University of Minnesota
Cultural Studies & Comparaive Literature
cscl@umn.edu
612-624-8099


Department Name's home page.

Home > Graduate Studies > Comparative Literature : Curriculum

Curriculum

Introduction

Our graduate program is flexible. Students are encouraged to define their own interests and, in consultation with the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) and their academic advisers, design programs suited to their particular needs. A core seminar series in the first year of residence, plus a course in pedagogy, constitute the only required courses. Courses appropriate to one's areas of interest are chosen from within the Program in Comparative Literature or from other departments or programs in the Graduate School.

The curriculum emphasizes small seminars and directed research. The first-year core seminar, CL 8001-8002, is a practicum aimed at the development of critical and analytical skills, in which current theoretical perspectives are introduced in conjunction with the study of specific and varied historic problems. The rest of the curriculum consists of highly topical seminars built around specific areas of current research and faculty expertise; the themes necessarily change regularly.

Graduate Courses

The Catalog of the Graduate School lists the graduate courses and seminars in the Program in Comparative Literature. However, since the specific themes of seminars change too frequently to appear in the Catalog, the actual courses offered from 2004 to 2007 are listed below, followed by selected descriptions and reading lists. These particular courses may not be offered again, but this selection will serve as a sample of the kinds of courses offered.

Comparative Literature Offerings, 2004-2007

Fall semester 2007

 5555 Introduction to Semiotics Mowitt
 5910 Transformations of the Fairy Tale Zipes
 8001 Basic Seminar I Mowitt
 8902 Methodologies Colloquium Staff
 8910 Lacan and Deleuze Casarino
 8910 Voice and Person in the 20th Century Pepper
 8910 Adorno Leppert

Spring semester 2007

5331 Discourse of the Novel Pepper
8002 Basic Seminar II Casarino
8901 Pedagogy Brown
8902 Methodologies Colloquium Staff
8910 Benjamin's Fallout Pepper
8910 Film Theory Kotz
8910 Traveling Concepts Aydemir

Fall semester 2006

 5555 Introduction to Semiotics Pepper
 5910 Theories of  the Other Ganguly
 5910 Meaning and Identity Sarles
 5910 Avant-Garde Cinema Bizri
 8001 Basic Seminar I Ganguly
 8910 The Stranger in Literature Brennan
 8910 Kant's Critique of Judgment Schulte-Sasse
 8910 Culture Industry and Children's Films Zipes

Spring semester 2006

 5555 Introduction to Semiotics Mowitt
 5910 Documentary Cinema Kotz
 8002 Basic Seminar II Pepper
 8901 Pedagogy Brown
 8910 Poets of Commodities Brennan
 8910 Containment and Freedom in the Baroque Spadaccini
 8910 Spinoza, Deleuze Casarino

Fall semester 2005

 5910 Satyajit Ray and Hans Christian Anderson Ganguly
 5910 The Brothers Grimm in Literature and Film Zipes
 8001 Basic Seminar I Mowitt
 8910 Adorno/Aesthetic Theory Leppert

Spring semester 2005

 5910 Pragmatism Sarles
 5910 (Post) Colonial Translation Tageldin
 5910 Arab Cinema Bizri
 8002 Basic Seminar II Casarino
 8901 Pedagogy Brown
 8910 Adorno Leppert

Fall semester 2004

5910 South Asian Women Writers Sawhney
8001 Basic Seminar I Brennan
8910 Theories of the Other Ganguly
8910 The Biopolitical Turn Casarino
8910 Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Schulte-Sasse
8910 The Neutral: Person and Voice in Theory and Fiction Pepper
8910 Spanish and Spanish-American Colonial Writing Spadaccini

CSDS 5555 "Introduction to Semiotics"

John Mowitt

In what sense does a word stand for a thought?  In what sense does a politician stand for his or her constituency?  How do we know what a weather vane is telling us?  In what sense do a photograph and a story stand for what they refer to differently?  In what sense are someone’s clothes “trying to say something”?  What does “stand for” stand for?  How might different answers to such questions transform the way we think about language, the world, ourselves?  These questions and the practices they refer to are among the many concerns of semiotics, the general science of signs (as it was once famously put).  In this course we will not seek to answer such questions directly, but we will study intently several key formulations concerning what is at stake—linguistically, philosophically, politically—in such questions.  More specifically, we will turn our attention to a number of figures who, over the course of roughly a century (beginning in the 1860s), have come to have an extraordinarily profound impact on how one thinks about the presence and function of signs in western culture.  Too often the writings of Peirce, Barthes, Derrida et al, are assimilated “second hand,” and rarely are their distinctive contributions to semiotics given the centrality they merit.  This course will create the context within which such shortcoming can be avoided, while at the same time clarifying how semiotics challenges the way text and context get opposed in so much contemporary scholarship in the humanities.

Readings have included:

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics.
Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.
Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits.
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology.

CL 5910 "Theories of the Other"

Keya Ganguly

This course presents an interdisciplinary exploration of alterity and representation. It addresses themes of otherness and difference in various disciplinary and representational discourses. Throughout the semester, the course will examine the strategies by which demarcations between notions of Self and Other and corollary distinctions between high/low, First World/Third World, and masculine/feminine, are deployed in various cultural texts. Readings will take up the question of how the Other is imagined and constituted by Western forms of knowledge production; and examine the possibilities of the Other's appropriative reformulations of dominant discourses. The texts and theories for the class derive from disparate locations such as literature, film, philosophy, anthropological theory, and cultural studies.

Readings have included:

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt.
Mircea Eliade, Bengal Nights.
Maitreyi Devi, It Does Not Die.

CSDS 8001 "Basic Seminar I"

John Mowitt

Conceived as having, at once, a pedagogical, sociological and intellectual function the Basic Seminar (hereafter BS) is intended to serve as the single most important venue for imparting a shared corpus of concepts, problematics and sense of intellectual engagement to the incoming graduate cohorts of CSDS and CL.  It expresses the departmental conviction that all of our students, regardless of their ultimate professional and intellectual goals, should be acquainted with some of the important concepts and theoretical positions that have constituted and continue to influence the diverse fields of inquiry active within CL and CSDS.  In this respect the BS attempts to forge a sense of intellectual community through introducing graduate students both to what we believe these disciplines expect them to know, and to what we hope graduate students will find intellectually valuable.

Thus, the content of the BS (in both fall and spring) is organized around figures and tendencies or positions deemed to reflect areas within which the most influential (even if suppressed) modes of inquiry have emerged.  Because the BS is understood to provide students with something of an intellectual foundation for their work in the department, said areas will be engaged through what are regarded as primary sources in the relevant theoretical traditions, even when these sources are clearly subsequent critical engagements with earlier texts.

Readings have included:

Francis Bacon, The New Organon.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
René Descartes, Discourse on Method.
Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1.
Ferdinand de Saussure, The Course in General Linguistics

CL 8002 "Basic Seminar II"

Cesare Casarino

The Basic Research Seminar is a one-year course designed as a broad introduction to a series of modern and contemporary theoretical concepts, problematics, and debates, which are foundational for the various disciplinary discourses of the human sciences as well as of the social sciences.  During the second semester, we will study excerpts from the works of thinkers such as Girogio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, René Descartes, Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Georg Lukács, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, as well as Baruch Spinoza.

Reading have included:

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
G.W.F.  Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History.
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel.

CSDS 8901 "Pedagogy"

Robin Brown

This is a workshop; it is not a content course.  So while from time to time we will have readings we'd recognize as more or less theoretical, and while we are engaging central questions of consciousness, cultural / institutional theory, the primary goals are practical.  One set of goals leads to the classroom, another to the eventual positions you'll secure at the end of your studies, allowing us to construct professional identities around pedagogy and its relationship to disciplinary content. 

Everyone will finish the quarter with coherent versions of one course (and another in outline), and five teaching 'units'  (coherent sections of your course, with relevant materials) for those courses.  We'll define our identities as teachers and how that teaching 'self' articulates with our (inter) disciplines, with the Department and with the University.  Particularly interesting for our Department is the triple-track Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature curriculum (including the Studies in Cinema and Mass Culture major embedded in it); how do the missions interact?  What theoretical and methodological assumptions 'travel' between them?  How do the discursive practices of each relate and differ?  We will all finish the semester confident about what to expect in a 1xxx classroom, and use that confidence as an anchor for the continuing process of articulating our professional identities.

An interesting, more theoretical goal is to define—collectively and individually—the relationship of 'pedagogy' to Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature as a political project.  When we base our work on critique, and wrestle with the role of the ' organic intellectual,' we need to be able to say why we're doing what we're doing in the classroom—what grounds our work?.  This is a question that engages theories of consciousness, opposition, materiality, identity, institutions, rhetoric and discourse.  I'll provide both photocopied articles and relevant bibliography for your interest, but please bear in mind that this is not a course in pedagogical theory. It's a site to produce ourselves and our materials as teachers.

So Pedagogy… moves between the practical (informed by our communal sense of what works) and the theoretical (explaining ourselves to ourselves).  We'll build our courses starting from the most abstract definition of the Department's mission and its relationship to the University, to the most concrete questions like 'how to set up a Web CT site.'  We'll work collectively, trying to start a conversation and a support network to carry through the next years.  We'll visit some classes and report on what we see.  We'll 'practice' teaching in the safety of our seminar setting.  We'll hear from teachers who've taught the 1xxx courses with success.  We'll try to figure out 'who's coming to Minnesota' in terms of student demographics, knowledge, discursive abilities and tastes.

Should be fun.

Readings have included:

Patrick Brantlinger, Who Killed Shakespeare?.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo. Literacy.
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress.

CL 8910 "Interculturalism, Theatricality, and Performance in (Post)modernity"

Maria Brewer

The seminar examines the background of and recent developments in contemporary theater and performance in France. Characterized by a turn to cultural and intercultural reference, this theater necessitates a reevaluation of models of theatricality and performance based on an avant-garde aesthetics. Intercultural theater is a dynamic and problematic space that seeks to invent links between diverse cultural traditions and the specific symbolic theatricalities that ground them. The intercultural recasting of, for instance, Greek tragedy, historical events, Shakespeare, and non-Western mythical and historical narratives will be viewed in the broader French social, political, and historical context of multiculturalism and immigration in which theater occurs.

We will read work on the theater by Antonin Artaud, Ariane Mnouchkine, Jean-François Lyotard, Peter Brook, and Eugenio Barba. Theorists on interculturalism and performance to be read will include Patrice Pavis, Bonnie Marranca, and Gautam Dasgupta.

Dramatic texts to be read and discussed will include works by Jean Genet and Hélène Cixous as well as selected plays by Fatima Gallaire, Denise Bonal, and Andrée Chedid. Stage productions by Ariane Mnouchkine (Les Atrides and L'Age d'or) and in Boal's "theater of the oppressed" will be discussed. Slides of stage productions will be used.

CL 8910 "Lacan, Deleuze"

Cesare Casarino

In one of the very rare attempts to articulate the complex relations between the thought of Jacques Lacan and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Daniel Smith relates what he calls a “revealing anecdote:”

In an interview in 1995, shortly before his death, Gilles Deleuze was asked by French scholar Didier Eribon about his relationship with Jacques Lacan. In response, Deleuze told the following story:

Lacan noticed me when he devoted a session of his seminar to my book on Sacher-Masoch [1967]. I was told—although I never knew anything more than this—that he had devoted more than an hour to my book. And then he came to a conference at Lyon, where I was then teaching. He gave an absolutely unbelievable lecture…. It was there that he uttered his famous formula, “Psychoanalysis can do everything except make an idiot seem intelligible.” After the conference, he came to our place for dinner. And since he went to bed very late, he stayed a long time. I remember: it was after midnight and he absolutely had to have a special whisky. It was truly a nightmare, that night.

My only great encounter with him was after the appearance of Anti-Oedipus [1972]. I’m sure he took it badly. He must have held it against us, Félix and me. But finally, a few months later, he summoned me—there’s no other word for it. He wanted to see me. And so I went. He made me wait in his antechamber. It was filled with people, I didn’t know if they were patients, admirers, journalists…. He made me wait a long time—a little too long, all the same—and then he finally received me. He roiled out a list of all his disciples, and said that they were all worthless [nuls] (the only person he said nothing about was Jacques-Alain Miller). It made me smile, because I recalled Binswanger telling the story of a similar scene: Freud saying bad things about Jones, Abraham, etc. And Binswanger was shrewd enough to assume that Freud would say the same thing about him when he wasn’t there. So Lacan was speaking, and everyone was condemned, except Miller. And then he said to me, “What I need is someone like you” [C’est quelqu’un comme vous qu’il me faut].

Whether this is an accurate recollection or it constitutes, rather, an elaborate fantasy on Deleuze’s part, or whether it is a bit of both (and even if it is merely Eribon’s own approximation or outright fabrication), it certainly belongs to the proverbial category of the too-good-to-be-true stories. That aside, what does this story reveal (or in what ways is it to be thought of as “revealing”)? Whatever else it might reveal, it reveals above all that there is much that still needs to be revealed, pondered, articulated, and elaborated further with respect to the relation between Lacan and Deleuze. For this story, after all, begs far more questions than it answers. For example: What resonances or dissonances with Deleuze’s own work made Lacan’s formulation that psychoanalysis “can do everything except make an idiot seem intelligible” so memorable for Deleuze? What exactly in Deleuze’s works might have prompted Lacan’s attempt to enlist Deleuze in the ranks of his—apparently unworthy—disciples? Was this a disingenuous attempt on Lacan’s part to co-opt and neutralize what he saw as a highly inimical and fatally threatening intellectual position or was it, rather, an attempt to extend, to modify, or to revitalize his own projects through what he understood to constitute a fundamentally complementary position? And what are we to make of Deleuze’s assumption that Lacan must have taken Anti-Oedipus “badly” and “must have held” this work “against” him given that the end of his own anecdote potentially contradicts such an assumption? And in assuming that Lacan had taken Anti-Oedipus “badly,” did Deleuze think that Lacan had understood or misunderstood that work? And might it be the case that Deleuze actually wanted Lacan to take Anti-Oedipus “badly” and that Lacan in effect disappointed his expectation or wish by asking him to build an alliance instead? And why does Deleuze describe this as a “great encounter?”

This course will attempt to think the missed, subterranean, and as yet unexplored encounters between Lacan and Deleuze by investigating the intersections, similarities, and differences between these two thinkers. In order not to prejudge such intersections, similarities, and differences, we will need to reconstruct them by engaging closely and critically with some of their most important works. For more than three decades, in fact, Lacanian and Deleuzian orthodoxies alike have contributed (conspired?) to produce an impoverishing stereotype according to which these thinkers’ projects are construed as mutually exclusive with and even inimical to one another. It is precisely this stereotype—which does not do justice to either of these thinkers—that this course wishes ultimately to address and to undermine. In particular, we will examine selections from Lacan’s second, third, and eleventh seminars, Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” and The Logic of Sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, works by Sigmund Freud, Lewis Carroll, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, as well as relevant secondary literature (Bruce Fink, Eugene Holland, Kiarina Kordela, Catherine Malabou, Antonio Quinet, Ellie Ragland, Daniel Smith, and Slavoj Zizek). In the end, what is at stake in this project is an assessment of the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Readings have included:

Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories.
Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
Gilles Deleuze, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.
Kiarina Kordela, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan.
Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences.