Interdisciplinary Seminars
The Struggle for The Word: History of Mass Media I
K20.1055 SOC, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Stephen Duncombe
The history of the media is the history of struggle, a battle waged over words and images: who produces them, who has access to them, and whose interests are served by them. Beginning with the Bible and moving through plays and popular song; pamphlets, penny press and advertisements; this course will use the history of the printed word to explore enduring questions of power and culture. Readings will range from Genesis and Plato to the forced confessions of a barely literate sixteenth-century miller, Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass, slave songs to early newspapers, and writings of public relations impresarios like Edward Bernays to the words of the novelist James Joyce.
Contemporary Aesthetics and Cultural History
K20.1081 HUM, 4 CR W 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.
Pride and Power: Renaissance Revolutions in Art and Culture
K20.1103 HUM, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 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.
The Spirit of the Comic and the Spirit of the Age
K20.1113 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 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.
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.
Speech, Silence, and the Struggle for Identity
K20.1157 SOC, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 M.-L. Achino-Loeb
We know a great deal about speech and its role in the formation and transformation of identity for both individuals and groups. We know less about silence in such matters: whether silence complements or subverts speech, hence how it ultimately affects our identity and access to power. Speech and silence can be seen as conflicting strategies used selectively by women and men, blacks and whites, immigrants and indigenous people, rich and poor for the maintenance of self and the silencing of others. Why? What are the psychic and social costs of these strategies? What myths do they help perpetuate? Finally, what are the ideologies that affect our understandings of both? Our readings will include Trudgill’s Sociolinguistics, Achino-Loeb's Silence: The Currency of Power, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and excerpts from other sources.
Culture as Communication
K20.1193 SOC, 4 CR MW 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.
Thinking Politically
K20.1248 SOC, 4 CR M 12:30-3:15 George Shulman
Open to sophomores only.
Two purposes shape this course. One is to explore our ambivalence towards and alienation from "politics." What does our apathy and cynicism say about politics as it is practiced in our society, and what does it say about ourselves? To pursue these questions means setting a second goal: to analyze what politics—as a concept and a practice—has meant in history, means to us now, and could mean. We begin by closely reading several canonical texts in political theory. We proceed by using more modern texts to explore different "dimensions" of political life: the ways we conceive and pursue interests; the ways we are motivated by often unconscious drives, anxieties, and fantasies; the role of culture in the form of narrative and identity; the place of rhetoric, persuasion and performance, since politics happens through speech on public stages; and lastly, different ways of understanding and practicing democracy. Our basic goal is to learn how to "think politically" about the world, by learning to understand politics in conventional and unconventional senses. Readings include: More, Utopia; Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses; Marx, selected writings; Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur; Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Foucault, The History of Sexuality; and Arendt, "What is Freedom."
Mysticism
K20.1250 4 CR T 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.
Shakespeare on the Uses of This World
K20.1253 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Pat Rock
Shakespeare, looking back to the Middle Ages and forward to the Renaissance, asks: “Is it possible to be at home in this world?” Falstaff warns Prince Hal that if Hal banishes him, he banishes “all the world,” implying what a tragedy that would be. Yet Hamlet says the uses of the world seem to him to be “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” This course examines the dynamic tension that lies between these two world views, and the complex and challenging ways Shakespeare deals with the question. Readings may include Henry IV, Part I; Hamlet; King Lear; Much Ado About Nothing; and Twelfth Night.
Narrative Investigations II: Realism to Postmodernism
K20.1289 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Stacy Pies
Narrative Investigations I 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.
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, global warming, and environmental justice. Readings may include Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare; Callenbach, Ecotopia; 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.
Critical Social Theory:The Predicament of Modernity
K20.1306 SOC, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Ali Mirsepassi
The central theme of this course is modernity as a social and intellectual project. We will read a number of critical social theory texts which deal with modernity as their central theoretical subjects. The goal of this class is to introduce various theoretical perspectives about modernity and to examine different aspects of the current debate on modernity and its fate in our time. In the first three weeks of the class we will study earlier social theorists of modernity (Karl Marx, Emile Durkhiem, and Max Weber). We will then read two modernist texts (Habermas’ Transformation of Public Sphere and Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air), two texts critical of the modernity project (Foucault’s Knowledge/Power and Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition), and a text which deals with the modernity’s colonial impact (Said’s Orientalism). This is a relatively advanced social theory course. In the first two weeks of the class we will study earlier social theorists of modernity (Karl Marx, Emile Durkhiem, and Max Weber), however, student participation in the course requires some knowledge of classical social theory.
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 theory 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.”
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.
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.
Behind the Mask I: Exteriority
K20.1351 HUM, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Nina Cornyetz
Same as V33.0551001.
It can be argued that until the 1880s one thing was completely lacking in Japanese literary and performing arts: the notion of an interiorized subject. In fact, the premodern Japanese arts are examples of extreme “exteriority,” that privilege form, word play and intertextuality and enfold the human being and human erotic passions within rituals for purity, and harmony with a cosmology of the heavens. This course will explore premodern Japanese poetics and prose, performing and visual arts, from the very first writings through the nineteenth century, in relation to history and religious and philosophic belief systems such as Buddhism, Shintoism and Confucianism. Texts will include: selections of poetry, emaki (picture scrolls), noh and puppet plays, selections from The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, Essays in Idleness.
Rethinking Science: Latour, Laboratories, and Pandora’s Box
K20.1358 SCI, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis
Same as V18.0721001.
With the rise of science, modern people believe they irrevocably separated themselves from their primitive, premodern ancestors. But are scientific practices really superior to other forms of inquiry? Does science provide the objective impartial knowledge that many moderns believe, or do social, cultural and traditional influences actually determine its course? And, in the face of increasing ecological crisis, will moderns eventually look back on science as not our greatest gift but our worst curse? For those interested in these kinds of questions, Bruno Latour has been one of the liveliest, most controversial, and most engaged scholars of the field. His work combines poststructuralist theory with robust empirical studies, and he consistently unpacks dense “actor-networks” of subjectivities, technologies, organizations, and social power. In this course, we follow Latour from his early ethnographies of laboratory life, through his more philosophical works on Modernism and Truth, to his later works on the environmental and the politics of “nature.” Along the way, Latour’s deliciously iconoclastic ideas will challenge us to rethink science, modernity, nature, and ourselves.
Liberalism and Sexuality in America
K20.1379 SOC, 4CR M 6:20-9:00 Nathaniel Frank
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 to live the good life. 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? Note that this course takes a historical approach to the study of liberal political theory, and examines both classical and modern liberalism. We will then turn to the study of sexual politics in modern America as a kind of test case to deepen our understanding of the ethical and practical challenges faced by modern liberal thought and practice. Readings may include John Locke, Jane Addams, Peter Beinart, Andrew Sullivan and Michael Warner, as well as historical documents and contemporary journalism.
Three Revolutions: Haiti, Mexico and Cuba
K20.1380 SOC, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 A. Lauria-Perricelli
We compare and contrast the revolutionary events, processes and outcomes in Haiti, Mexico, and Cuba. None were simple reflexes of European or North American ideas and politics, although such external factors were among their causes and effects. Each had significant anti-colonial or anti-imperial components, as well as social and political conflicts and alliances within the immediate societies of the revolutionary countries which involved both “internal” and “external” groups and ideas. We consider the roles of such investors, landowners, mineowners, merchants, bankers, politicians, state administrators, peasants, laborers, intellectuals, migrants, and other social groups in-country or in the relevant imperial centers. We analyze interrelations among kinds of capitalism, and anti-capitalist ideologies or social forms and types of rationality; changing revolutionary processes and demands; changing role and organization of the state; the supporters or antagonists of the revolution among differing social groups at differing times; the revolution’s relation to earlier and later movements. Where necessary, we invoke examples from other countries. Readings might include selections from Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century; DuBois, Avengers of the New World; Fick, The Making of Haiti; Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation; Gonzales, The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940; Nugent, The Spent Cartridges of Revolution; Stephen, Zapata Lives!; Kapcia, Cuba: Isle of Dreams; Saney, Cuba: A Revolution in Motion; Pérez-Stabli, The Cuban Revolution.
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 in America
K20.1382 SOC, 4 CR F 11:00-1:45 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. The exact age at which this transition takes place varies in each society, as does the nature of the transition. This course is an examination of the process of coming-of-age in American culture. The course will begin by looking at young people and their place in the family, the economy, and society from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth. The course will then trace the origins and development of the idea of adolescence which begins in earnest in 1904 when psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall offered advice to adults about what to do with a growing number of young people in America. Hall’s work invented the field of adolescent psychology and drew attention to adolescence as a social phenomenon. The course will also examine what the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep termed rites de passage, the rituals and ceremonies accompanying an individual’s transition from adolescence to adulthood. Finally, the course will consider cinema and novels of coming-of-age from the post-war period through the 1990s. Authors: Thomas Hine, G. Stanley Hall, Erik Erikson, Arnold van Gennep, Margaret Mead, Victor Turner, David Considine, Timothy Shary, J.D. Salinger, Douglas Coupland.
The Photographic Imaginary
K20.1387 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Eve Meltzer
Same as V43.0450008.
In this seminar we will examine some of the most provocative ways in which photography has been imagined and practiced over the past century and a half, from early accounts of the daguerreotype to recent work on the digital image. Through close examination of photographic practices and the critical discourses that have grown up around them, we will endeavor to understand not just what André Bazin calls the “ontology” of the photographic image, but also how the photograph gets thought about, talked about, utilized and, in turn, produced fantasmatically as a particular kind of object and a special way of picturing. Readings may include Barthes, Bazin, Benjamin, Fox Talbot, Kracauer, Manovich, Metz, Sontag, Tagg.
Thinking About Seeing
K20.1388 HUM, 4 CR T 2:00-4:45 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.
Sappho and David: The Greek and Hebrew Poetic Traditions
K20.1389 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Clair McPherson
From Sappho’s love songs to the Psalms of David, poetry in the ancient Greek and Hebrew traditions expressed the gamut of human thought, feeling, and experience. We will explore the Book of Psalms and Sappho, along with the Song of the Sea, the Songs of Songs, and the oracles of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and the odes of Pindar, the poetry of Anacreon, and Archolochus, and lyrical portions of the Iliad and Odyssey. We will consider historical setting (from war-tribes to kingship and city-state); culture (from the heroic to the democratic and the theocratic); theme (love, God, honor, sexuality, justice, forgiveness); function (the who, what, where, when, and why of any poem). Art and architecture, philosophy, and religious literature will also be accessed to provide an in-depth, three-dimensional sense of the context. And finally, we will, throughout the semester, ask the question why these poems, some of them three thousand years old, speak to us with such startling immediacy, power, and urgency in the twenty-first century.
American Shakespeare
K20.1390 HUM, 4 CR T 2:00-4:45 Alycia Smith-Howard
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.
The Powerless Empowered: Domination, Agency, and Resistance in Ancient and Modern Literature
K20.1397 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Carin Calabrese
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.
Leviathans, Lovers and Libertines: Theater and Aesthetics of Grandeur
K20.1408 HUM, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 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.
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 and 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, Evolution 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. Kant 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 first develop a philosophic conception of moral action. Next we will consider how evolution has shaped the debate over the cause, significance, and status of actions and sentiments commonly considered as moral. Finally, we will read contemporary social psychology on the acquisition of moral sense and the causes of destructive behavior. Our main, but not exclusive, texts will be Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning The Principles Of Morals, and Frans de Waa l’s Primates and Philosophers.
Swing Down: Constructing the Future and Creating Space in the African Diaspora
K20.1415 HUM, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 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
Open to sophomores only.
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 a 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.
The Iliad and Its Legacies in Drama
K20.1454 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Laura Slatkin
Permission of the instructor required. Same as V29.0104001.
"The poem of force," according to Simone Weil, the Iliad is also a poem of forceful influence. In this course we will read the Iliad intensively, followed by an examination of its heritage on the dramatic stage. In the first half of the semester we will primarily explore the Iliad in terms of the poetics of traditionality; the political economy of epic; the ideologics of the Männerbund (the "band of fighting brothers"); the Iliad's uses of reciprocity; its construction of gender; its intimations of tragedy. In the second half of the course, informed by a reading of Aristotle's Poetics, we will focus on responses to the Iliad in dramatic form: possible readings will include Sophocles' Ajax; Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis; Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida; Racine's Andromaque; Giraudoux's La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu; Ellen McLaughlin's Iphigenia and Other Daughters. Students will give presentations on an Iliadic intertext of their own choosing. [ No knowledge of Greek is required for the course, though those who wish to do reading in Greek will be offered assignment options.]
In Full Effect: Hip Hop Culture
K20.1464 HUM, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 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 2:00-3:15 Alejandro Velasco
Open to sophomores only.
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 revolution, 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 projects asking: is it time to re-imagine Latin America as a new century dawns, and if so, how? Authors include Simón Bolívar, Gabriela Mistral, Gabriel García Márquez, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Manlio Argueta, the EZLN, and Walter Mignolo.
Black Intellectual Thought in the Atlantic World
K20.1471 HUM, 4 CR W 2:00-4:45 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.
American Politics After 9/11: Empire, Race, and Democracy
K20.1475 SOC, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 George Shulman
The central goal of this course is to examine the strange relationship between democracy and empire displayed repeatedly in history: the Athenian polis, the Roman republic, parliamentary Great Britain, and the United States have professed democratic principles while practicing imperial politics. We will read in previous moments but will focus on the American case. Partly, we ask theoretical questions: What does it mean to call a state an “empire”? In what ways are “democratic” and “imperial” practices related? Partly, we ask historical questions: What is the relationship of democratic principles, exclusionary practices, and national expansion in American history? Partly, we assess how post-9/11 politics repeats and transforms inherited political languages and historical patterns of conduct: Is the post-9/11 “war on terror” both unprecedented and necessary, as many critics claim? Or is it related to historical white supremacy over Indians and slaves, and to a hundred years of anxiety about aliens and communism? Partly, we will use theory and history to ask political questions: Does global power now threaten democratic practices? If we have entered a “crisis of the republic,” what is to be done? Readings range from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War and William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, to current arguments by political theorists about post-9/ll politics.
The Public Theatre and the Village
K20.1483 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 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).
Moses and Modernity
K20.1500 HUM, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Eliza Slavet
This course will consider the multiple identities of Moses from a broad range of historical, religious and cultural perspectives. Particular attention will be on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Moses emerged as a figure of modernity, hovering between history and memory, between cultural purity and hybridity, and between linguistic expression and its limits. We will begin with the Hebrew Bible and debates about reading, re-reading and re-writing the Bible as literature. We will then explore the figures of Moses as an Egyptian, as the liberator of enslaved peoples, and as a complicated figure of modernism and post-modernism. Course materials will include excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, works by Hurston, Dunbar, Freud and Assmann, music by Schoenberg, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Marley, as well as a selection of Moses-inspired films and artwork. Final assignment will allow students to imagine their own Moseses for the twenty-first century.
Guilty Subjects: Guilt in Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis
K20.1504 HUM, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Sara Murphy
This seminar will explore guilt as the link between the three broad disciplinary arenas of our title. Literary works from ancient tragedy to the modern novel thematize guilt in various ways. Freud places it at the center of his practice and his theory of mind. While law seems reliant mainly upon a formal attribution of guilt in order to determine who gets punished and to what degree, we might also suggest it relies upon "guilty subjects" for its operation. With all of these different deployments of the concept, we might agree it is a central one, yet how to define it remains a substantial question. Is the prominence of guilt in modern Western culture a vestige of a now-lost religious world? Is it, as Nietzsche suggests, an effect of “the most profound change man ever experienced…when he finally found himself enclosed within the wall of society and of peace?” Freud seems to concur when he argues that guilt must be understood as a kind of internal self-division where aggressivity is turned against the self. Is guilt a pointless self-punishment, meant to discipline us? Or does it continue to have an important relation to the ethical? Readings may include Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, Toni Morrison, Ursula LeGuin, Primo Levi, and some case law, among others.
Russian Revolutionaries
K20.1505 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Lauren Kaminsky
“Only in Russia is poetry respected—it gets people killed. Nowhere else is poetry so common a motive for murder.” So said the poet Osip Mandelstam before his own state-sanctioned death in 1938. What is the connection between art and politics in Russia? Why have artists been at once so vital and so brutally repressed? Making sense of this terrible paradox means exploring the relationship between art, ideas, and a history of state repression on an almost unprecedented scale. Rather than studying art and politics separately, in this course we will consider together poets, anarchists, novelists, liberals, playwrights, communists, romantics, and other revolutionaries who defy generic categorization. In this course we will examine the cultural history of Russia from Pushkin to Putin, considering Soviet culture alongside that of the Tsarist Empire and today’s capitalist democracy. We will focus on the themes of “Russia” and “revolution,” organizing our ideas around these central concepts at the same time that we call these categories into question. How have ideas about revolution shaped ideas of Russianness? How have narratives of revolution been told and retold? How has the role of the revolutionary changed over time? What is the relationship between Russian society and the state? We will look for answers to these questions in significant texts by prominent Russian writers, thinkers, and actors on the world stage. Through posters, paintings, films, cartoons, speeches, essays, poems, and prose, we will trace recurring narrative threads pulled throughout the last two hundred years of Russian history. Readings will include works by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Lenin, Mayakovsky, Stalin, Trotsky, Akhmatova, Khrushchev, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn.
Societies and Cultures of the Middle East
K20.1508 SOC, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Ali Mirsepassi
Open to sophomores only.
This course is designed to introduce students to the historical, social, political, and cultural dynamics of the contemporary Middle East. We begin with the history and geographical contours of the region, and explore its various cultures, religions, and political systems as we analyze issues concerning economic development, secularism, gender, and Islamic politics. We will attempt to identify the defining characteristics that distinguish the Middle East as a region, but also its internal diversity. To do so, we will use multiple disciplinary approaches and perspectives, anthropological and sociological, economic and political as well as the literary and cinematic. Because the primary purpose of the course is to facilitate cross-cultural understanding, students will be asked to reflect on their own assumptions. Readings include: Dale F. Eickelman, The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach; Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood; Edmund Burke, ed., Struggle and Survival in the Middle East; Elizabeth Fenea, Women and the Family in the Middle East.
The Streetroots of Latin America I: Introduction to the Urban Experience
K20.1509 SOC, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Alejandro Velasco
“Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on the land there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and in front of us stood the great city of Mexico” (Bernal Diaz, 1518). When Europeans set foot on the “New World” they found a continent deeply shaped by a metropolitan experience. Yet urbanization in Latin America is still seen as a recent phenomenon, the consequence of post-war industrialization and misapplied dreams of Eurocentric modernity. Together, these forces have fixed an image of the Latin American city as a site of endless contradiction—poverty and wealth, order and chaos, intimacy and isolation, hope and frustration. Can we speak of an urban “culture” in Latin America, and if so, what are its features? In this first part of a two course sequence examining urban life in Latin America, we will trace changes and continuities in state policy toward cities and their citizens, from the pre-Columbian metropolises of Cusco and Tenochtitlan, to the colonial capitals of Lima and Rio de Janeiro, to the industrial centers of São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Readings range from the urban critiques of James Scott and Carlos Monsiváis, to personal accounts of city life by Flora Tristan and Carolina Maria de Jesús, and to the literary musings of urban misadventures by Machado de Assis and Mario Benedetti.
Our Gilded Age and Theirs: A Comparative History
K20.1510 SOC, 4 CR F 9:30-12:15 Steve Fraser
We are living through what many commentators describe as a “second Gilded Age.” The purpose of this course is to analyze that assumption. We will compare economic, political, social, and cultural life during the time of the industrial robber barons with the way America conducted its affairs during the age of Reagan through George W. Bush. We will explore striking similarities such as the extreme inequalities in the distribution of wealth and the politics of crony capitalism. But the course will also analyze fundamental differences that separate these two eras. For example: Does it matter that the first Gilded Age was based on the country’s industrialization while the second has been marked by de-industrialization? We will wrestle with the mystery of why the first Gilded Age was marked by enormous social and political upheaval and protest while the second Gilded Age has not been. The course will use primary documentary materials, novels, and films as well as accounts by historians. Readings may include writings by Andrew Carnegie, Jaccob Riis, Mark Twain, Thomas Frank, Tom Wolfe, and Barbara Ehrenreich.
New Deal Liberalism: Its Rise and Fall
K20.1513, SOC, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Steve Fraser
This course will examine the rise and fall of New Deal liberalism as the dominant political and social order of mid twentieth century America. It will begin with the onset of the Great Depression as the event which sets in motion profound transformations in the economy, in the balance of political power, in the role of the State, and in the relations between social classes and ethnic/racial groups. It will explore the rise of the labor movement and the creation of the welfare state. Classes will analyze the impact of the Cold War on domestic politics. Discussions will probe the emergence of the civil rights, anti-war, and counter-culture movements. The class will analyze the conservative reaction against the New Deal culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Students will analyze primary documents, novels, and films such as the Grapes of Wrath and Dr. Strangelove, as well as read secondary works including Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal by William E. Leuchtenberg, America in Our Time by Godfrey Hodgson, and Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody.
Homer/Ellison: The Odyssey and Invisible Man
K20.1515 HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 L. Slatkin/E.F. White
Who is the "man of many ways"? Who is it who declares "I am nobody but myself"? This course creates a dialogue between Homer's Odyssey and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the masterwork that evokes the Odyssey even as it reimagines the scope of the twentieth century novel. We will focus on the historical and cultural specificities of each text but will also pursue the synergies and energies promoted by reading them together. We will thus consider what the ancient world has to say to the modern novel, and how modernity might reanimate a key text of antiquity. Among the topics we will consider: formations and representations of subjectivity in antiquity and modernity; the status of race and ethnicity; the structuring effects of kinship, marriage, institutions, the state, the law; the cultural poetics and politics of narrative. What stories are we telling about "ourselves," and/or about "others," and to what ends? We will draw upon secondary readings in literary theory, gender studies, critical race studies, and other social sciences. Students need no background in these materials but do need critical energy and discipline.
Understanding the Universe
K20.1516 SCI, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Matthew Stanley
Open to sophomores only.
This class is an interdisciplinary exploration of how humans have tried to understand the universe. We begin with the first Greek attempts to make sense of the universe, discuss the “Scientific Revolution,” through to modern Big Bang theory. Themes include the interaction of astronomy, physics, and philosophy necessary for talking about the cosmos, and how scientists came to accept that the universe changes and develops over time. We discuss the history of how scientists came to understand the nature of stars, galaxies, black holes, extra-terrestrial life, and the apparent “fine tuning” of the laws of nature. Special attention is paid to the problem of how we can talk scientifically about things we can never experiment on or reproduce. We will examine not just ideas about the universe (what is it? where did it come from? and so on), but also the methods used to arrive at those conclusions (observations and theories), literary and visual representations of the universe, and larger philosophical issues (why are we here?). Readings may include: Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton, Kant, Einstein.
Feminism, Empire and the Postcolonial World
K20.1523 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Marie Cruz Soto
Jamaica Kincaid once said “I now consider anger as a badge of honor. [It is] the first step to claiming yourself.” Anger, rather than Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” has haunted the life of many women in the postcolonial world whose negotiations of the meaning of gender and race are marked by the violence of colonial-imperial encounters. Accordingly, this course examines the following questions. How have colonial-imperial encounters shaped the imagination of gender? How have postcolonial women built feminist solidarities amidst, or perhaps based on the shared experience of, violence and anger? In turn, how has the imagination of gender redefined the histories of colonies and empires? To pursue these questions, course reading include literary and other scholarly texts engaging feminist and postcolonial theory. Readings range from Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala to interviews with Gayatri Spivak and other texts by feminist scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Feminist Africa collaborators.
Reading Poetry
K20.1420 HUM, 2 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Lisa Goldfarb
Course meets September 2–October 16.
Poetry is an art which can express our deepest feelings and thoughts about our human experience. Too many of us, however, encounter poetry timidly. We wonder how we can make meaning of poetic words and rhythms so distinct from those we use in our daily lives. In this course, we will work at developing poetic sensibilities, not by digging to find clues to the mysterious meanings of poems, but by gaining an understanding of how to read poetry as a language within a language. We will study how the concentrated language and sounds of poetry help us to grapple with the shades and subtleties of our own experience. The course will begin with a study of various verse forms, and then focus on the art of close reading. We will read many poems ranging from early English lyrics, popular ballads, and Shakespeare’s sonnets, to modern and contemporary poems, as well as poems originally written in other languages.
The Simple Life
K20.1433 HUM, 2 CR T 6:20-9:00 Pat Rock
Course meets September 2–October 14.
This course examines a theme common to Eastern and Western philosophical traditions—the call to a simple life. Great thinkers in both traditions warn of mindlessly accumulating possessions and entering into a dangerous, frenetic competitiveness. This course examines the value of a simple life and asks such questions as: Is it possible to lead a simple life in an urban setting or does it imply living close to nature? Does such a life lead to a dangerous passivity or does it, as Plato suggests, provide reflective leaders for the society? Does it improve our relationships with others or does it affect them adversely? Texts may include selections from Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Thoreau’s Walden, and the poetry and essays of Wendell Berry.
Theorizing Popular Culture: Beyond the High/Low
K20.1443 HUM, 2 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Karen Hornick
Course meets September 3–October 20.
Why do discussions of a popular song or TV show so often begin with the assumption that it’s “bad” and then focus on its political and economic meanings rather than the aesthetic and emotional pleasures it may yield the consumer? This class will broach such issues as it surveys popular culture studies since its origins in the 1800’s. Readings may include critics such as Le Bon, Marx, Arnold, Leavis, Benjamin, Adorno, Macdonald, Barthes, and Jameson; historians such as Leach and Peiss; sociologists such as Riesman and Frith; and the “pop” marketing essayist Malcolm Gladwell. We shall anchor class discussions around two sub-themes: (1) the high/low art debate (we shall contrast the works and reception of Jackson Pollock, Norman Rockwell, and Andy Warhol); and (2) the idea of mass/consumerist culture as collective dreaming (we shall read William Leach’s discussion of the rise of American department stores and the surprising role L. Frank Baum played within it, Baum’s The Wizard of Oz as film and “star vehicle,” and "high art" responses to this idea).
Wallace Stevens and the Twentieth Century
K20.1421 HUM, 2 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Lisa Goldfarb
Course meets October 21–December 11.
Wallace Stevens holds an important place among modern American poets, yet his readers continue to puzzle over Stevens’ work, especially as it relates to the most pervasive concerns of the twentieth century. In his poetry, he writes very little about specific cataclysmic events of his time, yet Stevens ponders questions of faith in a secular world, considers heroism and loss in a century marked by two world wars, and probes our human relationship to nature in an increasingly industrialized and technological world. In this course, we will take a close look at Stevens’ relationship to the twentieth century. While his poetry will be at the center of the class, we will focus our attention on how Stevens gives voice to the contradictions and complexities of the modern world. Stevens’ own work will be the main text of this course, yet readings will include contextual material drawn from literary criticism, intellectual history, philosophy, and politics.
Looking at Popular Culture: The Poetics of Television
K20.1444 HUM, 2 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Karen Hornick
Course meets October 22–December 10.
Most television narrative comes to us in the form of a “series,” a dramatic structure that is our basic focus in this class. How has the development of television as an art been assisted or limited by that format? We will consider some of the basic Aristotelian components of “good” drama in relation to American television history—genre, character, plotting, and “spectacle”—in relation to aesthetic questions about how a given program provides pleasure, but also with regard to theories about the social and political consequences of television’s dominance of the American cultural scene in the latter half of the twentieth century. In addition to secondary readings, we will watch a lot of TV—students will choose at least half of the programs we’ll study as a group.
Abroad at Home
K20.1507 HUM, 2 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Steve Hutkins
Course meets October 21–December 11. Enrollment is restricted to students planning to study abroad at an NYU site during Spring 2009.
This course is for students preparing for a study-abroad experience during spring 2009. Working in small groups and on individualized projects, students read travel literature and other works about the place they’re going, study its culture (art, architecture, music, history, food, etc.), and work with maps, guidebooks, and other orientation tools. In order to practice getting into the mindset of the traveler, the course also encourages students to look at New York through the eyes of the foreigner by exploring the city as a tourist (visiting museums, tourist attractions, etc.) and by reading travel writing about New York. Students are required to blog about their responses to the readings and other assignments, and to work with the students abroad who are taking The Art of Travel course. Reading assignments are individualized for the city and country of each study-abroad site, but some readings are for the whole class: these may include selections from de Botton’s The Art of Travel, Urry’s The Tourist Gaze, MacCannell’s The Tourist, and Leed’s The Mind of the Traveler. For more information, see the course website: placeandliterature.com.
Science and Religion
K20.1514 SCI, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Matthew Stanley
In this course we will examine the complex interactions between science and religion through history. While most popular presentations of science and religion often descend into simplistic models of conflict (the secular nature of modern science and its repeated conflicts with religion) or cooperation/co-existence (science and religion each have clearly defined domains), we explore a wider variety of relationships between the two. Moving beyond claims of superiority or mutual isolation, we will consider the complicated negotiation of boundaries and proper authority between science and religion. We will mainly focus on the relationship of science and Christianity, but we will also discuss Buddhism, Judaism, and atheism. Topics include: religion and the laws of nature; how scientists can be religious; natural theology; evolution and religion; miracles and medicine; the social role of science and religion; and the nature of life. Readings may include: Augustine, Galileo, Hume, Darwin, Einstein, Dawkins.
Understanding the Universe
K20.1516 SCI, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Matthew Stanley
Open to sophomores only.
This class is an interdisciplinary exploration of how humans have tried to understand the universe. We begin with the first Greek attempts to make sense of the universe, discuss the “Scientific Revolution,” through to modern Big Bang theory. Themes include the interaction of astronomy, physics, and philosophy necessary for talking about the cosmos, and how scientists came to accept that the universe changes and develops over time. We discuss the history of how scientists came to understand the nature of stars, galaxies, black holes, extra-terrestrial life, and the apparent “fine tuning” of the laws of nature. Special attention is paid to the problem of how we can talk scientifically about things we can never experiment on or reproduce. We will examine not just ideas about the universe (what is it? where did it come from? and so on), but also the methods used to arrive at those conclusions (observations and theories), literary and visual representations of the universe, and larger philosophical issues (why are we here?). Readings may include: Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton, Kant, Einstein.
Nationalisms in South Asia
K20.1517 SOC, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Ritty Lukose
This course works at two levels: 1) to introduce the history, culture, economy and politics of South Asia and 2) to explore nationalism as a dynamic, fraught, and powerful force within third world societies. We begin with histories of pre-colonial and colonial South Asia, focusing on historical dynamics and imaginative representations through which the region has been understood. We explore colonialism and analyze anti- colonial nationalisms as political and cultural projects that re-shape religion, community, family, gender and kinship. We then examine the moment of Indian independence and the violent experience of Partition, as well as the different ways that development and nation have been articulated across the region. Finally, we examine contemporary struggles around nationhood in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. Readings may include: Sanjay Subramaniam and Amitav Ghosh on the Indian Ocean World; Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy by Sugata Bose; the writings of Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah; subaltern studies and post-colonial theory; studies of marginalized groups in India and Pakistan; and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
Globalization: Promises and Discontents
K20.1518 SOC, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Ritty Lukose
In popular and scholarly discourse, the term "globalization" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, "globalization" references the sense that we are now living in a deeply and ever-increasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization. Running through the course are three central concerns: 1) exploring claims about the "new-ness" of globalization from historical perspectives, 2) examining how a variety of social and cultural worlds mediate globalization and 3) analyzing a contested politics of globalization in which the opportunities for social mobility and transformation are pitted against renewed intensifications of exploitation and vulnerability along long-standing vectors of difference and inequality. Readings include: World Systems Theory; theories of globalization in the social sciences; studies of environmental and indigenous rights activism, gender and labor issues, and consumer culture; as well as a selection of films and novels.