Topics vary each semester. Fall 2019: "When industry erupts in the sphere of art," Baudelaire famously wrote in 1859, "it becomes the latter's mortal enemy, and in the resulting confusion of functions none is well carried out...If photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art's activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether...Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty, which is handmaid of the arts and sciences." History has not been kind to this argument. First, Henry Fox Talbot and many of his contemporaries attributed the photographic image to nature, not industry, and the same is true of a number of contemporary artists. Second, by 1842--three years after the official invention of photography--photographers had already begun hand-coloring their daguerreotypes, and a century and a half later Richter started smearing and spattering paint onto small photographs, and exhibiting them along with his abstract and figurative paintings. By the mid-1850's, many artists were also painting from photographs, sometimes by projecting them onto their canvases, and treating these projections as preparatory drawings. They called the resulting images photo-paintings. And although it became increasingly "disreputable" to work in this way as the century progressed,

Topics vary from year to year.

An advanced seminar in anglophone African literature, possibly including a few works in translation.

The extent to which the narrative reflexes of the novel can accommodate and express the nature of human work are explored primarily in a study of two nineteenth-century writers. Eliot and Hardy. Reading for the course also includes novels and short stories of other nineteenth-century writers (Dickens, Zola, tolstoy, Stowe, Melville), and background reading on the social and philosophic theory of work.

A study of the tradition of "serio-comic" literature from ancient times to the present, focusing on works that combine ostensibly incompatible tones, genres, and themes to produce a particular sense of man in history. Readings include: the dialogues of Lucian, Petronius' SATYRICON, extracts from Rabelais and Boccaccio, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, extracts from Sterne, and Gogol's DEAD SOULS. Students will be expected to attend a series of undergraduate lectures on these works; an additional hour will be scheduled in which the history and theory of menippean satire will be discussed. Special attention is given to general problems of genre theory that are raised by works that seem to challenge generic norms.

Within the last ten or fifteen years, there has been a flowering of scholarship revealing the diversity of oral verbal art worldwide. The course surveys a selection of recent book-length studies of specific narrative and other verbal art traditions in their cultural contexts. We will move from North Africa through the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, the western Pacific, and native America, examining particular traditions and texts, the ways they intersect with their societies, and the ways different scholars have found to document and interpret them.

This course will provide an overview of major European thinkers in literary theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will pay particular attention to the following movements: Structuralism and Deconstruction (Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, Barthes, Derrida), Social Theory (Foucault, Ranciere), Psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Abraham and Torok), Schizoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari), Feminism and Queer Theory (Irigary, Kristeva, Sedgwick), Spatial Theory (Bachelard, DeCerteau, Lefebvre), and the Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer, Kracauer). Readings and discussion will be in English.

Does architectural theory define architectural practice? The present seminar will explore this question in a number of ways. It will look at prominent examples of contemporary architecture and their evaluation by prize committees and architectural critics; recent theoretical work and architectural manifestoes and the practice of architectural firms; and the writings and work by architect-critics such as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, and Peter Zumthor. In the course of our seminar, we will also reflect on the question whether architecture, a discipline that deals with an inhabitable environment, may differ in its relationship between theory and practice from other arts, such as painting or literature.

Theories and models of historical investigation. Analysis of historiographic writings and musicological works exemplifying particular approaches, such as transnational, environmental/landscape, gender/sexuality, critical race studies, performance studies, archives, and the digital humanities.

The specific topics of the seminar vary from semester to semester, depending on the instructor and his/her choice. Among the topics previously covered, and likely to be offered again, are the following: The Theatre of Jean Racine, Fiction of Mme de Lafayette, The Moralists (La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld, Perrault ), Realistic Novels (Sorel's Francion, Scarron's Le Roman Comique, Furetiere's Le Roman Bourgeois). Students Give oral and written reports, and write a term paper.