Seminars

 Founding Narratives

This graduate research seminar will examine a number of seminal narratives that define the Americas as textual, contextual, continental, and incontinent narrative genre.

Our purpose is to trace and seek a fuller understanding of the genesis of American narratives by re-evaluating the processes of “worlding” the New World and the modes that narrate cultural forms and textual significance said to be distinctly peculiar to the Americas.

Literatures of Theory

The focus of this seminar is on the relationship of criticism to theory and their connection to literature. The work of the seminar consists in tracing the genesis of key critical formations and theoretical dicourses with exemplary works of literature that illustrate, underwrite, or contest the theoretical forms that would be imputed, applied, or affiliated to them. Theories, therefore, will be read in concert and/or in counterpoint to the literary texts in which those theoretical constructs purportedly have their genesis, sanction, or instantiation.

After Borges: The International Legacy of Jorge Luís Borges

A reading and research seminar that takes Jorge Luís Borges as pivotal figure of literary and meta-literary discourses in the global context of modern literature and its international practitioners.

 

 

Rehearsals of Modernism

Modernism has been the most persistent and internationally the most ubiquitous cultural movement since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Despite its appropriative impetus, it has also been among the least monolithic cultural movements when viewed comparatively in a global, international context and across inter-artistic and transdisciplinary lines. In spite of its persistence, its programmatic agendas, its virulent manifestos, its apocalyptic zeal, and its vocation for mastery, Modernism as aesthetic and cultural movement has remained an open, process-oriented, self-trangressive, and self-succeeding performative rehearsal.

Globalization and Academic Discourses

With the collaboration of distinguished specialists from a number of universities and from various Penn State academic departments, this seminar explores the phenomenon of globalization and the diverse discourses it has elicited within and among a number of academic disciplines. The seminar examines, especially, questions of culture, languages, fields, economies, narratives, human geographies, transnational networks, information technologies, and ethics.

 

Rethinking America

With the collaboration of an international team of distinguished practitioners of American Studies, this seminar aims to interrogate the multiplicity of America as literary, historical, geographic, and cultural phenomenon. Our project of “re-thinking” entails a reconsideration of America (U.S. and non-U.S.) as national, plural, transnational, and international/hemispheric agency in a global context.

 

Worlding America

“Mihi res non me rebus submittere conor” [I try to submit the things to myself, not myself to the things]. Horace’s sententia could well be the guiding dictum of America’s history. By 1967, the French historian of the Annales School Fernand Braudel would find it necessary to aver, “L’Amérique ne commande pas seule,” (Civilisation et Capitalisme, 352). We do not know what he might say today. Our seminar examines the way stations of a discursive itinerary that has made America, especially the imperial U.S. of America, the universal point of reference for global positioning of cultural life at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Absolute America

This seminar traces the morphology of monologic discursive formations in America. It tracks literary and public discourse to its historic and cultural foundations. From its originary Ishmaelite fate (the ostracism to the ends of the earth for murder at the heart of the Vineland Sagas, Columbus’s jail-bird crew, the Puritan divines as outcasts seeking redemption in flight from an irredeemable world) to its current crusader/jihadic obsession, America defines itself through emphatic disambiguations of history, language, and geography.

 

Morphologies of Postmodernism

The seminar will trace some of the more common versions of the history of postmodernism––its aesthetic, social, and ideological facets––and examine the phenomenon in its relationship to other “posts-” (post-structuralism, post-colonialism, the post-human).

 

 

Comparative Criticism: Foundations of Pre-Modern Theory

This first five-week module of Comparative Criticism and Theory seminar [CMLIT 502-503:1] is an introduction to the foundations of comparative criticism and theory through readings from the pre-modern period. The seminar examines formative ideas of our critical/theoretical discourses in such defining figures as Gorgias of Leontini, Zhuangzi, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian Longinus, and Lu Chi.

International Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe

Few American writers have been as consequential internationally in their influence as Edgar Allan Poe. This seminar explores the reasons for this renown, examines a number of key works by the American master and their avatars in various writers from around the world. The literary works of these writers from the international community will be read in their original language of composition by members of the seminar who have those linguistic proficiencies and, in cases where these works exist in English translation, they will be read by all members of the seminar.