Interdisciplinary Seminars
The Image: History of Media II
K20.1043 SOC, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Stephen Duncombe
In 1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of the new science and art of photography: “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth.” We now live in the world that Holmes could then only glimpse. In this course we will study the relationship between skin and carcass, surface and reality, through the history of oil painting, light, photography, films, television, public relations and cosmetics. We will pay special attention to issues of representation, presentation, spectacle and celebrity. Texts may include works by John Berger, Laura Mulvey, Daniel Boorstin, Wolfgang Schivelbush, Joshua Gamson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Liz Ewen, Stuart Ewen, Kathy Peiss, Charles Baudelaire, Lizabeth Cohen, and Guy Debord as well as period films and television programs.
Poets in Protest: Footsteps to Hip-Hop
K20.1072 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 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.
Fate and Free Will in the Epic Tradition
K20.1116 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Antonio Rutigliano
The role of the gods in human affairs inevitably raises the question of fate and free will. The epics, from the ancient world to the Renaissance, frequently reflect and define this debate. This course examines how the epics of Homer, Vergil, Dante and Milton not only mirror the philosophical and theological perceptions of the period, but sometimes forecast future debates on the issue. Readings may include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad or Odyssey, Aeneid, and Divine Comedy, as well as selections from Plato’s Protagoras or Aristotle’s Ethics, Cicero’s De Fato, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and Fromm’s Escape From Freedom.
The Medieval Mind
K20.1135 HUM, 4 CR MW 9:30-10:45 Clair McPherson
The cultural legacy of the Middle Ages continues to challenge and enchant us: its soaring architecture, its large philosophical and theological questions, its magnificent art, literature, and music. This course explores the genius of the medieval mind and its transcendent vision of life. A major focus of the course will be a study of the Realist-Nominalist controversy spurred by Aquinas and Ockham and its effect on writers such as Chaucer and Dante, as well as on the painting, music, and architecture of the period. Readings may include selections from Dante’s Inferno, Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the writings of the Pearl Poet. The course may include field trips to the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a performance of medieval music.
Free Speech, Media Law, and Democracy
K20.1144 SOC, 4 CR W 6:20-9:99 Paul Thaler
The tension between free expression and social control has shadowed the Great American Conversation since the birth of this country. The constitutional ideal that our government “shall make no law” abridging free speech has given way, in fact, to laws that limit discussion, ostensibly for the public good. Likewise, new media technologies advance our ability to access and exchange ideas and information, but raise new questions as to the limits of such dialogue. This course, then, addresses the delicate balance between free speech and democracy, guided by our readings of Plato’s Republic, Lippmann’s Public Opinion, and McChesney's Our Unfree Press. We also examine important Supreme Court decisions that have shaped First Amendment rights in regard to hate speech, pornography, corporate control of mass media, and the rights of journalists. With this foundation, we ask: Are there any forms of free speech that should be restricted? If so, which? And, who should decide?
The Darwinian Revolution
K20.1156 SCI, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Gene Cittadino
This year we will be celebrating the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth. 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, among others.
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 Emergence of the Unconscious:From Ancient Healing to Psychoanalysis
K20.1188 SOC, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Lee Robbins
Recognized in the modern world as Freud’s id and Jung’s collective unconscious, what we call the unconscious has a long and dignified ancestry in the ancient art of psychotherapy and in the history of religion, philosophy and medicine. The focus of this course is to trace the history of the idea of the unconscious from the Upanishads, Plato and Augustine through the Enlightenment, Freud, Jung and beyond, to the linguistic analyses of Lacan, Kristeva, and Benjamin, and recent discoveries in the genetic roots of consciousness.
Tragic Visions
K20.1202 HUM, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Bella Mirabella
This course studies the nature of the tragic form in dramatic literature and performance, as well as its role in human existence. Focusing on the two great periods of tragedy in Western literature and culture - ancient Greece and Renaissance England - we read selected tragedies by Aeschuylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare. We examine these works in their social, political, and cultural contexts, while considering questions such as gender, the role of women, and the origins and evolution of tragedy as a literary and political genre. Readings might include Agamemnon and Medea, as well as Hamlet and Macbeth. Special attention is paid to performance.
The Existential Imagination
K20.1208 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Jean Graybeal
To think in an “existential” mode is to attempt to address the most basic problems of individual human existence - the (possible) purpose of life, the meaning (if any) of death, the nature of the individual self, the possibility and limits of freedom - without premature recoures to answers prescribed by religion or tradition. In spite of or maybe because of the weightiness and darkness of such questions, many of the responses proposed by philosophers, religious thinkers, psychologists and writers of fiction have shone with compassion and appreciation for both the absurdity and the beauty of human lives. Readings may include Irvin Yalom’s Love’s Executioner, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and works by Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Beckett, and Nawal El Saadawi.
Anatomy of Love
K20.1238 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Susan Weisser
Recently the feminist author Vivian Gornick announced “the end of the novel of love,” though romance has in fact a powerful place in the history of Western literature. Romantic love is a ubiquitous phenomenon in Western culture; we are saturated with images from the popular media about its value and inevitability, but historians and anthropologists cast doubt on its universality, sociologists point out its unreliability as an index to happy marriages, and contemporary literary treatments tend to run from skeptical to scathing. In this course students will analyze major shifts in definitions and treatments of romantic love, attending especially to issues of gender and power. We will read a selection of representative poetry and fiction, excerpts from research in the psychology of love, cross-cultural and historical views of romantic love, and feminist appraisals of women’s relationship to romance as a cultural institution. Course work may also include texts by Plato, Dante, Goethe and Lawrence; and a selection of love poetry from Sappho to the contemporary era.
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
Open to sophomores only.
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.
Baseball As a Road to God
K20.1324 2 CR T 6:45-8:45 John Sexton/James Traub
Open to sophomores and juniors. Permission of the instructor required. Application available at 715 Broadway, 4th Floor Reception. Application deadline is Monday, December 1. Course meets on the following dates only: January 20, February 17 and 24; March 3 and 24; April 7, 14, 21, and 28.
Baseball has been called America's game, and it captures the American progressive spirit in a special way. (Only in America would there be a game the object of which would be to bat a ball outside a playing field, with the result named "going home.") Still more, the game has revealed a capacity to grip individuals, families, and collections of friends in a way that transforms their experience of the mundane into something sublime - for some, a genuinely spiritual experience. This course examines baseball as a metaphor capable of producing such experiences. It uses both a set of readings illustrative of the metaphor (such as Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy) and a set of readings reflecting on the metaphor (such as Giamatti's A Great and Glorious Game). These readings are discussed against a background of religion as a phenomenon (illustrated with texts such as Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane). The course entails a commitment to substantial reading (12 books and additional short pieces) and writing (7 papers of 5-6 pages and 1 longer final paper). Class discussion requires a mastery of the readings before class and participation is required.
Metaphor and Meaning
K20.1341 HUM, 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Stacy Pies
Aristotle described metaphor in The Poetics as “the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (XXII). Since ancient times, poets and philosophers have written about metaphor and its power, while visual artists have transposed the techniques of figurative language from the verbal to the visual. Metaphor has been employed in texts as ornamentation, as a means of introducing new ideas and concepts, and as a way of imitating the working of the mind itself. In this class, we investigate how metaphor, verbal and visual, influences our processes of thinking, creating, and innovating, both intellectually and artistically. And we experiment with making our own metaphors, in words and pictures. Readings will range over poetry, philosophy, theory of art, and linguistics, including essays by Plato, Derrida, Ricoeur, Lakoff, Richards, Arnheim, Gombrich, and Toulmin, and poetry by Shakespeare, Spenser, Blake, Bronte, Rossetti, Rilke, Stevens, Williams, Brooks, Hughes, and Bishop, among others. We will also discuss artwork and films.
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.
Behind the Mask II: Interiority
K20.1369 HUM, 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Nina Cornyetz
The process of modernization in Western Europe spanned hundreds of years, from its nascent origins in the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, into the twentieth century. In Japan this same process was collapsed into a few short decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. We will examine the shift from a premodern to a modern system of subjectivity and perspective in language, literature, and the performing arts. We will ask: What was the impact of Western imperialism, science, art, gender and sexual politics on Japanese language, literature and film? What were the internal conditions that made Japan ready for modernization? How did premodern conventions create a modernity in Japan different from Western models? What resisted modernization, and why? Our texts will include literature The Miner (Soseki), In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki), Ankoku buto dance, and secondary sources on history, language, and society, including Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature.
Ancient Comedy and Modern Thought
K20.1371 HUM, 4 CR F 9:30-12:15 Carin Calabrese
This course will examine the content and context of comedy in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Comedy is to be found in the world of carnival, where the mighty are brought low, the sacred made profane, the male passed off as female and vice versa. Because of its inherent upending of the social and political status quo, comedy is often considered a means by which the powerless can subvert the powerful. But can comedy also serve to mock and defuse dissent from that status quo? As recent interest in Aristophanes' Lysistrata has shown, comic responses to war and empire-building - both in our own era and in antiquity - can be a particularly rich locus for our study, offering powerful examples of engagement and critique. We will look at the ways ancient dramatic comedy interrogates, problematizes, and reinforces prevailing social norms (e.g. for gender, sexuality, and ethnicity) and political realities (e.g. war, democracy, and empire). Readings will primarily consist of Greek and Roman comic texts in translation (Aristophanes, Menander, Terence, Plautus), modern comic drama (Ionesco, Fo), as well as philosophy and literary and political theory (Bakhtin, Aristotle, Freud, Bergson, Critchley, Said). By tracing the course of Greek and Roman comedy, we can investigate why we laugh in response to this imagined world and what that laughter means and does.
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.
The Philosophy and Welfare Politics of Distributional Justice
K20.1466 HUM, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 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 and Sen’s Inequality Reexamined. These theoretical conceptions will be contrasted with the case studies contained in Esping-Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
Psychoanalysis and the Visual
K20.1468 HUM, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Eve Meltzer
At least since Freud’s “Dream Book,” psychoanalysis has taught us that psychic life is thoroughly steeped in images. This course will pursue the implications of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject. By examining a range of psychoanalytic texts alongside several films and photographs, we will consider Lacan’s proposition that the “I” comes into being though the subject’s identification with his or her mirror image. This is ultimately a problem for sociality itself, for we learn to relate to others by way of how we relate to ourselves, our primordial other. Readings include the writings of Borch-Jacobsen, Descartes, Fanon, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Laplanche. Visual materials include North by Northwest, American Psycho, The Thin Red Line, as well as several bodies of photographic images.
Dangerous & Intermingled: Subaltern New York
K20.1480 SOC, 4 CR W 2:00-4:45 Jack Tchen
Permission of the instructor required. Same as V18.0380004.
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.
Consuming the Caribbean
K20.1482 HUM, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Millery Polyne
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.
Performing Objects
K20.1487 HUM, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 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, Andre Breton, Edward Gordan Craig, Martin Heidegger, Wassily Kadinsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Claude Levi-Strauss, Filippo Marinetti, Frank Proschan, Richard Schechner, Steve Tillis, and George Speaight.
What is Biocultures?
K20.1501 SCI, 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Bradley Lewis / Helena Hansen
One of the most disquieting challenges of the contemporary era is the increasing awareness that our bodies, even our illnesses, are not purely biological states - no longer a brute fact of nature - but something in part created and interpenetrated by culture. In this course, we use the term “bio-cutures” to designate the dynamic interaction between physical embodiment and human culture because this term invokes biology and culture as mutually constitutive and conceptually contiguous. As such, this course will be arranged in a two step process. First we will work through the interdisciplinary theory needed to understand biocultures. And second we will explore the ways in which biocultures have been described, ranging from categories of gender, class, race and health as the result of biocultural processes, to biocultural metaphors of the body, space and place as organizing frameworks for society, to medical industries as biocultural enterprise, and finally to cyborgs (human-technological hybrids) as biocultural products. Authors include Friederich Engels, Mary Douglas, Ian Hacking, Lennard Davis, Anne Fausto-Sterling, David Morris, Donna Haraway, Kathy Davis, Nancy Sheper-Hughes, and Troy Duster.
Everyday Life
K20.1502 SOC, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 David Moore
Nothing is more taken-for-granted than everyday life: dinner-table conversations, work, shopping, classroom discussions, bull sessions in the dorm. And yet each situation is a complex production of its members’ talk, movement, thought and relationships. This course will give students theoretical and analytical tools for unpacking these common encounters, for understanding how people manage to construct situations that they can interpret and participate in competently, and for examining ways in which they are affected by, react to and resist larger social forces. We will analyze talk and non-verbal behavior as they shape activities and relationships; we will look at the way practical intelligence operates in different situations; we will track cultural differences in everyday behavior. We will examine the ways in which larger social structures and processes - class, gender, ethnicity, race, and so on - are produced, performed and changed in the course of everyday life, as well as the ways they shape people’s actions and thoughts. Along the way, we will tackle such issues as human agency vs. structural determinism; the processes of social change; the construction of identity, self and nation; and literary and cinematic representations of the quotidian. Readings may include Mead’s Mind, Self and Society, Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Hall’s The Silent Language, Erickson’s Talk and Social Theory, Rogoff and Lave’s Everyday Cognition, Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures, and Steinbeck’s The Red Pony.
Hemispheric Imaginings: Race, Ideology and Foreign Policy in the Americas
K20.1503 HUM, 4 CR F 9:30-12:15 Millery Polyne
In September 2006, Hugo Chavez’s address at the United Nations (UN) condemned U.S. imperialism and militarism. Reminiscent of Fidel Castro’s fiery speech in front of the UN’s General Assembly in 1960, Chavez stated that there is a “movement of the south . . . to save the planet from the imperialist threat.” What is this southern movement, and who are its participants? How does it impact inter-American affairs in the 21st century, when Chavez’s oil-rich nation of Venezuela is expanding its influence in South America, the Caribbean and the Middle East? Is there a new non-U.S. centered Pan-Americanism emerging? This course examines U.S. and Caribbean/Latin American relations through the lens of Pan-Americanism. Pan-Americanism is a political ideology that celebrates the equality and interdependence of the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Latin America. Traditionally, scholars have understood it to be a tool of U.S. imperialism. This course also considers multiple imaginings, meanings and uses of Pan-Americanism by non-U.S. foreign policy-makers, intellectuals, business persons and institutions. Through primary document analysis (writings of Simon Bolivar) and secondary source readings such as Alan McPherson’s Yankee No!: Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations and Darlene Rivas’s Missionary Capitalist: Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela, this course will allow students to assess the significance of regionalism, race, class, culture, and nation-building in 19th and 20th century inter-American affairs.
New Deal Liberalism: Its Rise and Fall
K20.1513 SOC, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Steve Fraser
This course will examine the rise and fall of New Deal liberalism as the dominant political and social order of mid- twentieth century America. It will begin with the onset of the Great Depression as the event which sets in motion profound transformations in the economy, in the balance of political power, in the role of the State, and in the relations between social classes and ethnic/racial groups. It will explore the rise of the labor movement and the creation of the welfare state. It will analyze the impact of the Cold War on domestic politics. Discussions will probe the emergence of the civil rights, anti-war, and counter-culture movements. The class will analyze the conservative reaction against the New Deal culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Students will analyze primary documents, novels, and films such as the Grapes of Wrath and Dr. Strangelove, as well as read secondary works including Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal by William E. Leuchtenberg, America in Our Time by Godfrey Hodgson, and Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody.
Biology and Society
K20.1519 SCI, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Myles Jackson
Perhaps the most recent ethical challenge faced by all of us is biotechnology. This seminar explores the relationship between the biological sciences and society in the U.S. throughout the twentieth century. We will examine how debates concerning “nature versus nurture” have been framed historically. We shall discuss the history of eugenics and investigate how the U.S. government saw eugenics as proffering an objective tool for testing immigration and sterilization policies. We shall ask if there is a link between eugenics and the Human Genome Project. How has the patenting of human and plant genes reshaped the conduct of scientific research? How is molecular biology challenging notions of race? How much of human behavior is shaped by genes, and how does that affect issues concerning free will and culpability? This course aims at drawing attention to the ethical, legal, and social issues generated by biology over the past century. Readings will include works from twentieth-century politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt, eugenicists, including Charles Davenport, the historian of science Dan Kevles, the philosopher of science Michael Ruse, the sociologist and historian of medicine Steven Epstein, the sociologist of race Troy Duster, and intellectual property lawyers such as Rebecca Eisenberg, as well as recent works by molecular biologists and geneticists on the definition of race, the role of patenting in biotechnology, and how commercial interests are driving scientific research.
The Streetroots of Latin America II: Urban Social Movements
K20.1520 SOC, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Alejandro Velasco
Long viewed as a region of landless peasants and landed elites, Latin America is now a continent of cities and mega-cities on whose streets vibrant social movements confront the challenges of metropolitan life. From Buenos Aires to Porto Alegre to Mexico City, new “streetroots” movements forge political identities, goals, and strategies out of a very particular experience of urbanization stretching back hundreds of years. This course examines the trajectory of these streetroots movements, asking: what social, political, and economic forces have shaped their strategies and demands over time? In turn, how have Latin American urban movements shaped developments in the region and beyond? What kinds of cleavages - geographic, generational, tactical - potentially hinder the broad appeal and usefulness of these movements? Among others, readings will include the work of Joao Jose Reis (Brazil), Peter Winn (Chile), and Deborah Levenson (Guatemala) to examine the interplay of race, class, and gender in the development of urban social movements, and first-hand accounts of urban activism by Abraham Guillen (Uruguay) and Hebe de Bonafini (Argentina). We will frame our analysis around seminal theories of urban social movements by E.P. Thompson, Manuel Castells, and Alejandro Portes, as well as contemporary contributions by Javier Auyero, Leonardo Avritzer, and Marina Sitrin.
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.
Masculinities in Literature, Film and Culture
K20.1522 HUM, 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Sara Murphy
While feminist theory has foregrounded the question of female identity and the demands of femininity, masculinity has often remained, as one critic put it, “invisible, by passing itself off as normal and universal.” Recent scholarship however has interrogated that invisibility, noting how masculinity is intersected with race, class, and sexual orientation. In this seminar, we explore the category of masculinity, paying attention to dominant cultural forms of white, heterosexual masculinity as they are inscribed in culture, and we think of masculinity as a fragmented category that also includes forms of racialized, sexualized identities that are frequently and variously marginalized. By examining literature, film and other cultural artifacts, we discern not so much what masculinity is, but how it works. What does it have to do with economic, social, psychic and political power? How does it operate diacritically with femininity, in order to enforce, organize, or even disrupt normative gender identities? Topics to examine may include the concept of fraternity in US politics, the American Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood, militarization, the family and the body. Authors may include Freud, Lacan, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Antony Easthope, Susan Bordo, David Eng.
Explaining Ourselves: Mind, Behavior and Emotion in History
K20.1526 SOC, 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Gary Belkin
It is a truism that we commonly rely on psychological categories to explain who we are, how we behave, both as individuals and as large groups. Even issues like the nature of war, conflict, terrorism, revolution, and democracy, which concern whole societies, are described and explained through the use of terms such as grief, trauma, hatred, shame, memory, self-expression. While pervasive, such language rarely engages specific empirical or theoretical work in fields such as psychology or social psychiatry and is rarely critically reflective about the real explanatory power of such terms applied in this way. This seminar uses primary and secondary sources in psychology and social psychology to critically read works of history with respect to their ability to credibly capture the psychological dimension as a factor in history. Readings include selections from Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain; Jurgen Straub, Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness; Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence; Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology; Maria Todorova, Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory.
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.
Virtue and Villainy: Melodrama and the Aesthetics of Astonishment
K20.1528 HUM, 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Christopher Cartmill
The secularized conflict of good and evil, salvation and damnation - melodrama - was the dominant popular theatrical form of late-18th and 19th century, but also found expression in literature, music and the visual arts. Now characterized as oversimplified and excessive, the melodramatic imagination still exerts a powerful influence on contemporary culture, from Hollywood to the pages of the New York Post. This class examines the origins, development and social/political/philosophical implications of this neglected genre. Readings may include Pixerecourt's The Dog of Montargis; Baillies’s De Monfort, de Vigny’s Chatterton; Dumas' The Tower; Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby; Boucicault’s The Octoroon and The Streets of London; George Aiken’s adaptation of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Fanny Kemble’s Francis I; Ibsen’s Ghosts; Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and theory of melodrama by Brooks, Bentley, Gates, Williams and Steiner.
Love as Language and Idea from Plato to Foucault
K20.1529 HUM, 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Karen Hornick
This class will survey ancient and modern texts that shaped the history, philosophy, and representation of Western love. We begin with a very close examination of Plato’s Symposium, a deeply ironic dialogue about love, the thing everyone claims to know but no one understands. Plato linked the pursuit of love to wisdom, but modern theorists have been more inclined to pathologize love and seek its medical, psychological, and social causes. Sigmund Freud’s writing epitomizes this point, as does his severest critic, Michel Foucault. Along with philosophy and theory, we will read a number of literary texts. 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. Texts will include Plato's Symposium, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Zola's Therese Raquin, Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and other short essays, Nabokov's Lolita, as well as one or more films.
Wall Street: An Iconographic History
K20.1530 SOC, 4 CR F 12:30-3:15 Steve Fraser
This course will examine the cultural history of Wall Street. For two centuries Wall Street has attracted, repelled, and fascinated Americans. It has profoundly influenced our economic and political life, challenged our conceptions of democracy and equality, and infused the work of writers, film makers, cartoonists, journalists, and others. Images of the Street have imprinted themselves on the public imagination. The course will explore five these images and how those images have changed over time. Students will consult the work of historians as well as analyze movies, novels, political tracts, cartoons, poems, and other materials to trace the influence of Wall Street in American public life from the time of the American Revolution to the present. Readings will include works by Tom Wolfe, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Kenneth Galbraith, William Dean Howells, Louis Brandeis, Thomas Friedman, and Herman Melville.
Lives in Science
K20.1532 SCI, 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Gene Cittadino
Open to sophomores only.
This course explores the nature of the scientific enterprise and its place in our culture through a selective study of the lives of scientists. In addition to technical knowledge, curiosity, and ingenuity, most achievements in science involve a fair amount of creativity and luck, not to mention institutional and financial support and networks of social interaction. We will examine the process of the creation of scientific knowledge and the mutual interactions between science and culture by exploring biographical and autobiographical accounts. These texts will show how ideas in science are influenced by intellectual and cultural trends, political developments, social theory, and religious beliefs. Examples could include well known scientists - Galileo, Einstein, James Watson; not so well known scientists - E. E. Just, Lise Meitner, Barbara McClintock; and fictional scientists - Faust, Frankenstein, Arrowsmith.
Narratives of the Civil Rights Struggle
K20.1533 HUM, 4 CR MW 6:20-7:35 Justin Lorts
Open to sophomores only.
How do we tell the story of the African American struggle for civil rights in the United States? How have scholars, writers, artists, activists and institutions constructed narratives of this struggle? How have modern social movements, as well as businesses, advertisers and politicians deployed civil rights narratives to accomplish economic and political goals that often run counter to those of earlier struggles? How do these narratives shape our understanding of this specific struggle as well as other contemporary struggles for social justice? This course examines the relationship between narrative, history and social justice, using the modern African American civil rights struggle as a focal point. Drawing on several disciplines and artistic forms, this course will provide a basis of understanding the civil rights struggle by examining the methods and techniques, strengths and limitations of various narrative forms, including history (oral and written), literature, memoir, documentary and feature film. Potential readings include works by Toni Cade Bambara, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Anne Moody, Deborah McDowell, Leon Litwack, Charles Payne and Robin Kelley.
The Seen and Unseen in Science
K20.1534 SCI, 4 CR MW 12:30-1:45 Matthew Stanley
This class explores how science and scientists work with the invisible, unseen, or unseeable elements of our world. We will examine how scientists convince themselves that these unseen things, such as atoms and molecules, are real. We ask probing questions about what it means to “see” or “observe” the world around us, and grapple with the basic question of how we gain scientific knowledge at all. Topics include the atomic theory, energy, evolution, quantum physics, the “invisible hand” of economics, the unconscious and psychoanalysis, genes, human consciousness and intelligence, and dark matter and dark energy. None of these can be seen or held in one’s hand, but scientists claim to have detected and to understand them. We will pay special attention to how scientists are trained to see in particular ways, and how culture and worldview can shape, restrict, or enhance the way we observe. Readings: Einstein, Darwin, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Galison, Kuhn, Adam Smith, Freud, Maxwell, Hacking, Watson and Crick.
Narrating Memory, History and Place
K20.1535 HUM, 4 CR TR 9:30-10:45 Marie Cruz Soto
Open to sophomores only.
The past is a contested terrain open to divergent interpretations that can shape and transform common understandings of places. The stories people tell endow places with meaning and dictate the usage and the extent of control that communities can exercise over them. This course therefore examines how people imagine a place of their own through historical narrations. It explores the relationship between memory and history as two different but related forms of narration, central to the process of transforming places. This relationship between memory and history is crucial in the struggle of disempowered communities, especially in (post)colonial contexts, to claim a place of their own. Course readings include literary and other scholarly texts ranging from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past and Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped to other writings by Pierre Nora, Michel De Certeau and Doreen Massey.
Perversion
K20.1536 SOC, 4 CR TR 2:00-3:15 Nina Cornyetz
For Sigmund Freud, perversion denoted all sexual deviances from the heterosexual and genital social norm, even as he acknowledged the ubiquity of such perversions. For Jacques Lacan, perversion meant a particular structure of desire, regardless of social norm, and was related to an ethical dimension. For Michel Foucault, who thoroughly rejected Freud’s “repressive hypothesis,” perversion was an effect of modern sexuality. The course will pursue the following questions and more: What is perverse? Is there a “cause” of perversion? Does it lie in the individual or in the epistemological and ideological formulations of a particular historical chronotope? This course will explore Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s three contrasting notions of perversion, alongside some feminist critiques of the psychoanalytic models, in relation to a selection of Japanese fiction and film depicting a variety of perversions. Readings will include: Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)”; Deleuze, “Masochism”; Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. I; Kawabata, The House of the Sleeping Beauties; Tanizaki, Naomi; Kono, “Toddler Hunting”; Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, some Yaoi manga, and selections from Lacan, Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, and Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion. Films will include Patriotism and Okoge.
Place and Memory: A Usable Past
K20.1537 HUM, 4 CR F 11:00-1:45 Becky Amato
By exploring a variety of source materials, including museums, memoirs, historic sites, material artifacts, and documentary evidence, we will begin to consider the ways in which our uses of the past have contemporary social and political impact. Today in the Fatih district of Istanbul, the 15th century Roma (gypsy) neighborhood of Sulukule is under threat of demolition as the city begins the process of urban renewal and gentrification. Meanwhile, in Nottinghamshire, England, the Workhouse Museum documents and interprets the brutality of the 19th century British “welfare system” within the dreary walls of an actual, landmarked workhouse. Such conflicting projects prompt us to ask: How do we choose to destroy certain places while preserving - or recreating - others, and what are the consequences of making these choices? What are the ethical problems we face when we save or demolish historic sites, and how are they tied to questions of individual, community, and national identity? These questions derive from political discourse that imagines how nationhood is created and sustained, as well as historical and anthropological inquiry, which so often attempts to locate the “truth” of the past. Texts will include selections from Van Wyck Brooks, Orhan Pamuk, David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig, Susan Slyomovics, and Christopher Mele.
Reading and Theorizing Film
K20.1538 HUM, 4 CR F 11:00-1:45 Rahul Hamid
This class is designed to teach students how to approach film analysis from a number of different perspectives. We analyze concepts such as genre, various aspects of film form, narrative construction, and different ways to interpret films. We also explore classic film theory, ideological criticism, formal analysis, and non-academic film criticism. Finally, the class places film criticism within a wider debate among intellectuals about how to understand popular culture, a debate characterized by the division between the Frankfurt School and the approaches of "cultural studies." Assignments include short papers on various aspects of film form as well as longer critical papers to address film as an aspect of mass culture. Texts include Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as well as criticism by Parker Tyler, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris. Directors covered will include John Ford, Wong Kar-Wei, Stan Brakhage, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee, Maya Deren, Michael Powell, Orson Welles, and Terence Malick.
Travel Classics: Before Tourism
K20.1539 HUM, 2 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Steve Hutkins
Course meets for the first seven weeks only.
The origins of mass tourism can be found in ancient times, when thousands traveled to the Olympic games and to festivals in Egypt, but the modern version of tourism gets its start in the eighteenth century with the Grand Tour - the rite-of-passage, “study abroad” experience of young aristocrats. In this course, we focus on the literature of travel before modern tourism begins. We’ll read some of the classics of travel writing, with attention to the conventions of the genre, the influence of myth and hero literature on the traveler’s tale, the Old World’s encounter with the New, and the many social and political questions raised by travel. Readings may include selections from Homer’s Odyssey, Herodotus’ History of the Persian Wars, Travels of Marco Polo, The Travels of Ibn Battouta, Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Power and Love in Shakespeare
K20.1540 HUM, 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Patricia Lennox
Open to sophomores only.
Shakespeare presents a complex and exciting exploration of the interrelated issues of love and power in his tragedies, comedies, and histories. We will focus on : Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Henry V and As You Like It. In these richly layered plays love and power overlap. Sometimes comic, often tragic, always dramatic and compelling, the characters’ jealousy, fears, desires, grief, and flashes of happiness are as relevant and real today as they were in Shakespeare’s time. In these five plays romantic love exhilarates and sometimes kills; the power of evil destroys lives, a young king’s power leads to war; the gender-bending power of a male disguise liberates a banished princess. The focus will be divided between close textual reading and stage and film production. Our discussions will often be shaped by the questions directors and actors must answer in order to bring the plays to life. In addition to the plays, readings will include critical commentaries, and films will play an important role.
Divine Indifference
K20.1541 HUM, 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Aaron Tugendhaft
Do the gods care about human beings? Is history providentially guided? Is there divine retribution after death? Or is god indifferent to human well-being? In this course we explore how different views of the divine are related to such themes as human freedom, happiness, despair, justice, and nihilism. We begin with works by Solon and Sophocles to set forth the traditional view of Greek piety and observe how it begins to be questioned. We then turn to the Epicurean tradition, to assess the impact of its view of god's indifference. We will conclude by considering two questions: What is at stake in the contrast between Epicurean theology and the Christian teaching of a philanthropic god who dies for human sins? To what degree does ancient Epicureanism serve as the foundation for the modern critique of Christianity? The key texts will be Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, Spinoza's Ethics, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.
Motown Matrix: Race, Gender and Class Identity in "The Sound of Young America"
K20.1542 HUM, 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 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.
Imagining the Middle East
K20.1543 SOC, 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Ali Mirsepassi
This course looks at historical and contemporary representations of the Middle Eastern cultures and societies in the modern Western imaginary. We will examine shifting representations of the Middle East in pre- and post-enlightenment European political and intellectual discourses, Western literary texts and travel literature, and contemporary US popular culture (films, advertising, thrillers, spy novels, romance fiction, etc.). We will also consider the interrelationship between popular cultural representations and the manner in which the Middle East is conceptualized in the academy and in "high culture" in general (e.g., theorized as Orientalism). It is an assumption of the course that a "post colonial" framework is key to interpreting not only the Middle East, but also the “West.”
Oceania vs. King Kong's New York: Decolonizing Pacific Worlds
K20.1547 SOC, 2 CR W 9:30-12:15 J. Tchen/S. Lei'ataua
Course meets for the last seven weeks only.
Why the utter lack of awareness in New York City of the Pacific? - of our own collecting, literary representations, missionary work, and “manifest destiny” expansionism systemically imagined and formulated in America’s Pacific? How is environmental justice foundational to Oceanic worldviews and our global futures? We will reformulate this historical absence of presence. Help us deconstruct King Kong on the Empire State Building and other New York City-generated representations and formations of scholarly, museological, and pop culture about Pacific places, peoples, goods and ideas! We’re adapting the formulation of Atlantic Worlds to understand the Pacific; what Fijian philosopher Epeli Hau’ofa calls “Oceania, a sea of islands.” Sessions, on and off campus, will include Herman Melville’s port culture novels, the Lincoln Center’s restaging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘South Pacific’ based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, written in New York City; Margaret Mead and the American Museum of Natural History; Michael Rockefeller and the wing named in his memory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pacific Missions to the United Nations; Pacificana kitsch - from tiki lounges to Halloween hula costumes. Through indigenous-grounded epistemologies, and the Pacific renaissance of cultural, linguistic, artistic and scholarly studies, we critically unpack the production of an imagined Pacific and global environmental policies.
Modernity and Identity: The Arabic Novel
K20.1548 HUM, 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Haytham Bahoora
This course will examine the intersections of history, politics, and identity and their representations in modern Arabic literature and film. How have Arab writers depicted the social, political and cultural upheavals that have shaped the Arab world in the 20th century? We will consider some of these changes - the end of the colonial period, the rise of the nation state and Arab nationalism, narratives of progress and development, debates on tradition and their place in a “modern” society, gender, displacement and migration, and globalization - in the context of the Arab world’s economic, cultural, and military interactions with Europe and the United States. The course, therefore, aims to examine Arabic literature and culture in a global context and will explore a range of texts, from novels, to theory, to films, that address the relationship between identity and modernity, and between the particular/local and what is represented as universal - development, progress, modernization, and liberalism. We will closely examine the relationship between politics and aesthetics, primarily through an examination of the novel genre in the Arabic tradition and its relationship to historical representation. Readings include Miramar, Naguib Mahfouz; The Saint's Lamp, Yahya Haqqi; The Committee, Sonallah Ibrahim; Season of Migration to the North, Tayib Salih; and The Story of Zahra, Hanan al-Shaykh.
Third-Year Symposium
K20.1800 2 CR M 12:30-3:15 Karen Hornick/Eve Meltzer
Pass/fail only. Open to Gallatin juniors and seniors who plan to write their rationale during the Spring 2009 semester and take their colloquium in the Fall of 2009.
In this class we will survey methods of interdisciplinary study and ask you to consider how they operate within your own concentration. By the end of the semester you will have drafted, revised, and completed your colloquium rationale. The Symposium will be organized in three phases. In phase I, we will survey conceptual frameworks that help expose recurring concepts and methods of individualized study. These include frameworks for 1) finding the history of your topic and ideas, 2) understanding how you have learned to compare ideas or practices (i.e. across cultures, belief systems, disciplines), 3) analyzing the forms (i.e. media, rhetoric, genre, etc.) of representation and expression pertinent to your topic, 4) reflecting upon the relevance of your non-classroom, experiential learning. The first phase of the course will include several faculty guest lectures and opportunities to form students working groups organized around common concentration interests. In phase II, the class will not meet as a group; rather, students will meet with their working groups, advisers, and course instructors as they draft a rationale that precipitates and anticipates the inquiry to be undertaken in the colloquium. In phase III, the class will resume as a group to share rationales and booklists, develop strategies for the colloquium, and continue the exchange of ideas within student working groups.
Dis/ability Studies: Art, Media and Philosophy
K80.2433 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Nicholas Mirzoeff
Same as E58.2206.
This class introduces students to the concepts used in the new interdisciplinary field of disability studies. Dis/ability (as it is written in the field) studies argues that “disability” is a socially-constructed set of restrictions placed on particular bodies or mentalities. Further, it suggests that all persons have experienced dis/ability as infants and will do so again (either temporarily or permanently) at some point in their lives. One way of understanding these concepts is to look at the extensive presence of people with dis/abilities in art, media and philosophy as both makers and subjects. This seminar class will be a joint exploration of the necessarily connected experience and representation of dis/ability, embodiment and the 'normal' in modern Western culture. It centers on questions of dis/ability in the three fields at three critical interfaces, namely the formation of Western rationality in the seventeenth century; the generalization and medicalization of the concept of the “normal” in the nineteenth century; and the emergence of dis/ability as a new form of identity in the past forty years. Assessment will be based on participation and the development of a project related to one or more of the areas studied, whether practice-based or critical, by arrangement with the instructor. The class will be wheelchair accessible.
