Interdisciplinary Seminars
Disease and Civilization
K20.1059 SCI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Gene Cittadino
This course explores the cultural, social, scientific, and political dimensions of epidemic disease through an examination of selected episodes from plagues in antiquity to AIDS, Ebola, avian flu, and bioterrorism in our time. We will approach the problem of understanding the role of disease in human history from two different, but interrelated, perspectives: an ecological perspective, making use of a combination of environmental, biological, and cultural factors to help explain the origin and spread of epidemics, and a cultural/social history perspective, emphasizing the interaction of cultural values, religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, medical practice, economics, and politics in shaping perceptions of the nature, causes, cures, and significance of various diseases. Readings will range from Thucydides and the Hippocratic writings to Boccaccio, Defoe, Orwell, and such current works as Hays, The Burdens of Disease, Wills, Yellow Fever, Black Goddess, and Preston, The Cobra Event.
Sound and Sense
K20.1071 HUM, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Lisa Goldfarb
In this course we study the correspondence between the world of sound and the world of words. While the analogy between poetry and music reaches back to the origins of poetry, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries poets, philosophers, writers of fiction, and composers breathed new life into the relationship between these arts. We look back to some early philosophical writings on the relations between poetry and music, and then examine how symbolist and modernist thinkers considered these arts. Our inquiry will concentrate on why there was such a rebirth of interest on the part of philosophers, poets, writers, and musicians in the expressive possibilities born of the intermingling of these art forms. Readings may include Plato’s Phaedrus, Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry and On Music, poems of Mallarmé, Valéry, Langston Hughes, Stevens, as well as Forster’s A Room with a View and Stravinsky’s The Poetics of Music.
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.
Inventing Modernity I
K20.1097 HUM, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Karen Hornick
From the mid-1700’s until the First World War, many European writers and artists saw themselves as living in an epoch radically separated from the past. They saw themselves as Moderns, radically different (though not always better) than the Ancients. Old questions seemed to require new answers: What is the relation of humans to gods and nature? How can a just and peaceful society be attained? What is the ideal relation between self and other? In this survey class, we will read and discuss major texts that will help us chart the emergence of modern consciousness, including authors such as Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Austen, (Mary) Shelley, Balzac, Marx, and Dickens.
Pride and Power: Renaissance Revolutions in Art and Culture
K20.1103 HUM, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 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 Protestant Reformation, revolutions in science, political transformation and 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, Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franca. This course examines the politics, literature, philosophy, visual arts, and music of this period, as well as the social behavior of manners, morality, and the role of the other, such as women and Jews. 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 W 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.
Discourses of Love: Antiquity to the Renaissance
K20.1122 HUM, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Bella Mirabella
Open to sophomores only.
This course explores the impulse to define, understand, contain, praise, analyze, lament, restrain, and express love. Through a study of philosophy, poetry, drama, religion, art, and music we will endeavor to discourse on the meaning of this profound emotion. However, in order to understand the place of love within the lives of humans, we need to look at love in its historic, cultural, social, and political contexts. We want to consider its multiple roles with regard to desire, seduction, betrothal, marriage, manners, morals, political power, and the pursuit of wisdom, as well as its role in class, gender, and race. Possible readings will include Plato’s Symposium, mystical, and philosophical writings, the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, the female troubadours, and Dante, as well as selected plays of Shakespeare.
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 Peter Trudgill’s Sociolinguistics, Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb’s Silence: The Currency of Power, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and excerpts from William S.-Y.Wang’s The Emergence of Language, Eugenia Shanklin’s Anthropology & Race, and Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern’s Nature, Culture and Gender.
Narratives of African Civilizations
K20.1197 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 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, and 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.
Origins of the Atomic Age
K20.1207 SCI, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Gene Cittadino
The uranium and plutonium nuclear fission bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 permanently altered the world we live in. Fear of nuclear annihilation became a fact of life. Although the end of the Cold War relaxed the tensions somewhat, the combined arsenals of existing nuclear powers are still sufficient to destroy most of life on this planet many times over. How did this extraordinary state of affairs come about? Why were the bombs made when and where they were made? Why were they used? Did the individuals involved understand the destructive potential of these new weapons and ponder moral questions involving their manufacture and use? Did they anticipate the nuclear arms race that has resulted. How does this episode fit into the longer history of the relationship between science and warfare? Readings will likely include Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary, Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and a variety of selections concerning nuclear proliferation and the disarmament movement.
“Chinatown” and the American Imagination
K20.1229 HUM, 4 CR W 2:00-4:45, F 10:00-12:00 J. Tchen
Same as V18.0370. Permission of the instructor required (jack.tchen@nyu.edu).
What is a “Chinatown”? The word alone evokes many images, sounds, smells, tastes from many different sensibilities. For recent immigrants it can be a home away from home, for “outsiders” an exotic place for cheap eats, for male action flic fans Chow Yun Fat (or Mark Walhberg) in “The Corruptor,” and for you ?!? (fill in the blank). We’re going to explore the nooks and crannies of Chinatown in the American imagination and in its New York real-time, non-virtual existence. How do we know what we know and do not know? What does Chinatown have to do with the formation of normative “American” identities? What are the possibilities (and limits) of crossing cultural divides? Class members will individually and/or in groups research, experience, and document a chain of persons, places, and/or events creating their own narrative “tour” of this place’s meanings. Novels, history books, tourist guides, films, and pop culture will supplement the primary “text” of New York Chinatown. This will be a collaborative, discussion-intensive, field-research-driven class limited to twenty students. The instructor is looking for a mixture of students with a variety of skills and backgrounds.
Colonies, Empires, Nations, Globalization
K20.1249 SOC, 2 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Marie Cruz Soto
Course meets October 27–December 15.
Colonialism, imperialism, and globalization all involve the domination of one part of the world by another. How do these forms of control differ? How are they related to each other? What are their dimensions in different places and times? What kinds of changes—economic, political, social, sexual, biological—are produced among the dominated and the dominators? What definitions and feelings of “nationhood” develop during these processes? How are peoples drawn into or able to resist these relations? What are the liberatory or the oppressive aspects of different kinds of nationalisms? What do the changing links among countries and peoples signify? How is today’s “globalization” connected to older forms of control, while creating new forms of domination? Texts may include several films (Life and Debt, The Triumph of the Will, The Battle of Algiers) with selections from, among others: AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame; Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, Sexuality, in the Colonial Context; Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; The Wretched of the Earth; Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
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 F 9:30-12:15 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.
The Ancient Theatre and Its Influences
K20.1258 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Laura Slatkin
Same as V29.0104.
What role did the theater play in the civic life of ancient Greece? How did Greek drama address vital social and political issues? Does Greek drama serve as a useful paradigm for exploring Roman drama? For contemporary theater? Through our readings of tragedy and comedy, we will explore Greek theater as a live space of social action, representing conflicts between the claims of family and state, between male and female, between traditional values and emergent democratic concerns. Drawing on the work of anthropologists and historians of antiquity, we will examine Greek drama’s relation to religion (e.g. sacrifice, lament, festival), to law (e.g. courtroom proceedings, punishment), and to civic debate. We will discuss both how plays were produced and the theories of drama they inspired. Building on our investigation of the Greek ‘case’, we will turn our attention to Roman tragedy and comedy and to selected works of the modern theater. Readings may include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander; Plato, Aristotle; Plautus, Seneca; Racine, Sartre, Fugard, Soyinka.
The Politics of Style
K20.1261 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Cornyetz /Duncombe
In this course we will ask: How do clothes make the man? How has style in its broadest sense come to function as an expression of a person’s political positioning, sexual/gender politics, and allegiance to groups and subcultures? Conversely, how has style been used to limit the individual’s mobility and freedom, that is, to keep people in their place? What is the relationship of capitalism to the marketing of sex, the appropriation of subcultural style, and the system of fashion? We will discuss these issues and others in relation to the politics of style, past and present, in America, France, Britain, Japan and Imperial China, looking at fashion, hair, manners, foot binding, and body arts like tattoo and piercing. Texts may include narrative films, documentaries, fashion magazines, commercials, and writings by Karl Marx, Wolfgang Haug, Dick Hebdige, Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, Dorinne Kondo, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Sennett, Liz and Stuart Ewen, Charles Baudelaire and George Bernard Shaw.
Objectivity and the Politics of the Journalism Revolution
K20.1299 SOC, 4 CR R 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 information 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? desirable? 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, Sinclair 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 F 12:30-3:15 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.”
Rethinking the Biological Sciences: Haraway, Theory, and Culture
K20.1316 SCI, 4 CR T 9:30-12:15 Bradley Lewis
Today’s biology has moved out of the lab and into our biofutures. Genetically modified foods, in vitro fertilization, cloning, the biomedical enhancement debates, neurochemical psychic manipulation, and even the possibility of a posthuman culture all loom on the immediate horizon. These biological developments challenge our familiar ways of thinking, and they upset many of our most cherished categories and priorities. As a result, new ways of thinking must emerge to understand and cope with today’s biological sciences. One of the most important scholars to respond to this challenge is feminist historian of science, Donna Haraway. Haraway is unique because, more than anyone else, she uses recent theoretical work from humanities and cultural studies to think again about biology. We devote this class to a close study of her work. We consider the intellectual context of Haraway’s work in both theoretical humanities and the biosciences, and we do careful readings of her key texts on the cultural history of biology.
Jung and the Postmodern Religious Experience
K20.1328 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Lee Robbins
The course unfolds around the question: How does a person locate meaning in the postmodern age when traditional belief systems have been emptied of symbolic authority? In his discovery of the symbol making function within the human psyche, Jung offers a possible answer. Variously described as the religious, imaginative or creative instinct, this activity offers the possibility of losing and finding multiple meanings throughout the cycles of life. We begin by defining pre and post modern within their historical context with special attention to the role of language. We identify the influences that shaped Jung’s discovery, focusing on the classical elements that characterize a religious experience. Finally, we look to figures in the history of culture that have lost and found meaning. Readings will include selections from the Collected Works of C.G. Jung; Julia Kristiva, In the Beginning was Love:Psychoanalysis and Faith; Nietzsche, The Gay Science; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Euripides’ Medea and Morrison’s Beloved: Exploring the Cultural Imaginary
K20.1330 HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 L. Slatkin / E.F. White
In this course we will focus intensively on Euripides’ Medea and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which acknowledges Medea as an important source. In exploring the cross-cultural and trans-historical enrichings each work may cast on the other, we will address questions of the political economy of the family and of sex, the nature of exile, the politics of the body, and the status of maternity. We will consider how these two distinctive genres—drama and novel—confront issues of agency and decision, and more broadly how literature displays and exposes the tensions and contradictions of the social. Readings will include essays by Gayle Rubin, Hortense Spillers, Nicole Loraux and others.
The Qur’an
K20.1357 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 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 over the course of the twentieth century, paying special attention to the relationship between the economy and political, cultural and intellectual transformations. It 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. The class will focus in particular on the problem of how Americans have confronted and sought to understand hard economic times. In a country whose culture privileges the "American dream" of economic success, how have people dealt with struggle, difficulty and failure? How have financial panics, depressions and recessions, and economic decline affected American political economy and culture? Readings will incorporate both primary and secondary sources. Possible a uthors include Betty Friedan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Ronald Reagan.
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."
Thinking About Seeing
K20.1388 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Miller
This course explores visual communication in the context of a media saturated society. We will analyze how humans “speak” through images and symbols as well as words, and how we “read” what we see. This class will attempt to understand the tools we use each day to reach an audience, while at the same time questioning what we think of as that audience. Images and texts from the past and present will help us assess both the character of various media and their personal as well as political implications. Texts will include works by Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Debord, Levi-Strauss, McLuhan, Sontag and other seminal essays on the media.
Nature and the Polis
K20.1396 HUM, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Justin Holt
Historically nature has been a fundamental philosophic concept for analyzing the origin and structure of the polis. It has been used not only as a means for explaining the political and its limits, but also as a regulative device for shaping preferred political outcomes. Determining certain actions or institutions as natural can provide a sanction to political decisions so they seem necessary. This is the case whether the natural is determined according to honest scientific analysis, or as the manipulation of belief, with Plato’s hierarchy of souls in the Republic being the most overt. Nature appears in various forms in regard to the political, easily identifying the polis as the end of natural processes or as a protection against a hostile nature that obscures the more important questions of how and why such an answer is arrived at. In this course we will examine the use of the concept of nature throughout the history of political philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the effect the concept has had on the analysis of human activity and on understandings of preferred societal outcomes. Our main, but not exclusive, texts will be Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’ Leviathan.
Leviathans, Lovers and Libertines: Theater and Aesthetics of Grandeur
K20.1408 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 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.
Satan and the Angels: Good and Evil Personified
K20.1410 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Clair McPherson
The popular imagination finds them irresistible; so did the great artists of the Renaissance. The major religious traditions all have versions of them; so do various cults and makeshift religions. They appear on television, and in Dante’s Commedia. Angels and demons seem to interest everyone, yet very few people have a clear notion of exactly what they are supposed to be and where they come from. Our course will explore the tradition of the angels and the devil in the great global faiths; their origins in the myths and religions of the ancient world; their history in art and literature, from the Greek daimons to modern movies, novels, and cartoon art. Readings will be excerpts from the classic religious texts such as the Bible and the dialogues of Plato, from poems such as the Commedia and Paradise Lost, novels such as The Screwtape Letters and The Exorcist; museum visits for visual art and film viewings will round out the course.
Politics and the Gods
K20.1417 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Aaron Tugendhaft
Open to sophomores only.
How is political life related to the divine? In this course, students will explore this question through close readings of classic texts from the ancient world. We shall tackle the question from both ends, asking both what it might mean to have a political life founded theologically and what the possibilities are for a politics that does not orient itself with respect to the divine. We will investigate the political roles of piety, revelation, and divine law, comparing these to notions of a politics rooted in unaided human reason. Additional themes will include: the relationship between poetry and prophecy, the tension between cultural particularity and universal humanity, and the political function of myth. Throughout, emphasis will be on close readings of primary texts. Readings are likely to include the Sumerian King List, the Hebrew Bible, Herodotus' Histories, and Plato's Republic. Occasional secondary-source readings may also be assigned.
The Simple Life
K20.1433 HUM, 2 CR R 6:20-9:00 Pat Rock
Course meets September 10–October 22.
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 2:00-3:15 Karen Hornick
Course meets September 8 –October 22.
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).
Looking at Popular Culture: The Poetics of Television
K20.1444 HUM, 2 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Karen Hornick
Course meets October 27–December 15.
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.
(Re)Imagining Latin America
K20.1470 SOC, 4 CR MW 4:55-6:10 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 M 3:30-6:10 Millery Polyné
This course examines the foundations, implementations, and implications of intellectual thought(s) of the African diaspora from the period of slavery in the Americas and post-emancipation societies through the present. Arguably, black intellectualism maintains roots in African-descended religious and cultural societies that pre-dates slavery in the West, however, this seminar seeks to explore the emergence of critical thought through historical, sociological, literary, autobiographical, religious and ethnographic writing that addressed vital issues facing African-descended peoples in the modern world. The matrix of race, class and gender has been a useful lens to analyze the systems and structures in place that both benefited and impeded racial progress. Yet, the themes of migration, nationalism, and empire-building also serve as essential tools to untangling and mapping the roots and routes of black intellectualism on four continents. Through a diverse set of materials (primary documents, films, music, and art) that utilize a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach to a range of historical, literary, political and economic questions central to Afro-diasporic experience(s), this course will critically engage the writings of thinkers who were at the vanguard of the Afro-modern and theoretical world, such as Frederick Douglass, Amy Jacques Garvey, Anténor Firmin, W.E.B. Dubois, Arturo Schomburg, Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Aimé Césaire, Paule Marshall, George Lamming and Angela Davis.
The (Post)colonial Arabic Novel
K20.1478 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 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.
Guilty Subjects: Guilt in Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis
K20.1504 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 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.
Science and Religion
K20.1514 SCI, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 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.
Political Theology
K20.1521 SOC, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 George Shulman
This course explores the idea of "politial theology" by considering how modern thinkers conceive the political implications of biblical texts. Strictly speaking, "political theology" suggests the idea that scriptures directly prescribe forms of political rule that are anchored in divine revelation or law, but broadly speaking, the idea of political theology suggests that every "faith" has a worldly bearing -not only on our ethical practice as individual subjects, but on collective life. Because the meaning of a scripture or a faith is not self-evident, but requires interpretation, not only do people practice a "theology" (and shape the world) in very different ways, but they come into profound and often violent conflict. Accodingly, this course explores how "the Bible" includes texts with radically opposed implications, whose interpretations have generated opposing forms of life. But we also the explore the senses in which human beings cannot help but live by "faith," whether in reason, secularism, or "democracy" as an ideal. As "political theology" signals the connections between faith and life, so we trace the bonds linking faith to politics. Readings include sections of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles paired with modern commentors such as Kierkergaard's Fear and Trembling, Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution, Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, Fydor Dostoievsky's "Grand Inquisitor" parable, Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ, as well as writings by John Milton, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and contemporary political theorists.
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 readings include literary and other scholarly texts engaging feminist and postcolonial theory. Readings range from Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala to other texts by scholars like Patricia Mohammed, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ann Stoler.
Finance for Social Theorists
K20.1527 SOC, 4 CR W 7:45-10:15pm Peter Rajsingh
Why are some private, profit-making institutions “too big to fail?” The objective of this course is to provide students with conceptual, interpretive and analytical tools to understand finance. The approach will be interdisciplinary and interpretive, drawing upon political theory, economics, psychology, basic statistics and accounting. For example, we will use the subprime crisis to explore core concepts associated with credit, banking, business ethics, monetary policy and macro economics. We will reference key ideas from familiar texts and also take up contemporary debates in finance. The aim is to help students become more literate and numerate as economic and social agents. Readings include Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (excerpts); John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (excerpts); Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money; Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk; Mohammed El-Erian, When Markets Collide; Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life.
Motown Matrix: Race, Gender and Class Identity in "The Sound of Young America"
K20.1542 HUM, 4 CR F 2:00-4:45 Michael Dinwiddie
In the 1960s Motown Records emerged as a dominant force in American popular music. Billing itself as “The Sound of Young America,” Motown established a lyrical and musical discourse through its records and albums that struck a responsive chord with white and black listeners alike. In this seminar we will examine the race, gender and class identity that is inherent in—and emerges from— “The Motown Sound.” How did this company exploit the nationalist pride in the African American community while simultaneously positioning itself as a “crossover” enterprise to whites? What models of business and community did Motown emulate and create? And how did Motown affect the politics and racial discourse of its listeners? Our exploration will situate Motown in the Detroit community of the 1950s and 1960s, to understand how it was “imagined,” and its impact on the wider culture. Readings may include excerpts from The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Segrue; One Nation Under a Groove by Gerald Early; Where Did Our Love Go? by Nelson George; American Odyssey by Robert Conot; Dancing in the Street by Suzanne E. Smith; Just My Soul Responding by Brian Ward, and Detroit: I Do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. The lyrics of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Holland-Dozier-Holland as well as such films as Standing in the Shadows of Motown and Dream Girls may be included.
Sociology of Religion: Islam and the Modern World
K20.1552 SOC, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Ali Mirsepassi
This course is designed to explore the role of religion in modern societies. We will examine religion as an important social institution and also as a cultural system. We will study canonical and contemporary theories of religion. The focus of the course, however, will be Islam. We will look at the cultural context and historical construction of Islam, as well as the different social contexts within which Islam has evolved. We will examine the relationship between Islam and modernity, including secular ideologies, gender politics, and modern democracy. We will pay particular attention to the role that Islam plays in the everyday life of those who practice it, who are affected by it, or who struggle with it as their tradition. Our goal is to study Islam not as a fixed object or authentic tradition but as a social and cultural phenomenon subject to change, contestation, and critique. Texts may include Mernissi, Islam and Democracy; Arkoun, Re-Thinking Islam; Fernea, In Search of Islamic Feminism; and Armstrong, Islam.
Imagining India: From the Colonial to the Global
K20.1555 SOC, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Ritty Lukose
Drawing on an interdisciplinary set of readings about India, this course explores a fraught and difficult dynamic within the modern world – democratic nation-building. We move from a variety of pre-colonial and colonial imaginings of South Asia to politicized assertions of a unified Indian identity during the anti-colonial movement. Here, nation is not only a political entity, but also a cultural project that re-shapes ideas of self, religion, community, region, family, gender and kinship. The post-independence period is explored through writings on the Partition that created India and Pakistan, “development” as a key concept that has been central to nation-building, and struggles around caste, gender, sexuality, tribal identity, environment, region and religion. How the state contends with majority and minority identities and claims, the complexities of secularism, notions of equality and difference, all in the context of vibrant social movements and a large NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) sector will enable an in-depth exploration of how democracy, as idea and practice, happens in India. How globalization shapes contemporary understandings of India will be explored towards the end of the course. Readings include: Ronald Inden’s Imagining India, Amitav Ghosh on the Indian Ocean World, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, the writings of Gandhi and Nehru, subaltern studies collective writings on nationalism in India, The Nation and its Fragments by Partha Chatterjee, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Menon and Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition and India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform by Leela Fernandes.
Religion and Modernity
K20.1557 HUM, 4 CR F 2:00-4:45 Caleb Elfenbein
From a distance, much like an impressionist painting, modernity appears as a coherent whole, its parts working in concert to represent the possibility of unending, universal progress. Take a step closer, however, and the parts disassemble before your eyes, scattering into discrete elements whose relationship is not always entirely clear. Religion is one such element of modernity. This course investigates the particular history of the passage to modernity in Europe, the concomitant emergence of the general concept of religion, and colonial and postcolonial global debates about the character of modernity and the place of religion in modern social, economic, legal, and political activities. Examples of such debate from around the world are legion, from the United States and Western Europe to South Asia and the Middle East, and will often inform class discussion. Among the general questions that will guide our work together: To what are we referring when we use the term “modernity?” What constitutes the historical novelty of modern conceptions of religion? What place did the emergence of modern forms of religion have in the transformation of humanity’s understanding of and place in the natural and social worlds? How do modern forms of colonialism and their effects relate to these transformations? To investigate these questions we will read works from (among others): Augustine, Louis Dupré, HM Abrams, Antoine Nicholas de Condorcet, Foucault, James Mill, Bernard Cohn, Talal Asad, Jose Casanova, and Timothy Mitchell.
The Travel Habit: On the Road in the Thirties
K20.1558 HUM, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Steve Hutkins
Course meets September 8–October 22.
The Great Depression turned millions of people into travelers. Many of the unemployed took to the road in search of work, preferring to give up their homes rather than their cars; others hitchhiked and rode the rails. Ironically, it was also a time for vacations, and this was the era when taking a family trip on a paid vacation became a national ritual. Government and industry promoted tourism to help the economy—and to pacify the working class. But getting people to travel required a deliberate, large-scale effort. As one tourism promoter put it, “The travel habit was not born with Americans. It’s an acquired taste that must be religiously and patiently cultivated.” The Roosevelt administration created a national travel bureau to assist the hospitality industry, poured millions of dollars into roads and highways, and put authors like Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren to work writing WPA travel guides. The travel theme attracted novelists like Nathaniel West and William Faulkner, who used the journey motif in their fictions, and James Agee and Walker Evans traveled south to document the suffering of sharecroppers. This course will survey the travel writing of the 1930s and provide an introduction to the social history of travel and tourism during the period. Readings may include Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, West’s A Cool Million, Daniels’ A Southerner Discovers the South, Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, and Agee and Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as the WPA travel guides and histories of the Depression and the tourist industry.
Politics and Rhetoric
K20.1559 SOC, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 George Shulman
Open to sophomores only.
The central question in this course is how to theorize language and conceive its place in political life. Since Plato, philosophy has defined itself against "rhetoric," as if to juxtapose a pure form of speech devoted only to truth against manipulative speech devoted to self-serving persuasion, even domination. Similarly, many theorists of media studies argue that in politics there is only "propaganda," and depict a political world ruled by monolithic "media," even as they disagree about how to respond. While some seek alternatives in scientific expertise, in rational validation, or in post-partisan dialogue, others endorse "counter-propaganda" claiming democratic goals. But perhaps the dichotomy between pure and impure speech is mistaken: Is there an inescapably rhetorical element in all speech, even speech that denounces "rhetoric?" Might rhetoric in fact be essential to any genuine truth-telling, great literary art, and authentic political speech? To pursue these questions we will read Plato, the Gorgias and Protagorus; Aristotle Rhetoric; Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers; Giambatista Vico, The New Science; Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric and Philosophy; Machiavelli, The Prince; Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech; as well as contemporary examples of political speech.
African-American History and Memory
K20.1560 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 E. Frances White
This course looks at the relationships between history, memory, counter-memory, amnesia, and social struggle. Our aim is to track back and forth between learning about the past and about its impact on today. We ask, what gets remembered about African American history, and who does the remembering? In what ways do communities develop collective memories? In what ways do counter-memories emerge? Accordingly, begin by exploring "the past" in West Africa, the ancestral home of most African-Americans in the United States, but we continue the course by asking: what memories of Africa are cultivated or suppressed? Likewise, we ask how experience of slavery in the United States is constituted as a past, remembered and forgotten. Our goal is to achieve a solid grounding in 18th and 19th century African-American history, and to develop conceptual tools for making a complex analysis of the past and of the politics of memory. We may read Tavia Nyongo'o, Toni Morrison, Barbara Chase Riboud, and David Blight.
Ancient Faces: Concepts of the Portrait in the Classical World and Before
K20.1562, HUM, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Hallie Franks
In this class, we will investigate the form, development, and role of images of people in ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome. Using visual and literary sources, we will focus on how we define a portrait, and will confront the variety of problems that the representation of the individual entails. How essential are the concepts of “likeness” and “realism” to the definition of a portrait, and to its function? How do we, from a modern perspective, even ascertain the degree of likeness? How are portraits manipulated to serve specific public or private roles? Who does the manipulating, and who is the audience? Does there exist a correlation between the rise of “true” portraiture and the emergence of interest in character in literary sources? We will address these questions others, concentrating on the use of portraiture in shaping personal, political, and cultural identities. Readings may include Pseudo-Aristotle Physiognomics, selected Lives of Plutarch, Suetonius, Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity, Vasari Life of Leonardo. We will also make use of objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Women’s Text(iles)
K20.1563 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Myisha Priest
Textile arts have been so firmly linked with women’s writing that one of the central metaphors of women’s writing traditions has become the metaphor of the quilt. This course will explore this metaphor that proposes the making of beautiful, functional wholes out of fragments and scraps, using it to explore the cultural work of African American women and illuminate connections between writers and artists. This rich intersection of writing and art will allow us to consider broader questions about power; we will investigate the ways in which the written works and textiles articulate, challenge and transform representations of race, gender, sexuality, as well as the meanings of art. This course will take us out into the city, where we will view the textile creations of Black women artists like Faith Ringgold, Brenda Amina Robinson and Carrie Mae Weems at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the American Craft Museum, and the Museum of Folk Art. Written texts may include: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Gloria Naylor, Mama Day; Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach; Ntozake Shange, Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. We will also participate in a quilt-making workshop, where each student will create his or her own textile interpretation of the major issues of the course.
Critically Queer: The Cultural Politics of Deviant Sexuality and Gender
K20.1565 HUM, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Jian Chen
Since the 1990s, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities and subcultures have come into mainstream visibility in popular media and political and consumer targeting. If the term “queer” has been used to describe cultural critiques of heterosexual and gender normativity, does “queer” still apply to these more mainstream representations? This course pieces together a mapping of “queer theory” and “queer studies” as critical and disciplinary formations that surface in the cultural landscape following the gay liberation, civil rights, power, third world, and feminist social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We will explore the multiple, contending critical strategies that emerge in the aftermath of difficult intersections among these social struggles. The course takes an intersectional approach towards the analysis of sexuality, gender, race, class, immigration, and ethnicity. It will also look to the emergence of transgender studies for new critical possibilities. Readings may include excerpts from: John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics (1998); Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (2001); Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas (2003); Juana Maria Rodriguez, Queer Latinidad (2003); and Susan Stryker, Transgender Studies Reader (2006). Screenings may include: Jennie Livingston, Paris Is Burning (1990); Kimberly Peirce, Boys Don’t Cry (1999); Wong Kar Wai, Happy Together (1997).
Myths as Images from the Ancient World to the Renaissance
K20.1569 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Hallie Franks
The mythological stories of the classical gods and heroes are perhaps the best known and most widely appealing of the legacies left from the ancient world. Myths offered morals and explanations in addition to entertainment, and, although they are familiar in large part because they are preserved in literary sources, the episodes and characters from the mythic world supplied a vast and compelling body of subjects for ancient artists. This course will investigate the ways in which episodes from mythology appear in the visual tradition, and will focus on the ways in which the visual tradition complicates and enhances what we think we know from written sources. We will also expand our study to later traditions from the Renaissance and modern periods. We will consider what ancient sources are influential in transmitting myths and how these myths are reinterpreted both in literature and in visual media. Readings may include Homer Iliad and Odyssey, Ovid Metamorphosis, Pseudo-Apollodorus Library, Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica, Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream, Kurt Weitzmann’s Illustrations in Roll and Codex. We will also make use of objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Harlem Renaissance
K20.1588 HUM, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Myisha Priest
The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most celebrated flowerings of culture in Americas history of literature, art, and music. It has also become crucial to the ways that we narrate the history of race in American life. Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, dancers (and more) used their creative expressions to depict, reject, recreate and transform narratives of African American and American identity. In the process, their work investigated the relation of the nations slave past to its definitions of freedom, analyzed the historical function of "race" in justifying inequality, and yet also re-imagined the racial identity of African-Americans as an asset and a gift. This class examines the fiction, essays, poetry, music, art and dance of the Harlem Renaissance, paying close attention to the ways that writers, artists, and filmmakers used forms of creative expression as sites of cultural rebellion, revision, and transformation. We consider a variety of forms, styles and themes, as well as the historical and political contexts that produced them, and in that way, begin to understand one of the most celebrated and significant periods of African American cultural production. Artists may include Toomer, Hurston, Hughes, Larsen, Micheaux, A. Jacobs, and will make a museum visit as well.