Spring 2012

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COML 5000-3      Proseminar
Christopher Braider
What is Comparative Literature? This introductory course will offer the chance to investigate what constitutes this field and practice what it means to participate in it. We will trace the history of the discipline and explore traditional as well as recent areas of research, such as interdisciplinarity and global, feminist, and multicultural comparativism, as we investigate how to more fluently cross the boundaries of disciplines and national literatures. The course will be organized loosely into four units: What was and is the field; Interdisciplinarity; Comparison and Difference; and Translation. Among others, we will look at readings by Bernheimer, Culler, Damrosch, Gasché, Higonnet, Pratt, Nancy, Saussy, and Spivak. We will also read essays by Montaigne to explore cultural difference; and juxtapose various texts: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza or Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color to investigate translation and the co-presence of different languages and cultures; Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Hugo’s Bug Jargal to analyze gendered and national understandings of colonial history; and an interdisciplinary unit on de Staël’s Corrine and one of the most famous museum rooms in Europe, the Tribuna in the Uffizi, in order to ask questions about the nature of collections, for example, the relationship of variety and unruliness to the question of diversity as communities of objects are formed.

COML 5830-3      Literature and its Environment
Helmut Muller-Sievers
The concept of “environment” as we understand it today – a finite yet infinitely diverse space governed by irreversible natural laws – is of relatively recent vintage; its first legal and metaphysical conception was introduced in the late 18^th century while its scientific formulation came with the second law of thermodynamics in the 1850s and Darwin’s concept of evolution shortly thereafter. Concurrently with these developments, European and North American authors began to explore new ways of configuring narrative space. The potentially unbounded space of the picaresque novel gave way to the Romantic idea of a nature infused with traces of the imagination, and ends up as the bounded, fully articulated social and natural environment of the realist novel.  In this course we will try to reconstruct the genealogy of the concept of environment by reading texts from Immanuel Kant, Schelling, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Thoreau, as well as narratives from Goethe, Novalis, Eichendorff, Stendhal, Balzac, and Dickens. Same as GRMN 5310-001.

COML 5830-3      Forming the Secular
Ruth Mas
This course examines how the enlightenment notion of critique has played a central role in the formation of the secular as modernity’s response to religious experience.  We will examine how critique has developed in modernity as the result of questions and issues that remain unresolved within the Enlightenment and the concepts of rationality, subjectivity, and history through which it articulated the secular in opposition to religion.  We will focus, in particular, on the issue of crisis within secular thought as the site where historical and discursive questions are posed about the legitimacy of the secular.  This will then lead us to the position of rethinking the division between religion and the secular and the concept of critique on which that division is founded.  These questions will be examined in the light of work by Kosseleck, Benjamin, Foucault, Gasché, Butler, and Asad.  Same as RLST 5820-001.

COML 6040-3      The Poetics of the Essay in Modern Spain
Javier Krauel
In 1924, literary critic Eduardo Gómez de Baquero affirmed that the essay was the central, defining genre of contemporary Spanish letters.  According to Gómez de Baquero, three developments explain the essay’s success in the early twentieth century: the growth of the periodical press, the formation of an intellectual middle class, and the creation of a reformist civic atmosphere in the aftermath of 1898.  Taking these developments as its starting point, this seminar seeks to both familiarize students with the conventions of the essay as a genre and to perform an in-depth examination of some of the major essays published during what has come to be known as the Silver Age of Spanish letters.  We will read some of the landmarks in the history and theory of the essay (Lukács and Adorno, but also Montaigne) as well as major works in the Spanish tradition (Unamuno, Ortega, d’Ors, Pérez de Ayala, Zambrano).  In order to better evaluate the achievements of Spanish essayists, we might also consider the work of contemporary essayists from other European traditions (Valéry, Woolf, Orwell).  Same as SPAN 5220/7220-001.

COML 6040-3      Against the Boom: Reading Latin American Literature in the U.S.
Leila Gomez
This seminar will be devoted to studying the complex relationship between the U.S. and Latin America, specifically by examining the process by which Latin American writers become best-selling authors in the United States. Central questions will be: How do market-based factors operate alongside literary and ideological factors? To what extent is there cross-over between best-sellers and the literary canon? To answer these and other questions, our main focus will be U.S. readings of Latin American texts and writers. Primitivism, Magical Realism, youth rebellion, archaism, eroticism and travel literature are the most widespread topics and genres through which Latin America is imagined or exoticized internationally. In order to understand these readings, it is necessary to be aware of Latin American writers’ and intellectuals’ reactions and responses to such common images. By looking at these “contact zones”, we will situate each writer within the historical and economic setting of U.S.-Latin American relations, avoiding generalizations, while still tracing recurring trends. Our examination will begin by uncovering the 19th-century roots of U.S. Hispanism at Harvard, with the famous History of the Conquest of Mexico, by William Prescott. However, we will mainly focus on the most prominent Latin American authors in the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries. Of course, the issues of translation of Latin American texts, as well as market distribution and reproduction will also be debated in the course of the seminar.   Same as SPAN 5320/7320-001.

William Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) (and selections from History of the Conquest of Peru, 1847)
Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (1949)
Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph (1949)
Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (1950), México y Estados Unidos y otros ensayos
Miguel Ángel Asturias, Leyendas de Guatemala (1970)
Rosario Castellanos, El uso de la palabra (1974)
Juan José Saer, El entenado (1983)
Gabriel García Márquez, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985)
Rosario Ferré, Maldito amor (1989)
Roberto Bolaño, Nocturno de Chile (1999)
Mario Vargas Llosa, La fiesta del chivo (2000)
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
Mabel Moraña, editor, Ideologies of Hispanism (2005)

GRMN 5030-3      Foundations of Critical Theory: Kant, Hegel, & Marx
Chad Kautzer, CU Denver
In this course we take up the philosophical systems of 18th and 19th century Europe that came to be foundational for contemporary critical theory. We begin with Kant’s critical philosophy, focusing on his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which inaugurated what we now call German idealism. We then turn to the culmination of this school of thought in Hegel’s so-called “absolute” idealism, which sought to incorporate all of nature and human experience into a dynamic, yet unified, philosophical system. We focus primarily on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), investigating Hegel’s claim that the path to true philosophy is a “path of despair,” which, as it happens, leads through his own thought. The last part of the seminar engages the work of Karl Marx, which represents the most influential critical response to Hegel’s idealism. While Marx goes to great lengths to distance his “materialism” from Hegel’s idealism, we’ll find that the similarities are greater than their differences.  CLGP students may count this course toward their Comparative Literature coursework.