Comparative Literature (COLIT-GA)

For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses

Studies in Renaissance genres.

For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses

What does it take to be a witness? What are the ethical, political, cultural, legal and personal stakes in witnessing? Can photography and other media turn us into witnesses, or do we have to witness events personally for our testimony to be valid? What is the difference between documenting and witnessing an event? What is the difference between rendering an account and giving testimony? What role has photography played in the formation of our contemporary understanding of witnessing, and how does contemporary photography bear witness?

“For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses”?

This year-long course will be taken for 8 credits, fall and spring. Enrollment is restricted to Comp Lit 3rd year students only.

Selected problems in current literary criticism are examined and applied to biblical narrative. Various ?modernist? approaches to Scripture are emphasized: structuralism and poststructuralism; feminism and psychoanalysis; translation theory; phenomenology of reading; and historical poetics.

It is no secret that we live in an age of paranoia, our times distinguished by a heightened concern about surveillance that is far from pathological, and a disturbing return, since 2015, to what Richard Hofstadter in 1964 termed “the paranoid style in American politics.” Our seminar is thus an attempt to gain an orientation in these times by engaging in a close and critical reading of texts and sources of theory about paranoia, from Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Freud and Lacan’s readings thereof, to works by Melanie Klein, George Orwell, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, and others. Close attention will also be devoted to documents relating to WikiLeaks and to two of the best known whistleblowers of our time, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. In broader terms, this course is designed as opening the question of the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to the analysis of texts both literary and political in a time of rapidly changing media and communications technology.

Close discussion of works by dramatists such as Yeats, Pirandello, Synge, O?Neill, Artaud, Lorca, Piscator, Brecht, Williams, Weiss, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, and Albee

“For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses”?

For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses

This course takes up cultures and theories of the American hemisphere to think beyond imperial cartographies and logics and center texts, art, music and performance that articulate modes of sovereignty beyond the state. We will consider works and cultural histories that challenge dispossession through placemaking (palenques, urban and rural autonomous territories, social rupture) and the retaking of home environments. Thinking with blackness, indigeneity, migration, and ecologies in the Americas, we consider how struggles over sovereignty and territoriality are accompanied symbolic and cultural practices, or world-making, that challenge the finitude of the present and the hegemony of capital. Works will include a conventional canon of "Americas" articulation (Whitman, Martí, Darío, Neruda, etc) but will move on to narrative, prose, film, music and performance in English, Spanish, French, Kreyol, and Portuguese (also perhaps in Garifuna and other nation languages).

Topics include autobiography, literature of the fantastic, the gothic novel, travel literature, etc.

Querelles des femmes from 1500 to 1620 in context of social and economic crises and political struggles. Debates of the 17th and 18th centuries to the Revolution. Poetry, novels, and plays by women.

Topics vary by semester

From Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Plutarch, and Longinus through the Middle Ages, to the Italian and English Renaissance and French and English neoclassicism.

From German neoclassicism to romanticism in Germany, England, and France, through American transcendentalism, to late 19th- and 20th-century literary critical discussion.

“For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses”?

Introduces recent developments in Comparative Literature, harnessing energies of Area Studies (Middle Eastern Studies, African Studies, and so forth) in order to extend its scope geographically.

By stepping outside the conventional domain of the literary, this course calls for broader considerations of semiotic processes, which in turn modify our understanding of the specificity of literary art from both historical and cultural points of view, either in an autonomous sense or in relation to other societal discourses and practices.

Topics vary by semester

For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses

Topics vary by semester

Colonialism and the development of national and Pan-Caribbean literary cultures; finding an independent voice; the novel, poetry, theatre.

Topics vary by semester

Style of approach varies according to instructor, but concentration is on the 19th-century novel in the European and American traditions.

Homer, Virgil, Tasso, and Milton.

For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses

Variable selected topics in the theory and practice of translation aiming at elucidating its centrality to comparative literature and interdisciplinarity. Framed by the cultural turn in translation studies, this series explores the poetics and politics of translation in conjunction with a range of phenomena (such as globalization and new media), concepts (for example, cosmopolitanism and world literature), and theoretical issues (reception theory and postcolonial theory). Topics include but are not limited to translation in relation to imperialism and/or postcoloniality; translation, theory, and practice: a vexed relationship?; reception theory and translation; translation in adaptation; translators? testimonies.

Contemporary discussions on the nature and implications of translation as applied specifically to literary issues and generally to modes of interpretation. Analysis of theory and practice from the 17th century to the present.

Topics vary by semester

This seminar examines varieties of temporal experience in modern philosophy, poetry, prose, the history of science, and cinema. We will study how conflicts of interpretation over temporal experience—and on the nature and limits of lived, chronological, narrative and historic time—led to some of the most enduring psychic and stylistic shifts in modernity. From Bergson, Einstein and Freud to Chaplin, Woolf, and Senghor, time becomes one of the central concerns of modernism in literature and critical theory.

Topics vary by semester

A seminar devoted to a close and systematic reading of Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman. In addition to exploring the roots of Irigaray's philosophical methodology in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and feminism, we will read texts she places under scrutiny in their own right, including selections from Freud, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hadewijch, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel.

Topics vary by semester

Topics vary by semester

Topics vary by semester

Students in this course work with a faculty member on some element of their dissertation.

Students in this course participate in an approved internship.

Examines North American literature in a comparative (international) context in order to explore new paradigms for understanding literal and cultural development. Topics vary by semester and instructor.

Topics vary by semester

Topics vary by semester

“For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses”?

For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses

Topics vary by semester

For course description, please see Comp Lit website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.grad.courses

Studies in 20th-century European and American poetry: Val?ry, Cernuda, Lorca, Eliot, Breton, Neruda, Borges, Paz, Parra.

Topics vary by semester

Exploration of the concept of ?discourse? and the theme of discursive transformation as a means to understand societies and their creation, especially as manifest through ?aesthetic? writings and practices.

Topics vary by semester

Students in this course work with a faculty member on some element of their dissertation.

Students in this course work with a faculty member on some element of their dissertation.

Students in this course work with a faculty member on some element of their dissertation.