Course Descriptions

PIC 550A/PHIL 416/550F/: Seminar On Merleau-Ponty
[MARTIN DILLON MW 12:00-1:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Survey of major works by the French existential phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Prerequisites. Three courses in philosophy, including at least two of the following: Phil 107 - Existentialism & Phenomenology, Phil 116 - Philosophy & Literature, Phil 201 - Plato & Aristotle, Phil 202 - Descartes, Hume, & Kant.
FORMAT: Lecture/discussion. Midterm exam (Phil 416 only) (1 hour), seminar presentation (Phil 550U only), final exam (2 hours), term paper (10-15 pages).
BOOKS: To be determined

PIC 550K/PHIL 460H: William James
[DONALD WEISS TR 10:05-11:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Philosopher, physician, psychologist, and religious apologist, William James is perhaps the most radically challenging of all American thinkers. In this course, we will read his most famous works, including The Will to Believe, and The Varieties of Religious Experience.
FORMAT: Three or four papers; no exams
BOOKS: Above

PIC 550L/PHIL 456T: Art and Morality: The Contemporary Relevance of Kant's Critique of Judgment
[MELISSA ZINKIN T 6:00-9:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will involve both a careful reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment and a more general discussion of issues that this book raises for contemporary aesthetics. Topics will include: Judgments of Beauty and their relation to social class. Genius and the role of the artist outsider. The sensus communis: aesthetic judgment as the ground of a political community. The relation between sensitivity to art and morality. The sublime and the postmodern. Readings will include, Kant, Hume, Arendt, Lyotard, Bourdieu, Adorno, Ginsburg, Heidegger, Guyer.

PIC 606J/AFST 483C: Comparative Epic Poetry
[ISIDORE OKPEWHO TR 4:25-5:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Reading of 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. Begins 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). Concludes with two texts Sunja and The Ozidi Saga from African oral tradition that are gaining attention in studies of world literature. Open only to seniors. A few juniors may be admitted with consent of instructor.
FORMAT: After a few introductory lectures on the nature of oral epic and aspects of its performance, the texts are shared out among students to lead the class in open discussion.

PIC 606M/COLI 541D: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot
[MARILYN GADDIS ROSE M 1:15-4:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) has survived controversy, censorship, even translation. Virginia Woolf thought it should not have been published; T.S. Eliot thought it changed the English-language novel forever. This seminar will study Ulysses in juxtaposition with Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) and Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922), all as early monuments of Modernism.
FORMAT: informal lecture and discussion. Annotated bibliographies and oral reports required of all participants; seminar "papers" may be traditional papers or creative projects.
Texts: any edition will suffice. Recommended: Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 1989, $26.95.

PIC 606N/COLI 332M/COLI 532 M: Modernisms I
[GISELA BRINKER-GABLER M 4:40-7:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An exploration of some experiences and experiments of 20th century literature, art and theory, with focus on movements like Cubism, expressionism, dadaism and surrealism, some shorter works of different genres: essays, short stories, novellas, lyrical dramas, letters, art criticism, manifests. There will be specific discussions e.g. on the relationship of women and modernism(s), the relations between visual and verbal modernism(s), and the (dis)juncture of modernism/postmodernism.
In this first course of a sequence of two the focus is on the turn of the 10th/20th century and the early 20th century. The second course, following in Spring, discusses movements and works after WWI.
BOOKS: TBA

PIC 606P/COLI 322W/522W/WOMN 380W: Modern Women Writers
[GISELA BRINKER-GABLER W 4:40-7:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Within an overview of the work of twentieth century women writers and artists the course will focus on the work of a few key figures of the generations born in the end of the nineteenth century, the beginning of the twentieth century respectively. Of particular considerations will be: the role of women artists and writers in the establishment of Modernism; the counter traditions to Modernism established by women writers and artists revisioning and dialoguing with received poetic and artistic forms, as well as questions of voice and vision in the representation of gender and sexuality, and the creation of a feminist canon in literature and art. Students will give in-class presentations, write response papers and a final exam.
Autors and artists will include: Ch. Perkins Gilman, L. Andreas-Salome, Gertrude Stein, Moderssohn-Becker, Kollwitz, Alexandra Kollontai, Colette, Nella Larsen, V.Woolf, I. Keun.

PIC 608F/ARTH 482D/550E: Cultural Strategies and the State
[JOHN TAGG T 4:25-7:25]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In a crucial sense, the very concept of "culture" is born with the nation state: its theorization at the beginning of the nineteenth century turns on the question of the constitution of the nation state and the levels at which it can be claimed to emerge and cohere. But, if "culture" constituted the imaginary of the nation state, then the state has in turn not hesitated to appropriate culture, mobilizing more or less planned cultural strategies, especially at times of crisis when its very cohesive fabric has been threatened. Is this the same, however, as saying, as Althusser did, that culture is an apparatus of the state--an ideological state apparatus? How else might we understand the relation between new formations and institutions of the state, their machineries of capture, and the development and deployment of new cultural technologies, new genres of cultural production, new forms of rhetoric, and new regimes of representation? What, too, of the role of the state as promoter and regulator of a burgeoning and profitable image industry, including its negative and normative function as censor, but also its adjudication of cultural property? And what of the state's posture as patron and preserver of Culture, often through quasi autonomous national government agencies that present themselves as operating outside the state's domain? Such extensions of official and quasi-official authority imply new and more pervasive forms of state power. Does the state, however, possess the monopoly of power to which its claims of sovereignty pretend? What of the non-state or fomations of power irreducible to the state? Oh yes, and do we even talk of resistance any more, let alone revolution? Pursuing such questions about the implication of culture and the modern state will require us both to analyze specific historical conjunctures and cultural strategies and to engage theoretical debates about the formation of the modern state, the non-state, power and representation, the state and subjecthood, machineries of recruitment and capture, and the imaginary structures of identification and consent. If you want the reasurance of a list of names here, then you could start with the ususal suspects: Althusser, Foucault, Clastres, Deleuze and Guattari, Zizek, Laclau. The seminar will take the form of 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. Seminar members will produce a research paper on an agreed topic closely related to the themes and debates of the seminar.

PIC 608G/PHIL 508: Contemporary Continental Political Philosophy
[BAT AMI BAR ON W 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: While set up to survey some of the most pertinent texts in contemporary continental political philosophy, this course, nonetheless, puts forward a few specific questions regarding the conceptualization of politics post Marxism and in an era of post-modern globalization. Of special importance are questions regarding the critique of the political present, the possibility of democracy, what it implies, and the social ontology it presupposes.

PIC 615F/SOC 690H: Global Black Movements, 1760-2001
[WILLIAM MARTIN and MICHAEL WEST T 7:00-10:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Examines the world-wide ebb and flow of black movements, from the age of revolutions and related anti-slavery struggles, through anti-colonial and panafrican movements, to the black 1960s and contemporary, postcolonial, black movements. Particular emphasis is placed on identity and linkages across oceanic and continental boundaries.

PIC 615G/AFST 480C/PHIL 480U/657A/WOMN 480N/COLI 691E: Theories of Globalization
[NKIRU NZEGWU M 9:40-12:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
We will explore various theories of globalization beginning with but going beyond Samuel Huntington's thesis on the clash of civilizations. In striving to unlock the mysteries of globalization, we will study the nature and character of McWorld, the rise of illiberal democracy, the decline of the nation state, and the rise of barbarisms.

PIC 615H/ENG 673M: Globalization of American Culture
[WILLIAM SPANOS TR 11:40-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION:

PIC 615I/SOC 690J: Global Neoliberalism
[KELVIN SANTIAGO ]
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This seminar examines how and why the principal world-systemic shifts within core spaces/ populations and peripheral spaces/ populations during 1970-2000 cannot be adequately understood unless they are studied relationally, as interconnected processes in the historical long-term: core spaces/ populations have experienced the uneven dismantling of the welfare state's social wage, even as peripheral spaces/ populations have experienced the jettisoning of development programs, features which have marked anti-systemic struggles at both ends of the global spectrum. Particular emphasis will be placed on trying to figure out why racially-depreciated laborers inside and outside the geographical core have been among the main targets of these global structural adjustments leading to the expansion of more coercive forms of labor regulation for the majority of the world's laboring population.
Prerequisites: none

PIC 616C/ENG 555D/COLI 535U/LACAS 480L/616/WOMN 480L/AFST 481D: Race and Sexuality
[MARIA LUGONES & MICHAEL HAMES-GARCIA W 5:50-8:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will address critical theories of race and sexuality, with an eye toward their intersections with each other and with class, coloniality, gender, and ethnicity. A central question will be how theorists have thought about the study of culture in relation to the construction of race and sexuality. Additionally, emphasis will be placed on models of thinking about race and sexuality in resistance to historical and continuing structures of oppression.

PIC 621B/ARTH 441F/503B: The Making of Orientalism
[KAREN-EDIS BARZMAN W 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar focuses on the emergence of western representations of difference (racial, sexual, cultural, and religious) that turn on notions of exoticism, violence, and excess. Drawing on text and image, emphasis will be placed on the diffusion of increasingly fantasized types associated with areas to the east and south of Europe ("the Turk," "the Oriental Jew," "the Gypsy," "the Moor"), from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance (when "the Orient" consisted primarily of Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East) through the period of transition into modernity, when "the Orient" became more expansive. Weekly readings will provide information on the ongoing social, commercial, diplomatic, and military encounters among peoples and states in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East as we examine the role of representation in the discursive production of "the Oriental" in its various figurations. For term papers, students may choose to work on modern or contemporary representation.

PIC 631A/ARTH 483C/530C: Medieval Spain: Frontier Culture Convivencia?
[BARBARA ABOU-EL-HAJ M 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: We will explore the historiography of cultural exchanges among Jews, Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain. Using documentary sources and scholarly literature, we will examine the social and historical circumstances that stand behind the disputed histories of these diverse populations, and the institutions that circulated ideologies that form the basis for these contested views. We will equally examine their visual and spatial representation in painted manuscripts, in sacred and secular architecture, and in sculpture.

PIC 645E/PHIL 480U/649D/WOMN 480J/AFST 482F/COLI 574C: Transcolonial Figurations, Feminist and Diasporic Oscillations
[JEFFNER ALLEN M 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Motile debris, the residue of implosions of post-, neo-, and transcolonial narratives, not into a collection of readily identifiable categories, but into a fractious gnawing at the marrow of contemporary life will be the focus of the class. Dehiscent, chancy narratives, animated by the gravitational push, or pull, of borders, longings and luminous habitations, may persistently erode predictable parameters. We will examine the unstable dimensions--gelatinous intervals, transborder flows, slight movements among motley tangles, surfaces, and glossy strands--which such narratives elicit.
Amid incongruous linkages and the alluring ambiguities of unknown error, do transnational diasporic and feminist figurations render urgently flimsy ecologies of survivance? Ever in relation to World Bank literature and the lacunae, burials, omissions, eclipses and denials, memory and vast forgetting of the colonial archive, the sonic whirr, or fluttering of the intra- and trans- spaces of these narratives, will be a primary area of discussion.
The class will emphasize recent transnational feminist and diasporic mixed genre writing, artistic productions, and activist practices. Transdisciplinary productions in varied mediums, the book, the internet, video, street protest, film, etc., will be taken up not as one subordinated to or folded into the other, but as enmeshed without duplication in the oscillations between.
Texts: TBA
Note: key theoretical, literary, and visual texts by African diasporic writers and by writers of the Caribbean are central to the course.

PIC 646B/PHIL 480P/646A/COLI 691D/ENG 674N: Studies in Embodiment: What Bodies Can Do
[STEPHEN DAVID ROSS R 2:50-5:50]
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 war 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, political, and aesthetic 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: 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.

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