Course Descriptions

PIC 504B/ARTH 400/500: Body City Text [McDonough M 9:40 – 12:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar will examine the intersection of these three terms through the paradigmatic experience of modern city-dwellers. How has urban form isolated us within our bodies, and what opportunities has the city presented for escape from the body-prison? And how have these experiences been recorded, been “given body” in a variety of innovative textual forms? Several readings will orient our inquiry: the experimental diaristic writings of Rousseau, Rétif, Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Barthes.

PIC 540B/COLI 535T: The Cause of Thought [Haver R 4:25 – 7:25]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The cause of thought is at once the experience of the provocation of thinking (for thought does not cause itself), and the object of a difficult affirmation. From the perspective of our contemporary culture of (entirely justified) political despair, when real subsumption has seemingly rendered thinking useless, perhaps impossible, we will approach the questions and possibilities of that experience and affirmation through readings drawn from Deleuze and Guattari, Jean-Luc, Alain Badiou, and perhaps others.

PIC 540C/COLI 541S: Sartre and De Beauvoir [Gaddis Rose M 1:10 – 4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), two of the most eminent 20th-century French philosophers, continue to intrigue readers as postwar dramatis personae. All seminar participants will have some shared readers from Sartre’s and De Beauvoir’s fiction and drama, but participants should expect to make individual reports on other works from these writers’works.

PIC 550S/COLI 574G/PHIL 460P/550P: Spinoza’s Voice [Ross M 3:30 – 6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: A course on Spinoza, primarily a reading of his Ethics, but including some of his political writings; also including readings of his work by philosophers who have been deeply influenced by his most extreme and radical side.
Spinoza was excommunicated as a heretic in his lifetime and has always been regarded as a heretic. In this course we will attempt to understand why and to revel in his heresies.
Students are responsible for 15-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 30-minute presentations at a class miniconference at the end of the semester, presenting a joint reading of a small part of Spinoza's writings with and in relation to a reading inspired by Spinoza (not a commentary).
Each presentation is to employ and present materials from the following tangible, material, and expressive modalities and media: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell; painting, sculpture, music, drama, dance, film, photography, dress, body ornamentation; images, sounds, aromas, textures; etc. etc.

PIC 550T/COLI 480U: Irigaray [Brinker Gabler W 3:30 – 6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The course will focus on the ground-breaking work of one of the essential thinkers of our time. It will concentrate on key works across the fields of philosophy, linguistics, spiritualism, arts and politics.


PIC 550K/PHIL 460H/JUST 480H "H" William James [WEISS M W 10:50 - 12:20]
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.

PIC 606V/COLI 592: Proseminar in Comparative Literature [Brinker Gabler T 1:15 – 4:15]
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 603A/PHIL 480T/666K : Consciousness, Science, & Religion [DIETRICH M W 2:20 - 3:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Consciousness, Science, and Religion are quintessential human properties. Which is odd because they are in such conflict. Science and religion clash: they make different and substantial claims about the world. Though it tries, science cannot explain consciousness. And yet consciousness is necessary for both science and religion. In this course, we will examine this unhappy, tripartite partnership. Our texts will be very new philosophy books on consciousness and it place in the universe, and the scientific explanation (i.e., atheistic explanation) of religion, which may or may not actually work, to put it mildly.

PIC 608T PHIL 456K/Political Theory: Radicalism and Conservatism [WEISS M W 8:30 - 9:55]
: Comparative study of the two "wings" that have dominated our political culture since at least the time of the French Revolution. Though texts have not been finalized at the time of this writing, my tentative plan is to concentrate on contrasting views concerning the alleged "universality" of the West and allied questions about the legitimacy of "imperialism."

PIC 616F/MASS 552: RACE AND HISPANIC CARIBBEAN PEOPLES [Jimenez-Munoz R 10:05-1:05]
: Past and present contexts of how race has been experienced among peoples in and from the Hispanic Caribbean. Broad historical settings and socio-cultural circumstances of the question of race. Racial identities, questions of gender, class and sexuality in Caribbean and U.S.

PIC 612B/TRIP 573: Translation Workshop: Literary [Arrojo T R 11:40 – 1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: COMING UP SOON.

PIC 612C/TRIP 573: Translation Workshop: Non-Literary [Arrojo T R 11:40 – 1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: COMING UP SOON.

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 620B/AFST 483E: Black Autobiography: Africa, African American, Caribbean [Okpewho T R 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 622B/COLI 574M/LACS 576/PHIL 480U/640M: Latin American Philosophy [Lugones M 3:30 – 6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: COMING UP SOON.

PIC 645L/AAAS 486E/AFST 481C/COLI 574N/PHIL 480Q/647L/WOMN 412C: Narratives of Survivance [Allen M 3:30 - ]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Emergent diasporic and feminist narratives, drawn primarily from Recent African and Asian visual productions, literatures, and theorizings, will be the focus of the class. Motile debris, the residue of post-, neo-, and trans- colonial implosions, scatters everywhere, not into a collection of readily identifiable categories, but into a fractious gnawing at the marrow of contemporary life. Ever in relation to memory and vast forgetting, omissions, burials, and denials, the course will examine the critical implications and promise of narratives that persistently erode predictable parameters, that inhabit transborder flows, unstable dimensions, gelatinous intervals and glossy strands. Such chancy narratives, animated by the gravitational push, or pull, of borders, longings and luminous habitations, are themselves pierced with incongruous linkages and the ambiguity of unknown error. Do such entangled narrative forms render ecologies of survival?

PIC 655D/COLI 574E: The Event [Levinson W 1:10 – 4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The "material base," once viewed as the name for the site that resists representation and appropriation, has recently yielded to the notion of "singularity" or "the event." Taking advantage of the 2006 publication in English of Badiou' s Being and Event (to be examined in detail), we will study this phenomenon through a reading of Heidegger' s Ereignis, Kristeva' s notion of trauma and depression, Lacan' s idea of missed encounter, Derrida' s "it comes," Ranciere' s ruminations on aesthetics, Virilio's "landscape of events," and three recent essays on September 11: Does that date constitute an event? We will also scrutinize a series of short stories.

PIC 649A/COLI 535G/PHIL 480S/655A: The Enchantment of the World [Ross W 3:30 – 6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world." (Max Weber)
Some say our times are characterized by modernization, globalization, perhaps postmodernism. This course will begin with Max Weber's suggestion that these are disenchanted, including religion, "that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means." Everything is rational, accountable, and technical, science and academic knowledge of course but also religion.
The course will examine the conditions of disenchantment and the possibilities for scientific reason and technical rationality. But it will attend far more to possibilities of enchantment, in religion but also secular enchantments in art and literature, everyday life, fairies, spirits, magic and myths, in short to the many ways in which the earth exceeds accounting.
Among the topics to be considered are the following: modernity, modernization, globalization; postmodernism, postrationality; ecology and ecological philosophy, magic, superstition, wizardry, witchcraft, illusion, mystery; spirituality, religion, monotheism, paganism, the death of god; aesthetics, images, literature, language, virtuality, simulacra; science, academic disciplines, knowledge, truth, methodologies; orthodoxy, heterodoxy, marginality, aporia, heresy; inspiration, creativity, intoxication, passion, frenzy, madness, love; the caesura between reason and unreason, disenchantment and enchantment; above all the wonder and abundance of the earth, in exposition: exposure, expression, calling; aisthesis, mimesis, poiesis, catachresis, techne; image, aesthetics, beauty, art; performance, presentation.
Among the authors we may read are the following: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weber, Adorno, Habermas, Levinas, Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Nancy, Blanchot, Bachelard, Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Certeau, Bataille, Bonhoeffer, Altizer, Hamilton, Dubuisson, Eliade, Berman, Griffin, Merchant, Vattimo, Calasso, Spelman, Berry, Whitehead, Dewey, Buchler, Brennan, Nagarjuna, Haraway.
This course will explore the production and expression of enchantments of all kinds, together with reflections on them, again of all kinds. Materials will be drawn from philosophy and religion, east and west, north and south, arts and aesthetics, cultural studies and feminism.
Students are responsible for 15-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 30-minute presentations at a class miniconference at the end of the semester.
Each presentation is to employ and present materials from the following expressive modalities and media: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell; painting, sculpture, music, drama, dance, film, photography, dress, body ornamentation; images, sounds, aromas, textures; etc. etc.

Other Semester Offerings