Comparative Literature Department :: University at Buffalo

COL 525A - 20th Century Italian Literature
COL 705 - Ethics of Criticism
COL 706 - Calypso Theory: The Postcolonial Caribbean
COL 707 - Late Joyce and Post Modernism
COL 708 - Literary Theory I: Reading Deleuze
COL 712 - Literary Theory II: Blanchot and Literary Criticism
COL 714 - Definition of America: Poetics of the Americas
COL 718 (A) - The Baroque
COL 719 (A) - Maghrebian Literature
LAW 764 - Law as Literature

COL 525A - 20th CENTURY ITALIAN LITERATURE (top)

Professor Maria Elena Gutiérrez
Registration Number: 406204
Cross-listed: ITL 519, HMN 505
Tuesday 4:10-6:50, Fronzack 422

The focus of this semester will be to read and critically explore some masterpieces of twentieth-century Italian literature, covering the time span from World War I to the eighties. The course will provide review of major literary and cultural currents vis-à-vis Italy's political history, through two World Wars, the rise and fall of the Fascist regime and the post-war re-construction and industrialization of Italian society. We will examine the intersection between the realm of writing, philosophy, and history.

We will read the following fundamental narratives:
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopard
Luigi Pirandello, One, none, and a hundred-thousand
Italo Svevo,Zeno's Confessions
Cesare Pavese,The Silent Dutchess or Natalia Ginzburg, Family Sayings
Alberto Moravia, The Conformist or Leonardo Sciascia, Sicilian Uncles
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

The readings will include relevant theoretical texts by Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Rowland Barthes and Georg Lukacs and feminist critical writings by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.

THE COURSE AND THE READINGS WILL BE IN ENGLISH.

COL 705 - ETHICS OF CRITICISM (top)

Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Number: (A) 301093 (B) 312767
Cross-listed: ENG 705 A,B
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640

The main focus of this course will consist in a close reading of Walter Benjamin's long essay on "Goethe's Elective Affinities." The goal of the course is, first, to elaborate on the presuppositions and tenets of Benjamin's literary criticism in this essay which more than any other by this author can be said to be a manifesto for the task of criticism. Second, we will seek to spell out the ethical implications of Benjamin's criticism, and will discuss in this context the section on marriage in Immanuel Kant's Metaphysics of Morals to which Benjamin refers in the essay. An additional digression into Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics will help us understand Benjamin's disregard for what he calls "mere life".

COL 706 - CALYPSO THEORY: THE POSTCOLONIAL CARIBBEAN (top)

Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) 445234 (B) 199224
Cross-listed: ENG 707 A,B
Tuesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens 640

calypso [Origin unknown] A West Indian Ballad or song in African rhythm, usually improvised to comment on a topic of current interest.

This course seeks to introduce some of the discourses and debates that constitute postcolonial theory. It also aims to give the phenomenon of postcoloniality some historical and geopolitical specificity by examining the works of several key figures from the Caribbean who have made postcolonial discourse possible.

Contemporary postcolonial discourse in the American academy has been predominantly associated with South Asian studies and the exploration of subalternity articulated by postcolonial and West-based Indian intellectuals (figures like Bhabha, Rushdie, Spivak, Suleri, Chatterjee, and Guha). This perspective has prevailed to the extent that recent critiques of postcolonial theory (by Ahmad and others) have unjustly challenged postcoloniality as merely a bid by deracinated South Asian intellectuals to confect a spurious legitimacy for themselves in the West. Whatever the other shortcomings of this critique, however, it also utterly overlooks the role of the Caribbean and North Atlantic rim in determining the vocabulary of postcolonial theory.

This course will endeavor to situate a specific geopolitical region, the Caribbean, in terms of postcolonial theory, and will investigate postcolonial discourse as a hybrid Caribbean phenomenon developed in both "theoretical" and "literary" texts. One aim of the course will be precisely to examine the way these generic distinctions get dismantled and redrawn at Caribbean addresses.

The primary focus of the course will be the work of Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James, who we shall read in some depth. However, the course will also include works by Césaire Jamaica Kincaid, Mootoo, Naipaul, Glissant, Walcott, Benitez-Rojo, and others. In these texts we shall focus on constructions of postcolonial and oppositional subjectives, on the challenge of imagining emergent national territories, cultures and communities, on the discursive constraints that dictate certain tactics, strategies and responses to colonial occupations and, on the techniques of improvisation invented by Caribbean cultures to address their specific geopolitical location.

"...usually improvised to comment on a topic of current interest"

Finally, to what extent is postcolonial theory itself improvisational in character? To what extent is it a calypso theory? Fanon writes of his theoretical enterprise, "I do not come with timeless truths." Above all, by limiting ourselves to a specific geopolitics and geohistory, the aim of the course will be to ask how we might "historize" the phenomenon of postcolonial theory in the Caribbean archipelago, and also to emphasize how the insights of postcolonial theory might, in turn, be productively applied to the protean character of postcolonial Caribbean discourse.

COL 707 - LATE JOYCE AND POST MODERNISM (top)

Professor Henry Sussman
Registration Number: (A) 445234 (B) 199224
Cross-listed: ENG 707 A,B
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 640

Rather than denoting separate epochs or aesthetic contracts, the terms "modernism" and "postmodernism" are complements in an overarching twentieth-century endeavor that pivoted around such issues as representation, myth, history, sexuality, structuration, rebellion, engagement, and indifference. Many of the masters of modernist experimentation, among them Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Stein, and Borges, alp made significant inroads within the postmodern countermodality. This seminar will begin with some general theoretical considerations of myth, structure, and narrative, and will proceed to devote some weeks to the interface between modernism and postmodernism in Joyce, beginning with Ulysses and proceeding to Finnegans Wake. We will the explore further contributions to postmodern discourse, made, among others, by Adorno, Beckett, Blanchot, Bernhard, and Pynchon. The primary coursework is an extended essay or articulation in some other relevant medium.

COL 708 - Literary Theory I: READING DELEUZE (top)

Professor Elizabeth Grosz
Registration Numbers: (A) 451118 (B) 006686
Cross-listed: ENG 651 A,B
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640

This course will focus on a close and selective reading of key texts written by Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuze and Felix Guattari. While it is a self-contained course with no formal pre-requisites, it is closely linked to the Foucault and Deleuze course last semester. The course will be roughly divided into three parts, which roughly correspond to the three broad phases in Deleuze's intellectual career: first, his early works, especially his writings on Nietzsche, Spinoza and Bergson; second, his middle period, which includes his most difficult writings- The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition; and third, his collaborative writings with Guattari, including A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? The course will provide an introduction to his most central and difficult concepts and questions.

Texts:
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy
Bergsonism
Expressionism in Philosphy Spinoza
Spinoza Practical Philosophy
The Logic of Sense
Difference and Repetition
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
What is Philosophy?

Secondary Texts:
Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Constantin Boundas, The Deleuze Reader
Micheal Hardt, Deleuze and Philosophy
Alain Badiou, The Clamour of Being
I Buchanan and C Colebrook, Deleuze and Feminism

COL 712 - Literary Theory II: BLANCHOT AND LITERARY CRITICISM (top)

Professor Jill Robbins
Registration numbers: (A) 203209 (B) 474875
Cross-listed: ENG 652 A,B
Wednesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640

In his critical essays and narrative prose, Maurice Blanchot interrogates the bery conditions of literature and literary criticism. This more originary level of questioning brings him into proximity with Emmanuel Levinas's "ethics of ethics." Blanchot thematizes the relationship to alterity in terms of writing, the neutral, death, and disaster. Moreover, he gains access to these alteriries within an experience that he calls "literature." Blanchot's critical essays often take their starting point in a pragmatic issue specific to the interpretation of a particular writer, before opening up to problems of "the literary" and existence as such. Within this distinctive "phenomenology" of reading, the meaning of "the literary" can no longer be taken for granted.

Readings include: Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, The Infinite Conversation, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, The Instant of My Death, selections from The Work of Fire and Friendship. Additional readings by Emmanuel Levinas, George Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man.

COL 714 - DEFINITION OF AMERICA: POETICS OF THE AMERICAS (top)

Professor Dennis Tedlock
Registration Number: 492560
Cross-listed: AMS 697, ENG/APY 694
Wednesday 12:00-2:40, Clemens 540

This seminar will be guided, in part, by a stratgeic (or provisional) essentialism. We will look and listen for poetry- whether past, ongoing, or projected- that is specific, in some radical sense, to the so-called Americas or New World or Western Hemisphere, or to Turtle Island. In the case of poetries from the indigenous languages of these worlds, we will try for modes of interpretation and translation that neither locate them on the margins of Eurocentric poetics nor assign them to a prehistory of poetics. In the case of poetries that belong to the new languages of these worlds, which is to say creoles and pidgins, we will again try to decenter Europe.

Texts dealing with the first contacts between Europeans and the peoples who were new to them will be read for clues to poetic differences, with special attention to native accounts of the invaders. We will also consider the radically indigenous writings of the Americas, including pictographs but with special attention to newly deciphered Mayan texts. Mayan literature, written in what turns out to be a phonetic script, begins 500 years earlier than English literature. Its re-emergence into readability, which comes at the same time as a major cultural renewal among Mayan peoples, poses major problems for Eurocentric cultural schemes (and for Olson's human universe).

One-page response papers will be due at each meeting, with a longer piece of work due at the end. Alternatives to term papers may be negotiated, including translations, writerly works, performance pieces, etc.

Visitors to the seminar will include Cecilia Vicuna, Mapuche poet Lionel Lienlaf, and others to be announced.

Readings will include a wide range of texts, translations, and interpretations by most of the following and others as well: Paula Gun Allen, Mary Austin, Jorge Luis Borges, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Daniel G. Brinton, Edouard Glissant, Dell Hymes, Ah Maxam, Alonzo Gonzales Mo, Charles Olson, Simon Ortiz, Andrew Peynesta, Kenneth Tarn, Celcilia Vicuna, Lady Xok, ray Young Bear. Listenings will cover a wide range of performances in various languages, some of which will be made available on the course web site.

COL 718 (A) - THE BAROQUE (top)

Professor William Egginton
Registration Number: 369093
Cross-listed: SPA 530
Monday 4:10-6:50, Clemens 102

The thesis this course intends to explore is that the art-historical concept "the Baroque" refers to a stylistic enterprise that is coterminous with a particular historical constellation of ideas, values, and technologies. The art, literature, thought, and music we identify as baroque corresponds to a historical fascination or even obsession with mediation, and with the possible materialities of mediation, i.e., media. Concomitant to this fascination is the emergence of spatiality as an issue, perhaps the principle issue, for representation. The Baroque constitutes an architecture of representation of whose principle drive is the production of spaces that serve as alternatives to the newly constituted space of "reality." We will endeavor to make out the contours of this architecture of representation via the analysis of the literature, philosophy, theater, painting, architecture, and music of the period bridging the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe analyzing examples of such cultural production from Spain, France, Italy, England, and Germany, all the while paying close attention to each culture's specific stage in the process of nation/empire building. Finally, we will examine the recurrence of the Baroque as a theme in contemporary theory, in particular as manifested in the work of Deleuze and Lacan, and attempt to answer the question of whether the postmodern qualifies in some way as a neo-Baroque. To better adapt our inquiries to the multitude of media that constitute the phenomenon of the Baroque, the course will itself take place in a highly medialized environment, in which visuals, text, and music will be made present to us during our discussions via the Internet. We will read texts in their original languages when possible, and in translation when necessary, but discussions will take place in English.

COL 719 (A) - MAGHREBIAN LITERATURE (top)

Professor Christian O. Onikepe
Registration Number: 210673
Cross-listed: ENG 578X, FR 482ONI, FR526ONI
Monday 4:00-6:50, Baldy 121

"The poet must show his disagreement [with opposing forces of politics and religion], even in a progressive political climate. That is his job. He undertakes his own revolution at the center of the political revolution. He becomes, in the context vexing disturbances, the perpetual troubleshooter. The poet is the Revolution in its nakedness; he is life's own movement"
-(Kateb Yacine-Algeria)

This course looks at the literature of Francophone Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia), and some pockets- no less pertinent- of Francophone writings from Egypt and Lebanon. It seeks to unearth a fundamental arabite, a cultural and metaphysical rootedness in a world-view that is distinctively Maghrebian, even in its unswerving postcolonial stance and lucid quest for identity and self-understanding.

Using the works of writers such as Driss Charibi, Abellatif Laabi, Tahar Ben Jalloun, Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebbar, Leila Sebbar, etc., the course retraces the origins of Francophone Maghrebian literature, its engagement in the struggle for the countries' independences, its poetic rendition of post-independence disillusions, as well as its poet's retracing of "life's own movement."

This course will be taught in French and primary readings will be in French also. However, students from departments other than MLL may choose to write their term papers in English.

LAW 764 - LAW AS LITERATURE (top)

Professor Guyora Binder

This 3-credit course meets only seven times, during the first two weeks in January, before the graduate's semester begins. It does not conflict with any of your other spring semester courses. The meetings are in O'Brian 545 at these times:

January 3 9:30-12:30 (Course Introduction: Law as Literature)
January 4 10:30-1:00 (Legal Theories of Interpretation)
January 5 9:30-12:30 (Literary Hermeneutics and Legal Interpret.)
January 8 9:30-12:30 (Law as Narrative)
January 10 9:30-12:30 (Law as Rhetoric)
January 11 10:30-1:00 (Law as Language: Deconstruction)
January 12 9:30-12:30 (Law as Culture: Cultural Studies,?)

Papers are due at the end of the spring semester for graduated students in the seminar.

Despite the unusual class schedule, this is a spring course, covered by your spring semester tuition. You may register for the course by getting a "force slip" from Lois Stutzman in room 718 O'Brian Hall and bringing it to the Law School's Records and Registration window on the third floor of O'Brian. If you have any difficulty registering, or questions regarding the course, contact Professor Binder directly at 645-2673.

The course description as it follows:

What are legal arguments about? In part about who gets what. But also about what laws mean; about how the story of a relationship, a transaction or an institution should end; about what kind of characters the parties; the advocates and the decision markers are; about what values we will be allowed to express; what roles we will perform; what interests we will represent. Law, in short, is an area of struggle about how we will imaginatively construct ourselves and our social surroundings.

This seminar will explore how the legal construction of society can be illuminated by literary theories and methods. Readings will survey and summarize research examining interpretation, narration, persuasion, signification and representation in law. Students will write and orally present a paper. This not a course about legal themes in imaginative literature; it is about how we can read and understand legal texts, disputes, and institutions as cultural artifacts.


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	:: Spring 2001 - Graduate Courses
Graduate Undergraduate Course Archive	COL 525A - 20th Century Italian Literature COL 705 - Ethics of Criticism COL 706 - Calypso Theory: The Postcolonial Caribbean COL 707 - Late Joyce and Post Modernism COL 708 - Literary Theory I: Reading Deleuze COL 712 - Literary Theory II: Blanchot and Literary Criticism COL 714 - Definition of America: Poetics of the Americas COL 718 (A) - The Baroque COL 719 (A) - Maghrebian Literature LAW 764 - Law as Literature COL 525A - 20th CENTURY ITALIAN LITERATURE (top) Professor Maria Elena Gutiérrez Registration Number: 406204 Cross-listed: ITL 519, HMN 505 Tuesday 4:10-6:50, Fronzack 422 The focus of this semester will be to read and critically explore some masterpieces of twentieth-century Italian literature, covering the time span from World War I to the eighties. The course will provide review of major literary and cultural currents vis-à-vis Italy's political history, through two World Wars, the rise and fall of the Fascist regime and the post-war re-construction and industrialization of Italian society. We will examine the intersection between the realm of writing, philosophy, and history. We will read the following fundamental narratives: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopard Luigi Pirandello, One, none, and a hundred-thousand Italo Svevo,Zeno's Confessions Cesare Pavese,The Silent Dutchess or Natalia Ginzburg, Family Sayings Alberto Moravia, The Conformist or Leonardo Sciascia, Sicilian Uncles Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler The readings will include relevant theoretical texts by Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Rowland Barthes and Georg Lukacs and feminist critical writings by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. THE COURSE AND THE READINGS WILL BE IN ENGLISH. COL 705 - ETHICS OF CRITICISM (top) Professor Rodolphe Gasché Registration Number: (A) 301093 (B) 312767 Cross-listed: ENG 705 A,B Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640 The main focus of this course will consist in a close reading of Walter Benjamin's long essay on "Goethe's Elective Affinities." The goal of the course is, first, to elaborate on the presuppositions and tenets of Benjamin's literary criticism in this essay which more than any other by this author can be said to be a manifesto for the task of criticism. Second, we will seek to spell out the ethical implications of Benjamin's criticism, and will discuss in this context the section on marriage in Immanuel Kant's Metaphysics of Morals to which Benjamin refers in the essay. An additional digression into Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics will help us understand Benjamin's disregard for what he calls "mere life". COL 706 - CALYPSO THEORY: THE POSTCOLONIAL CARIBBEAN (top) Professor Shaun Irlam Registration Numbers: (A) 445234 (B) 199224 Cross-listed: ENG 707 A,B Tuesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens 640 calypso [Origin unknown] A West Indian Ballad or song in African rhythm, usually improvised to comment on a topic of current interest. This course seeks to introduce some of the discourses and debates that constitute postcolonial theory. It also aims to give the phenomenon of postcoloniality some historical and geopolitical specificity by examining the works of several key figures from the Caribbean who have made postcolonial discourse possible. Contemporary postcolonial discourse in the American academy has been predominantly associated with South Asian studies and the exploration of subalternity articulated by postcolonial and West-based Indian intellectuals (figures like Bhabha, Rushdie, Spivak, Suleri, Chatterjee, and Guha). This perspective has prevailed to the extent that recent critiques of postcolonial theory (by Ahmad and others) have unjustly challenged postcoloniality as merely a bid by deracinated South Asian intellectuals to confect a spurious legitimacy for themselves in the West. Whatever the other shortcomings of this critique, however, it also utterly overlooks the role of the Caribbean and North Atlantic rim in determining the vocabulary of postcolonial theory. This course will endeavor to situate a specific geopolitical region, the Caribbean, in terms of postcolonial theory, and will investigate postcolonial discourse as a hybrid Caribbean phenomenon developed in both "theoretical" and "literary" texts. One aim of the course will be precisely to examine the way these generic distinctions get dismantled and redrawn at Caribbean addresses. The primary focus of the course will be the work of Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James, who we shall read in some depth. However, the course will also include works by Césaire Jamaica Kincaid, Mootoo, Naipaul, Glissant, Walcott, Benitez-Rojo, and others. In these texts we shall focus on constructions of postcolonial and oppositional subjectives, on the challenge of imagining emergent national territories, cultures and communities, on the discursive constraints that dictate certain tactics, strategies and responses to colonial occupations and, on the techniques of improvisation invented by Caribbean cultures to address their specific geopolitical location. "...usually improvised to comment on a topic of current interest" Finally, to what extent is postcolonial theory itself improvisational in character? To what extent is it a calypso theory? Fanon writes of his theoretical enterprise, "I do not come with timeless truths." Above all, by limiting ourselves to a specific geopolitics and geohistory, the aim of the course will be to ask how we might "historize" the phenomenon of postcolonial theory in the Caribbean archipelago, and also to emphasize how the insights of postcolonial theory might, in turn, be productively applied to the protean character of postcolonial Caribbean discourse. COL 707 - LATE JOYCE AND POST MODERNISM (top) Professor Henry Sussman Registration Number: (A) 445234 (B) 199224 Cross-listed: ENG 707 A,B Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 640 Rather than denoting separate epochs or aesthetic contracts, the terms "modernism" and "postmodernism" are complements in an overarching twentieth-century endeavor that pivoted around such issues as representation, myth, history, sexuality, structuration, rebellion, engagement, and indifference. Many of the masters of modernist experimentation, among them Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Stein, and Borges, alp made significant inroads within the postmodern countermodality. This seminar will begin with some general theoretical considerations of myth, structure, and narrative, and will proceed to devote some weeks to the interface between modernism and postmodernism in Joyce, beginning with Ulysses and proceeding to Finnegans Wake. We will the explore further contributions to postmodern discourse, made, among others, by Adorno, Beckett, Blanchot, Bernhard, and Pynchon. The primary coursework is an extended essay or articulation in some other relevant medium. COL 708 - Literary Theory I: READING DELEUZE (top) Professor Elizabeth Grosz Registration Numbers: (A) 451118 (B) 006686 Cross-listed: ENG 651 A,B Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640 This course will focus on a close and selective reading of key texts written by Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuze and Felix Guattari. While it is a self-contained course with no formal pre-requisites, it is closely linked to the Foucault and Deleuze course last semester. The course will be roughly divided into three parts, which roughly correspond to the three broad phases in Deleuze's intellectual career: first, his early works, especially his writings on Nietzsche, Spinoza and Bergson; second, his middle period, which includes his most difficult writings- The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition; and third, his collaborative writings with Guattari, including A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? The course will provide an introduction to his most central and difficult concepts and questions. Texts: Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy Bergsonism Expressionism in Philosphy Spinoza Spinoza Practical Philosophy The Logic of Sense Difference and Repetition Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus What is Philosophy? Secondary Texts: Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia Constantin Boundas, The Deleuze Reader Micheal Hardt, Deleuze and Philosophy Alain Badiou, The Clamour of Being I Buchanan and C Colebrook, Deleuze and Feminism COL 712 - Literary Theory II: BLANCHOT AND LITERARY CRITICISM (top) Professor Jill Robbins Registration numbers: (A) 203209 (B) 474875 Cross-listed: ENG 652 A,B Wednesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640 In his critical essays and narrative prose, Maurice Blanchot interrogates the bery conditions of literature and literary criticism. This more originary level of questioning brings him into proximity with Emmanuel Levinas's "ethics of ethics." Blanchot thematizes the relationship to alterity in terms of writing, the neutral, death, and disaster. Moreover, he gains access to these alteriries within an experience that he calls "literature." Blanchot's critical essays often take their starting point in a pragmatic issue specific to the interpretation of a particular writer, before opening up to problems of "the literary" and existence as such. Within this distinctive "phenomenology" of reading, the meaning of "the literary" can no longer be taken for granted. Readings include: Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, The Infinite Conversation, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, The Instant of My Death, selections from The Work of Fire and Friendship. Additional readings by Emmanuel Levinas, George Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. COL 714 - DEFINITION OF AMERICA: POETICS OF THE AMERICAS (top) Professor Dennis Tedlock Registration Number: 492560 Cross-listed: AMS 697, ENG/APY 694 Wednesday 12:00-2:40, Clemens 540 This seminar will be guided, in part, by a stratgeic (or provisional) essentialism. We will look and listen for poetry- whether past, ongoing, or projected- that is specific, in some radical sense, to the so-called Americas or New World or Western Hemisphere, or to Turtle Island. In the case of poetries from the indigenous languages of these worlds, we will try for modes of interpretation and translation that neither locate them on the margins of Eurocentric poetics nor assign them to a prehistory of poetics. In the case of poetries that belong to the new languages of these worlds, which is to say creoles and pidgins, we will again try to decenter Europe. Texts dealing with the first contacts between Europeans and the peoples who were new to them will be read for clues to poetic differences, with special attention to native accounts of the invaders. We will also consider the radically indigenous writings of the Americas, including pictographs but with special attention to newly deciphered Mayan texts. Mayan literature, written in what turns out to be a phonetic script, begins 500 years earlier than English literature. Its re-emergence into readability, which comes at the same time as a major cultural renewal among Mayan peoples, poses major problems for Eurocentric cultural schemes (and for Olson's human universe). One-page response papers will be due at each meeting, with a longer piece of work due at the end. Alternatives to term papers may be negotiated, including translations, writerly works, performance pieces, etc. Visitors to the seminar will include Cecilia Vicuna, Mapuche poet Lionel Lienlaf, and others to be announced. Readings will include a wide range of texts, translations, and interpretations by most of the following and others as well: Paula Gun Allen, Mary Austin, Jorge Luis Borges, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Daniel G. Brinton, Edouard Glissant, Dell Hymes, Ah Maxam, Alonzo Gonzales Mo, Charles Olson, Simon Ortiz, Andrew Peynesta, Kenneth Tarn, Celcilia Vicuna, Lady Xok, ray Young Bear. Listenings will cover a wide range of performances in various languages, some of which will be made available on the course web site. COL 718 (A) - THE BAROQUE (top) Professor William Egginton Registration Number: 369093 Cross-listed: SPA 530 Monday 4:10-6:50, Clemens 102 The thesis this course intends to explore is that the art-historical concept "the Baroque" refers to a stylistic enterprise that is coterminous with a particular historical constellation of ideas, values, and technologies. The art, literature, thought, and music we identify as baroque corresponds to a historical fascination or even obsession with mediation, and with the possible materialities of mediation, i.e., media. Concomitant to this fascination is the emergence of spatiality as an issue, perhaps the principle issue, for representation. The Baroque constitutes an architecture of representation of whose principle drive is the production of spaces that serve as alternatives to the newly constituted space of "reality." We will endeavor to make out the contours of this architecture of representation via the analysis of the literature, philosophy, theater, painting, architecture, and music of the period bridging the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe analyzing examples of such cultural production from Spain, France, Italy, England, and Germany, all the while paying close attention to each culture's specific stage in the process of nation/empire building. Finally, we will examine the recurrence of the Baroque as a theme in contemporary theory, in particular as manifested in the work of Deleuze and Lacan, and attempt to answer the question of whether the postmodern qualifies in some way as a neo-Baroque. To better adapt our inquiries to the multitude of media that constitute the phenomenon of the Baroque, the course will itself take place in a highly medialized environment, in which visuals, text, and music will be made present to us during our discussions via the Internet. We will read texts in their original languages when possible, and in translation when necessary, but discussions will take place in English. COL 719 (A) - MAGHREBIAN LITERATURE (top) Professor Christian O. Onikepe Registration Number: 210673 Cross-listed: ENG 578X, FR 482ONI, FR526ONI Monday 4:00-6:50, Baldy 121 "The poet must show his disagreement [with opposing forces of politics and religion], even in a progressive political climate. That is his job. He undertakes his own revolution at the center of the political revolution. He becomes, in the context vexing disturbances, the perpetual troubleshooter. The poet is the Revolution in its nakedness; he is life's own movement" -(Kateb Yacine-Algeria) This course looks at the literature of Francophone Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia), and some pockets- no less pertinent- of Francophone writings from Egypt and Lebanon. It seeks to unearth a fundamental arabite, a cultural and metaphysical rootedness in a world-view that is distinctively Maghrebian, even in its unswerving postcolonial stance and lucid quest for identity and self-understanding. Using the works of writers such as Driss Charibi, Abellatif Laabi, Tahar Ben Jalloun, Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebbar, Leila Sebbar, etc., the course retraces the origins of Francophone Maghrebian literature, its engagement in the struggle for the countries' independences, its poetic rendition of post-independence disillusions, as well as its poet's retracing of "life's own movement." This course will be taught in French and primary readings will be in French also. However, students from departments other than MLL may choose to write their term papers in English. LAW 764 - LAW AS LITERATURE (top) Professor Guyora Binder This 3-credit course meets only seven times, during the first two weeks in January, before the graduate's semester begins. It does not conflict with any of your other spring semester courses. The meetings are in O'Brian 545 at these times: January 3 9:30-12:30 (Course Introduction: Law as Literature) January 4 10:30-1:00 (Legal Theories of Interpretation) January 5 9:30-12:30 (Literary Hermeneutics and Legal Interpret.) January 8 9:30-12:30 (Law as Narrative) January 10 9:30-12:30 (Law as Rhetoric) January 11 10:30-1:00 (Law as Language: Deconstruction) January 12 9:30-12:30 (Law as Culture: Cultural Studies,?) Papers are due at the end of the spring semester for graduated students in the seminar. Despite the unusual class schedule, this is a spring course, covered by your spring semester tuition. You may register for the course by getting a "force slip" from Lois Stutzman in room 718 O'Brian Hall and bringing it to the Law School's Records and Registration window on the third floor of O'Brian. If you have any difficulty registering, or questions regarding the course, contact Professor Binder directly at 645-2673. The course description as it follows: What are legal arguments about? In part about who gets what. But also about what laws mean; about how the story of a relationship, a transaction or an institution should end; about what kind of characters the parties; the advocates and the decision markers are; about what values we will be allowed to express; what roles we will perform; what interests we will represent. Law, in short, is an area of struggle about how we will imaginatively construct ourselves and our social surroundings. This seminar will explore how the legal construction of society can be illuminated by literary theories and methods. Readings will survey and summarize research examining interpretation, narration, persuasion, signification and representation in law. Students will write and orally present a paper. This not a course about legal themes in imaginative literature; it is about how we can read and understand legal texts, disputes, and institutions as cultural artifacts.
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	Department of Comparative Literature \| 638 Clemens Hall \| Buffalo, NY 14260-4610 Telephone: 716.645.2066 \| Fax: 716.645.5979 \| Email: complit@buffalo.edu © College of Arts and Sciences 2005. All rights reserved. This website is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences web team. Inquiries or comments about this website should be directed to the College of Arts and Sciences webmaster.