CPLT 5004a, Proseminar in Translation Studies  Jane Tylus and Robyn Creswell

This graduate proseminar combines a historically minded introduction to Translation Studies as a field with a survey of its interdisciplinary possibilities. The proseminar is composed of several units (Histories of Translation; Geographies of Translation; Scandals of Translation), each with a different approach or set of concerns, affording the students multiple points of entry to the field. The Translation Studies coordinator provides the intellectual through-line from week to week, while incorporating a number of guest lectures by Yale faculty and other invited speakers to expose students to current research and practice in different disciplines. The capstone project is a conference paper-length contribution of original academic research. Additional assignments throughout the term include active participation in and contributions to intellectual programming in the Translation Initiative.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 5070a / ER&M 6547a / SPAN 7705a, Carceral Disability Studies: The Case of the Philippines  Aurelie Vialette

This seminar examines the racial, ethical, political, environmental, and social implications of the penal colonization process in the Philippines through the lens of disability studies. Carceral disability studies is in great need of exploration and that is the aim of this seminar. We analyze archival documents (manuscripts) from the Philippines and engage with theoretical and historical texts on disability, prison labor, racial capitalism, ecocriticism, Indigenous studies, carceral studies, gender studies, and law and the humanities. Overseas incarceration was a method employed by empires to dispose of criminals, the poor, sex workers, and vagrants. In the Philippines (a Spanish colony until 1898), the dispossession of indigenous people of their land and the implication of intensive farming were also consequences of the colonial project. We see that labor and procreation were crucial to using prisoners to build the colonial structure and strengthen the Spanish presence in the archipelago. We discover the centrality of this transnational and transhistorical approach to understanding the contemporary treatment of imprisoned people and the centrality of disability studies to understand mass incarceration today. Course in Spanish or English depending on the students enrolled. Spanish reading knowledge is mandatory.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 5100a / GMAN 5110a / PHIL 5100, The Mortality of the Soul: From Aristotle to Bernard Williams  Martin Hagglund

This course explores fundamental philosophical questions of the relation between matter and form, life and spirit, necessity and freedom, by proceeding from Aristotle’s analysis of the soul in De Anima and his notion of practical agency in the Nicomachean Ethics. We study Aristotle in conjunction with seminal works by contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers (Korsgaard, Nussbaum, Brague, and McDowell). We in turn pursue the implications of Aristotle’s notion of life by engaging with contemporary philosophical discussions of death that take their point of departure in Epicurus (Nagel, Williams, Scheffler). We conclude by analyzing Heidegger’s notion of constitutive mortality, in order to make explicit what is implicit in the form of the soul in Aristotle.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 5480a / GMAN 5480a / HSAR 6580a, Art/Work: On Aesthetics and Labor  Kirk Wetters

Since the 1980s, so-called “postfordistic forms of labor” have increasingly replaced the production processes of industrial good manufacturing in modern information societies and service economies. These new forms of work bear a remarkable resemblance to the ways the artist and artistic processes have been understood in aesthetic discourses since the end of the eighteenth century. The course explores this relation between art and labor from two different angles. (1) It gives an historic overview over the development from ancient concepts of leisure and contemplation to a modern understanding of work as anthropologically crucial and the role art and aesthetic concepts did play in it. (2) It discusses contemporary literature and theories on “new capitalism”, forms of subjectification, and discourses of creativity with regard to their connection to aesthetics around 1800, while also addressing the question of how this development is currently being decisively changed once again by AI.
TTh 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 5530a / ANTH 5852a / GMAN 5530a / SOCY 7610a, Karl Marx's Capital  Paul North

A careful reading of Karl Marx's classic critique of capitalism, Capital volume 1, a work of philosophy, political economy, and critical social theory that has had a significant global readership for over 150 years. Selected readings also from Capital volumes 2 and 3.
TTh 9:25am-10:15am

CPLT 5970a / ENGL 6768a / HSAR 6768a, The Birth of Aesthetics  Jonathan Kramnick

This is a course on the emergence of aesthetic theory in Enlightenment and Romantic era Europe. We'll examine how a new language of art and nature focused on the experience of the beholder and track evolving categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque in key texts of philosophy and literature. We'll connect ideas of aesthetic judgment and autonomy to central institutions and ideologies of the modern era, including the public sphere, secularism, the private subject, racial capitalism, and the market. Readings begin with empirical philosophies of perception and early accounts of the aesthetic in Locke, Addison, Hutcheson, Pope, Hume, and Burke and continue through the watershed moment of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kant, and Schiller. The seminar ends with a consideration of aesthetic theory in the long contemporary period of Adorno, Scarry, Rancière, and Ngai. Previously ENGL 768.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 6046a / EMST 5460a / ENGL 5746a / GMAN 6046a, Rise of the European Novel  Katie Trumpener and Rudiger Campe

In the eighteenth century, the novel became a popular literary form in many parts of Europe. Yet now-standard narratives of its “rise” often offer a temporally and linguistically foreshortened view. This seminar examines key early modern novels in a range of European languages, centered on the dialogue between highly influential eighteenth-century British and French novels (Montesquieu, Defoe, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, Edgeworth). We begin by considering a sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque life history (Lazarillo de Tormes) and Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century secret history of French court intrigue; contemplate a key sentimental Goethe novella; and end with Romantic fiction (an Austen novel, a Kleist novella, Pushkin’s historical novel fragment). These works raise important issues about cultural identity and historical experience, the status of women (including as readers and writers), the nature of society, the vicissitudes of knowledge—and novelistic form. We also examine several major literary-historical accounts of the novel’s generic evolution, audiences, timing, and social function, and historiographical debates about the novel’s rise (contrasting English-language accounts stressing the novel’s putatively British genesis, and alternative accounts sketching a larger European perspective). The course gives special emphasis to the improvisatory, experimental character of early modern novels, as they work to reground fiction in the details and reality of contemporary life. Many epistolary, philosophical, sentimental, and Gothic novels present themselves as collections of “documents”—letters, diaries, travelogues, confessions—carefully assembled, impartially edited, and only incidentally conveying stories as well as information. The seminar explores these novels’ documentary ambitions; their attempt to touch, challenge, and change their readers; and their paradoxical influence on “realist” conventions (from the emergence of omniscient, impersonal narrators to techniques for describing time and place).
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 6085a / JDST 7841a / RLST 7550a, Theory and Politics in the Hasidic Tale  Hannan Hever

The Hasidic movement is a pietistic movement of believers that crystallized in the eighteenth century and organized around the courts of the Tzadik (righteous man) who led their communities. Following its inception, the Hasidic movement began to produce a vast number of stories whose purposes were educational, political, shaping the worthy Hasid, and establishing the Tzadik as a sovereign mediator between God and his believers. The course establishes theoretical foundations, anchored in neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theories, for the politics of the literary form and the language of the Hasidic literary text, which is part of a circulation of Hasidic stories that generates a political field and operates in social, educational, faith-based, and path-setting fields—how to behave—and primarily glorifying the status and authority of the Tzadik. At the center of the discussion are the two most important collections: “In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov” (Shivchei HaBesht) and the book of tails, written by Rabbi Nachman's student. However, two additional corpora are added, from which we study a selection: one is Hasidic, tales written and distributed after “In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov,” for example, of Chabad Hasidism; and the second—Maskilim’s (proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment) satires against the Hassidim’s life that allow for a reading of the Hasidic experience and its tales through the eyes of the “Maskilim.” At their center stand the satires written by Joseph Perl, and the biting satires of Isaac Erter. Through the confrontation between the Maskilim and the Hasidim, contradictions are revealed between two different politics and opposing poetics, all of which provide a valuable key to mapping Jewish life and culture in moments of crisis in Eastern Europe in which Hasidism, which became a large movement, plays a central role in addressing the “Jewish Question.”
T 4pm-5:55pm

CPLT 6173b / ENGL 6173b, The Canon in the Colony: How Literature Made The British Empire  Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

This course explores the colonial and postcolonial life of the English literary canon from the nineteenth century to the present. The “canon” wasn’t merely a cultural export that bolstered the global project of colonialism. It was just as often ignored, interrogated, and appropriated by local readers across the Anglophone world. Taking this as a starting point, this course has four main aims: (1) to examine the theoretical underpinnings of canon formation: what is the canon, and what institutional and cultural forces go into its making? (2) to interrogate the link between literature and national culture and consider the role that the canon played in propagating notions of “Englishness” in the colonial and postcolonial worlds (3) to think about how reading choices and practices invite us to rethink questions of power, dominance, and agency (4) to introduce students to ways of measuring reader responses, both qualitative and quantitative. Starting with the nineteenth century, we look at some early legislative attempts to put the canon in the service of colonialism. We move on to traces of colonial readers—both compliant and resistant—in the archive. The course then turns to English authors who have had a particularly colourful afterlife outside England. We go on to study postcolonial theories of “writing back” and the reinvention of the canon, and end with a discussion of the place of the canon in literary culture today. Our discussions are informed by a range of literary texts, theoretical essays, publishing records, colonial textbooks, book reviews, and films from across the colonial and postcolonial world.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 6600b / NELC 6180b, Writing Muslims  Shawkat Toorawa

We read and enjoy the works of Leila Aboulela, Nadia Davids, Aisha Gawad, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Manzu Islam, Sorayya Khan, Laila Lalami, Hisham Matar and others, and such films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Surviving Sabu, and Ae Fond Kiss, paying special attention to articulations of displacement, faith, history, identity, and memory. We try to develop an understanding of how the “diasporic” or “expatriate” Muslim writes herself, her world, and her condition. All material in English.  Prerequisite: Undergraduates need instructor's permission to register for this course.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 6631a / EMST 5631a / ENGL 6631a, Neoplatonism Across Time and Faith  Feisal Mohamed

In his 2024 book on mysticism, Simon Critchley points to it as a form of human experience allowing us to “push outside the sticky self towards something larger, something vaster, something full of vibrancy and maybe a sheer, mad joy at the fact of life and the world.” The Neoplatonic tradition provides a philosophical foundation for that experience, a foundation common to mystical writings in all three Abrahamic traditions. The wellspring of Christian mysticism is the Syrian monk Pseudo-Dionysius, who was clearly an attentive student of Proclus; Neoplatonism is at the core of the Islamic tradition of falsafa and of the mystic-poet Ibn ’Arabi; such poets as Solomon ibn Gabirol reveal the currency of Neoplatonic thought in Jewish Andalusía; and the early modern period witnesses another resurgence of interest in Neoplatonism, Christian and Jewish, as in the thought of Marsilio Ficino and Judah Leon Abravanel. Exploring this vast influence allows us to engage in a profound remapping of cultural and intellectual traditions—classical, medieval, early modern, and modern—less centered on Athens and Rome and taking into its ken Alexandria, Damascus, and Baghdad. Plotinus really gets around, and following his travels can shed new light on familiar texts from late antiquity to the Modernist moment. To study the Neoplatonic tradition is to take an intellectual journey to a distant planet, only to discover upon arrival that it is the home one has always known, now seen with new eyes. The Neoplatonists are rivaled only by Aristotle in their ability to cross time and culture. And yet they are widely neglected in the Anglo-American university. While devoting significant attention to the resurgence of interest in Neoplatonism in early modernity, this course spans periods and disciplines to make visible a ubiquitous tradition hiding in plain sight.
T 9:25am-11:20am

CPLT 7070a / AFAM 7107 / BLST 7107a / MHHR 7070a, What Is An Archive?  Melissa Barton

This graduate seminar seeks to answer the question in the course’s title by looking closely at professional archival descriptive practices and broader, looser uses of the term in cultural and literary studies, art history, history, and beyond. By looking at these distinct but curiously, even suspiciously, concurrent genealogies, we seek to explain why the term “archive” has become so demonstrably popular, in multiple senses of the word, even as archival practice has become more professionalized and specialized. Put differently, many humanistic fields have undergone “archival turns” in recent decades, and many cultural and performance theorists, critics, and historians have advanced arguments about “the archive” as a monolithic concept, perhaps “the archives” as an abstract location where the work begins (e.g., “I’ve been in the archives”), or perhaps “my archive” as the group of texts I interpret and cite. Meanwhile, professional archivists regularly publish tweets, articles, and blog posts asking them to stop it. This course hopes to ponder and maybe even find a way toward an answer to the question: What is up with this? We explore archives in theory and practice, as both figurative and literal, both concrete and abstract, repositories for “primary” inquiry into the past. We consider theories of archives from humanities fields and the archival profession (including the emerging subfield “critical archival studies”), and we discuss how archives are made, how they are used, how they are made usable, what may be assumed or elided in the making and use of archives, and the popularity of, and tensions around, “the archive” as a concept. Topics and keywords include: what is primary or original? What is order or process? What is a trace, and how is it made distinct from the great mass of human traces? What does it mean to collect, to curate? What is an archival silence, and what might be comparable notions of archival noise? What does it mean to recover or discover? In addition to readings, students complete two assignments: a provenance research assignment and a descriptive project in the form of a survey of an existing collection at Yale or a subject guide to a collection or group of collections.
Th 9:25am-11:20am

CPLT 7510a / BLST 7681a / ER&M 6524 / PORT 7510a, The Portuguese Black Atlantic (1420s–2020s): History, Literature, Film  Staff

The Atlantic turn in history and cultural studies often unwittingly reproduced imperial history, studying the impact of European power and forms of knowledge on the Americas. Even postcolonial approaches such as Paul Gilroy’s in The Black Atlantic displayed an implicit Anglophone bias that entirely overlooked historical processes occurring elsewhere in the South Atlantic. On the other hand, scholarly inquiries that focus on Latin America cannot fully account for the specificities that are associated with what we call the Portuguese Black Atlantic, as they still consider 1492 as the watershed moment for Atlantic history. In this seminar we study the emergence of what was known for centuries as the “Ethiopic Ocean,” an imaginary space where important polities, diasporic formations, and cultural creation and confrontations took place around the Portuguese language, beginning in the fifteenth century. We examine a range of materials from early modern Portuguese chronicles, Jesuit sermons, proto-abolitionist dialogues, prose fiction, poetry, journalism, and film, among other textual sources. We also foreground the emergence of Black literary authorship in Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa within a wider cultural process that we can call Portuguese Black modernity between the 1920s and the 1960s. Conducted in English, but reading knowledge of Portuguese required.
W 4pm-5:55pm

CPLT 8970a / FREN 8990a, Modernity  Maurice Samuels

The seminar studies literature and art from nineteenth-century France alongside theoretical and historical reflections to explore the significance of modernity. How did historical forces shape cultural trends? How did literature and art define what it means to be modern? Writers to be studied include Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola. Theorists include Benjamin, Durkheim, Foucault, Marx, Simmel, and Weber. We also examine the painting of Manet and his followers. Reading knowledge of French required.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

CPLT 9000a, Directed Reading  Samuel Hodgkin

Designed to help fill gaps in students’ programs when there are corresponding gaps in the department’s offerings. By arrangement with faculty and with the approval of the DGS.
HTBA

CPLT 9004a / FILM 6170a / FREN 875 / FREN 8750a / GMAN 6004a / SPAN 6205a, Psychoanalysis: Key Conceptual Differences between Freud and Lacan I  Moira Fradinger

This is the first section of a year-long seminar (second section: CPLT 914) designed to introduce the discipline of psychoanalysis through primary sources, mainly from the Freudian and Lacanian corpuses but including late twentieth-century commentators and contemporary interdisciplinary conversations. We rigorously examine key psychoanalytic concepts that students have heard about but never had the chance to study. Students gain proficiency in what has been called “the language of psychoanalysis,” as well as tools for critical practice in disciplines such as literary criticism, political theory, film studies, gender studies, theory of ideology, psychology medical humanities, etc. We study concepts such as the unconscious, identification, the drive, repetition, the imaginary, fantasy, the symbolic, the real, and jouissance. A central goal of the seminar is to disambiguate Freud's corpus from Lacan's reinvention of it. We do not come to the “rescue” of Freud. We revisit essays that are relevant for contemporary conversations within the international psychoanalytic community. We include only a handful of materials from the Anglophone schools of psychoanalysis developed in England and the US. This section pays special attention to Freud's “three” (the ego, superego, and id) in comparison to Lacan's “three” (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). CPLT 914 devotes, depending on the interests expressed by the group, the last six weeks to special psychoanalytic topics such as sexuation, perversion, psychosis, anti-asylum movements, conversations between psychoanalysis and neurosciences and artificial intelligence, the current pharmacological model of mental health, and/or to specific uses of psychoanalysis in disciplines such as film theory, political philosophy, and the critique of ideology. Apart from Freud and Lacan, we will read work by Georges Canguilhem, Roman Jakobson, Victor Tausk, Émile Benveniste, Valentin Volosinov, Guy Le Gaufey, Jean Laplanche, Étienne Balibar, Roberto Esposito, Wilfred Bion, Félix Guattari, Markos Zafiropoulos, Franco Bifo Berardi, Barbara Cassin, Renata Salecl, Maurice Godelier, Alenka Zupančič, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Eric Kandel, and Lera Boroditsky among others. No previous knowledge of psychoanalysis is needed. Starting out from basic questions, we study how psychoanalysis, arguably, changed the way we think of human subjectivity. Graduate students from all departments and schools on campus are welcome. The final assignment is due by the end of the spring term and need not necessarily take the form of a twenty-page paper. Taught in English. Materials can be provided to cover the linguistic range of the group.
T 4pm-5:55pm

CPLT 9024a / JDST 7857a, Modernism and Avant-Garde in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics and Theory  Hannan Hever

Modernism in Hebrew poetry: close readings of the poetry of Nathan Alterman, Lea Goldberg, Nathan Zach, Yona Volakh, Avot Yeshurun. Prerequisites: a high level of reading Hebrew texts in poetry and criticism, and permission of the instructor.
Th 4pm-5:55pm