Comparative Literature Department :: University at Buffalo

COL 470: HONORS - MODERN WOMEN WRITERS
COL 443: HONORS - LITERATURE & WAR
COL 308: 20th CENTURY LITERATURE: SATIRISTS OF THE 60's
COL 303: HONORS - THE TERROR OF ART: JOSEPH CONRAD AND THOMAS MANN
COL 302: HONORS - THE HISTORY OF LITERARY THEORY
COL 203: DEMOCRACY & LITERATURE

COL 470: HONORS - MODERN WOMEN WRITERS (top)

Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Monday, 3:30 - 6:10pm , Clemens Hall 436, 1x per week
Registration Number: 379540

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters...But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own . In this course we will focus on the texts of three modern women writers who shared Woolf's spirit of the defiance of cultural and political authorities and the contestation of social, literary, racial and sexual norms: Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, and, of course, Woolf herself. We will examine their experimental attitude to literary language, their attempts to imagine and create new forms of female subjectivity, their playful explorations of new modes of sexuality, pleasure and desire. But we will also discuss sometimes tragic costs of such daring artistic struggle for freedom in the world of unfreedom: loneliness, isolation, loss, mourning, and destruction. The larger question we will raise in the course is about the role of literature and art in social, political, and personal transformations.

Requirements: fresh ideas, interesting questions, and active participation in class discussion; class presentations; one page typed discussion questions (supported by quotations and followed by a tentative answer brought to each class and kept in the folder); an abstract and a research paper (6-8 pp., with at least 6 critical sources) devoted to one of the novels discussed in this course, midterm, the complete folder turned in with all the assignments at the end of the semester.

You are also required to bring to class texts to be discussed (make sure you have required editions)

Required Texts (ordered at The Talking Leaves):
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt)
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Harcourt)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (Harcourt)
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Harcourt)
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New Directions)
Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing (Rutgers UP) all paperbacks

COL 443: HONORS - LITERATURE & WAR (top)

Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Tuesday and Thursday, 3:30 - 4:50pm , Clemens Hall 640
Registration Number: 459241

We will read a number of philosophical and literary texts ranging from the fifth century BC to the present. We will be examining how the concept of war and the art of strategy have developed from the Chinese sage Sun Tsu to the great continental strategist of the 19th century von Clausewitz. The literary portraits of war that we will be dealing with will be analyzed with regard to the ideas of these thinkers. In doing this, we will also be looking at the specific issues, historical, psychological, autobiographical, that these literary works are concerned with. This course will also be interested in the question of why wars have been such a privileged subject in literature, and how the art of military strategy can be compared with the art of writing.

Readings include the following: Sun Tsu, The Art of War , J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (selections), Carl v. Clausewitz, On War (selections), S. Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," and "Why War?", G. Flaubert, Salammbô , E. Junger, The Storm of Steel , J. Swift, The Battle of the Books , S. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.

COL 308: 20th CENTURY LITERATURE: SATIRISTS OF THE 60's (top)

Shane Herron
Monday and Wednesday, 11:00am - 12:20pm, Clemens Hall 640
Registration Number: 422884

When looking back over the last decades, satire is not the first word that jumps to mind when we try to imagine the 1960s: we hear a lot about "pastiche," nostalgia, and a loss of political narratives, all seeming to suggest a general climate of depoliticization. While most of the authors we will examine are generally not considered solely to be satirists, much of the literature of the period manages to remain attuned to questions of the political through an often ferocious sense of humor, despite the claims of some critics. Through a close reading of some of the classic literary texts of this period, we will attempt to explore the mass reemergence in the 1960s of satire as a viable form of political expression. While we will most definitely be interested in exploring the particular social conditions that enabled the emergence of this literature in the environment of 1960s America , we will equally try to interrogate what exactly makes this literature continue to have such profound relevance beyond the immediate conditions in which it emerged. How does this literature manage to seem as politically engaged when we read it today? Is there any way to establish an inherent politicality to humor? To answer these questions, we'll turn towards a number of the funniest and most overtly political authors to have emerged in the 60s, as well as some of those most heavily influenced by these writers. We'll also turn our eye towards Freud, Ranciere, Laclau, Lacan, Derrida and Badiou, all in their own way theorists of the intersection between the aesthetic and the political.

Literary Texts May Include:
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Phillip Roth, Our Gang and Portnoy's Complaint
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

COL 303: HONORS - THE TERROR OF ART: JOSEPH CONRAD AND THOMAS MANN (top)

Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Monday, 3:30 - 6:10pm , Clemens Hall 412, 1x per week
Registration Number: 175599

This seminar will focus on two modern novellas, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Mann's Death in Venice . The common thread that runs through both stories is the way they treat a theme at least as old as Plato's theory of art: art's relation to terror, since art was for Plato divine madness. In other words, both novellas explore the importance of death, madness, and violence in relation to artistic creativity.

Heart of Darkness , a story about the violence of colonialism and the terror of encountering the other, centers around the mysterious and horrifying figure of Kurtz, who is himself portrayed as painter, orator, poet, and musician?in other words, as an artist, a Renaissance man. In our readings, we will try to establish how this story about colonialism unravels also as a study of the terror that art entails.

While set in a different context, Death in Venice , presents us with yet another angle of this terrorizing aspect of art. Here death is the price the artist must pay in order to reclaim the heights of his long lost inspiration. Mann writes this novella while consciously responding to Nietzsche's work The Birth of Tragedy and incorporates ideas from the Platonic dialogues and the Greek tragedies that describe art as a terrifying experience.

Required texts : Heart of Darkness , Death in Venice , The Birth of Tragedy

There will be 3 papers exploring related themes in each of the texts. Attendance is mandatory as is energetic participation in the seminar discussions.

COL 302: HONORS - THE HISTORY OF LITERARY THEORY (top)

Professor Krzysztof M. Ziarek
Wednesday, 3:30 - 6:10pm , Clemens Hall 640, 1x per week
Registration Number: 212880

Why do philosophers read poets, and why do poets read philosophy? This course will trace the history of this question, beginning with the "quarrel" between philosophy and poetry in antiquity and leading up to the contemporary conversations and polemics between the two disciplines. The course is an introduction to the history of criticism but is open to all students interested in exploring the fascinating and challenging intersections between the two main areas of the humanities: literature and philosophy. Reading literary and philosophical texts, we will discuss such questions as the nature of human existence, the problem of time, death, and finitude, the role of gender, as well as the differences and similarities between the imagination and reason, passion and logic, literary language and philosophical argumentation.

In the first part of the course, we will examine convergences and differences between literary and philosophical texts in antiquity (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics , Sophocles' tragedies), the Middle Ages (Boethius and Dante), the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Candide ), and Romanticism (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments , Hölderlin, poetry.) Rethinking the heritage of Greek culture and tragedy for the moderns, Nietzsche's influential study The Birth of the Tragedy will serve as the transition to the questions, which will characterize contemporary debates between philosophy and literature. After The Birth of Tragedy , we will read several essays by Heidegger and Irigaray, and a number of literary texts: short stories by Dinesen and Borges, excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses , and poetry by Gertrude Stein and Wislawa Szymborska.

Requirements : presentation, participation in discussion, term paper.

COL 203: DEMOCRACY & LITERATURE (top)

Sol Pelaez
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00am - 12:20pm , Clemens Hall 640
Registration Number: 223316

The aim of this class is to explore the problem of democracy through literature. I propose to read a group of literary texts that are concerned with the problem of the democratic community. Tragedy will be the place to start our reflection because it necessarily deals with the fundamental problems of democracy. We will focus on two major works of Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone , and on Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet as well as Hofmannsthal's Introduction to Antigone . These works explore the problems of power, legitimacy, justice, membership in a community, hospitality, civil war, and rebellion. After this introduction into some of the most important issues for thinking about democracy, we will turn to Kafka's Before the Law to focus on the problem of law and decision and The Castle to think about the power of bureaucracy. Then, we will turn to the problem of war and how it affects community. We will read Jünger's Storm of Steel and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. These accounts of the First World War posit the concerns not only of defining who are enemies and who are friends but also those of unity and dissolution of the community. Finally we will read Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards and Toller's The Machine-Wreckers . These two leftist German playwrights will introduce us to the problems of ?revolution' and ?class struggle.' In fact, here we can see the dislocation of society by its antagonistic forces and the impossible decision of the political. Finally, taken as a group, all these texts make us think about the myths that ground community and democracy.

More generally, reading these works will make it possible for us to explore a set of fundamental questions on democracy. What makes a democratic community? How do we ground a community? Should this community be open and what would this mean? How does the logic of inclusion and exclusion work in founding a community? How does the law function in relation to a community? How can we understand the relation between law and emancipation? What is emancipation? How does class, civil, or international war affect a community? Can we defend democracy? How does literature relate to democracy? How does it relate to authority and to rebellion?

To consider these issues in relation with the literary we will also visit the thought of critics such as Benjamin, Derrida, Nancy, Laclau, Rancière, Agamben, and Deleuze and Guattari among others.

Readings
On Community:
Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: Prologue to the "Antigoneof Sophocles .

On Freedom and Law:
Kafka, Franz: Before the Law
The Castle

On War and Peace:
Jünger, Ernst: Storm of Steel
Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front

On Revolution:
Brecht, Bertolt: St. Joan of the Stockyards
Toller, Ernst: The Machine-Wreckers (or Masses and Man)

Requirements:
All students are expected to attend class, have active class participation, a 10 min class presentation on one of the literary works, an outline of the final paper and a final paper of 16 pages. The paper should not be on the same literary text as the oral presentation but should try to integrate texts.


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Graduate Undergraduate Course Archive	COL 470: HONORS - MODERN WOMEN WRITERS COL 443: HONORS - LITERATURE & WAR COL 308: 20th CENTURY LITERATURE: SATIRISTS OF THE 60's COL 303: HONORS - THE TERROR OF ART: JOSEPH CONRAD AND THOMAS MANN COL 302: HONORS - THE HISTORY OF LITERARY THEORY COL 203: DEMOCRACY & LITERATURE COL 470: HONORS - MODERN WOMEN WRITERS (top) Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek Monday, 3:30 - 6:10pm , Clemens Hall 436, 1x per week Registration Number: 379540 "So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters...But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own . In this course we will focus on the texts of three modern women writers who shared Woolf's spirit of the defiance of cultural and political authorities and the contestation of social, literary, racial and sexual norms: Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, and, of course, Woolf herself. We will examine their experimental attitude to literary language, their attempts to imagine and create new forms of female subjectivity, their playful explorations of new modes of sexuality, pleasure and desire. But we will also discuss sometimes tragic costs of such daring artistic struggle for freedom in the world of unfreedom: loneliness, isolation, loss, mourning, and destruction. The larger question we will raise in the course is about the role of literature and art in social, political, and personal transformations. Requirements: fresh ideas, interesting questions, and active participation in class discussion; class presentations; one page typed discussion questions (supported by quotations and followed by a tentative answer brought to each class and kept in the folder); an abstract and a research paper (6-8 pp., with at least 6 critical sources) devoted to one of the novels discussed in this course, midterm, the complete folder turned in with all the assignments at the end of the semester. You are also required to bring to class texts to be discussed (make sure you have required editions) Required Texts (ordered at The Talking Leaves): Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt) Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Harcourt) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (Harcourt) Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Harcourt) Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New Directions) Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing (Rutgers UP) all paperbacks COL 443: HONORS - LITERATURE & WAR (top) Professor Rodolphe Gasché Tuesday and Thursday, 3:30 - 4:50pm , Clemens Hall 640 Registration Number: 459241 We will read a number of philosophical and literary texts ranging from the fifth century BC to the present. We will be examining how the concept of war and the art of strategy have developed from the Chinese sage Sun Tsu to the great continental strategist of the 19th century von Clausewitz. The literary portraits of war that we will be dealing with will be analyzed with regard to the ideas of these thinkers. In doing this, we will also be looking at the specific issues, historical, psychological, autobiographical, that these literary works are concerned with. This course will also be interested in the question of why wars have been such a privileged subject in literature, and how the art of military strategy can be compared with the art of writing. Readings include the following: Sun Tsu, The Art of War , J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (selections), Carl v. Clausewitz, On War (selections), S. Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," and "Why War?", G. Flaubert, Salammbô , E. Junger, The Storm of Steel , J. Swift, The Battle of the Books , S. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage. COL 308: 20th CENTURY LITERATURE: SATIRISTS OF THE 60's (top) Shane Herron Monday and Wednesday, 11:00am - 12:20pm, Clemens Hall 640 Registration Number: 422884 When looking back over the last decades, satire is not the first word that jumps to mind when we try to imagine the 1960s: we hear a lot about "pastiche," nostalgia, and a loss of political narratives, all seeming to suggest a general climate of depoliticization. While most of the authors we will examine are generally not considered solely to be satirists, much of the literature of the period manages to remain attuned to questions of the political through an often ferocious sense of humor, despite the claims of some critics. Through a close reading of some of the classic literary texts of this period, we will attempt to explore the mass reemergence in the 1960s of satire as a viable form of political expression. While we will most definitely be interested in exploring the particular social conditions that enabled the emergence of this literature in the environment of 1960s America , we will equally try to interrogate what exactly makes this literature continue to have such profound relevance beyond the immediate conditions in which it emerged. How does this literature manage to seem as politically engaged when we read it today? Is there any way to establish an inherent politicality to humor? To answer these questions, we'll turn towards a number of the funniest and most overtly political authors to have emerged in the 60s, as well as some of those most heavily influenced by these writers. We'll also turn our eye towards Freud, Ranciere, Laclau, Lacan, Derrida and Badiou, all in their own way theorists of the intersection between the aesthetic and the political. Literary Texts May Include: Joseph Heller, Catch-22 Phillip Roth, Our Gang and Portnoy's Complaint Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 COL 303: HONORS - THE TERROR OF ART: JOSEPH CONRAD AND THOMAS MANN (top) Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Monday, 3:30 - 6:10pm , Clemens Hall 412, 1x per week Registration Number: 175599 This seminar will focus on two modern novellas, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Mann's Death in Venice . The common thread that runs through both stories is the way they treat a theme at least as old as Plato's theory of art: art's relation to terror, since art was for Plato divine madness. In other words, both novellas explore the importance of death, madness, and violence in relation to artistic creativity. Heart of Darkness , a story about the violence of colonialism and the terror of encountering the other, centers around the mysterious and horrifying figure of Kurtz, who is himself portrayed as painter, orator, poet, and musician?in other words, as an artist, a Renaissance man. In our readings, we will try to establish how this story about colonialism unravels also as a study of the terror that art entails. While set in a different context, Death in Venice , presents us with yet another angle of this terrorizing aspect of art. Here death is the price the artist must pay in order to reclaim the heights of his long lost inspiration. Mann writes this novella while consciously responding to Nietzsche's work The Birth of Tragedy and incorporates ideas from the Platonic dialogues and the Greek tragedies that describe art as a terrifying experience. Required texts : Heart of Darkness , Death in Venice , The Birth of Tragedy There will be 3 papers exploring related themes in each of the texts. Attendance is mandatory as is energetic participation in the seminar discussions. COL 302: HONORS - THE HISTORY OF LITERARY THEORY (top) Professor Krzysztof M. Ziarek Wednesday, 3:30 - 6:10pm , Clemens Hall 640, 1x per week Registration Number: 212880 Why do philosophers read poets, and why do poets read philosophy? This course will trace the history of this question, beginning with the "quarrel" between philosophy and poetry in antiquity and leading up to the contemporary conversations and polemics between the two disciplines. The course is an introduction to the history of criticism but is open to all students interested in exploring the fascinating and challenging intersections between the two main areas of the humanities: literature and philosophy. Reading literary and philosophical texts, we will discuss such questions as the nature of human existence, the problem of time, death, and finitude, the role of gender, as well as the differences and similarities between the imagination and reason, passion and logic, literary language and philosophical argumentation. In the first part of the course, we will examine convergences and differences between literary and philosophical texts in antiquity (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics , Sophocles' tragedies), the Middle Ages (Boethius and Dante), the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Candide ), and Romanticism (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments , Hölderlin, poetry.) Rethinking the heritage of Greek culture and tragedy for the moderns, Nietzsche's influential study The Birth of the Tragedy will serve as the transition to the questions, which will characterize contemporary debates between philosophy and literature. After The Birth of Tragedy , we will read several essays by Heidegger and Irigaray, and a number of literary texts: short stories by Dinesen and Borges, excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses , and poetry by Gertrude Stein and Wislawa Szymborska. Requirements : presentation, participation in discussion, term paper. COL 203: DEMOCRACY & LITERATURE (top) Sol Pelaez Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00am - 12:20pm , Clemens Hall 640 Registration Number: 223316 The aim of this class is to explore the problem of democracy through literature. I propose to read a group of literary texts that are concerned with the problem of the democratic community. Tragedy will be the place to start our reflection because it necessarily deals with the fundamental problems of democracy. We will focus on two major works of Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone , and on Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet as well as Hofmannsthal's Introduction to Antigone . These works explore the problems of power, legitimacy, justice, membership in a community, hospitality, civil war, and rebellion. After this introduction into some of the most important issues for thinking about democracy, we will turn to Kafka's Before the Law to focus on the problem of law and decision and The Castle to think about the power of bureaucracy. Then, we will turn to the problem of war and how it affects community. We will read Jünger's Storm of Steel and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. These accounts of the First World War posit the concerns not only of defining who are enemies and who are friends but also those of unity and dissolution of the community. Finally we will read Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards and Toller's The Machine-Wreckers . These two leftist German playwrights will introduce us to the problems of ?revolution' and ?class struggle.' In fact, here we can see the dislocation of society by its antagonistic forces and the impossible decision of the political. Finally, taken as a group, all these texts make us think about the myths that ground community and democracy. More generally, reading these works will make it possible for us to explore a set of fundamental questions on democracy. What makes a democratic community? How do we ground a community? Should this community be open and what would this mean? How does the logic of inclusion and exclusion work in founding a community? How does the law function in relation to a community? How can we understand the relation between law and emancipation? What is emancipation? How does class, civil, or international war affect a community? Can we defend democracy? How does literature relate to democracy? How does it relate to authority and to rebellion? To consider these issues in relation with the literary we will also visit the thought of critics such as Benjamin, Derrida, Nancy, Laclau, Rancière, Agamben, and Deleuze and Guattari among others. Readings On Community: Shakespeare, William: Hamlet Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus Antigone Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: Prologue to the "Antigoneof Sophocles . On Freedom and Law: Kafka, Franz: Before the Law The Castle On War and Peace: Jünger, Ernst: Storm of Steel Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front On Revolution: Brecht, Bertolt: St. Joan of the Stockyards Toller, Ernst: The Machine-Wreckers (or Masses and Man) Requirements: All students are expected to attend class, have active class participation, a 10 min class presentation on one of the literary works, an outline of the final paper and a final paper of 16 pages. The paper should not be on the same literary text as the oral presentation but should try to integrate texts.
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