PHIL 317R/601R: TRANSCOLONIAL FIGURATIONS
[ALLEN]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Figurations of transcolonial whore and the impact
of multiple articulations of whoredom on diasporic thematizations
of nation, race, class will be the focus of this course. We will examine
wanton, slattern salvages of histories, bodies, spirits, salvages
which loosen and, in so doing, critically reposition europologic postcolonial
discourse. How do whorish transactions with anti/neo/post colonial
discourses reconfigure those accounts? The class will emphasize recent
transdisciplinary and mixed genre writing, artistic productions and
activist practices.
FORMAT: Requirements include class participation and short exercises.
This is a discussion centered class. Class members are expected to
arrive on time with readings and exercises completed. Two 10-page
projects or combinations of writing and artwork.
BOOKS: To be determined.
PHIL 403E/540F: SOCRATES PLATO PAIDEIA
MIMESIS
[PREUS]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Education and imitation are persistent and paradoxical
themes is Platos s dialogues. How does Socrates educate if he claims
not to know anything? How can Plato condemn representation while he
represents Socrates philosophical practice? In addition to the REPUBLIC
and the PHAEDRUS (central texts for this course), we will read selected
dialogues from the entire corpus. Students should have completed Philosophy
201 or equivalent.
FORMAT: Seminar, Oral presentations, two quizzes, term paper including
prospectus, draft & revisions.
PHIL 413/550C: HEIDEGGER
[DILLON]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Entire course to be devoted to a careful reading
of Being and Time.
FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion. Seminar presentation. Term paper and final
exam.
PHIL 433/507: EPISTEMOLOGY
[GOLDSTEIN]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: A study of a variety of claims with respect to
the nature of knowledge, its acquisition and justification. Our point
of departure will be the careful examination of a number of books
representing different standpoints in philosophy, in general, and
theory of knowledge in particular.
FORMAT: Students will be expected to participate in class discussions,
submit seminar papers and submit a term paper which will be due during
the last week of classes.
BOOKS: To be determined.
PHIL 456A/608W: NATIONALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
[PENSKY]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Examination of current debates in political, ethical,
social and legal theory organized via the terms nationalism and cosmopolitanism.
Topics of special interest include: the resurgence of nationalism
in the context of globalization; normative and legal dimensions of
contemporary nationalism and nationalist movements; nationalism, cosmopolitanism
and democracy; questions of national, cultural, multicultural, diasporic
and fragmented identities; normative dimensions of citizenship status,
emigration, and asylum; cosmopolitanism and moral universalism; normative
and political dimensions of cosmopolitan law; the discourse of universal
human rights and cultural difference.
FORMAT: To be determined.
BOOKS: Authors include Immanuel Kant, Homi Babha, Georgio Agamben,
Etienne Balibar, Jacques Derrida, Bruce Robbins, Pheng Chui, Michael
Walzer, John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Axel Honneth,
Yel Tamir, Will Kymlicka, Bhiktu Parek.
PHIL 480S/550D: PHILOSOPHY OF LEIBNIZ
AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT
[ZINKIN]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This class will be an in-depth study of Leibniz's
philosophical corpus. Topics will include: philosophy of language,
philosophy of science, logic, metaphysics and theodicy.
FORMAT: To be determined.
BOOKS: Readings will also include those who influenced Leibniz and
those whom he influenced, such as: Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Mallebranche,
Newton, Kant, Russel, Rescher, Heidegger, Hacking, and Deleuze.
PHIL 488F/646A: WHAT BODIES CAN DO
[ROSS]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course is organized around Spinoza's suggestion
that we do not know what bodies can do, and perhaps may never know.
Bodies, human and other, that protrude, extrude, touch each other;
bodies that break apart and come together, in motion and rest; bodies
that act, and feel, that move, strike other bodies and are struck;
bodies that assault and wound other bodies, that caress and care for
other bodies; sexual, erotic, engendered bodies, human and other;
productive and reproductive bodies; bodies in the flesh; wrinkled,
colored, rainbow bodies; desiring, pleasurable, fascinated and fascinating
bodies; solid, corporeal, gossamer, airy bodies; bodies that ooze,
excrete, vomit, throw up, throw out; bodies that think, imagine, dream,
that mean and sign; bodies of work, bodies of knowledge, textual bodies,
bodies of law, political bodies and bodies politic; material surfaces,
grids, planes, folds, assemblages of inscription; corporeal forces,
linkages, energies, mechanics; bodies that live and die, fight and
resist, that suffer disease and pain, inspire and expire; all that
bodies can be and do, perhaps including whatever humans, and animals,
and other creatures and things can be and do. And more. Throughout,
issues of materiality will be examined in ethical and political terms,
pursuing the possibility of another understanding of ethics and politics
in relation to corporeality. A recurrent theme of the course will
be to explore ecological issues, especially relations between human
beings and the earth, in corporeal terms. Approximately one-third
of the semester will be devoted to a small number of historical texts
defining the European tradition's understanding of human, animal,
and material embodiment, including some quite non-traditional texts
and readings. The rest of the course will be devoted to contemporary
attempts to think of corporeality in different ways. Half the course
will examine contemporary feminist writings approaching bodies in
terms of issues of gender, race, culture, their interrelations and
intersections.
FORMAT: Each week: one hour lecture each week to all students, graduate
and undergraduate; one hour lecture discussion meeting with all students;
one hour discussions with undergraduate and graduate students separately.
BOOKS: To be determined.
PHIL 608V: ARENDT: THE HUMAN CONDITION
[BAR ON]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The Human Condition is considered to be
Arendt's most philosophical work, though she herself did not see herself
as turning to philosophy until much later in her life, seeing herself
at this point as still doing some kind of practical political theory.
It is in this spirit that we will engage with this work, examining
Arendt s narration of modernity and its problematic reconfiguration
of the spaces of politics both as a description and and intervention,
hence as offering both analytical categories and ethico-political
perspectives that at times are fused together.
FORMAT: To be determined.
BOOKS: Our readings will take us into detours into others of Arendt's
works when these can help with the interpretation of The Human
Condition, but our attention will stay with The Human Condition.
ARTH 552C/PHIL 604F: ADVANCED WORLD OF
AFRICAN ARTS
[NZEGWU W 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: A major but little discussed contribution of Africa
(and other so-called Non-Western cultures) to global art is the principle
of multidimensionality . On this model to global art is the principle
of multidimensionality . On this model, creative expression is rarely
constrained by the compartmentalization of artistic media and artistic
profession that characterized and shaped European art since the influence
of the craft guilds in the 15th century. Under the ideal of multidimensionality
, an artist can be many things at the same time: sculptor, architect,
musician, dramatist, poet, and either priest/priestess, farmer, teacher,
or bureaucrat. As a social being, primarily, an individual unproblematically
elaborates his or her identity in many possible ways according to
choice. This course looks at a contemporary society in which this
historic mode of creativity and principle of creative expression occurs.
It strives to articulate the particular cultural logic of multidimensionality
, and the social dynamics that facilitates the contemporary manifestation
of this mode of artistic production. Through examining the character
of forms produced by a select number of contemporary artists, we shall
highlight the specific cultural issues impacting on art as well as
the sociopolitical conditions of creativity and identity formation.
FORMAT: Seminar, presentation, and term paper.
ARTH 503A/COLI 535C/ENG 593S: DOCUMENTARY,
DISCIPLINE AND THE STATE
[TAGG 2:50-5:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: "Documentary": a familiar enough term, anchored
it is for us in the public-service side of entertainment and, especially,
in certain practices of photography and film, but, in its historical
emergence, "documentary" was a cross-over genre that trespassed also
on the novel, on travel writing, on journalism, on forms of sociological
report, on radio, theater, advertising, on mural painting, and on
public sculpture. We would have to work to recover this striking proliferation.
And this is only the first indication of how much we have to do to
grasp documentary's historical specificity. It is not just a question
of "the classic realist text." This seminar will map documentary strategies
and their rhetorics of recruitment into a specific cultural formation
that coalesced amidst a liberal-democratic, corporatist response to
the economic, political and cultural crises of the 1930s . What we
have to deal with is the cultural strategy of a particular mode of
governance a strategy of management of meaning, of identity, of social
democracy at a moment of deep structural crisis. Though that is not
to say we can do this without also tracing other converging histories:
of documentation and discipline; of record cards and filing cabinets;
of new formations of state power and new technologies of representation;
of decisive changes in the machinery of social consent, compelled
on the liberal-democratic state by the systemic crisis; and of our
overdetermined investment in pictures of misery, the power of horrors
and the pleasures of the paternalistic agaze. It is also not to deny
that to propose a "history" of documentation is only, in a sense,
to redouble the problem, since the formation of History as a discipline
was itself inseparable from the development and institutionalization
of a regime of evidence, a technology of truth and an apparatus of
documentation.
ARTH 573A: POSTCOLONIALISM AND CULTURE
[KING M 5:20-8:20]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Recent years have witnessed an explosion in writing
on colonialism and postcolonial criticism, initially in the field
of literary studies, though now across the whole range of the humanities
and social sciences. Since the publication of three Readers' in postcolonial
studies in 1994/5 it has become impossible to keep up with publishers'
offerings. How do we explain this phenomenon? How does it relate to
alternative theorisations of the contemporary world? Postmodernism?
Postmilleniumism? Postcommunism? In this course we will examine some
of the key texts in this corpus of writing (in English/literary studies,
geography, sociology, anthropology, art history, philosophy - among
others), interrogate the conditions which have given rise to it, and
especially, address those texts which bring a critical postcolonial
perspective to bear on issues of urbanism, space, and architecture
as well as cultural studies more generally.
FORMAT: Weekly seminar of participatory nature requiring attendance,
regular readings, reading reports, and presentations. Grade allocated
on basis of attendance, oral and written reports, and contribution/participation
discussion.
COLI 517E/ENG 565B: MODERNISM AND THE
OBJECT
[GARBER T 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Modernism, early and late, is obsessed with objects.
Objects stand at the center of Modernist practices and concerns, from
issues of epiphany and the structures of consciousness (Surrealism)
to issues of essentialism (Edward Weston) to studies of the nature
of language (Gertrude Stein and Dada) to connections of thought and
thing (William Carlos Williams). In particular objects are major subjects
in Modernism's research on the nature of relation: How does one address
an object? What kinds of relation are possible? What kinds of community
emerge from such relation? Is there a Modernist rhetoric of the object;
i.e. what does Modernism do with the object as a trope? We shall take
up as many of these issues as time permits. After a look at Romantic
prefigurations (Emerson) we shall look at Cezanne as a point of beginning
for Modernism on these issues. We shall deal at some length with Rilke
(some prose and the Dinggedicht), Gertrude Stein (Tender
Buttons), William Carlos Williams' lyrics ("no ideas but in things")
and a number of photographs, still and moving by, among others, Edward
Weston, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. We shall put particular attention
on the movement of these issues from Modernism to Postmodernism.
FORMAT: Class will be a mixture of lecture and discussion. Each student
will do a presentation on these and related issues. A seminar paper,
maximum of twenty pages, will be due on the last day of class.
COLI 541A/ENG 655D: JOYCE, ULYSSES
[GADDIS ROSE M 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Close reading of the greatest 20th-century Western
novel with an English-language matrix. Familiarity with Dubliners
and Portrait of the Artist is assumed. Participation in Finnegan's
Wake dependent upon the pleasure of the group. ULYSSES in the
context of the novel, Anglo-Irish literature, and comparative literature.
To be considered, if not answered: did Ireland provide the 20th century
also its greatest English-language playwright (Beckett) and poet (Yeats)?
COLI 572/TRIP 572: TRANSLATION WORKSHOP:
LITERARY
[GADDIS ROSE TR 11:40-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Specialized workshop training students to translate
literary works from foreign languages to English.
FORMAT: Individual tutorials, group sessions as needed. BOOKS: M.
G. Rose, ed., Translation Horizons: Beyond the Boundaries of Translation
Spectrum (Translation Perspectives IX). PREREQUISITES: Fluency
in foreign languages and effective expression in English. The workshop
is geared to graduate students although undergraduates may be admitted
with the permission of the TRIP Director.
COLI 573/TRIP 573: TRANSLATION WORKSHOP:
NON-LITERARY
[GADDIS ROSE TR 11:40-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Specialized workshop training students to translate
from fields dependent upon translation (e. g., cross-cultural scholarship,
international affairs, world trade, etc.) from foreign languages to
English.
FORMAT: Semi-weekly 1 1/2 hour group sessions.
BOOKS: M. G. Rose, ed., Translation Horizons: Beyond the Boundaries
of Translation Spectrum (Translation Perspectives IX).
PREREQUISITES: Fluency in foreign languages and effective expression
in English. The workshop is geared to graduate students although undergraduates
may be admitted with the permission of the TRIP Director.
COLI 574C/HIST 501M: THE HUMAN AND THE
INHUMAN
[FYNSK/HAVER T 4:30-7:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The aim of this course is to probe the limits
of the concept of "the human" to seek a usage of the term exceeds
the parameters of modern humanism and to define the exigency of recourse
to a term such as "the inhuman" for defining dimensions of modern
experience. We will have recourse to authors such as Blanchot , Foucault,
Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, Lyotard , and Rosenzweig , and we hope
to integrate discussions from contemporary philosophy of science.
The course should serve to complement (and interrogate) the new Humanities
initiative in Comparative Literature, the "Program for Fundamental
Research in the Humanities"-- an initiative to which all interested
parties are invited, human and other.
COLI 574I/ENG 572D/WOMN 480T: COMPARATIVE
FEMINIST CRITICISM
[BRINKER-GABLER M 4:30-7:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will analyze topographies of history,
memory and dreams in women's cultural productions.
FORMAT: This course will be conducted as a seminar.
BOOKS: TBA
COLI 590: MASTER'S PROSEMINAR
[LEVINSON TBA]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Students partake in weekly discussion groups concerning
the Master's exam, the state of the humanities today, teaching, writing,
to be directed by various faculty members.
COLI 690: PHD PROSEMINAR
[LEVINSON TBA]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Students partake in a weekly discussions on literary/theoretical
themes, the state of humanism, and interdisciplinarity , but also
on dissertation writing, the job market, conferences, and on job opportunities
for Comparative Literature Ph.Ds outside the Academy.
HIST 501D: THE MAKING OF THE AFRICAN
DIASPORA
[PATTERSON M 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION; This is a graduate course which examines and builds
on previous efforts to devise a theoretical framework and/or conception
of history that treats the African diaspora as a unit of analysis
and situates it squarely within the context of world history. We are
especially interested in the historical construction of the African
diaspora; the development of a diasporic identity and its social,
cultural, and political manifestions ; the contributions of black
migrant/colonial intellectuals to re-thinking the modern West; the
continual reinvention of Africa and the diaspora through cultural
work, migrations, transformations in communications, and the globalization
of capital. Conceived as part of a broader scholarly endeavor to develop
an Atlantic Studies framework, this course is as concerned with the
creation and evolution of a diasporic paradigm useful for students
with little or no background in African American history as well as
for students interested in global history.
FORMAT: Discussion. Critical essays and presentations. BOOKS: (tentative
list) Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery; Holt,
The Problem of Freedom; Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making
of a Black Radical Tradition; Du Bois, The World and Africa;
Mintz and Price, The Birth of African American Culture: an Anthropological
Perspective; Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil; the Muslim Uprising
of 1835 in Bahia; Thompson, Flash of Spirit: African and Afro-American
Art and Philosophy; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.
HIST 532E: DE-CENTERING THE U.S.IN HISTORY
[SHAH W 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar explores that would happen if historians
did not presume that the American people or the U.S. state were the
privileged subject of historical inquiry. Would we think of time,
space, place and people differently? What would the concepts be that
would govern such a history? We will pursue recent scholarship which
is no longer satisfied with either the territorial imagination that
contained the meaning of "America" within official borders of the
nation, or the imperative toward consensus that melded into singularity
multiple histories, languages, identities and cultures. The course
foregrounds the critique of Asian American, Chicano and African American
studies, as well as feminist and queer studies scholars to raise questions
about commerce and global capitalism; citizenship and belonging; empire
and colonial modernity; sexual subjectivity and affiliation; political
formations and state ideologies; migration and cultural diaspora;
and borders and boundaries. In attending to a history from below and
beyond, we will examine theories of power, subject formation and historical
practice and representation. And we will reckon with how the making
of personhood in modernity has collapsed individual identity with
nationalism through the State and communities.
FORMAT: TBA.
BOOKS: TBA.
SOC 621: NATION-STATES, SEX AND MODERNITY
[SANTIAGO W 10:00-1:00]
DESCRIPTION: Exploration of conflictive process whereby modernity,
the state and, national identities emerged as class-based, sexualized,
and racialized constructs. Historical specificities , socioeconomic
contexts, disputed sign systems, East-West and North-South differences;
linkages among the social body, physical bodies, and the body politic;
current theories on the relationship among the state, economic structures,
and other power relations; examples of the mobilization capacities
of nationalism, racism, ( hetero ) sexism, and the various forms of
identity politics responding to these hegemonic discourses in various
instances of state formation.
MASS 523/LACAS COLI 523: FOLK AND POPULAR
EDUCATION
[LUGONES M 5:50-8:50 p.m.]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Different theories and practices of folk education.
Comparison and connection of Antonio Gramsci 's and Paulo Freire 's
work. Examination of relationship between folk education and radical
social change. Focus on folk education movement in Latin America and
in communities of color in the U.S.
Spring
2000 Courses |Fall
2000 Courses|Spring
2001 Courses
