COL 714 - Hermeneutics and Rhetoric
COL 713 - J.M. Coetzee and the Enigma of the Other
COL 704 - Hobbes and Locke on Language and Politics
COL 703 - The Ethics of Tragedy
COL 710 - Heidegger: Art, Power, Technology
COL 712 - Labor of the Negative: Adorno, Kristeva, Irigaray
ENG 682 - The Country and the City: Writing In/Of Place
COL 714 - Hermeneutics and Rhetoric (top)
Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Numbers: (A) 270835 (B) 137366
Tuesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
Starting with Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, we will first seek to establish the basic tenets of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, and how they bear on his understanding of the nature and task of the discipline of aesthetics, in order then to explore the intrinsic relation of his conception of hermeneutics to the tradition of rhetoric.
COL 713 - J.M. Coetzee and the Enigma of the Other (top)
Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) 083338 (B) 223496
Tuesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
During the fractious life and times of apartheid, J M Coetzee articulated the predicament of subjects living in states of crisis and displacement, and in agonistic relations to oppressive sexual and political circumstances. These texts have since been widely recognized to address more general challenges of the postcolonial condition and have collectively mustered a trenchant analysis of states of terror.
Through a broad selection of Coetzee's works, both fictional and non-fictional, we will examine the persistent issue of intelligibility and explore how the anthropological Other becomes a hermeneutic aporia. In particular, guiding our discussions will be the question of the relation to the Other: whether these texts dodge confrontation with the Other or paradoxically, whether they articulate a relation to what is beyond relation; whether the remote inscrutability of the Other becomes a form of exoticism or an ethical means of preserving the radical alterity of the Other.
Among the texts the class will address are In the Heart of the Country; Waiting for the Barbarians; The Life & Times of Michael K., Foe, Age of Iron, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello. We will also read a selection of Coetzee's non-fictive essays, notably Doubling the Point and White Writing.
Requirements: All participants will be expected to make a 20-minute class presentation on one or more of the assigned texts. You will also be required to prepare a short outline of your term paper with a bibliography, and submit a final paper of 18-25 pages.
COL 704 - Hobbes and Locke on Language and Politics (top)
Professor David Johnson
Registration Numbers: (A) 322816 (B) 164143
Wednesday, 12:30-3:10; Clemens 640
We will read Hobbes' Leviathan and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and we will ask about the status of language and the constitution of the political and the ethical. Given the Department's recent interest in politics (Schmitt) and ethics (Kant, Hegel), it seems like a good idea to take up Hobbes and Locke as important precursors to any reading of Continental political and ethical theory.
Requirements: research paper (15-20 pages), presentation
COL 703 - The Ethics of Tragedy (top)
Professor Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Registration Numbers: (A) 186763 (B) 029718
Monday, 12:30 - 3:10; 640 Clemens
Beyond being a literary genre, tragedy has come to signify the very posture of speculative philosophy?not only is it a genre uniquely suited for the philosophical enterprise in its thematization of certain ethical and ontological questions, but philosophy itself, in its endless quest for grounds, partakes in the notion of the tragic. We will investigate the connections between philosophy and tragedy by concentrating on Sophoclean drama and the ways it has been received, from German Idealism to psychoanalysis to contemporary theory.
Other than Sophocles's Theban plays, texts include Aristotle's Poetics, Walter Otto's Dionysus, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, as well as selections from Hegel, Heidegger, and Hölderlin.
Requirements: presentation and term paper.
COL 710 - Heidegger: Art, Power, Technology (top)
Professor Krzysztof Ziarek
Registration Numbers:(A) 309740 (B) 485505
Monday 3:30 - 6:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
This class will focus on the relation between Heidegger's critique of aesthetics and his reflection on power and technology. This investigation will have as its context the recently published works from late 1930s (including Contributions to Philosophy), which contain Heidegger's critique of power and totalitarianism, developed through the prism of the question of being and the notion of the event (Ereignis). While Heidegger's critique of technology is well known, his long unpublished writings put this critique in the context of a broader rethinking of power (Macht), making (Machen), and machination (Machenschaft). In this new perspective, Heidegger's ideas about art, poetry, and poiesis emerge as ways of contesting what Foucault later calls, in reference to Heidegger, modern technologies of power.
Readings from Heidegger will include parts of Contributions to Philosophy, Introduction to Metaphysics, "The Origin of the Work of Art," parts of Nietzsche, "The Question Concerning Technology," as well as his essays on language. In addition to Heidegger, we will read several texts that similarly examine the conjunctions between art, power, and technology: parts of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Agamben's Man Without Content, excerpts from Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and selections from Foucault.
Requirements: presentation, term paper.
COL 712 - Labor of the Negative: Adorno, Kristeva, Irigaray (top)
Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Registrations Numbers: (A) 381088 (B) 230133
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 640
In this seminar we will examine the revisions of the Hegelian negativity beyond the principle of identity and dialectical reconciliation proposed by two different 20th century theoretical traditions: the Frankfurt school, in particular, the work of Theodor Adorno, on the one hand, and French feminism, in particular, the thought of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. At stake in the juxtaposition of these diverse thinkers are the complex intersections between sexuality, political praxis, and the negative function of experimental aesthetics. By focusing in greater depth on the theories of the semiotic, abjection, melancholia, and female sexuality, we will begin the course with Kristeva's negotiations between dialectical negativity and Freud's libidinal force of rejection (the death drive). Subsequently we will turn to Adorno's negative dialectic, which refuses reconciliation in order to preserve the non-identical within social mediation. We will follow the implications of Adorno's critique of Enlightenment's compulsion to identity for oppositional political and aesthetic practices. We will end the course with Irigaray's critique of Hegel and her attempt to rethink the labor of the negative in the context of sexual difference. What does it mean to characterize sexual difference as the "impossible" labor of disappropriation? Why does Irigaray's theory of sexual difference call not only for a different politics but also for a "new poetics"? Our readings will include Adorno's, Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, and selected essays; Kristeva,'s Revolution in Poetic Language, Powers of Horror, and Black Sun; Irigaray,'s This Sex Which Is Not One, I Love to You, and An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
Requirements: Active participation in class discussion, oral presentations, research paper.
ENG 682 - The Country and the City: Writing In/Of Place (top)
Professor James Bunn
Registration Numbers (A) 7409207 (B) 0116479
Thursday 3:30pm, Clemens Hall 436
In this survey we shall start with two books that have shaped most contemporary cultural studies about the relations between country and the city. Raymond William's book, with that title, and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden have staged an opposition between two environments that are more permeable than the cliché between nature and culture may allow. To test this idea we'll read some current environmental books, such as Bill McKibben's The End of Nature and Michael Pollan's Weeds Are Us, both of which suggest that humans and other species have co-evolved in ways that complicate the traditional divide between nature and human technology. What technologies have carried people out to nature and back to culture? What energy paths have they followed -- trails, roads, highways -- and how do these media transport and communication help to describe a place? For this task we'll study some of the flow patterns in Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus. But the writing too is technology. We shall also explore the traditional idea of the "spirit of the place", beginning with D.H. Lawrence, in order to see how different rhythms of writing (and of voice) characterize the country and the city. For many environmentalists, cities are anathema. For many city dwellers, nature is what you step around carefully on the curb. So, finally, we shall end with an urban ecology that sustains communities in cities and other places.
Readings: Early Ideas of Wilderness: Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, Bartram's travels through Florida, Crevecoeur's American farmer.
The Frontier and the cowboy economy: Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, some of Frederick Jackson Turner's essays, Willa Cather's My Antonia.
Ideas of Community: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Nicola Griffith's Slow River, Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer.
