COMPARATIVE LITERATURE FACULTY
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DEPARTMENT AFFILIATIONS

Robert Alter teaches courses on the 19th-century European and American novel, on modernism, and on literary aspects of the Bible, and he also teaches and writes on modern Hebrew literature. A devoted close reader and an unreconstructed eclectic, he has addressed a wide variety of literary issues with varying critical approaches. His publications range from critical biography (Stendhal) to literary theory (The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age) to two recent volumes of Bible translation accompanied by literary commentary --Genesis (1996) and The David Story (1999). His work has been recognized by numerous awards and fellowships, and he has lectured at major universities throughout the country and in England and Europe. In the spring of 1999 he delivered the Rosezweig Lectures at Yale University, which will be the basis for his forthcoming book, Recasting the Canon. -- Department of Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew) - (Ph.D., Harvard University)

Michael André Bernstein works primarily on literature and history, high modernism, ethics and literature, and prosaics. The intersection of the imagination with history, and the search for an ethical language that engages moral issues without being moralistic is fundamental to his writing and teaching. His course offerings frequently include Symbolist and post-Symbolist Poetry, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Robert Musil and fin-de-siècle Vienna, and the European nineteenth and twentieth century novels. He has written extensively on the relationship between Classical and Modern literature, and what might be called the public rhetoric of extremity, especially as it relates to the Shoah. His publications include Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero, and The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic. He is also the author of a volume of poetry, Prima della Rivoluzione. His next book, Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth Century German Writing will be published in 2000. In 1995 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. -- Department of English - (D.Phil., Oxford University)

Karl Britto teaches courses in French literature, particularly francophone colonial and postcolonial literatures of Vietnam, Africa, and the Caribbean. His interests also include anglophone colonial and postcolonial studies; theories of gender and identity; cultural studies. His recent work includes an article in Yale French Studies, "History, Memory, and Narrative Nostalgia: Pham Duy Khiem's Nam et Sylvie." A book-length manuscript in preparation, Disorientation: Interculturality and Identity in Vietnamese Francophone Literature, examines Vietnamese francophone texts written from 1921 to 1990, focusing on narratives that dramatize and interrogate intercultural identity, primarily through the use of characters who face difficult homecomings after years spent in France or in French schools. A second research project entitled Bodies in Motion: Immigration and Identity in Contemporary Literature is a book-length study on the representation of the immigrant body in contemporary francophone and anglophone literature. -- Department of French - (Ph.D., Yale University)

Judith Butler teaches courses in literary theory, philosophical fictions, feminist and sexuality studies. She has given courses in Comparative Literature on "Mimesis and Alterity" and "Philosophical Fictions" and, most recently, on "Antigone." She has written on Hegel, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Freud, feminist theory, gender studies, and queer theory. She is currently publishing two books. One is a co-authored book with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Hegemony, Universality, Contingency (Verso). Another is on Antigone and the politics of kinship, Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia). She hopes to publish a volume of essays on 'philosophical fictions' in the next few years. -- Department of Rhetoric - (Ph.D., Yale University)

Anthony J. Cascardi (Department Chair) works on literature and philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and early modern literature. His most recent book is Consequences of Enlightenment: Aesthetics as Critique (Cambridge, 1999), which places Kant's Critique of Judgment in relation to modern critical theory. Before that he staked out a view of modernity that challenges Habermas (The Subject of Modernity) and an account of literature and history in early modern Spain (Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age.) He is currently working on several projects. One is on art, emotion, and agency, operating under the tentative title "tragedy and modernity." Another is the Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, of which he is the editor and a contributor. He is currently teaching a seminar on aesthetic theory and another on practices of intepretation and the contemporary arts. In 1997 he was appointed to the Goldman Chair in the Humanities. -- Department of Spanish - (Ph.D., Harvard University)

Joseph Duggan's specialties are medieval epic, romance, and lyric poetry, and the theory and practice of editing medieval texts. His publications include books on the Chanson de Roland and the Cantar de mío Cid. His latest work is a book on Chrétien de Troyes's romances, The Romance of Chrétian de Troyes: A Study. He teaches a course on the medieval book that meets in the Bancroft Library and draws on Berkeley's collection of medieval manuscripts. His main interests are oral literature, theory of genres, and the relationship between literature and social context. -- Department of French - (Ph.D., Ohio State University)

Anne-Lise François's research and teaching interests include the modern period, comparative romanticisms; lyric poetry; the psychological novel and novel of manners; gender and critical theory; literature and philosophy; fashion and popular culture. She is currently revising for publication Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Her recent publications include: " 'Don't Say I Love You' : Agency, Gender and Romanticism in Mary Shelley's Matilda," co-authored with Daniel Mozes, Mary Shelley: Fictions from Frankenstein to Falkner (Macmillan Press, Ltd, forthcoming 2000); " 'These Boots were Made for Walkin': Fashion as 'Compulsive Artifice' in the 1970s," The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (Routledge, 1999). She has also published on falsetto in seventies disco in Perspectives of New Music (1995), and on the "gentle force" of habit in Hume and Wordsworth in The Yale Journal of Criticism (April, 1994). -- Department of English - (Ph.D., Princeton University)

Timothy Hampton works on Renaissance and Early Modern European culture, in both English and the Romance languages. His research and teaching involve, generally, the relationship between politics and culture, and focus on such issues as the ideology of literary genre, the literary construction of nationhood, and the rhetoric of historiography. He is the author of Writing from History: the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Cornell University Press, 1990), and Garden of Letters: Literature and Nationhood in Renaissance France (Cornell University Press, forthcoming). Among his recent articles are "The Subject of America: History and Alterity in Montaigne's 'Des Coches' " (Romanic Review, 88, 1997) and "'Turkish Dogs': Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity" (Representations, 41, 1993). -- Department of French - (Ph.D., Princeton University)

Ralph Hexter (Dean of Arts and Humanities) works on Greek and Roman literature as well as several of the literatures and cultures of medieval and modern Europe. Among his special interests are the reception and interpretation of what has come to be called the "classical tradition." Through critical analysis of modes of reading and interpretation (e.g., commentary), he interrogates "tradition" and related concepts (from canonicity to poetic authority) as he questions the ways in which European high culture and its heirs has privileged the study of the Greco-Roman heritage. He takes particular interest in those periods and authors involved in rewriting or translating one set of ideas (aesthetic, religious, philosophical, or political) into another. To study tradition is to study not only change and adaptation but exclusion and misinterpretation, and these concepts are key to his reading of literary texts as well, from misreading as well as the cultural occlusion of the Punic in Vergil's Aeneid to fifteenth-century plays in which language (Latin) and form (comedy), along with a host of "classical" subtexts, enable the construction of a space in which deviant sexuality can be permitted yet policed, paraded yet pilloried. Or both at once, for this is a vertiginously unstable interpretive space that may presage the knowing unknowing "closet" of more recent times. In current work, Professor Hexter is drawing on the insights and methods of "queer studies" to analyze selected moments in the history of classical studies. -- Department of Classics - (Ph.D., Yale University)

Victoria Kahn's fields of interest include Renaissance literature, rhetoric and poetics, early modern political theory, and the Frankfurt School. Her forthcoming work and work in progress are a coedited collection entitled Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming from Yale University Press, 2000) and a book entitled The Romance of Contract: Fictions of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674. -- Department of Rhetoric - (Ph.D., Yale University)

Chana Kronfeld teaches Hebrew, Yiddish, and Comparative Literature with a special emphasis on modern poetry. She is interested in modernism, minor literatures, the politics of literary history, feminist stylistics, intertextuality (not as an anonymous dialogue between texts but as a form of action, an expression of agency), translation studies, the relevance of linguistics and the philosophy of language to literary studies, and of close reading to a critique of literary thoery. Her book On the Margins of Modernism won the MLA Scaglione Prize in 1998 for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies. Her co-translation (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open won the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marie Syrkin Awards. She is currently working on a book on women's poetry entitled The Genders of Grammar and the Grammars of Gender. She believes in enabling people to learn through collaborative, non-competitive work. Her classes are never conducted as lectures and never include exams. She is, however, quite addicted to purple. -- Department of Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew, Yiddish) - (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley)

Leslie Kurke is Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics. Her most recent book is Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Princeton University Press, 1999). This book analyzes the ideological functions of Greek coinage as one of a number of symbolic practices that arise for the first time in the Greek archaic period. By linking the imagery of metals and coinage to stories about oracles, prostitutes, Eastern tyrants, counterfeiting, retail trade, and games, the book traces the rising egalitarian ideology of the city, as well as the ongoing resistance of an elitist tradition to that development. Kurke's interests span archaic and classical Greek literature and cultural history, with special emphasis on archaic Greek poetry in its social context, Herodotus and early prose, the constitution of ideology through material practices, and the relations of economics and literature. Kurke was awarded a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship for the years 1999-2004, and plans to use the funding to pursue a project on Aesop and Greek popular culture. -- Department of Classics - (Ph.D., Princeton University)

Lydia H. Liu has published in the areas of cross-cultural interpretation, contemporary theory, modern Chinese literature, eighteenth-century European aesthetics and material culture, nineteenth-century international legal discourse, feminist gender studies, television and global media culture, etc. Prof. Liu is the author of several books including Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995). Her second book, Cross-Writing: Critical Perspectives on Narratives of Modern Intellectual History, was written in Chinese and published in 1997. More recently, she edited a volume of essays called Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (1999) and published an article titled "Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot" in Critical Inquiry (Summer, 1999). She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow and a Research Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1998-1999. She serves on the advisory board of the New Century scholarship book series with the National Translation and Compilation publishing house of the People's Republic of China in Beijing and is an executive editor of the journal Jintian (Today), a diasporic Chinese-language journal distributed across Europe, North America, Hong Kong, China, and other Chinese-speaking communities. -- Department of East Asian Languages (Chinese) - (Ph.D., Harvard University)

Michael Lucey has been writing lately about the relationship between sexuality and culture in nineteenth and twentieth century France. In particular, he is currently finishing up a book on the place of sexuality in Balzac's novels (The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality), and is also working on a book of essays about the place of queer sexuality in the literary field of twentieth-century France (As Long as You Never Say "I": Representing Queer Sexuality in Twentieth Century France), including essays on Proust, Gide, Colette, Genet, Rochefort, Guibert, and a few others. He also teaches about nineteenth and twentieth century British literature and culture, and twentieth century American literature and culture. He is the author of Gide's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing (Oxford UP, 1995). Other areas of interest include social and literary theory; music and culture; lyric and rhythm. -- Department of French - (Ph.D., Princeton University)

Francine Masiello (Director of Undergraduate Education) works on topics related to Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, gender theory, and comparative North/South literatures; most recently, she has developed projects on globalization and culture. Her books include Lenguaje e ideología: las escuelas argentinas de vanguardia (1986); Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (1992), winner of the Modern Language Association award for best book on a Latin American topic and subsequently revised and translated into Spanish (1997); and La mujer y el espacio público (1994). Scripts, Maps, and Markets, a book on Latin American culture and neoliberalism, is in press, and she is now completing a critical edition of the writings of nineteenth-century feminist Juana Manuela Gorriti for Oxford University Press. Masiello is also co-author of Women, Politics, and Culture in Latin America (1991), written with members of the Berkeley-Stanford Seminar on feminism and Latin American culture, and in collaboration with Tulio Halperin Donghi and Gwen Kirkpatrick, Sarmiento, Author of a Nation (1994). Recent seminars she has offered in the Department of Comparative Literature have addressed globalization and the cultural narratives of the Americas, the culture of postdictatorship socieities, neoliberalism and gender crisis, 19th century women and nation formation in the Americas, and theories of translation in the North/South context. -- Department of Spanish - (Ph.D., University of Michigan)

Kathleen McCarthy specializes in the social and cultural analysis of Latin poetry. Her forthcoming book, Slavery and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy (Princeton, 2000) offers a new analysis of the potential subversiveness of this early body of dramatic comedy, focusing especially on the paradoxical desire of each audience member to inhabit simultaneously the positions of rebel and authority figure. Her current work centers on the political and social functions of Augustan love elegy. She has taught graduate seminars on the literature of slave societies and on domestic comedy as a genre, and undergraduate courses on comedy and on Greco-Roman religion and literature. -- Department of Classics - (Ph.D. Princeton University)

James T. Monroe works in the areas of lyric poetry, the Middle Ages, and East-West relations, with particular interest in the importance of the Arab contribution to Spanish civilization. He has published numerous books and articles in the field of Arabic literature with special emphasis on its Hispano-Arabic component, including Ten Hispano-Arabic Strophic Songs in the Modern Oral Tradition : Music and Texts with Benjamin M. Liu and The Art of Badi az-Zaman al-Hamadhani as Picaresque Narrative. -- Department of Near Easter Studies (Arabic) - (Ph.D., Harvard University)

Eric Naiman works in the fields of ideological poetics, sexuality and history, history of medicine, Soviet culture, the gothic novel, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Platonov, and Mikhail Bakhtin. His most recent book is Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology. He is currently working on Nabokov, Perversely; Monumental Intimacy: The Art of Healing and the Art of Terror. His recent articles: include "Shklovsky's Dog and Mulvey's Pleasure: The Secret Life of Defamiliarization," "Litland: The Allegorical Poetics of The Defense," "When a Communist Writes Gothic: Aleksandra Kollontai and the Politics of Disgust," and "V zhopu prorubit' okno: seksual'naia patologiia kak ideologicheskii kalembur u Andreia Platonova." -- Department of Slavic (Russian) - (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley)

Nancy Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford University Press, 1998). Her current research and teaching interests include American literature and culture between the Revolution and Civil War, Russian literature and culture in the Emancipation era (mid- to late-nineteenth century), democratic theory, novel theory, and the relation of political to literary forms, with special reference to the constitution of subjects. She is currently at work on two book projects. Emancipation and Authorship: Democratic Subjectivity in Dostoevsky's Russia will analyze the largely literary construction of a non-liberal democratic subjectivity in the wake of the peasant-emancipation in 1861. The second project analyzes the category of the "theologico-political" in relation to the liberalization of American democratic expression from the Federalist through antebellum periods. -- Department of English - (Ph.D., Sanford University)

Miryam Sas teaches and writes about 20th century poetry, experimental theater, memory and trauma, mass media and cultural studies, and film with an emphasis in Japanese literature and culture. In 2000 Stanford University Press will publish her book Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. She is currently writing a second book on performative memory and Japanese theater since the 1960s. She is also working on two collaborative projects at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris), one on Japanese avant-garde butoh dance, the other on American theater director Peter Sellars. She has presented her work widely, most recently at symposia in Zurich, Paris, and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. -- Department of East Asian Languages (Japanese) - (Ph.D., Yale University)

Barbara Spackman (Vice-Chair and Director of Graduate Studies) is the author of Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio (1989) and Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (1996), which won the 1998 MLA Howard Marraro and Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes. Her teaching and research interests include gender studies and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, narrative, fascism and culture, European Decadence, and travel writing. She is currently working on a study of travel writing and geopolitical fantasy in Italy, as well as on a comparative project on ideological fantasy at the fin-de-siecle. -- Department of Italian - (Ph.D., Yale University)

Kenneth Weisinger offers courses on Romanticism,Weimar Classicsim, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Thomas Mann, Opera and Literature, and the history of the lyric. He has published a book on Goethe, The Classical Facade: Non-classical Readings of Classical Goethe Texts, which deals primarily with the relationship between Faust and the so-called classical works of Goethe. He has also published a number of articles on various aspects of German literature and culture, including Goethe, Hölderlin, Thomas Mann and Rilke. He is currently working on a book on Schiller which deals with the problem of rhetoric and self-realization in the major plays and the philosophical essays. Another project underway is an examination of German Romanticism as an extension of the passionate correspondance between two men (Tieck, Wackenroder), Male Literary Collaboration and the Invention of German Romanticism. Whenever he can, he uses Goethe's love of Italy as an excuse for going there himself. He is currently the Berkeley campus Director of the Education Abroad Programs and he strongly urges every undergraduate to consider taking part of their education abroad. -- Department of German - (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley)

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