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GRADUATE
COURSE OFFERINGS
Fall 2009
Spinoza, Leibniz, Deleuze Bill Haver
R 4:25PAM- 7:25PM
This seminar is constituted in a close attention to Gilles Deleuze s writing on Spinoza and Leibniz (Expressionism in Philosophy and The Fold), as well as to Spinoza s Ethics and selected texts by Leibniz. I assume no prior familiarity with any of these texts. We will most particularly be concerned with Deleuze s development of concepts of immanence, singularity, and multiplicity in Spinoza and Leibniz in an attempt to understand the importance of Spinoza and Leibniz for radical political philosophy in Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Althusser, Balibar, Negri, et al.). A substantive, albeit succinct, essay is required at end of term.
PIC
280H (ALSO TAUGHT AS HDEV 380U, SOC 280G)
Heidegger's Voices
Stephen David Ross
T 4:25- 7:25PM
A course reading Martin Heidegger, including selected works spanning his career. The first half of the semester is devoted to Being and Time, the second to a variety of short later works, such as What Is Metaphysics? On the Essence of Truth, Discourse on Thinking, Early Greek Thinking, What Calls for Thinking? The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, The OntoTheological Constitution of Metaphysics, Identity and Difference, The Origin of the Work of Art, Letter on Humanism, The Question Concerning Technology, Building Dwelling Thinking, On the Way to Language, On Time and Being, Age of the World Picture, many of which are available in Basic Writings, some in abbreviated form. The course also includes selections from major writers influenced by as well as critical of Heidegger: Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, Levinas, Rorty, Lyotard, etc.
PIC 280J
Modes of Production
Thomas F McDonough
T R 4:24- 7:25PM
At a moment when contemporary art seems to be embracing the latest models of outsourcing and computerized fabrication, we pause to take a look back at modernism¿s conflicted relation with industrial production. Just what was the artwork¿s relation to the dominant mode of production during the period stretching from the 1880s to the 1960s? This seminar will open with a set of classic readings addressing industrial production, Taylorism, deskilling, and monopoly capital, as well as their social relations. We will then examine a series of case studies of the artwork¿s imbrication with production and labor, from Seurat and Van Gogh through Robert Morris. Students will develop research projects that continue these investigations through to the present, as we enter a post-Fordist world of flexible production, telematics, and intellectual labor.
PIC
Latina Aesthetics
Maria Lugones
M R 4:40- 7:40PM
In Chicana Art, Laura Elisa Perez explores altars, glyphs, cajas, retablos, all traditional forms of Mexicana-o/Chicana-o religious expression. Spirituality opens up expressive possibilities closed by the secular. In particular, it opens up esoteric connections to Maya and Mexica/Aztec cosmologies and to an imagining against the colonial patriarchal grain. In Pedagogies of Crossing Jacqui Alexander challenges the modern Western separation between the secular and the sacred. She explores the concept of the palymsest and of the body as habituated through histories of crossing, of torture, of daily practices of relation so as to access memories that have left the conscious mind and have left no records, no documents. Santeria, Candomble, Spiritism are practices of accessing the sacred in relation through which she proposes to read the body and the material world otherwise. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Rosalinda Fregoso, Ivonne Jarbro Bejarano also read a strong relation between spirituality/the sacred, the political, and art. If dehumanization, sexual torture, maiming, confinement, isolation, depletion, have been constitutive of reality organized through tight filaments of power, there are other reads of the dehumanized, other socialities through which they self-constitute otherwise, as immense, knowing, parfumed, exciting, in relation, creatixes. And, so with other bends in the real. This seminar will explore this way of reading Latina Aesthetics. The range will include liteature, performance, installations, graphic art, cinema.
PIC 280M
Medieval Colonialism
Marilynn Desmond
W W F 9:40-12:40AM
Post-colonial theory, which is based almost entirely on modern cultures and modern global politics, seldom addresses the culture and activities of Europe before 1492. This interdisciplinary course will investigate the formation of colonizing discourses and desires in medieval European cultures. In order to look at medieval Europe in a global context, we will consider the orientalizing constructions of the crusades and crusade literature, including the visual components of illuminated manuscripts. We will also consider the development of extensive trade routes and the circulation of travel literature as well as luxury objects from abroad, which shaped medieval European perceptions/representations of and relations with other worlds. Requirements include: one 5 page paper, one 15 page paper, and one oral report (students may select topics for these assignments in their own disciplines, under the supervision of their departmental advisors). Texts: Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, Gerald of Wales, Journey through Wales, History and Topography of Ireland, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Joinville & Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, The Travels, The Alexiad of Anna Comnena. Bartlett, R. The Making of Europe, as well at texts by Chrétien, Chaucer and Christopher Columbus.
PIC
Diasporic Imaginaries
M 3:30-
6:30PM
The course offers an introduction to aesthetic, political, epistemological, and economic perspectives on the making of modernity `outside¿ the West. Diaspora in a trans-national age is taken up as heterogeneous historical processes of formation and narrative practice, without uniformity. Yet, if there is no singular modernity that defines all other histories in its terms, nor an easy pluralism of alternative modernities, how might one hear/read/write complex dissonant imaginaries of contemporary diasporas in which specific strategies of modernization and globalization are articulated, negotiated, renegotiated, displaced? We will focus on intersitial zones of translation in which the fractures and contradictions of a postcolonial moment trace time, space, subjectification, corporeal image, sexuality, and violence as frequently, though not always, exceeding the grasp of categories and out of reach, adrift. How to attend a composite, multilayered present in which the past is remote and contemporary? Recycling history, tending forgotten graveyards and the debris of former lives, do the jointing and the fracturing of scattered remains yield imperatives for interactive futures? The class will emphasize recent transnational feminist and diasporic mixed genre writing, artistic productions, and activist practices. Transdisciplinary productions in varied mediums, theory, literature, street protest, film, etc., will be taken up not as one subordinated to or folded into the other, but as enmeshed without duplication.
PIC
Enchantment of the World
Stephen David Ross
W R 3:30- 6:30PM
Some say our times are characterized by modernization, globalization, perhaps postmodernization and other posts. This course begins with Max Weber's suggestion that these are disenchanted, including religion, "that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means." Everything is rational, accountable, and technical, science and academic knowledge of course but also religion. The course explores the conditions of disenchantment and the possibilities for scientific reason and technical rationality. But it especially attends to multiple possibilities of enchantment, in religion but especially secular enchantments in art and literature, everyday life, fairies, spirits, magic and myths, in short to the many ways in which the earth exceeds accounting.
Other
Semester Offerings
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