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Students should refer to a current class schedule each semester to determine current course offerings. Many courses meet in the evenings. Most carry 4 points. The list below is representative, not exhaustive.ART WORLDSIntroduction to Art Worlds I G65.1106 The first of a two-course sequence designed to explore debates about the production, consumption, distribution, and interpretation of the arts. Incorporating methods and insights from anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, this course introduces students to issues in and methods for cultural analysis. Readings include texts by Adorno, Benjamin, Becker, Bourdieu, Weber, Williams, and others. Introduction to Art Worlds II G65.1116 Focuses on questions of reception and interpretation, particularly on the distinctions between “high” culture and other cultural designations. How have avant-garde notions and systems contributed to the “culture wars”? What role do class distinctions have in the evolution of cultural controversies? How do notions of good and poor “taste” emerge, and how are they defined? To what extent do debates over cultural freedom serve as proxies for other political struggles? Modernism and the Alienation of Form G65.2190 After the French Revolution, the idea of progressive evolution gave Western culture a unified sense of its place in the great scheme of things. But the decades leading up to World War I saw the gradual decline of that paradigm. From the linguistic turn in philosophy to the professionalization of sociology, from symbolist poetry to cubism, from Bartók to Bauhaus, from the New Criticism to socialist realism, a preoccupation with form emerged as the defining characteristic of a modernism that could no longer rely on natural design. This course considers various examples of that preoccupation in a search for the roots of postmodern dissolution. Topics in Art Worlds: About Face G65.3008 Reading the face has been a relevant activity in both Western and non-Western epistemological thought and practice through many eras. It appears both as an informal daily practice as well as the more formalized “art/science” of physiognomy. By examining how the face, its gestures and its activities, is employed in different contexts and through diverse forms of political and artistic image making, students explore some of its literal and figurative meanings as a discursive, metaphorical, and material object and medium. Alongside the central focus of the face as it appears in representations and the receptions of these images, students also address specific issues, problems, and practices of its aesthetic and social significance, such as ideas about social classification, status and hierarchy, political satire, stereotyping and racial profiling, national expressions and gestures, defacement and masking, facial reconstruction, the face in relation to the body, and the cyberfaces and interfaces of new media. Topics in Art Worlds seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently. Previous seminars have included “Cultural Policy and Patronage” and “Memoir and Manifesto: Artists in Their Own Words.” THE CITYIntroduction to the City I G65.1108 Introduces the complex nature of the city and the local and global political, social, and economic forces that shape it. As these forces manifest themselves differently in different localities, students study various city types, including the global city, the modern metropolis, and the informal city. New York City is the main platform for exploration, revealing as it does the continuities and congruencies in the forms and processes that characterize contemporary cities. Garbage in Gotham: The Anthropology of Trash G65.1813 Traces changing definitions of value and worthlessness through Enlightenment, modern, and postmodern theory. Considers these through the perspective of trash, which is read as a reflection of contemporary social mores, time/space compression, and fragmentations of cultural identity, among other themes. Uses New York City as a case study. Introduction to the City II G65.2108 Students learn various approaches for studying the city by transforming a topic of interest into a researchable question, developing a research design, and identifying the most appropriate methods for their chosen research project. An overview of qualitative research methods is provided, both through the examination of existing studies and the development of the students’ own projects. Topics in the City: A Brief History of Urban Consciousness G65.3003 Starting with Walter Benjamin’s submission of the flaneur as the prototypical subject of the modern metropolis, theorists have debated the Eurocentric, hetero-normative, and bourgeois assumptions that underlie such as framing of urban subjectivity. Indeed, post-structuralism, feminist geography, queer theory and subaltern studies have staged valuable interventions into this original thesis of urban consciousness as submitted by Benjamin. This course is arranged around the central premise that understanding urban space requires and interrogation of the particular subjectivities that it produces and a sustained exploration of the dialectic between subject and city. Topics in the City seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently. Previous seminars have included “Militarization and Urban Warfare” and “The Public City: Public Space and the Public Sphere.” GENDER POLITICSIntroduction to Gender Politics I G65.1205 Investigates the relationship of the shape of the body to the shape of the self. Focuses on psychoanalytic discourse and its legacy in academic, artistic, and popular culture. Students read texts by Freud, Riviere, Fanon, Butler, Sedgwick, and others, and study material representations of sexuality in fiction, philosophy, photography, and dance. Introduction to Gender Politics II G65.1215 Focuses on Foucault’s thinking about sexuality, power, knowledge, and the body. Students read several of Foucault’s most influential works and discuss the critical reception of his ideas and their application by a range of scholars in the decades since his death. Topics in Gender Politics: Popularizing Identity: Engendering Sexuality, Race, and Nation in Cultural Studies G65.3004 Interrogates ongoing definitions of “the popular” through the lens of recent national, transnational, and global constructions of sexual identity. Examines how contemporary popular culture produces, enables, and delimits personal practices of sex and identity. Intersectional and culturally specific analyses of gendered, ethnic, and sexual dissonance and dissidence engage the question of how the “popular” is constructed over and through overtly unpopular or unrecognized forms of erotic existence. Addressing both mass media and marginal forms of personal and aesthetic expression, this course investigates how the featured texts define the conditions of social legibility in myriad postmodern and transnational contexts. Topics in Gender Politics seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently. Previous seminars have included “Gendered Genealogies of American Exceptionalism,” and “U.S. 20th-Century Queer Novels.” GLOBAL HISTORIESInternational Studies in Human Rights G65.1048 Introduces students to international human rights and the movement’s relationship to the field of comprehensive peace education. As a multidisciplinary field, peace education takes a holistic approach to conflict and education. Essentially, peace education is the creation and transmission of knowledge needed to achieve and maintain peace. It is also about developing the critical and reflective capacities to apply knowledge in order to control, reduce, and eliminate various forms of violence. Using a peace education approach, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related normative global standards are used as the primary conceptual frameworks to guide the course’s inquiries. Introduction to Global Histories I G65.1107 Surveys world historical trends by examining spaces and practices outside the normative expectations of national histories. Students read accounts from different historical periods of human encounters on and across the world’s major seas and oceans—“contact zones” that blur conventional territorial and cultural definitions—and review related concepts, tools, and methodologies adopted by world and global historians in their analyses. Introduction to Global Histories II 65.2107 Studies colonialism from a comparative perspective. Examines the ways in which relations of power, subordination, and negotiation were constituted across time and space and poses questions about the most effective ways in which to understand the colonial “moment” in world history. Themes that are covered include race and classification, political subjectivity, and nationalism. Topics in Global Histories: Islam and the Left: Languages of Resistance G65.3005 Explores the complex interactions between two major intellectual and activist traditions of transnational resistance to Western imperialism over the last century and a half: leftist and Islamist political movements—each, contrary to popular perception (and orthodox insistence), a discourse of great internal diversity. The course starts with theoretical framing, locating both in the historical context of accelerated global connectivity, capital expansion, and processes of modernization. Students examine alternate critiques of Western capitalist modernity possible from vantage points along a spectrum of relationships within both genealogies, discussing the implications of liberalism, secularism, orientalism, and alternate modernities. Topics in Global Histories seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently. Previous seminars have included “Violence, Culture, and Democracy in South Asia” and “History, Economy, Society, and Diaspora in the Indian Ocean.” LITERARY CULTURESThe Passions of the Mind: Affect, Literature, and Music in Europe, 1600-1850 G65.1005 Studies relationships among affect, literature, and music in early modern Europe. Examines the ancient roots of early modern affective theories and contrasts those theories with our own. Takes as working hypotheses that what we now call “emotions” are primarily culturally determined and that social constructions of affect have varied over time. Three questions are posed: (1) How did people in earlier periods understand their affective experiences? (2) How did they think that affect—called passions, affections, sentiments, feelings, or emotions—functioned in literature and music? (3) How were these affective and aesthetic beliefs manifested in literary and musical practices? Students read theoretical and literary texts from the periods under study, as well as recent historical and analytical writings, and listen to musical examples. Topics include social constructionism, catharsis, the passions, the origins of opera, moral sentiments, sensibility, the emergence of the modern self, program music, and the roles of affect in ethics and rhetoric. Works by Aristotle, Cicero, Shakespeare, Monteverdi, Descartes, Dryden, Haywood, Francis Hutcheson, Richardson, Adam Smith, Mozart, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others are studied. Note: Musical training is not a prerequisite for this course. The Experience of Time in the 20th-Century Novel G65.1009 Examines the representations of time in 20th-century European and American novels, as well as the relationship between this fictional time and the descriptions of time offered in philosophical and psychological works of the same period. Unlike earlier fiction, novels produced during the 20th century no longer recount objective sequences of events in the order in which they are supposed to have occurred. With the advent of literary Modernism, writers began fragmenting and reordering such “realistic” chronological accounts, sometimes abandoning altogether any attempt at representing objective, absolute time. Further, the subject matter of these texts is concerned to an unprecedented degree with questions about time, its nature, and the ways it is experienced in human life. This interest in time echoes similar speculations among 20th-century philosophers and psychologists regarding the consciousness of time. Reading works by Bergson, Husserl, Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, Heidegger, Nabokov, and others, students analyze the connections among innovations in narrative technique, fiction’s increased thematic focus on time, and nonfictional explorations of the experience of time during the last century. Introduction to Literary Cultures I G65.1301 An intensive survey of foundational texts in contemporary literary theory. Reading literary works from antiquity through modernity, students investigate how language and the literary determine our various approaches, relations, and commitments to the “true” and the “real.” Touchstones for discussion include imitation, representation, subjection, transformation, resistance, and freedom. Introduction to Literary Cultures II G65.1321 Investigates the ethical and political dimensions of contemporary critical theory. Also explores the ways in which literary texts articulate and unfold the ethical and political paradoxes that traditional philosophical discourse too often characterizes as simply forms of error, unreason, contradiction, or transgression. Heidegger and Wittgenstein G65.2192 “Philosophy is an age grasped in thought,” Hegel once said, and if the 20th century was grasped in thought at all, it was by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. If their thought is elusive, no wonder—for their age made the very idea of comprehension suspect. In Heidegger and Wittgenstein we meet two philosophers profoundly inclined toward the unity that metaphysics promises, but forced to confront that promise as a receding possibility in an incomprehensible historical moment. Topics in Literary Cultures: Trauma and the Politics of Witnessing G65.3006 Investigates how recent theories of trauma and testimony that focus on the Holocaust and European literature might be productive for reading literature from other regions that stage different historical events as traumas. How might these literary works in turn revise, question, or displace theoretical models that have developed largely around one specific traumatic event? Topics include formal versus thematic articulations of the traumatic, testimony as crisis and event of translation, trauma as transnational and transcultural displacement, autobiographical utterance as the supplement and the confounding of collective memory, and attestation as a condition of possibility and aporia of forgiveness. Topics in Literary Cultures seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently. Previous seminars have included “The Ethics of Literary Interpretation” and “Literary Hospitalities.” SCIENCE STUDIESIntroduction to Science Studies I G65.1109 Surveys science from a variety of philosophical, sociological, historical, linguistic, anthropological, and critical perspectives. Explores debates over constructivism, relativism, and the uses to which scientific knowledge is put by examining how cultural boundaries between science and nonscience are constructed and maintained. Introduction to Science Studies II G65.1110 Examines how new and emerging knowledges and technologies, such as cold fusion, genetics, cloning, organ transplantation, and assisted conception, are problematizing boundaries that are assumed to be natural and fixed, while at the same time remaking the social structures that support science. Topics in Science Studies: Thinking About Tomorrow G65.3007 Focuses on the many roles of the future in Western cultures over the last several centuries. Its ability to serve as a blank canvas has made it an ideal location for projecting and working out today’s concerns and anxieties. Such projections, meanwhile, often feed back into the present, becoming the basis for restructuring social and cultural relationships that, in turn, give rise to the world of tomorrow. Over the course of the semester, students assemble some basic conceptual tools for understanding discussion of the future, as well as talk about why modern societies encourage so many predictions of things to come. The course looks into particular sites of futuristic imagery, including fiction, space travel, warfare, urban planning, nanotechnology, and the end of the world, and touches on the characteristics and implications of future predictions that failed. Topics in Science Studies seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently. Previous seminars have included “Race, Science, and Technology” and “Science, Religion, and the Modern State.” A History of Media Theory G65.2193 It has become commonplace for theories of media to attribute massive psycho-cultural transformations to their influence. Homeric Greeks (like other “tribal” peoples) lacked an interior self because they lived in an “oral” world. The phonetic alphabet made philosophy possible. Print underlies bureaucracy and mechanization. TV creates a “global village.” Multimedia technologies on the Internet undermine (or realize) centralized attempts to control social meaning. And so on. The primary aim of this course is to raise the underlying, and as yet unanswered, questions upon which all such media theory depends: To what extent does the emerging age, the age we live in now (postindustrial, postphilosophical, postmodern, post-Western, information age, late capitalism), recover certain characteristics of oral/traditional culture? To what extent does it preserve or intensify or dilute characteristics of print/modern culture? To what extent is it constituting something entirely new? |
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