divide, the relation of self and other, the specificity of other than Western beginnings. We will also read "A Dialogue on Language" in this seminar. Requirements: term paper (12-15 pages). COL 712: POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS (top) Professor Shaun Irlam Registration Numbers: (A) 200320 (B) 183124 Monday, 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 The angel of postcolonial history seems to have left in its wake a boulevard of broken dreams. Just as the wave of decolonizations in the 1960s once appeared to hold so much promise for nations of the Third World, so the nascent discourse of postcolonial theory promised a way forward. In recent years, however, Marxists, humanists, even postcolonial theorists have attacked postcolonial theory on a number of significant issues. If recent obituaries are any sign of the future, postcolonial theory may soon occupy an unmarked grave. There currently appears to be a vogue among its critics (they are legion and growing) to impute inordinate degrees of stupidity to postcolonial theorists on several accounts. Indeed, even scholars loosely congregated in the field of postcolonial theory vie to be fiercest in their denunciations of the intellectual pretensions of postcolonial theory. This is surely the legible mark of a crisis in the discourse and the moment to revisit the accomplishments and objectives of postcolonial theory. How does postcolonial theory position itself in relationship to postmodernism and globalization? Is the European imperial problematic around which postcolonial theory was initially organized no longer relevant? Hardt and Negri's recent work Empire suggests that there is life in the imperial paradigm yet. Others have charged that postcolonial theory is nothing more than intellectual colonialism or that it is merely an ideological mask for global capitalism. What are the roots of the recent assault on postcolonial theory? What is the source of postcolonial theory's recent crisis of self-hatred? What precisely is postcoloniality? Who is FOR postcolonial theory? Who's afraid of postcolonial theory? The gloves are off! Through a set of readings from "classic" postcolonial texts such as Said's Orientalism as well as recent critiques, we will examine what is currently at stake in this field and whether it has a future. Texts: Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory; Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture; Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other; Gaurav Desai, Subject to Colonialism; Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism; Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Edward Said, Orientalism; Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason; J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace. Miscellaneous recent essays and selections by Parry, McClintock, Dirlik, Prakash, Shohat. COL 681: BIBLE: PAUL'S PROMISE (top) Professor David Johnson Registration Numbers: (A) 265689 Tuesday, 6:30-9:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 We will read Paul's letters in order to think about the structure of the promise, the law, justice, and the community of believers. We will also read 20th-century reconsiderations of Paul, including those of Heidegger, Taubes, Boyarin, Badiou, Zizek, and Agamben. Requirements: seminar paper (15-25 pages). COL 705: THE ROMANTIC SUBLIME (top) Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Registration Numbers: (A) 097969 (B) 263814 Thursday, 3:30-6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 This seminar will focus on the philosophical and literary thinking of the sublime in English and German Romanticism. We will examine the relation of the sublime to nature and aesthetics, as well as the ways in which this figure informs and delimits modern theories of subjectivity and ethics. Readings will include Longinus's Peri Hypsous, Kant's sections on the Analytic of the Beautiful and the Sublime in the Third Critique and his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and writings by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Kleist, and Novalis. Requirements: Seminar participation, oral presentation, term paper. COL 708: POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, LANGUAGE (top) Professor Krzysztof Ziarek Registration Numbers:(A) 024804 (B) 485414 Monday 3:30-6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 This course will explore the relation between 20th century philosophical and poetic approaches to language and thought. The starting point of our explorations will be Heidegger?s notion of ?poetic thinking,? which we will examine in a dialogue with avant-garde poetry. In several texts, Heidegger characterizes the new, non-metaphysical, thinking he seeks as ?poetic.? At the same time, he proposes to initiate this way of thinking in the context of what he calls ?thoughtful poetry?. This dialogue between poetry and thinking pivots on a decisive transformation of language and of our relation to it. As Heidegger puts it, ?In order to think back to the essence of language, in order to reiterate what is its own, we need a transformation of language, a transformation we can neither compel nor concoct. The transformation does not result from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases. The transformation touches on our relation to language.? We will explore this notion of transformation through the prism of avant-garde poetics, in order to see whether and in what way such a transformation is at stake in experimental writings. Readings will include texts by Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Susan Howe, Paul Celan, as well as Heidegger?s "What Is Called Thinking?" and his essays on language and poetry. COL 713: THEORIES OF MOURNING / FUTURE OF THEORY (top) Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek Registrations Numbers: (A) 444175 (B) 444971 Wednesday 3:30-6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 In this course we will explore the tension between commemorative and transformative functions of modern aesthetics in the context of theories of mourning and utopia, on the one hand, and the politics of race and gender, on the other. By reading selected works of Adorno and Bloch, we will examine how modern art negotiates its own precarious social status in modernity (which Hegel famously diagnosed as ?the death of art?) by bearing witness to the catastrophic history of modernity, and by mobilizing transformative possibilities of aesthetics in resistance to that history. We will also ask in what sense the aesthetic tasks of mourning and that of inventing the new converge and diverge with the politics of gender, race, and sexuality. We will then examine the psychoanalytical, poststructuralist, and feminist revisions of mourning and melancholia (Freud, Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler) which not only problematize the role of mourning in the formation of gender identity, subjectivity, and alterity, but also call into question its status as ?work.? By engaging aspects of race and postcolonial theory (in particular, Paul Gilroy?s ?Postcolonial Melancholia?), we will ask in what sense art bears witness not only to the unmourned losses of the destructive history of colonialism but also to the transformative possibilities of resistance. We will explore the questions of the future of theory in the context of active engagements with the selective lectures and presentations of COL lecture series (usually held on Thursdays, at 1 o?clock) and the Humanities Institute conference, ?New Futures,? tentatively scheduled for the last weekend in October. The participants of the seminar will be required to attend at least three lectures and the conference in place of regular seminar meetings. If there are potential conflicts between the lectures and your other seminars, we will find creative solutions to these scheduling dilemmas. Requirements: class presentations, active participation in class discussions, research paper, in-class presentation of research. COL 707: IDENTIFICATION AND THE SOCIAL BOND (top) Professors Ernesto Laclau & Joan Copjec Registration Numbers (A) 042668 (B1) 375182 Wednesday 12:30-3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 This seminar takes Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego as its central text. We will read the text carefully in an attempt to determine in what the process of identification consists. How does it permit the individual subject to perceive herself not only as unique, but also as a member of a group? How is it that identification with others is constitutive of one's own identity? Professor Laclau will lead the discussions of Freud's precursors and contemporaries in an effort to isolate psychoanalysis's specific contribution to the theory of group identity. Here we will examine the phenomena of hysteria, studied by Janet and Charcot prior to Freud, and that of "mental contagion" as defined by the sociologists of Freud's time. Professor Copjec will lead the discussions of theories since Freud: Balibar, Ranciere, Agamben, and Lacan, most likely. The focus of this part of the seminar will be the relation between identification and the "emotional tie." Freud makes some provocative remarks on the subject, but they have not been sufficiently followed up. Our reflections on affect and identification will lead us back to our discussions of hysteria and mental contagion and, time permitting, to the theory of the "state of exception." COL 710: INTRODUCTION TO RHETORICAL ANALYSIS (top) Professor Ernesto Laclau Registration Numbers (A) 040075 (B) 213278 Tuesday, 3:30-6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640 This seminar has a double aim. The first is to provide a description of both the main moments in the history of Rhetoric and of the main subjects to be found in both ancient and modern Rhetoric (figures, argumentation, types of conviction brought about by extra-logical means, etc). The second is to see the relation between Rhetoric and Philosophy in contemporary thought. Issues such as the structure of naming, of affective cathexis, of condensation and displacement as constitutive of meaning will be studied. The main references will be deconstruction, Heideggerian philosophy, Lacanian theory and the theory of hegemony. The aim of the whole seminar is to show how the whole field of classical ontology can be recast in rhetorical terms, and in what way this project diverges from other contemporary attempts at reformulating ontology in a post ontotheological era. Other Courses COL 700 Thesis Guidance (1 thru 16 credit hours) COL 600 Independent Study (1 thru 12 credit hours) COL 650 Supervised Readings (1 thru 6 credit hours) Permission of instructor is required for registration in Thesis Guidance, Independent Study, or Supervised Readings. Registration numbers are instructor-specific.
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