COML 4154 - Haunted Subjects

(crosslisted)
(also ENGL 4154, ROMS 4154) (LA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

Co-meets with COML 6154/ENGL 6154/ROMS 6154.

C. Caruth.

The starting point for this course is Balzac’s narrative of a Napoleonic soldier, declared dead in battle, who returns during the Restoration to claim his property. Balzac’s story asks: What does it mean for the dead to speak before the law? And what does it mean for the law to listen to such a claim? In this course we will examine, in literary and theoretical texts, the haunting legacy of the revolutions that established the political and legal subject in the 19th century. How does the split between “man” and “citizen” return to mark the traumatic historical and political events of the 19th and 20th centuries? Authors include Balzac, Kleist, Kafka, Melville, Morrison Dorfman and Arendt, Agamben, Balibar, de Man, Derrida, Lefort, Keenan, among others.