Interdisciplinary Seminars
The Image: History of Media II
K20.1043 SOC, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Stephen Duncombe
In 1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of the new science and art of photography: “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth.” We now live in the world that Holmes could then only glimpse. In this course we will study the relationship between skin and carcass, surface and reality, through the history of oil painting, light, photography, films, television, public relations and cosmetics. We will pay special attention to issues of representation, presentation, spectacle and celebrity. Texts may include works by John Berger, Laura Mulvey, Daniel Boorstin, Wolfgang Schivelbush, Joshua Gamson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Liz Ewen, Stuart Ewen, Kathy Peiss, Charles Baudelaire, Lizabeth Cohen, and Guy Debord as well as period films and television programs.
The Meaning of Silence
K20.1063 SOC, 4 CR R 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.
Contemporary Aesthetics and Cultural History
K20.1081 HUM, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Elliott Barowitz
The objectives of this course are to familiarize students with the major thinking in art theory the last century, in the belief that only knowledge can triumph. Ergo, this course follows the rise, drift and decay of modernism, as it mutated into a condition called postmodernism. This is a course in cultural history with specific emphasis on images—modern painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, film, and postmodern art—video performances site-specific work, “woman’s art,” TV and popular images in slick publications. It is designed to engage students interested in the arts, social sciences and humanities within a social context. It asks the question: Is postmodernism the reverse side of modernism or is it a [w]hol[l]y new mint? The above will be examined and augmented with the following: Readings by Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Victor Burgin, Roland Barthes, Jerome Klinkowitz, Laura Mulvey, Patricia Mellencamp, Judith Williamson and others; fine art slides and films—Vertigo, Modern Times and Brazil.
Inventing Modernity
K20.1097 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Karen Hornick
From the mid-1700’s until the First World War, many European writers and artists saw themselves as living in an epoch radically separated from the past. They saw themselves as Moderns, radically different (though not always better) than the Ancients. Old questions seemed to require new answers: What is the relation of humans to gods and nature? How can a just and peaceful society be attained? What is the ideal relation between self and other? In this survey class, we will read and discuss major texts that will help us chart the emergence of modern consciousness, including authors such as Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Austen, (Mary) Shelley, Balzac, Marx, and Dickens.
Pride and Power: Renaissance Revolutions in Art and Culture
K20.1103 HUM, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Bella Mirabella
The Renaissance in Europe remains one of the most creative, prolific, and dramatic eras in human history. It was a period in which tumultuous events—such as the bubonic plague, the Reformation, and political intrigue—were accompanied by an unprecendented explosion in the arts, with the work of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and many female writers such as Christine de Pizan and Veronica Franca. This course examines the politics, literature, visual arts, and music of this period and focuses on its manners, morals, daily life, and the role of women. We will explore the new ideas about existence, the self, and humankind fostered by humanism, philosophy, and the arts. Readings may include Christine de Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Castiglione’s The Courtier, Shakespeare’s plays, and the work of the Italian female poet, Gaspara Stampa.
Belief and Skepticism
K20.1107 HUM, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 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, Buber’s I and Thou, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and selected poems of Auden and Stevens.
The Spirit of the Comic and the Spirit of the Age
K20.1113 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Antonio Rutigliano
Comedy, no less than tragedy, yields insights into the great questions of an age. This course examines the ways the comic, from the ancient world to modern times, reflects attitudes about love, marriage, religion, power, and war. In addition to the philosophical writings of Meredith, Freud, and Hegel, readings may include Aristophanes’ Clouds and Lysistrata, Plautus’s Pot of Gold, Petronius’ Satyricon, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Congreve’s The Way of the World, and Beckett’s Endgame.
Authority, Modernity and Democracy
K20.1119 SOC, 4 CR M 12:30-3:15 George Shulman
Prerequisite any two of the following Primary Text courses: K20.1449, K20.1450, K20.1452 or K20.1455.
A specifically “modern” politics seems to overthrow the authority of god, church, and tradition—in the name of freedom. To deny the authority of a idea, institution, or person is to withdraw assent, to refuse allegiance. In turn, “self-determination” in its personal and political senses seems to mean an ongoing “democratic experiment” that opens to question the authority of all cultural codes and social practices. But debates about modernity and democracy reveal that the relationship between authority and freedom is more paradoxical than antithetical. Partly, a democratic culture requires commitment to certain values as an authoritative framework that justifies and enables creative and critical action. Partly, citizens need to develop a sense of their own authority as actors to overcome deference and challenge domination. Maybe the conflict in modernity is not between authority and autonomy as such, but between different conceptions and practices of authority, and the freedoms they entail. Accordingly, we ask: in what ways does democracy require commitment to certain beliefs, and in what ways is democracy a contest about assumptions, ideas, and practices? We also ask: how are people shaped as individual subjects by the authority of parents, and by the authority of ruling ideas about, for instance, rights, gender, and moral agency? We join such political, cultural, and psychological questions by analyzing how several significant modern theorists relate claims about authority to visions of freedom. Readings include: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals; Franz Kafka, “The Penal Colony;” Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor;” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition and On Revolution; Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love; Jacques Ranciere, Dis-Agreement; and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power.
Bodily Fictions
K20.1128 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.
Culture as Communication
K20.1193 SOC, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Vasu Varadhan
This course examines the concept of culture through its forms of communication. The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing has important consequences for the social, political, and economic structures within a culture. If we take as axiomatic that every culture wishes to preserve itself through its forms of communication, we then need to ask ourselves which forms of communication are best suited for this purpose. What happens to cultures when traditional forms of communication are forced to compete with the newer technologies? What do we mean by “knowledge” in the age of information? The impact of written narrative on orality will be discussed as well as the changes brought about by the invention of the printing press. We will examine the development of electronic media including the newer technologies such as the Internet and analyze their effects on individual and cultural levels. Readings may include Plato’s Phaedrus, Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and Lessig’s The Future of Ideas.
Narratives of African Civilizations
K20.1197 HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 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. African modernist art and writing will also be represented, through novels like Conde's Segu, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Mda's Ways of Dying, and films like Lumumba, Mandabi, and Hyenas.
Tragic Visions
K20.1202 HUM, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Bella Mirabella
This course studies the nature of the tragic form in dramatic literature and performance, as well as its role in human existence. Focusing on the two great periods of tragedy in western literature and culture—ancient Greece and Renaissance England—we read selected tragedies by Aeschuylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare. We examine these works in their social, political, and cultural contexts, while considering questions such as gender, the role of women, and the origins and evolution of tragedy as a literary and political genre. Readings might include Agamemnon and Medea, as well as Hamlet and Macbeth. Special attention is paid to performance.
Colonies, Empires, Nations, Globalization
K20.1249 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 able to 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.
Sex, Gender, Nature, Culture: Feminist Theory/Gender Theory
K20.1251 HUM, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Sara Murphy
Is anatomy really destiny? Does physiology precede culture? Or is gender socially constructed? If so, how, on what grounds, through what agencies, does that construction take place? The interrogation of sex and gender raises fundamental issues not only about identity and the relations of nature to culture, but also about the authority of different disciplines to articulate those relations. In this course, our goals will be twofold: first, we propose to examine some central questions about sex/gender as they have been taken up by writers from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, focusing on various feminisms and emergent gender theories. Second, because our inquiry is of necessity interdisciplinary, we’ll be paying close attention to the ways in which different disciplines think about these questions, what kinds of methods they use and assumptions they make. Readings will be taken from Wollstonecraft, Mill, De Beauvoir, and more recent investigators like Freud, Lacan, Butler, Foucault, Irigaray, and Kristeva.
Alchemy and Transformation of Self
K20.1277 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Lee Robbins
The focus of this course is the one relationship we sustain from birth to the grave and possibly beyond—the relationship to ourselves. The quality of our relationship to work, community and intimate others is deeply affected by the level of connection we have to parts of ourselves. In this course we explore the “middle ground of psychic realities” between ego and unconscious, soul and deity, male and female, spirit and body and finally self and other. The middle ground within the psyche is presented in historical perspective from Buddha through the ancient art of alchemy to the modern depth of psychologies of Freud, Jung and Winnicott. How does each of these traditions understand the psyche as the site of struggle and radical transformation? Students will have the opportunity to discover and experience the middle ground within themselves through the crafting of personal rituals. Readings may include: Suttas from the Pali Canon, Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible, Plato’s Symposium, Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, Emerson’s “Self Reliance”, Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought and selections from Freud, Jung and Winnicott.
Ecology and Environmental Thought
K20.1298 SCI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Gene Cittadino
Ecological science and environmentalism appear to be relatively recent developments, but they have long and deep, and somewhat different, roots in our culture. Their interrelated histories, their connections to broader intellectual, cultural, social, and political trends, their sometimes tenuous relationship to one another over the past century, and their continuing interactions in the discourse over the fate of nature constitute the subject of this course. Topics include the Protestant roots of both ecology and environmentalism, myths of the primitive (biological, anthropological, etc.), the transfer of metaphors between social theory and ecology, changing views of equilibrium and balance in nature, conservative and postmodern critiques of ecology, and recent debates over biodiversity and environmental justice. Readings may include Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America; Carson, Silent Spring; Vandermeer & Perfecto, Breakfast of Biodiversity; and Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology, along with selections from Linnaeus, Darwin, Thoreau, Leopold, and a variety of contemporary ecologists and environmentalists.
Objectivity and the Politics of the Journalism Revolution
K20.1299 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.
Mad Science/Mad Pride
K20.1311 SCI, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis
In recent years, questions of madness and psychiatry have been the subject of considerable strife and controversy. This class uses narrative theory to map out the terrain of these conflicts and explore competing approaches to psychiatric concerns. We start with an overview of narrative theory as relevant to psychological issues. Authors we read include Jerome Bruner, Michael White, Tanya Luhrman, and Nikolas Rose. With this theoretical as our guide, the alternative approaches we consider include biopsychiatry, psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy, family therapy, feminist therapy, spiritual approaches, and creative approaches. We conclude with a consideration of the Icarus Project idea that sometimes madness is best seen as a “dangerous gift.”
Readings in Asian and Comparative Philosophy
K20.1331 HUM, 4 CR F 12:30-3:15 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; and Abe, Zen in Comparative Perspective. 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.
Contemporary Political Economy
K20.1336 SOC, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Kim Phillips-Fein
Economic policies and the state of the economy shape all of our lives in fundamental ways, affecting our social position, the kind of work we are able to do, the types of goods we are able to consume, and our very ability to survive. This course will teach students to understand basic modes of thinking about the economy. We will discuss different models of the economy and categories of economic analysis, and then we will analyze real-world economic issues in their historical context. This course will emphasize the economic history of the past thirty years. Examples of topics we will cover include: free trade, globalization and the anti-globalization movement; the stock market; homelessness; unions; monetary and fiscal policy; the economics of war; the causes of inequality. This is not an economics class, but a course that should give non-economists some familiarity with contemporary economic history.
Metaphor and Meaning
K20.1341 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Stacy Pies
Aristotle described metaphor in The Poetics as “the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (XXII). Since ancient times, poets and philosophers have written about metaphor and its power, while visual artists have transposed the techniques of figurative language from the verbal to the visual. Metaphor has been employed in texts as ornamentation, as a means of introducing new ideas and concepts, and as a way of imitating the working of the mind itself. In this class, we investigate how metaphor, verbal and visual, influences our processes of thinking, creating, and innovating, both intellectually and artistically. And we experiment with making our own metaphors, in words and pictures. Readings will range over poetry, philosophy, theory of art, and linguistics, including essays by Plato, Derrida, Ricoeur, Lakoff, Richards, Arnheim, Gombrich, and Toulmin, and poetry by Shakespeare, Spenser, Blake, Brontë, Rossetti, Rilke, Stevens, Williams, Brooks, Hughes, and Bishop, among others. We will also discuss artwork and films.
AIDS and Its Cultural Effects
K20.1364 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Patrick McCreery
Whether by design or happenstance, art often confronts its consumers with political and social challenges. This interdisciplinary seminar examines the challenges presented by films, novels, critical essays, and works of visual art that depict the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Through this case study, we will engage broad questions that have vexed artists, politicians, dissenters, and the art-consuming public for millennia: To what extent is art able to convey the emotional magnitude of a widespread calamity? To what extent can it impact public policy and effect political change? Is art that makes emotional and political sense in one demographic or geographic context easily translatable to others? We will focus primarily on relevant artistic works produced in the United States (especially New York City) and in sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, we will attempt to identify themes that are shared by both regions—the need to protect oneself sexually, the documentation of loss, the creation of memory—and themes that are regionally specific. The works we may engage include Unity Dow’s Far and Beyon’, Larry Kramer’s Normal Heart, Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, Douglas Crimp’s Melancholia and Moralism, Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors, and the art and writing of Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz.
Arabic Poetry
K20.1368 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Sinan Antoon
It is often said that “poetry is the archive of the Arabs.” Although the novel and audiovisual media are, nowadays, serious competitors, poetry still occupies a unique space in the Arab imaginary and is one of the most potent forms of cultural expression. Poets are still revered as heirs to an ancient tradition and their poems can, at times, cause controversy and lead to imprisonment or exile. This course will explore the various sociopolitical functions of Arabic poetry from pre-modern to contemporary times. We will begin by tracing the evolution of Arabic poetry from a highly developed oral tradition of a bedouin society, to a written literary mode of urban elites and patrons where it developed multiple genres (political, erotic, mystical, and others). The latter part of the course will examine the rise of neo-classical and modern Arabic poetry and the influence of colonialism, nationalism and the encounter with European languages and poetic traditions. Readings and translations may include the Mu`allaqat (Pre-Islamic Odes), Abu Nawwas, al-Mutanabbi, al-Ma`arri, al-Sayyab, Youssef, Adonis and Darwish.
Comedy: Ancient and Modern
K20.1371 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Carin Calabrese
This course will examine the content and context of comedy in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Comedy is to be found in the world of carnival, where the mighty are brought low, the sacred made profane, the male passed off as female and vice versa. Because of its inherent upending of the social and political status quo, comedy is often considered a means by which the powerless can subvert the powerful. But can comedy also serve to mock and defuse dissent from that status quo? As recent interest in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata has shown, comic responses to war and empire-building—both in our own era and in antiquity—can be a particularly rich locus for our study, offering powerful examples of engagement and critique. By tracing the course of Greek and Roman comedy, we can investigate why we laugh in response to this imagined world and what that laughter means and does. Readings may include selected works of the Greek playwrights Aristophanes and Menander, the Roman playwrights Terence and Plautus, modern comic playwrights Eugene Ionesco and Dario Fo, as well as readings from Nietzsche, Freud, Bakhtin, and Bergson.
Religion and “The Times”
K20.1378 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Jean Graybeal
Every day the media bring stories demonstrating the surprising and growing influence of religion in contemporary events. Defying earlier predictions that science and secularism would displace faith-based worldviews, religion persists, offering hope, compassion, conflict, and terror. This course aims to develop tools for a critical analysis of the functioning of religion in today’s world. We will engage in a daily reading of The New York Times and other media, with special attention to articles that deal in some way with the impact of religion. We will also read works from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and theology that attempt to elucidate the nature of the forces at work. Readings may include such works as Berger’s The Sacred Canopy, Clifford Geertz’s “Religion as a Cultural Symbol System,” Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, and Catherine Keller’s God and Power.
Liberalism and Sexuality In America
K20.1379 SOC, 4CR M 3:30-6:10 Nathaniel Frank
Formerly titled: Liberalism, Desire and Visions of the Good.
From its Enlightenment roots as a political philosophy of limited government, private property and individual rights, American liberalism was transformed in the twentieth century into a program of activist government designed to promote equality and prosperity. In each case, it has sought to allow a diverse citizenry to define, pursue and regulate competing visions of how best to live. This course will explore that contested process by focusing on what place American liberalism has carved out for sexuality. As a key embodiment of individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness, sexual expression has been the site of fierce battles over the extent of freedom and tolerance required by a just and orderly society. What are the ethical and practical limits to sexual freedom? Do the demands of morality and social stability justify regulating the private actions, and even desires, of citizens? How have liberal societies accommodated the paradox that both liberty and tolerance require limits to liberty and tolerance? We will examine the roots of liberal political theory and its evolution in America, including the debates of our founders and key historical episodes since, culminating in a research essay on liberalism today. This course should appeal to students interested in history, political theory, sexuality or gay and lesbian studies. Readings may include John Locke’s Second Treatise, Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal, Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal, Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent, as well as primary sources and contemporary journalism.
Creative Democracy: The Pragmatist Tradition
K20.1381 SOC, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Bill Caspary
From Emerson, through William James, to John Dewey, and beyond, Pragmatism has been a uniquely American contribution to political theory and philosophy. Pragmatism, like classical political theory, is concerned with politics as a way of achieving the good life rather than viewing politics narrowly in terms of elections and governments. Through texts by and about the Pragmatists, especially Dewey, the course will introduce theories and practices of participatory democracy, economic democracy, civic journalism, progressive education, participatory action research, and conflict-resolution. Reading Pragmatism as philosophy, in the Hegelian tradition, we will address many of the questions pursued by Marx, Nietzsche, and the postmodernists, and uncover rich alternative answers. Possible readings include Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” James’s "Moral Equivalent of War," Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, "Creative Democracy," and “The Economic Basis of the New Society,” Royce’s The Hope of the Great Community, Seigfried’s Pragmatism and Feminism, and West’s writings on "prophetic pragmatism."
Coming-Of-Age on American Film
K20.1382 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Lang
The passage from adolescence to adulthood is one of life’s most profound experiences. Every religion marks this pivotal moment, and every culture tells its own stories about it. This course will examine the rites of passage necessary to become an adult as depicted in American “coming-of-age” film narratives from the postwar period to present day. Social scientists, particularly anthropologists and ethnographers, have analyzed the ceremonies that mark the passage from adolescence to adulthood and so the course will focus its analysis through their work. We will pursue such questions as the following: what are the crucial rites involved in coming-of-age? In what ways have they changed over time as depicted on film? How do rites shape identity formation and how is this represented in coming-of-age films over time? How do rites reinforce the social order and inscribe norms? Do rites of passage depicted in American films represent adolescent or adult attitudes of their time? Along the way the course will ask the bigger question: what is the purpose of adolescence in the twentieth century? Some of the films that will be examined: Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, The Graduate, Easy Rider, A Clockwork Orange, Over The Edge, River’s Edge, Clueless, Boyz N’ the Hood, Reality Bites, Virgin Suicides, Donnie Darko, Mean Girls, and others. Authors: G. Stanley Hall, Victor Turner, Arnold van Gennep, Erik Erickson, Edgar Friedenberg, Timothy Shary, Thomas Hine, Thomas Doherty.
Modernism and Imperialism: Objects of Transcultural Desire
K20.1384 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Clyde Taylor
In popular understanding, modernity puts colonialism and imperialism into the past. But the actual traffic between modernism and imperialism was surreptitious and intense. What were the provocations of colonial objects on Western artists and thinkers that grounded foundational texts and images, and accelerated modernist innovation? How far can we trace ideas of spiritual and physical adventure, glamour, seduction, freedom, liberation, and plenitude in Western modernism to an “imperialist gaze”? The recent re-opening of modernism to include non-Western spaces of creativity calls for a new look at the colonial encounter and a revised appraisal of who and what is modernist. The target is not a survey of colonial literature and art but a re-examination of the dynamics of modernism from a more global angle of vision and more openly engaged with critical historical coordinates. Texts and images being considered are: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Marlene Dietrich as auteur of colonial-modern desire; Michael North, The Dialect Of Modernism; Debra Root, Cannibal Culture; Aime Cesaire, Tempete; Robin Kelly, Freedom Dreams; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism.
Black Cultural Studies
K20.1385 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 E. Frances White
How do we understand racial identity? How is race represented in popular culture and how has that representation changed over time? In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will answer such questions by focusing intensively on the black cultural studies approach to understanding race. Paying particular attention to the writings of Stuart Hall and those who have been influenced by him, we will introduce to or deepen students’ knowledge of this important school of thought that has arisen out of an Afro-British context—a context that has been deeply influenced by African American experiences and political discourses. We will historicize this work, exploring antecedents to black cultural studies and the contexts in which it arises. In the process, we will be asking questions about black identities and their relationships to gender, class, and sexuality and about the African diaspora. Taking this opportunity to study the way that non-Americans look at race will help us break from commonsense and misleading notions of ethnic identity in our own country. At the end of the course, we turn our attention to the United States. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to how race plays out it popular culture. Writers to be studied will include, W.E.B. DuBois, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Kobena Mercer, Paul Gilroy, Isaac Julien, and Zadie Smith.
Thinking About Seeing
K20.1388 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Miller
This course explores visual communication in the context of a media saturated society. We will analyze how humans “speak” through images and symbols as well as words, and how we “read” what we see. This class will attempt to understand the tools we use each day to reach an audience, while at the same time questioning what we think of as that audience. Images and texts from the past and present will help us assess both the character of various media and their personal as well as political implications. Texts will include works by Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Debord, Levi-Strauss, McLuhan, Sontag and other seminal essays on the media.
American Shakespeare
K20.1390 HUM, 4 CR F 12:30-3:15 Thomas Cartelli
Open to sophomores only. Students will be expected to pay for their own travel costs and some admissions fees.
“Shakespeare is the god of American idolatry. He is the intellectual all-in-all of the American people”(DeQuincey, 1850). Ironically, the American nation (a rebel British colony) has from its earliest days revered Shakespeare--Britain’s quintessential poet-dramatist--as a touchstone and symbol of intelligence, artistry and wisdom. In this course we will explore facets of what Ralph Waldo Emerson termed the “Shakespearization” of America. The central aim of this course is to introduce students to methods and materials of bibliographic and archival research via pursuit of individual fields of interest within the concept of “American Shakespeare” or Shakespeare in America, such as: performance history (Shakespeare on the American stage); bibliography and print history (Shakespeare as “book” in America); criticism and theory (American writers on Shakespeare); as well as other areas such as education (Shakespeare in the American classroom), visual arts, politics, etc. Students will engage in diverse methods of inquiry to complete written assignments and will maintain a research journal. We will make use of the rich scholarly and cultural resources available in NYC, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum; New York Public Library; the Grolier Club; Fales Special Collections (NYU); and the New York Historical Society. Course readings may include: Bloom’s Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human; Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare; Greenblatt’s Will in the World; Bristol’s Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare; Papp’s Shakespeare For All; selections from such writers as Emerson, Lincoln, Hawthorne, Whitman and Twain.
American Bohemia
K20.1399 HUM, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 Rebecca Amato
What is bohemia and who qualifies as a bohemian? Can bohemia be chosen or is it thrust upon artists and intellectuals by political ferment and economic flux? Is bohemia in the United States fundamentally different from what it is elsewhere? Do race, gender, and sexuality play a part in how bohemia functions? Can it be bought and sold, felt and measured, or is it simply a state of mind, what rock critic Ann Powers has described as “the floating world where artists and other weirdos made their own rules, turning their lives in the city’s twilight into one long experiment?” Through critical readings that may include the work of Charles Baudelaire, Emma Goldman (Living My Life), Jack Kerouac (On the Road), James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son), and Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm), as well as the analysis of Christine Stansell (American Moderns), Richard Lloyd (Neo-Bohemia), Thomas Frank (“Why Johnny Can’t Dissent”), and Malcolm Cowley, we will explore the multiple meanings of bohemia and assess its value as both a tool for social critique and a fertile landscape for consumer cooptation. We will also apply our theories to the living, self-proclaimed bohemias of New York by producing a series of creative projects that “map” these communities and test the boundaries of our theories against contemporary versions of bohemianism.
Leviathans, Lovers and Libertines: Theater and Aesthetics of Grandeur
K20.1408 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Christopher Cartmill
Louis XIV used theater, music and the visual arts to solidify and articulate his supremacy and in so doing created for himself the role of the magnificent and mighty "Sun King." But in his time Louis was not alone in understanding an idea that we now think so modern that image is all and that the manipulation of that image is the way to power and influence. This course examines performance and its expressions, both theatrical and political, during the Baroque period and the Age of Enlightenment. Readings may include: John E. Wills, 1688; Aphra Behn, The Rover; Jean Racine, Phaedra; Pierre Corneille, The Theatrical Illusion; Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream); Molière, La Tartuffe and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife; John Dryden, All for Love; Marivaux, The Game of Love and Chance; Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer; the music of Monteverdi, Lully, Bach, Händel and Glück; as well as the art of Rubens, Le Brun, Watteau and more.
The Postcolonial World and the Legacies of Empire
K20.1409 SOC, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Edmund Fong
This course examines how the colonial experience has structured the modern world. We begin with some classic treatments of the colonial and postcolonial condition. We examine how the colonial condition has shaped the nation-state form, the law, and the culture and identities of colonizer and colonized. We consider whether the US should be viewed from a postcolonial framework. We will also concentrate on more contemporary theories of postcolonial politics and the strategies devised for resistance and transformation. We end with considerations of the enduring legacies of past and present projects of Empire. Required texts: Ashcroft, et.al. (eds.), The Postcolonial Studies Reader; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Said, Orientalism; Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
Satan and the Angels: Good and Evil Personified
K20.1410 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Clair McPherson
The popular imagination finds them irresistible; so did the great artists of the Renaissance. The major religious traditions all have versions of them; so do various cults and makeshift religions. They appear on television, and in Dante’s Commedia. Angels and demons seem to interest everyone, yet very few people have a clear notion of exactly what they are supposed to be and where they come from. Our course will explore the tradition of the angels and the devil in the great global faiths; their origins in the myths and religions of the ancient world; their history in art and literature, from the Greek daimons to modern movies, novels, and cartoon art. Readings will be excerpts from the classic religious texts such as the Bible and the dialogues of Plato, from poems such as the Commedia and Paradise Lost, novels such as The Screwtape Letters and The Exorcist; museum visits for visual art and film viewings will round out the course.
What was Conceptualism, and Why Won’t It Go Away?
K20.1411 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Eve Meltzer
This course examines the conceptual art movement, the hopes that shaped its political and aesthetic stratagems, and its legacy. We will begin by revisiting some of the major assumptions and conditions that catalyzed conceptualism, including the cultural climate of the 1960s, the critique of the object-status of art, concerns about the broader social function of the artist, as well as commodity culture. We will then take up our topic from various thematic vantages: the historical and philosophical question of language; the notions of “dematerialization” and documentation, particularly as aesthetic strategies aimed at “suppressing the beholder”; the practice of institutional critique and the broader idea of the world as system; the relationship between art, “information,” and the technological imaginary of the times. A few seminar meetings will be dedicated to focusing on a single artist or artwork. As we proceed we will also keep an eye on the question of why and in what ways conceptualism has persisted beyond its founding moment in the late 1960s, and what its more recent iterations in artistic production—as ‘global-’, ‘neo-’, and ‘post-conceptualisms’—have to offer.
Yellow Peril
K20.1412 SOC, 4 CR W 2:00-4:45, F 10:00-12:00 Jack Tchen
Permission of the instructor required (Jack.Tchen@nyu.edu). Same as V18.0383.003
Fears of “yellow peril” (and brown “Turban tides”) run deep in the present and past of U.S. political and commercial culture. Its imagery and stories are just beneath the surface of everyday discourse and always latent-readily triggered by an incident, real or fabricated. SARS fears, charges of Chinese “pirating” U.S. cultural properties, the racial profiling of “Arab-looking” peoples, and Asians “taking over” U.S. higher education all illustrate contemporary forms of Asian “peril.” Americans are woefully unaware of this scapegoating tradition, its history, and consequently remain particularly vulnerable to its ideological and affective power. Seminar students will learn historical research skills and collaboratively document historical and contemporary case studies. We’ll explore what can and must be done to counter these fallacies and practices.
Moral Behavior: Sentiment and Psychology
K20.1413 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Justin Holt
Emotions and sentiment have always been a problem for moral philosophy. Aristotle found emotions useful for the development of character but not as the Good in itself. Idealist thinkers went even farther and considered all emotions as unnecessary and even dangerous for moral actions. But other thinkers, such as the British Moralists, have tried to understand the importance of emotions in moral motivations and they actually developed systems of morals based on emotions. In this course we will study philosophy’s work on the moral roll of emotions and also contemporary social psychology concerned with moral behavior. Evolutionary understandings of moral behavior will also be considered. Our main, but not exclusive, texts will be Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Hume's An Enquiry Concerning The Principles Of Morals, and Mill's Utilitarianism.
How the Laws of Nature Lie
K20.1414 SCI, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00
Science is a powerful cultural force that has served as an engine of social change, liberating us from long held prejudices and challenging conceptions of ourselves and our relation to the natural world. But at times science has been used to support racism, sexism, and other elements of repressive social agendas. Why and how are some parts of nature investigated while others are overlooked at certain historical moments? We will examine the complex relationships between science and the broader society by reading philosophical theories of the production of scientific knowledge and analyzing historical and contemporary case studies. Historical topics will include scientific representations of gender and race, and the influences of the insurance industry on medical diagnostic practices. Contemporary topics will be selected by the class and may include research into genetic bases for homosexuality and the debates over global warming and evolution. Students will learn how to read original scientific articles and analyze how they are interpreted and circulated in popular science journalism, and we will investigate how museum exhibitions, artworks, and films are used to educate and provoke critical engagement with science. Throughout the course, we will consider the role of public participation and criticism of science in a democratic society.
Swing Down: Constructing the Future and Creating Space in the African Diaspora
K20.1415 HUM, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Guillermo Brown
This course will explore the visions of the future, creation of space and modes of escape in the African Diaspora. The approach is an interdisciplinary one, using music, video, literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and history to trace the relations between African diasporic modes of cultural expression and the creation of spaces of escape, community, and pleasure. The rise of Afro-diasporic musical genres and styles symbolize important phases of popular aesthetics in the global sphere. This course interrogates Afrofuturism, popular culture, postmodernity, and globalization, and will survey transformations in popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries mapping Afrological cultural flows. We will examine a variety of music, innovators, and cultural practices including spirituals, jazz, hip-hop, dub, grime, Sun Ra, George Clinton Parliament-Funkadelic, works by Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and others.
Politics and the Gods
K20.1417 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Aaron Tugendhaft
At a time when religion is playing an ever-increasing role in the workings of both national and international politics, this course will introduce students to key ancient texts foundational to understanding the relationship between the theological and the political. Combining both an historical and a philosophical approach, we will investigate such topics as piety, zealotry, prophecy, sovereignty, holy war, autochthony, and divine law. Questions to be addressed include: how have conceptions of the divine been modeled upon human political realities? How have different “organizational principles” of the divine such as polytheism, monolatry, and monotheism influenced political ideas? How has the nation been conceived of theologically—in its origin and its rationale? Furthermore, we will ask about the kinds of knowledge religions claim to provide and the effect these have on both collective politics and individual human action. Throughout, emphasis will be on close readings of primary texts. Readings may include: Enumah Elish, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Herodotus’s Histories, Plato’s Apology of Socrates, selections from the Hebrew Bible, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and Josephus’s Jewish War. Occasional secondary-source readings may also be assigned.
Literary Geography
K20.1418 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Steve Hutkins
Some writers are forever associated with a particular place: Dickens and London, the Brontes and Yorkshire, Hawthorne and New England, Twain and the Mississippi, Joyce and Dublin, Hemingway and Paris, Faulkner and the South. This association of writer and place is but one of the many ways literature and geography connect. This course will examine some of these connections as it scopes out the field of “literary geography.” It will consider such questions as: How are writers shaped by where they grew up and where they live? What are the techniques writers use to represent places in literature, and how do these representations teach us to see and experience places in new ways? What are the problems in labeling literary works in terms of “regional” and “national” literatures? How do spatial relations like “east and west” and “north and south” become so loaded with meaning? How can mapping be a useful tool of literary analysis? How do the insights of fields like human geography help us understand literature, and how can literary works be useful to geographers? The course will involve work with the instructor’s website (www.placeandliterature.com), such as keeping a blog and doing research in electronic sources. Readings will include fiction and nonfiction that focus on particular settings, landscapes, cities, regions, and countries, such as Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, Frederic Prokotsch’s The Asiatics, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge, Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain, as well as articles in landscape studies and human geography.
Primary Texts: Plato and Machiavelli on Philosophy and Politics
K20.1419 SOC, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 George Shulman
Open to sophomores only.
This course compares Plato’s Republic to Machiavelli’s two great texts, The Prince and The Discourses. Our goal is two-fold. On the one hand we learn the art of close reading to reveal the complex and contradictory layers of meaning in a text. On the other hand, we introduce the enterprise of political theory by exploring two of the greatest (and apparently antithetical) thinkers about politics. For Plato, philosophy seems to provide standards of judgment and order in politics: human life can flourish only if rulers gain philosophic knowledge of justice. He thus consigns political life, and the “mere” opinions of those who inhabit it to a “cave” which can be escape (and ruled) only by those who pursue philosophy. In contrast, Machiavelli denies that philosophic truth is relevant to politics: we do not need to leave “the cave” of the political world, for we can produce forms of order and standards of justice through political life itself. If he seems to embrace the moral dilemmas, contingency, and risk that Plato seems to avoid by turning to philosophy, it is no wonder he has been cast as a corrupt even “evil” figure! To stage a conversation between Plato and Machiavelli, therefore, is to confront the fundamental questions about politics: what is the nature of power? What is justice? What is the best form of regime? How is myth and art related to political life? Is force or fraud ever justified? What characterizes human excellence? In what consists human freedom? We pursue these questions by focusing on primary texts, but also by reading essays about the contemporary stakes of their arguments. This class is limited in enrollment to sophomores.
Environmental Risk and Society
K20.1460 SCI, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Chris Schlottmann
In this course, we will examine how society understands and interacts with the environment. Specifically, we will emphasize global environmental risk, using global climate change as the case study. Understanding environmental risk requires knowledge and awareness. While modern science is one means to this awareness, with its own special qualities, narratives also figure prominently. A synthesis of the two holds promise in the American context, as it brings scientific knowledge into light using stories, symbols and experiences. We will analyze narratives of global warming in relationship to cultural conceptions of “nature”, “catastrophe,” and “wilderness,” as well as in the context of other cases of depleted environmental foundations. Responding to environmental risk raises a number of conceptual dilemmas. Since environmental issues are often global (or at least super-national), cumulative, long-term and probable, they challenge traditional notions in politics, ethics and social relationships. These include the scope of moral considerability and governance, the role of science in policy decisions, and responsibility to future generations. Cognitive limitations as well as psychological mechanisms restrict our ability to fully appreciate risks that are distant in time or space. Climate change is precisely this type of problem. How has - and how might - society both understand and respond to an unprecedented risk such as climate change? Specific climate change topics to be discussed include global environmental governance, cost-benefit analysis, scientific uncertainty, and ethical and conceptual problems with climate change. Texts: Jared Diamond, Collapse; Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers; Bill McKibben, The End of Nature; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind; Elizabeth Kolbert, Fields Notes from a Catastrophe; Vig and Kraft, Environmental Policy for the 21st Century (excerpts); Richard Posner, Catastrophe; Gus Speth, Global Environmental Governance.
Philosophy of Science
K20.1465 SCI, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Laura DeNardis
Why is string theory science? Is intelligent design science? What constitutes causation in global warming? What counts as admissible scientific evidence or expertise in the judicial system? This seminar will explore classic issues in the philosophy of science in the context of modern scientific questions. Beginning in the era now known as the Scientific Revolution, a system of knowledge based on observation, experimentation, and inductive reasoning challenged the way humans viewed the physical world. This seminar examines attempts by philosophers of science to understand the nature of scientific inquiry, explanation, method, theory choice, progress, and the relationship between scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge. While historically tracing the philosophy of science through logical empiricism, historicism, realism, postmodernism, and feminist critical theory, this seminar will emphasize how philosophical issues in the nature of scientific inquiry and explanation influence important contemporary issues like educational curricula, environmental decisions, research funding, and judicial norms. Students will select a contemporary issue important to them and examine that issue through the lens of ontological and epistemological theories from various schools of thought in the philosophy of science. Texts include: Imre Lakatos, Science and Pseudoscience; Michael Frayn, Copenhagen; Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives; and Paul Feyerabend, Against Method.
In Full Effect: Hip Hop Culture
K20.1464 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Henry Williams
Nearly a generation after Chuck D of Public Enemy called hip hop music “the Black CNN”, Nas’s latest CD declares that “Hip hop is dead,” and proceeds to investigate who killed it. We’ll put off the autopsy to ask a more basic question: is there a hip hop aesthetic or common themes/tropes that can be traced through the various hip hop-infused cultural forms? To find an answer, we’ll take an interdisciplinary approach to examining hip-hop’s influence on poetry, fiction, film, art, style, and visual culture to see how it operates as a definitive cultural form and (in Raymond Williams’ words) “a particular way of life.” A key subtheme will be the relationship to American mass culture. Equally important to the discussion will be questions of race, class, and gender. Readings will include cultural critics Todd Boyd, Michael Eric Dyson, Mark Anthony Neal, and bell hooks, among others. Also on the list are Krush Groove and Juice (film); Black Artemis’ Picture Me Rollin’ (fiction); Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop (drama); Willie Perdomo, Kahlil Almustafa, and Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam (poetry); and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Lady Pink (art/graffiti).
(Re)Imagining Latin America
K20.1470 SOC, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Alejandro Velasco
In Bolivia where non-indigenous elites long ruled exclusively an indigenous President now leads a socialist revolution; in Argentina where governments once massacred youth by the thousands citizens now fill the streets to demand accountability; in Guatemala where Catholicism long reigned supreme evangelicals now find rapt audiences. Throughout the region the once unthinkable is fast becoming normative, and everywhere pundits wonder: are these the stirrings of a new Latin America or the rumblings of old ghosts in different form? This course has two aims: on one hand to decipher how Latin America has conventionally been imagined, by introducing students to major themes in the region’s study like mestizaje and machismo, authoritarianism and democratization, dependency and industrialization; on the other hand to question how valid these imaginaries remain against the backdrop of contemporary examples of social, political, and economic transformation in Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Brazil, and others. Readings draw widely from academic articles in history, anthropology, and political science, excerpts from memoirs and contemporary journalism, and samplings of music and visual arts, culminating in research papers asking: is it time to re-imagine Latin America as a new century dawns, and if so, how? Authors include: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Simón Bolívar, Gabriela Mistral, García Márquez, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Rigoberta Menchu, and Subcomandante Márcos.
Black Intellectual Thought in the Atlantic World
K20.1471 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Millery Polyné
This course examines the foundations, implementations, and implications of intellectual thought(s) of the African diaspora from the period of slavery in the Americas and post-emancipation societies through the present. Arguably, black intellectualism maintains roots in African-descended religious and cultural societies that pre-dates slavery in the West, however, this seminar seeks to explore the emergence of critical thought through historical, sociological, literary, autobiographical, religious and ethnographic writing that addressed vital issues facing African-descended peoples in the modern world. The matrix of race, class and gender has been a useful lens to analyze the systems and structures in place that both benefited and impeded racial progress. Yet, the themes of migration, nationalism, and empire-building also serve as essential tools to untangling and mapping the roots and routes of black intellectualism on four continents. Through a diverse set of materials (primary documents, films, music, and art) that utilize a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach to a range of historical, literary, political and economic questions central to Afro-diasporic experience(s), this course will critically engage the writings of thinkers who were at the vanguard of the Afro-modern and theoretical world, such as Frederick Douglass, Amy Jacques Garvey, Anténor Firmin, W.E.B. Dubois, Arturo Schomburg, Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Aimé Césaire, Paule Marshall, George Lamming and Angela Davis.
The Invention of Love
K20.1472 HUM, 2 CR M 3:30-6:10 Karen Hornick
Course meets first seven weeks only, 9/10/07-10/22/07.
This class will take a fast trek through the history, philosophy, and literature of Western love from Plato to Shakespeare. Plato’s Symposium, a deeply ironic dialogue about love, the thing everyone claims to know but no one understands, will serve as our base camp. Is love an emotion or a relationship, and why is it so often associated with problems of perception and knowledge? Is “love” just a euphemism for a base instinct towards pleasure, or is it in fact the nearest thing to Wisdom? Does the lover deserve respect or ridicule? Are there different kinds of love—erotic, familial, social, divine? If so, what happens when these loves conflict with each other? Why, finally, do we talk about these particular questions when we talk about love? Readings will include Plato’s Symposium and probably one or more of the following texts: Euripides’ Hippolytus; selections from Ovid’s The Art of Love; The Gospel of St. John, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, lyric poetry by Sappho, Martial, Catullus, Shakespeare, and Donne; Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan; and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The Public Theatre and the Village
K20.1483 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Ben Steinfeld
This course will examine the relationship between theater and the public life of New York City by studying the history of The Public Theater. We will consider The Public’s effect on American theater, as well as its relationship to Greenwich Village and, by extension, New York City. We will research and discuss landmark productions from the last 50 years, examine the democratizing impulse of the New York Shakespeare Festival and identity theatre, and discuss the recent influence of Joe’s Pub on the development of new work. Questions to be explored include: What social and political circumstances led to the creation of the Public? How did producing Shakespeare and fostering new plays, seemingly in opposition, become the twin missions of the theater? Has the Public contributed more to the American Theater because of its “importance” or its artistic achievements? How has the Public helped to shape the culture and public life of New York City? The course may include attending performances of the 2007-08 season at The Public, and will feature a special appearance from The Public’s current Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. Readings may be taken from the following genres: biography (Joseph Papp: An American Life, Helen Epstein; A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, James Shapiro), theatrical history (Shakespeare Alive!, Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland; On the Line, Robert Viagas, Baayork Lee, Thommie Walsh), social history (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs), and plays (Topdog/Underdog, Susan-Lori Parks among others).
The Emergence of Mind: Who Am I?
K20.1484 SCI, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Efrain Azmitia
The human mind is the source of awareness, thought, volition, feeling, and memory, and is what makes us individuals. Scientific study of its properties reveals, too, that it has a potential that is ever expanding. Starting with the ancient Greek notion that the mind is located in the brain, this seminar course will provide an opportunity to explore the history of brain studies over the past 2 1/2 centuries. Our discussions of how the mind functions within the brain will emphasize key scientific discoveries and philosophical theories. We will cover such topics as the mind-brain dichotomy, neuroplasticity, mind-expanding drugs, and language evolution. Readings may include material from Galen, Avicenna (Abu Ali ibn Sina), Descartes, Ramon y Cajal, Julian Jaynes, Albert Hofman, Antonio Damasio and Nancy Andreasen.