Prerequisites: Graduate standing or permission.

Recent offerings:

Bakhtin, Benjamin and Dialogic Criticism (Fall 2009, Brinkley)

Writing in the 1930s and in the context of the Stalinist terror, Bakhtin offered the dialogic imagination as an alternative to the authoritarian discourse to which Soviet society was overwhelmingly subject at the time. As alternative to the “authoritative” word, he offered what he called the “internally persuasive” word. At about the same time, confronted by Fascisms of the left and the right, Benjamin offered the indexical as a way of bringing dialectic to a standstill. He developed a theory of translation into a theory of history, the practice of translation as a dialogic practice in a montage of past and present instants. The course will construct a dialogue between Benjamin and Bakhtin. It will also broaden that dialogue through engagements with a range of additional texts. Both Benjamin and Bakhtin were experimental readers, and the course will work experimentally in their spirit.

Texts:

• Anna Akhmatova, Requiem
• Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics
• Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
• Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
• Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
• Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project (Selections)
• Harold Bloom, The Book of J
• Fydor Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
• Carolyn Forché, The Angel of History
• Franz Kafka, The Trial
• Claude Lanzmann, Shoah
• Osip Mandelshtam, The Voronezh Notebooks
• Lee Sharkey, A Darker, Sweeter String
• Marina Tsvetaeva, The Poem of the Mountain
• Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin

Students will write short bi-weekly papers (500-1000 words). They will also develop a longer written project that will be due at the end of the semester.

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