COL 720 - On Responsibility
COL 721 - Hegel and Terror
COL 722 - Early Modernity and the Novel
COL 723 - Proust, Memory, Technology
ENG 679 - Levinas
FR 525 A - Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud
COL 525 - Caribbean Aesthetics
ENG 648 - Psycho-Analytic Criticism: History and Sexuality
SPA 532 - Literary Analysis and Theory: The Aftermaths of Structuralism
DMS 534 - Bodyworks
COL 720 - On Responsibility (top)
Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Number: 131348
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
In this seminar I intend to discuss a variety of texts, mostly from within the phenomenological tradition, on the notions of responsibility, rendering accounts, and the relation to Others, and how these notions are interrelated. Among other things, we will read, Max Weber, "Politics as a Profession," Edmund Husserl, "The Vienna Lecture," and the "Kaizo" articles, Martin Heidegger, a selection of chapters from The Ground of Reason," as well as sections from Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death.
COL 721 - Hegel and Terror (top)
Professor Rebecca Comay
Registration Numbers: (A) 169182 (Seminar) (B) 442344 (Recitation)
Wednesday 12:30-3:30, Clemens Hall 640
Despite or because of Hegel's abiding loyalty to the ideals of the French Revolution, the actual details of its unfolding pose a conceptual challenge: a "knot" whose solution remains the task for the future (Philosophy of History). This untypical admission of unfinished business is enough to challenge habitual perceptions of absolute knowing and its notorious modalities of closure. Taking as our point of departure Hegel's text on "Absolute Freedom and Terror" (in the Phenomenology of Spirit), this course will explore Hegel's various characterizations of the Terror of 1793-94 in relation both to the discourse of the epoch and to Hegel's thought as a whole. A few memorable phrases demand scrutiny: a) "fury of destruction" (in relation both to the iconoclastic practices of the revolution and to Hegel's own logic of negation); b) "the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off the head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water" (in relation both to the medical discourse and popular imaginary of the guillotine and to Hegel's sustained elaboration of symbolic mourning rituals throughout the Phenomenology and elsewhere); c) "universal freedom" (in relation both to the revolutionary appropriation of Rousseau's concept of the general will and to Hegel's own critique of this); d) finally, "terror" itself (in relation both to Kant's analytic of the sublime and to Hegel's own characterization of the conceptual role of anxiety before death - the "absolute master"). We will explore the specific features of the revolutionary Terror - in particular, its institutions and conceptions of death, sovereignty, language, commemoration, and history-writing itself - which seem to present the greatest challenge (and fascination) for Hegel's own thought. How does this "ineffaceable" event (Kant) get philosophically remembered? In addition to considering a variety of eighteenth and nineteenth century sources (Rousseau, Robespierre, Kant, Burke, Marx), we may also have occasion to read certain philosophical reverberations in our day (Bataille, Blanchot, Lyotard, Arendt, Lefort).
Background reading:While none is presupposed, some familiarity both with Hegel and with the contours of the French Revolution would be helpful. For the latter, Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution provides a useful orientation. A good introduction to the historical context of Hegel's own thought is Charles Taylor, Hegel.
Course readings:
Primary readings: Hegel, selections from the Phenomenology of Spirit (ch 6), Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Right; Kant, selections from the Rechtslehre, Conflict of Faculties, and the Critique of Judgement; Rousseau, selections from Social Contract; Robespierre, selected Discourses; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire.
Supplementary readings:
Bataille, "Hegel, Death, Sacrifice"; Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death"; Lyotard, On Enthusiasm; Arendt, On Revolution, Claude Lefort, "The Revolutionary Terror." (A detailed syllabus will be provided at the first meeting.)
COL 722 - Early Modernity and the Novel (top)
Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) 219489 (Seminar) (B) 203221 (Recitation)
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
The purpose of this course is to examine the early novel as a genre both created by and responding to the nascent culture of capitalist modernity. Through a reading of select eighteenth-century novels in English and French, we will examine the novel's role as a technology for mapping and attempting to understand early modernity. How do these works chart the nation at home and the geopolitical formation abroad?
The eighteenth century as been described as inaugurating consumer culture, the rise of individualism, contemporary gender roles, liberal democracy and mercantile capitalism. It is a period that witnessed emerging industrialization and urbanization at home, colonial conquest and imperial expansion abroad. How are these issues represented and aestheticized in literary production from the period? These questions will guide our readings of some key texts in the novel tradition. Among the texts we will read during the semester will be Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana, Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, Tom Jones, Smollett's Launcelot Greaves, Walpole's, Castle of Otranto, Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey
COL 723 - Proust, Memory, Technology (top)
Professor Rebecca Comay
Registration Numbers: (A) 023632 (Seminar) (B)250079 (Recitation)
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
Proust in Transit: Mnemotechnics and Mobility
Inspired by the fin-de siècle technologies of mass transit and telecommunication (railroad, airplane, telegraph, telephone, photography, cinema) and preoccupied with the various social mobilities these both express and occasion (tourism, journalism, mass culture, mass warfare, etc.), Proust finds in modern travel both a metaphor and a medium of the work of memory: spatial displacement becomes a privileged mode of temporal dislocation. A view of language is also implicit: the transport of metaphor, the trajectory of narrative, the passage of translation. These are ambivalences, perhaps only partially understandable in terms of the occultist or spiritualist fantasies invested by Proust as by so many of his contemporaries in the new technologies of the day. These ambivalences may eventually complicate the official aesthetic of redemption famously elaborated in the final section of Le Temps retrouvé. Such ambivalences point to a traumatic blockage and arrested motion exemplified by the various shortcircuits, accidents, and breakdowns of the modern communication network but equally suggest an alternative way of figuring redemption. Benjamin's notion of Dialectic at a standstill (for which he offers the image of the stalled locomotive - "pulling the emergency brake" of history) may here prove pertinent.
This course will explore the various modalities of transit elaborated in A la recherche du temps perdu, which we will try to illuminate in relation to the contemporary technological discourse both of Proust's day (train neurosis, spirit photography, etc.) and of our own (Derrida, Stiegler, Kittler, etc.).
ENG 679 - Levinas (top)
Professor Jill Robbins
Registration Numbers: (A) 200251 (Seminar) (B) 034624 (Recitation)
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 436
This course centers on a reading of Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity, with special emphasis on Sections I and III. Our reading will be cross-referenced with key philosophical essays by Levinas in the decade preceding and the talmudic readings he produced throughout his professional career. We will attend closely to the influential interpretations of Levinas by Derrida, Blanchot and Lyotard.
Texts: Levinas, Totality and Infinity; Collected Philosophical Papers; Nine Talmudic Readings; Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics"; Adieu, and selections from Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation and Lyotard, The Differend.
Requirements: one fifteen to twenty-page paper.
FR 525 A - Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud (top)
Professor Gérard Bucher
Registration Number: 290997
Wednesday 4:10-6:50, Baldy 106
COURSE DESCRIPTION SOON
COL 525 - Caribbean Aesthetics (top)
Professor José Buscaglia
Registration Number: 417116
Wednesday 4:10-6:50, Clemens 104
This is a course on the history of ideas in the Caribbean which will venture into the discussion of the very complex aesthetic order of that area of Atlantic America. Readings and discussions--all in English--will also help students develop a thorough understanding of the most fundamental moments in Caribbean history and of the basic problems of its historiography. Readings will include works by Bartolomé de las Casas, José Marti, Fernando Ortiz, C.L.R. James, José Lezama-Lima, Franz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Manuel Moreno-Fraginals, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul and others.
Course Requirements
Students will be required to make one brief oral presentation of the assigned reading materials. At the beginning of the semester students will sign up for their oral presentation on a first come/first served basis. Oral presentations should be accompanied by a 3-5 page typewritten paper to be handed in on the day of the presentation.
They will also be required to hand in six 1-2 page reviews on the assigned class readings as specified in the syllabus. Reviews will also be typewritten and will be handed in on the day the readings are to be discussed according to the syllabus. Papers will be accepted one week after they are due, receiving one full grade demotion. No reviews will be accepted after one week from the assigned date.
Students will be required to write a 15-20 page, double spaced and typewritten final paper for successful completion on the course.
The distribution of the final grade will be as follows:
20% oral presentation
20% reviews
40% final paper
ENG 648 - Psycho-Analytic Criticism: History and Sexuality (top)
Professor Joan Copjec
Registration Number: (A)117412 (B)409912
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436
The History of Sexuality ought to have disappointed you. There were two things wrong with it: its notion of history and its notion of sexuality. Foucault tried to remove sex from the processes of history and make it only a product of one historical moment, the regime of modern power. Deleuze argues that Foucault knew immediately he had backed himself into a corner by making it impossible to "conceive a 'power of truth' which would no longer be the truth of power, a truth that would release transversal lines of resistance and not integral lines of power." Sketching an image of Foucault as a kind of theoretical Richard Serra, bending the force of his own ideas back to create the titled are of The Use of Pleasure, Deleuze makes a seductive argument for giving Foucault a second chance. We will read The Use of Pleasure alongside chapters from Deleuze's Foucault and The Fold, and Freud's "The Uncanny." Our purpose will be to place sex back into the very process of history, to forge an antihistoricist concept of history. Films and artwork (yet to be selected) will be brought in as primary texts to help us develop our argument.
SPA 532 - Literary Analysis and Theory: The Aftermaths of Structuralism (top)
Professor William Egginton
Registration Number: 033292
Friday 4:10-6:50, Baldy 115
This course aims to achieve an understanding of what we do as literary scholars when we read and write about texts. Its starting point will be the recent history of literary theory, from the structuralist revolution to the contemporary pluralism of literary-theoretical approaches, and we will move from there to questioning the basic principles of reading involved in these various paradigms. At issue will be a suspicion I wish to bring to a general tendency in criticism that we might call the "application paradigm," in which the practice of literary criticism is seen as involving the application of some theoretical model to a literary text, as if the spice of theory might make literature more exciting, if not more comprehensible. In place of this I will be advancing an understanding of critical models as pragmatic vocabularies that interact with literary and other texts such as to produce new concepts, new understandings, new texts. Class time will be divided into lectures and discussion, and work will include presentations and papers.
DMS 534 - Bodyworks (top)
Professor Bernadette Wegenstein
Registration Number: 496113
Monday and Wednesday, 1:00-2:50, Center for the Arts 232
COURSE DESCRIPTION SOON
