Fall 2015 Graduate Course Descriptions Theorizing the Anthropocene Stephanie Clare COL 731 A: 018671/24415 B: 018670/24414 Wednesdays 6:30-9:10 According to many earth scientists, we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Although there is disagreement about how to date the beginning of the epoch, the thesis is consistent: humankind has become a global geological force affecting changes at the scale of the Earth as a single, evolving planetary system. These changes threaten life as we have come to know it. They call for a response across disciplines and milieus. This graduate class introduces students to recent humanities-based scholarship that responds to the Anthropocene, including literary, philosophical, and historical texts. The course considers several problems. First, although the Anthropocene thesis has gained prominence only recently, the notion that humans have and are transforming the earth has a long history, dating at least to the nineteenth century. Our course begins by reading these earlier accounts of human life and its relation to the earth and comparing these accounts to contemporary scientific descriptions. Next, we consider the place of postcolonial, feminist, queer, and critical race theory in conceptualizing and responding to the Anthropocene. We ask how this geological epoch puts pressure on these fields to think anew. Finally, we study understandings of freedom and their imbrication with climate change. Many scientists date the Anthropocene to the beginning of the 1700s, which coincides with the development of liberalism. How have the notions of liberty and freedom been entangled with the physical transformation of the earth? Have feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial models of freedom transformed this nexus? Because this is a relatively new field of inquiry, students should be prepared to engage in creative readings and exploratory seminars. Readings include works by Paul Crutzen, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Zora Neale Hurston, Rob Nixon, and Elizabeth Grosz (amongst many others). We analyze fiction, scholarly monographs and essays, scientific articles, and theoretical/philosophical sources. Students write a final term paper and lead one seminar. Phenomenology in Mexico David Johnson COL 730 A: 018669/24172 B: 007962/24171 Tuesdays 6:30-9:10
This seminar will read the rather short history of phenomenology in Mexico, but we will begin with four to five weeks devoted to a reading of Edmund Husserl so that students will have an idea of the methodological stakes of phenomenology and, further, so that we can come to terms with the phenomenological vocabulary and its particular relevance for literary and cultural studies. After reading (however quickly and schematically) selections from Husserl s works (Ideas I, Logical Investigations, and Cartesian Meditations), we will turn to Mexican phenomenology, beginning with Antonio Caso s essay on Husserl and then reading among others, Alfonso Reyes, Vasconcelos, Gaos, Eduardo Nicol, Emilio Uranga, and Luis Villoro. Our concern will be to examine the way in which Mexican phenomenology develops and to see how it will have appropriated not only Husserl, but also Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although we will not have time to read it in its entirety, we will want to pay some attention to Reyes s El deslinde, precisely because he considers it a fenomenografía and as a prolegomenon to any literary theory. Readings of Husserl will be in English; readings of Mexican phenomenology are in most cases available only in Spanish. Course will be taught in English, unless everyone enrolled speaks Spanish. Papers can be written in English or Spanish. Bible & Philosophy Sergey Dolgopolski COL 724 A: 018460/23310 B: 018459/23311 Mondays 6:30-9:10 This course will explore the role of the Bible and its subsequent Jewish and Christian interpretations in modern philosophy and literary theory. We will pay particular attention to the following question: how modern philosophy and literary theory construes and critiques the Biblical traditions as either "Jewish Law" or "Judeo-Christian" religion. The flip side of the same question would be: how Jewish and Christian techniques of Bbilical interpretation inform classical and modern philosophical thinking. Along with readings in Carl Schmitt, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Franz Rosenzweig, and Jean-Luc Nancy, we will come back to the relevant primary Biblical and post-biblical sources to trace the development of the "Jewish Law" and "Judeo-Christianity" -- both as concepts and as traditions -- as these concepts and traditions are engaged in and inform the work of the above thinkers. Community & World: JL Nancy Rodolphe Gasché COL 729 A; 018668/23303
B: 018469/23304 Tuesdays 12:30-3:10 The aim of this course is to explore in depth Jean-Luc Nancy s conception of the being-together of beings, who, like human beings, are characterized by the singular plural, in his works devoted to the notion of a community without any projected communitarian end, and those in which he explicitly addresses the question of what is a world. We will also be interested in retracing the different sources, particularly in Hegel and Heidegger, that are instrumental to gauge the philosophical significance of Nancy s reconception of community and world. The main text that we will discuss are The Sense of the World, The Creation of the World, or Globalization, and Possibility of a World (an interview with Pierre-Philippe Jandin). These works are required readings. The course s objective is not only to learn how to practice close readings of philosophical texts by developing critical and analytical skills, but also to become familiar with the writings of a leading contemporary thinker on community, the world, and globalization. Course requirements: Attendance is mandatory. A final research, or argumentative paper of ca. 12-15 pages is required for students, who take the course intensively (A section); a three page paper, for those who take the course extensively (B section). Event & Singularity Krzysztof Ziarek COL 723 A: 018458/23312 B: 018457/23313 Mondays 12:30-3:10 Event has emerged as the focal notion in recent Continental thought and has exerted important influence on the discussion of literature and the rethinking of the nature of the literary work. This term is well known from various approaches: from its first incarnation in Heidegger s Ereignis, through the work of Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida to Nancy, Agamben and Badiou. Against the backdrop of these competing approaches, this course will investigate the critical link between event and singularity, and examine it with a view to the role of language in this relation. We will focus on Heidegger s still insufficiently understood notion of Ereignis, especially on its unexplored difference from the various incarnations that the term event has received more recently in French thought. Heidegger s text, The Event (2012), especially its sections on language and poetry, will form the focal point of our discussion,. We will also read Derrida, A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event, sections from Lyotard, The Inhuman and from Nancy, Being Singular Plural. Other texts we might consult include Heidegger s discussions of the work of art, Agamben on language and potentiality, and Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature. As If, As Such, Part III: Locke to Hegel David Johnson
COL 728 A: 018468/23305 B: 018467/23306 Tuesdays 3:30-6:10 Clemens Hall We will attempt to determine the "promise" of the imagination--both the chance for experience and subjectivity and the threat to experience and subjectivity--in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, Kant's Critical and empirical writings, and Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, the third volume of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. This is an ongoing seminar but it is not necessary to have followed the first two parts to paricipate in the third. Our interests will be the role of the imagination in the constitution of language, experience, sovereignty, the relation to the other. We will attempt to determine the relation between the "as such" (essence, being, substance) and the "as if" (virtuality, fiction, literature, deception, ruse, etc.) Heroism in Philosophy Kalliopi Nikolopoulou COL 720 A: 018452/23366 B: 018451/23365 Wednesdays 3:30-6:10 Though various popular and media discourses continue to use, and even over-use, the notion of heroism, modern literature has for long now displaced this concept in its adoption of anti-heroic characters. This critical displacement of heroism was furthered by postwar continental thought, where heroism was scrutinized for its politically and ethically dangerous implications: heroism became synonymous with the violent delusion of the full subject. What are heroism and its attendant virtue of courage? Is heroism really a thing of the past as modern thought claims? If so, why has it always been thought to be a thing of the past? For instance, the Homeric heroes were already figures of a long lost Golden Age, and the tragic heroes were mythical personae anachronistic to democratic classical Athens. Is this anachronism constitutive to the heroic stance, and why? We will look at philosophical treatments of heroism and courage, but most importantly, we will also address how philosophy itself assumes the heroic task in the twilight of the heroic genres (epic and tragedy). Indeed, among the many definitions of philosophy in the Platonic corpus, philosophy is also the inheritor of old heroism (philosophy qua the new heroism ), while Socrates emerges as its greatest hero. Texts include: Homer s Iliad (Book 1, especially), Aeschylus s Prometheus Bound, Plato s Apology and Laches, Aristotle s discussion of courage in the Nicomachean Ethics, Foucault s Fearless Speech. Reparative Reading & Critique Ewa Ziarek COL 722 A: 018456/23314 B: 018455/23315
Wednesdays 12:30-3:10 The call for reparation has been haunting feminist and feminist queer studies for over a decade now. This call is not a demand for economic and political reparations for dispossessed groups, but rather for a new mode of reading of artistic and cultural practices that would replace the authority of critique or even theory at large. As such, as Robyn Wiegman suggests, reparation belongs to aesthetics broadly speaking, an aesthetics that includes Foucault s arts of existence in a broader sense and engagement with art in the narrower sense. Reparative reading claims to go beyond the recognition and debunking of hidden agendas concerning race, gender, and sexuality. Not limited to critique, reparation cultivates zones of more life-affirming queer communities and inspires the belief that a painful and traumatic past could have happened differently. The the reparative turn in queer feminist scholarship and in literary and cultural studies (Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, and Elizabeth Freeman) has been inspired by selective readings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick s enormously influential essay Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, in which she traces her own use of this term to Melanie Klein. For Sedgwick, paranoid, symptomatic reading not only continues a certain distorted legacy of Marxism, Nietzsche, and Freud, but also characterizes the hegemonic positions of poststructuralism, feminism, and feminist queer theory, since one of Sedgwick s prime (and surprising) examples is Butler s Gender Trouble. In this team-taught course, we will question whether critique, theory, interpretation, in its numerous manifestations, can be equated with paranoid reading, and vice versa, can paranoid position be equated with theory. How are critique, theory, and interpretation associated with the Enlightenment as its subsequent transformations? Second, we will reflect on the tensions between reparative turn in queer feminist criticism and the so called antisocial thesis in queer studies, on the one hand, and the move beyond critique in literary studies, on the other hand. Finally, as time permits we will try to situate reparative reading within a broader trend in contemporary literary studies to finds ways of reading such as surface reading, distance reading, and the new emphasis on objects that try to go beyond critique. Our readings will include Freud, Klein, Sedgwick, Butler, Felski, Cvetkovich, Kristeva, Edelman, Koselleck, Love, and Latour among others. Requirements will include seminar presentations, participation in class discussions, and the final research paper (12pp conference style). JM Coetzee and the Enigma of the Other Shaun Irlam COL 727 A: 018466/23307 B: 018465/23308 Thursdays 12:30-3:10
During the fractious life and times of apartheid, South African Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee articulated the predicament of subjects living in states of crisis and displacement, and in agonistic relations to oppressive sexual, racial and political circumstances. His novels explored different modalities of response to the moral challenges and horrors of apartheid. 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 lies beyond relation; whether the inscrutability of the Other becomes a point of departure, a reiteration of exoticism or an ethical means of preserving the radical alterity of the Other. The seminar will also examine Coetzee s more recent constructions of the self as Other and his deconstruction of memoir in his recent autobiographical trilogy. We will conclude with a reflection on Coetzee s Australian novels, his estrangement and othering of national identity and his emerging status as an Australian writer. Among the texts the class will address are Waiting for the Barbarians, The Life & Times of Michael K., Foe, Age of Iron, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year. In addition we shall read the autobiographical trilogy, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime. 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.