Fredric Smoler

Comedy is a startlingly various form, and it operates with a variety of logics: It can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In this course, we will explore some comic modes—from philosophical comedy to modern film—and examine a few theories of comedy. A tentative reading list includes Simon Critchley's On Humour; a Platonic dialogue (the Protagoras); plays by Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, and Molière; some Restoration comedy; and dramatic comedies by by Oscar Wilde, David Ives, and Tom Stoppard. This reading list is subject to revision.

Some of the greatest dramatic literature is set in an era preceding its composition. This is always true of a form of dramatic literature that we usually call by a different name (Plato’s dialogues), but it is also true of some of the most celebrated drama—plays that we identify with the core of the Western theatrical tradition (for example, much of Greek tragedy)—and it is very famously true of some of the greatest works of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Corneille. We will read, slowy and carefully, Shakespeare's second tetralogy: Richard II; Henry IV, pt., 1; Henry IV, pt. 2; and Henry V. Some of the best contemporary playwrights set some of their work in the past: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia are all, in one or another sense, history plays. Setting a play in the past can create and exploit dramatic irony—the audience knows the history to come, the protagonists usually cannot—but there is no single reason for setting a play in the past. For some playwrights, history provided the grandest kind of spectacle, a site of splendid and terrible (hence dramatic) events. Their treatment of the past may not depict it as radically discontinuous with the present nor necessarily different in kind. Other playwrights may make the past little more than an allegory of the present; Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) seems to be a celebration of Victorian liberal imperialism. The playwright may set work in the past as part of an urgent analysis of the origins of his own situation: Michael Frayn’s best play, Benefactors, was written in 1984 but set in the late 1960s and attempts to locate the causes of a then-recent collapse of political liberalism, seeking in history an answer that could be found only there. But another of Frayn’s plays with a historical setting, Copenhagen, does not necessarily focus on something irretrievably past; its interests may rather be concentrated on a living problem of undiminished urgency. Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, arguably the most successful work of 1960s political theatre, was a history play focused on what then seemed the explicit and unbreakable link between late 18th-century politics and the politics of the present. And a play by Alan Bennett, The History Boys, seeks to illuminate something about the political present by examining a changing fashion in the teaching of history. In any event, we will read a number of works of dramatic literature, all of them in one sense or another history plays written for various purposes and generally of very high quality. We may or may not discover anything common to all history plays, but we will read some good books.

Comedy is a startlingly various form, and it operates with a variety of logics: It can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In this course, we will explore some comic modes—from philosophical comedy to modern film—and examine a few theories of comedy. A tentative reading list for the first semester includes poems by Swift and Yeats, a song, a Platonic dialogue (the Protagoras), and then moves on to a work on the philosophy of comedy, Aristophanes’s Old Comedy (The Clouds), Plautus’ New Comedy, Roman satire, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, Molière, and Fielding. In the second semester, we will read (among other things) Byron, Stendhal, Mark Twain, Dickens, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard—and look at Preston Sturges’s (and possibly other) screwball comedies. Both semesters’ reading lists are subject to revision.

Comedy is a startlingly various form that operates with a variety of logics. Comedy can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In this course, we will explore some comic modes—from philosophical comedy to modern film—and examine a few theories of comedy. A tentative reading list for the first semester includes a Platonic dialogue (the Protagoras), Aristophanes, Plautus, Juvenal, Lucian, Shakespeare, Molière, some Restoration comedy, and Fielding. In the second semester, we may read Jane Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Kingsley Amis, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard. We will also look at film and cartoons. Both semesters’ reading lists are subject to revision.

Some of the greatest dramatic literature is set in an era preceding its composition. This is always true of a form of dramatic literature that we usually call by a different name (Plato’s dialogues); but it is also true of some of the most celebrated drama, plays we identify with the core of the Western theatrical tradition (for example, much of Greek tragedy), and it is very famously true of some of the greatest work by Shakespeare, Schiller, and Corneille. Some of the best contemporary playwrights also set some of their work in the past: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia are all, in one or another sense, history plays. Setting a play in the past can create and exploit dramatic irony (the audience knows the history to come, the protagonists usually cannot), but there is no single reason for setting a play in the past. For some playwrights, history provided the grandest kind of spectacle, a site of splendid and terrible (hence, dramatic) events. Their treatment of the past may not depict it as radically discontinuous with the present or necessarily different in kind. Other playwrights may make the past setting little more than an allegory of the present; Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) seems to be a celebration of Victorian liberal imperialism. The playwright may set work in the past as part of an urgent analysis of the origins of his own situation: Michael Frayn’s best play, Benefactors, was written in 1984 but set in the late 1960s and attempts to locate the causes of the then-recent collapse of political liberalism, seeking in history an answer that could be found only there. But another of Frayn’s plays with a historical setting, Copenhagen, does not necessarily focus on something irretrievably past; its interests may rather be concentrated on a living problem of undiminished urgency. Peter Weiss’s Marat/ Sade, arguably the most successful work of 1960s political theatre, was a history play focused on what then seemed the explicit and unbreakable link between late 18th-century politics and the politics of the present. A recent play by Alan Bennett, The History Boys, seeks to illuminate something about the political present by examining a changing fashion in the teaching of history. In this course, we will read a number of works of dramatic literature—all of them, in one sense or another, history plays written for various purposes and of generally very high quality. We may or may not discover anything common to all history plays, but we will read some good books.

Traditional imperialism is generally understood to be the policy of extending a state’s authority by territorial acquisition. Neoimperialism is generally understood to be the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other states. Because 19th-century European imperialism was remarkably dynamic and expanded over much of the globe—by 1914, the only truly sovereign states not controlled by Europeans or their descendants were Japan, what were then called Abyssinia and Siam, and Afghanistan—we tend to see imperialism through the prism of race. But this can be a distorting prism, because imperialism is almost as old as politics. The first Sumerian cities were part of imperial arrangements. And, over the millennia, imperialism has been almost indifferent to race (in our sense of the word) as often as it has been racially-charged. So, while we will look at some of the ways in which imperialism maps onto modern conceptions of race and racism, we will also examine older imperial ventures and arguments. The indictments of and apologies for imperialism are richly contradictory, Imperialism has been understood as the cause of war and as the only possible escape from war, as the instrument of civilization and as the devastating exposure of the moral claims of the “civilized,” as the hidden economic base of wealthy societies and as an economically irrational and self-destructive course that brings down wealthy societies. The clash of rival imperialisms is often seen as the great and terrible drama of the last century, and the new century has been touted as inaugurating a burst of self-conscious imperialism by the United States—which had long understood itself as a vigorously anti-imperial power while being seen by many as the most successful imperial power of modern history. In this course, we shall look at some of the literature, history, and theories of imperialism. Readings may include, among others, Thucydides, Xenophon, Virgil, Gibbon, Marx, Conrad, Kipling, Schumpeter, Joseph Roth, Orwell, and Shaw. We shall also look at contemporary theorists and use some secondary sources.

War is one of the great themes in European literature. The greatest works of Greco-Roman antiquity are meditations on war; and as an organizing metaphor, war pervades our attempts to represent politics, economics and sexuality. Efforts to comprehend war were the genesis of the disciplines of history and political science; and the disaster of the Peloponnesian War forms the critical, if concealed, background to first great works of Western philosophy. We’ll begin the first semester with readings from the Iliad, Thucydides, Plato, and Augustine and go on to study the Aeneid, Machiavelli, Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy, and Hobbes. In the second semester, we’ll look at the origins of political economy, among other things a discipline that sought to transcend the military metaphor; at Marxism, which remilitarized the language of political economy; at Byron’s mock epic, Don Juan; and at two 19th-century novelists, Stendhal and Tolstoy—one of whom described war directly, and the other used it as an organizing metaphor for erotic, economic, and political life. We’ll conclude with a look at some 20th-century literary, artistic, historical, and critical attempts to represent war with an allegedly unprecedented accuracy.

One group of 19th-century realist novels, also some later novels with apparently comparable ambitions, are sometimes imagined to have been, in part, responses to things that seemed unprecedented; e.g., an acceleration of historical velocity, the diffusion of new forms of economic life, the rise of new classes and pressures on older elites, increasing urbanization, and the apparently sudden and disorienting arrival of something denoted by a word that dated from the beginning of the 19th century—modernity. The ambitions of these novels included description and assessment (in the title of one of them) of “the way we live now.” In roughly the same period, a new science—sociology— appeared, comparably ambitious and also attempting the description and analysis of new forms of social order and social change. Since some of the novelists and sociologists appear to have been engaged in a comparable project, it may be rewarding to read them together—which is what we’ll do in this class. Our syllabus will probably include Balzac’s Old Goriot, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Dickens’ Bleak House, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, some of Simmel’s essays and some of Weber’s, and W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Whether or not it proves particularly profitable to read these writers in the same course, we’ll certainly read some good books.

Comedy is a startlingly various form that operates with a variety of logics; it can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In this course, we’ll explore some comic modes—from philosophical comedy to modern film—and examine a few theories of comedy. A tentative reading list for the first semester includes a Platonic dialogue (the Protagoras) and moves on to Aristophanes’ Old Comedy (The Clouds); Plautus’ New Comedy; Roman satire; Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; Molière; some Restoration and later stage comedy; and Fielding. In the second semester, we will read Byron, Stendhal, Dickens, Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard—and also look at some cartoons and some film comedy. The reading lists for both semesters are subject to revision.

The alternate history, which imagines a different present or future originating in a point of divergence from our actual history—a branching point in the past—is both an increasingly popular form of genre fiction and a decreasingly disreputable form of analysis in history and the social sciences. While fictions of alternate history were, until very recently, only a subgenre of science fiction, celebrated “literary” novelists (Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, and Colson Whithead, among others) have, within the last decade and a half, written well-regarded novels of alternate history: The Plot Against America, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and The Underground Railroad. Similarly, while counterfactual historical speculation is at least as old as Livy, academic historians have, until recently, scorned the practice as a vulgar parlor game; but this is beginning to change. In the early 1990s, Cambridge University Press and Princeton both published intellectually rigorous books on alternate history and counterfactual analysis in the social sciences. More recently, Cambridge published a volume analyzing alternate histories of World War II. And in 2006, the University of Michigan Press published an interesting collection of counterfactual analyses, titled Unmaking the West. This course will examine a number of fictions of alternate history, some reputable and some less reputable, and may also look at some of the academic work noted above. We shall attempt to understand what it might mean to think seriously about counterfactuals;, about why fictions of and academic works on alternate history have become significantly more widespread; and about what makes an alternate history aesthetically satisfying and intellectually suggestive rather than ham-fisted, flat, and profoundly unpersuasive.