INTRO TO ICLS

Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics may include: oral, print, and visual culture; epic, novel, and nation; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; sex and gender transformation; the human/inhuman; writing trauma; urban imaginaries; world literature; medical humanities. Open only to students intending to declare a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medicine, Literature, and Society in Spring 2015.

• T 10 a.m.-11:50 a.m.
• Instructor: Nanor Kebranian
  Info
• 3 points

LIT, MEDICINE & TECHNOLOGY

Contemporary biomedical technologies have delivered an unprecedented ability to refashion our bodies and by extension the social institutions in which bodies circulate and become meaningful. But these technologies have also wrought unexpected changes in social and cultural institutions like the family and the novel. And the novel has always responded to technological change in its preoccupation with revolutions, industrial and digital, while also becoming an object of those changes as the printing press gives way to digital ways of reading, producing and structuring texts. Technology has broadened medicine's involvement in everyday life and new literary genres like the neuro-novel and the illness memoir have risen in response. By reading technological change in terms of health and illness, family structures and literary innovation, we will engage with the medical, cultural and representational meanings developed by many of these new technologies. Readings will include but not be limited to novels and memoirs by Shelley Jackson, Lucy Grealy, Maggie Nelson, Kazuo Ishiguro and Tom McCarthy.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rishi K Goyal
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS IN COMP LIT/SOC

Students who decide to write a senior thesis should enroll in this tutorial. They should also identify, during the fall semester, a member of the faculty in a relevant department who will be willing to supervise their work and who is responsible for assigning the final grade. The thesis is a rigorous research work of approximately 40 pages (including a bibliography formatted in MLA style). It may be written in English or in another language relevant to the student's scholarly interests. The thesis should be turned in on the announced due date as hard copy to the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

• Instructor: Madeleine Dobie
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 3 points

DIASPORA, EXILE & DISPLACEMENT

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Anna Fishzon
  Info
• 4 points

BASIC CONCEPTS-POST-FREUD THGT

This course examines psychoanalytic movements that are viewed either as post-Freudian in theory or as emerging after Freud's time. The course begins by considering the ways Freud's cultural and historical surround, as well as the wartime diaspora of the European psychoanalytic community, shaped Freudian and post-Freudian thought. It then focuses on significant schools and theories of psychoanalysis that were developed from the mid 20th century to the present. Through readings of key texts and selected case studies, it explores theorists' challenges to classical thought and technique, and their reconfigurations, modernizations, and total rejections of central Freudian ideas. The course concludes by looking at contemporary theorists' moves to integrate notions of culture, concepts of trauma, and findings from neuroscience and attachment research into the psychoanalytic frame.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• None None-None
• Instructor: Karen Seeley
  CULPA: 9 Info
• 4 points

LAPLANCHE

An introduction to the work of Laplanche. The emphasis will be on his recent work which is the culmination of this theorizing and is accessible even to those unfamiliar with French psychoanalysis. By the end of the course students will be thoroughly familiar with Laplanche's central concepts, their origins in Freud and in Laplanche's own development, and their relation to other psychoanalytic theorizing on the same topics. The central themes include "the Generalized Theory of Seduction", "the Fundamental Anthropological Situation", and "the Translational Model of Repression". Some familiarity with Freud work, not merely secondary sources, is expected and re-reading certain of his texts will be helpful or even necessary during the course. Some familiarity with Freud is expected and reading or re-reading the works of Freud which Laplanche addresses will be helpful although perhaps not essential.

• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Jonathan House
  Info
• 4 points

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ETHICS

In recent years there has been a growing impatience with the sort of formalistic morality one finds in Immanuel Kant and John Rawls. As a result, we have witnessed an attempt to formulate a thicker and more robust conception of ethics in a number of fields, including philosophy, critical theory and feminism. The developments in psychoanalysis over the last half a century that we will examine in this class can make a major contribution to this new ethical discourse. Because of his pessimistic anthropology and critique of civilization, Freud's ethics might be seen as "Protestant," in that they centered on repression and renunciation. The developments that have occurred in the field since his death, however, which have centered on pre-Oedipal development, provide abundant material for envisioning a less gloomy and more positive vision of a "fulfilled" life. In this class we will attempt to integrate those findings with developments in other fields in order to explore the contributions psychoanalysis can make to the current discussion of ethics.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Joel Whitebook
  Info
• 4 points

THE POETICS OF PERFORMATIVITY

Mini-seminar April 4 - April 20, 2016
Which is the relationship in between the environmental, material conditions such as territory and weather, and a subject's performativity? Is it possible to detect this relationship through interpretation of examples driven from ancient and/or modern poetic texts? This course will examine the way certain subjectivities are portrayed performing embedded within an environment, detecting these paradeigmatic situations inside poetic texts. Usually architectural design is taking subject's performativity and corporeality as granted. The aim of the course would be to tackle this assumption by the research and analysis of poetic texts. We will investigate specific cases of what Gilles Deleuze would have called heccéités, unique polymorphic moments collecting together the embodied performing subject and its unique surrounding conditions. Through our readings we will reconstruct certain examples of embodiment for the poet during performance/or composition and we will use them to think about performativity and the material world. Are there any kinds of spatial or weather situations and corporealities related to them that can stand as metonymies for the poetic performance? How is memory linked to the state of mind connected to these corporealities? Can we track inside texts performative ways of becoming-Other? Ancient greek poetry provides us with certain poetic performance prototypes that are carried on later epochs such as the walker/passer-by (traveler, shepherd or wanderer) and the poet-animal (cicada, nightingale). We will explore how poetics link the performativity to the materiality of weather conditions, territoriality, and locality in order to enrich our way of understanding design. The material will be approached bias various contemporary hermeneutic tools mainly anthropology and philosophy but also biology. Students will be invited to approach these issues through the study of bibliography and the exploration of specific case-studies that they will select from the corpus of ancient or modern poetry and architecture. The course is open to undergraduate and graduate students.

• MWMWMW 6:10 p.m.-8:40 p.m.
• 1.5 points

INTRO TO COMP LIT & SOC-GRAD

INTRO TO COMP LIT & SOCIETY

This course introduces beginning graduate students to the changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, paying special attention to the range of interdisciplinary methods in comparative scholarship. Students are expected to have preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Our objective is to broaden the theoretical foundation of comparative studies to negotiate a conversation between literary studies and social sciences. Weekly readings are devoted to intellectual inquiries that demonstrate strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from a multiplicity of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, architecture, political theory, philosophy, art history, and media studies. Whenever possible, we will invite faculty from the above disciplines and fields to visit our class and share their perspectives on assigned readings. Students are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities and explore fields and disciplines outside their primary focus of study and specific discipline.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Madeleine Dobie
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 4 points

COMP DIASPORAS & TRANSLATION

A seminar on the theory and practice of translation from the perspective of comparative diaspora studies, drawing on the key scholarship on diaspora that has emerged over the past two decades focusing on the central issue of language in relation to migration, uprooting, and imagined community. Rather than foregrounding a single case study, the syllabus is organized around the proposition that any consideration of diaspora requires a consideration of comparative and overlapping diasporas, and as a consequence a confrontation with multilingualism, creolization and the problem of translation. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to a practicum, in which we will conduct an intensive workshop around the translation projects of the student participants.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• 3 points

READING MARX

PLEASE NOTE: Admission to this course is limited, and an interview is required. 15-20 minute interviews will be held in late November through late December. Please contact Kristen Reichardt at ker2152@columbia.edu to arrange an interview time slot. ICLS students must show acquaintance with German and French texts. A knowledge of German is strongly preferable. Students will be interviewed.
Some important texts by Marx will be carefully read with special emphasis on problems of translation. We will refer briefly to texts of Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Western Marxism, Marxist-Feminism, Black Marxism, and the contemporary turn.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Gayatri C Spivak
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

NOMADIC POSTHUMAN SUBJECTS

Time: MW 11:00am-12:55pm MINI-SEMINAR 2/15/16 – 3/9/16
The course focuses on contemporary formations of critical and feminist issues that start from issues of non-unitary subjectivity and open up to questions related to technological mediation, economic globalization, contemporary security concerns and the cognitive character of advanced capitalism. Questions of "nomadic" mobility are more relevant than ever in the context of advanced capitalism. This means that the role of non-human actors is central to the political economy of critical discourses in the global arena. Global mobility, and the re-definition of human/non-human interaction however, does not automatically resolve power differences and other forms of structural inequality and in many ways even intensifies them. The "posthuman" predicament, far from being post-ideological, calls for an urgent redefinition of political and ethical agency. The course aim at raising critical perspectives to come to terms with the complexity of these conceptual and methodological challenges.

• MW 11 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Rosi Braidotti
  Wikipedia Info
• 1.5 points

FR THE INQUISITN TO GUANTANAMO

The use of torture to extract confessions and obtain information has formed an integral part of legal and political practice throughout history, from the inquiry that Oedipus conducted in Oedipus Rex to the CIA interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. At times, these practices have been strictly regulated according to legal manuals detailing the precise forms of torture that could be applied to a suspect; at others they have been strictly prohibited by human rights conventions and used nonetheless. During several historical periods, these practices comprised a specific juridical form of the "inquest"; at other times, similar kinds of practices (e.g. the threat of death) have been permitted under adversarial legal methods. This seminar will explore torture and confession from an eminently theoretical perspective. What we are proposing here is not to explain a certain history, and even less to explain torture or confession. We want to think critically on the ever-changing apparatuses, systems, tactics, devices, justifications, and strategies that make possible the presence of torture and the adequacy of confession in the name of certain transcendent goals (i.e. the integrity of the ecclesia christiana, universal western peace, the state, one nation under god, blood, lineage, security, etc.). As we will explore in this seminar, torture and confession-tortured confessions-are in a permanent regime of exhibition that at the same time aestheticizes the ultimate purpose of this kind of violence and anesthetizes the audience-in what has often amounted to, over the ages, a particularly perverse form of catharsis. The seminar will explore how efforts, over the centuries, to tame these perverse practices-through manuals, prohibitions, instructions, directions, exhibitions, legal opinions, justification, and denunciation-have shaped us, as subjects, and society more broadly.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• 3 points