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GRADUATE
COURSE OFFERINGS
List
of Courses
PIC 550J/PHIL 409/550J: Nietzsche [Dillon] Course Descriptions
PIC 550J/PHIL 409/550J: Nietzsche What we cannot remember we must not forget. In Plato, souls return to life after drinking in the river of forgetfulness (Lethe). In Heidegger, truth is unforgetting (a-lethe), and forgetting is constitutive of Being. This course explores what it might mean to take unremembering as constitutive of remembering--to take forgetting, oblivion, loss as ineradicable, constitutive conditions of meaning, of identity and becoming, of affirmation, promise, and revelation. Inevitably, the course will touch on most of the following: memory, truth, secrecy, inheritance, genealogy, posterity, national identity, time, writing, art and literature, history, forgetting, trauma, death, loss, disaster, truth and reconciliation, mourning, repetition, place, promise, transfiguration; and will consider the works of many of the following as well as others: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, Heidegger, Whitehead, Levinas, Levi, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Proust, Morrison, Soyinka, Armstrong, Scarry, Csordas (Winker), Bhabha, Blake. 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. PIC 608J/AFST 422/PLSC 422: Black Politics in America [DARRYL THOMAS TR 4:25-5:50] COURSE DESCRIPTION: The central concern of this course is to critically examine how and why that the 20th century’s African American struggle for both civil and human rights had their origins in the post-Reconstruction era as these New World Africans began devising innovative strategies to challenge their political, economic, social, and racial subordination. It compares and contrasts a range of strategies including bourgeois reformism, divergent forms of Black Nationalism, with Pan-Africanism, and the global black radical projects undertaken during the first and second Reconstruction eras by such leaders as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Monroe, Trotter, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, James Weldon Johnson, C.L.R. James, and George Padmore among others (Post-WWII era: A. Phillip Randolph, DuBois, Paul Robeson, Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., James Baldwin, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ella Baker, Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, etc.) as they engaged American policymakers on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts. Through an examination of African Americans contestation and engaging of Globalization, Democratization, and Empire from the contested Presidential election of 1876 to the recent disputed 2000 Presidential election and its aftermath we can analyzed the divergent strategies employed by this non-state actor to change the set of unequal power relations within the United States and to transformed the power relations and structures that governs human rights practices, racial capitalism, and global apartheid international regimes supported by the U.S. during divergent waves of globalization and democratization. In this context the African American experience will be analyze in comparison with the Latinos, Asian Americans, Irish, and other ethnic and minority groups. This course will engage both the scholarly and policy discourses and literatures on pluralism, democracy, ethnicity, race, class, gender, globalization and empire. PIC 608L: Space, Place, and Displacement [MARIA LUGONES M 6:30-9:30] COURSE DESCRIPTION: The seminar will begin with a focus on the production of imperial, capitalist space and its relation to the spatial locatedness of the production of unfreedom. The process of abstraction is ocular centric and requires the neglect and repression of those sensual knowledges that are auditory, tactile and olfactory (Mary Pat Brady). We will turn against the spatiality of unfreedom through concreteness and embodiment, in the sensual recreations of space. Place-lugar-has been a name for the subjectivity of spatiality, whether individually or collectively inhabited, named, traversed. Liberatory places are most often produced, interpreted, conceived inside embodied collectivities. The seminar will also investigate the many forms of displacement that have marked histories of oppression, of survival, of liberation. Importantly we will consider how the third world has functioned as a metaphorical margin for European oppositional strategies, an imaginary space, rather than a location of theoretical production itself.(Kaplan critiquing Deleuze and Guattari.) "This kind of othering in theory repeats the anthropological gesture of erasing the subject position of the theorist and perpetuates a kind of colonial discourse in the name of progressive politics. The production of sites of escape or decolonization for the colonizer signals a kind of theoretical tourism." (Kaplan) Displacement-whether forced or voluntary (the voluntariness always itself forced)--has also been a crucial "location" for metamorphosing from within unfreedom. Authors we will read include E. Glissant, M.P. Brady, C. Kaplan, E. Soja, H. Lefebvre, J. Wolff, D. Massey. PIC 608M/PHIL 456A/608N/AAAS 486C: Human Rights [AMI BAR ON W 1:10-4:10] COURSE DESCRIPTION: The primary question that motivates this course is whether there can be a politically viable conception of human rights. To be viable the conception has to be perceived as practicable and therefore not utopian in its assumptions and demands and it has to be open to multiple local or culturally based interpretations since the international community is culturally diverse. What kind of conception of human rights can meet both of these criteria? This course critically examines texts from and about the Western, Muslim, and Buddhist ideas regarding human rights in an attempt to understand the possible elements of a generalized conception of human rights as well as its current and future ethico-political efficacy given the present historical conjecture. PIC 612G/TRIP 580A/COLI 580A: Survey of Translation Theory [MARILYN GADDIS ROSE M 1:10-4:10] COURSE DESCRIPTION: A survey of translation theory as it evolved. Focus on Western translation theory from the Bible through benjamin, but theories beyond the Western tradition will be entertained. Seminar format. PIC 640B/ENG 674B/410B/COLI 608E: Edward Said [WILLIAM SPANOS TR 11:40-1:05] COURSE DESCRIPTION: Examines the major critical writing of the late Edward W. Said: Beginnings; The World, The Text, and The Critic; Orientalism; The Question of Palestine; Covering Islam and Culture and Imperialism. Taking their point of departure from his notion of "contrapuntal reading," students attempt to work out what he means by Orientalism, "the exilic consciousness," secular criticism," "post-colonialism," "the migrant" and "structures of attitude and reference" -- all terms that have become crucial to contemporary theory and literary criticism. Inevitably, they also confront his controversial views on Palestine and Islam. In addition to these texts, they read a couple of novels about which he has written -- possibly, Austen's Mansfield Park, Kipling's Kim and a couple that pertain to the question of imperialism, possibly Forster's A Passage to India and Conrad's Nostromo. The critical orientation they take is broadly post-structuralist, since Said, despite his reservations, was deeply influenced by such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida. PIC 645G/AFST 480N/COLI 691A/ENG 572Y/PHIL 480G/601V/TRIP 580D/ WOMN 312B: Diasporic Imageries [JEFFNER ALLEN M 3:30-6:30] COURSE DESCRIPTION: 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 not as standing in an essentialist relation to a definitive locale, but as heterogeneous historical processes of formation and narrative practice, perhaps without universalization or uniformity of communication. Yet, if there is not a 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 interstitial zones of translation in which the fractures and contradictions of a postcolonial moment trace time, space, subjectification, corporeal image, sexuality, and violence often, though not always, as exceeding the grasp of categories and out of reach--adrift. Questions to be raised include: 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. This may include new Brazilian cinema, the sonic work of Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), literature of the Maghreb, and writing by Dionne Brand. PIC 647A/AFST 482B/ENG 593J/COLI 574C/SOC 690H/WOMN 412A: Ideologies of Black Creativity [NKIRU NZEGWU M 9:40-12:40] COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will explore contemporary aesthetic, political, economic and social issues of Africa through films and relevant readings. According to current estimates, the Nigerian movie industry now produces more than 400 movies a year. In the last two decades, African filmmakers have examined themes from witchcraft, slavery, colonialism, anticolonial strategies of resistance, conflicts between modernity and tradition, emigration, sexuality, and the role of women in African societies. Watching these videos raises complicated questions about social identities and the nature of contemporary realities in Africa. What is the notion of tradition in Africans' imagination? How do contemporary Africans view Africa and their own cultural heritage? How do they view themselves and their values in the context of the globalized world? Videos will include selections from Nollywood producers, Haile Gerima, Ousmane Sembene, Martin Mhando and Ron Muluihill, Joseph Gai Ramaka, Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, Christian Onu, and Tunde Kilani. PIC 655B/COLI 608D: Deleuze's Dissertation [WILLIAM HAVER R 1:15-4:15] COURSE DESCRIPTION: A reading of three major texts (two of which constituted Deleuze's dissertation): Difference and Repetition, Expressionism in Philosophy (on Spinoza), and Logic of Sense (on Alice in Wonderland). We will also look at collateral texts as dictated by our readings of these major works. Undergraduates admitted if space is available, and with the permission of the instructor. Course Requirements: As this is a seminar, attendance, reading, and participation are required. Also required is a substantial essay at the end of term.
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