Course Descriptions

PIC 504/ARTH 451D/COLI 574Q/PHIL 480M/504: Art, Interpretation, and Culture
[STEPHEN DAVID ROSS MW 1:10-3:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: A course concerned with art in relation to lived experience and its surroundings, especially with: (1) possibilities of developing a general understanding of art and the limits of any such understanding; (2) ethical-political issues pertaining to art and aesthetics; (3) relations between art and truth, art and nature, art and philosophy; (4) images, figures, sounds, stories, gestures, performances in human experience: the cacophony of the world as aesthetic phenomenon; (5) the world as image, the expressivity of things, the irrepressibility of mimesis, poiesis, aisthesis, catachresis. The course will trace important historical and contemporary European writings, supplemented by materials from other traditions, together with recent discussions that confront the tradition in the names of feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and environmental aesthetics.
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.
The course will be based on my anthology, Art and Its Significance, 3rd edition, State University of New York Press; plus supplementary materials available for copying.

PIC 550C/PHIL 413: Heidegger
[MARTIN DILLON TR 4:25-5:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Entire course to be devoted to a careful reading of Being and Time.
FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion. Midterm exam (undergraduates only). Seminar presentation (graduates only). Term paper and final exam (both undergraduates and graduates.)

PIC 550C/COLI 574O/PHIL 550M: Foucault
[BRETT LEVINSON W 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION:

PIC 604A/AFST 385E: The African American Heritage in Poetry and Jazz
[ISIDORE OKPEWHO TR 4:25-5:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course traces the parallel development of two art forms that enable us to explore African American history by way of its cultural achievements. Essentially, we shall read the poems, hear the songs and the music (in CDs and tapes), and watch the videos that trace the growth of black poetry and jazz through the key moments of black history. The aim of the course is to understand the intersection of artistic forms as they reflect the social and political climates around them. Special attention will be given to the contributions of African American women to these art forms as well as the growing phenomenon of "jazz poetry." In this seminar course, students will be encouraged to shape and articulate their individual as well as group responses to the poetry and the music. Graduate students taking the course should expect to do, as a final paper, a substantial and wellresearched treatment of a key theme as revealed in the arts of a chosen era: e.g., through an exploration of the careers of at least one poet and one jazz musician.

PIC 604C/ARTH 500: Theory and Methods
[BARBARA ABOU-EL-HAJ W 2:20-5:20]
COURSE DESCRIPTION:

PIC 604F/ARTH 441E: Race and Religion in Renaissance Art
[Karen Barzman M 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar focuses on the figuration of self and other in Renaissance art (1300-1700), with particular emphasis on notions of difference that turn on race and religion. Proceeding by case-study, students will examine representations of "others" (Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Black Africans, and indigenous peoples of the "New World"), in an on-going discussion of the formation of identity at the local level and at the level of the state. Centers of artistic production will include Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia from the Ottoman and Mughal Empires to China.

PIC 606E/AFST 363: The African Novel
[ISIDORE OKPEWHO TR 11:40-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Course will explore development of the novel in Africa both historically and thematically. On one hand, we shall trace formal growth of genre, beginning with its emergence from oral narrative traditions of the continent, through its attachment to certain European trends and techniques, to its present achievement in blending various traditions (African and nonAfrican) in articulation of key problems in contemporary African socio political life. On the other hand, we shall examine some of the key concerns that have engaged one generation of writers after another: e.g., confrontation with European presence, critique of postcolonial leadership, Apartheid, and the place of women in African society.
FORMAT: This course will be based partly on teaching and partly on group presentations by students. Regular class attendance is mandatory and will count in the overall assessment. There will be one midterm and one final examination: each is a takehome paper of at least 10 pages in length. Graduate students taking this course will be expected to submit a substantial, well researched final paper on a chosen issue from the course.

PIC 606L/COLI 531G: THE ANGEL OF LITERATURE: Literature and Philosophy in the work of Ingeborg Bachmann
[GISELA BRINKER-GABLER M 4:40-7:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION:

PIC 608E/ENG: Representing Viet Nam
[WILLIAM SPANOS]

PIC 612B/TRIP 572: Translation Workshop: Literary
[ROSEMARY ARROJO 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.

PIC 612C/TRIP 573: Translation Workshop: Non-Literary
[ROSEMARY ARROJO 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.

PIC 612D/TRIP 580C: Computer Assisted Translation
[ROSEMARY ARROJO W 9:00-12:00]

PIC 612E/COLI 541B: Translation and Fiction
[ROSEMARY ARROJO M 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The main interest of the course is to reflect on how some exemplary works of fiction (by Kafka, Borges, Poe and Calvino, among others) deal with issues of originality, translation and interpretation, and how they treat translators and readers. We will also be reading a few seminal texts on the relationships that can be established between origin and reproduction, as well as between authors and readers, by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Derrida, Barthes and Foucault. Texts will be read either in the original or in their English versions. Format: Lectures and general discussion based on weekly readings that will be previously assigned. Students will be expected to give short presentations on a regular basis and to write a research paper on an agreed topic. Some books: J. L. Borges (Collected Fictions), Kafka (The Complete Stories), Poe ("The Oval Portrait" and "The Gold Bug"), I. Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler). A complete list of readings will be determined later.

PIC 615E/AFST 436: Globalization, Democracy & Development
[DARRYL THOMAS TR 4:25-7:25]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The overriding objective of this course is to examine the forces of globalization, the current wave of democratization and transitions that are challenging the nation-state in the Developing World. We will explore the globalization processes in the political, economic, and cultural arenas. We will compare and contrast the current era of globalization with the past experiences in the Developing World, including divergent waves of colonization and decolonization. This course will examine the forces of democratization and the extent that Developing Countries are making the transition to democracy or another era of authoritarianism. We will compare and contrast the different regions in the Third World.

PIC 616B/PHIL 488H: Critical Theories of Race
[LISA TESSMAN TR 1:15-2:40]

PIC 622D/COLI 480L/691L/LA&C 622: In Between/Multiple Knowledges in a U.S. Latino/a Voice
[MARIA LUGONES T 4:25-7:25]
COURSE DESCRIPTION:Nepantla is a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio, land in-between. Nepantleras and nepantleros cross worlds, "facilitate passages between worlds,"(Anzaldua, Keating, 2002, p.1) inhabit liminal spaces as if they were homes--always unsafe homes. In this seminar we will visit with gente de entre medio who know multiple realities because they live in between, because they cross back and forth: queers, hybrid talkers, bridge builders (coalition makers), seers of the processes of subjectification, and of the processes of cultural resistances to intermeshed oppressions. Popular culture as "contemporary practice that involves the indissoluble, nonlinear and noncausal relationship between past and present, memory and desire" (Fabian, 1998) is the terrain where we seek these knowledges in the company of interpreters who themselves move among people who inhabit many worlds.

PIC 622E: Latin American Liberation Philosophy Today
[ENRIQUE DUSSEL (March 31-May 9) W 3-6:30, R 4:25-7:25]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: We will examine the conditions, in Latin America, of the appearance of the Philosophy of Liberation in the sixties; its first expressions (such as Para una étuca de la liberación latinoamericana [For an ethics of Latinamerican liberation] as well as other works by certain of the members of this philosophical movement that suffered, in the seventies, harsh persecution and exile. We will also examine later changes in socio-political content and in popular and indigenous movement in Latin America, along with the works that accompanied this development from the sixties until the end of the century. This course will cover the theoretical paradigm of Philosophy of Liberation and its fundamental categories in relation to the social sciences in the cultural horizon of Latin America.

PIC 636A/AFST 487B/COLI 691N/PHIL 480N: Studies in Colonialism
[NKIRU NZEGWU T 10:05-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Colonialism is a complex of ideas. It is about wielding power over others; it prescribes conditions of reality; it deploys assumptions about others, and it treats as substantive certain presuppositions about the kind of the relationship that should hold between people. This course looks at and raises the following questions: What is the central philosophy of colonialism? What sorts of human and social vision does this philosophy embody? What does it say about the nature and character of reality? And what was the role of Western philosophy and philosophers in the project of colonialism? Using the critiques of the project of colonialism, this course undertakes a critical study of the imperializing moments in theories of knowledge.

PIC 643A/COLI 331B: Public Enemies
[WILLIAM HAVER R 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An attempt to think what is at stake in political violence insofar as it exceeds its instrumentality; an attempt to think, therefore, of what is at stake in what is denounced as "terror." The first half of the course will be devoted to reading a few reflections on political violence and terror by Girard, Arendt, Benjamin, Derrida, Fanon, Clastres, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari. The second half of the course will be devoted to an examination of documents relating to Jean Genet's political involvements with Zengakuren, the RAF (Baader-Meinhof), the Black Panthers, and above all with the Palestinians. Course Requirements: Attendance, participation, seminar paper on a relevant topic.

PIC 645D/AFST 381M/COLI 691K/PHIL 317T/601S/WOMN 317S: Desirous Writing, Transcolonial & Feminist Risks & Volatilities
[JEFFNER ALLEN M 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Risks and volatilities of transcolonial and feminist writing--unpredictable practices of writing, oscillating visual oral and written narratives, the interactive collisions of complex diversities and incommensurable sites--will be the focus of the course. Abundantly desirous writing, how might it be attentive to instabilities, uncertainties, and surprising heaps of concepts? Might volatilities pierce and thereby reposition a horizonal narrowness of europologic certainty? Currently, is desirous writing at risk? The class will emphasize recent transcolonial and feminist transdisciplinary theory and literature, mixed genre writing, artistic productions, and activist practices.
Readings may include texts such as Kamau Brathwaite, LX the Love Axe/1: Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic, Anna Keating and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.
Requirements: Class participation, exercises and presentations, two projects.

PIC 647C/PHIL 480L/657A: Multiculturalism and Anthropology
[ALEJANDRO DE ACOSTA R 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course concerns what can be learned about forms of social organization through methods related to ethnology, and the criticisms that have been leveled against such forms of knowing. We will begin by reading some criticisms of the anthropological gaze as a colonial and imperial project, primarily from North and South American indigenous perspectives. Once we have a grasp on that criticism, we will risk an entry into what seem to me to be some of the best texts by anthropological writers, ones which seem to be animated by something other than a colonial project even if their methodology can still come under vigorous critique. We will address questions of location and dis-location, methodology and style, the survival of endangered knowledges and ways of life, and political engagement. Texts tba, but will likely include all or portions of: Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society; "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism", Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians; Society Against the State; Archeology of Violence, Alphonso Lingis, Abuses; Dangerous Emotions; Excesses, Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse, Marta Weigle, Creation and Procreation, Fernando Coronil, The Magical State, George Devereux, Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry, Winona LaDuke, All Our RelationsNotes from A Native Son, Subcomandante Marcos, Shadows of Tender Fury

Other Semester Offerings