Course Descriptions

PIC 550N/PHIL 460M/550L: Nietzsche and Bataille
[Weiss TR 10:05-11:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Nietzsche (1844-1900) celebrates the Dionysian "witches' brew of sensuality and cruelty" or (as the idea evolved) "the will to power." All life is excessive, violative, self-surpassing. The problem is to "sublimate" these potentially destructive forces, and above all to transmute them into art. Bataille (1897-1962) was strongly influenced by these Nietzschean ideas, and explores them in a detailed study of taboo, excess, eroticism, transgression and death ritual. This course will be preoccupied with this nexus of concepts and issues.

PIC 604H /ARTH 484D/574G: Foundations of Urban Studies
[McDonough F 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course aims to orient students to some basic issues the social life of cities and the building of cities. It is not a survey of urban sociology; rather, it is a more in-depth of three key themes that all engage the social with the material: 1) spatial narrative, the relation between urban space and time; 2) nature and practice, the dialectic between nature and city; and 3) dramaturgical space, the reenactment of place through everyday theater.
The course explores the following problems: public life and public space; the characters that inhabit the cities and their practices; the public realm conceived as a theater; memory and place; spatial narrative; movement and velocity; bodily experience and built form; crowding and subjective agency; exposure and the domestication of the public sphere; and city as habitat versus city as picture.

PIC 604J/ARTH 480B/580B: Thinking Photography
[Tagg T 4:25-7:25]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This year marks twenty-five years since the collection Thinking Photography was first published, as a challenge to the presiding orthodoxies of photographic practice and photographic criticism. The occasion is being marked by a major international conference--evidence, perhaps, of how much the field has changed and of the surprising role in this of one relatively slim book. This seminar will take this book as its object, pull it apart and then try to glue it together again. Working collectively to pool our research, we will re-examine its contents and its contributors, relocate it in its peculiar moment in the cultural politics of Britain and France at the end of the 1970s, and ask whether it is still serviceable as a model for the possibilities of the new field.

PIC 605B/PHIL 458G/544D: Evil in the History of Philosophy
[Zinkin MW 2:20-3:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will survey a range of theories of privacy, publicity and their relation to each other from Aristotle's time to the age of the Internet. Readings will include, Aristotle, Smith, Kant, Mill, Arendt, Habermas, Kripke, and Anita Allen.

PIC 606M/COLI 541A/480D/WOMN 480A: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, and Post-Impressionism
[Gaddis Rose M 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The works of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), isolated and lonely, sometimes psychotic, albeit a part of a close-knit support group, can be read both in isolation or in counterpointing her heady environment. This seminar will use Woolfs novels and essays as a focal points of the Bloomsbury luminaries in the intellectual and artistic life from 1914 to 1941, especially in England but also in the U.S. and on the continent. Familiarity with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse is assumed.

PIC 606N/ COLI 517M/331M/ENG 566P: Transnational Modernism I
[Brinker Gabler T 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: With a focus on some "century cities", Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Dublin, New York, the seminar will explore theories of modern society, urban spaces, and Modernist cultural practices. Selections from Nietzsche, Simmel, Weber, Benjamin, R. Williams, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Wilde, G. Stein, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Th. Mann, Rilke, Worringer, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Benn, Walser and Joyce. There will be special attention to relations between visual and verbal modernism, and the (dis)juncture of modernism/ postmodernism. This is the first course (including works until World War War I) of a series of two. The second course next semester with a focus on the "century avant-gardes" will discuss movements and works after World War I.

PIC 606V/COLI 592: Proseminar in Comparative Literature
[Haver R 4:25-7:25]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The seminar is organized around five questions. 1. Is there an epistemological object that might be the determination of comparative literature as a discipline? 2. Is the putative disciplinarity of comparative literature a methodological possibility? 3. Is the possibility of comparative literature given by the fact of a shared sensibility, or an affective being-in-common? 4. Is comparative literature's only question the question of its own possibility? 5. Is comparative literature perhaps a historical, social, political, practice?

PIC 609A/Phil 480E/640K/Coli 574F: Self, World and Other
[Ross W 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An exploration of the self (a certain self, a certain kind of self), self identity, and subjectivity from within the critique of the autonomous individual and (Western) subject, including some of the following: self as agent, person, individual, human being, consciousness, ego, I (Locke, Kant, Hegel), body (Grosz), animal, cyborg (Haraway); self in society, self in nature, self in culture; ecological self, economic self; the constitution of the self by: selfknowledge (Plato), care (Foucault), friendship (Aristotle), possession (Locke, Kant, Hegel), love (Irigaray), the other (Levinas), nothing, without qualities (Nietzsche, Buddhism), production (Spinoza, Marx, Deleuze & Guattari), materiality and corporeality (Spinoza, Marx), performativity (Butler), the curse (Bataille), shattering, sharing, singularity (Nancy), subjectivity (Kant, Hegel, Levinas), beingthere, beingthrown (Heidegger, Nancy), beinghere, responsibility (Levinas, Derrida), responsivity (Whitehead), language, exposition, expression, diffirance (Freud, Levinas, Lacan, Derrida), itself (Whitman), experience (Hume, Dewey, Kant), others (Levinas), disaster (Blanchot), death (Plato, Heidegger); the gendered self (Freud, Irigaray, Griffin), self in world (Griffin, Heidegger, Spinoza); shattered self (Nancy, Glass, Daniel), empty, selfless self (Buddhism), endless self (Hinduism), produced self (Marx, Badiou), material self (Marx), worldly self (Spinoza, Deleuze & Guattari, Nancy, Griffin), nomadic self (Deleuze & Guattari), pragmatic self (Dewey, James), postmodern self (Nancy, Derrida), postcolonial self (Bhabha), nonWestern self (Japanese, African), hybrid self (African American, Asian American, EuroAsian), expressive, responsive self.
Course Syllabus

PIC 612D/TRIP 580A Introduction to Translation Studies Survey
[Arrojo W 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An introduction to the main questions raised by translation studies as an independent discipline, and an examination of the relationships it has established with other disciplines such as linguistics, literary theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

PIC 616B/PHIL 456D/608A: Critical Theories of Race
[Tessman T R 10:05-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: We will begin this course with some history and sociology, looking at race and racial politics in the United States from the 1960-1990s, and we will read a few important pieces of writing on race from the late 1960s, 70s and early 80s. After that, we will focus on more recent scholarship that critically analyzes the concept of race, with an emphasis on how race and racism operate in the United States. The course will include a consideration of some of the widely different approaches taken by critical theorists of race, covering topics such as: theorizing multiple oppressions together, the status of race as illusory, real, and/or constructed; the politics of identity and the value or disvalue of racialized identities; "political race" as a response to racism; the dominance of the black-white paradigm in the United States; critical theories of whiteness; the strategies of resistance tied to different conceptions of race and racism.

PIC 620B/AFST 483E: BLACK AUTOBIOGRAPHIES-- AFRICAN, AFRICAN AMERICAN & CARIBBEAN
[Isidore Okpewho TR 4:25-5:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course has two basic objectives. One, it seeks to understand the logic and nature of autobiographical statements. Why do people write autobiographies: Is there anything in their lives or experiences they honestly think other people may learn from? Are they trying to justify their lives and defend its course? Is the autobiographical statement an unqualified truth, or an embellishment of truth at varying degrees? Two, the course takes a careful look at the peculiar circumstances of autobiographies produced in black societies with histories of domination, racial and otherwise. What do they have in common with standard Western autobiographies, and what are the noticeable differences between them? We begin by examining a few theoretical positions on the subject of autobiography, then concentrate on a selection of such statements: personal and family accounts from the African oral tradition, testimonies of enslavement and emancipation, and more recent life histories. Besides a couple of films that will be shown, this course will be based largely on group presentations of focused texts and open class discussion. Undergraduates will write two papers (one midterm and one final, both take-home), while graduate students will develop one research paper from a list of optional topics.

PIC 621B/ARTH 441B/503D: Early Orientalizing
[Karen Barzman M 9:40-12:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar maps 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, the focus is 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.

PIC 645J/AFST 481G/COLI 608T/PHIL 647K/WOMN 412B: Porosity, Migration, Implosions
[Jeffner Allen M 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: How to unsettle the bundles of relations that shape transcolonial and feminist narratives of migration? The course will emphasize non-insular circulations, unpredictable practices, and a complex diversity of interpretative pulse.
Drawing upon selected works from recent diasporic African and Asian literature, theory, and artistic production, the class will navigate volatile and, perhaps, intimate spacings, minute openings, elastic uneven interlacings, mutations of codes, strings of relational clusters that scratch, loop, collide. Class discussions will traverse transdisciplinary processes, the representation of non-synchronous histories and movements, incommensurable sites, cross-generational cultural attachments.

ENG 566R Prison Literature and Theory
[Hames Garcia TR 2:50-4:15 ]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course is intended as an exploration into several interconnected themes. These include the centrality of the experience of incarceration and struggle against the prison-industrial complex for literature and theory produced by people of color in the United States. This exploration will begin include a careful look at recent theories of the prison and work on race and law by contemporary legal theorists. This course will also attempt to investigate the relations between gender, race, class, and sexuality in a variety of texts insofar as they address questions of justice, freedom, solidarity, and social protest in America during the last 40 years. This organizing principle allows the productive juxtaposition of texts that would normally never be considered side-by-side. Additionally, it allows for a realization of the centrality of prisons to the American experience, a realization that is often obscured by the very nature and function of prisons.
ENG 593: Literature of Asian Diasporas
[Lisa Yun F 9:00-12:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The class will examine cultural and racial formations, with emphasis upon perspectives about or by peoples of Asian descent from multiple geographies (all assigned texts will be in English language). Cultural identity and its manifestations in the matrix of global and local economies will be addressed, with particular attention to coloniality and creative alliances. Readings include novels, autobiography, testimony, historical background, as well as works of hybrid and experimental forms. Theory readings will come from postcolonial, gender, race/ethnic, and diaspora studies. Theoretical, critical, creative, and interdisciplinary approaches will be utilized.

Other Semester Offerings