MA students should enroll using the first course number; PhD students should use the second.
Classes meet in room C244.C except for Research Seminar II, which will meet in room C138.B.
TEO4.911535/ TEO7.920259 Introduction to the Advanced Study of Literature
TEO5.922035/ TEO8.922034 Topics in Literary Theory (12 ECTS, Autumn, Mon, 9:30-12:30, Miguel Tamen)
Adequate Opinions about Literature
Adequate opinions about literature are not the consequence of our having applied the right theories about literature to fictions or poems; they imply however our having acquired, and our having learned how to examine, opinions about language, stories, interpretation, art, and cultures, among many other things; from which, with luck and talent, adequate opinions about literature may ensue. In this seminar we will discuss ten basic distinctions that might stimulate the development of adequate opinions about literature. Examples of such distinctions are: use and mention; propaganda, ambiguity and nonsense; mimesis and catharsis; familiar and unfamiliar; paraphrase and example; making and finding; us and them, among others. Discussions may include the reading of relevant bibliographical sources. Most weeks students will be expected to submit 300 to 500-word essays on topics to be assigned in class.
TEO5.922045/ TEO8.922043 Topics in Literary Theory (12 ECTS, Autumn, Wed, 2:00-5:00, Carlo Arrigoni)
On Naturalism: Zola, Verga, Crane
Naturalism has long been described as a backward-looking phenomenon, firmly tied to a notion of art as the objective or photographic reproduction of reality. On the contrary, this international literary movement, at least in its most radical, experimental versions, paved the way for twentieth-century fiction by bringing to the fore all the distortions inherent in every storytelling act, i.e., the ways in which people represent reality according to their own relative point of view, informed by individual interests, feelings, desires, biases. These dynamics of representation, or misrepresentation, will be at the heart of this seminar. Primary texts will include: L’Assommoir by Zola; I Malavoglia and the major Sicilian tales by Verga; Maggie, The Red Badge of Courage, and some of Crane’s Western and maritime short stories; as well as seminal essays by Auerbach, Bakhtin, Lukács, and Empson. Among the topics discussed will also be the role of descriptions in fiction, the representation of subaltern classes, and the portrayal of the relationship between nature and human beings.
TEO5.922083/ TEO8.922084 Topics in Literary Theory (12 ECTS, Autumn, Thu, 9:30-12:30, Alberto Arruda)
On Human Fragility
The course will consist in an argument concerning the apprehension of human fragility as the source of philosophical, moral, esthetical, and political problems. The first part of the course shall propose a reading of the history of modern philosophy as the history of the problematic apprehension of human fragility. We will read texts by Hobbes (fragility as fear: Of Man), Descartes (fragility as fallibility: Meditations on First Philosophy), and Rousseau (fragility as inequality: Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men). In the second part of the course, we will read and discuss some of the heirs of this distinctively modern problematic. We will attempt at an understanding of how a few philosophers and a poet have endeavored to reconcile humanity with its fragility. We will read texts by Marx (Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts), Emerson (Self-Reliance), Wittgenstein (On Certainty), and the play The Robbers by Schiller.
TEO5.922037/ TEO8.922036 Topics in Literary Theory (12 ECTS, Autumn, Fri, 2:00-5:00, Fotini Hadjittofi)
Rewriting in the Classical and Early Medieval Eras
Is rewriting as creative as writing? Twentieth-century postmodernism placed an emphasis on retelling earlier stories of mythical significance and taught us to appreciate the techniques through which a new text comes into being by reworking and “transposing” a previous text. Rewriting, however, was not invented by postmodernism: it was the chief mode of literary creation for much of the pre-modern period. In classical antiquity, authors adapted myths that would have been familiar to the audience from previous texts, oral narratives, and visual representations. Many classical-era authors also created new texts by translating, paraphrasing, or abridging earlier texts. In the late antique and medieval periods, translation and paraphrasis become essential elements in the ideology and aesthetics of a Christian culture which obsessively rewrites homilies, hagiographies, theological orations, hymns, and even biblical works (for example, by transposing some of the latter into poetry). Ancient and Byzantine commentators and theorists even had their own critical vocabulary to describe the workings of rewriting. This seminar will look at some classical and early medieval rewrites, performing comparative readings between what Genette (Palimpsestes, 1982) calls the hypertext (new text) and the hypotext (model text), and asking how the rewriters themselves seem to conceptualise what they are doing, for whom, and why.
TEO5.922039/ TEO8.922038 Topics in Literary Theory (12 ECTS, Spring, Tue, 9:30-12:30, João R. Figueiredo)
Enlightenment on The Lusiads
The Enlightenment has produced a remarkable amount of criticism on The Lusiads, much of which of great virulence. Following the discussion of some of these texts (Voltaire, José Agostinho de Macedo, among others), the seminar will attempt to describe the major problems identified by Neoclassical criticism and, above else, to provide answers to them: the misfit between subject-matter and style, incoherence in action and character motivation, incongruence between the status of characters and what they say or do, logical inconsistencies of various kinds, lack of unity and verosimilitude, and the abuse of mythology. Many of these criticisms are similar to those brought forth at the time against Paradise Lost, and this debate will be recalled in the many instances where it is applicable. The issues raised by Camões (and Milton) critics raise further general issues concerning, for instance, the status of fiction, the concepts of originality and poetic liberty, and the author's aesthetic project. (Are such "flaws" intentional? If so, why and wherefore? When can we ascribe "flaws" or "mistakes" to poets?) Bearing in mind the actual unfolding of the seminar, which will consist mostly in a detailed commentary of The Lusiads, we will also often consider the pertinence of what literary interpreters have to say on these various issues. (Bibliography will also include texts by Samuel Johnson, William Empson, Stanley Fish, and Terry Cochran.)
TEO5.922041/ TEO8.922040 Topics in Literary Theory (12 ECTS, Spring, Wed, 9:30-12:30, Maria Sequeira Mendes)
Adoption Tales
Adoption appears again and again in Europe’s literature, from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1609-11), and All’s Well that Ends Well (1623). In these texts, the trope of adoption is used to explore and question the nature of family, individual identity, and social status. In some cases, where it is said that “choice breeds / a native slip to us from foreign seeds” (All’s Well), family – whether natural or adoptive – is positive, the place for affection. In others – perhaps most notably that of Edmund in King Lear – adoption is more negatively linked with deception, the figure of the bastard, and the dangers of social mobility. Fundamentally, in these texts, familial bonds variously belong to the “order of law” or the “law” of nature, and we are presented with a literary landscape where the “plague of custom,” to borrow Edmund’s complaint – that the tyranny of patrilineage, both defines and defies natural categories. This seminar shows how descriptions of adoption in literature and in law work to forge new kinds of cultural identity in the period, showing this often-neglected topic to be fundamental to an understanding of the legal transformations of early modern social and affective relations.
TEO5.922044/ TEO8.922042 Topics in Literary Theory (12 ECTS, Spring, Thu, 2:00-5:00, Joana Matos Frias)
Dead Letters
Emily Dickinson’s famous verses “This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me —” may hyperbolically describe the topic of the seminar, according to which the adjective “dead” points to a failure (imaginary or not) interfering in the kind of interlocutory circuit that the idea of correspondence as an “exchange of letters” presupposes. In one of the chapter-episodes of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, a character wonders “what these ghosts of mail-coaches carry in their bags”, and receives as an answer: “The dead letters of course”. The dead letters of course is the topic: based on a broad concept of undeliverability, the seminar will try to reconstitute the elements which mark the posthumous life of some dead letters; papers issued (not always sent) by Horace, Mariana Alcoforado, Diderot, Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Edgar A. Poe, Zola, Hofmannsthal, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Tilda Swinton will be commented on and discussed.
TEO6.920301/ TEO9.913606 Research Seminar I (12/30 ECTS, Autumn, Fri, 9:30-12:30, João R. Figueiredo)
Thesis Projects
The seminar is structured around the discussion of oral expositions by the participants. These expositions will deal, in a preliminary way, with the topics on which they intend to write in their dissertations. A likely effect of these discussions is the modification of the original topics. The final aim of the seminar is the production, by the participants, of a detailed written outline of their future dissertations.
TEO6.920303/ TEO9.913607 Research Seminar II (6 ECTS, Spring, date and program tba, João R. Figueiredo)
Thesis Colloquia: The Theses of Theory
In this seminar, the participants, otherwise engaged in the writing of their theses, present their current research in a series of public lectures.