New York University

Gallatin School of Individualized Study

• Schedule of Classes
• Course Schedule Changes
• New Spring Courses

• First-Year Program
• Interdisciplinary Seminars
• Writing Courses
• Arts Workshops
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• Individualized Projects

Digital Revolution: History of Mass Media III

K20.1042 SOC, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Stephen Duncombe

We are in the midst of a revolution. Computers permeate nearly every aspect of our life, yet we understand relatively little about how they work, their historical development, and their impact on our selves, society and politics. In this course we will explore this ever changing and rapidly expanding terrain, paying special attention to how computers and the Internet are transforming how we experience and understand identity and community, control and liberation, and simulation and authenticity. In addition, we will explore the conflict between free and open communication and information commerce, addressing the greater issue of who benefits from this digital revolution. Authors whose works we will read include: Plato, Lewis Mumford, Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Jean Baudrillard, Neal Stephenson, the Critical Art Ensemble, Bill Gates, Donna Haraway, Ellen Ullman and Theodore Kaczynski.

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 Negritude 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.

Body and Soul

K20.1112 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 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 the Dao De Ching 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.

Travel Narratives

K20.1124 HUM, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Steve Hutkins

This course explores the experience of travel and the many questions it raises about social identity and cultural difference, the traveler’s search for adventure and authenticity, the relationship between tourism and colonialism, and the pervasive use of metaphors of travel in the discourse of postmodernism.  Readings will include a variety of nonfiction travel narratives: Flaubert in Egypt, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Chatwin's Songlines,  Mary Morris’s Nothing to Declare, and Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express.

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.

Borders of Western Imagination

K20.1143 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Clyde Taylor

Why do boundaries of perception exist in societies, and what are these walls and barriers made of?  Columbus supposedly navigated across one boundary of Western consciousness in his time. Freud confronted another.  Where are the limits of our imagination sentried today, and what is on the other side of them?  Borders of Western Imagination is an expedition into the mental landscape at the points where Western thought intersects with the unwestern, unfamiliar, unsimilar, focusing on the Other outside of the Western definition of itself, and therefore glimpsing the Other within.  Frontiers of Western self-definition may include monotheism, aesthetics, cannibalism, the “Great Books,” capitalism, and American exceptionalism.  Texts may include: Freud, The Future of an Illusion; Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture; Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology; Richard Wright, “The Man Who Lived Underground”; and Walter Mosley, Working on the Chain Gang.  Probable films: The Matrix, Fight Club, Ritual Clowns, and The Name of the Rose.

Free Speech, Media Law, and Democracy

K20.1144 SOC, 4 CR W 7:45-10:15 Peter Rajsingh

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

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 TR 2:00-3:15 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, Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

The Teachings of the Buddha: Buddhist Influence on Western Psychology

K20.1211 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Lee Robbins

The course will explore in depth the Great Awakening of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, and the psychological principles that came out of his experience to form the cornerstone of Theraveda Buddhism.  We will also examine parallel developments in the western psychologies of Freud and Jung.  We begin with an overview of Buddhist history and then trace the ancient roots of Buddha’s understanding of the human psyche through the pre-Aryan, Aryan and Brahmanical cultures.  Special attention will be given to a comparison of the Buddhist notion of karma and Jung's theory of archetypes.  Readings may include Bhikkhu Bodhi's (ed. and trans.) In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon; Paul Williams' Budhist Thought, Edward Conze’s A Short History of Buddhism, John Strong's The Buddha: A Short Biography, and Wings to Awakening and Mind Like Fire Unbound by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Narrative Investigations

K20.1215 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Stacy Pies

How does narrative create a sense of identity and give value to our lives?  What are the ethical implications of looking at knowledge as a construction of narrative?  The concept of narrative is currently used across disciplines to describe how people, texts, and institutions create meaning.  This course will explore the idea that stories organize our thinking and our lives.  We will begin with Plato’s ideas on tragedy and Aristotle’s Poetics,  which later narrative explorations emulate and challenge.  Our reading of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting will investigate the ways fictional texts radically reinvent literary forms and question social conventions.  The works of critics such as Bakhtin, Chatman, Schafer, and Iser will reveal how narrative has been adopted as both a theoretical model and a methodology within a variety of fields.  Students will carry out projects that explore narrative trends within their particular areas of interest.

Philosophy of Medicine: An Interdisciplinary Approach

K20.1294 SCI, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis

Models of health and healing dramatically shape medical research and medical practice. Depending on which medical model you use, you create radically different solutions for key questions like: What is disease? What is health? What is the role of healthcare? What is the core knowledge base for healthcare? And what is the best way to pursue medical inquiry? In addition, medical models also shape the way the broader culture understands bodies, race, age, gender, sex, sexuality, desire, death, disability, biotechnology, and care of the self. In this class, we introduce students to the world of medicine through fictional and documentary portrayals of illness. We consider several medical model approaches to illness, suffering, and bodies. Plus, we use a range of interdisciplinary scholarship for context and reflection. Topics covered include philosophy of medicine, phenomenology and existentialism, psychoanalytic theories of loss, Buddhist philosophy, narrative theory, sociology of medicine, gender studies, and disability studies.

Militaries and Militarization

K20.1300 SOC, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 A. Lauria-Perricelli

What are the effects of a large, permanent military upon the political economy and society of the United States?  What are the effects on other countries of their militaries?  What are the effects on local societies of US military bases?  What is the role of the various militaries in the history of colonial/neo-colonial control, and in contemporary empire?  How are military establishments and violence linked to ethno-national, class and other social  movements—and to the repression and domination of such movements?  What does a military do to/for the people who staff it?  What are the implications of militarization in such areas as gender, human rights, the environment, sports, knowledge and learning?  What is the role of militias, “para-militaries”, and guerrillas?  What methods can social or popular movements use in their attempts to subvert, paralyze, eliminate or otherwise struggle against militaries, military bases, and weapons?  Texts include: Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century;  Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives;  McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest:  The U.S. Navy in  Vieques, Puerto Rico;  Green, “Fear as a Way of Life”; and Tilly, “War-making and State-making as Organized Crime.”

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 11:00-12:15 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.

Foucault: Biopower and Biopolitics

K20.1339 SCI, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis

Michel Foucault radical approach to knowledge, science, and the body destabilized rigid distinctions between biology and culture and anticipated a new form of “bio-politics.” Contemporary biopolitical approaches were first used by ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and have gone on to influence feminist theory of the body, disability studies, queer theory, and WTO activism. Each of these forms of theory and activism has in common a focus on the dense intertwining of knowledge (science/reason), power, desire, and disciplinary control that Foucault conceptualized as biopower. We devote this class to close readings of Foucault’s work. Our focus will be on his notions of discourse, power, biopower, discipline, subjectivity, and sexuality. Selections from Foucault include Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punishment, History of Sexuality and some of his later interviews. Secondary sources include David Halprin’s Saint=Foucault and Nicolas Rose’s “Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century.”   

Hiroshima

K20.1340 HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Nina Cornyetz

On August 6, 1945 the city of Hiroshima in Japan was leveled by the first atomic bomb. On August 9, the city of Nagasaki was leveled by the second bomb. It is estimated that between 210,000 and 270,000 people were killed, some immediately, some from the radiation days or months later, These estimates do not include more long-term impacts of the radiation, such as birth defects, or various cancers. How can we, as human beings, make sense of these events? How can we cope with, and represent unthinkable trauma? What are the politics of such representation? What processes of healing are possible through remembering? Is it important to represent such traumas, and if so, why? This course will explore a selection of Japanese historical, literary, cinematic, musical, and other venues in which this unrepresentable trauma was, and continues to be, indeed, represented. We will aim at exploring the processes of mourning, remembering, and representing collective cultural trauma. Readings will include: Michael Hogan, ed. Hiroshima in History and Memory, John Treat, Writing Ground Zero, Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Walter Benjamin, selections, and selected short fiction from Crazy Iris. We will view documentary and narrative films, including Black Rain.

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.

The Qur'an

K20.1357 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Sinan Antoon

The political upheavals and events of recent years have focused much attention on “Islam” and its cultures and texts, especially the Qur’an. Most of the attention and interest in the Qur’an, however, has been reductive and superficial, amounting to no more than de-contextualized misreadings of certain verses in most cases. This seminar will serve as an introduction to the Qur’an as scripture, but also as a generative and polyphonic cultural text. We will start with a brief look at the legacy of Qur’anic studies within the larger paradigm of Orientalist scholarship and “western” approaches to all things Islamic. We will, then, address the historical and cultural background and context of the Qur’an’s genesis as an oral revelation, its intimate affinities with Biblical and Near Eastern narratives, and its transformation into a written and canonized text after the death of Muhammad. We will then examine the Qur’an’s structure as a “book” and read selections from its most famous chapters and explore how they were deployed in various discourses as Islam became the official religion of a civilization and an empire. Readings and discussions will focus on the themes of prophecy, gender and sexuality, violence and peace. The seminar neither assumes nor requires any prior knowledge of Islamic studies or Arabic. In addition to the Qur’an and its exegesis (in translation), secondary sources may include Marx, Said, Bell, Sells, Bouhdiba and Ahmed.

American Capitalism in the twentieth Century

K20.1359 SOC, 4CR MW 12:30-1:45 Kim Phillips-Fein

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.

Intellectuals and Power: Foucault, Lenin, Gramsci

K20.1360 SOC, 4 CR M 2:00-4:45 René Francisco Poitevin

This course uses Lenin, Gramsci, and Foucault to pursue two questions: first, how does power operate in societey?  Second, what is the role of intellectuals in relation to power and politics? On the one hand, we ask: what is power? (Is it located in the state? corporations? media? in discourse? In what ways is power a problem and in what ways a resource?) On the other hand, we ask: what is “the intellectual?” What sort of social category and institution is thereby denoted? What do intellectuals claim to know and what is the political impact of their authority? Our goal is to explore how intellectuals give us a language to “see” power, but also how they have been implicated in the very forms of power they teach us to analyze. Readings include texts by Lenin, Gramsci, and Foucault, among others.

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.

Inventing Modernity II: Rebels and Realists

K20.1366 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Karen Hornick

This class is structured around the close reading of eight major texts: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Gissing’s The Odd Women, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Europe dominated most of the world through political, economic, and cultural expansion. At home, however, unhappy intellectuals and writers found themselves compelled to expose the hyprocrisy in religion, politics, capitalism, and family life in order to uncover what Joseph Conrad called the “heart of darkness,” the underlying truth about human nature. By the middle of the 1800’s, the true artist channeled truth, no matter how unpleasant. Many writers and intellectuals embraced the artistic and analytical mode of Realism as the only way to challenge the stale pieties of those who wished to maintain an illusory stability. The point of art, all at once, was to expose “frank, unidealized, and unpleasant realities” (as a lawyer said at Baudelaire’s obscenity trial in the 1850’s). The most conspicuous “unpleasant realities” in our readings are related to philosophical and religious doubt, marriage and family, consumerism, double standards of morality, feminism, insanity, and identity. Despite the literary/philosophical orientation of our readings, final projects will be developed according to students’ concentrations.     

African Diasporic Art and Spirituality in the Americas: Honey is My Knife

K20.1372 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 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.

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.

American Shakespeare

K20.1390 HUM, 4 CR F 12:30-3:15 Alycia Smith-Howard

“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. Students will be expected to pay for their own travel costs and some admissions fees. 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 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 T 3:30-6:10 Lauren Kaminsky

What is the political and economic value of people?  Who has the right to control 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 works by Angela Davis, Thomas Malthus, Emma Goldman, Michel Foucault and Margaret Sanger.

Life on the Square: Washington Square Park as Muse and Refuge

K20.1405 HUM, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Alycia Smith-Howard

This course is a literary and historical survey of one of New York’s (and America’s) most pivotal cultural epicenters. Since the 19th century, Washington Square has been a center of cultural life in New York City. In this course we will examine Washington Square’s role as muse and haven for generations of writers, artists and “bohemians.” Our investigation will encompass a diverse cross-section of literature and the arts: the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Allen Ginsberg and Michael Cunningham; the visual art of such artists as the Hudson River School, Jackson Pollock, de Kooning and Edward Hopper; and the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Following in the footsteps of such legendary artists, course participants (who will be required to maintain an observation and research journal) will develop and produce their own responses to “life on the Square.” The course will culminate in a final paper. For those who wish to produce a more creative response, Washington Square may serve as muse for an individual project in fiction/nonfiction, poetry, film, visual arts, theatre and/or music.  Students should plan to pay for their own travel and museum admissions fees.

The Philosophy of the Welfare State: Rawls and His Critics

K20.1466 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Justin Holt

Are the outcomes of capitalist exchanges fair or unfair?  Is capitalism supportive or detrimental to democratic virtues?  Does the welfare state rectify the problems of capitalism or exacerbate them?  John Rawls’ work A Theory of Justice has greatly shaped these considerations of the welfare state.  His theory refined many of the debates concerning the fairness of capitalist economic outcomes and the effects capital accumulation has on democratic virtues.  According to Rawls, the welfare state in some form was necessary for capitalism to have morally acceptable outcomes.  But, critics of Rawls have called into question welfare state interventions, many finding them economically inefficient and detrimental to democratic virtues.  Other critics have founds Rawls’ theory to be too limited in its impact, thereby supporting more extensive interventions into capital accumulation.  In this course we will try to answer questions about the morality of capitalist accumulation by study ing theoretical conceptions of Rawls’ work and the responses of his critics.  The main texts of Rawls’ critics we will consider are Nozick’s Distributive Justice, Dworkin’s What is Equality, and Cohen’s Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality.  These theoretical conceptions will be contrasted with historical case studies including Esping-Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. 

Psychoanalysis and the Visual

K20.1468 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Eve Meltzer

In this seminar we will read some of the most important psychoanalytic texts in order to understand what they have to say about visuality and the visual field. Alongside this rich theoretical terrain we will also explore the uses, abuses, and elaborations of psychoanalytic thought with various films, works of art, and seminal texts in the areas of art history, film studies, and visual studies. For example, the kind of intersections we examine may include: Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, and the work of performance and “body” artists; Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and a selection of the art historians and artists who work with the concept of “the gaze”; Kobena Mercer on Robert Mapplethorpe and racial “fetishism”; Anne Wagner and Melanie Klein on notions of motherhood and sculpture; Borch-Jacobsen’s theory of the ego considered together with the film American Psycho; Freud and Richard Meyer on the unconscious, and forms of visual “censorship.”

Contemporary Art and its Media

K20.1473 HUM, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Eve Meltzer

“To know the significance of something,” writes Judith Butler, “is to know how and why it matters, where ‘to matter’ means at once ‘to materialize’ and ‘to mean’.”  Adopting Butler’s claim as a point of departure, this course examines contemporary artistic practice (1945 to the present) through the lens of this question: how has art mattered—whether the work is a painting of an American flag by Jasper Johns (1954-55), a giant cut made in the earth by Michael Heizer (1969-70), or the body of artist James Luna displayed as museum artifact (1986)?  In the present moment, when so many artworks incorporate so many media, the question of medium may seem a misguided or even useless one to pose.  Does medium matter at all anymore?  This course proposes that it does.  We will begin by reading some of the most important voices on the question of material and meaning.  We will then proceed by focusing on a different medium each week, including: paint, sculpture, the body, language, the installation, landscape, photography, video, and digital or ‘new’ media.

History of the American Conservative Movement After 1945

K20.1474 SOC, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Kim Phillips-Fein

Writing in the 1950s, political scientist Louis Hartz described the United States as the quintessentially liberal nation—not only was there no socialism in America, there was no conservatism either. At about the same time, literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote that conservatism was only “irritable mental gestures.” Over the past thirty years, however, conservative politics has seemed to dominate the American scene. This course will look at the rise of the conservative movement in the postwar United States. We will place contemporary American conservatism in the broader intellectual history of the right. We will consider the major intellectual problems at stake in understanding the rise of conservative politics, and we will analyze the respective roles played by intellectuals, businessmen, politicians and ordinary people. We will look at anticommunism, religion, race, and economic ideology. Finally, we will interrogate the idea of “conservatism” itself and ask how such a seem ingly contradictory political position has managed to achieve such success. The course will use secondary works of historical scholarship, but we will also read many primary texts, also incorporating literature and film. Possible readings include Edmund Burke, George Nash, William F. Buckley, Dan Carter, Jonathan Rieder, Michael Rogin, Irving Kristol, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Jefferson Cowie and Phyllis Schlafly.

American Politics After 9/11: Empire, Race, and Democracy

K20.1475 SOC, 4 CR M 12:30-3:15 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 to 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 (Post)colonial Arabic Novel

K20.1478 HUM, 4 CR W 9:30-12:15 Sinan Antoon

Colonialism left indelible marks on the cultures and societies of its colonized subjects. While nation-states have emerged, the colonial legacy and its various effects continue to haunt post-colonial societies and the modes in which they represent their history and subjectivity. The novel is a particularly privileged site to explore this problem. This course will focus on the post-colonial Arabic novel. After a brief historical introduction to the context and specific conditions of its emergence as a genre, we will read a number of representative novels. Discussions will focus on the following questions: How do writers problematize the perceived tension between tradition and modernity? Can form itself become an expression of sociopolitical resistance? How is the imaginary boundary between “West” and “East” blurred and/or solidified? How is the nation troped and can novels become sites for rewriting official history? What role do gender and sexuality play in all of the above? In addition to films, readings (all in English) may include Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Naguib Mahfuz, al-Tayyib Salih, Abdelrahman Munif, Ghassan Kanafani, Elias Khoury, Sun`allah Ibrahim, Huda Barakat, Assia Djebbar, and Muhammad Shukri.

The Dangerous Woman in Japanese Literature

K20.1479 HUM, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Nina Cornyetz

As Japan entered its modern period around the turn of the twentieth century, a new literary trope appeared, into which a variety of premodern and ancient archetypes were collapsed.  This is what I am calling the “dangerous woman,” a powerful, sexy, and intimidating female figure who was reminiscent of, although not a replication of, earlier frightening females of the literary and dramatic tradition.   This course will begin by reading a selection of premodern and ancient texts featuring various archetypes of witches, shamanesses, and female demons.  Then we will examine how these figures are transformed with modernity, and what literary, social, gendered and other functions they serve as objects of male desire and fear. We will read a selection of relevant feminist literary theory alongside the fictional texts. Texts will include: Excerpts from Buddhist sutras, a Noh play, selections from The Tale of Genji, fiction by Izumi Kyoka, Enchi Fumiko, Sakaguchi Ango and Nakagami Kenji, and feminist theory by Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Cixous and Clement.

Dangerous & Intermingled: Subaltern New York

K20.1480 SOC, 4 CR W 2:00-4:45, F 10:00-12:00 Jack Tchen

Research lab Friday, 10:00-12:00. Permission of the instructor required. Same as V18.0090003.

In the world of political moralists, intermingled New York has and still represents the epitome of danger and evil about the American experiment—the public intermixture of classes, genders, races, sexualities, spiritualisms, and the-devil-knows-what-else!#? As elite Protestants created a refined European-affected “high brow” culture, they also created myriad “others”—a transgressive, lowly polyglot city of shadows, miscegenation, and impurity. The docks, the Bowery, The Five Points, Greenwich Village, LES/Loisaida, Chinatown, and Harlem were all forged against the repressed imaginings of the powerful and the distinguished. This peoples’ Gotham, this disdained intertwined underworld of music, slang, jokes, songs, stories, foodways, and marvels of people will be the focus of this advanced research seminar. Course materials will include: Wallace & Burrow’s Gotham, Burn’s documentary New York, Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, and a course reader. Research walks and visits off campus will be held during lab hours on Fridays. Students will learn how to conduct a case study using primary sources.

The Medieval Imagination: Myth and Saga, Heroes and Monsters

K20.1481 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Clair McPherson

Why are the early medieval myths so resonant today? In the form of the hugely popular Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (and the Tolkien originals they were based on), the currently popular novel Eragon, the recent Dungeons and Dragons craze, and the never-ending series of television, movie, and novel treatments of King Arthur, Beowulf, and other heroes, the medieval imagination has fascinated the contemporary mind. Beyond the popular, poets such as T. S. Eliot, historians like the Marxist Marc Bloch, and visual artists such as Paul Gauguin have likewise referenced the Middle Ages in their art and thought. Our course will try to answer this question by exploring the medieval originals—Beowulf, the Icelandic Sagas, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and their analogues in medieval visual art—and their later incarnations, including the novel The Hobbit, films such as The Seventh Seal, Rashomon, and The Adventures of Robin Hood, and their pre-modern, Romantic predecessors (such as the novels of Walter Scott and the poetry of the Rossettis).

Consuming the Caribbean

K20.1482 HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Millery Polyné

Paradise or plantation?  Spring break, honeymoon, or narcotics way station? First World host or IMF delinquent? Where do we locate the Caribbean? From Columbus’ journals to Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, the Caribbean has been buried beneath the sedimentation of imagery by and large cultivated by non-Caribbeans, including colonial governments, settlers, international tradesmen, tourist agents and their clients. Caribbean peoples have had to re-member the islands which they eventually called home—haunted by a history of slavery and still a site of consumption and exploitation. A unifying trope, Caribbean landscapes function as metaphor, emblem, symbol, or even character. This course takes an interdisciplinary (history, literature, anthropology and sociology) and transnational approach by examining the themes of race, freedom, gender, tourism and consumption in the Caribbean.  As a conglomeration of nationalities, languages, and cultures, what are the connections between the historical legacy of slavery, European colonialism and migration to the Caribbean’s current realities of inequality?  Some of the texts we will engage are Mimi Sheller’s Consuming the Caribbean, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, and Denise Brennan’s What’s Love Got to Do With It: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic.

Power and Culture in Latin America

K20.1485 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Alejandro Velasco

On the quincentennial of Columbus’s Atlantic passage Nobel awarded its peace prize to Rigoberta Menchu, a K’ich’e Indian whose memoir shocked readers worldwide with the enduring racial, political, and economic legacies of colonialism in Guatemala.  But when questions surfaced about the accuracy of Menchu’s account the result was a bitter academic debate about the interplay of truth, power, and politics in the making of Latin American culture. In its wake a new generation of scholars, informed by the theoretical contributions of subaltern studies and postmodernism, forsook the empiricist approaches that long characterized Latin American studies and instead set out to carve a new epistemological space privileging the subjective over the objective, hidden meanings over observable ‘fact.’ Drawing from the Latin American example but looking more broadly at its repercussions in the realm of critical thought, this course traces the theoretically rich terrain of Cultural Studies as it reshaped scholarship, cinema, literature, and public policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Authors may include Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Michael Taussig, Ariel Dorfman, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, Carlos Monsiváis, and Luisa Valenzuela.

¡Revolución!

K20.1486 SOC, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Alejandro Velasco

Equating Latin America and revolution seems almost a truism. From Zapata to “Che” to Chavez, the region’s modern history is a tale of one movement promising epic change to the next, each more dramatic than the last and collectively giving rise to an image of Latin America as a cradle of firebrand leaders and riotous masses leaving in their wake endless cycles of unrest. But to look deeper into this history is to find a world of complexity, of peoples pursuing radical change but also gradual reform, at times taking up ballots and at times taking up arms, at times in the factory and at times on the farm, at times from the left and at times from the right. All of it “revolucion,” yes, but what kind? And through what means? And for what ends? And at what cost? This course traces the evolution of revolution in twentieth century Latin America, from the final collapse of Spanish colonialism in 1898 to the rise of chavismo in 1998. Authors may include, among others, Mariano Azuela, Eva Perón, Gustavo Gutierrez, Omar Cabezas, and Subcomandante Marcos.

Performing Objects

K20.1487 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Kristin Horton

Puppets and objects used in performance collectively fall under the term “performing object.” In this course we will study the history of performing objects and consider their practices in a variety of contexts including religious ceremony, political activism, and popular theater. We will examine several “case studies” from a variety of perspectives including folklore, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and performance studies. These case studies will include the Javanese wayang kulit shadow plays, Japanese bunraku, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, the English Punch and Judy tradition, and Victorian toy theaters to name a few. In each study we will examine the aesthetics of the objects as well as the relationship of the manipulator to the objects and how these values and dynamics change depending on the culture and circumstance of performance. Finally we will consider contemporary performance and the use of puppetry in the work of major downtown New York theater artists including Basil Twist, Lee Breuer, Theodora Skipitares, Great Small Works, Ralph Lee, Julie Taymor, and Dan Hurlin. Readings may include texts by John Bell, Eileen Blumenthal, André Breton, Edward Gordan Craig, Martin Heidegger, Wassily Kadinsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Filippo Marinetti, Frank Proschan, Richard Schechner, Steve Tillis, and George Speaight.

Democratic Persuasion

K20.1489 SOC, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Stephen Duncombe

This course begins with the controversial premise that persuasion and propaganda are a necessary part of modern politics. With this approach we reject the simple project of critique and condemnation of propaganda and set for ourselves the far more difficult task of rethinking how one might create methods of mass persuasion that build democracy instead of undermining it and facilitate political discussion instead of closing it down. We begin by exploring the history of rhetoric and persuasion, and defining what we mean by propaganda. Next, we will study classic examples of propaganda produced by advertising agencies and totalitarian states. Then, as an extended case study, we will explore how photographs, speeches, architecture, murals, guidebooks and even material projects of the New Deal might suggest an alternative model of propaganda. Finally, we will use what we have learned to sketch out a set of principles for democratic mass persuasion. Authors, artists and sites we will look at include Plato, Aristotle, Edward Bernays, Leni Riefenstahl, Joseph Goebbels, Stuart Ewen, Walter Lippmann, Lizabeth Cohen, Dorothea Lange, Timberline Lodge, The Bonneville Dam, Woody Guthrie, Clifford Odets, Coit Tower and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Tragedy, Justice and Interpretation

K20.1490 HUM, 4 CR F 2:00-4:45 Susanne Wofford   Open to sophomores only.

This is a course on literary interpretation, the problem of evidence and the question of justice. In this class, we will consider theories of evidence and how they relate to our own processes of literary interpretation. We will consider whether evidence must be literal and whether it ever can be understood outside of the narrative constructions that give it meaning. We will consider how we look at metaphor and figure as kinds of evidence in literary interpretation and compare it to other kinds of evidence. Can we found ideas of justice on notions of evidence that are not literal? What kinds of evidence can there be for internal crimes or emotional events? We will consider also how literary forms represent and dramatize the contradictions in value and ideology that often make questions of justice most difficult to decide, and ask how representations of the struggle for justice through trial, through drama, and through testimony shape our theories of what justice should be. The question of how to define justice in an era of globalism, radical inequality and postmodernism will inform our discussions, and we will briefly consider theories of tragedy (especially those of Hegel and Nietzsche), and the question of how literary form controls and is exploded by ideological contradiction.

James Reese Europe and American Music

K20.1439 HUM, 2 CR W 2:00-4:45 Michael Dinwiddie   Course meets for seven weeks only, January 23 - March 5.

This course will examine the impact of James Reese Europe (1880-1919) on the development of American music in the early twentieth century.  An innovative musician and conductor, Europe organized and conducted the first jazz concerts at Carnegie Hall (1912-1914), founded an African American music school, and served as a collaborator with Irene and Vernon Castle, who made social dancing a world-wide rage.  During World War I, James Reese Europe led the all-black “Hellfighters” 15th Infantry Band, which performed throughout France and offered Europeans their first exposure to ‘le jazz hot.’  Readings may include A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe by Reid Badger; excerpts from The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I by Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri; From Harlem to the Rhine by Arthur W. Little; Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson; and They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis. Sound and film recordings will also be utilized.

The Odyssey: Estrangement and Homecoming

K20.1457 HUM, 2 CR T 6:20-9:00 Laura Slatkin   Course meets for seven weeks only, January 22 - March 4.

One of the two foundational epics of so-called Western Culture, the Odysseyfeatures a wily hero whose journeys are extraordinary and whose longing for home is unbounded. The Odysseyoffers a complex meditation on brotherhood, bestiality, sexuality, kinship, and power; it is the great epic of cross-cultural encounter, in all its seductive and violent aspects, as well as the great poem of marriage. An adventure in nostos (homecoming), the Odysseyshows us the pleasures and dangers of voyaging among strangers. Constantly exploring the boundaries between the civilized and the savage, the poem offers as well a political critique of many ancient institutions, not least the family, patriarchy, hospitality customs, and the band-of-brothers so central to epic ideology. And as a masterwork of narrative art, the Odysseyasks us to consider the relation of fiction to “truth.” We will explore these and other matters in the Odyssey, and may make some concluding forays into contemporary re-workings of Odyssean themes and characters.

Painted Blind: Modern Tales of Madness and Love

K20.1467 HUM, 2 CR M 3:30-6:10 Karen Hornick   Course meets for seven weeks only, January 28 - March 10.

While the ancients blamed mad love on potions and sorcery or the nature of love itself, modern writers associate inappropriate love with medical, psychological, and social causes.  Sigmund Freud’s writing epitomizes this point, as does that of one of his severest critics, Michel Foucault.  Is love today a sickness or the last trace of a human will to elude institutional power?  From Austen’s comic romance Sense and Sensibility, in which desire wages a quietly eternal war against decorum, to Truffaut’s  historical dramatic film The Story of Adele H, in which the maddest of unrequited-love stories plays out as a full-fledged revolution of one against all authority, modern storytellers continue to demonstrate that narrative remains an important source of enlightenment for those who would understand the relations of love, consciousness, and power.  Readings will include selected essays by Freud on love and sexuality;  Foucault’s History of Sexuality;  one or more of the following novels:  Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility;  Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, and Emile Zola, Therese Raquin;  one or both of these films: Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve and Francois Truffaut, The Story of Adele H.

Primary Texts: Moby Dick

K20.1476 2 CR T 6:20-9:00 George Shulman   Prerequisite any two of the following Primary Text courses: K20.1419, K20.1449, K20.1450, K20.1452 or K20.1455.  Course meets for seven weeks only, January 22 - March 4.

This two-credit course focuses on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Our goal is two-fold. Partly, we learn the art of close reading to reveal the complex layers of meaning in a text. Partly, we expand the canon of political thought by exploring how a literary text asks foundational political questions. Indeed, the only profound thinkers about politics in American history are the great literary artists, like Melville, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison. Only they analyze American life and politics with the depth and artfulness we find in Plato, Hobbes, Marx, or Nietzsche. We read Melville, then, to explore how he dramatizes questions about the nature of nature, the practice of philosophy, the meaning of justice, the forming of national identity, racial violence and empire, the role of myth (and art) in culture. In addition to Moby Dick, we read Melville’s greatest short stories—“Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy Budd”—as well as scholarly readings about American culture and politics.

Antigone

K20.1488 HUM, 2 CR W 3:30-6:10 Laura Slatkin   Course meets for seven weeks only, January 23 - March 5.

Antigone:  heroine or harridan? political dissident or family loyalist?  Harbinger of the free subject or captive of archaic gender norms?  Speaking truth to power or preserving traditional privilege? Sophocles' Antigone has been good to think with since its first production in the fifth century BCE.  From ancient commentators through Hegel to contemporary gender theorists like Judith Butler, readers have grappled with what Butler calls "Antigone's Claim."  The play's exploration of gender, kinship, citizenship, law, resistance to authority, family vs. the state, and religion (among other issues) has proved especially compelling for modern thought.  In this seminar we will closely read the play and some select commentary; supplemental readings may include writings of philosophers, classicists, playwrights, political theorists.  We will also conclude with some 20th C. adaptations/re-imaginings of Antigone on the stage.

The Meaning of Home

K20.1432 HUM, 2 CR T 6:20-9:00 Pat Rock   Course meets for seven weeks only, March 11 - April 29.

“Home,” Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West, “is a profound word.” This course examines the concept of home as it has been studied in literature, philosophy, psychology, and art.  It examines the issues of home as a place in which we dwell, a place where we find our center.  It examines the idea of home in relation to the physical world, cultural ties, and a changing world, a world where homelessness and exile are common.  Readings may include: The Odyssey, King Lear, E.M. Forster’s Howards End, and selections from the works of Frost, Freud, and Jung.

Sissle, Blake and the Minstrel Tradition

K20.1440 HUM, 2 CR W 2:00-4:45 Michael Dinwiddie   Course meets for seven weeks only, March 12 - April 30.

This 2-credit course will explore the conflicting ideologies apparent in the works of Noble Sissle and James Hubert “Eubie” Blake.  Famed for such hit musicals as “Shuffle Along” and “Chocolate Dandies,” Sissle and Blake formed one of the most successful musical theatre collaborations of the 1920’s.  Their work draws strongly on the minstrel tradition in African American theatre, and attempts to subvert many of its conventions.  It may be argued that their commercial success had the opposite effect, and served to update and modernize the very theatre conventions they sought to destroy.  We will examine the effect of Sissle and Blake’s oeuvre on musical theatre in general and African American musicals in particular.  Readings may include Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls by Allen Woll, Black Drama by Loften Mitchell, with excerpts from Terrible Honesty by Mary Douglas, Blacks in Blackface by Henry T. Sampson, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake by Robert Kimball, and essays by W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke. Archival sound and film footage will be utilized along with such works as Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled.

Primary Texts: Critical Race Theory

K20.1477 SOC, 2 CR T 6:20-9:00 George Shulman   Open to sophomores only.  Course meets for seven weeks only, March 11 - April 29.

This course focuses on key texts in what has recently come to be called critical race theory. We use them to address several key questions. First, how should we assess the very concept of "race" and the related binary of "white" and "black?" (Should our political and cultural goal be to re-work or abolish these categories?) Second, what is the relationship between the universalist promise of American democracy, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and the enslavement or subjugation of people marked as "racial" others? (If American freedom is based on American slavery, and if racial domination is a central and ongoing fact, not an unfortunate past anomaly in American history, then what is the appropriate political response?) Third, how does recent Latino and Asian migration challenge the hegemonic white/black racial paradigm? (Are they assimilating into mainstream society—becoming "white" like European counterparts a hundred years ago—or, are some positioned as racial others?) Texts include: James Baldwin, "Many Thousands Gone" and Fire Next Time; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Charles Mills, The Racial Contract; Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise; Mai Ngai, Impossible Subjects; essays by Ralph Ellison and Kimberlee Crenshaw; speeches by Malcolm X; Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Warren Beatty’s Bullworth.

Literature and the Politcal Imagination

K20.1491  HUM, 4 CR  R 6:20-9:00 Edmund Fong

Many of the most salient and perceptive understandings of political issues and political themes are found in works of fiction and literature. This course examines some classic and contemporary works of literature with a specific focus on the political imaginaries and mediations they disclose and inhabit. We will ask how such works mediate the political themes that circulate in their texts and in the process develop a critical ability to “read” and understand the narrative and imaginative dimensions of political life and political possibility. Works and authors that we will read include Thomas More’s Utopia, Shakespeare's Tempest, Toni Morrison’s Recitatif, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Environmental Values and Education 

K20.1492  SCI, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10  Chris Schlottmann

Environmental education – the formal and informal practice of increasing our understanding of the environment – plays a centrally important role in resolving environmental problems.  While there is an increasing awareness of the need to confront environmental problems, the precise values and education required to do so are still debated.  This course focuses on which values inform environmental education.  The central question of this course is: what is the relationship between environmental values and environmental education?  This course will (1) analyze historical and contemporary schools of thought regarding values and the environment, (2) analyze historical and contemporary schools of thought regarding the proposed roles for these values in environmental education, and (3) assess these various approaches for clarity and practicality. We will address four primary questions: Is environmental education a form of values education? Do we need to have an established set of environmental values before we can constructively pursue environmental education?  To what extent is personal consciousness a desirable goal of environmental values or education?  What might a coherent, justifiable, value-inclusive theory of environmental education look like?   Readings will be from (1) Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy (Oxford, 1994), ed. Lori Gruen and Dale Jamieson, (2) Earth In Mind (Earth Island, 1994/2004), by David Orr, (3) the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development curricula and (4) supplements (curricula, contemporary articles, environmental education websites). They will include ancient and modern texts discussing the value of nature, environmental education, sustainable development, environmental justice, and aesthetic appreciation.

Moses and David

K20.1495  HUM, 4 CR  R 6:20-9:00  Aaron Tugendhaft

The Bible has been repeatedly invoked for political purposes.  This course will explore how the Bible itself presents politics through an analysis of the lives of its two exemplary political leaders: Moses and David.  Through close literary readings, we will familiarize ourselves with the personalities of these two biblical characters—paying attention to such themes as ambition, loyalty, prudence, rage, sexual passion, trickery, and intrigue.  At the same time, we shall consider these stories in light of the more general “types” of the priest/prophet and the king, asking how each establishes its own version of sovereignty and how each mediates between human beings and the divine.  We shall also consider the significance of this “double articulation” of political leadership for the Bible’s larger political teaching.  Our reading of the Moses narrative in Exodus-Deuteronomy and the David story in the Book of Samuel will be informed by insights from political theory, comparative mythology, and the history of religions.  Focus throughout will be on the biblical texts, though we shall occasionally take guidance from such medieval and modern thinkers as Moses Maimonides, Isaac Abarbanel, Pierre Bayle, Max Weber, and Georges Dumézil.