COL 720 - Philosophy, Science & Technic
COL 704 - Postcolonial Literature: Alterations of Apartheid
COL 640 - Literature of the Enlightenment
COL 653 - The Frankfurt School
COL 703 - Glance, Gaze and Japanese Cinema
FR 525 A - 18th-Century Literary Studies
COL 525 - Caribbean Aesthetics
ENG 648 - Deleuze on Cinema
ENG 541 - 20th Century American Novel
ENG 679 - Basic Concepts in Psychoanalysis
SPA 510 - History of Spanish Theory
SPA 513 - Contemporary Spanish American Novel: Magical Realism and Beyond
COL 720 - Philosophy, Science & Technic (top)
Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Number: (A)223496 (Seminar); (B)230133 (Recitation)
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
In this course we will explore Husserl's and Heidegger's conception of science and technology. The texts we will discuss include, Husserl's "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Pheonomenology, as well as Heidegger's, The Question Concerning Technology.
COL 704 - Postcolonial Literature: Alterations of Apartheid (top)
Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) 083330 (Seminar) (B) 270835 (Recitation)
Monday 12:30-3:30, Clemens Hall 640
"People are people through other people"
--- Xhosa proverb
Postcolonial theory, in its interrogations of subjectivity and the colonial Other, has increasingly turned to the "poetics" and praxis of territoriality that inaugurated imperial geographies, and the discursive processes involved in producing unevenly developed geopolitical spaces. In this course we will explore the spectralities of postcolonial space reflected in literary and cultural texts from post-apartheid South Africa. We will examine the way the coercive spatial organizations of segregation are received, imaged, and deciphered in postcolonial literatures and the vernacular spatial practices that issue from them.
Confected by a frenzy of segregationist legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, apartheid South Africa was and remains structured like a language. Apartheid produced a geography of segregation that seems integral to any inscription of imperial power. Derrida has commented recently on the "colonial structure of every culture" (Monolinguisme de l'autre), the recognizable verso of his previous statement that South Africa, for most of the twentieth century the archetypal colonial society for the Western imagination, is the "concentration of world history" ("Racism's Last Word"). Understood in these terms, South Africa emerges as the unexampled example of the colony, the Rosetta Stone for a modern history construed as a history of colonialisms. Using South Africa as a "case-study," this course will focus on the bi-lateral production of postcolonial geography and postcolonial literature.
The South African novelist, J.M. Coetzee in 1987 remarked, "The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under ... apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life." He writes, "South African literature is a literature in bondage ... a less than fully human literature ... a world of pathological attachments." It will be our task to understand the meaning of the phrase "a literature in bondage." In other words, if the Xhosa epigram outlines a "local" theory of subjectivity, what happens in a culture where this formation of subjects was deliberately interrupted, and what kind of literature emerges under such conditions? Through an examination of selected South African texts we will develop various strategies for reading postcolonial literatures and explore post-structuralist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic Marxist and cultural materialist perspectives.
In particular we will read theorists such as Bhabha, Fanon, Jameson, Memmi, Mamdani, and Rose as well as Derrida's "Admiration de Nelson Mandela," and "Le dernier mot du racisme". We will also read works by several South African writers: Brutus, Coetzee, Gordimer, Bessie Head, Antjie Krog, La Guma, Malan, Etienne van Heerden, Marlene van Niekerk, and Zakes Mda.
Finally, we will be reading imperial geography, the poetics of segregationist space under apartheid, and the myriad ways this pathological geopolitics is projected in literary texts from South Africa.
COL 640 - Literature of the Enlightenment (top)
Professor David Johnson
Registration Numbers: (A) 186673 (Sem);(B) 029718 (Recitation)
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
This course is not an introduction to the principles of Enlightenment thought; it does not assume the Enlightenment. The 18th century witnessed the birth of anthropology as a human science; it was also the close of the Age of Discovery. Our interest will be to read the scene of that parturition, which was perhaps already still-born. Reading between philosophical anthropologies and narratives of travel/proto-anthropology, we will be most concerned to understand the function of the imagination in the relation to the other. In short, we'll ask whether our experience is not always the experience of the other and what the consequences of such experience are for ethics. Texts include: Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil; Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (selections) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View; Humboldt, Personal Narrative; Hegel, Anthropology; Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt. There's chance we'll look at some Diderot, too.
COL 653 - The Frankfurt School (top)
Professor Nicholas Lawrence
Registration Numbers: (A) 309740 (Sem) and (B) number forthcoming (Recitation)
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
This course serves as an introduction to the interdisciplinary critical theory developed by T. W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and their associates at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research from the 1920s to the 1960s. We'll begin with a reading of important precursors, from Marx to Lukács, then take up the question of critical methodology, particularly as this issue was debated by Adorno and Benjamin in the 1930s. After reviewing the theoretical elaboration of such themes as reification, commodification, art and mass culture, instrumental reason, and so on, we'll focus the latter part of the semester on an intensive reading of the major documents (or portions thereof) produced by the Frankfurt School from the period of its American exile through Adorno's death in 1969: Dialectic of Enlightenment, Eros and Civilization, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory. Throughout we will pay special attention to the meta-theme of critical engagement, agency, and autonomy, as well as consider the question of what, in the legacy of the School, continues to pose a challenge to contemporary models of cultural theory.
COL 703 - Glance, Gaze and Japanese Cinema (top)
Professor Margherita Long
Registration Numbers: (A) 334661 (Sem) and (B) 137366 (Recitation)
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 436
Thursday evening screenings
What is the gaze? Some follow Lacan and call it "object small a," an impossible object of desire with which one may never coincide. Others follow early feminist film theory and call it the privilege of the voyeur, a position of "pure perception" that lures male viewers to the cinema again and again. Yet either way, "gaze theory" seems to have run its course, even while the psychoanalytic subject on which it is based has not. How do "post-gaze" theorists address this problem? This course reads key essays in the history of the debate, from Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, and Jean-Louis Baudry to Vivian Sobchack, Jonathan Crary, and Judith Mayne.
Our aim is to bring specific questions about the gaze to the most celebrated period in Japanese film. The "Golden Age" of the 1950s witnessed the ascendancy of Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro and Kurosawa Akira. It also inspired a body of contradictory criticism. Some argue that what makes it interesting is its distance from the Western cinematic apparatus, while others hold that its global appeal testifies to the universality of its codes -- codes to which the gaze is central. Especially now, when Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro says the field of film studies has long since abandoned Japanese cinema, how should we theorize the relation between these films and their viewers?
There will be three films each by Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa plus one each by Naruse Mikio, Kunugasa Teinosuke, Shindô Kaneto, and selected others. Screening times to be announced.
FR 525 A - 18th-Century Literary Studies (top)
Professor Gérard Bucher
Registration Number: 290997
Wednesday 4:10-6:50, Baldy 106
DESCRIPTION SOON
COL 525 - Caribbean Aesthetics (top)
Professor José Buscaglia
Registration Number: 420348
Wednesday 4:10-6:50, New Science Center NSC 205
This is a course on the history of ideas which will venture into the discussion of the complex and at times "unorthodox" (in the context of what Chatterjee would call an ethics of rationality) aesthetic values that affect all movement in the Caribbean world and its diasporas. Readings and discussions (all in English) will help students develop an understanding of some of the most fundamental moments in Caribbean thought by exploring key issues in the history of what Aníbal Quijano calls the "coloniality of power," questioning national mythologies, and exploring the divergences and commonalities of the discourses of Négritude, Creolité, métissage and mulatage.
ENG 648 - Deleuze on Cinema (top)
Professor Joan Copjec
Registration Number: (A)117412; (B)409912
Wednesday 12:30-3:10 | Clemens 538
The primary focus of this seminar is the two-volume contribution of Gilles Deleuze to the theory of cinema: The Movement Image and The Time Image. But we will also take a look at the other theories of film in order to understand what Deleuze is (underline) not saying, or, more polemically, what he is opposing. Clearly, he wanted to steer the theory of film in a different direction from the one Christian Metz and Screen staked out from the mid-1970s through the end of the 1908s. The Metzian/Screen position is so extensive, however, that we will do little more than sketch it out through readings of a few isolated texts. We will pay more attention to the work of Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell -- to What Is Cinema? and The World Viewed -- who offer distinctive views of cinema. Short films or film clips will be screened for time to time in class. At other times I will ask you to view video's or DVD's on your own, since we will need to reserve class time for discussion of the theory.
ENG 541 - 20th Century American Novel (top)
Professor Robert Daly
Registration numbers: A ( Reg. # 168169 ); B ( Reg. # 161195 )
Wed. 3:30pm-6:10pm | Clemens 436
DESCRIPTION SOON
ENG 679 - Basic Concepts in Psychoanalysis (top)
Professor Tim Dean
Registration number: (A)300730 ; (B)416397
Thursday 7:00 pm --9:40 pm | Clemens 538
This course functions as an introduction to psychoanalytic theory, specifically, Freud and the French rereadings of Freud in Lacan and Laplanche. We will focus particularly closely on Freud's writings on culture and aesthetics, guided by the question of how psychoanalysis can be used non-reductively for literary and cultural study. Thus we will consider psychoanalytic accounts of fantasy, sublimation, transference, the drive, the uncanny (and theories of aesthetic affect), the enigmatic signifier, and the cultural unconscious, asking not how psychoanalysis can be applied to literature but how a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity might change our understanding of how we--as readers, viewers, critics, collectors, and teachers--relate to aesthetic and cultural forms.
Readings by Freud include Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, Papers on Technique, "The 'Uncanny,'" and "Negation"; readings by Lacan include The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI) and The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII); readings by Laplanche include Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, Essays on Otherness, and (with J.-B. Pontalis) "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality."
Secondary readings by Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, Hélène Cixous, Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Teresa de Lauretis, Shoshana Felman, Neil Hertz, Julia Kristeva, Jacques-Alain Miller, Charles Shepherdson, and Slavoj Zizek, among others.
This course is open to students with minimal previous experience with psychoanalytic theory, as well as to more experienced graduate students.
SPA 510 - History of Spanish Theory (top)
Professor William Egginton
Registration Number: 033292
Friday 4:10-6:50 | Baldy 115
In this course we will closely examine examples of philosophical writing from the Spanish literary and intellectual tradition. Beginning with the 17th century, we will explore the work of a different writer from a variety of historical moments, reading the work with regard to both the cultural context of its production and its international intellectual setting. Readings will include selections from the work of Baltasar Gracián, José Ortega y Gasset, Humberto Maturana, and Xavier Zubiri. Particular attention will be paid to the literary character of much of this thought. Although students will be encouraged to read in Spanish when possible, translations will be available in addition to the original language texts, and every effort will be made to accommodate graduate students who are interested in the material but whose language skills may not be up to working with the original texts. Course work will consist of presentations and a final paper.
SPA 513 - Contemporary Spanish American Novel: Magical Realism and Beyond* (top)
Professor Ramón E. Soto-Crespo
Registration Number: 101819
Wednesday 19:00 - 21:40 | BALDY 120
Magical Realism is a term by which most of the literary world knows or presumes to know Spanish American literature. In fact, Magical Realism began as a politicized term with which Spanish American authors described their personal and political relationships to both their nations and the writing process. Later, Magical Realism was the phrase which powered the "Boom Period" of the 60s, during which non-Latin American audiences came to know authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, and many others. In the years since, Magical Realism has grown into the principal trait by which Spanish American literature is known and marketed, and the category itself has grown from a region-specific genre into a super-genre that sometimes is used to describe writing that is neither Spanish American, modernist, postmodernist, nor stylistically atavistic.
In light of this and other acts of anachronistic appropriation, we must ask what Magical Realism has come to mean in the academy today. We will examine the term from many different perspectives: as genre, as writing style, as a "third world" form, as postcolonial form, and in terms of cultural imperialism or neocolonial politics. In recent decades, Magical Realism has influenced U.S. minority writers and it is key to understanding the emergence of a new style of U.S. minority representational politics. It is for this reason that in this course we will be looking at the Spanish American novel as a prototypical American novel. By "American" we mean the Americas of the northern and southern hemispheres, not only the United States. In studying the Spanish American novel as a hemispheric artifact, this course investigates the development of the genre of Magical Realism in Spanish American and Caribbean literature, and its appropriation by United States minority writers. This course will therefore study narrative techniques ranging from Magical Realism to the Post-Boom, and will address the interconnected political space between history, the fantastic, race, and sexuality in Boom and post-Boom narratives.
In its overall range the course covers the Spanish-speaking American novel and considers the impact of this genre on U. S. Latino literature. We will read novels by Isabel Allende, José María Arguedas, Reinaldo Arenas, Miguel Angel Asturias, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Alejo Carpentier, Rosario Ferré, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Manuel Puig, Thomas Rivera, Juan Rulfo, and Severo Sarduy. In terms of the theory, we will be revisiting essays by Gloria Anzaldúa, Homi Bhabha, Mikhail Bakhtin, Angel Flores, Néstor García-Canclini, Fredric Jameson, Alberto Moreiras, Edward Said, Doris Sommer, Gayatri Spivak, Tsvetan Todorov, and Lois Parkinson Zamora. The requirements for this graduate student seminar will consist of: a presentation and a 25 pp. final paper. The course will be taught in English. The books could be read in Spanish or English.
* This graduate seminar is in the process of being given a ENG and a COL course number. In the meantime students can sign up under the SPAN number and later re-register under the new number. For further information contact the professor at rs55@buffalo.edu.
