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Sample Recently Taught Graduate Courses

  • French

    • French 311: Aesthetic Trends in French Literature

      This course examines the new "malaise" or discontent of French culture and society during the nineties, in the context of the emergent paradigm of "global culture studies", brought abut by the new mode of production or economic globalization and the technological change of the so-called electronic "democracy". Among the various effects of such radical transformations, we will explore the pathologization of society and discourse, the new forms of depression and melancholia represented in different discursive and aesthetic modes. Starting with readings on mourning and melancholy by Freud, Lacan, and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, we will explore the ambiguous relationship between literary and aesthetic representations of depression and today's psychiatric and psychotherapeutic views on depression, as opposed to a new clinical model of melancholy that informs new "creative melancholy" in writings of the nineties. Moving from literary styles to symptoms, we will focus on the different treatment of depression in writings by philosophers (Clément Rosset, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva), sociologists (Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Ehrenbert) women writers (Christine Angot, Lydie Salvayre), young writers (Stéphane Zagdanski, Ilan Duran Cohen, Eric Faye, Mathieu Lindon), writers born or raised outside of France (Nina Bouraoui, Linda Lê, Mehdi Belhaj Belkacem), writers from the banlieues (Azouz Begag, Jean-Claude Izzo,) and controversial writers (Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq, etc.).

    • French 370: The Problem of Identity and the Promise of Science

      This seminar explores the ways in which literature in the second half of the 19th century conceived of and explored the problem of identity. In both prose and poetry, the Romantic notion of the fragmented or divided subject is further dissected with the tools offered by the new physiological psychology. At the same time that writers are looking to science (psychology, optics, theories of evolution), literary form is evolving in new directions. We will analyze the place of the Subject in Symbolism and Decadence, in texts by Huysmans (A Rebours) and Rodenbach (Bruges-la-morte) that are contemporary with the "scientization" of literature represented by Zola's La Bête humaine. Other writers studied in this course: Nerval, Gautier, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Maupassant.

  • Italian

    • Writing and Screening Historical Trauma: Representations of the Italian Risorgimento in Literature and Film

      At the center of the Italian "Imaginary" lies the Risorgimento, a defining moment in the history of Italy that marks the time when the fragmented Italian peninsula became a unified nation state in 1860. In the course of this seminar, we will explore cultural responses to Risorgimento in the work of selected novelists from the 19th century but we will also consider the resilience of Risorgimento in mid- and late-20th century narrative and cinematic practices amidst and despite declarations of post-nation(alism) such as Gentile's La grande Italia, Lepre's Italia addio?, Romano's Finis Italiae , and Rusconi's Se cessiamo di essere una nazione.

    • Umberto Eco and Culture(s): Reading, Narrating, Theorizing

      James Joyce to James Bond, Peanuts to Saint Thomas of Aquinas, 007 to Kant.......... Umberto Eco's encyclopedic thought and writing continue to disorient his readers. Through a rhizomatic exploration of the many fields of his inquiry ––including historical and contemporary aesthetics, semiotics and the philosophy of language, popular and postmodern narratives, cultural reading of the "Italian genius" and the "everyday life," this course will map Eco's complex work of reading, theorizing, and narrating cultur(es) from Opera aperta to La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana.

  • Spanish

    • Spanish 325: Cervantes

      Instructor: R.H. Chinchilla
      The Ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha will be the focus of this course. Critical readings will focus on central issues associated with the most important novel written in Spain in the Baroque period, including the problems of novelistic structure, linguistic approaches, heteroglossia in Cervantes, rhetorical approaches, folkloric approaches and historical context of the novel. We will concurrently read portions of the Entremeses, Novelas ejemplares, Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda and Galatea that will aid in elucidating our discussion of Cervantes’ art of the novel.

      Text: Miguel de Cervantes. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Luis Andrés Murillo, ed. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1978

    • Spanish 335: Latin American Drama

      Instructor: L. Seda
      This course will deal with the development of Latin American Drama through the 20th Century. Some authors to be included are Roberto Arlt, José Triana, René Marqués, Griselda Gambaro, Jorge Díaz and Sabina Berman, among others.