[CW-Grad] FW: 12F Comp Lit course: Theme: Sovereignty, Comparativism, Critique

[Bryan G Bradford]

MFA's -

Professor Winer passes along this Comp Lit course that may be of interest to you this fall.
CPLT 212 - Introduction to Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature
Theme: Sovereignty, Comparativism, Critique

Professor Jeffrey Sacks

Thursdays, 4:10-7:00pm, SPR 2212



During the week of October 18-21, 1966 a conference entitled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" was held at the Johns Hopkins University. This conference heralded a shift in work in the humanities in the American University, advancing an institutional frame for literature studies in relation to what was to become literary theory, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and more. But what are the terms of criticism, in the wake of this event, thought in the broadest possible sense, today? In the fallout of 9/11, the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, and the attendant resurgence of Cold War and Area Studies models of scholarship, and with the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and diverse forms of resistance and collective protest world-wide, our seminar will ask: What are the stakes of comparative writing and scholarship-and Comparative Literature-in the humanities in the university institution today?

Our seminar will address these questions-we will seek to translate, reword, rework, and reinvent them-through a series of readings around comparativism. In doing so we will ask: What are the historical, linguistic, and institutional legacies of comparison? What is its relation to philology, Orientalism, the Higher Criticism, Jena Romanticism, Enlightenment, and colonialism? What are the relations between colonialism and the massively unequal power relations it implies and proliferates, on the one hand, and acts of comparison-literary and others? How does a reflection on comparison in this sense imply a reflection on sovereignty in relation to scholarship and academic writing? What is the relation between sovereignty, on the one hand, and mourning, loss, history, and time? If the present places comparison in crisis-if the terms of comparison have been lost, and if everywhere the task at hand seems to be to gain or regain them, in a context of massive social strife and asymmetrically imposed unfreedom-how may comparison be thought anew? If comparison no longer relies upon a set of terms, if it must be something like a practice or even a mode of being-something that does not designate an object it presupposes in advance, but that articulates itself through its relation to that "object" and its persisting loss, each time anew-how may one speak, and in what language, of what we wish to solicit in this seminar: futures of comparison?


Readings to include selected work by Erich Auerbach, Edward W. Said, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler, Avital Ronell, Wendy Brown, Werner Hamacher, Marc Redfield, Kevin Newmark, Immanuel Kant, Theodor Adorno, Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi, Talal Asad, Mark C. Taylor, Gil Anidjar, Johannes Fabian, Reinhart Koselleck, David Scott, Emily Apter, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michel Foucault, Djelal Kadir, Natalie Melas, Elizabeth Povinelli, Robyn Wiegman, Timothy Mitchell, Kathleen Davis, David L. Eng, David Kazanjian, Marc Nichanian, David Lloyd, Heather Love, and Elissa Marder.


--
Jeff Sacks
Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Literature
UC Riverside

http://complitforlang.ucr.edu/people/faculty/bio.html?page=sacks.html
http://www.archipelagobooks.org/bk.php?id=17
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/cwgrad-announcements/attachments/20120823/3c234144/attachment.html