COL 707 - On War
COL 706 - Imperial Geographies: Poetry and Empire in 18th c. Britain
COL 703 - The State of Affect
COL 715 - Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
COL 704 - Art, Technology, Globalization
COL 705 - Feminist Aesthetics
ENG 683 - The Films of Abbas Kiarostami
COL 680 - French Theater & Tragic Drama
ENG 537 - Hawthorne
SPA 527 - The Comedia
COL 542 - Caribbean Aesthetics
COL 682 - Puerto-Rican Studies
ENG 583 - Poetics of Difficulty
COL 542 - 20th Italian Literature
COL 707 - On War (top)
Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Numbers: (A) 412133 (Seminar) (B) 128718 (Recitation)
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
In this course we will mainly be concerned with Carl Schmitt's political theory, in particular, his concept of the political, the friend/foe distinction, his juridical concept of war, the notion of the partisan, and so forth. The works that we will read include: The Concept of the Political, Theory of the Partisan, Political Theology, and Political Romanticism.
COL 706 - Imperial Geographies: Poetry and Empire in 18th c. Britain (top)
Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A)278800 (Seminar) (B) 421681 (Recitation)
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
The eighteenth century in England witnesses the formation and alignment of the great imperial forces that will shape the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the period those peculiarly modern phantasmatic geographies are drafted into existence: private property, national territory, and cartographic space. We will chart the circulation of these signifiers in eighteenth-century economic writings, literature and topographical poetry. We will also explore the developments in technology, aesthetic theory, spatial imagination, literary ideology, ethnography and anthropology that facilitated the synthesis of an imperial consciousness and an imperial geography.
We begin with Virgil's Georgics. Readings will also include some early economic writings (William Petty, Defoe, Mandeville, Adam Smith) as well as texts by Addison, Collins, Cowper, Grainger, Gray, Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope, Swift, and Thomson.
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 703 - The State of Affect (top)
Professor David Johnson
Registration Numbers (A) 317831 (seminar) (B) 244593 (Recitation)
Tuesdays, 3:30-6:10; Clemens 640
In this course we'll be interested in the origin of the state and of community in affect or auto-affection. We'll read Rousseau's Social Contract, Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, taking as our point of departure the impossible moment of absolute simultaneity, of coming together, constitutive of the state. Then we'll turn to Levinas' Totality and Infinity and Alphonso Lingus' Dangerous Emotions to see in what ways, if any, this founding event of the state and of community is complicated. Requirements: research paper (15-20 pages), presentation.
COL 715 - Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (top)
Professor Henry Sussman
Registration Numbers: (A) 458762 (Seminar) (B) 369231 (Recitation)
Wednesday 4:00-6:40, Crosby Hall 115, South Campus
The German critic, Walter Benjamin, worked on his Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk) intermittently over the past two decades of his life. It was never finished, in the conventional sense of the term. When life in Paris became too tenuous, and before he set out on his abortive escape to Spain, he deposited his vast compendium of materials from and about Paris during the Second Empire with Georges Bataille, who preserved it.
The Passagen-Werk is not only a seemingly disorderly collection of fragments about every aspect of Paris during the decisive period of its modernization, its transformation into a world-economy encompassing everything we associate with high capitalism in the west (industrialization, 'mechanical reproduction,' iron-and-glass architecture, advertising, modern transportation and merchandizing, gambling, and prostitution, to name a few). It is an experiment in book-making, more similar to a contemporary website than a conventional non-fiction book told from a single authorial perspective and torqued into conformity with a 'main thesis' or argument unfolding throughout its development.
This course will survey the experimental design and architecture of The Arcades Project. It will not be able to avoid digressions in the direction of Benjamin's major inspirations (Adorno, Simmel, Weber, Baudelaire, Hugo, Blanqui, and Aragon) and demons (Fourier, Toussenel, and national socialism). Such a course also cannot avoid questions of urban design and the urban experience under expansive capitalism. It is thus part of a wider inquiry into the nature and features of cultural space and spacings: the plan of a city, the layout of a book or newspaper, the blueprint of a commercial center, the penetration of modern urban life by print, film, and radio messages. For this reason, there will be a visual as well as a verbal component in students' work for the course, whether this assume the form of photographs, drawings, or a website. Students will be strongly encouraged to adapt and appropriate Benjamin's innovations as a critic of modern culture into their primary fields of interests, whether these be scientific, social scientific, or related to the arts and humanities.
The course will focus on and circulate around The Arcades Project, which may be read in German or its translations (e.g. English, French, Spanish). Additional readings include Aragon's Paysan de Paris, Buck-Morss's The Dialectics of Seeing, and Cadava's Words of Light. There will be a showing of Marcel Carnet's 1938 feature film about the epoch, Les enfants du paradis. The course's dual emphases, textual and visual, as suggested above, will be reflected in the assignments, one of which will be oriented to the visual and architectural media, and one of which will be an interpretative essay.
COL 704 - Art, Technology, Globalization (top)
Professor Krzysztof Ziarek
Registration Numbers: (A) 192647(Seminar) (B) 179720(Recitation)
Monday 12:30 - 3:10pm, Clemens Hall 640
The course will examine the relations between art, technology, and capital in the context of globalization. While discourses of globalization focus predominantly on social, economic, and political issues, we will try to understand the significance of art, literature, and aesthetics for thinking critically about globalization and technology. Globalization is a hotly contested term, producing a number of different theories and perspectives. Nevertheless, they all respond to the emergent phenomenon of "globality," to the nascent global network of economic, cultural, and political links, and its ambiguous transformative/destructive influence on everyday life. This class will analyze how globalization is, on the one hand, conditioned by developments in capital, and, on the other, dependent on the information and telecommunication technologies and the growing technicization of experience and relations. In this context, art and literature can be seen as increasingly responding to this phenomenon of a global technicization of experience. In his preface to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche remarked that, though ostensibly writing a book about art, he ended up diagnosing the problem of science in modernity, thus disclosing a critical link between science and technology, on the one hand, and art, on the other. Pursuing this link between technology and aesthetics through the work of Adorno, Heidegger, Irigaray, and Nancy, the course will inquire into the relevance of avant-garde aesthetics for a critical understanding of technology and information in the context of globalization. The reading material will include texts by Adorno, Arrighi, Bauman, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, Heidegger, Irigaray, Marx, Nancy, Nietzsche, Wodiczko. While discussion will focus on critical texts on art, technology, and globalization, we will also examine literary and artistic works, from Italian and Russian Futurism to contemporary Net and transgenic art.
COL 705 - Feminist Aesthetics (top)
Professor Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Registrations Numbers: (A) 193773 (Seminar) (B) 323840 (Recitation)
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640
Focused on the multiple intersections among theories of modernity, aesthetics, and feminism, this course will examine the possibilities and impossibilities of formulating the project of feminist aesthetics. Beginning with a brief genealogy of the main debates about the social function of art in modernity, we will examine how the emergence of the dichotomy between historicism and formalism in the 19th century shapes both feminist critiques of aesthetics and the debates about "the gender of modernism." Then we will consider how this dichotomy can in turn be complicated by Theodor Adorno's notion of the heteronomous autonomy of modern art. In what sense can we understand this paradoxical autonomy as the social antithesis of society' By rereading Adorno's aesthetic theory in the context of Kristeva's and Irigaray's work, we will begin to explore the complex relationship between modernism, embodiment, gender, and race, in particular, the vexed relation between the negativity of art and the racial/sexual politics of modernity. Our discussions will focus, among other things, on the ambiguous status of the work of art vis-a-vis the commodification of social relations and female bodies; the interconnections between political and literary avant-garde movements; the development of modern discourses of sexuality; the intersections between female masquerade, racial passing, and new modes of mimesis; the questions of memory, morning, and the death of art. Our reading list will include Kant, Hegel, Marx; Larsen, Rhys, Woolf, A. Locke, Du Bois, Riviere; Adorno, Kristeva, Irigaray, Gilroy, Felski, and Jameson.
Requirements: active participation in class discussion, class presentations, research paper.
ENG 683 - The Films of Abbas Kiarostami (top)
Professor Joan Copjec
This seminar is an introduction to the films of the contemporary Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami. In recent years his highly-laurelled films, exhibited at major international film festivals, have brought Iranian cinema to the attention of the world. My intention is to retain some attention for this national cinema while focusing on Kiarostami's work, which remains unique despite having developed out of similar conditions and sharing many features and concerns.
Among the notable features of Kiarostami's films are their exquisitely beautiful images of the Iranian landscape; their pared-down action and radical elimination of all mythological elements of traditional Iranian literature and ideology; and their often documentary format. These features have led many critics to compare Kiarostami to the Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, yet the conditions of Kiarostami's cinema are quite different. We will examine the critical comparison and the background of Iranian culture and politics that throw it into question.
Students signing up for the seminar will be required to attend the film screenings scheduled for the undergraduate course, "Iranian Cinema," which meets Thursdays at 3:30 pm. (N.B.: you may not take this seminar if you are unavailable for Thursday's meeting.) Wednesday's seminar meeting will be devoted to screenings of other Kiarostami films not shown in the undergraduate class; to individual presentations by students; and to discussions of related theoretical materials. These meetings will often be shortened to compensate for the extra hours of classroom time required.
COL 680 - French Theater & Tragic Drama (top)
Professor Gérard Bucher
Registration Number: 406306 (Seminar)
Thursday 4:10-6:50pm, Clemens Hall 218
The purpose of the seminar is to explore the origin and development of the tragic genre, i.e. to determine in which way a certain unvarying tragic experience (exemplified in Greek tragedy) was profoundly reworked in the modern European (French) theater. The main sources of reflection on the theory of the tragic will be found in Hölderlin (his texts on Empedocle and Antigone), Nietzsche (The Origin of tragedy), Mallarmé (Hamlet and Reverie of French poet) and Artaud (The Theater of cruelty). Our investigation into the intimate nature of the tragic genre will be illustrated by the discussion of a number of French plays: Polyeucte by Corneille, Lorenzaccio by Musset, Le soulier de satin by Claudel, Les mouches by Sartre, finally Caligula by Camus. The seminar will be taught in French. Students will be required to present at least one oral report and write a final paper.
ENG 537 - Hawthorne (top)
Professor Robert Daly
Registration Numbers: (A) 335060 (B) 409014
Wednesday 3:30 -6:10, Clemens Hall 538
Long ago, Americanists met to lament that we know bits and pieces of many writers but rarely know any one writer in detail and in context. This seminar aims to help you become an exception to that sad rule. Nathaniel Hawthorne is a cultural icon, considered "major" in both his time and our own. As the current flood of commentary on his work suggests, he remains an important writer of literature as ethical and aesthetic exploration. He read most of the American writers who preceded him and influenced many who followed. Even today, his writing continues to do important cultural work. For that reason, to become conversant with his writing is to learn a good deal of American literature and culture.
We shall read the best of Hawthorne's short tales and the four completed romances, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. There will be handouts on research essays, publication, annotated bibliographies, a chronology of Hawthorne's life and writing, a guide to the manuscript sources, and other handouts on how we read Hawthorne and why it matters.
We shall read the texts in roughly the order in which he wrote them, pay attention to their interactions with other texts and with the larger culture, ask why he so often altered the historical accounts, why he peopled his tales with poor readers who enact various epistemological reductions and suffer the elaborate consequences. We'll consider how one can use in literature a historical culture already literary in at least two senses, not only shaped by and in literary genres, but also lived and written by people aware and wary of the interpretive resonances of their every move. We shall attempt a double focus, viewing Hawthorne's writings as both representative (participating in the cultural conversations of their times) and hermeneutic (enabling us to attend to our own interpretive repertoires and cultural strategies). We shall ask how and what they meant in his time and how and what they mean in ours.
Each student will be expected to participate in seminar discussion, to do a seminar introduction, and to write a research essay on a subject of his or her own choosing. Those taking the seminar extensively will be expected to do everything but the research essay.
Texts: McIntosh, James, ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales. New York: Norton, 1987.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 3rd ed. Ed. Seymour Gross, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988.
---. The House of the Seven Gables. Ed. Seymour Gross. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1967.
---. The Blithedale Romance. Ed. William E. Cain. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996.
---. The Marble Faun. Ed. Richard Brodhead. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Though you may, of course, acquire them anywhere you please, these books will be available at Talking Leaves Bookstore on Main Street.
SPA 527 - The Comedia (top)
Bill Egginton
Registration Number: 205289
Tuesday 1:00 - 3:40, Baldy Hall Room 110
This course will trace the origins of the Spanish Theater from the late Middle Ages to its acme in the seventeenth century. The comedia, the dominant theatrical form of Spain's Golden Age, will be analyzed in the context of Spain's and Europe's social, intellectual, and cultural history. Special attention will be paid to the relation between the rise of this early modern form of theater and notions of truth and illusion. Authors will include Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and others.
This course will be taught in Spanish.
COL 542 - Caribbean Aesthetics (top)
José Buscaglia
Registration #: 302265
Time: W, 1:00 - 3:40 PM; 902 Clemens
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 in Spanish as well as in English will help students develop an understanding of some of the most fundamental moments in Caribbean thought and aesthetic practices since the 18th century by exploring key issues in the history of what Aníbal Quijano calls the "coloniality of power." The course is structured around a series of eight sites or movements: Fuge and counterfuge, (Im)Possibility, Counterpointing, Metaphoricity, Transversality, (Un)Certainty, "Bregar," and Fragmentation. Readings will include selected works by Peguero, Sánchez Valverde, Plácido, Martí, Betances, CLR James, Fernando Ortiz, Lezama-Lima, Glissant, Benítez-Rojo, Díaz-Quiñones and Walcott among others.
COL 682 - Puerto-Rican Studies (top)
Ramon Soto-Crespo
Registration Numbers: 412257; 124429
Tuesdays, 7 -9:40 pm, CLEMENS 218
In recent years there has been growing interest in border theory, and in Puerto Rican literature and culture as part of a larger study of border criticism. Although the Southwest of the U.S. is known for its border culture, Puerto Rican writers have shifted the perspective on their political location in the U.S. from studies of national migration to border studies. Puerto Ricans, that is to say, have come to understand New York City -- and, increasingly, other cities in the eastern seaboard of the U.S. -- and San Juan as border cities in similitude to the way El Paso and Ciudad Juarez have captured the imagination of Chicanos in the Southwest borderlands.
In order to analyze this development in border studies, we will read Puerto Rican/Latino scholarship such as Frances Aparicio's Tropicalizations and Listening to Salsa, Jorge Duany's The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, Juan Flores' Divided Borders and From Bomba to Hip-Hop, Carlos Antonio Torres's The Commuter Nation, Negron-Muntaner and Ramon Grosfoguel's Puerto Rican Jam!, and Edwin Torres' The Puerto Rican Movement. The shift from national to ethnic and then to a border emphasis shows one of Puerto Rico's major contributions to Latino studies: an anti-national border aesthetics. We will study this shift in Puerto Rican/Latino literary production by looking closely at the following works: Nicholasa Mohr's In Nueva York, Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, Edward Rivera's Family Installments, Carmen de Monteflores' Singing Softly, Abraham Rodriguez Jr. Spidertown, Judith Ortiz Cofer's The Line of the Sun, Piri Thomas' Down These Mean Streets, Edwin Torres' Carlito's Way, Ed Vega's Mendoza's Dream, Ernesto Quinones' Bodega Dreams, and Pedro Pietri's Illusions of a Revolving Door.
Course requirements include one seminar presentation and one 15-20 page research paper.
ENG 583 - Poetics of Difficulty (top)
Tim Dean
Registration Numbers: (A) 151773 (B) 341353
Thursday, 7:00-9:40 p.m., Clemens Hall 436
This course investigates different forms of poetic "difficulty," understood broadly as the workings of language at the outer reaches of intelligibility. With "difficulty" as our rubric, we will consider the poetry and poetics of Emily Dickinson and Hart Crane, asking questions such as the following:
What is the place and function of "difficulty" in modernist aesthetics?
How has "difficulty" come to be aligned with the avant garde?
How should we understand tensions between "difficulty" and democratic access?
How does the question of poetic "difficulty" map onto public/private distinctions?
How does "difficulty" challenge conventional forms of publication?
How might categories of gender and sexuality inflect our understanding of "difficulty"?
What is the relation between "difficulty" and queerness?
What is the relation between "difficulty" and mental illness?
How might poetic "difficulty" be understood as a dialect of the linguistic unconscious?
How might we develop an ethical as well as a hermeneutical relation to "difficult" poetry?
In coming to grips with different kinds of poetic "difficulty," we will read a number of philosophical as well as poetic texts, asking both how "difficult" theory might connect with "difficult" poetry, and how certain poetries might be understood as forms of theory in their own right--how, that is, "difficult" poetry manifests heuristic and speculative values that illuminate theoretical problems (as well as the reverse). In other words, we will be reading a lot of theory as well as a lot of poetry.
Dickinson and Crane will offer us test cases, and we will attempt to become familiar with their canons, their careers, and the critical industries produced around their work. However, students enrolled in the course may write final papers on "difficult" poets other than Dickinson and Crane.
Visits from poets Lucie Brock-Broido (The Master Letters) and Allen Grossman will be integrated into the course.
Course Requirements: Participation in class discussion, oral presentation, and final research paper (25 pages)
Note: In the interests of keeping this class at a size conducive to serious seminar discussion, no auditors without instructor permission, please.
COL 542 - 20th Italian Literature (top)
Maria Gutierrez
Course descripition to follow
