40 classes matched your search criteria.

Spring 2019  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Postcoloniality and Politics of Narrative Voice (66529)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/22/2019 - 05/06/2019
Tue 01:00PM - 04:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 325
Enrollment Status:
Open (2 of 8 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
It would be hard, if at all possible, to conceive of a case of colonization that does not extend to language and thought. In post-Columbian colonial endeavors, at least, land confiscation comes with a whole range of imposed institutions (political, religious, educational, artistic…) that alter people's daily habits from forms of subsistence to the languages spoken, from long-held beliefs and collective self-representations to cultural performances. The resulting impacts, with their political weight, are at the heart of postcolonial aesthetics. Thus, although the immediate driving force of colonization is economic in nature, its repercussions reach questions of cultural and personal identities, forms of governance, migration, imperial hegemony and, obviously, aesthetic creation and discourse. The purpose of the seminar is to explore these various aspects through that most symbolic dimension of discourse: the voice. Focusing on narrative choices in selected francophone novels and drawing on essays on Caribbean and African aesthetics (but also on literary theory in general), the seminar will examine the political dimensions of literary discourse.

Literary readings for the seminar include Crossing The Mangrove (by M. Condé), The Fourth century (E. Glissant), The Pillar of Salt (A. Memmi) and Dark Heart of the Night (L. Miano). Theoretical readings, ranging from poetic and aesthetic analyses by writers themselves (Glissant, Memmi, Miano, Benitez Rojo…) to academic essays with narratological, postcolonial or postmodern perspectives (Currie, Fanon, Bhabha, Spivak, Chow…), will complement our conversations.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66529/1193
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
4 December 2018

Spring 2019  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Raymond Williams and the Sociology of Culture (66530)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/22/2019 - 05/06/2019
Thu 01:00PM - 04:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Lind Hall 216
Enrollment Status:
Open (1 of 8 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?CSDS8910+Spring2019
Class Description:
It might appear, at first glance, that Raymond Williams has disappeared from the scene of contemporary criticism and theory - at least from his prominence as the figure who, according to Terry Eagleton, "transformed cultural studies from the relative crudity in which he found them to a marvelously rich, resourceful body of work." In this seminar, our collective task will be to disinter Williams, to return him - as an idea and as a representative of a tradition - to our thinking about the present and the future (not to mention the past). The challenge for any materialist approach to culture these days comes not from sources overtly hostile to transformative ideals, but from those that regard an emphasis on social transformation to be the stuff of "vulgar," "exhausted" and "conservative" Leftism. Our project throughout the semester will be to read closely, derive the impulses behind, and re-imagine the politics that animated the work of Williams. This is necessarily a comparative project since Williams mostly wrote in and about English society; but in so far as the discipline of literary criticism (as well as the sub discipline of cultural studies) represents a cultural import, such comparison opens up ground for critical cultural inquiry unavailable elsewhere, while also providing a deeper acquaintance with the history of our own formation in and by English studies. Using his own preferred designation of a "sociology of culture," we will explore the range of Williams's essays, reviews, books, as well one of his novels, and assess them in the light of secondary readings.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66530/1193
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
13 November 2018

Fall 2018  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Socialist Realism and Peripheral Modernism (32161)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
ENGL 8090 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/04/2018 - 12/12/2018
Wed 01:00PM - 04:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Lind Hall 216
Enrollment Status:
Closed (3 of 3 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:

This course will be addressed particularly to students of world literature, postcolonial studies, and European modernism.

We are not especially interested in the specific Soviet or Chinese policies on the arts that came to be known as "socialist realism." Instead, our intention is to ask whether there is something like a peripheral aesthetic - which is to say, a set of formal properties that seem to recur in non-Western settings because they capture the experience of dependency, uneven development, the clash of alien cultural values, economic disenfranchisement, and decolonization. We wonder whether such an aesthetic - if it exists - is not drawn to or reassembled out of the fragments of a "realism" that is at times socialist, at others merely socially critical, but no less modernist (in the sense of fresh, inventive, current). And we seek to expand significantly the definition of socialist realism to explore whether it is a genuinely popular sensibility and not only a bureaucratically imposed policy of the arts.

These sorts of questions take place within a frame that we should foreground. The theory within which we have all been trained - the theory that defines the entire post-war period, in fact -- is itself profoundly modernist, and takes its philosophical gestures from the very figures of modernist literary texts. For that reason, high canonical modernism (1850-1940) is uniquely defined in most of our minds with positive "newness": with avant-garde practices, formal experimentation, cultural transgressions, and a linguistic depth-model. This is the very definition of "modernist" for most scholars, in fact, and it deeply colors and in some ways distorts earlier attempts to speak of a peripheral aesthetic. We are questioning the part of this assumption that considers this ensemble to be unique, and are skeptical about whether the differences among these variouys modes have to do with degrees of experimentation or linguistic sophistication.

The early decades of the 20th century saw a collision between aesthetic transgression and artistic alienation (classic modernism, in short) and liberationist movements that set out actually to transform bourgeois life. These movements not only sought to invent a counter-aesthetic appropriate to the new reality, but did so in the very specific context of a world revolution against empire. These movements - even on the continent of Europe itself - were made up of intellectuals and artists from all over the global periphery, including of course the Eastern periphery of Europe where most of the avant-gardes originated.




Who Should Take This Class?:
Anyone interested in the forms of art and culture in the non-Western world, the legacies of socialism, and the colonial experience.
Learning Objectives:
To grasp working definitions of social realism in the arts, its distinction from socialist realism (seen broadly as the art form of the global periphery), and an introduction to specific works of literature and film.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/32161/1189
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
21 March 2018

Fall 2018  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Mysticisms of the Avant-Garde (32165)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/04/2018 - 12/12/2018
Tue 05:30PM - 08:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 201
Enrollment Status:
Open (5 of 8 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:

CL/CSDS 8910: Mysticisms of the Avant-Garde

Prof. Michael Gallope

T 5:30 - 8:30

Nicholson Hall 135

This seminar will focus on artistic uses of the occult, the mystical, and the esoteric among figures of the Western avant-garde. Topics to be discussed include twentieth-century Neoplatonism, the metaphysics of vitalism, negative theology, alchemy, theosophy, mysticism and feminism, mutations of Christian mysticism, perennialism, the Western reception of Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, esoteric formalisms, the formation of new age spirituality, the meaning of hipsterism, the significance of bad or inscrutable attitudes, the exploitation of atmospheres and hypnosis, and late modern Pythaogreanism. Readings by Meister Eckhart, Aldous Huxley, Georges Bataille, Ananda Commaraswamy, Hazrat Inayat Kahn, D. T. Suzuki, Sri Ramakrishna, Carl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Carl Jung, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Susanne Langer, Edward Said, Julian Baldick, Luce Irigaray, Livia Kohn, Amy Hollywood, Taraka Larson and Fred Moten. Students will present and write a term paper on an artist of their choosing (literature, film/video, music/sound, theater, intermedia, etc.); we will also discuss works by David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Paul Laffoley.

Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/32165/1189
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
8 April 2018

Spring 2018  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Dialectics (52122)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/16/2018 - 05/04/2018
Thu 01:30PM - 04:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Civil Engineering Building 213
Enrollment Status:
Open (3 of 8 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Topic: Dialectics
Class Description:
In reaction to the analytic eclecticism of the past few decades that has often gone under the sign of "interdisciplinarity," the question of method has once more returned for consideration in the humanities -- from the "How we Do What We Do: Methodology in the 21st century" 2010 graduate student conference at Harvard, to calls for the "new formalism," "new comparatism," as well as in works such as Fredric Jameson's Valences of the Dialectic, Edward Said's writings on "Traveling Theory," or "late style," the special issue of Representations (2009) on "surface reading," the reprise of attention to ontology in literary and film studies, and so forth. In opposition to mix-n-match, eclectic ("toolkit") approaches, several of these critical ventures seek to revalue the problem of method as a problem of theoretical understanding itself; in this way, they both refuse a conventional theory/practice opposition as well as advocate renewed attention to the ways that conceptual frameworks and methodological standpoints shape the production of knowledge. This seminar will address the problem of method as it impinges on critical theory and comparative studies. We will read classic statements on method such as Georg Lukacs? ?What is Orthodox Marxism,? Theodor Adorno's ?Skoteinos? and ?The Actuality of Philosophy,? Walter Benjamin's ?Epistemological Prologue? from his Origins of German Tragic Drama, Max Horkheimer's ?Traditional and Critical Theory,? selections from Louis Althusser's Lenin and Philosophy, Raymond Williams? ?On Materialism,? Perry Anderson's ?Components of the National Question,? Roland Barthes? take on ?The Rhetoric of the Image,? Pierre Bourdieu's propositions about ?habitus? or ?field,? as well as secondary works of criticism whose methodological assumptions and implications we will collectively evaluate. Seminar participants will be required to present on a reading of their choosing and write a final paper that presents a methodological statement appropriate to their interest in a specific object or field of study. [Professor Keya Ganguly]
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/52122/1183
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
20 October 2011

Spring 2018  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Feminist Cultural Theory (52500)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
COMM 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/16/2018 - 05/04/2018
Tue 05:00PM - 08:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 325
Enrollment Status:
Open (3 of 4 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Topic: Feminist Cultural Theory
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/52500/1183

Spring 2018  |  CL 8910 Section 004: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Adorno/Aesthetic Theory (66973)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 004
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/16/2018 - 05/04/2018
Wed 01:00PM - 03:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 325
Enrollment Status:
Open (6 of 8 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?CSDS8910+Spring2018
Class Description:

Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's last major work, left unfinished at his death, but in an advanced state of final revision. The book represents perhaps the most important socially-grounded examination of aesthetics produced in the last century. Adorno's single largest work, it is written without chapter divisions of any kind. Notoriously difficult, it is nonetheless intellectually stunning and provocatively rich on the relation of aesthetics to society, the subject, subjectivity, and modernity generally. Following three weeks of introductory material, the seminar will be organized as a patient and careful read of this single text.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School and the "founding" of Critical Theory, wrote extensively on culture, society, the Enlightenment, modernity, aesthetics, and the arts--music in particular (classical, popular, jazz, film music, etc.), but also extensively on literature. Together with his colleague Max Horkheimer, he formulated one of the first and most influential sustained critiques on the social transformations wrought by mass culture and modern communications media. He was a philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, composer, and a quite talented pianist. Not least, Adorno was a prominent public intellectual in postwar Germany up to the time of his death, writing for the popular press and giving 160 radio lectures on topics that included education, music, and contemporary politics.

Who Should Take This Class?:
This is a doctoral seminar available to all interested graduate students, entering to advanced
Exam Format:
no exams
Workload:
up, to 50 pages Reading Per Week
1 Paper due at term end (15 pp.)
Other Workload: Participants will also write several position brief papers on assigned readings and also prepare short passages for in-class discussion.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66973/1183
Syllabus:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/syllabi/leppe001_CL8910_Spring2018.syllabus
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
29 October 2017

Fall 2017  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Critical Debates in Comparative Literature (34628)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/05/2017 - 12/13/2017
Wed 02:15PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 201
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Critical Debates in Comparative Literature
Since their "first" appearances in Noël and de Laplace (France, 1816) and in Goethe (Germany, 1827), comparative literature and its corollary, world literature, have defied easy definition: a problem, perhaps, all to the good. In this graduate seminar, we will confront questions that have vexed comparative literature since its inception. If the act of comparison presupposes both the similarity and dissimilarity of two things, what does it mean to "compare" literatures or to study "comparative" literature? If comparison establishes equivalence between two things only to claim the superiority of one over the other or to mask the inequality of one to the other, what are its ethics of commensurability and incommensurability? How do we liberate--indeed can we liberate--comparative literature from the tautological tyranny of difference and likeness? Our approach in this seminar will be transhistorical. After a look at foundational problems of comparison (Derrida, Melas), we will probe the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century roots of modern comparative and world literature in the United States (Shackford, 1876, and Gayley, 1903) and in France, Egypt, Germany, Britain, India, and China: from Goethe on Weltliteratur (1827) to al-Tahtawi and Chasles on comparativity and comparative literature as such (1834, 1835), from de Lomnitz's mobilization of Weltliteratur in defense of "minor" literatures (1877) and Posnett's social Darwinist approach to national and world literatures (1886) to the thought of Tagore and Zheng on comparative and world literature (1907, 1924-1927). At each turn, we will interleave--and yes, compare--post-World War II, postcolonial, and other contemporary reinterpretations of the meaning, method, and compass (disciplinary, linguistic, literary/trans-medial, political, geographic) of comparative and world literatures. Our discussions will center on four axes of critical debate: 1) objectivity: historicity/scientism (Chasles, Shackford, Posnett, Moretti, Tsu); 2) philology, literariness, and their discontents (Gayley, Auerbach, Said, Pollock, Ahmed, Mufti); 3) worldliness (Goethe, Tagore, Damrosch, Casanova, Tiwari, Cheah); and 4) un/translatability: the opening and impasse--across epistemes, languages, literatures, and oratures old and new--that wrinkle would-be unified worlds with the differences of comparison (al-Tahtawi, Lomnitz, Kilito, Apter, Spivak, Gikandi, Ngũgĩ). In discussions and in final papers, seminar participants are encouraged to relate their own research to these problems. By semester's end, we will come away with a sharper sense of the history of our field; its periodic reengagement of the relationship of the "literary" to geopolitics, science, and linguistic and economic exchange; and its struggle to replace a Eurocentric worldview with a polycentric vision.
Who Should Take This Class?:
This course is open to graduate students only.
Learning Objectives:
See course description.
Grading:
60% Papers
20% In-Class Presentation
20% Class Participation
Exam Format:
60% Papers
20% In-Class Presentation
20% Class Participation
Workload:
100-150 Pages Reading Per Week (average over course of term)
20-25 Pages Writing Per Term
1 Paper
1 Presentation
Other Workload: Three 500-word Moodle posts on assigned readings also are due over the course of the term, as is a two-page prospectus for the final paper.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34628/1179
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
30 August 2017

Fall 2017  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Marx (34629)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
Instructor Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/05/2017 - 12/13/2017
Tue 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Please contact the instructor, Cesare Casarino, for permission to enroll. http://classinfo.umn.edu/?acad_group=TCLA&subject=CL&level=8&x500=casarino&term=1179
Class Description:

Marx. Focus on Capital Volume One and excerpts from the Grundrisse, with minimal secondary literature (e.g., Althusser, Balibar, Negri).

Grading:
The final grade will be based primarily on a 20-to-25-page final essay
Workload:
Approximately 100 Pages Reading Per Week
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34629/1179
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
7 April 2017

Fall 2017  |  CL 8910 Section 003: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Media/Telephone (34630)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 003
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/05/2017 - 12/13/2017
Thu 01:30PM - 04:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 118
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
The ubiquity of digital, mobile media devices and technologies--mobile phones, iPods, laptops, portable video game players, PDAs, MP3 files, flash drives--requires a rethinking of sound studies and its unmarked, static assumptions of place, space, and the ambient, so that we might accurately understand and assess the real and apparent fluidity of digital modernity. Focusing on the auditory, this course will attempt to listen to that digital condition, diagnosing its peculiarities, replaying its sweetest songs, and tracking its faint murmurs and loud rumblings. Collected for the purpose of developing a research method for this subject matter, course readings will include selections in mobility studies (Urry, Cresswell), network-based theories (Castells, Latour), world-systems theory (Wallerstein, Arrighi), communications (Williams, Smythe), new media studies (Manovich), labor in the new economy (Huws, Sennett), convergence theories (Jenkins, Lotz), as well as more focused studies of the music industry, sound recording, and auditory mobile media. Students will produce original research projects on the sonic and musical facets of contemporary digital and online media.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34630/1179
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
7 December 2010

Spring 2017  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (53278)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
CSDS 8910 Section 003
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017
Wed 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 201
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Topic: Some Fundemental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/53278/1173

Spring 2017  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Structuralism (68120)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017
Thu 05:30PM - 08:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Topic: Structuralism
Class Description:
In late modernity, one hears frequent recourse to the concept of structure to describe the workings of systems large and small (from the circulatory system to the banking system, systems of language, genre, artistic works, and style, and social, ideological, and political systems). For example, it is a common refrain from the left that the working class is caught in structured cycles of poverty, de-skilling, and pessimism, victimized by an economic system that is rigged in favor of the rich and well connected. Along another axis, structural racism entails forms of implicit bias and afflicts people of color worldwide. Women and transgender people are similarly afflicted by structural inequalities and prejudices. Why is the concept of structure doing so much work for us today?

In part, it may be because structure enables one to think beyond the limits of parochial human experiences, to contemplate actions, causes, and problems in the millions and billions. The Oxford English Dictionary links the classical Latin structura to practical activities: "a practice or process of building, method of building, masonry, brickwork, concrete, (in plural) masonry or concrete edifices, (of an army) arrangement, disposition." The English definitions it then offers range from the concrete - related to building materials and architecture - outward to more abstract arrangements of elements and systematic relationships. Across a range of scales, the concept of structure enables one to theorize the assembly and operation of systems (both large and small) that may elude the faculties of human perception.

At a time when scholars are increasingly turning to materialities and affects - things that seem to be relatively unstructured, finely grained, infinitesimal, inconsistent, qualitative, empirically textured, multiples upon multiples - how might we cast renewed attention on the concept of structure, which tends to reduce complex material circumstances to the operation of key elements? Is the concept of structure necessarily reductive? How might it be elucidating? How might we re-think its modern powers to organize bodies, languages, symbols, images, sounds, commodities, societies, and desires? And how might we distinguish structure from the related concept of form?
This course will revisit the concept of structure through a series of key readings. We will focus particular attention to the mid-century development of French structuralism, an interdisciplinary movement that attempted to recast the concept of structure at the center of aesthetic, linguistic, cognitive, social, and political forms of inquiry. Readings by Plato, Pierce, Saussure, Todorov, Merleau-Ponty, Susanne Langer, Norbert Wiener, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Jakobson, Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Althusser.
Grading:
50% Response Papers or Final Paper
20% In-class Presentation
30% Attendance and Class Participation
Workload:
~ 80 - 100 pages per week
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68120/1173
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
22 November 2016

Fall 2016  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Global Apartheid; or, Biopolitical Sovereignty (18513)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
DSSC 8310 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/06/2016 - 12/14/2016
Tue 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?casarino+CL8910+Fall2016
Class Description:

What would it mean to understand the contemporary capitalist world system as a system of "global apartheid?" This question is prompted by what may seem a historical paradox: on the one hand, official, legal, historical apartheid in South Africa rapidly started breaking down in 1990 and finally was abolished in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as the country's first black president; on the other hand, during approximately the same period (i.e., from 1989 to 1991), the Cold War officially ended (following the fall of the Berlin Wall), the first post-Cold-War war (a.k.a."Operation Desert Storm") was waged, a "New World Order" (as then U.S. President George H. W. Bush - invoking Winston Churchill - called it) was established, and an exponential leap in the globalization of capital took place that has ushered in a planetary order increasingly characterized by racialized separations and divisions (often marked by the proliferation of physical walls and borders of all sorts) between rich and poor, between the privileged and the disenfranchised, between humans whose life and safety must be protected at all costs and humans who are entirely expendable and who can be killed or let die with impunity. In short, at the same time that apartheid was officially abolished in South Africa, apartheid (or a variation on that theme of racialized separation, oppression, and exploitation) went global. Or - to capsize all of the above - had apartheid in some sense been global all along? Was modernity, among other things, a project of apartheid from the very start?

This seminar will address these questions - as well as the apparent paradox generating it - by examining the complex relations between sovereignty and biopolitics in modernity and by situating apartheid as central to the intersection of sovereignty and biopolitics. To this purpose, we will study works (or excerpts from works) by Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Étienne Balibar, Walter Benjamin, Steve Biko, Nahum Chandler, Aimé Césaire, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Grant Farred, Michel Foucault, Alfred Hoernle, Kiarina Kordela, Achille Mbembe, Naboth Mokgatle, S.M. Molema, Ernest Renan, Carl Schmitt, Adam Sitze, Ann Laura Stoler, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Hendrik Verwoerd, Alexander Weheliye, as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.

Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/18513/1169
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
26 May 2016

Fall 2016  |  CL 8910 Section 003: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Said and Vico (34838)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 003
ENGL 8090 Section 002
ENGL 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/06/2016 - 12/14/2016
Thu 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?brenn032+CL8910+Fall2016
Class Description:
Said and Vico: This course will examine in detail the writings of Edward Said and the great 18th-century Neapolitan theorist Giambattista Vico. We will explore Said's influential work in very different arenas -- on music, the politics of intellectuals, orientalism, the U.S. media, the question of Palestine, left philology, and theories of language and the novel. Said's famous invention of postcolonial theory will be seen against the background of a conscious tradition of humanism and historical materialism that he derived from Vico, and that was later taken up in original ways by 20th-century Marxist intellectuals whose impact on Said was profound, among them Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Lucien Goldmann, Mahmoud Darwish, Anouar Abdel-Malek, and Theodor Adorno. We will look also at Vico's work directly, assessing its significance for contemporary theories of culture, language, and political life -- his seminal work, _The New Science_ of course, but also his autobiography, and his polemical writings on the importance of the humanities and the limits of scientific reason.
Grading:
Grading will be based on class participation (30%), an oral report (20%), an essay draft, and a final essay of approximately 20-25 pages based on that draft (50%)
Exam Format:
There will be no exams.
Class Format:
Roughly 20% lecturing, 20% student presentations, and 60% discussion
Workload:
Roughly 100 pages of reading per week, sometimes less.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34838/1169
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
15 April 2016

Spring 2016  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Politics of the Vernacular (69736)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 003
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/19/2016 - 05/06/2016
Tue 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?tageldin+CL8910+Spring2016
Class Description:
How did the Latin _verna_, which once designated a slave born in his or her master's house, come to signify a populist freedom from mastery: linguistic, visual, political? This course explores the complex history, theory, and politics of the vernacular; its presumed synonyms in languages beyond those of Europe; and the many concepts with which it has been closely associated. Certainly the vernacular holds currency in architecture, where it refers to the use of "native" techniques of landscape and building design, and in film studies, where Miriam Hansen's notion of "vernacular modernism" has become an especially influential argument for at once the global diffusion and localization of Hollywood cinema. Still, the vernacular arguably enjoys its longest history and widest elaboration in linguistics, semiotics, and comparative literary studies. From its use by Dante, in the early fourteenth century, to champion the production of literature in the spoken languages of the Italian city-states rather than in Latin, the idea of the vernacular has been entwined with notions of mother tongue, native tongue, indigenous language, natural language, common language, language of the "folk" or "people," and thus also democratic, grassroots, populist, and progressive politics. Thus it finds its way into anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-hegemonic demands--in contexts as far-flung as those of the United States, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, and Algeria--for educational systems to recognize and for writers to produce literatures in African American Vernacular English, the Indian vernaculars, Kikuyu and Swahili, and Arabic _'ammiyya_ or _darija_. At the same time, the vernacular underpins colonially inspired projects of modernity and modernization the world over, from China to the Congo, from India to Turkey, from Egypt to Venezuela, where the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the construction of "natural" languages as keys to the global South's accession to the present, to modern scientific empiricism, and thus also to progress. Even as we explore the liberatory power of the vernacular, then, we also will interrogate its coercive logics. Is the notion at the core of the politics of vernacular language--namely, that writing should resemble speaking, and that spoken language is the most natural or native language--born inside a master narrative? Is it possible to understand language otherwise? Readings may include selections by Adejunmobi, Badiou, Baugh, Bensmaia, Blanchot, Chomsky, Dante, Derrida, Eco, Elbow, Erturk, Fabian, Ferguson, Gates, Gikandi, Haeri, Hansen, Hegel, Herder, Kilito, Mir, Mizumura, Mufwene, Ngugi, Perry and Delpit, Pollock, Rafael, Rama, Ramaswamy, Rickford and Rickford, Rousseau, Safouan, Saussure, Shankar, Suleiman, Volosinov, Williams, Wilson, Yildiz, Zadeh, Zhou, and others.
Exam Format:
60% Reports/Papers
20% In-class Presentations
20% Class Participation
Class Format:
25% Lecture
50% Discussion
25% Student Presentations
Workload:
100-150 Pages Reading Per Week
20-25 Pages Writing Per Term
1 Paper(s)
1 Presentation(s)
Other Workload: Three 500-word Moodle posts on assigned readings also are due over the course of the term, as is a two-page prospectus for the final paper.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/69736/1163
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
27 March 2015

Spring 2016  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Poets of Commodities: Economics & Cultural Theory (59563)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
ENGL 8520 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/19/2016 - 05/06/2016
Thu 02:30PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Lind Hall 202
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?brenn032+CL8910+Spring2016
Class Description:
Poets of Commodities: On the Economic in Cultural Theory In this course, we will explore a number of texts of economic theory central to the traditions of cultural critique. For historical and political reasons, allusions to the "economic" are everywhere in the discourses of theory today, which makes it impossible to read many of the emerging theorists without understanding the texts upon which they draw (often without acknowledgement). Such reliance on economic concepts include recent attempts to dwell on the double-meaning of (aesthetic/economic) "value," for instance; the received wisdom that we are living in a "post-industrial" society, to take another; or the old idea (recently resurrected) of immaterial labor; the possibility and potential of socialism, communism, or a redefined capitalism; the economic role of intellectuals; the principle of deterritorialization in light of capital flow-- all of these issues dominate the writing and thinking of contemporary theorists from David Harvey to Silvia Federici and Karatani Kojin, and it has become a basic task to clarify their meanings.

But it is a difficult task in that so few of the cultural theorists actually study economics relying instead on inherited ideas at second-hand - Mauss taking from Durkheim; Benjamin from Simmel; Derrida from Marx, and so on. This course will instead face a broader and richer history of economic concepts and ideas and attempt to position them within an intellectual-political matrix. At the same time, it will attempt to theorize the ubiquitous gestures towards the economic by theorists operating in philosophical or aesthetic modes that, curiously enough, take their stand by vigorously rejecting economic determinations and, in general, casting skepticism on the "economism" of certain trends in philosophy and social theory.

The present prominence of these issues stems from a long and venerable tradition of sociologists, misfits, autodidacts, philosophers, and poets - that is, precisely not economists, since economists themselves were (and are) rightly seen as basically apologists and ideologists with no scientific validity whatsoever. One of the theses of this course is that this maverick economic has rarely been perceived as a tradition as such. From them emerged startling modes of questioning that exploded many of the claims of political economy, and constituted an influential challenge to the claims of economic expertise. Although setting out from disparate points of departure (revolutionary cells, avant-garde broadsheets, muck-raking journalism, or the lurid voyeurism of ethnography), they all in their own way dislodged economics from the ponderous arithmetic and impenetrable graphs of the discipline's own pseudo-scientific grandeur. Marx's title for The Grundrisse was "A Critique of Economic Categories." As if in answer, a tradition of thought opened up vast new unexplored areas of inquiry: the concept of "expenditure" seen as substitute for "accumulation," for example; the "image-function" of the global periphery; the concept of "over-development," the trope of the commodity fetish, capital mobility's decoupling of space and place; "reification," and the surpassing ofthe mode of production paradigm. In this course, we will try to pin down what these concepts mean, where they come from, and what their stakes are.

The point is not so much to march through the various schools of thought within economics in order to show their failings as to point out that "economics" - or what that science supposedly treats - has been creatively, and very skeptically, addressed by a host of non-economists for the last two centuries. In fact, these thinkers constitute a tradition that has never been named. One doesn't find here so much a debate with economists as an attempt to move the whole discussion of what economics nominally treats (value, material reproduction, the circulation of goods, the satisfaction of needs, development) to broader areas of culture and the human sphere.

Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/59563/1163
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
26 October 2015

Spring 2016  |  CL 8910 Section 003: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Ephemeralities (60224)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/19/2016 - 05/06/2016
Tue 05:30PM - 08:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?mgallope+CL8910+Spring2016
Class Description:
Does it seem like modern life is a life for which little is guaranteed for the future? In which that what comes to be, so quickly passes away? Or is the necessity of change a source of endless creativity and potentiality? Paradoxically: Is what we value based primarily in the inevitability of its loss and decay? This seminar examines a philosophical conundrum that is both ancient and modern - the transience, fragility, and precariousness of beings (matter, life, subjects, objects, and structures). We will approach this question from an array of physical, metaphysical, historical, socio-political, and aesthetic perspectives. The syllabus places emphasis on the close reading of European intellectual history, though our approach to these texts will be attentive to potential resonances with marginal, peripheral, vernacular, and non-Western forms of life. We will begin with philosophers from Ancient Greece and Rome (the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius) and then turn to a range of modern thinkers (Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson, Jankélévitch, Whitehead, Heidegger, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno, Butler). Throughout the seminar we will take time to discuss modern case studies in ephemeral art, or art where ephemerality is a crucial component (Allan Kaprow, Ornette Coleman, Adrian Piper, and the Velvet Underground).
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/60224/1163
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
6 December 2015

Spring 2016  |  CL 8910 Section 004: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Brecht's Theaters (70342)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
A-F or Audit
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
GER 8240 Section 001
CSDS 8910 Section 004
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/19/2016 - 05/06/2016
Tue 02:30PM - 04:25PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 118
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?mrothe+CL8910+Spring2016
Class Description:
Brecht's Theaters

Brecht's theater never existed. From the very beginning there was a plurality of methods, subjects and ‘stage philosophies.' And, an aspect closely related to such a plurality: Brecht's theater has always been "Brechtian," that is, the work of many. How, then, is one to identify what is specific about this theater while respecting its striking diversity? One possible unifying theme presents itself through the "impossible task" that Brecht and his collaborators had set for themselves: to present the totality of society. Theodor W. Adorno once critiqued: "This is a theater that - without mediation - drags society itself onto the stage." Yet focusing on this "assignment" opens up new readings of Brecht's plays and writings, not the least by blurring the distinction between "masterpiece" and "failure." Going with and against Adorno, it is the goal of this course to read Brecht's dramatic texts, poems, notes and theoretical essays from the perspective of an ongoing and never completed struggle for presentation; the emphasis will be on their becoming by situating them within the force field of collaborations, political allies and enemies. Finally, through digressions, we will examine contemporary examples of Brechtian theater in and outside of Germany.

Note: Students of German will have to read and write in German; a course packet with texts in German will be available at Paradigm copy. Inexpensive collections of Brecht plays in English are easy to find and the following ones will be needed: "Baal," "In the Jungle of Cities," "Man equals Man," Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," "Threepenny Opera," "Saint Joan," "The Decision," "Lindbergh's Flight," "The Caucasian Chalk Circle." Other English texts will be provided on moodle.

Grading:
40% Final Paper
30% In-class Presentations
30% Class Participation
Workload:
40 - 80 Pages Reading Per Week (plays and writings on theater)
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/70342/1163
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
22 December 2015

Fall 2015  |  CL 8910 Section 004: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature (35425)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
ENGL 8090 Section 003
GER 8010 Section 001
GSD 8001 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/08/2015 - 12/16/2015
Tue 02:30PM - 04:25PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 118
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Approaches to Textual Analysis -- Poetics of Consciousness
Class Description:
This seminar will explore marginalia as literary form. We will first consider marginalia in its most literal meaning of writing found in the margins of texts, and move to a broader consideration of the materiality of literary texts and the poetics of writing ?outside the margins.? Examining classic cases of marginalia (Coleridge; Poe; Kafka; Benjamin), we will explore text that is both on and outside the margins; text that slips off the page; paratext; writing found outside the margins, within the parentheses, on the body, on the wall. Topics to be addressed include: the archive and marginalia; discarded texts and their ?afterlives?; marginalia and the found text, the fragment, and translation; imprint of Talmudic text on contemporary Jewish poetic practices; hypertext as marginalia; the ways in which emendation, annotation, citation, footnotes, the index and gloss expand the frame of the text. The seminar will also consider the place of print text in Conceptual and Pop art and the relationships between word, text, and image. Readings by, among others, Benjamin, Blonstein, Borges, Calvino, Celan, Cixous, Coleridge, Derrida, Oswald Egger, Freud, Kafka, Karasick, Pessoa, Poe, Sebald. Sondheim, Benjamin Stein,. Class will be conducted in English, with all readings available in English.
Class Format:
20% Lecture
80% Discussion
Workload:
100 Pages Reading Per Week
25 Pages Writing Per Term
1 Paper(s)
1 Presentation(s)
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/35425/1159
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
28 October 2013

Fall 2015  |  CL 8910 Section 005: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Kant in Asia: The Politics of German Idealism (35902)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
ALL 8920 Section 001
GER 8300 Section 001
CSDS 8910 Section 004
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/08/2015 - 12/16/2015
Wed 02:30PM - 04:25PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 6
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Kant in Asia
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/35902/1159

Fall 2015  |  CL 8910 Section 006: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Readings in 18th Century Literature and Culture (36072)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
ENGL 5140 Section 001
CSDS 8910 Section 005
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/08/2015 - 12/16/2015
Mon 06:20PM - 08:50PM
UMTC, East Bank
Lind Hall 207A
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Sublime Politics and the End of Existence
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/36072/1159

Spring 2015  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Formalisms (61590)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/20/2015 - 05/08/2015
Tue 05:30PM - 08:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 201
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
How do the humanities variously define and deploy the concept of form? How is it adopted differently across the media of word, still image, moving image, sound, and space? This seminar attempts to give equal voice to five disciplinary conceptions of form and their attendant formalisms: literary, visual, cinematic, musical, and architectural. The syllabus begins with canonical conceptions of form in the history of Western philosophy (Plato's eidos and Hegel's "sensuous appearance of the idea") before turning to writings drawn from a variety of modern disciplinary contexts. Our discussion will range from the Russian formalists, to architectural formalism, the New Criticism, formalism in film theory, writings on twelve-tone music, the concept of medium specificity, minimalism in various media, as well as utopian and dialectical accounts of form. We will engage with the following questions: To what end are concepts of form summoned and developed? Are the purposes purely technical? Are they pedagogical? Is form understood to be perceptible or is it an imperceptible horizon? Is it esoteric or does is strive for transparent populism? Is it linked with a conservative or progressive politics? Is form seen as engaging critically or affirmatively with historical traditions? How is it used to restrict or include various objects and styles? By the end of the term, we will aim to have an intellectual framework that allows us to think comparatively about varying conceptions of form across the humanities.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/61590/1153
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
4 November 2014

Spring 2015  |  CL 8910 Section 003: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Spinoza and the Twentieth Century (68004)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 003
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/20/2015 - 05/08/2015
Tue 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68004/1153

Fall 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Science/Scientism in the Humanities (23904)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
Instructor Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
ENGL 8520 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/02/2014 - 12/10/2014
Thu 02:30PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Rapson Hall 15
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
This course will question the effects of the "sciences" on the humanities, especially recently, but also historically. We will study the public and media devaluation of the humanities, the deference to the sciences, and the assumption that there is nothing uniquely "scientific" about the humanities themselves. Also, and more significantly, we will explore tendency by humanists (literary critics, artists, philosophers and social theorists) to defer to the claims of science: its evidentiary models, its futurisms, its speculative "materialism." We will be interested as well in counter-trends: the critique of "scientism," for example; resistance to technological or instrumental reason, to a pure productivity without negation, to the death of the subject, and the rhetoric of "being," which is so widespread today. We will discuss the many forms of scientism in the humanities today: "thing" theory, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism; object-oriented philosophy, the neo-positivism of "distant reading," and the digital humanities. If Julien de la Mettrie in 18th-century France, regarded man as a self-moving machine, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, calls for "strip[ping] the human sciences of any hermeneutic privilege and assign[ing] the position of chief importance to technoscience, the history of which he equates with Being." Scientism, in short, has a long history. But there is another side of the coin. The sciences are more and more reliant on ideas taken from the humanities without acknowledgement, the "Big Bang," for example; "the God particle." The infiltration of the sciences by the humanities (again, without acknowledgement) can be seen in many of the most celebrated theorists of science in practice: viz, Ian Hacking (Historical Ontology and The Emergence of Probability) and Paul Feyerabend, Against Method. We will assess these trends, explore what is methodologically unique to the humanities, weigh the meaning of the word "materialist," discuss the politics of scientism, and think about the reasons for its current prominence. Readings will be from several genres: novels, criticism, manifestoes. Some possible readings include: Max Horkheimer, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, Ian Hacking, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bruno Latour, Katherine Hayles, Henri Atlan, Curtis White, Leon Wieseltier, Stanislaw Lem, Carl Popper, Jane Bennett, and others. Requirements: one or two in-class presentations, a mid-term essay prospectus, and a final essay of 15-25 pages.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/23904/1149
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
2 April 2014

Fall 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Critical Debates in Comparative Literature (24045)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/02/2014 - 12/10/2014
Wed 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 201
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Since their first invocations by Noel and de Laplace in France (1816) and by Goethe in Germany (1827), comparative literature and its corollary, world literature, have defied easy definition: a problem, perhaps, all to the good. In this graduate seminar, we will address ourselves to questions that have vexed the field since its inception. If the act of comparison presupposes both the similarity and dissimilarity of two things, what does it mean to "compare" literatures or to study "comparative" literature? If comparison establishes equivalence between two things only to claim the superiority of one over the other or to mask the inequality of one to the other, what are its ethics of commensurability and incommensurability? How do we liberate--indeed can we liberate--comparative literature from the tautological tyranny of difference and likeness? Our objectives in this seminar will be twofold. The first half of the course will focus on the history of comparative literature and on foundational texts in the field. Taking as our points of departure the work of Bassnett and Melas, we will read early texts in U.S. comparative literature (Shackford, 1876, and Gayley, 1903). We then will look at nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century articulations in France, Egypt, Germany, Britain, Ottoman Palestine, and India: from Goethe on Weltliteratur (1827) to al-Tahtawi and Chasles on comparativity and comparative literature as such (1834, 1835), from de Lomnitz's mobilization of Weltliteratur in defense of "minor" literatures (1877) and Posnett's social Darwinist approach to national and world literatures (1886) to al-Khalidi and Tagore on comparative and world literature (1904, 1907) and Benjamin's translation theory (1923). From these beginnings we will turn to post-WWII incarnations of the field (1942-1970), focusing on Warren, Wellek, Auerbach, Spitzer, Etiemble, and Levin. Finally, we will consider the contemporary field in the Arab world, Africa, China, India, and the West. In the second half of the course, we will examine recent reinterpretations of the meaning, method, and scope of comparative literature now. We will focus on four axes of critical debate: 1) Comparative, world, or planetary literature (Damrosch, Casanova, Hayot, Spivak); 2) Methods of comparison: close vs. distant reading, philology vs. scientism (Moretti, Quayson, Said, Spivak); 3) The translational turn and (post)colonial failures of translatability (Apter, Melas); and 4) The changing status of the "literary" in an increasingly inter-medial discipline. In discussions and in final papers, seminar participants are encouraged to relate their own research to these problems. By semester's end, we will come away with a sharper sense of the history of our field; its periodic reengagement of the relationship of the "literary" to geopolitics, science, and linguistic and economic exchange; and its struggle to replace a Eurocentric worldview with a polycentric vision.
Grading:
60% Reports/Papers
20% In-class Presentations
20% Class Participation Other Grading Information: The 60% reports/papers grade shown above includes 10% for a 2-page final paper prospectus and 50% for the 18-20-page final paper itself.
Class Format:
25% Lecture
50% Discussion
25% Student Presentations
Workload:
150 Pages Reading Per Week
25-28 Pages Writing Per Term
1 Paper(s)
1 Presentation(s)
Other Workload: Three 500-word Moodle posts on assigned readings are required during the semester.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/24045/1149
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
10 April 2014

Fall 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 003: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Adorno (26388)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 003
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/02/2014 - 12/10/2014
Tue 01:30PM - 04:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 325
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
The seminar investigates key works of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), Frankfurt School philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and aesthetician. Readings of major monographs include Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-authored with Max Horkheimer), Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, The Psychological Techniques of the Martin Luther Thomas Radio Address, The Stars Down to Earth, as well as numerous free-standing essays on critical theory, dialectics, mass culture, language and writing, the Adorno-Benjamin aesthetics debates, and music, among others. Key examples of secondary writings on Adorno will be included as well.
Class Format:
35% Lecture
65% Discussion
Workload:
50-100 Pages Reading Per Week
1 Paper(s)
Other Workload: Participants will also write several position papers on assigned readings and also prepare short passages for in-class discussion.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/26388/1149
Past Syllabi:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/syllabi/leppe001_CL8910_Spring2018.syllabus (Spring 2018)
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
3 April 2014

Fall 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 004: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Sound and the Visual (24503)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
ARTH 8440 Section 001
CSDS 8910 Section 004
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/02/2014 - 12/10/2014
Mon 04:15PM - 06:15PM
UMTC, East Bank
Walter W Heller Hall 445
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/24503/1149

Fall 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 005: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Weimar Philosophy (35034)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 005
GER 8010 Section 001
GSD 8001 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/02/2014 - 12/10/2014
Wed 02:30PM - 04:25PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 4
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/35034/1149

Fall 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 006: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- The Animal (35148)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 006
ENGL 8090 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/02/2014 - 12/10/2014
Tue 06:20PM - 08:50PM
UMTC, East Bank
Lind Hall 207A
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/35148/1149

Spring 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Post-Colonial Translation (64821)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/21/2014 - 05/09/2014
Wed 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 325
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
"Translation," writes Gayatri Spivak, "is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate." Here Spivak speaks of translating a Bengali tongue whose intimacy has been lost to her as an Indian-born academic living in (post)colonial diaspora, not of the transfers of power at stake when a (post)colonial writer translates a colonizer's language--or vice versa. Yet translation, literary and otherwise, figures prominently in the cultural history of imperialism and begs a closer critical look. This seminar will interrogate the role of translation in both imperialisms and reactions to imperialism--past and present--across the (post)colonial power divides of Africa, Asia, the Arab world, Europe, and their diasporas. On each side of the power differential it enforces, empire deforms and reshapes both the theory and the praxis of translation. We will consider those effects, as well as the impact of the translation-empire nexus on world literary and historical formations and transformations. Translation in this seminar, then, will denote as much ontological, epistemological, and cultural translation as it will inter- and intra-lingual translation. Shuttling between critical translation theory, literary history, and close readings of "translational literature," we will engage a set of interrelated questions. How have representatives of modern Western empire (invaders and traders, preachers and teachers, scholars and bureaucrats) used translation to elicit the surrender of their would-be subjects? How have writers and intellectuals in colonized or semi-colonial domains, in turn, pursued translation to resist or embrace their dominators' assumed "superiority" and--most often--to propel their cultures toward the West's presumed "modernity"? Why have literary-cultural "awakenings" in much of the world beyond Europe--from the Indian "renaissance" to the Arab nahda to the Chinese May Fourth movement to pan-African negritude--taken such charged translational forms, refashioning literary cultures at once along and against a dominant European grain? Which face of translation--equivalence or incommensurability--might forge cultural and political equity between the dominator and the dominated? Which reinforces subjection? How might we theorize (post)colonial translation in terms linguistic, material, religious, affective, sexual, psychological? Finally, what are the implications of the translation-empire nexus for world or comparative literature and postcolonial studies today? Readings include selections from Agha Shahid Ali, Emily Apter, Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, Aime Cesaire, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Brent Hayes Edwards, Roman Jakobson, Abdelfattah Kilito, Lydia Liu, Lu Xun, Tejaswini Niranjana, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Vicente Rafael, Naoki Sakai, S. Shankar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rabindranath Tagore, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Lawrence Venuti, and others.
Grading:
60% Reports/Papers
20% In-class Presentations
20% Class Participation
Class Format:
25% Lecture
50% Discussion
25% Student Presentations
Workload:
100-150 Pages Reading Per Week
20-25 Pages Writing Per Term
1 Paper(s)
1 Presentation(s)
Other Workload: Three 500-word Moodle posts on assigned readings also are due over the course of the term, as is a two-page prospectus for the final paper.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/64821/1143
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
7 April 2014

Spring 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 003: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Dialectics & Dialectical Thought (64823)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
Instructor Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 003
ENGL 8510 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/21/2014 - 05/09/2014
Wed 05:30PM - 08:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Lind Hall 207A
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
This course is about giving students an understanding, both historical and practical, of what it means to think dialectically, and why it matters. As for the historical, 1) the term (in philosophy) has been central since antiquity. In Aristotle it referred to the art of argument, particularly refutation; in Plato, to the method of acquiring truth by means of a dialogue. Dialectics is, in fact, another name for dialogue, and in all its variants it is dialogical. In modernity, very famously in Hegel, dialectics achieves a massive historical and political prominence. It is not going too far to say that it generates a global wave of social activism and critique, leading in time to the well-known story of Marx's development of a theory of historical materialism and of social contradiction. Here it becomes nothing less than the philosophical logic of revolution. Our own time (the last three or four decades) has been notoriously at war with dialectics (partly because of its fear of revolution), and yet here we confront a paradox. For the word "dialectics" is used everywhere in essays and books today, deployed with complete abandon, and at times even applied to schools like deconstruction or the Deleuzian critique of modalities in the most confusing ways, since both are so explicitly hostile to the Platonic and Hegelian sources of dialectical thought. As for the practical aspects of the issue, 2) as we struggle to compose our essays and dissertations, we are forced to confront eventually the question of how we are to prove what we set out to prove. What constitutes a case? How tell whether one has a viable idea or not? What purchase do our ideas have on the world? Our discussion of dialectics will address what the term means as method, and how that method differs from others -- from, say, the neo-positivism of world literature; the liberal empiricism of affect theory, ontologies of the body, and surface reading; the prophetic anarchy of autonomist communism and Badiou's theory of the "Event"; and the perennial attractions in early 21st century America and Europe to a "productive" reading that forecloses any dialogue between an active subject and an active object. Let me stress, though, that the course will proceed basically. Little prior knowledge of the above subjects is assumed. Our work will be to read slowly and thoroughly through a discreet number of central texts in order to arrive at useable, working definitions of dialectics, contrasting this mode of thought to other alternatives. My desire is to place the issue of this mode of thought in its proper history, and to leave students with a clear reason for embracing or rejecting it in ways relevant to their own writing and to their understanding of the current moment of theory in the humanities.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/64823/1143
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
8 November 2013

Spring 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 004: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- The Linguistic Turn (68987)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 004
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/21/2014 - 05/09/2014
Thu 05:30PM - 08:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 201
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Is philosophy best articulated through language? Or do other media?musical, visual, cinematic, physiological, performative, mathematical, scientific, material, industrial?have uniquely non- linguistic modes of articulating, indicating, or implying philosophical wisdom and critical thought? In recent decades, much has been made of what Richard Rorty once described as "the Linguistic Turn," a constellation of theories that viewed the properties of language as conditions for philosophy, knowledge, culture, and life. Taking a broad historical view of this intervention, this seminar proposes two trajectories: 1) to reassess the foundational texts of the linguistic turn (Wittgenstein, Saussure, Russell, Heidegger, Derrida, Searle, Foucault, Lacan) and 2) to survey a range of thinkers who develop critical views concerning the hegemony of language (Bloch, Adorno, Jankelevitch, Rosset, Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou, Meillassoux). In our meetings, we will link basic expositions of the central problems with close readings of selected passages, develop critical responses to the stated views, and initiate dialogue with relevant aesthetic, historical, and ethnographic objects.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68987/1143
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
19 November 2013

Spring 2014  |  CL 8910 Section 005: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature (69242)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 005
ENGL 8090 Section 001
GER 8300 Section 001
GSD 8002 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/21/2014 - 05/09/2014
Mon 02:30PM - 04:25PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 106
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
This seminar will explore marginalia as literary form. We will first consider marginalia in its most literal meaning of writing found in the margins of texts, and move to a broader consideration of the materiality of literary texts and the poetics of writing ?outside the margins.? Examining classic cases of marginalia (Coleridge; Poe; Kafka; Benjamin), we will explore text that is both on and outside the margins; text that slips off the page; paratext; writing found outside the margins, within the parentheses, on the body, on the wall. Topics to be addressed include: the archive and marginalia; discarded texts and their ?afterlives?; marginalia and the found text, the fragment, and translation; imprint of Talmudic text on contemporary Jewish poetic practices; hypertext as marginalia; the ways in which emendation, annotation, citation, footnotes, the index and gloss expand the frame of the text. The seminar will also consider the place of print text in Conceptual and Pop art and the relationships between word, text, and image. Readings by, among others, Benjamin, Blonstein, Borges, Calvino, Celan, Cixous, Coleridge, Derrida, Oswald Egger, Freud, Kafka, Karasick, Pessoa, Poe, Sebald. Sondheim, Benjamin Stein,. Class will be conducted in English, with all readings available in English.
Class Format:
20% Lecture
80% Discussion
Workload:
100 Pages Reading Per Week
25 Pages Writing Per Term
1 Paper(s)
1 Presentation(s)
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/69242/1143
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
28 October 2013

Fall 2013  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Propaganda (30714)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
Instructor Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/03/2013 - 12/11/2013
Tue 05:00PM - 07:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 325
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Please contact Prof. Alice Lovejoy (alovejoy@umn.edu) to receive permission to enroll.
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/30714/1139

Fall 2013  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Blanchot (30980)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/03/2013 - 12/11/2013
Thu 02:00PM - 05:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
At Odds with Identity and Representation Under this rubric, we seek to accompany Friedrich Nietzsche, who was at odds with his own time just as he is with ours. While the blossoms of French philosophy of the postwar period were steeped in Nietzsche, his works themselves would seem to have disappeared down a memory hole, since they are highly literary and defy the current rules of "communication." Readings to include: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music; The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack together with St. Paul's Letter to the Romans; The Gay Science; Ecce Homo; On Truth and Lie in their Extra-Moral Sense, as well as many other aphorisms and essays. Other works to be discussed as readings of Nietzsche include: Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? and parts of his massive study of Nietzsche; essays by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/30980/1139
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
29 November 2010

Fall 2013  |  CL 8910 Section 003: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Forms of Critique: Adorno, Foucault and Beyond (31657)

Instructor(s)
Falko Schmieder
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 003
FREN 8230 Section 002
GER 8820 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/03/2013 - 12/11/2013
Wed 02:30PM - 04:25PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 12
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Both Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault develop a philosophy of history centered on the concept of enlightenment, explore the relation between rationality and power, attempt to exercise a form of immanent critique, and share a great number of reference authors such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Husserl. Yet the perspectives on society that they put forward, as well as the critical interventions they encourage, differ radically. Their enterprises seem to be related in the form of a mirror image. In this course we will explore first and foremost the differences between these philosophers to work out the intricate logic of their projects: assess method and style of their proceedings, historically contextualize them, and discuss their legacy. A reader will be provided containing the English texts; texts in original language will be available on moodle.
Grading:
30% Reports/Papers
20% Written Homework
20% In-class Presentations
30% Class Participation
Class Format:
30% Lecture
30% Discussion
10% Small Group Activities
20% Student Presentations
Workload:
40 Pages Reading Per Week
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/31657/1139
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
25 April 2013

Fall 2013  |  CL 8910 Section 004: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Spanish and Spanish-American Baroque/ Neobaroque (34884)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 004
EMS 8500 Section 007
SPAN 8900 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/03/2013 - 12/11/2013
Thu 02:30PM - 05:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 317
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34884/1139

Spring 2013  |  CL 8910 Section 001: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Adorno (66905)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Seminar
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/22/2013 - 05/10/2013
Tue 01:30PM - 04:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 325
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
The seminar is intended as a general introduction to the work of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) in particular and the classic phase of Frankfurt School thought more generally. The course focuses sustained attention on a variety of key essays (Adorno's preferred form of address), as well as his most important socio-cultural monographs: Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Max Horkheimer), and Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.
Grading:
80% Reports/Papers
20% Class Participation
Class Format:
60% Lecture
10% Film/Video
30% Discussion At least two screenings will be scheduled outside of class times.
Workload:
100-300 Pages Reading Per Week
30 Pages Writing Per Term
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66905/1133
Past Syllabi:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/syllabi/leppe001_CL8910_Spring2018.syllabus (Spring 2018)
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
24 October 2012

Spring 2013  |  CL 8910 Section 002: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Critical Pedagogy & the New Humanities (66906)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Seminar
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 002
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/22/2013 - 05/10/2013
Wed 12:00PM - 02:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 135
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Description:
Let's get real: the essays often suck, and we beat ourselves up?asking what we didn't give 'them,' what we mis-said, how our prompts could have been clearer to prevent this heartbreaking mess. Or worse: we fall into those endless, guilty-pleasurable conversations about why our students are so awful and how we really deserve better ones. They are not that bad. Nor are we. And those are the wrong questions. This workshop/seminar identifies the underlying and often occulted structures determining our teaching lives and those of our students. Paolo Freire calls them 'limit conditions.' They were there before we arrived; identify them and we have some measure of agency. We'll work from a few interesting case studies (how and why you can't (or can) teach PERSEPOLIS in post-911 Minnesota, say), and core readings in critical pedagogy to build courses that work and papers that matter (really?as articles or presentations in professional venues). Join us. The more range of disciplines and philosophies of teaching, the better.
Class Format:
50% Discussion
15% Small Group Activities
25% Student Presentations
10% Guest Speakers
Workload:
Other Workload: It's a workshop. While we'll read primary material and theory that's as good (and hard) as it gets, this is not an exercise in 'mastery' of 'material.' It's a production site. We make real and useful things.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66906/1133
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
15 October 2012

Spring 2013  |  CL 8910 Section 003: Advanced Topics in Comparative Literature -- Gramsci (66907)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Seminar
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
Instructor Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Delivery Medium
Meets With:
CSDS 8910 Section 003
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/22/2013 - 05/10/2013
Wed 03:00PM - 06:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Nicholson Hall 201
Course Catalog Description:
Practical applications of specific methodologies and theories to a determined area. Topics vary by instructor and semester.
Class Notes:
Instructor Permission only. Please contact instructor to gain admission to course. casarino@umn.edu. Students will need to read Machiavelli's The Prince before the beginning of the Spring semester.
Class Description:
A detailed examination of the thought of Karl Marx, focusing entirely on his major works (i.e., selections from Grundrisse, and from Capital, Volumes One and Three). Secondary literature will include works by Althusser, Balibar, Negri, and others.
Grading:
80% Reports/Papers
20% In-class Presentations
Class Format:
40% Lecture
40% Discussion
20% Student Presentations
Workload:
200-300 Pages Reading Per Week
30-35 Pages Writing Per Term
1 Paper(s)
1 Presentation(s)
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66907/1133
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
7 April 2011

ClassInfo Links - Comparative Literature Classes

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To see a URL-only list for use in the Faculty Center URL fields, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=CL&catalog_nbr=8910&url=1
To see this page output as XML, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=CL&catalog_nbr=8910&xml=1
To see this page output as JSON, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=CL&catalog_nbr=8910&json=1
To see this page output as CSV, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=CL&catalog_nbr=8910&csv=1