Fall 2012

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Catalog #TitleSectionCourse #DayTimeLocationInstructorLimitSame As
COML 5051Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School*00117819Th3:30-6:00MUEN E432Henry Pickford6GRMN 4051/5051
COML 5370Modern Poetry: Elegy and Exile CANCELLED00129775David Ferris
COML 5610Intro to Literary Theory*00121533W3:00-5:30KTCH 231Paul Gordon12
COML 5830Enlightenment Aesthetics00129776T2:00-4:30KTCH 231Chris Braider12
COML 604020th Century Spanish American Literature: Travel Literature*00114291TTH3:30-4:45HUMN 1B70Leila Gomez4SPAN 4220
COML 6040Introduction to the Academic Study of Religion*00229762Th3:30-6:00HUMN 270Ruth Mas4RLST 6830-
(13085)
* Enrollment in asterisked courses is restricted to CLGP students until
April 21.
COML 6950Master's Thesis90013132-
COML 6950Master's Thesis90113133D. Ferris
COML 6950Master's Thesis90213134P. Greaney
COML 6950Master's Thesis90313135D. Stimilli
COML 6950Master's Thesis90413136M. Leiderman
COML 6950Master's Thesis90513137P. Kroll
COML 6950Master's Thesis90613138C. Braider
COML 6950Master's Thesis90729763L. Gomez
COML 6950Master's Thesis90829764R. Mas
COML 6950Master's Thesis90929765K. Jacobs
COML 6950Master's Thesis91029766R. Salys
COML 6950Master's Thesis91129767E. White
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90012910-
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90112911D. Ferris
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90213117J. Heydt-Stevenson
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90313118E. White
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90413119M. Leiderman
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90513120V. Ferme
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90613121J. Green
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90713122B. Weber
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90813123L. Osterman
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation90913124P. Gordon
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation91013125J.E. Rivers
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation91113126W. Motte
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation91213127C. Braider
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation91313128P. Greaney
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation91413129K. Jacobs
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation91513130H. Muller-Sievers
COML 8990Doctoral Dissertation91613131P. Kroll

COML 5051     The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School
Henry Pickford

This course serves as an introduction to the “Frankfurt School” and Critical Theory with particular emphasis upon rationality, social psychology, cultural criticism, and aesthetics. Through close readings of key texts by members of the school (Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas) we will work toward a critical understanding of the analytical tools they developed and consider their validity. Taught in English. Same as GRMN 4051 and GRMN 5051.

COML 5370     Modern Poetry: Elegy and Exile  – THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN CANCELLED
David Ferris

CANCELLED

COML 5610     Introduction to Literary Theory
Paul Gordon

In this class we will take the two terms of “literary” and “theory” as a form of doubling which both establishes and denies its own identity.  To accomplish this we will conjoin literary texts with certain theoretical correlates throughout the course:

Aristotle’s Poetics / Sophocles’ Oedipus the King

Brooks’ The Language of Paradox / Donne’s Canonization and other poems

William Empson 7 Types of Ambiguity / Yeats’ two Fergus poems

Levi-Strauss(R.Jakobson) “The Cats,” “The Structural Study of Myth” / Baudelaire and Sophocles

James’ The Figure in the Carpet / Iser, Todorov

Goethe’s Elective Affinities / Benjamin (et al.)

Derrida, Heidegger, Shapiro / van Gogh

Freud, On the Uncanny / E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman

Agamben, The Coming Community / Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies / Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor

Blanchot, From Kafka to Kafka / Kafka’s Parables

Mulvey, Modleski / Hitchcock’s Vertigo

Poe, The Purloined Letter / Lacan

Foucault / Magritte

In addition to the final, 20 pp. seminar paper,each student will be responsible for a class presentation on one of the above couplings.

COML 5830 Enlightenment Aesthetics
Christopher Braider

A central paradox of the so-called period of Enlightenment of the Western European eighteenth century is the persistence of the Renaissance standard of the Idea in a culture whose most advanced moral, historical, aesthetic, and epistemological postulates assert the primacy of empirical experience and the reductive sense of “nature” this assertion implies.  Enlightenment thought, art, literature, and historiography are characterized by what looks at first glance like a thorough-going repudiation of the idealisms of the Renaissance and baroque.  Where their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forebears remain often problematically but nonetheless consistently loyal to values and virtues grounded in the traditional metaphysics of Christian and/or neo-Platonic transcendence, eighteenth-century novelists, historians, painters, and philosophers embrace a metaphysics of immanence and the naturalistic, skeptical, and ironic habits of expression and thought immanence dictates. Yet not only did these new habits fail to eliminate the ideals they did so much to discredit; they regularly place themselves in their service, as moral, stylistic, and ontological boundary conditions designed to ensure an authentic, irreducibly non-contingent exhibition of the transcendence they show to be impossible.  Thus the primacy of natural experience as an at once causal, historical, and behavioral test does not preclude but rather reframes the exhibition of “la belle nature” inherited from the Renaissance and baroque aesthetics of ut pictura poesis.  Similarly, the experimental insistence on the supremacy of the body over the mind, and the related conception of the body itself as a material machine entirely accounted for by naturalistic means, do not eliminate but rather give fresh moral and aesthetic emphasis to the self-directed behavioral dressage by which the human animal turns itself into a self-fashioning rational person.

The course explores a variety of ways in which period writers, thinkers, and artists attempted to negociate, mediate, and resolve these contradictions, with special emphasis on the central role play by the doctrine of the Aesthetic and its presumptive experimental organ, the faculty of Taste.  In addition to reviewing developments in visual art, and in particular in landscape design and in the paintings of Watteau, Fragonard, Chardin, Vernet, Greuze, Constable, Reynolds, and Hogarth, students will undertake readings in the work of the Britons, Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, Burke, and Hume, the Germans Winckelmann, Lessing, and Kant, and their French contemporaries, Batteux, Caylus, Diderot, and Rousseau.  Representative themes will be eighteenth-century doctrines of the beautiful and the sublime, the pictorial dialectics of “theatricality and absorption” and their role in the development of notions of moral “feeling” in visual art, the emergence of the theory of “imagination” as a means of mediating between moral and natural modes of experience, and the invention of the faculty of “moral taste” in both conjunction with and deviation from the definition of “standards” of critical taste.

COML 6040     20th Century Spanish American Literature: Modern Empires and Travel Literature in Latin America
Leila Gomez

This course will focus on the study of travelers to Latin America and from Latin America to Europe, U. S. and Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore the configuration of transnational identities in a dialogue with foreign societies, and we will analyze the political tensions and intellectual exchange in travel literature. Theoretical concepts such as informal empire, contact zone, heterogeneous literatures will be discussed and used to question the texts we will read.  This course will be taught in Spanish.  Same as SPAN 4220.

COML 6040     Introduction to the Academic Study of Religion
Ruth Mas

Introduction to the graduate academic study of religion through the exploration of contemporary models and issues that demonstrate the theoretical and methodological nature and future of the field. Same as RLST 6830.
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