Interdisciplinary Seminars

K20.1038 Gender Outlaws
HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Christopher Packard

This course investigates the traditions of gender deviants: those who challenge codes defining masculinity or femininity. Students test contemporary gender theory against evidence gleaned from history, literature, film and their own observations of sissies and tomboys, eunuchs and hermaphrodites, androids and angels. What can we learn from those who defy gender norms? Why do definitions of masculine and feminine change over time and across cultures? How should the balance between biological determinism and social behavior be negotiated? Do historical figures like Joan of Arc, Catalina de Erauso, and Herculine Barbin establish a lineage for today’s social activism on behalf of transsexuals? Students can expect to write ethnographies of observed behavior as well as analyses of works by Plato, Chaucer, Woolf, and Goyen, and films like Bombay Eunuch, Paris is Burning, The Ballad of Little Jo, and The Brandon Teena Story.

K20.1049 Sexual Identity and Social Space
HUM, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Patrick McCreery

This course examines relationships between people’s sexual identities and the streets, homes, schools and workplaces they inhabit. We will study how sexual practices and notions of identity differ by culture and era, while paying particular attention to New York City’s history as a site of sexual expression, liberation, and oppression. These investigations will culminate in students producing observational field reports of the sexual characteristics of particular neighborhoods. The readings, from the fields of history, literature, and urban and queer studies, may include Walker’s The Color Purple, and essays by Judith Butler, Cathy Cohen, Jane Jacobs, Gayle Rubin and Michael Warner.

K20.1061 Literary Forms: The Craft of Criticism
HUM, 4 CR R 2:00-4:45 Sharon Friedman

Note: Open to sophomores, juniors and seniors.
This seminar focuses on the study of literature and literary criticism. Through close reading of a range of literary forms, including short stories, novels, plays, and narrative essays, we identify the conventions that characterize each genre and that invite various strategies of reading. In addition to the formal analysis of each work, we will consider theoretical approaches to literature—for example, historical, feminist, and psychoanalytic—that draw on questions and concepts from other disciplines. Attention will be given to the transaction between the reader and the text. The aim of the course is to encourage students to make meaning of literary works and to hone their skills in written interpretation. Authors may include Chekhov, Hawthorne, Wharton, Bellow, Beckett, Baldwin, Woolf, Morrison, Gordimer, and Erdrich.

K20.1063 The Meaning of Silence
SOC, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 M.-L. Achino-Loeb

In this course we will examine the meaning of silence from the perspective of linguists, philosophers, anthropologists and poets alike, all pointing to the understanding that silence is at the heart of speech, at the heart of power, and at the heart of intimacy. A survey of the anthropological approach to silence; a critical reading of Plato’s idea of knowledge and its repercussions on our categories of identity; and a comparative analysis of the myth of Orpheus, as it surfaces in different forms, will provide the backbone for our discussions. Because our topic can be amorphous, it will be necessary to ground it through a rigorous reading of the social science sources at our disposal and through a committed discussion of the literary texts. A willingness to do both is the first requirement for this course. Our readings will include Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Tannen and Saville-Troike (Perspectives on Silence), Plato (excerpts from The Republic) Trudgill (Sociolinguistics), Shanklin (Anthropology and Race), Woolf (A Room of One’s Own), Ibsen (A Doll’s House), Cocteau (Orphee), as well as material distributed in class.

K20.1081 Contemporary Aesthetics and Cultural History
HUM, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Elliott Barowitz

The objective of this course is to familiarize students with the major thinking in art theory from late modernism (c.1940) to the current time. Ergo, the course follows the history of modernism from its zenith to its drift and decay. It asks, did modernism mutate into the spectacle called postmodernism and is postmodernism the reverse side of modernism, or is it a wholly (holy) new mint? Literature, the visual arts and popular culture will be examined theoretically and analytically. The readings will include works by modernists—Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg; postmodernists—Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin, Jerome Kinkowitz; feminists—Laura Mulvey, Patricia Mellencamp, Judith Williamson; and others. Fine art, slides, photographs, advertisements and the films Vertigo, Modern Times, and Brazil will augment the written material.

K20.1082 Work in Historical Perspective
4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Nathaniel Frank

This course explores the historical relationship between work and identity as part of the struggle for dignity in a market economy. Focusing on the American experience, we begin with the Colonial history of the Anglo-American work ethic, addressing how the social and economic arrangements of labor have affected the quest for personal identity. We explore the conflicts between individual freedom and social obligation, need and desire, personal fulfillment and responsibility, social mobility and class boundaries, dominant views of success and the struggles of marginalized people to shape their own work lives. By addressing historical and philosophical conceptions of manual labor, business, intellectual work and the professions, we attempt to understand how labor became a central lens through which Americans comprehended their identities and the development of market capitalism and democratic culture. Readings include Locke, Marx, Jefferson, Emerson, Arthur Miller, Betty Friedan, Studs Terkel.

K20.1107 Belief and Skepticism
HUM, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Lisa Goldfarb

A tension between belief and skepticism marks literary, intellectual, and religious history. In this course we will examine how philosophers, writers of fiction, and poets build and try to uphold belief systems, and we will consider how they address the doubts that often force them to question their beliefs. We will also explore how, in some modern texts, writers who seem to have abandoned traditional structures address their continuing need for belief. Readings may include Augustine’s Confessions, Montaigne’s Essays, Voltaire’s Candide, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and selected poems of Auden and Stevens.

K20.1126 Culture and Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century and Beyond
4 CR R 2:00-4:45 Don White

The course traces the relationship between American culture and diverse world cultures. It takes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to foreign policy, exploring its dimensions not only in politics and government, but also in culture and ideas. Through literature, film, art, music, radio, television, and the Internet, the course examines some of the great world events of the twentieth century—the breakup of colonial empires, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the atomic bomb, Vietnam, and recent controversies. Although in the twentieth century the United States abandoned its role as a cultural colony and became a cultural metropolis, the aim is to compare the cultures and ideas of America with those of Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, as well as Native America. Readings include novels, best sellers, and cultural histories, e.g., Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations.

K20.1128 Bodily Fictions
4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Laura Ciolkowski

Freud once famously announced that femininity is a riddle and the female body is a problem. Some years later, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir insisted that the problem is not the female body as such but rather the fictions we produce about the body. In this course, we will focus simultaneously upon two kinds of bodily fictions: Works of literary fiction with the body as their subject; and the various social fictions and cultural representations of the body that are to be found in a wide range of scientific, sociological, and critical texts. Some of the key questions that will structure our work include: How has our understanding of male and female bodies been shaped over time? What does it mean to explore the body as a historical rather than a biological object? How do we define deviant bodies and which bodies get to count as normal? How does our understanding of the opposition between Nature and Culture structure our beliefs about gender and the body? Authors may include: Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Susan Bordo, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, and Joan Brumberg.

K20.1148 The Sublime: Transcendence, Terror, Theory
HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Bettina Carbonell

The sublime has long been a subject of philosophical inquiry. As we begin anther century, where do we find ourselves in the search for and achievement of states of mind and body which transcend the natural, political and cultural boundaries of the human condition? To what extent do our newest versions of transcendence through technology, art, religion and theory reflect our (post)postmodern condition, and how do these versions compare/contrast with earlier versions of the sublime? We will address these questions by turning to philosophy and theory, poetry and fiction, visual arts and the technological sublime, using these and other primary sources: Longinus, Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Stevens, Borges, Courbet, Carpeaux, and the contemporary visual arts.

K20.1197 Narratives of African Civilizations
HUM, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 C. Daniel Dawson

African civilizations speak to us as much through monumental edifices, visual artifacts, sign systems, oral tradition, and films as they do through alphabetic texts. In their varied expressions, these societies, ancient and contemporary, present us with new ways of knowing. When we encounter these social imaginations through their multiple texts, the experience is reflexive, double-imaged, because of the complex interaction of the perceptions of Africa with the West’s own image of itself. Texts may include hieroglyphics, architectural symbolism, music, visual art, epics, folktales and proverbs, cosmologies and rituals, such as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead; medieval Ghana and Mali through The Epic of Sundiata and other mythical works; the society of the Dogon and their extraordinary cosmology; Maryse Conde’s novel Segu; Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Manthia Diawara’s In Search of Africa, and such films as Sembene’s Ceddo (Senegal); Lumumba; Hyenas and several others.

K20.1203 The Bible and Dante
HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Antonio Rutigliano

This class is an examination of the Bible and Dante’s Divine Comedy in their social, cultural, and historical contexts. The class focuses on such universal themes as good and evil, sin, redemption, and punishment, doubt and faith, the nature of God, and the construction of religious experience. Students will read selections from both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Bible, as well as the Gnostic Gospels. Although attention is paid to the entire Comedy, the class usually focuses on the Inferno.

K20.1208 The Existential Imagination
4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Jean Graybeal

To think in an “existential” mode is to attempt to address the most basic problems of individual human existence—the meaning (if any) of death, the (possible) purpose of life, the nature of the individual self, the possibility of freedom—without premature recourse to answers prescribed by religion or tradition. In spite of or maybe because of the weightiness and darkness of such questions, many of the responses proposed by philosophers, religious thinkers, psychologists and writers of fiction have shone with humor and appreciation for both the absurdity and the beauty of human lives. Readings will include Ecclesiastes, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Sartre’s No Exit, Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, Beckett’s Happy Days, and selections from Simone de Beauvoir.


K20.1229 “Chinatown” and the American Imagination
HUM, 4 CR F 9:30-12:15 Jack Tchen

Permission of the instructor required.
What is a “Chinatown”? The word alone evokes many images, sounds, smells, tastes from many different sensibilities. For recent immigrants it can be a home away from home, for “outsiders” an exotic place for cheap eats, for male action flic fans Chow Yun Fat (or Mark Walhberg) in “The Corruptor,” and for you ?!? (fill in the blank). We’re going to explore the nooks and crannies of Chinatown in the American imagination and in its New York real-time, non-virtual existence. How do we know what we know and not know? What does Chinatown have to do with the formation of normative “American” identities? What are the possibilities (and limits) of crossing cultural divides? Class members will individually and/or in groups research, experience, and document a chain of persons, places, and/or events creating their own narrative “tour” of this place’s meanings. Novels, history books, tourist guides, films, and pop culture will supplement the primary “text” of New York Chinatown. This will be a collaborative, discussion-intensive, field-research-driven class limited to twenty students. The instructor is looking for a mixture of students with a variety of skills and backgrounds. Prospective registrants are required to email the instructor (Jack.Tchen@nyu.edu) before signing up for the class.

K20.1243 Gender, Sexuality, and Self-Representation
HUM, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Sara Murphy

From the defiant self-revelations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the case studies of Sigmund Freud to the barrage of bold-faced names our celebrity culture retails to us, there is much evidence for the philosopher Michel Foucault’s insistence that modern cultures identify sexuality with the truth of the self. If this is true, then the forms of self-representation—autobiography, memoir, self-portraiture, even legal testimony—would seem to have a privileged relationship with sexuality and gender. How does gender shape autobiography? How is sexuality represented or not in memoirs or self-portraiture? What do forms of self-representation have to tell us about gender and sexuality? And vice versa: what do gender and sexuality have to tell us about the forms and limits of self-representation? Readings may be taken from Rousseau, Sade, Beauvoir, H.D., Samuel Delany, Kate Bornstein, and others, and are supplemented by writings from theorists such as Foucault, Freud, Butler, and Irigaray.

K20.1249 Colonies, Empires, Nations, Globalization
SOC, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 A. Lauria-Perricelli

Colonialism, imperialism, and globalization all involve the domination of one part of the world by another. How do these forms of control differ? How are they related to each other? What are their dimensions in different places and times? What kinds of changes—economic, political, social, sexual, biological—are produced among the dominated and the dominators? What definitions and feelings of “nationhood” develop during these processes? How are peoples drawn into or resist these relations? What are the liberatory or the oppressive aspects of different kinds of nationalisms? What do the changing links among countries and peoples signify? How is today’s “globalization” connected to older forms of control, while creating new forms of domination? Texts may include several films (Life and Debt, The Triumph of the Will, The Battle of Algiers) with selections from, among others: AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame; Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, Sexuality, in the Colonial Context; Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; The Wretched of the Earth; Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

K20.1250 Mysticism
4 CR W 2:00-4:45 Jean Graybeal

The desire to experience a transcendent or depth dimension of reality has inspired religious life throughout human history. Every culture has had its own ways of opening the doors between “the sacred and the profane,” of invoking “cosmos” within “chaos.” Even in contemporary times, religious and spiritual practices flourish. This course examines the quest for mystical experience as a cross-cultural phenomenon, exploring philosophical, psychological, and neurological approaches to understanding it. Readings will include works by mystical writers from several religious traditions, psychologists, philosophers Stephen Katz and Robert K. Forman, and neurobiologists Newberg and D’Aquili.

K20.1253 Shakespeare on the Uses of This World
HUM, 4 CR W 2:00-4:45 Pat Rock

Shakespeare, looking back to the Middle Ages and forward to the Renaissance, asks: “Is it possible to be at home in this world?” Falstaff warns Prince Hal that if Hal banishes him, he banishes “all the world,” implying what a tragedy that would be. Yet Hamlet says the uses of the world seem to him to be “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” This course examines the dynamic tension that lies between these two world views, and the complex and challenging ways Shakespeare deals with the question. Readings may include Henry IV, Part I; Hamlet; King Lear; Much Ado About Nothing; and Twelfth Night.

K20.1263 American Road Trip
HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Steve Hutkins

Going on the road is an archetypal American experience, the subject of countless poems, songs, movies, novels, and travel books. Throughout the country’s history, native-born writers and visitors from abroad have hit the road in the hope that through direct experience they could come to a better understanding of the American character, our institutions and values, our towns and cities and natural landscapes. In this course we travel across the country with these writers, exploring such questions as: What is the “American way of life,” and what are the distinctly American values, myths, and obsessions? Given the country’s enormous cultural diversity, what does it mean to speak of a national identity? And why this love of movement and speed, this romance with the road? Readings may include Twain’s Roughing It, Miller’s The Air-conditioned Nightmare, Beauvoir’s America Day by Day, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, Kerouac’s On the Road, Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and Baudrillard’s America.

K20.1265 Women and Gender in Antiquity
HUM, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Laura Slatkin

This course will explore ancient conceptions of the female and of gender in antiquity. Abominated, fetishized, reviled, idealized, the figure of the woman—as mother, wife, sister, daughter, bride, queen—preoccupied the imagination of the ancients. Although the historical record notoriously favors the activities of men, the representations of women in literature and the visual arts offer a window into the complexities of gender roles in antiquity. Focusing on the societies of Greece, Rome and Hellenistic Egypt, we will consider “woman” as a cultural category engaged with, and constituted by, other categories, such as “man,” “citizen,” “slave,” “goddess,” “animal.”

K20.1266 Ancient Indian Literature: Translating the Sacred into the Secular
HUM, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Vasu Varadhan

How are the key concepts in Hinduism, dealing with birth and rebirth, disciplined action and ultimate liberation, manifested in epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata? Why did the Bhagavad Gita. dealing with the dilemma of waging war, have such a powerful influence on Gandhi, Emerson and Thoreau? The Laws of Manu, drawing on jurisprudence, philosophy, and religion, created a model of how life should be lived in public and private, and this course will explore its applicability to modern times. The course will conclude by examining the secular aspects of Hinduism and how they permeate everyday life in India, as well as how Hinduism is practiced and transformed in the American diaspora. Readings may include the Upanishads, Jonah Blank’s The Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, and Diana Eck’s A New Religious America: How a Christian Country Has Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation.

K20.1274 Making Peace
SOC, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Bill Caspary

This course involves intensive study of the theory and practice of conflict, conflict resolution, and nonviolence with applications to the current world scene, and to intergroup, interpersonal, and intrapersonal conflict. Experiential learning of active listening, reframing, and creative problem-solving will be part of classroom activity. Topics will include conflict theory and conflict-mapping; sociology and psychology of conflict, and of nationalism; power, poverty, and conflict; emancipation, revolution, terrorism, and war; positive and negative peace. Further topics include: conflicts over resources, identities, and misunderstandings, human needs and human tendencies toward cooperation and aggression, game theory analogies, including win-win outcomes; Gandhian nonviolence; and nonviolent social movements. Study of theory will be related to an in-depth case study of the Northern Ireland conflict, supplemented by a survey of civil tensions and wars, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Background in world politics will be helpful but not required. Readings will include Gandhi, King, Roger Fisher, Carl Rogers, Karl Deutsch, Barbara Deming, Richard Gregg, O’Leary and McGarry

K20.1299 Objectivity and the Politics of the Journalism Revolution
SOC, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Paul Thaler

At the birth of this nation, it was assumed by journalists and their readers that journalists were partisans, telling stories from particular points of view. But the growth of the modern newspaper, combined with the ideals of science, transformed the image, self-image, and practice of journalism, which now claims to worship at the altar of objectivity, to present infomation or “news” without bias. This ethic has carried over to the contemporary media, despite challenges from critics. Rather than multiple media outlets presenting different optics or lenses through which to see events and their contexts, media outlets claim to speak impartially. In this course we examine this ideal or promise: is it possible? desireable? To pursue this inquiry we consider challenges to objectivity by figures such as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, who linked a “new journalism” to a personal point of view. Did such innovations debase journalism? Or is it better for journalists to admit that they can disavow, but can never escape, a point of view? In turn, we relate this question to the political theory of Jurgen Habermas, who defends an “emancipatory mode” of journalism. Lastly, we bring these arguments about journalism to several case studies: the OJ Simpson murder trial, the Clinton impeachment, and the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. Readings will include Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Sinclar Lewis, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr and Jurgen Habermas.

K20.1301 Sigmund Freud and Modern Social Theory: Understanding Life in The Therapeutic Age
4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Michael Laskawy

The aim of this course is twofold—to gain a clear understanding of Freudian theory, and to place it in relation to broader critiques of what many have called our “therapeutic age.” In the first part of the course, we will engage in a close reading of Freud’s major works, with a special focus on how he built upon his theory of the individual to craft a powerful critique of modern society. In the second part of the course, we will read works by authors who have used Freudian theory as a starting place for more comprehensive and elaborate critiques of modern life. We will seek to understand their arguments against revisions to Freud and why they see Freudian theory as vital to their explanations of contemporary society. Readings from Freud will include several of his major case studies, The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on Sexuality, Civilization and Its Discontents. Other readings will include works by Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Nancy Chodorow and Philip Rieff.

K20.1304 The Politics of Experience: Women of Color
SOC, 4 CR W 2:00-4:45 Asale Angel-Ajani

In her 1991 essay, “The Evidence of Experience” Joan Scott writes of the problems associated with accepting experience as evidence when analyzing social and historical processes. Although it may be true that by underscoring experience one risks leaving unquestioned the conditions that enable it, feminists of color have long argued that there is a political necessity to recognizing that experiences are shaped by both discursive and structural conditions. In this course we will focus on the experiences of women of color through memoir, narrative, testimony, fiction, theory, and ethnography. We will critically examine the effects of racism, sexism, classism and other structural oppressions such as the impacts of colonization and post-colonialism, and historize how racialized and gendered subjectivities are produced and transformed. Through the critical engagement about what constitutes experience and what counts as theory, we will trouble the norms of institutionalized knowledge production. Readings may include: Chela Sandoval’s Methodologies of the Oppressed, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Paula Gunn Allen’s Off the Reservation, and Gayatri Spivak’s The Post-Colonial Critic.

K20.1310 Maid for Convenience: Female Domestic Service in Fiction, Fact, and Performance
4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Alycia Smith-Howard

Who are the members of the “invisible army” that clean our homes, schools, and offices? Images of female domestic workers (maids) are prevalent throughout literature and popular culture. In such these women are often romanticized, sexualized, and/or demonized. What do we know of these women and their lives, voices, and personal histories? What is the relationship between fictive representations and factual reality? To answer these questions we will survey a cross-section of modern depictions of maids in literature and film. Fictive treatments will be counterpoised by factual data from such sources as: Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Rollins); Maid in the U.S.A. (Romero); and Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers (Ehrenreich). This is the first of a two-part course. The second is an arts workshop practicum, titled Domestic Changes: Social Action through Performance, to be offered in the Spring 2005 semester.

K20.1311 Mad Science/Mad Pride
SCI, 4cr M 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis

In recent years, questions of madness and psychiatry have been the subject of considerable discussion and controversy. This class is devoted to exploring different approaches to psychiatric concerns. We start our reflections with background scholarship from Michel Foucault. We consider both his early work on historical shifts in psychiatric knowledge formations (Madness and Civilization) and his later concepts of “discursive practice” and “power.” We go from there to study the details of three current approaches to psychiatry: 1.) biopsychiatry, 2.) psychoanalysis, and 3.) the consumer/survivor movement. We look at anthropologist T.M. Luhrman's recent ethnography of psychiatry, and we consider exemplary texts from each of the three approaches. For each approach, we consider an expository text (written by an “expert”) and a fiction or memoir account (written by a consumer). Using Foucault’s scholarship as a backdrop, we side-step the usual “truth” question regarding these alternative approaches. Rather than ask “which approach is true?,” we ask the more pragmatic question: “what are the contrasting advantages and disadvantages of each approach and for whom?”

K20.1312 Science Studies and New Medical Genomics
SCI, 4 cr R 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis

This class introduces students to interdisciplinary field of science studies and to the new science of medical genomics (particularly genetic diagnosis, bioinformatics, therapeutic cloning, and gene therapy). Our assumption for the class is that students of any new science need familiarity with three domains of knowledge: the science itself, the controversies surrounding the science, and the contextual perspectives available from science studies. We introduce genomic science through Stuart Brown’s Essentials of Medical Genomics and a from genetics articles in NYT’s science page. We explore the controversies of the new genetics through an analysis of a recent public debates between Francis Fukyama and Gregory Stock, and also from Margaret Atwood’s new science fiction novel, Oryx and Crake, about a future world where biotech corporations take humankind on an uncontrolled genetic-engineering ride. We put genomic science and its controversies in perspective through a study of key texts from the following areas of science studies: philosophy of science; sociology of scientific knowledge; sociology of institutional science; and critical and cultural studies of science and technology.

K20.1325 Cross-Cultural Perceptions and Representations
4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Cañeque / Mirsepassi

Permission to register is required. Students interested in taking this class must submit an application form that can be picked up at the reception desk, 715 Broadway, 5th floor.
This course provides a unique opportunity for Gallatin students to share their educational experience with students from the Arab world. It attempts to engage students from Gallatin and American University at Cairo into a dialogue on the question of the “other” that will raise historical, political, sociological and anthropological questions concerning the perceptions and representations of Middle Eastern, North American, Latin American, and European societies. The medium for this shared experience will be videoconferences held with AUC. Students taking this course will participate in one videoconference per week with AUC students registered in a course that mirrors the one being offered by Gallatin. Readings will include, among others, Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America, Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, Edward Said’s Orientalism, Bernard Lewis’s Islam and the West, Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Caliban, Octavio Paz’s Mexico and the United States, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, and Thierry Hentsch’s Imagining the Middle East.

K20.1326 Science and Democracy
SCI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Gene Cittadino

Does science as a human enterprise share fundamental values with democratic forms of government? Does science flourish best in a democracy? Do scientists in democratic states have particular responsibilities regarding the dissemination and use of scientific knowledge? Does modern science, as critics have charged, represent a privileged priesthood? Are current technological applications dictating and distorting the traditional values of science? This course will provide both an inquiry into the nature and practice of science and an examination of the relationship, past and present, between science and the political contexts in which it is practiced. Topics will include the rise of modern science and its relationship to political revolutions in Europe and the U.S.; science, secularizatiion, and intellectual autonomy; the role of science in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and contemporary China; science and the Cold War; science and the courts; and the role of scientific knowledge and expertise in developing nations. Readings may include Shapin, A Social History of Truth, Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, Josephson, Totalitarian Science and Technology, and selections from John Dewey, T.H. Huxley, Michael Polanyi, Paul Feyerabend, and Vandana Shiva, along with the texts of several U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

K20.1327 Religion and Social Change
HUM, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Angela Dillard

This course explores the “double-edged” relationship between religion and politics. On the one hand, religion and religious institutions have played a role in maintaining the status quo and traditional modes of authority. On the other hand, religion has fueled a number of large-scale movements for social change. Along with a broad range of theoretical, sociological, historical and theological readings, we will be considering two major case studies: the US civil rights movement and the pro-life movement. Some of the questions and issues we will explore include the ways in which mass movements have attempted to mobilize religious communities, how movements have developed their own “political theologies,” and how individuals and groups have used religion in both politically “progressive” and politically “conservative” ways. Readings may include the Book of Exodus and selections from the New Testament; writings by theologians such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin L. King, Jr. as well as texts dealing with civil rights, anti-abortion and other relevant social movements.

K20.1328 Jung and the Postmodern Religious Experience
HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Lee Robbins

The course unfolds around the question: How does a person locate meaning in the postmodern age when traditional belief systems have been emptied of symbolic authority? In his discovery of the symbol making function within the human psyche, Jung offers a possible answer. Variously described as the religious, imaginative or creative instinct, this activity offers the possibility of losing and finding multiple meanings throughout the cycles of life. We begin by defining pre and post modern within their historical context with special attention to the role of language. We identify the influences that shaped Jung’s discovery, focusing on the classical elements that characterize a religious experience. Finally, we look to figures in the history of culture that have lost and found meaning. Readings will include selections from the Collected Works of C.G. Jung; Julia Kristiva, In the Beginning was Love:Psychoanalysis and Faith; Nietzsche, The Gay Science; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

K20.1329 Election
SOC, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 George Shulman

This course is organized around the '04 Presidential elections. What does it take to “read” an election? How are we to understand what is happening and assess its meaning? Partly, we need to deepen our sense of a specifically American cultural context. Partly, we need to explore the big questions raised by great works of political theory: do we live in a meaningful democracy? What counts as truly democratic? What is the relationship between participatory visions, and representational versions, of “democracy?” Political theory also helps us think about social power and ideology, and about the ways that political rhetoric and theatrical appearances can seduce -or empower- people. Partly, we need to immerse ourselves in media coverage, to see how it constitutes what it claims merely to depict. The purpose of this course, then, is to explore the relationship between democratic politics and elections more broadly, and to analyze the meaning of participation in this electoral ritual: is it a symptom of delusion? self-defeating? necessary? valuable? Readings include Machiavelli and Marx, democratic theory, and essays in American Studies, as well as intensive study of media representations.

K20.1330 Euripides’ Medea and Morrison’s Beloved: Exploring the Cultural Imaginary
HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 L. Slatkin / E.F. White

In this course we will focus intensively on Euripides’ Medea and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which acknowledges Medea as an important source. In exploring the cross-cultural and trans-historical enrichings each work may cast on the other, we will address questions of the political economy of the family and of sex, the nature of exile, the politics of the body, and the status of maternity. We will consider how these two distinctive genres—drama and novel—confront issues of agency and decision, and more broadly how literature displays and exposes the tensions and contradictions of the social. Readings will include essays by Gayle Rubin, Hortense Spillers, Nicole Loraux and others.

K20.1331 Readings in Asian and Comparative Philosophy
HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Lou Nordstrom

This course attempts to introduce students both to Asian philosophy/religion and to notable examples of comparative philosophy. The primary sources will consist of one reading each from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism; the texts, respectively, are the Bhagavad Gita; The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Nagarjuna); and Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu). The comparative philosophy texts are the following: Loy, Non-Duality; Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness; Abe, Zen in Comparative Perspective; and Katz, Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Some of the themes that will be focused on include the problem of evil; the nature of mystical experience; the concept and experience of emptiness (sunyata); the idea of non-duality; and the concept of the Way (Tao) as all-inclusive reality. There will be three short papers of 3-5 pages each.

K20.1332 Behind the Mask: Interiority and Modernity in Japan
HUM, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Nina Cornyetz

The process of modernization in Western Europe spanned hundreds of years, from its nascent origins in the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, into the twentieth century. In Japan this same process was collapsed into a few short decades around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In this class we will examine the shift from a premodern to a modern system of subjectivity and perspective in language, literature, and the visual and performing arts. We will take up such issues as: What was the impact of Western imperialism, science, art, gender and sexual politics on Japanese language, literature, drama and art? What were the internal conditions that made Japan ready for modernization? How did premodern conventions in turn create a modernity in Japan different from Western models? What resisted modernization, and why? Our texts will include premodern primary sources such as The Pillow Book, picture scrolls (emaki), and noh plays, modern literature such as The Quilt (Katai), Confessions of a Mask (Mishima), and Masks (Enchi), films such as Sisters of the Gion (Mizoguchi), Yojimbo (Kurosawa), and secondary sources including Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, and Plugfelder, Cartographies of Desire.


K20.1333 Business and the Economy in American History
TR 3:30-4:45 Kim Phillips-Fein SOC, 4 CR

The United States has often been seen as the quintessentially commercial nation, in which the values of the marketplace are universally embraced. This course will examine the trajectory of American economic development from the colonial period through to the present day, and the conflicted relationship between the economy and American politics. Some of the questions asked in the class will include: What were the economic origins of the American Revolution, and what is the economic basis of the Constitution? Was the slave South a capitalist economy? How did Americans cope with the rapid rise of industrial corporations in the late nineteenth century? What caused the Great Depression, and how did it affect American culture? And what is the nature of globalization and the economic order we live in today? Readings will include primary historical documents (revolutionary-era writings, the letters of freed slaves, labor pamphlets) along with novels and plays (Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Clifford Odets) and historical works of political economy (Charles Beard, Eugene Genovese, John Kenneth Galbraith).

K20.1334 Tyranny, Totalitarianism and Terror
TR 4:55-6:10 Justin Holt HUM, 4 CR

Tyranny, totalitarianism and terror are all actions that are interrelated. Regimes, which have been considered tyrannical or totalitarian, have used terror to maintain or enforce their existences. Terror as an internal, an external, or an imagined threat has caused governments to resort to tyrannical or totalmethods of control. Both classical and modern authors have considered the nature of tyranny or totalitarianism to be epistemic failings. In other words, tyranny and totalitarianism, and their resultant terror, are problems due to deficiencies of knowing. Thinkers have found this deficiency of knowing to be attributable to various sources: habit, human nature, or power, to name a few. In this course we will consider these various understandings of the nature of tyranny, totalitarianism and terror, and whether these understandings are valid for our current political situation. The readings will include: Plato The Seventh Letter Apology and selections from the Republic, Aristotle Politics, Xenophon Tyrannicus, Hegel Absolute Freedomfrom Phenomenology of Spirit, Dostoevsky The Grand Inquisitor, Strauss and Kojève On Tyranny, Orwell 1984, Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism, Marcuse One-Dimensional Man, Berman Terror and Liberalism.

K20.1335 Appearance and Reality
W 9:30-12:15 Robert Zimmerman HUM, 4 CR

Many thinkers have struggled with the question of appearance and reality. In other words, they have been concerned with the question of "what is really real and not merely apparently real?" This course will examine and assess some of their answers. It will pursue the question of the "really real" by reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (where Hegel shows human development over time) and Nietzsche's Will to Power (where Nietzsche reduces all reality to what he calls "will to power"), Levi-Strauss' Totemism (where Levi-Strauss discovers the underlying rationality of all societies), Freud's "Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (where Freud looks to the unconscious as the really real), Buber's I and Thou (where Buber illustrates an immanent--and most real--God), Sartre's Nausea and Camus' The Stranger (where both authors argue for the reality of the existential alone).

K20.1424 Caliban: Crossing Time and Cultures
Stacy Pies MW 11:00-12:15 HUM, 2 CR

Course meets for seven weeks only, 9/8-10/25.

Called a monster by his master, Prospero, yet speaking in poetry, the character Caliban first appears in Shakespeare’s Tempest in 1611. Although the play leaves Caliban’s fate uncertain, many authors since have finished his story in literary, musical, and political texts. This course will focus on how Caribbean, West African and European writers have freed Caliban from Prospero’s island. What has he come to represent since the Renaissance? How have his character and his voice brought politics into literature? Why have writers, poets, anthropologists and composers taken him as an emblem for the anger and aspirations of peoples striving for freedom and self-determination? We will read The Tempest, Césaire’s A Tempest, and works by Lemuel Johnson, Marysé Condé, and Roberto Fernandez Retamar. Students are asked to read (or reread) Shakespeare’s Tempest before the course begins.

K20.1433 The Simple Life
Pat Rock T 620-9:00 HUM, 2 CR

Course meets for seven weeks only, 9/7-10/19.

This course examines a theme common to Eastern and Western philosophical traditions—the call to a simple life. Great thinkers in both traditions warn of mindlessly accumulating possessions and entering into a dangerous, frenetic competitiveness. This course examines the value of a simple life and asks such questions as: Is it possible to lead a simple life in an urban setting or does it imply living close to nature? Does such a life lead to a dangerous passivity or does it, as Plato suggests, provide reflective leaders for the society? Does it improve our relationships with others or does it affect them adversely? Texts may include selections from Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Thoreau’s Walden, and the poetry and essays of Wendell Berry.

K20.1443 Theorizing Popular Culture: Beyond the High/Low
Karen Hornick MW 4:55-6:10 HUM, 2 CR

Course meets for seven weeks only, 9/8-10/25.

Why do discussions of a popular song or TV show so often begin with the assumption that it’s “bad” and then focus on its political and economic meanings rather than the aesthetic and emotional pleasures it may yield the consumer? This class will broach such issues as it surveys popular culture studies since its origins in the 1800’s. Readings may include critics such as Le Bon, Marx, Arnold, Leavis, Benjamin, Adorno, Macdonald, Barthes, and Jameson; historians such as William Leach and Kathy Peiss; sociologists such as Riesman and Frith; and the “pop” marketing essayist Malcolm Gladwell. We shall anchor class discussions around two sub-themes: (1) the high/low art debate (we shall contrast the works and reception of Jackson Pollock, Norman Rockwell, and Andy Warhol); and (2) the idea of mass/consumerist culture as collective dreaming (we shall read William Leach’s discussion of the rise of American department stores and the surprising role L. Frank Baum played within it, Baum’s The Wizard of Oz as film and “star vehicle,” and "high art" responses to this idea).

K20.1425 The Philosophical Dialogue
Stacy Pies MW 11:00-12:15 HUM, 2 CR

Course meets for seven weeks only 10/27–12/13.

How are ideas born from conversation? What is the importance of human relationship in intellectual inquiry? How does the dialogue imply our participation as readers? What is the effect, on our understanding of ideas, of staging an intellectual debate in the imagination? This course will consider philosophical dialogues about art to explore how this form, which combines philosophy with aspects of theater, stretches the boundaries of thought, audience and genre. We will examine the dialogue as a rhetorical device and investigate whether the form affects the process of inquiry. Readings may include Plato’s Phaedrus, Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Iris Murdoch’s Acastos, Kleberg’s Starfall, and excerpts from Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination and Buber’s I and Thou.

K20.1444 Looking at Popular Culture: Gender, Genre, and Situation Comedy
Karen Hornick MW 4:55-6:10 HUM, 2 CR

Course meets for seven weeks only 10/27–12/13.

By most definitions comedy is transgressive, and yet it seems undeniable that, from “I Love Lucy” to “Will and Grace,” American television situation comedies have reflected and reinforced traditional gender roles more often than it has challenged them. This class will trace the ups and downs of this genre, essential to popular television programming since the 1940’s. We will pay special attention to aesthetic, literary, sociological, and political issues such as: the representation of sexuality, femininity, and masculinity; the role of gender within important sub-genres such as family and office comedies; the response of sitcoms to socio-historical events such as the emergence of the women’s liberation and gay rights movements of the late 1960’s; and how the representation of gender on American sitcoms contrasts and compares with foreign programs. We will focus on particular series and read a selection of texts on the nature of comedy, the representation of gender, television and social history, and the politics of popular culture.