Interdisciplinary Seminars
Literary Forms: The Craft of Criticism
K20.1061 HUM, 4 CR T 2:00-4:45 Sharon Friedman
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.
Poets in Protest: Footsteps to Hip-Hop
K20.1072 HUM, 4 CR M 2:00-4:45 Michael Dinwiddie
This seminar examines the tradition of poetic protest in the African Diaspora. From the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude to the Black Liberation Movement of the 60's and today's Hip-Hop/Rap explosion, poets, lyricists and rap/hip-hop artists have sought to reclaim and reshape images of themselves and their communal experiences. Through comparative and critical analysis of historical works, songs, and poetry, we will come to a deeper understanding of the common thematic and aesthetic approaches of these movements as they continue to alter the discourse on race and liberation. Texts may include Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean; David L. Lewis, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader; Tricia Rose, Black Noise; films such as Euzhan Palcy, Sugar Cane Alley, and Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, Style Wars; and samples from Langston Hughes, NWA, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, KRS-One, OutKast, Dead Prez, Public Enemy, and Tupac Shakur.
The Caribbean: Crossroads and Creolization
K20.1074 SOC, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 A. Lauria-Perricelli
The first world region to be remade by European colonizers who massively imported laborers from Africa, India and Europe, the Caribbean became the meeting ground of three major continental diasporas. The rich variety of Caribbean cultures is diverse and complex, inflected by the multiple intersections of race, class, gender, language, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and place. This course considers the major socio-historical forces and the cultural purposes/projects that have shaped Caribbean realities. Using readings from anthropology, history and literature, we will examine continuity and change in the construction of various Caribbean identities. Texts may include James' The Black Jacobins, Brown's Mama Lola, Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Holt's The Problem of Freedom, Manuel, et. al. Caribbean Currents, Ferrer's Insurgent Cuba, and and Fouron and Glick-Schiller's Georges Woke Up Laughing.
Slavery and Culture: U.S. and Brazil
K20.1083 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Cheryl Sterling
The focus this year will use three angles of vision. First, we will discuss the extent to which African slavery was a defining experience of Western Hemispheric societies, contradicting the established image of a "brave new world." Second, our discussions will acknowledge some continuities between the slavocracies and contemporary society. Third, we will witness the way what has been called "the African dynamic" has transformed the art, culture, language, spiritual reference, definition and meaning of "America." Our concentration on the U.S. and Brazil will be extended to include insights from Cuba and Haiti.
Body and Soul
K20.1112 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Jean Graybeal
Embodiment, or the fact that we live "in," "through," or "as" bodies, has profound implications for our experience of existence. The course builds on the assumption that this human body is meaningful, symbolic, and questionable; it is therefore important and worthy of reflection and study. We look first at the philosophical roots of Western mind-body dualism, reading Plato and Descartes, and explore Susan Bordo's analysis of the effects such a perspective may have on our lives (Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body). We then pursue some alternative understandings, both non-Western and Western, including Kristofer Schipper's The Taoist Body and Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Fate and Free Will in the Epic Tradition
K20.1116 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Antonio Rutigliano
The role of the gods in human affairs inevitably raises the question of fate and free will. The epics, from the ancient world to the Renaissance, frequently reflect and define this debate. This course examines how the epics of Homer, Vergil, Dante and Milton not only mirror the philosophical and theological perceptions of the period, but sometimes forecast future debates on the issue. Readings may include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad or Odyssey, Aeneid, and Divine Comedy, as well as selections from Plato's Protagoras or Aristotle's Ethics, Cicero's De Fato, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and Fromm's Escape From Freedom.
The Medieval Mind
K20.1135 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Pat Rock
The cultural legacy of the Middle Ages continues to challenge and enchant us: its soaring architecture, its large philosophical and theological questions, its magnificent art, literature, and music. This course explores the genius of the medieval mind and its transcendent vision of life. A major focus of the course will be a study of the Realist-Nominalist controversy spurred by Aquinas and Ockham and its effect on writers such as Chaucer and Dante, as well as on the painting, music, and architecture of the period. Readings may include selections from Dante's Inferno, Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the writings of the Pearl Poet. The course may include field trips to the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a performance of medieval music.
Free Speech, Media Law, and Democracy
K20.1144 SOC, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Paul Thaler
The tension between free expression and social control has shadowed the Great American Conversation since the birth of this country. The constitutional ideal that our government "shall make no law" abridging free speech has given way, in fact, to laws that limit discussion, ostensibly for the public good. Likewise, new media technologies advance our ability to access and exchange ideas and information, but raise new questions as to the limits of such dialogue. This course, then, addresses the delicate balance between free speech and democracy, guided by our readings of Plato's Republic, Lippmann's Public Opinion, and McChesney's Our Unfree Press. We also examine important Supreme Court decisions that have shaped First Amendment rights in regard to hate speech, pornography, corporate control of mass media, and the rights of journalists. With this foundation, we ask: Are there any forms of free speech that should be restricted? If so, which? And, who should decide?
The Darwinian Revolution
K20.1156 SCI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Gene Cittadino
Open to gallatin students only.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection may be the single most influential, and controversial, scientific theory ever proposed. This course will examine the origin, nature, and consequences of Darwin's theory, with an emphasis on interrelationships among the social, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of the scientific enterprise. Topics include the connections between Darwinian theory and social, political, and moral discourse in Victorian Britain; initial and more recent scientific and public controversies; resistance to the theory by conservative Christians; applications and misapplications of the theory, such as Social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology; and the influence of Darwinian thought on literature and the arts. In addition to Darwin's Origin of Species and excerpts from Voyage of the Beagle and Descent of Man, readings will likely include Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, selections from Malthus, Spencer, and Huxley, and recent works by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould.
A Sense of Place
K20.1181 HUM, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Steve Hutkins
This course examines the places in which we work, travel, play, and dwell—the office tower and the suburban house, the city street and the superhighway, the small town and the megalopolis, the shopping mall and the theme park. Synthesizing insights from several fields, including cultural geography, urban studies, and architectural history, we explore such questions as: How do our values and worldview affect the way we experience places? How do places shape our attitudes and behavior? What are the qualities, both good and bad, of the places we inhabit, and what could we do to design and build better places? Readings may include J. B. Jackson's A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, James Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere, Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
Poetry, Prophecy, Politics
K20.1198 4 CR M 12:30-3:15 Goldfarb/Shulman
This course examines the relationship between poetry and politics. For many readers, poetry ‘changes nothing,' whereas politics means enacting worldly agendas by the exercise of power. Poetry seems private, emotional, and unworldly because it is concerned with aesthetic arrangement and sound, whereas politics is viewed as public, impersonal and worldly because it concerns collective action, institutions, and social change. Many poets, however, claim for poetry a public, collective, worldly and political meaning. Blake, Shelley, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and Ginsberg give poets a profoundly "political" role. Conversely, political leaders and movements often draw on and use poetic resources to envision and motivate change. Despite these similarities, "poetry" and "politics" denote antithetical sensibilities and enterprises. In this course, we pursue the vexed relationship between poetry and politics by comparing several lyric poets to avowedly political texts. We will also read in the genre of "prophecy" to explore a poetry with worldly aims. What is the relationship between prophets, announcing god's word, and poets offering world-transforming visions? Is prophecy always a form of poetry, and poetry a form of prophecy? How are poetry and prophecy used to address the crises and fate of the American republic? Readings may include: the Hebrew prophets and Christian gospels, Shelley, Blake, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, King, Stevens, Rich, and Ginsberg.
Cultural Resistance
K20.1214 SOC, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Stephen Duncombe
"When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver," said the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, in 1937. From the Diggers seizing St. George's Hill in 1649 to Hacktavists staging virtual sit-ins in the twenty-first century, from retributive fantasies of Robin Hoods to those of gangsta rappers, culture has long been used as a political weapon. This course will look at theories and case studies of cultural resistance, paying special attention to the often problematic and sometimes contradictory relationship between cultural challenges and political change. Authors whose works we'll use will include Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, Antonio Gramsci, C.L.R. James, Janice Radway, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Theodor Adorno, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, Hakim Bey, Abbie Hoffman, Robin Kelley and others.
Performing Politics and the Minority Experience
K20.1216 HUM, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Nina Cornyetz
This course will focus on an eclectic group of mostly contemporary, politically-directed writers and artists from various ethnic or racial minority backgrounds. We begin with performance proper, and then narrow our focus to discuss what elements of performance are incorporated into narrative text to produce "performative writing." Does minority positioning affect the content, structure, and manner in which these artists perform or write, and in turn, how they are received? How might sexual/gender politics nuance that positioning? Rather than seeking division under the rubric of "national literature," or the multicultural versions such as "African-American" or "Asian-American" writers/artists, the course will look for structural and contextual models that cross these categories—concern with oral histories and family-community genealogies, for example. We will also analyze how specific power politics inform these artists' activities across their broadly diverse sociocultural, ethnic, and geopolitical contexts. Artists and texts may include: Amiri Baraka, Ruth Ozeki, Japanese butoh dance and the Takarazuka all-women theater troupe, Ntozake Shange, William Faulkner, Brecht, Foucault.
Anatomy of Love
K20.1238 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Susan Weisser
Recently the feminist author Vivian Gornick announced "the end of the novel of love," though romance has in fact a powerful place in the history of Western literature. Romantic love is a ubiquitous phenomenon in Western culture, and we are saturated with images from the popular media about its value and inevitability, but historians and anthropologists cast doubt on its universality, sociologists point out its unreliability as an index to happy marriages, and contemporary literary treatments tend to run from skeptical to scathing. In this course students will analyze major shifts in definitions and treatments of romantic love, attending especially to issues of gender and power. We will read a selection of representative essays, excerpts from research in the psychology of love, cross-cultural and historical views of romantic love, and feminist appraisals of women's relationship to romance as a cultural institution. Course work may also include texts by Plato, Dante, Jane Austen, The Brontes, and Doris Lessing; films such as Wuthering Heights or Casablanca; and a selection of love poetry from Sappho to the contemporary era.
Mysticism
K20.1250 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 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.
American Road Trip
K20.1263 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.
Ancient Indian Literature: Translating the Sacred into the Secular
K20.1266 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.
Narrative Investigations II: Realism to Postmodernism
K20.1289 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Stacy Pies
Narrative investigations is not a prerequisite for this course.
In this class we will continue to explore the concept of narrative and the way writers interrogate literary and social conventions. As we consider how stories shape our notions of history, gender, class, and sexual identity, we will examine how the thinking of readers, and stories, changed from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Tracing the evolution of literary narrative from realism, to modernism and postmodernism, we will see a new form of narration emerge, whose protagonists include not only characters, but also time, place, the city, the reader, and language itself. Our readings will include Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Joyce's Ulysses, and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, as well as writing on film by Seymour Chatman and films such as Memento.
Ethics for Dissenters
K20.1313 SOC, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Bill Caspary
This course is about dissent in a double sense: criticizing accepted ethical values, and criticizing old ways of philosophical thought about ethics. It is about affirmative ethics, not just criticism. Topics will grow from student questions and concerns, as well as the professor's. Suggested topics include viewpoints and skills to: (1) Criticize unjust ethical standards, e. g. sexist ones, and invent fair ones; (2) Choose ethical careers and life paths; (3) Recognize responsibilities to the larger community; (4) Resolve ethical dilemmas; (5) Justify visions of a better world; (6) Dialogue productively with adversaries; (7) Respect different ethical positions without "anything goes;" (8) Learn, and question, and still have principles; (9) Get beyond dead-end debate on idealism/realism, egotism/altruism, objectivism/relativism? (When is it justified to defeat adversies politically, as with civil rights laws? Is force justified, as in the American Civil War?) Readings from feminist, pragmatist, existentialist, ecological, nonviolence and conflict resolution, neo-classical, Marxist, and humanistic and developmental psychology approaches as alternatives to mainstream Kantian and utilitarian ethics. Authors include de Beauvoir, Dewey, Emerson, Gandhi, Gilligan, James, Kohlberg, Marx, Maslow, Nietzsche, Nussbaum, Rogers, Sartre.
Literary and Cultural Theory: An Interdisciplinary Introduction
K20.1314 HUM, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Sara Murphy
In this course, we will examine several questions that arise for students interested in the relation of theory to interdisciplinary study. What is theory essentially? How does it help us to develop approaches and shape questions for study? What are some influential theoretical schools and theoreticians? What do they say and how might they be related to one another? We will proceed through readings from Structuralism to Post-structuralism, focusing on language, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and interpretations of power and discourse. Authors considered may include Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray.
Shakespeare and the London Theatre
K20.1318 HUM, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Bella Mirabella
In this class we will take a visit to London in the years 1590 to 1616, in search of Shakespeare and the London in which he lived and wrote. During this period, London at the height of its Renaissance power, was a center of dramatic arts unparalleled in the rest of Europe. Volumes of plays were written, theaters were built all over London, and each day, during the season, those theaters were filled with audiences who were drawn from every social and economic class and both genders. Theater was a craze. It was the center of cultural life in London. And in the center of this remarkably, vibrant creative world, Shakespeare was a superstar. We will examine the city of London, Shakespeare, and theater from literary, historical, political and cultural perspectives. Our consideration of the theater will be in relation to the roles women played as performers and to other forms of popular entertainment, such as dancing and mountebank performances. We will read a selection of plays written by Shakespeare such as As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Othello, and The Tempest. We will also see film versions of some of the plays and go to the New York theater.
Baseball as a Road to God
K20.1324 2 CR R 6:45-8:45 John Sexton/James Traub
Open to sophomores and juniors only. Permission of the instructor required. To request permission, please complete the application form, available at 715 Broadway, 5th floor. Deadline for applications is december 1. Please note that course meets on the following dates: January 18 and 25; February 1, 8, 15, and 22; March 1, 8, and 29; April 5, 12, and 19.
Baseball has been called America's game, and it captures the American progressive spirit in a special way. (Only in America would there be a game the object of which would be to bat a ball outside a playing field, with the result named "going home.") Still more, the game has revealed a capacity to grip individuals, families, and collections of friends in a way that transforms their experience of the mundane into something sublime—for some, a genuinely spiritual experience. This course examines baseball as a metaphor capable of producing such experiences. It uses both a set of readings illustrative of the metaphor (such as Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy) and a set of readings reflecting on the metaphor (such as Giamatti's A Great and Glorious Game). These readings are discussed against a background of religion as a phenomenon (illustrated with texts such as Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane). The course entails a commitment to substantial reading (12 books and additional short pieces) and writing (7 papers of 5-6 pages and 1 longer final paper). Class discussion requires a mastery of the readings before class and participation is required.
Jung and the Postmodern Religious Experience
K20.1328 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 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.
Beyond the Invisible Hand: The History of Economic Thought
K20.1337 SOC, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Kim Phillips-Fein
What is the economy, and how did it come to be understood as a separate, discrete realm of society, so unique that it demands its own academic discipline? How have philosophers understood the basic problems of economics—production, labor, coercion, risk, leisure, desire, self-realization, and the constraints of the material world—over time? Contemporary economics is modeled to a great extent on the hard sciences, and claims to reveal the universal laws that underlie the immense complexity of economic life. The economy, however, is itself a historical and political realm, shaped in fundamental ways by human choices, and the very way that people think about and try to make sense of the economy is influenced by historical circumstance. In this course, we will read and analyze works of economic philosophy and literature in order to understand the variety of ways that people have looked at economic life. Readings may include Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Friedrich Hayek.
Language, Globalization and the Self
K20.1342 SOC, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 M.L. Achino-Loeb
This course is intended as an exploration of language as vehicle for processes of globalization. What role did language play in the changes wrought by early capitalist transformations and the colonial expansion? Conversely, how have these global changes affected localized communities and the languages that identifies them? And why should we care? To answer these questions we will examine how the colonial experience has given rise to value-laden linguistic practices that mirror and sustain the racializing of privilege; and how the experience of language-loss encountered by voluntary and involuntary migrants can attack the integrity of the self. While ultimately concerned with language, our discussions will have a wide scope ranging from issues of political economy to collective consciousness and individual psychology. Readings will include Achino-Loeb's Silence: The Currency of Power, Anderson's Imagined Communities, Wolf's Europe and the People Without History, Hoffman's Lost in Translation, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, as well as selected excerpts from Appiah"s In My Father's House and Appadurai's Modernity at Large.
American Capitalism in the twentieth Century
K20.1359 SOC, 4CR MW 12:30-1:45 Kim Phillips-Fein
Formerly titled Business and Economy in American History II:From Steel to Silicon Valley.
This course examines the development of capitalism in the United States from the Civil War to the 1990s, paying special attention to the relationship between the economy and political, cultural and intellectual transformations. We will look especially closely at the changing concept of economic freedom in America. The course will cover the rise of the modern corporation, the labor movement, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the economic impact of war in the twentieth century, racism and economics, the changing economic position of women, deindustrialization and the stock market boom of the 1990s. Readings will incorporate both primary and secondary sources. Possible authors include Betty Friedan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Ronald Reagan.
History of Modern U.S. Feminism and Feminist Activism I: Theory, Literature, Politics
K20.1363 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Laura Ciolkowski
Feminist poet and essayist Katha Pollitt once quipped: "for many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking." In this course we will focus on some of the founding texts of modern feminist thought in the West in order to develop a strong critical and historical basis for grappling with the problem of "feminism" that Pollitt has described. Some of the key questions that will structure our work include: What are some of the social and political struggles of 18th, 19th and early-20th-century feminism and how have these struggles contributed to the ways we think about and talk about feminism and gender equality here in the US? What are the critical terms of the early historical debates over the meaning of femininity? What has been left out of the classic story of women and feminist politics and why has it been excluded? Readings will be drawn from a wide range of genres, including literature, history, philosophy and political theory.
The Body in the Arabic Tradition
K20.1367 HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Sinan Antoon
The body has always been a productive site for the construction of meanings, boundaries, and hierarchies. Taking the trope of the body in pre-modern Arabo-Islamic tradition(s) as its starting point, the course will examine the modes in which various discourses have inscribed themselves unto the body and competed for it. Readings and discussions will revolve around a number of interrelated questions: How was the body gendered and constructed in the early texts of the tradition? How were these representations appropriated and altered in later periods? How were desire and pleasure regulated, contained and/or celebrated ? How were religious representations of the body as a reflection of the divine appropriated by profane poetry and mystical writings? What boundaries and laws existed for the body's movement in space (particularly female), and what were the implications and punishments for violating them? How did rituals of purity deal with blood and bodily fluids? How did religious and legalistic discourses deal with otherized and marked bodies of religious and sexual minorities? Readings (in translation) will range from excerpts from the Qur'an, hadith, (Prophetic tradition) poetry, Islamic law, philosophy, and erotica.
Popular Culture and the Struggle for Black Civil Rights
K20.1370 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Justin Lorts
How has popular culture served as a path (or obstacle) to social, political and economic equality for African Americans? Can black popular culture align itself with political movements without compromising its artistic integrity and authenticity? What is "authentic" black popular culture anyway? For over a century black artists, intellectuals, political leaders and audiences have engaged with these questions, as part of a larger debate on the relationship between African American participation in popular culture and their status in American society. Because popular culture has historically been one of the few avenues of success open to African Americans, some have credited it with offering black artists and entertainers the possibility of economic success, social mobility and cultural visibility. Others, however, have charged popular culture with perpetuating negative stereotypes and limiting blacks in their quest for equality. Far from being settled, this debate continues today. This course will trace the development of this debate from a variety of historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives. Students will analyze some of the key historical and contemporary works on the subject, as well as some of the movies, television shows, literature, music and comedy routines that were at the center of this debate.
African Diasporic Art and Spirituality in the Americas: Honey is My Knife
K20.1372 HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Daniel Dawson
This seminar will investigate the cultural contributions of Africans in the formation of the contemporary Americas. There will be a particular focus on the African religious traditions that have continued and developed in spite of hostile social and political pressures. Because of their important roles in the continuations of African aesthetics, the areas of visual art, music and dance will be emphasized in the exploration of the topic. This seminar will also discuss two important African ethnic groups: the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, and the Bakongo of Central Africa. It will highlight the American religious traditions of these cultures, e.g., Candomble Nago/Ketu, Santeria/Lucumi, Shango, Xango, etc., for the Yoruba, and Palo Mayombe, Umbanda, Macumba, Kumina, African-American Christianity, etc., for the Bakongo and other Central Africans. In the course discussions, the Americas are to include Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, the United States and numerous other appropriate locations. There will also be a focus on visual artists like Charles Abramson, Jose Bedia, Juan Boza, Lourdes Lopez, Manuel Mendive, etc., whose works are grounded in African based religions. In addition, we will explore how African religious philosophy has impacted on every-day life in the Americas, for example in the areas of international athletics, procedures of greeting and degreeting, culinary practices, etc.
Critical Approaches to Photography
K20.1373 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Keith Miller
Since the invention of photography in the 19th century the nature of representation has been vastly altered. Through a close analysis of the many meanings given to photography, and the critical discussion surrounding it, the class will look at how photography has been defined, has defined us and how both definitions have shifted over the period since its invention. Within this framework the class will look at the numerous critical approaches to photography as it initially struggled to be understood as an art and why this distinction is still significant. Simultaneously, the readings and class discussion will focus on the politics of vision implied within the photographic discourse. The scientific objectivity of photo, an apparently logical extension of Enlightenment thought, will be scrutinized in an attempt to see how this idea of objectivity, truth and the real, affect our experience of the photo and of the everyday. The readings will include canonical and newer texts including Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Berger, David Levi-Strauss, bell hooks and Siegfried Kracauer. The artists looked at will include Daguerre, Gregory Crewdson, the Khmer Rouge, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andreas Gursky, Hans Bellmer and others.
The Birth of the World: The Cosmological Traditions
K20.1374 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 McPherson
"How did the world begin?" and "why is there anything rather than nothing?" and "Who made the starts?" These are primary questions: the kind children like to ask, and philosophers, and theologians, and scientists. In this course we'll read and discuss the various classic accounts of Creation. We will anchor the course in the Hebrew tradition (Genesis) and the Greek tradition (both mythic and philosophical: Hesiod, and the Presocratics), and from there examine sources and analogs in Babylon, Sumer, Egypt; their counterparts in Japanese, African, and other global mythologies and religions; the story of their interpretation (especially in the Talmudic and Patristic traditions); and, finally, their relation to the paradigms of modern astronomy and philosophy. Texts will include Genesis; the Theogony; the fragments of the Presocratics; selections from Plato's Timaeus and other dialogues; Midrash on Genesis; Commentaries by Church Fathers such as Augustine and Gregory on the Creation story; and selections from ancient Middle Eastern, Hindu. Buddhist, Taoist, and Muslim scriptures and myths.
Romantics and Revolutionaries: The Birth of Modern Political Theater
K20.1375 HUM, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Christopher Cartmill
In the period of the American and French Revolutions, theater and theatricality took on powerful political significance. This course explores the convergence between theater and politics during the Age of Revolution, while seeking parallels to the theatricality of our own political culture. Partly, we examine the historical conditions and cultural innovations that fueled writers and artists during this volatile and dynamic period between 1770 and 1850. Partly, we examine dramaturgy and theatre aesthetics exploring the links between history, and theories of drama, playwriting and stage practice, performance styles and critical reception. In addition to class discussions, students will be responsible for an extensive research project (paper and presentation). Course materials may include works by such figures as Voltaire, Rousseau, Sheridan, Blake, Schiller, Byron, Goethe, Stendhal, Robespierre, Washington, Pitt, and Paine; the music of Mozart and Beethoven; and the art of Piranesi, David, Ingres, and Delacroix.
Memory and Forgetting
K20.1376 HUM, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Eliza Slavet
While "memory" and "forgetting" are often posed as opposites, it is possible that these terms are complementary aspects of a larger phenomenon. We will explore how these concepts depend on one another and define one another. We will examine the tensions between individual and collective memory, memory and history, forgetting and forgiving, and memory and justice. How do the processes of remembering and forgetting shape individual and collective identities? In order to remember, do we need to forget? How does the threat of forgetting encourage memorialization? Do memorials help us remember or allow us to forget? For the final project, students will design an "instrument" of memory and/or of forgetting, and examine the potential effects and uses of such objects. Course materials will include fictional short stories, theoretical essays, films and artworks. Readings will be drawn from Borges, Freud, Halbwachs, Proust, Yerushalmi and the Hebrew Bible, amongst others.
Orientalism
K20.1391 4 CR F 11:00-1:45 Antoon/Cornyetz
The term "Orientalism" designates how the "West" has historically apprehended the "East." Orientalism has three primary manifestations: (1) as an object of study defined by a geographical, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic unit known as "the Orient"—to be taught, and known, through discursive sources; (2) as a system of thought based on an ontological (rather than a historically determined) distinction between the Occident and the Orient; (3) as politically embedded in various legal and political institutions (such as in immigration laws). Moreover, the myth of the Orient that is constructed through these manifestations has largely been internalized and reproduced by the "East" itself. This course will combine an examination of Orientalist texts on the Middle East and East Asia with ones that challenge and analyze this imaginary construct. We will ask what are the persistent myths of the Orient, how and why are they constructed, and what purpose do these myths serve? Our texts will include Said, Orientalism, Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Chow, Writing Diaspora, Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, Foucault, Power/Knowledge, as well as a selection of films and excerpts from early Orientalist literature.
Trauma, Transmission, Postmemory
K20.1393 HUM, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Judith Greenberg
Inasmuch as our entry into the twenty-first century may suggest new horizons, we live very much in the aftermath of the twentieth century. Its great literary, philosophical and artistic developments shape our perceptions and actions. But so too do its mass scale traumas and atrocities. This course will examine what it means to live, write and create in the aftermath of trauma. How do memories pass from one generation to the next? What do we inherit from our families, culture and history? Is there such a thing as what Marianne Hirsch calls "post-memory"—the condition of carrying the memories of others? This seminar will explore what it means to live in the shadow of the Holocaust and other traumas. Can one ever know the experience of another? How do we attend to "the pain of others" as Susan Sontag put it? What are the limitations of our knowledge of the past? What's the role of photography, memorials, museums and architecture in documenting and passing on such memories? How do we build memorials that consider not only an event but also its aftermath—how future generations may engage with and remember in their contexts? Readings may include Eva Hoffman's After Such Knowledge, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, W. B. Sebald's Austerlitz, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Michael Ondatje's Anil's Ghost, Marguerite Duras' The War, Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames, Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw's Extremeties, as well as theoretical investigations from a variety of disciplines by such writers as Theodor Adorno, Susan Sontag, James Young and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub.
Latinos and The Politics of Race
K20.1394 SOC, 4 CR M 2:00-4:45 René Francisco Poitevin
This course takes a look at the history of racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. from the standpoint of Latinos. We will explore how recent changes in Latino demographics, now the largest minority group in the U.S., are challenging our notions of whiteness, blackness, and the dominant White-Black race paradigm. Are Latinos the ‘new whites'? Or are they becoming instead the ‘new blacks'? What does this mean for politics and public policy debates? Through memoirs, fiction, videos, and social science theory, we will trace the history of racialization in the U.S. (from slavery to our latest Latino immigration cycle) in order to interrogate both the fluidity and the challenges confronting race relations in U.S. society. Readings will include Michael Omi, David Roediger, Leo Chavez, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Lisa Lowe, Clara Rodriguez, Piri Thomas, and Samuel Huntington.
Contemporary Latin American Social Movements: Revolutionary and Autonomous Visions
K20.1395 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Marina Sitrin
The past ten years have witnessed a tremendous upsurge in revolutionary social movements in Latin America. One of the characteristics of these movements is their varied relationship to concepts of power, state power in particular. There have been a number of left parties that have won national elections, from Venezuela and Bolivia, to Brazil, Uruguay and Chile. At the same time there has been a rise in social movements that identify as autonomous, such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas or certain movements in Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia. These movements, while generally anti-capitalist, conceptualize power as something to be created, not taken. The focus is self-organization (autogestion), rather than demands on the State. This course will examine these diverse revolutionary processes, looking both to history and listening to the voices of those actors involved in these movements. We will incorporate poetry and literature in each class, including selections from Latin American Revolutionary Poetry, ed. Robert Marquez.
Nature and the Polis
K20.1396 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Justin Holt
Historically nature has been a fundamental philosophic concept for analyzing the origin and structure of the polis. It has been used not only as a means for explaining the political and its limits, but also as a regulative device for shaping preferred political outcomes. Determining certain actions or institutions as natural can provide a sanction to political decisions so they seem necessary. This is the case whether the natural is determined according to honest scientific analysis, or as the manipulation of belief, with Plato's hierarchy of souls in the Republic being the most overt. Nature appears in various forms in regard to the political, easily identifying the polis as the end of natural processes or as a protection against a hostile nature obscures the more important questions of how and why such an answer is arrived at. In this course we will examine the use of the concept of nature throughout the history of political philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the effect the concept has had on the analysis of human activity and on understandings of preferred societal outcomes. Our main, but not exclusive, texts will be Plato's Republic and Hobbes' Leviathan.
The Powerless Empowered: Domination, Agency, and Resistance in Ancient and Modern Literature
K20.1397 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Carin Calibrese
This course will examine the ways in which the powerless, whether made so by gender, race, class, imprisonment, or some combination thereof, can act against and in the face of their oppression, when all agency has seemingly been stripped from them. Denied a politics of force, the oppressed find power elsewhere, frequently in public speech and action with double meaning, designed to shield the intent of the actors. Employing and critiquing frameworks from various theorists, including Fanon, Bhabha, and James Scott, we will try to identify and unpack this coded speech and action. By tracing the course of this stealthy resistance of the dominated against the dominant from ancient philosophy and drama to modern literature, we can investigate its successes and failures, its changes from culture to culture, from speech to action, and most importantly, its role in social change. Readings may include selected works of the Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Roman poets Ovid, Petronius, and Seneca, women's captivity narratives, slavery narratives, modern novelists such as George Eliot and Margaret Atwood, and the philosophers Aristotle, Althusser, and Foucault.
Birth Control: Population, Politics and Power
K20.1398 SOC, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Lauren Kaminsky
What is the political and economic value of people? Who has the right to manipulate human reproduction, and why? How do individuals express reproductive autonomy, and how do states exercise population control? This course will focus on birth control (broadly defined as the management of human reproduction) as a lens through which to see how the evaluation and cultivation of national populations has shaped government in the modern world. In discussing and writing about topics such as race and eugenics, overpopulation and sustainability, sterilization and abortion, human rights and demographic nationalism, students will draw on a variety of primary and secondary sources to develop their own ideas about government and self-government in the age of birth control. Readings will include excerpts from Angela Davis's Women, Race & Class, Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Woman's Right, Thomas Malthus's On Population and James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, as well as texts by Emma Goldman, Michel Foucault, Pat Robertson, Margaret Sanger and Amartya Sen.
American Bohemia
K20.1399 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 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.
Autobiography: Study of the Self
K20.1400 HUM, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Nicole Parisier
This course focuses on autobiography as a means of understanding human experience. While psychology, philosophy and history each take human nature as a subject of study, autobiography allows its reader to live another life vicariously—to use experience as a critical tool. This course will provide an opportunity for students to work on their own life stories, while developing an intellectual context for this project. Toward this end, this course will examine the genre of autobiography and the idea of the self historically and analytically, to ask how the writing of selfhood has changed over time and how the idea of the self has evolved concurrently. Readings will include Saint Augustine's Confessions, Freud's Dora, Anais Nin's Diaries, Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Nicole Krauss's History of Love.
Ethnographic Fictions: Writing Culture, Reading Culture
K20.1402 SOC, 4 CR W 9:30-12:15 Asale Angel-Ajani
Novelists, journalists and academics all write about culture in some capacity. Ethnography, the representational by-product and the practice—ethnographic research—has created tension between the "researcher" and the "subject". This tension calls attention to a host of questions: how is knowledge about cultures produced, what are the consequences of these representations, and what is at stake for communities that challenge the ways their cultures have been portrayed? Our task in this course is to explore the space in between this tension by looking at alternative representational strategies. We may read the work of Trin T. Minha-ha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, James Clifford, among others.
Revolutionary Media: Theory and Practice
K20.1406 SOC, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Holly Lewis
This course examines how new media revolutionizes—and restrains—human consciousness. We will decode the role of new media during specific moments of radical social change; conversely, we will examine how media innovations have been used to maintain social order. We will investigate classic examples of "revolutionary" media: Nazi film propaganda, Soviet poster art, Situationist graffiti and the audio tapes of the Islamic Revolution. We will pay special attention to the rise of digital technology, particularly the growing impact of online communities, and students are welcome to examine more contested media terrains such as zines, protest music, weapons technology, architecture, prosthetics, fashion, and religious practices. Selected readings from Marx, Heidegger, Marcuse, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Haraway and Badiou will provide theoretical ground for our inquiry. This course will encourage hands-on experimentation and creative practice.
Television and Dissent: The Contested Terrain of the Cathode Ray
K20.1407 SOC, 4 CR F 12:30-3:15 Mark Read
Televison is arguably the most powerful and influential means of mass communication ever invented. In its dual role as informer and entertainer of the masses, it acts as both a filter of information and an arbiter of social norms. The powerful role it plays and has played in society has made it a target of critics and activists almost since its inception. The issues around which these critiques are organized are wide ranging, taking in virtually the entire scope of political struggle in the latter half of the twentieth century. The strategies that activists have used to try and reform the medium, or to "play" it in order to achieve their own goals has been equally wide ranging. In this seminar we will begin by examining the political, economic and aesthetic evolution of the medium. As we proceed we will trace the many threads of criticism that have orbited around "the tube," and discover the links between these critiques and the strategies of action that have been used to try and contend with this seemingly monolithic and all-powerful institution.
