COL 726 A - Asystematic Writing: Schlegel, Nietzsche, Kafka, Blanchot, Beckett, Borges
COL 727 A - Euroanalysis
COL 728 A - Sexual Difference
COL 729 A - Body Criticism
COL 730 A - Literary Theory 2
COL 731 A - Literary Theory 1
COL 733 A - Aesthetics and the Sublime
COL 734 A - Theology & Postmodernism
COL 735 A - Definition of America
COL 736 A - Allegory
COL 737 A - Poetry & Thought
COL 738 A - Rethinking the Americas
COL 739 A - Bodyworks
COL 740 - The Filmic Text
COL 741 A - Media Curating
COL 751 A - Topics: Literature and Perversion
COL 752 - Ethnopoetics
COL 753 - Caribbean Aesthetics
COL 754 - Black Poetics
COL 755 - Italian Cinema from the 50s to the Present
COL 756 - 18th Century English Literature
COL 726 A - ASYSTEMATIC WRITING: SCHLEGEL, NIETZSCHE, KAFKA, BLANCHOT, BECKETT, BORGES (top)
Professor Henry Sussman
REG. #084011 (A)
TUESDAY - 12:30-3:10 REG. #194207 (B) CLEMENS 640
This course views certain experiments in modern discourse that would have been possible only by virtue of philosophical systems such as those by Kant and Hegel. Such discursive and literary forms as the fragment, the aphorism, and the "interior monologue" presuppose the architecture of a system behind them, as do the complex phenomena of irony and allegory. This course will consider philosophical and literary works by the above authors in terms of such phenomena as fragmentation, irony, discontinuity, condensation, and allegory. There will be an attempt to characterize the respective innovations of modernism and postmodernism as reactions to major systemic experiments. The primary assignment for the class will be the classical 18-22 pp. seminar paper. Students will be encouraged to report on their works-in-progress. Readings will include the Athenaeum and Philosophical Fragments by the Schlegels, Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Kafka's short fiction, Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation, Beckett's Molloy, and Borges's Ficciones.
COL 727 A - EUROANALYSIS (top)
Professor Rodolphe Gasché
THURSDAY REG. #006368 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #080460 (B) CLEMENS 640
In this seminar we will investigate the intimate linkage in phenomenological thought of the project of philosophy to the idea of "Europe". We will discuss among others, parts of Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, as well as the "Vienna Lectures;" a selection of texts by Heidegger, in particular, the essay "Europe and German Philosophy;" as well as a selection of Jan Patocka's Heretical Essays and Plato and Europe.
COL 728 A - SEXUAL DIFFERENCE (top)
Professor Elizabeth Grosz
MONDAY REG. #491649 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #080460 (B) CLEMENS 640
This course is designed to provide an introduction and overview of one of the major sites of feminist theory in the 1990s, the debates surrounding the question of sexual difference. The course aims to introduce students to the terms and positions involved in these debates. We will discuss the question of how to define and socially position women: are women to be viewed as human subjects, fundamentally the same as men? Or as different kinds of subjects with their own specificity? How far does the notion of specificity or autonomy reach? In the first part of the course, we will examine what might be called the 'difference within': notions of the divided or split subject derived from psychoanalytic theory and phenomenology. Here we will also examine the question of essentialism, and the role it has played methodologically and substantively in the production and evaluation of feminist discourses; in the second part, we will discuss what could be called the 'difference between', differences between women, which may divide them according to class, race, ethnicity and sexual preference; in the third part, we will look at the question of biological and cultural differences and how these are or are not relevant to accounts of men's and women's social and psychical relations. The course will close with an examination of the ethical implications of sexual difference; if the two sexes are to be understood as distinct from each other, what kinds of relations may exist between them? What effects does the acknowledgment of sexual difference have on reconceiving relations between the two sexes?
COL 729 A - BODY CRITICISM (top)
Professor Margherita Long
TUESDAY REG. #256531 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #253221 (B) CLEMENS 640
COL 729 examines theoretical attempts to replace modernity's mind/body dichotomy with a more strategic, more celebratory account of corporeal wisdom. All the writers we examine agree that to equate the materiality of the body with what is ahistrorical, inert, or unknowing is to dismiss one of our richest resources for social change. All are concerned with whether the deconstruction of the mind/body opposition is enough to challenge the patriarchal and racist paradigms that continue to evaluate disprized bodies according to a singular "natural" standard. Where our writers tend to disagree is in their different answers to a set of common questions: How much can the body in pain tell us? The body in pleasure? The maternal body? The body without organs? The body at art? The body of the narcissist? How did feminist art criticism in the 1980s manage to persuade us that any presentation or representation of the female body necessarily participates in the phallocentric dynamic of fetishism? How did Freud manage to make what Deleuze and Guattari call "the ridiculous death drive" seem plausible, and how do their rhizomatics, or Irigaray's linguistics, offer alternative libidinal economies? Readings include selections from Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain; Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body; Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter; Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Amelia Jones, Body Art; and Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. To keep our interpretive circuits flowing freely, we will take time to bring body criticism to bear on, and be borne upon by, three non-theoretical texts:
- The masochist's body in a Japanese novel from the "erotic, grotesque, nonsensical" school of 1930's Tokyo: Tanizaki Jun'ichirô's The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi.
- The post-colonial Hong Kong woman's body as projected onto a dying Jeremy Irons in Wayne Wang's 1998 file Chinese Box.
- The "affects, local movements, and differential speeds" of poetic "haecceity" bodies as attributed by Deleuze and Guattari to "The Oriental Haiku," in several seventeenth century haikai sequences (The Monkey's Straw Raincoat) by the Basho school.
COL 730 A - LITERARY THEORY 2 (top)
Professor Carol Jacobs
TUESDAY REG. #338063 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #433649 (B) CLEMENS 436
Our readings will begin by considering the ways in which Enlightenment values and concepts are questioned in the works of the German eighteenth century thinker, Johann George Hamann. Hamann is conventionally viewed as the father of the Sturm and Drang and also of Romanticism. Who was this figure, seen as the turning point from a rigorous philosophy that promised, apparently, a control of nature, to a new found freedom welcomed in the name of the senses, the passions, and a redefinition of language? One is wont to read Hamann by quoting the most readable and appealing passages, especially from his most famous essay "Aesthetics in a Nutshell," but his work is made considerably more complex when one takes other factors into consideration, his use of citation, his relation to religion, the performance of his own, slightly mad, prose. Thinking through Hamann will take us on byroads to other authors: including Herder, Plato, Rousseau.
Readings will be in English (although available in the original).
Students will be asked to write a term paper of 15 pages either directly concerning one of the authors read in the course or on a related topic to be worked out with me.
COL 731 A - LITERARY THEORY 1 (top)
Professor Joseph Conte
TUESDAY REG. #248655 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #403610 (B) CLEMENS 309
Although the mass media have adopted the term "postmodern" (more or less as a synonym for "nifty") to describe the current period in cultural history, there have been a number of competing and often irreconcilable definitions of the poetics of postmodernism. If we accept Jean-François Lyotard's proposition that the postmodern is defined by "incredulity toward metanarratives," it's no wonder that there have been so many differing petit récits regarding the quality, product, and theory of postmodernism. We'll begin our reading, then, with Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, paying particular attention to his claims for the impact of science and informational technology in the postindustrial age. The issue of periodization and/or cultural shift arises in Ihab Hassan's The Postmodern Turn, which argues that postmodern indeterminacy and immanence represent a rupture from--rather than a belated version of--modernism. Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postmodernism, investigates the function of irony practice. Frederic Jameson counters with a less flattering description of art, literature, and popular culture as pastiche occasioned by an overheated consumer economy in his analysis of late capitalism, most recently collected in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. Jameson's position is supported in part by a reading of Perry Anderson's historical overview, The Origins of Postmodernity.
Particularly relevant to the problem of provenance in American culture, Jean Baudrillard argues that the simulacrum has been substituted for the real, making it impossible to trace our cultural icons to some authoritative source. In defense of popular culture we'll visit one of the inaugural essays in the field, Leslie Fiedler's "Cross the border--close that gap: Postmodernism." Another Buffalonian (emeritus), John Barth, offers the complementary view from the heights of self-conscious, reflexive fiction in his essays "The Literature of Exhaustion" and "The Literature of Replenishment." Literary Theory, however, has had no exclusive purchase on postmodernity. The eclectic appropriations of postmodern architecture and the visual arts are the subject of Charles Jencks?s What is Post-Modernism?. In an extension of Lyotard's concerns regarding the new science, we'll read an account of the influential field of the cybernetic organism, Donna J. Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. At various points in the semester we'll consult t least one other history of the period, Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern.
The preceding is necessarily presented in the manner of a reading list rather than as metanarrative of its own regarding postmodernism. Our discussion will be studded with as many references to individual works of postmodern art, architecture, poetry, fiction, and digital media as time permits.
Seminar participants who are registered intensively will be required to make a twenty-minute oral presentation and produce a twenty-page research paper.
COL 733 A - AESTHETICS AND THE SUBLIME (top)
Professor Joan Copjec
WEDNESDAY REG. #043589 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #434311 (B) CLEMENS 309
This seminar will approach the topic of aesthetics (and anti-aesthetics) from a psychoanalytic perspective; this means that our primary focus will be the concept of sublimation. Underdeveloped, confused, in considerable disrepair, this concept was nevertheless sufficiently elaborated by Freud to leave behind rich theoretical material with which we will work.
Since part of the problem seems to have been Freud's notoriously conservative artistic taste (which led him to accept the still prevalent doxa about art: that it plays a basically compensatory role, that its primary function is to make up for life's failings; or that it is symptomatic and we are thus able to read through it to the culture that produced it), we will supplement readings of psychoanalytic texts--by Freud and Lacan primarily, though the work of Bersani and Laplanche will also be relevant) with readings of more "transgressive" texts: Duchamp's ready made's, Pasolini's Salo, Cindy Sherman's photographs, Kara Walker's silhouettes, Toni Morrison's Beloved among others, in order to carve out a better working definition of beauty and art.
We will also devote some attention to the relation between aesthetic transgression and the transgressions associated with perversion, two phenomena often confused, but whose differences should turn out to be instructive.
COL 734 A - THEOLOGY & POSTMODERNISM (top)
Professor Jill Robbins
THURSDAY REG. #004888 (A)
12:30-3:10 REG. #224566 (B) CLEMENS 436
Course description not available.
COL 735 A - DEFINITION OF AMERICA (top)
Professor Robert Daly
WEDNESDAY REG. #443618 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #169557 (B) CLEMENS 436
This course will attempt an exercise in synthesis. We shall read, within their reciprocal cultural contexts, several writings that help to define, create, or revise our national cultures, both the discourse of nationalism and what Julia Kristeva calls the discourses of "nations without nationalism." We shall attend to these writings? interactions with other cultures, conversations among them, and the ways in which they are both representative (participating in the cultural conversations of their time and ours) and hermeneutic (affording practice and instruction in the arts of interpretation). Cultural theory, ecocriticism, feminism, ecofeminism, trauma theory, rhetorical hermeneutics, literary anthropology, postanalytic philosophy, postmodern ethics, and any other theories we find useful will inform our discussions of these texts but will not replace them.
TEXTS: Mary White Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, in William Andrews, ed., Classic American Autobiographies (Mentor, Penguin). Susanna Haswell Rowson, Charlotte Temple. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, in Andrews. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills. Henry James, Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw. Zitkala-Sa, Four Autobiographical Narrative, in Andrews.
Each student will do one seminar report (15-20 minutes), and each student taking the seminar intensively (for full credit) will also do one research essay (8-24 pages) on a topic of his or her own choosing. This essay should use the format for parenthetical documentation suggested in the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (New York: MLA, 1998).
COL 736 A - ALLEGORY (top)
Professor Daniel Hack
TUESDAY REG. #158907
12:30-3:10 REG. #406055 CLEMENS 436
Usurped as a narrative mode by the novel and rejected as a rhetorical figure in the epochal poetics of Coleridge and Wordsworth, allegory has been widely denigrated and neglected for the better part of two centuries. Yet over the past quarter-century or so, allegory has emerged as a crucial topic in literary theory and criticism: allegory plays an indispensable role in the work of arguably the most important deconstructionist critic of our time, Paul de Man, of the leading U.S. Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, and of the hugely influential if unclassifiable Walter Benjamin, and working from avowedly feminist, new historicist, philosophical, postcolonial, postmodernist, and psychoanalytical perspectives (to name only those we'll tackle). Tracking allegory's progress through the wilderness of literary studies, as this course proposed to do, should therefore teach us much about the ways of both allegory and contemporary criticism and theory.
Above all, allegory will serve in this course as an exemplary site for the study of the nature of representation and interpretation and of the ideological (political, ethical, metaphysical,...) implications and affiliations of tropes, literary forms, and reading practices. We will also spend a good deal of time examining (and joining in) the current rethinking of the version of literary history adumbrated in the first sentence of this course description. Accordingly, we will attend to the treatment and use of allegory in Romanticism and in the nineteenth-century novel; more specifically, we'll read poetry and prose by Coleridge and Wordsworth, and perhaps Shelley and/or Keats; and novels by Balzac (La Cousine Bette(, Dickens (Bleak House), Eliot (Daniel Deronda), and Schreiner (Story of an African Farm), as well as tales by Hawthorne. Critics we'll read, in addition to those mentioned above, will likely include Aijaz Ahmad, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Luis Borges, Sharon Cameron, Jonathan Culler, Wai-chee Dimock, Joel Fineman, Angus Fletcher, Mary Jacobus, Roman Jakobson, Anne McClintock, Elaine Scarry, and Doris Sommer. If there is sufficient demand, we'll also find time to think about allegory and film, with Hitchcock's Vertigo our focus.
Course requirements: active class participation, oral presentation, term paper.
COL 737 - A POETRY & THOUGHT (top)
Gérard Bucher
TUESDAY REG. #114529
4:10-6:50 PM BALDY 109
One of the most striking characteristics of European Romanticism concerns its radical reformulation of the connection between literature and philosophy, i.e. poetry and thought (our primary reference book will be The Literary Absolute by J.L. Nancy and Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe). In a first stage, we will investigate the way in which these ideas, which first flourished in the context of German Romanticism, impacted the Romantic movement in France (Lamartine, Vigny, Nerval). Beyond the Romanticist heritage per se, we will then assess Baudelaire's development of an original concept of <
COL 738 A - RETHINKING THE AMERICAS (top)
Professor David Johnson
THURSDAY REG. #499103
1:00-3:30 ALUMNI 90
This course has a twofold objective. First, it seeks to begin the necessary work of reimagining the theoretical limits of (the idea of) the Americas, including such notions as American literature, American history, and American culture. To this end we will read major theoretical statements about the possibility of America or the Americas, both following these statements? particular ways of articulation the problems and borders of the Americas and considering their possible shortcomings for a more inclusive discourse of Americanicity. We will read across disciplinary boundaries, including texts by philosophers, historians, literary and cultural critics, and anthropologists. Second, the course promotes informed participation in the "Borders of the Americans: Rethinking Our Modernities" conference, which will take up the same problematic as the seminar and which will be held at UB, 23-25 March 2000. In the seminar we will read texts by several of the invited speakers and students from the seminar will have the opportunity to host plenary speakers at lunches over the course of the three-day event. Requirements: Seminar presentation, research paper (20 pages), conference attendance.
The conference speakers are Jody Berland (York University), José Limón (UT-Austin), Marc Shell (Harvard), Carol Zemel (UB), Gordon Hutner (Kentucky), Dennis Tedlock (UB), Walter Mignolo (Duke), Mary Louise Pratt (Stanford), Robert Warrior (Stanford), Jolene Rickard (UB), Enrique Dussel (UNAM and Harvard), and Vera Kutzinski (Yale).
Our reading list will be drawn from the following provisional list:
José Martí, Our American; Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America; José Limón, Dancing with the DevIl: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas; Américo Paredes, Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Travel Writing and Transculturation; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance; Marc Shell, Children of the Earth; Vera Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets; Dennis Tedlock, Breath on the Mirror or The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation; Walter Benn Michaels, Our America; Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of U.S. Imperialism; José David Salívar, Dialectics of Our America; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America; Lois Parkinson Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse or A useable Past.
COL 739 A - BODYWORKS (top)
Bernadette Wegenstein
THURSDAY REG. #369913
4:00-6:40 BALDY 209 Course outline
"Bodyworks: Medicine, Technology and the Body in the late 20th Century" takes the late twentieth century as its historical timeframe for an analysis of concepts and representations of the human body under the influence of new technologies. In an interdisciplinary framework, evidence from both scientific and artistic "discourse universes" will be under analysis. "Bodyworks" is a web conference course between the University at Buffalo (Comparative Literature, Henry Sussman/Bernadette Wegenstein) and Stanford University (History and Philosophy of Science, Timothy Lenoir; Vascular Surgery/Mechanical Engineering, Charles Taylor).
COL 740 - THE FILMIC TEXT (top)
Professor Brian Henderson
WEDNESDAY REG. #125635
12:30-3:10 CENTER FOR THE ARTS 235
Course description not availabe
COL 741 A - MEDIA CURATING (top)
Professor Caroline Koebel
THURSDAY REG. #403483
3:30-6:10 CENTER FOR THE ARTS 232
This course about the field of media curating will provide students the tools to conceptualize, develop and--with a view to joining practice to theory--realize curated media programs and events. In addition to engaging in a step-by-step process to reach this goad, the curators across the united States, view select programs of media art (film, video, web art, et al.), read various materials, and (when possible) host visiting speakers and attend screenings outside of class. Special attention will be paid to the often novel approaches of activist collectives and individuals/groups confusing distinctions between artist, curator and educator. As media curating is a relatively untheorized mode of cultural production, the course is an experiment in paving new territory and forging articulations--through debate, articles, media programs, et al.--of curatorial strategies, histories and theories. Catalysts for the course's own cultural productions will include feminist and postcolonialist thinkers such as bell hooks, Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha; activist and roaming artist-curators (individual and groups) such as Group Material, Termite TV and Fred Wilson; alternative media exhibition groups such as Other Cinema in San Francisco and the Filmmaker's Cooperative in New York City; and critics who cover noncommerical media events, including Liz Kotz, Manohla Dargis and Jim Hoberman.
COL 751 A - TOPICS: LITERATURE AND PERVERSION (top)
Professor William Egginton
TUESDAY REG. #480317
4:10-6:50
This course will undertake an examination of the concept of "perversion" in its historical manifestations in a variety of discourses. While the notion of "sexual perversion" is the most highly connoted of this semantic field in contemporary western society, attention will be paid to its derivation from other dimensions of experience, mainly the religious and the political. The scene of our examination will be perversion as it is experienced, explored, and redefined in literature spanning from the late Middle Ages to the present. In the context of the twentieth century, some film and other media will also be examined. Finally, we will question to what extent perversion or "the perverse" has become an intrinsic element in the production of literature and art in general in modern times. Readings may include works by Tirso de Molina, Santa Teresa, Sade and the French libertines, Miller, Dostoyevsky, Bataille, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, and others.
COL 752 - ETHNOPOETICS (top)
Professor Dennis Tedlock
MONDAY REG. #132167
12:00-2:40
Ethnopoetics is a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now. To have any hope of getting outside we must set aside any notion we may have that these poetries will necessarily come from a distant time, or from present-day peoples who are somehow living in the past, or that they will necessarily resemble Homer, or that they will be less complex than Western or metropolitan poetries, or that they will have been produced in some kind of isolation from other languages or cultures.
Ethnopoetics does not merely contrast the poetics of "ethnics" with just plain poetics, but implies that any poetics is always an ethnopoetics. Our main interest will indeed be the poetries of people who are ethnically distant from ourselves, but it is precisely by the effort to reach into distances that we bring our own ethnicity, and the poetics that goes with it, into fuller consciousness.
Ethnopoetics originated among poets with an interest in anthropology and linguistics and among anthropologists and linguists with an interest in poetry, such as David Antin, Stanley Diamond, Dell Hymes, Jerome Rothenberg, Gary Snyder, Nathaniel Tarn (E. Michael Mendelson), and myself. The emphasis has been on performances in which the speaking, chanting, or singing voice gives shape to proverbs, riddles, curses, laments, praises, prayers, prophecies, public announcements, and narratives.
Practitioners of ethnopoetics treat the relationship between performances and texts as a field for experimentation. Texts that were taken down in the era of handwritten dictation and published as prose are reformatted and/or retranslated in order to reveal their poetic features. In the case of sound recordings, transcripts and translations serve not only as listening guides but also as scripts or scores for further performances. An ethnopoetic score not only takes account of the words but silences, changes in loudness and tone of voice, the production of sound effects, and the use of gestures and props. Whatever a score may encompass, the notion of a definitive text has no place in ethnopoetics. Linguists and folklorists tend to narrow their attention to the normative side of performance, recognizing only such features as can be accounted for by general rules. Ethnopoetics remains open to the creative side of performance, valuing features that may be rare or even unique to a particular artist or occasion.
Special attention will be given to the dialogical dimensions of performances. At the simplest level this means that in many genres an audience response may be required, or there may be a division of roles among two or more speakers or singers. But it can also mean that a single speaker produces multiple contrasting voices. A poet, instead of settling on just the right words, may give voice to multiple ways of saying something, thus treating language itself as fundamentally dialogical. It is simply not true that multivocal discourse is an invention of novelists, or that poetry must be monological.
Readings will include translations of verbal arts in various African, Asian, and Amerindian languages. There will also be listenings covering a wide range of recorded performances. As an alternative to a term paper, a transcription and/or translation, and/or performance may be acceptable.
COL 753 - CARIBBEAN AESTHETICS (top)
Professor José Buscaglia
REG. #467956
WEDNESDAY - 4:10-6:50 CLEMENS 117
Course description not available.
COL 754 - BLACK POETICS (top)
Professor Christian Onikepe
REG. # 432104
MONDAY - 4:10-6:50 BALDY 118
This course retraces the origin of black poetics, its development from an enormous corpus of indigenous pre-colonial oral and written literature and its final insertion into an embattled reaction to slavery and colonialism. Methodologically, it proposes with Ducrot and Todorov to "elaborate categories that allow us to grasp simultaneously the variety and unity of literary works" (Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sources of Language, 1979). It implies further for the African and Caribbean works to be studies, an investigation of their recurring thematic motifs and stylistic choices, the aesthetic kinship that informs their ontological autonomy, especially when compared to known Western poetic categories. We shall be guided here by Africa's Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka's assertion according to which black poetics "is structured within a conceptual tradition which embodies essentials of the metaphysics of the African world" (Poems from Africa, 1975).
The study proper begins with an analysis of Césairian and Senghorian Negritude for an examination of what may be termed the anthropological and metaphysical matrix from which black poetic imagination derives its vitality and specificity. Thereafter, we shall study the works of African and Caribbean poets such as David Diop, Birago Diop, Rabéarivelo, Rabemananjara, Tchicaya U Tamsi, Bernard Dadié, Tati-Loutard, René Depestre, Jean Metellus, Jacques Roumain, Edouard Glissant, Etienne Lero, Gilbert Gratiant, etc. Our purpose here is to look for a confirmation of an aesthetic kinship which, though originating in the bowels of the African continent, has continued to define and shape black cultural and spiritual identity in Africa and its diaspora despite, and not because of, the black peoples? ongoing struggle against all forms of political, cultural , and economic hegemony.
This is a course in translation and required texts are in English. As such, it will be taught in English for both graduate and undergraduate credits. However, French students are required to use original texts and to write assignments in French.
COL 755 - ITALIAN CINEMA FROM THE 50s TO THE PRESENT (top)
Professor M.E. Gutierrez
THURSDAY REG. #
4:10-6:50 NORTON 15
In this seminar we will critically explore the cinematic production of some of the major Italian filmmakers from the 50s to the contemporary scene. Special attention will be paid to the work of women directors. We will engage some of the fundamental questions posed by particular films, for example, the intertwining of myth, eroticism and politics in Pasolini's Medea and Oedipus Rex, and in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris and 1900. Other questions that will occupy us will be those concerning the politics of sexuality and gender as (re)presented in Cavani's The Night Porter, The Berlin Affair, in Pasolini's Teorema and in Francesca Archibugi's Mignon has left.
The readings will be presented in a course packet and will include theoretical writing about cinematography by the following authors: Teresa De Lauretis's "Rethinking Women's Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory" and Alice Doesn't (excerpts); Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1. The Movement-Image and Cinema 2. The Time-Image (excerpts); Robert Bresson's Notes on Cinematography; James Monaco How to read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media (excerpts); Peter Bondanella's Italian Cinema (excepts); Giuliana Bruno's and Maria Nadotti's Off Screen: Woman and Film in Italy (excerpts).
N.B. The course and the readings will be in English. The films will be in Italian with English subtitles.
Required Films: We will select 12 films from the following list according to the interests of the class:
Pier Paolo Pasolini Medea, Teorema; Oedipus Rex or Hawks and Sparrows, or
The Decameron
Bernardo Bertolucci 1900; Last Tango in Paris, or The Spider's Stratagem or
The Conformist, or Besieged
Liliana Cavani The Night Porter, Ther Berlin Affair, The Cannibals, or
Beyond Good and Evil
Dario Argento's Cat o? Nine Tails or Deep Red
Francesca Archibugi Mignon has left
Roberta Torre Tano da morire
Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West, or Once Upon A Time In
America, or Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro Non Troppo
Lina Wertmüller Swept Away or Love and Anarchy or Seven Beauties
Nanni Moretti Ecce Bombo or The Mass Is Over
Marco Bellocchio The Devil in the Flesh
COL 756 - 18TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE (top)
Professor James Bunn
MONDAY REG. #103628 (A)
3:30-6:10 REG. #277796 (B) CLEMENS 309
However else education may be defined, it is surely supposed to prepare students fro the future. But just as Hamlet's studies at Wittenburg University didn't exactly prepare him for acting in the castle at Elsinore, so education doesn't seem to prepare one specifically for future contingencies. Or does it? In this seminar we'll study some 18th century narratives in order to learn how alternative futures were beginning to be scripted. For instance, futures-as-fictions were postulated in Hobbes's theories of social contract and natural law. Furthermore, during the course of the century, when most disciplines became historicized, religious eschatology was transformed into secular hope. Religious advent was converted into mercantile adventure. Lotteries, insurance tontines, runs on the futures markets of commodities and stocks, were perfected into new theories of probability. A politics of the future was appropriated by Whig social theorists, on both 'sides' of the Atlantic, whose new learning promised that the future belonged to them. So great expectations in time, such as the South Sea Bubble, funded expansionism in space, towards America, The Northwest Passage, and around the world Along the way, we'll attend to some current works of transatlantic criticism. Utopian tracts, travel literature, science fiction, are surely scripted towards the future, but so are the new developmental novels, and even some historical novels. Here are the basic texts to be studied: More's Utopia, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, Tom Paine selections, Malthus On Population, and Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. There will be secondary readings in Aristotle (on probability), Locke, Lessing on the pregnant moment); in addition there will be selections from Habermas, Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, Richard Rorty, L. Dolozel, among others, and especially the futures semiotics of C.S. Peirce.
