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| Fall 2003 Courses CPLT 7120:01 W 6-9 Scriptor Ludens: Italo Calvino and the Playful Side of Postmodernism Italo Calvino's poetics about how "the pleasure of fantasy lies in the unraveling of [...] solutions that keep some surprises up their sleeves," point to a literary system built on positive imagery (utopia worlds), ludic transgression, and enlightened fantasy that translates into a counter-discourse paralleling classical postmodernism's unequivocal skepticism (Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, Fukuyama). Italo Calvino's poetics are founded predominantly on the imago-centric structures of "point of view" and "perception." By focusing on the world-generating potential of perceptual and playful impressions rather than on stable linguistic utterance, Calvino's fiction progressively foregrounds the transfiguring effects of human perception through literature as they both remold the world into ludic (and multiple) structures; texts and margins, center and periphery or margin, playful deceit vs deceptive play, description and progression, speech discourse vs visual discourse, foreboding signs vs ineffable images, etc. This course will examine Italo Calvino's novels and theoretical writings on aesthetic postmodernism with reference to symbolic anthropology ("liminal theory" as originally theorized by Van Gennep and then further elaborated by Calinescu and V. Turner in reference to literature) and a possible worlds theory of fiction (Pavel; Dolezel; Eco;) in an effort to situate Calvino's "positive imagery and utopia" not in the historical idea of actual place but rather in an alternative narrative of process, transformation, of conviction and ludic integration; all intended to replace postmodern skepticism and fragmentation. METHOD OF EVALUATION: Oral Report 50% (Mid-semester) Final written essay 50% (Last day of class) Method of instruction: Lecture/ Reading/ Discussion. Course will be taught in English and the reading material (primary and secondary sources) will be in English and/or available in English translation. Required text: Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature. (Trans. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986) Recommended texts: There will be additional theoretical reading material to complement the Calvino text. Additional reading will be included in the syllabus and students can read the material from the course packet. Professor John Mastrogianakos CPLT 7130:01 Professor John Pizer CPLT 7130:02
Professor Bainard Cowan
Spring 2003 Courses CPLT
7130:02 This seminar will offer a multilingual survey of important recent works of literature from the Caribbean region. The course will be organized around two themes: the oppositional binarism Caliban/Ariel, (Signifying Trickster/Obedient Servant to a Master Subject), and the figure of the cannibal, the Caribbean text/writer as “cannibal” with respect to European and North American texts. Readings will include works and excerpts from the following: Carpentier, El siglo de las luces [Explosion in a Cathedral]; Cesaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Return to my Native Land ]; Chamoiseau, Au temps de l’antan [Creole Folktales]; Conde, Moi, Tituba, sorciere [I, Tituba, Witch . . .]; Ferre, La casa de la lagunas [The House on the Lagoon ]; Glissant, selections from Poemes complets [xerox translation] , Poetique de la relation [Poetics of Relation]; Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River; Marti, Major Poems (bilingual edition); Naipaul, Miguel Street;Retamar, Caliban & Other Essays ; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Perse, Eloges [Eloges and other poems]; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Vega, True & False Romances ;Walcott, Omeros. Professor Jeff Humpries CPLT
7140:01 This course will consider the question of "diversity"--religious, cultural, ethnic, intellectual, hermeneutic, and otherwise--through the reading of some of the most significant texts from the first several centuries of the Islamic tradition (from roughly 610 AD to 1300 AD). We will strive to become familiar with a variety of texts in a broad range of genres and modes: scriptural, literary, exegetical, lyrical, theological, narrative, scientific, political, allegorical, philosophical, etc. After a few sessions studying the origins of Islam, we will follow several of the diverging paths opened up by the revelations to Muhammad. There will be a special emphasis on the writings of Sufi mystics (such as the astonishing Ibn Arabi, known as "the Greatest Master," and the famous Persian poet Rumi) and Arabic philosophers (such as the great rationalist Ibn Rushd and the influential political philosopher Alfarabi). All readings will be in English. We will see that these writings share in common a concern for the situation of others--of those who are unlike "one's own." Professor Greg Stone CPLT
7130:01 Interleaved within the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment is an array of literature, art, music, and architecture that is somewhat more than neo-classical, somewhat less than unbearably extravagant, and more than somewhat important for understanding the great epoch of western modernization. Celebrating light, motion, surprise, excess, instability, curiosity, and inquiry, the Baroque remains the least appreciated but most pervasive of recent literary and artistic idioms. This course will look at numerous Baroque writings and artifacts---from literature, philosophy, music, painting, and architecture---in an attempt to understand the aesthetic, social, and intellectual foundations of these productions. Attention will be paid to Baroque critical and aesthetic theories and to modern commentators on same. Readings will come from several language traditions, but all assignments will be available in English translation. Afternoon meeting hours to take advantage of the play of shadows! Professor Kevin Cope CPLT
7140:02 This second course in tracing the genealogies of postmodernity is the follow-up to our Fall 2002 course on the political economy of globalization. In this course we investigate the sciences of complexity in order to provide another of the genealogies of postmodernity in the relations among culture, political economy and science. Themes to be followed include the heritage of the cybernetics movement, the relations between information theory and the theorization of DNA as the genetic code, the impact of nonlinear dynamics, and the effects of communication networks on social and cultural formation. Texts: Assignments: CPLT
7120:01 This course is a multi-disciplinary exploration of allegory and the allegorical imagination in literature, philosophy, religion, visual art, and criticism in the Western tradition from the ancient world through the early modern period. Readings will include: texts from the Bible, including the Book of Isaiah, the Gospel of Matthew, the Epistles of Paul. Classical authors: Plato's Republic (selections); Virgil's Aeneid. Medieval writers: St. Augustine's Confessions and On Christian Doctrine; Aquinas' Summa Theologica; Dante's Inferno; Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Gentile Gods; Chaucer's "The Pardonner's Tale"; the Middle English "Pearl." And seclected early modern poets, including Spenser and Herbert. Visual arts will be studied through on-screen examples of medieval and renaissance illustrated manuscripts, sculpture, and painting. Throughout we will consider prominent contributions to the theory of allegory from various modern critics, including Auerbach, Gombrich, Benjamin, De Man, Jauss, and Tesky. The course will be taught in English with readings in English translation (and the original languages, depending upon ability). Professor
Jesse Gellrich Fall 2002 Courses
Professor Kate Jensen CPLT 7120 Texts: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism Professor Adelaide Russo CPLT 7140 Did the world change in 1969 with the installation of the first node of
ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet? Or was it Nixon’s decision in 1971
to take the US off the gold standard? The first MTV broadcast in 1981? Whatever
your favorite event, there’s a pervasive sense that the world is different
now than “before”; the cultural marker of our changed world is “postmodemism,”
while the political marker is “globalization” and the scientific marker is
“complexity.” Our year-long course will develop genealogies of postinodernity
in the relations among culture, political economy and science.
Readings for fall 2002: Hardt and Negri, Empire Frank, One Market Under God Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity Baudrillard, Simulations Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Debord, The Society of the Spectacle Professor John Protevi
Spring
2002 Courses Comparative
literature 7130 This course will offer a broad-ranging study of the relationship between ancient epic and a variety of cultural forms, including social structure, religion, and politics. We will read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony, Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses (selections). What elements of ancient epic are especially influential in shaping literary genres in the Western tradition? What makes an epic hero, and to what degree do writers after Homer reshape his model or react against it? Why is epic the dominant poetic form in the ancient world, and from where do challenges to its hegemony come? Are there mythical or ritual patterns that occur regularly in ancient epic, and if so, how should we understand them? Professor Michelle Gellrich
This course will be based on my book Phallophanies. published by the Editions du Regard (Paris, 2000). We will first look into the Pagan conceptions of sexuality. Against this backdrop, we will then assess the transformations of sexuality brought on by Christianity. Finally, we will examine the function of Christ's incarnation and its consequences on modern sexual life. The course will organized around a slide presentation. It will address topics situated between religion, theology, mythology, art history, literature and psychoanalysis. Alexandre Leupin Comparative
Literature 7120 Martin Heidegger is arguably the most influential and certainly one of the most controversial philosophers of the twentieth century. In the decades following the publication of his famous Being and Time, Heidegger's thinking began to revolve more and more around questions concerning poetry, art, and language - phenomena that he came to regard not as supplementary to but rather as bound up with the very foundations of human existence. In this course we will focus on those writings of the "later" Heidegger that most directly deal with issues in "poetics" (a term to be understood in a broad sense). This will also necessarily entail some attention to Heidegger's thinking on topics such as technology, politics, and the historicity of human communities- All readings will be in English translation. Professor Greg Stone
Course
Description: This course is an examination of the relationship between
painter, painting, and writing through its examination of fictional
tests (novels and short stories) which provide written portraits of
painters in the process of painting. Of utmost consideration will be
questions regarding the underlying nature of both writing and painting,
painter and writer, and their interrelationships when being presented
in a literary text as well as questions regarding portraiture (written
and painted) itself. Theoretical texts addressing aesthetic theories
in both painting and literature will help provide an analytical context
for aesthetic textual analysis.
CPLT 7020 The course will address the evolution of literary theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Topics discussed include phenomenology structuralism, post-structuralism, linguistics and pragmatics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, feminism, and cultural studies as approaches to literary theory. In the first part of the course students will examine a broad spectrum of critical texts. In the second half they will be required to confront their theoretical readings with practical analysis of various literary genres. Text: Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, Critical Theory since 1965 (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986) and additional photocopied selection of articles. Students will be required to write two theoretical analyses(one on prose and a second on poetry or theater) and give an oral presentation of one of the critics studied. If you wish to have more information contact Adelaide Russo at frrussunix1.sncc.lsu.edu or 578-6670.
Professor John Lowe CPLT 7130 This course will trace the origins of the picaresque in Classical literature (the Menaechmi, Metamorphoses), in Renaissance Italian literature (Decameron, La Mandragola), in the modern origin of the genre, Lazarillo de Tormes (and epigones), to Moll Flanders, the American version in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, in Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. The course will also analyze the picaresque in films: Buñuel’s Los olvidados, Midnight Cowboy, My Private Idaho, and other films, as well as the pictorial examples in the paintings of Veláquez and other painters. Professor Joseph V. Ricapito
Professor Kevin L. Cope CPLT 7140 Professor Jeff Humpries
Professor Greg Stone Comparative
Literature 7140-02
Topic
Outline of Course:
Readings:
These works will be discussed during weeks preceding the three paper deadlines. They are to be approached as "reading experiments" in finding interactions between the poetic and the scientific imaginations. Course Requirements:
CPLT
7140 The objectives of this course are: 1) to introduce students to Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism in literature, the plastic arts, and music; 2) to investigate the problematic nature of the concept of the avant-garde through the examination of its political, national, and philosophical implications by studying the principle works of literary theory which deal with this notion; 3) to examine the interrelatedness of the arts and the group dynamics of artistic movements, including treatment of the status of women, both as full participants, and collaborators in these groups, and as objects of reflection for the male members as expressed in the representation of women in their works; 4) to trace the notion to end of the century through an investigation of such movements as the New York School, Tel Quel, and the Situationists Required Readings: Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Movement: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" In Illuminations (New York: Schoken Books, 1973); Selections from Journals including Cabaret Voltaire, Dada, Transition, Lacerba, Literature, La Revolution Surrealiste, Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution, Documents, Minotaure and writers including Guillaume Apollinaire, Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Leonora Carrington, Jacques Lacan, Valentine de Saint-Point, Frank O'Hara, Guy Debord, Philippe Sellers, Julia Kristeva, David Shapiro Requirements: Students will be required to give an oral presentation which will be submitted as a short critical paper and a 15-20 page research paper devoted to a specific author, artist or movement. Any national literature or artistic movement may be examined. All readings will be in English. Students in Comparative Literature should demonstrate their ability to deal with texts of their choice in the original language. Any of the following are acceptable: French, Italian, German, Russian, Spanish. Adelaide Russo, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature CPLT7120 Alexandre Leupin Comparative
Literature 7010 This course aims to introduce graduate students to many of the fundamental works in the history of Western literary criticism. Texts will be selected from authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley. There will also be some consideration of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptural hermeneutics. Note: This course is officially listed as "Bibliography and Methods of Research." The course title is in the process of being changed. CPLT 7130 This course will discuss how the colonial heritage (Assimilation vs. Indirect rule) plays in the works major postcolonial African writers. Francophone and Anglophone sub-saharan historical and cultural issues will be presented as a background for the study of literary works by representative post-independence major authors. We will approach these texts through close readings while focusing on the cultural context and theoretical questions of post-colonial discourse. Fictional texts will be studied both as a product of society and as a picture of a specific universe considered in a historical, political and sociological context. Readings from: Sony Labou Tansi, V. Y. Mudimbe, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and others.Professor André Siamundele
Professor Greg Stone CPLT 7130 explore the implications of mimesis and the sublime on the notions of the objective, the subjective, and the absolute in aesthetic theory (“beauty is an aesthetic experience of truth,” for instance), and ultimately, confront the question of Representation as such and that of the legitimation of the aesthetic judgment. There will be no textbook, but readings from major theoreticians and contemporary critics will be provided. Students will write a paper or make an oral presentation based on their research. Professor Selma Zebouni CPLT 7020 This course will trace the origins of contemporary literary criticism and theory from the mid-19th century through the 1970s. Authors and topics to be treated will include: Saussure and structuralism; Russian formalism; Marx and materialism; Freud and psychoanalysis; Nietzsche and deconstruction; New Criticism; et al. Professor
Greg Stone
ITAL 7971 A close reading of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. Professor Greg Stone Spring 1999 Courses CPLT 7010 Students will practice diverse aspects of the methods of literary research and bibliography, including both traditional library and recent computer methods. Bibliographical emphasis will be on using the Internet as a tool for literary research.
Students will also become familiar with a variety of "intellectual methods"
(critical approaches). We will read articles of literary criticism that exemplify
various twentieth-century schools of thought (such as semiotics, Marxism,
psychoanalysis, deconstruction, new historicism, feminist criticism, cultural
studies, gender studies, ecocriticism, et al.). There will also be some discussion
of the present state of literary studies (and, in particular, of Comparative
Literature) within the university.
Requirements:
Each student will be assigned, through a random drawing, a well-known literary text that will function as the basis for his/her course work. Required work includes: 1) Three teaching sessions (25-30 minutes each). the students will "teach" his/her literary text to the class on three different occasions. On the first occasion, the text will be taught as if the audience were a class of undergraduates; on the second, as if the audience were a class of beginning graduates students; on the third, as if the audience were a class of advanced graduate students. [45% of final grade) 2) A gross bibliography. Students will compile a critical bibliography, as extensive as possible, on the assigned literary work. [20% of final grade] 3) An annotated bibliography. The student will select the ten most significant articles on the assigned literary text and prepare an annotated bibliography. In addition, the student will select the single best article, furnish copies of it to the rest of the class, and use it as the basis for the third of the abovementioned teaching sessions. [20% of final grade]
4) A book review. Students will write a review of a recently published book
treating the author of the assigned literary text. [15%of final grade)
Professor Greg Stone CPLT 7140 Word and Image: Translations of the Gaze Course objectives: To examine 1) the theoretical principles which govern the translation of a visual image into a verbal image - ekphrasis; 2) the evolution of practices of description and the status of the visual object which coincide with the emergence of avant-garde movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; 3) the specific works of writers and painters whose reciprocal inspiration or collaboration produced literary works or visual objects which are interrelated; 4) to investigate the complex relationship between gender and the gaze. The focus of our attention will be on the following writers and painters: John Keats, John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, Apel.les Fenosa, Salvador Espriu, Bernard NotI, Francis Ponge, Mark Strand, Claude Esteban, Edward Hopper, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Bona Tibertelli de Pisis, Andr~ Pieyre de Mandiargues, Lee Miller, Man Ray. Students should have a reading knowledge of French. Knowledge of the following languages would also be useful: German, Spanish, Catalan, Italian. All readings are available in English. Professor Adelaide Russo
CPLT 7140
Introduction to Psychoanalysis We will concentrate an a few texts by Freud and Lacan. Issues such as sexual difference, femininity, the relationship between Humanities and Science, the birth of culture will be tackled through a direct contact with the texts, in order to dispel misinformation and avoid derivative readings. A 15-20 page paper, first read and discussed in class, will show the student's ability to deal with psychoanalytical concepts. It will consist in a psychoanalytical reading of his/her favorite work(s). 1) The First Freud: a) The Interpretation of Dreams: the notion of the unconscious. drive and instinct, overdetermination and double inscription. b) Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex: normality and perversity, the infantilism of the unconscious. 2) The Second Freud: a) Totem and Taboo: the originary scene ("in the beginning was.. language"), the dead father. b) Beyond the Pleasure Principle ; The Ego and the Id: death "instinct" or death drive: beyond Freud's biologism. 3)Lacan: a) Generalities: return to Freud and displacement (from Unconscious, Superego, Ego to Real, Symbolic, Imaginary). Freud's errors. The conjunction of Saussure and Freud. b) Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire : writing the human structure. c) Seminar XI: beyond applied psychoanalysis: objects in the Humanities. Getting rid of the Freudian applications. The status of literary texts in Lacan. There is no metalanguage. d) Science and Truth: epistemological considerations. Lacan's original contribution to epistemology, the compatibility of Human and exact sciences. e) Seminar XVII: the four discourses (paranoia, neurosis, analysis, hysteria) f) Seminar XX: rereading femininity: the other sex; rereading religion: God as unconscious. There is no sexual ratio. Texts: 1) Freud, The Basic Freud (Modern Library); Beyond the Pleasure Principle ; The Ego and the Id 2) Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (Norton); "Science and Truth," Newsletter of the Freudian Field 3 (1-2), 1989
Professor Alexandre Leupin
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