Course
Descriptions
PHIL 508: CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
[PENSKY TR 10:05-11:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An advanced survey course covering current trends
in political theory. The course will emphasize material from the last
ten years, and will range from contemporary liberalism through communitarianism,
discourse-based political theory and neo-Marxism. Anglo-American and
continental philosophical approaches are both covered. Topics include:
contemporary liberalism and its critics; theories of procedural and
deliberative democracy; current debates over cultural pluralism, democracy,
and "group rights"; political consequences of globalization. Authors:
To be determined. Course requirements: seminar participation and discussion
leadership, research paper.
PHIL 540G: GERMAN PHILOSOPHY FROM KANT
TO NIETZSCHE
[ZINKIN TR 1:15-2:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will examine the philosophical movements
in Germany in the 19th century initiated by Kant's Critical Philosophy.
We will focus on the topics of aesthetics, philosophy of history,
the nature of philosophical reason, and human freedom. We will study
German Idealism, Romanticism, and Dialectical Materialism. Readings
will include texts by Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Holderlin, Feuerbach,
Marx, Nietzsche.
PHIL 550G: KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE
REASON
[ZINKIN R 4:30-7:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will be a close reading of Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason.
PHIL 550J/COLI 574N: NIETZSCHE
[DILLON TR 2:50-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Survey of major writings with emphasis on the
topics of art, truth, and illusion.
FORMAT: Lecture/discussion. Seminar presentation; term paper (15 pages),
final exam (2 hours).
BOOKS: To be determined.
PHIL 601T/WOMN 480L: FEMINIST ETHICS
[TESSMAN M 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Feminists have engaged with traditional Western
ethical theory by critiquing it, borrowing from it, revising it, and-perhaps
most importantly-by creating new ethical theory motivated by feminist
insights and concerns. This course will focus on some of the most
current themes being developed in feminist ethics. Some questions
addressed will include: What does feminist ethics consist of, besides
an ethical consideration of feminist "issues"? How has feminism motivated
critiques of impartiality in ethics? Is "care" or "justice" (or both,
or neither) the best conceptual framework for feminist ethics? Does
the experience of oppression alter the possibility of moral agency?
Is moral character gendered, racialized, or otherwise related to socially
constructed categories of difference? Is there a set of virtues and
vices that should be of particular interest to feminists? How should
ethical considerations inform feminist politics, from a local to a
global level?
PHIL 605C: ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND POLICY
[LIGHT MW 3:30-5:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Topic: Ethical Theory, Human Needs, and Environmental
Values. From the start, environmental philosophers have argued that
whatever the characteristics of an environmental ethic it must be
non-anthropocentric (non-human centered). This course will examine
the growing challenge to that assumption and then inquire into the
scope and limits of a human centered environmental ethic which seeks
to avoid charges of speciesism . In particular, we will engage in
a critical investigation of those versions of weak anthropocentric
theories which claim to get the same level of environmental protection
as non-anthropocentric accounts. In addition to metatheoretical arguments
concerning anthropocentrism in environmental ethics, we will look
at particular extensions of this general type of theory to issues
involving the acknowledgment of obligations to future generations
and the use of economic instruments to insure environmental quality.
PHIL 608C/COLI 691C: IMPERIALISM, VIOLENCE,
REVOLUTION: ARENDT AND FANON
[BAR ON T 6-9]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: We live in a postcolonial age and are still struggling
with the complex legacies of modern imperialism and colonialism and
the resistances that they have generated. By situating the writings
of both Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon in the context of this "work,"
and reading them in nuanced dialectical tension with each other, the
course intends to create a productive exploration of (a) modern European
imperialism and colonial settlement, (b) their entanglements with
modern racism and nationalism, (c) the multiplicity of their effects,
(d) the revolutionary responses to them and their trajectories, and
(e) the problematics of oppositional violence.
PHIL 659C/COLI 535N/English 674D: RETHINKING
NATURE, REIMAGINING THE EARTH
[ROSS MW 1:10-3:20]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An exploration of nature and the earth, responding
to issues arising in the critique of metaphysics and scientific and
technological rationality, especially feminist and poststructuralist
writings, in environmental and ecological writings, and in contemporary
aesthetics and art. Nature in general, the earth (universe, world,
environment, being); the nature of things, what makes them what they
are (essence, substance, intrinsic qualities). Nature as intelligible,
rational, open to scientific investigation. Nature as animate: abundant,
teeming, growing, touching, embracing, caressing; frightful, dangerous,
risky, threatening; full of wonder, peace, radiance, and glory. Nature
as expressive: squawking, hissing, buzzing, howling, ringing, gurgling,
screaming, screeching, shrieking; calling, signing, pointing, questioning,
answering, writing, tracing, coding, marking, touching, inscribing,
imprinting; full of cacophony, sound and fury. Nature as essence,
form, substance, space, and time; nature as formlessness, interruption,
disruption, overwhelming. Nature as wildness, wilderness, beyond humanity;
nature as human settlement, dwelling, city, place. The nature of human
beings, animals, plants, and things, what makes them what they are.
The nature of things, always to be growing, changing, on the move.
A feature of the course is to approach nature in all these aspects
through the prisms of aesthetics and art, poiesis, techne, and mimesis,
through issues of representation, presentation, expression, image,
simulation, and imagination. What if art and aesthetics were not separate
from and inferior to the sciences in relation to nature? What would
that reveal of nature? What would that say of science? In return,
what might a truly ecological science say of nature, art, and humanity?
Half the course is devoted to writings that historically have defined
nature in the Western philosophical tradition, the rest to alternative
visions of the earth and humanity: dwelling, living, knowing, caring,
cherishing, building, writing, thinking, imagining; including environmental
aesthetics, ecological fiction, landscape, gardening, and place.
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.
Students are responsible for 10-minute presentations initiating small
group discussions, raising questions rather than supporting theses.
At least one such presentation is required at each discussion. Students
are also responsible for presenting ten-page papers at a class miniconference
at the end of the semester.
SOC 603: WORLD-HISTORICAL STUDY OF STRUCTURAL
INEQUALITIES, ECONOMIC EXPANSION, SOCIAL CHANGE AND CLASS FORMATION
IN THE PERIPHERY
[SANTIAGO-VALLES T 10:00-1:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Examination of conflicting, world-scale, and uneven
interconnections between the following processes from Early-Modern
Era to present century: (a) the rule of capital and asymmetrical expansion
of its multiple servitudes ; (b) the rise of Western domination and
of Occidentalist culture(s); (c) the invention and lived experience
of "race" as fundamental conflicting articulation of all other power
relations in general and particularly of various labor forms; (d)
the (hetero) normalization of propertied/bourgeois families and of
the gender/sex structures thus fabricated and authorized; and (e)
the proliferation of practices antagonistic to all such interrelated
patterns of social regulation.
FORMAT: Variable credit
SOC 627: SOCIOLOGY OF GLOBAL STUDIES
[MARTIN T 1:05-4:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Examines the emergence and transformation of theoretical
and institutional forms of studying the world beyond the borders of
Europe and North America. Includes examination of European and Asian
Orientalism, the rise and fall of area/international/development conceptions
and programs, and the ongoing exploration of alternatives-from world-system
perspectives to new forms of cultural and global studies.
FORMAT: Variable credit
ARTH 540F/MDVL 501F: GENDER/ART IN EARLY
MODERN EUROPE
[BARZMAN W 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar will take the form of a critical
review of the literature on gender and art in the early modern world.
We will read articles and essays from a variety of disciplines on
female artists and patrons; the construction of ideal femininity on
literature and art; the representation of women and various economies
of pleasure (both male and female); the use of images and objects
in the performance of gender as individuals entered the visual and
material fields of early modern culture.
FORMAT: Weekly reading assignments and discussions; seminar presentations
on research projects and final term paper.
ARTH 502A/COLI 574M: MARXISM AND REPRESENTATION
[TAGG T 4:25-7:25]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: One might say it was, in large part, an insistence
on foregrounding the politics of representation that marked the difference
between models of cultural politics prevalent in the 1930s and those
that emerged in the 1970s . What were the reasons for this insistence?
What theoretical, cultural or political shifts did it imply? Onto
what kinds of practice did it open? To what conditions or opportunities
did it respond and how adequate was it as a response? Clearly, more
than one route runs into the territory skirted by these questions,
but one, in particular, takes us back to a now unfashionable neighborhood
of theory that barely had time to benefit from its passing gentrification
before it was all but abandoned. Follow this path and you come to
the no-go areas and, some say, the haunted houses of Marxist Theory.
That's where I want to go. I want to revisit a number of once frequented
sites to which certain Marxisms used to lay claim, but which were
never settled. I mean the sites of totality, difference and the logic
of over determination; ideology, the subject and the fixing of identity;
commodification, fetishism and reification. What I want to stake out
here is the territory of "Marxism and Representation." And where better
to start, in the post-Cold War period of post-Marxism, than by returning
to some of the most extraordinary texts by Marx himself, in which
we shall have to follow both the systematic, containing rigors of
historicist law and the opening movements of one of the great decenterings
of modern thought. The seminar will be conducted as a structured reading
group, whose emphasis will be on the close analysis of specific texts
that will, however, be located in an unfolding argument, from week
to week. No prior knowledge of the literature or terminology will
be assumed, but a serious commitment to the reading program will be
essential.
ARTH 574A: SPACE, FORM AND POWER
[KING M 5:20-8:20]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Over the last ten or fifteen years, major paradigm
shifts have taken place in the way in which urban space, architecture,
and the larger built environment have been researched, written, and
read. This is not just in relation to so-called "Western" cities and
cultures but in cities worldwide, both historical and contemporary.
In many of these studies, undertaken in a variety of disciplines (urban
and cultural studies, planning studies, architectural history, anthropology,
urban and historical geography, sociology, literary studies) the emphasis
has been on a politics of space, the way in which power (as a social,
economic, political or even interpretative category) has been understood
and represented. In this course, open to graduates from all departments,
our aim will be threefold: to take a critical look at some of the
"classic" recent texts, both theoretical and historical, relevant
for an investigation of this these; to examine a selection of representative
recent monographs; and thirdly, to explore some of the newer journals
and periodicals which, through the papers and reviews they publish,
will help us build up a working bibliography of exemplary titles.
FORMAT: Assigned readings, reports on readings for each class. Grade
based on oral and written reports, participation, attendance.
COLI 574L: LACAN
[LEVINSON W 4:00-7:00}
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this class we will analyze portions of the
Ecrits, as well two complete Seminars (eleven and twenty, most
likely) so as to accomplish a pair of tasks: grasp the general movement
of Lacan 's project; and examine the historical, social, and political
importance of psychoanalysis.
COLI 531A: MODERNITY & GESCHLECHT II
[BRINKER-GABLER T 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar will explore configurations of Modernity
and Geschlecht focusing on the rich connotations of the German
term Geschlecht--sex, the feminine, species, descent, blood,
family, race. We will chart the landscapes of Geschlecht and
relate them to modernity focusing on the trauma of the Great War,
Modern abstraction and distortion, primitivism, culture and metropolis,
popular culture, flanerie and public space.
COLI 541A: MAJOR IRISH WRITERS: YEATS
TO O'BRIEN
[ROSE M 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Focused study of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Mary
Lavin, Seamus Beckett, Seamus Heaney, and Edna O'Brien to explore
George Moore's precept that being universal in the end requires being
parochial in the beginning. Individual projects on other writers such
as John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey, Flann O'Brien welcome.
BOOKS: Yeats, The Collected Poems; Lavin, In a Cafe;
Joyce, selections from Finnegans Wake (Viking, 1998); Heaney,
Beowulf; Beckett, Stirrings Still; O'Brien, James
Joyce (Viking, 1999).
TRIP 572/COLI 572: TRANSLATION WORKSHOP:
LITERARY
[ROSE TR 11:40-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Special training for students to translate literary
works, usually from a foreign language to English.
FORMAT: Individual tutorials, group sessions as needed.
TRIP 573/COLI 573: TRANSLATION WORKSHOP:
NON-LITERARY
[ROSE TR 11:40-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Special workshop training students to translate
from fields dependent upon translation (e.g., cross-cultural scholarship,
international affairs, world trade, etc.) Usually from a foreign language
to English.
FORMAT: Semi-weekly 1+ hour sessions.
COLI 574T: COMPARATIVE EPIC POETRY
[OKPEWHO TR 2:50-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this course, we shall read folk stories, from
various cultures, that center around heroes so as to see not only
what such stories (generally called epics) have in common but also
what they tell us about the societies they come from. We shall begin
with texts from the better known traditions: The Epic of Gilgamesh
(Sumeria [in present-day Iraq]), the Iliad (ancient Greece),
and Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon Britain). Then we shall conclude with
two texts (Sunjata and The Ozidi Saga from African oral
tradition that are gaining increasing attention in studies of world
literature. After a few introductory lectures on the nature of oral
epic and aspects of its performance, the texts will be shared out
between students to lead the class in open discussion.
COLI 691G/LACAS 691G: ON THE BORDER
[LUGONES M 4:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This is an interdisciplinary seminar on the spatiality of resistance to colonization. The space, figurative and literal is the border, conceived both as an intersection and as a limit.
We will read Emma Perez, Arturo Islas, Renato Rosaldo, Maria Patricia, Fernandez-Kelly, Vicky Ruiz, Jose David Saldivar, Gloria Anzaldua, Walter Mignolo, Juan Flores, Mario Garcia, Sonia Saldivar-Hull, Cherrie Moraga.
HISTORY 532T: RACE AND RACISM
[SHAH R 7:00-10:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Race has been a powerful force shaping the American
experience and a contentious, confusing concept in historical writing.
This course is not a general survey of race relations or racism in
the U.S. The primary objective is a sustained inquiry into the methodologies,
interpretations and explanations of race historically. As such it
is intended for those pursuing future research in the problems of
race and racism. The course will be grounded in the specific history
of the United States, but will also include material on other racial
formations and national sites (e.g. Canada, Britain, South Africa).
The reading will be multi-disciplinary, drawing particularly from
the emerging fields of social theory and cultural studies as well
as history, literary criticism, geography and sociology.
FORMAT: The seminar will depend on students' active and consistent
participation in class discussions. Each student will be responsible
for preparing a seminar paper (twice in the semester) that will involve
an in-depth and critical evaluation of the weekly readings. These
papers (5 single-spaced pages) will be distributed in advance to all
the participants of the seminar. The final assignment will be a critical
review essay (approximately 15-20 double-spaced pages) based on a
problem of the student's choice relevant to the course.
HISTORY 576D: POST-POLITICAL JAPAN
[HAVER M 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: What if the major questions of postindustrial
transnationalist capitalist societies are not so much questions of
this or that particular politics, as they are of the very possibility
of the political as such? In a world where traditional forms of political
organization and action are widely regarded as simply nostalgic, where
does one look for a "ground" of the political? On the assumption that
the political is too important to relegate to mere politics, we look
at the verbal texts and visual cultures in late 20th century Japan
that are more concerned to make the political happen than to define
a politics. Work by Mishima Yukio, the Arechi poets, Ota Yoko, Oshima
Nagisa, Tsukamoto Shinya, Imamura Shoehei, Kurosawa Akira, Murakami
Ryu, and others.
FORMAT: Seminar. Substantial paper required at end of term.
ENG 593B: ETHICS OF READING
[DESMOND T 5:30-8:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In a PMLA issue last year devoted to the "ethics
of reading," Lawrence Buell asserts: "Ethics has gained new resonance
in literary studies during the past dozen years, even if it has not-at
least yet-become the paradigm-defining concept that textuality was
for the 1970's and historicism for the 1980's." Buell goes on to identify
six different strands of the "ethical turn" in literary studies, and
he notes that it is a "Pluriform discourse." Ethics, as a philosophical
or literary category, is a confusing and often contested term. While
medieval literary theory generally understood reading to be an ethical
activity, the medieval concept of the "ethical" differs from both
ancient and modern understandings of the term. In addition, the discourse
of ethics as a philosophical concept "entails a necessary and principled
confusion" in the words of G. G. Harpham . In this course, we examine
the notion of an "ethics of reading" in ancient, medieval and modern
literary cultures: we will read philosophical texts (Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas, Levinas ), literary texts (Christine
de Pizan, Philip Sidney, Marquis de Sade) as well as theoretical discussions
of ethics (Martha Nussbaum, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Derrida,
Rey Chow). This course will approach the topic of the ethical turn
in literary studies as a multi-disciplinary issue, and students will
be encouraged to pursue this issue from their chosen disciplinary
positions in relation to literary or philosophical texts of their
choice. The course will be conducted as a seminar. Some particular
questions we will take up: is the contemporary interest in an "ethics
of reading" indebted to the medieval formulations of reading as an
ethical activity? Is it possible to formulate a feminist ethics of
reading despite the patriarchal assumptions embedded in the tradition
of ethics as a discourse? Are discourses of sexuality conducive or
resistant to ethic understandings? Ethics as a category is a western
construct; as a product of western, imperial culture, does ethics
have any viability as a concept in the global context of contemporary
cultures?
ENG 566C: REPRESENTING VIETNAM
[SPANOS TR 1:15-2:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The America media, newspapers, television networks,
Hollywood, and even educational institutions--the producers, that
is, of American culture in general--have been obsessed with the memory
of the Vietnam War since it "ended" 25 years ago. This obsession is
also true of the highly autobiographical American "fiction" coming
out of the Vietnam War. Guided by certain postmodern directives, not
least its suspicion of representation itself, this course will examine
some representative short stories and novels about the Vietnam War
in an attempt to answer the following questions: What lies behind
this insistent, unrelenting, and apparently unappeasable obsession
to represent the Vietnam War? And how is it similar or different from
its manifestation in the media? The course, therefore, will not be
"value free" in the sense of taking an "objective" or "impartial"
approach to this "fiction." Instead, we will read these texts, in
Walter Benjamin's phrase, "against the grain" in order to disclose
the ideological agenda hidden behind this obsession. Not least, we
will interrogate the paradox that this obsessive remembering of the
Vietnam War is simultaneously related to a deeply structured desire,
sometimes contested but more often not--going as far back as the origins
of the American national identity (the Puritan colonization of the
"new world"--to forget it. Or, as President George Bush put it in
the aftermath of America's "decisive" victory in the Gulf War, "to
kick the Vietnam syndrome." Texts will include: Graham Greene's The
Quiet American; Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War; Tim O'Brien's
Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the
Lake of the Woods; Michael Herr's Dispatches; Robert Stone,
Dog Soldiers, Gustav Hasford, Short Timers, Michael
Cooper, Dues, Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July,
Robert Olen Butler, A Good Sent from a Strange Mountain, John
Del Vecchio, The Thirteenth Valley
FORMAT: Lectures and discussion requirements: attendance; midterm
exam; final term paper addressing a significant question concerning
representation emerging from the course
ENG 593A: RESISTANCE & REVOLUTION, THEORY
& PRACTICE
[HAMES-GARCIA/YOUNG W 5:30-8:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In the aftermath of World War II, "third world"
nations--including China, Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria and Ghana--exploded
onto the world stage inaugurating the era of formal decolonization.
Orchestrated in many instances by a Western-educated, national bourgeoisie,
anticolonial movements of the 1950s-1970s were often characterized
by their ideological hybridity, an emphasis on the (re)invigoration
and political uses of culture, and an espoused concern (and often
identification) with the "voice"' and material conditions of the most
oppressed segments of society. Anticolonial movements on the world
stage were accompanied by nationalist struggles among indigenous peoples
in settler nations and among oppressed racial groups within the "First
World." Using theoretical texts, social histories, and testimonials,
we will explore the differing means and methodologies by which peoples
of color in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia defined
their struggle against Western cultural, political, and military imperialism.
Troubling the divide between theory and praxis, we will pay special
attention to the ways in which anticolonial theorists and activists
grappled with perceived (and real) dichotomies between the "first"
and "third" worlds, culture and politics, elites and working classes,
the industrial future and an agrarian past. Of critical importance
will be the ways in which anticolonialists reflected upon and reflected
the complicated relationship of intellectuals to political movements.
Readings will include works by Gloria Anzaldua, Amilcar Cabral, Angela
Davis, Frantz Fanon, Ernesto Che Guevara, George Jackson, C.L.R. James,
Rigoberta Menchu, and Mao Zedong.
Other Semester Offerings
