COL 696 - Time and Temporality
COL 730 - Postcolonial Theory and its Discontents
COL 540 - Reading Borges
COL 720 - Hegel: The Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of History
COL 728 - Psychoanalytic Criticism: Rhetoric, Psychoanalysis and Politics
COL 697 - Sexual Difference
COL 680 - French Philosophical Responses to the Holocaust
COL 731 - Systems and their Theory
ENG 697 - Definitions of America
COL 646 - Psychoanalysis and Interpretation
COL 842 - Poetry From Romanticism to Symbolism
COL 693 - Writing in the Americas
L-764 Law as Literature
COL 696 - Time and Temporality (top)
Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Numbers: (A) 324272 (Seminar); (B) 318990 (Recitation)
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
In this course I will seek to explore Kant's conception of time in Critique of Pure Reason and Deleuze's reflections on time in Difference and Repetition. Apart from reading the section of "Transcendental Aesthetics," in the First Critique, our main focus will be the section on the "Analytic of the Principles." Therefore, familiarity with the Critique of Pure Reason up to this latter section will be required. In Difference and Repetition, we will center on chapter II, and IV.
COL 730 - Postcolonial Theory and its Discontents (top)
Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) 399124 (Seminar) (B) 082724 (Recitation)
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
The angel of postcolonial history seems to have left in its wake a boulevard of broken dreams. Just as the wave of decolonizations in the 1960s once appeared to hold so much promise for nations of the Third World, so the nascent discourse of postcolonial theory promised a way forward. In recent years, however, Marxists, humanists, even postcolonial theorists have attacked postcolonial theory on a number of significant issues. If recent obituaries are any sign of the future, postcolonial theory may soon occupy an unmarked grave.
There currently appears to be a vogue among its critics (they are legion and growing) to impute inordinate degrees of stupidity to postcolonial theorists on several accounts. Indeed, even scholars loosely congregated in the field of postcolonial theory vie to be fiercest in their denunciations of the intellectual pretensions of postcolonial theory. This is surely the legible mark of a crisis in the discourse and the moment to revisit the accomplishments and objectives of postcolonial theory. How does postcolonial theory position itself in relationship to postmodernism and globalization? Is the European imperial problematic around which postcolonial theory was initially organized no longer relevant? Hardt and Negri's recent work, Empire suggests that there is life in the imperial paradigm yet.
Others have charged that postcolonial theory is nothing more than intellectual colonialism or that it is merely an ideological mask for global capitalism. What are the roots of the recent assault on postcolonial theory? What is the source of postcolonial theory's recent crisis of self-hatred? What precisely is postcoloniality? Who is FOR postcolonial theory? Who's afraid of postcolonial theory? The gloves are off!
Through a set of readings from "classic" postcolonial texts such as Said's Orientalism as well as recent critiques, we will examine what is currently at stake in this field and whether it has a future.
Texts:
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory
Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture
Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other
Gaurav Desai, Subject to Colonialism
Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject
Edward Said, Orientalism
Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Miscellaneous recent essays and selections by Parry, McClintock, Dirlik, Prakash, Shohat.
COL 540 - Reading Borges (top)
Professor David Johnson
Registration Numbers: (A) 185740 (Seminar) (B) 390294 (Recitation)
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
We will read Borges, his ficciones principally, but also his poetry and "nonfiction" prose. In addition to reading a substantial selection of Borges's literary/critical obra, we will also attempt to situate his texts in relation to philosophy and recent critical encounters with his work. Accordingly, texts may include Lyotard's Heidegger and the "jews" and pages from The Differend, Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, Derrida's Monolingualism; along with Sylvia Molloy's Signs of Borges and Lisa Block de Behar's Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation (if available). These plus Borges's Obras completas, of course. There are other possibilities as well. Our largest concern will be to think through questions of experience, singularity and universality, the relation to the other. Put simply, we will take up Borges's delimitation of the possibility of the human.
COL 720 - Hegel: The Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of History (top)
Professor Ernesto Laclau
Registration Numbers: (A) 382692(Seminar) (B)389939 (Recitation)
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
This seminar will explore, in its first part, the central categories of Hegel's political philosophy, and its connections with the debates - both classical and contemporary - about the destination state/civil society. The second part will concentrate on the notion of secularized eschatology and the way Hegel's theorization of universal history continues basic categories of Christian theology.
COL 728 - Psychoanalytic Criticism: Rhetoric, Psychoanalysis and Politics (top)
Professor Joan Copjec and Professor Ernesto Laclau
Registration Number: (A) 444631(Seminar); (B)389940(Recitation)
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
The aim of this seminar is to analyze the rhetorical logics structuring a plurality of contemporary discursive spaces. In the last 50 years there has been a rhetorical turn in many field, including epistemology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, mass communications and literary theory. The form of this turn has been putting into question the possibility, for theoretical thought, of generating its own closure without an appeal to tropological movements that introduce rhetoricity into the very structuration of the conceptual medium.
This seminar will systemically explore the various forms of the rhetorical turn. In the first Section we will present an outline of the transition from Old to New Rhetoric - i.e., the Constitution of a rhetorical corpus in the classical period and its continuity until Romanticism; the reason for its decline in the early 19th century; and finally, the conditions of the emergence of a New Rhetoric in the last 50 years. The remainder of the seminar will be devoted to a reconsideration of key concepts of psychoanalysis and political theory in light of these developments in rhetoric. The categories of the real, fantasy, and sexual difference will be the main focus if the psychoanalytic section, while sovereignty, representation, and hegemony will be the focus if the discussions of politics and political theory. Along the way, a number if topics essential and tangential, will be touched on, including the relation between rhetoric and ontology and the role of metaphor in contemporary epistemology and the philosophy of science.
The first section will be taught by Professors Copjec and Laclau; the psychoanalytic section by Professor Copjec and the political section by Professor Laclau.
COL 697 - Sexual Difference (top)
Professor Margherita Long
Registration Number: (A) (B)
Wednesday 3:30 - 6:10 220 Clemens
This course examines some major debates in "difference feminism" using Japanese anime as a case study.
We begin with Irigaray's critique of Freud to understand why, for her, sexual difference is impossible within the male/female dichotomy, and so has yet to exist. Next we focus on the problem of maternity to examine an important schism in ideas about the status of life-giving and the ethics of "envelopment". On the one hand, there are psychoanalytic feminists like Kristeva and Shepherdson who defend Lacan's definition of maternity-as-abjection by separating the phallic mother from the female subject. On the other hand, there are feminists like Grosz and Whitford who call psychoanalysis a dead-end, and look instead to theories of evolution and inevitable change in search of "difference". How do monumental changes in reproductive technology offer new ways of thinking about life and sexuation?
Japanimation holds a special place in the history of philosophies of the new. In the 1930s, Japanese philosophy attempted to "overcome modernity", with disastrous results. Postwar, anime has arguably gotten much farther, using movement-images to think a different future for a host of modern ills, sexual indifference among them. In anime, "modernity" is commonly imagined at the level of the body, with cyborgs, artificial life, virtual maternity and even the otaku lifestyle signaling the threshold of modernity's beyond. What is new here? The course reads episodes in several popular series -- Neon Genesis Evangelion, Lain, Patlabor - to discuss the merits of some cyborg and post-human feminisms. Essays by Donna Haraway, Kaja Silverman, Katherine Hayle, Vicki Kirby, Susan Napier, Sharon Kinsella, Wendy Chun, and Ueno Toshio.
COL 680 - French Philosophical Responses to the Holocaust (top)
Professor Jill Robbins
Registration Number: 214666 (Seminar)
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
COL 731 - Systems and their Theory (top)
Professor Henry Sussman
Registration Number: (A) 285274 (Seminar); (B) 494084 (Recitation)
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 640
This course will attempt to survey the impact of conceptual systems on modern literature, art, and critical discourse. It will keep open the fundamental question as to what systems are and how they might function. It will begin, but certainly not end, with the systemic formatting that was provided by Kant and Hegel at the outset of the broader modernity that is still current and in process. It will ask to what degree conceptual systems became a liability to thinkers dealing with the disruptiveness of modern life and the centrality of language to its media and institutions, at the same times that systems furnished an indispensable template and shorthand for conceptual projects.
The course will incorporate literary examples, and even ponder the ongoing influence of current "real life" systems, whether legal, educational, familial, or installed into cybernetic devices. Freud and Marx will appear as pivotal thinkers engaged in a redirection of "purer" systematic articulations toward, respectively, the psychological and sociopolitical arenas of endeavor. Readings by Walter Benjamin will pursue his work both as a chronicler and critic of systematic sociocultural engineering. Explicating a major essay by Jacques Derrida will have as its purpose surveying deconstruction's systematic intervention(s). Examples by Hans Blumenberg and Nikolas Luhmann will begin to assess the current status of systems theory.
A strand of literary examples parallel to this systematic working-though will highlight major aesthetic processings in the ongoing evolution and reconfiguration of modern systems. This literary "canon" will be limited, and references to its elements will recur throughout the semester. It will include Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's The Castle, Borges's Ficciones, Calvino's Cosmicomics, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
While familiarity with the course material and its implications will be assumed, students will be encouraged to allow their work for the course to be inflected by their first-hand existential encounters with systems, whether these be sociopolitical, psychosexual, educational, familial, or technological in nature. Students will plan a major project with the instructor, and present their work in preliminary form to their colleagues.
ENG 697 - Definitions of America (top)
Professor Robert Daly
Registration Number: 417116
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436
We shall read, within their reciprocal cultural contexts, several writings that help to define, create, or revise our national cultures, both the discourse of nationalism and what Julia Kristeva calls the discourses of "nations without nationalism." We shall attend to their interactions with other cultures, with conversations among them, and with the ways in which they are both representative (participating in the cultural conversations of their times and ours) and hermeneutic (affording practice and instruction in the arts of interpretation). Ecocriticism, feminism, ecofeminism, trauma theory, rhetorical hermeneutics, literary anthropology, cultural criticism, post-analytic philosophy, postmodern ethics, cultural theory, and any other theories we find useful will be welcome in our discussions of these texts but will not replace them.
Each student will do one seminar report (15-20 minutes), and each student taking the seminar intensively (for full credit) will also do one research essay on a topic of his or her own choosing.
Texts:
William Andrews, ed., Classic American Autobiographies (Mentor, Penguin) [contains Rowlandson, Franklin, Douglass, and Zitkala-Sa]
Susanna Haswell Rowson, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Oxford)
Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Signet)
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Signet)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts (Rutgers UP)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson's Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (Norton Critical Edition)
Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Larry J. Reynolds (Norton Critical Edition)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Bedford)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 2d ed., ed. William Rossi (Norton Critical Edition)
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (Bedford)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (Signet)
Though you may, of course, acquire them anywhere you please, these texts will be available in the University Bookstore.
COL 646 - Psychoanalysis and Interpretation (top)
Professor William Egginton
Registration Number: (A) 449761
Wednesday 3:00 - 5:40 pm 221 Clemens
This course seeks to examine the enormous influence Freud's discovery of the unconscious has had on the art and practice of interpretation. The course will begin by briefly surveying the history of theories of interpretation, from the religious and mystical to 19th century hermeneutics. Then we will enter into Freud's oeuvre, paying particular attention to the 1901 text The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as the case studies. At this point, the course will be structured along a series of interpretive lineages or strings, in which we will observe the metamorphosis of interpretive theory as it, in turn, is interpreted and reinterpreted. Such strings might include, for example, the Schreber string: Schreber's memoirs-Freud's analysis-Lacan's commentary-Deleuze's critique; the Poe string: "The Purloined Letter"-Lacan's seminar-Derrida's critique-Barbara Johnson's commentary; and the Hamlet string: Hamlet-Jones' analysis-Lacan's reading, etc. Additional readings will include works by such psychoanalytically inspired readers as Harold Bloom, Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, and others.
COL 842 - Poetry From Romanticism to Symbolism (top)
Professor Gérard Bucher
Registration Number: (A) 466137 (Seminar)
Tuesday 4:10 - 6:40 pm; 121 Baldy
The purpose of the seminar is to examine the impact of the ideas of Romanticism (particularly German Romanticism) on the first generation of French Romantic Poets (Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny and Nerval). In a second phase, we will focus particularly on the ways these ideas were reworked in the " supernaturalist " perspective advocated by Baudelaire at the time of the publication of Les fleurs du mal in 1857 (we will discuss the concept of " poetic imagination " in L'art romantique and in Salon de 1859). We will finally consider in which way the " Symbolist " quest of a poetic absolute finds its highest forms of accomplishment in both Rimbaud's Illuminations and Mallarmé's sonnets and prose texts (we will also examine in this light Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror). The seminar will be taught in French. Students will be required to do at least one oral presentation and to write a final paper (students in Comparative Literature will have the option of writing their paper in English)
| Cross-Listed with: | Cross-Listed with: |
| COL 682 BUC | ENG 703 BU |
| Reg.# 466137 | Reg. # 047458 |
COL 693 - Writing in the Americas (top)
Professor Galen Brokaw
Registration Number: (A) 463350 (Seminar)
Monday, 4:10 - 6:50 pm; 115 Baldy
This course will examine some of the oral and inscribed discourses developed in the pre-Columbian Americas and their interaction with alphabetic script in the colonial period. One of the goals of the course will be to overcome our Euro-centric, alphabet-based theories of writing, literacy, and orality. We will discuss the problematic relationship between orality and literacy in alphabetic texts, and the nature of the relationship between indigenous modes of discourse and their associated media. We focus on questions such as the following: What is writing? What is reading? How are these notions culturally constructed? Are these terms applicable to non-alphabetic media? What are the ideological implications of such applications? Is there an essential difference between oral and written discourse? How does writing transform oral discourse? Do other forms of media such as the khipu or the pictographic codex also transform oral discourse? Readings will include secondary anthropological/historical/literary studies as well as transcribed and transpositioned alphabetic versions of texts from different indigenous groups as well as actual indigenous media to the extent possible (Mesoamerican codices and Andean khipus). A basic reading knowledge of Spanish would be extremely helpful, although not absolutely necessary.
L-764 Law as Literature (top)
Professor Guyora Binder
Registration Number:
Thursday 9:45 -12:45; 706 O'Brien
What are legal arguments about? In part about who gets what. But also about what laws mean; about how the story of a relationship, a transaction or an institution should end; about what kind of characters the parties, the advocates and the decision makers are; about what values we will be allowed to express; what roles we will perform; what interests we will represent. Law, in short, is an arena of struggle about how we will imaginatively construct ourselves and our social surroundings.
This seminar will explore how the legal construction of society can be illuminated by literary theories and methods. Readings will survey and summarize research examining interpretation, narration, persuasion, signification and representation in law. Students will write and orally present a paper. This is not a course about legal themes in imaginative literature; it is about how we can read and understand legal texts, disputes, and institutions as cultural artifacts.
This seminar is open to graduate students in Comparative Literature, and English, as well as law students. Professor Binder may be reached at 645-2673.
