The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory offers a series of public lectures on the history of critical theory every fall semester. These lectures, each of which will be followed by open discussion, will take place on Tuesdays from 5:15-6:45pm in-person or via Zoom. The lectures are coordinated with graduate seminars on critical theory in a number of departments, but are also open to other faculty or graduate students who may wish to attend.

Schedule

8/31 German Idealism (Hegel), Mark Alznauer (Philosophy, Northwestern University)

Required Readings

  • Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood, translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. See esp. 86-88 and 95-97.
  • Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, translated by William Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894. See esp. 260-62. 
  • Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of World-History: Volume 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822-3, edited and translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. See esp. 78-89, 100-04, 404, and 457-59.
  • Pinkard, Terry. “Infinite Ends at Work in History.” In Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice, 140-68. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.
  • Williams, Bernard. “Human Rights and Relativism.” In In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, 62-74. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 

Supplemental Readings

  • Croce, Benedetto. “History as the History of Liberty.” In History as the Story of Liberty, 54-62. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000. 
  • Kojève, Alexandre. “Summary of the First Six Chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit.” In Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 31-70. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969. 

9/7 Marx and Marxism, Tim Brennan (Comparative Literature, U of Minnesota)

  • Adorno, Theodor W. “Lecture 8: Ontologizing the Ontic (I)” and “Lecture 9: Ontologizing the Ontic (II).” In Ontology and Dialectics, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 73-94. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
  • Adorno, Theodor W. “The Ontological Need.” In Negative Dialectics, 61-70, 100-04. New York: Continuum, 1994. 
  • Feuerbach, Ludwig. “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy.” In The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence S. Stepelevich, 156-71. Humanities Press, 1983.
  • Marx, Karl. “Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks" and "Theses on Feuerbach.” In The German Ideology, 33-70. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1998.
  • Žižek, Slavoj. “The State of Things.” In Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Posthuman Capitalism, 13-56. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018.

9/14 Structuralism, Calvin Thomas (English, Georgia State)

  • Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today (1957).” In Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology, edited by Calvin Thomas, 77-88. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 
  • Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology, edited by Calvin Thomas, 149-82. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 
  • Saussure, Ferdinand. “The Sign Considered in Its Totality (1916).” In Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology, edited by Calvin Thomas, 45-47. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 
  • Thomas, Calvin. “Lesson Eight: The Unconscious is Structured Like a Language—or, Invasions of the Signifier.” In Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing, 226-46. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

9/21 Psychoanalysis, Rob Rushing (Comparative Literature, UIUC)

  • Freud, Sigmund. “’A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversion.” In Introduction to Psychoanalysis, translated by Alix Strachey and James Strachey, 179-204. 1924.
  • Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud.” In Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, 111-36. London: Routledge: 2001.
  • Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage.” In Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1-6. London: Routledge, 2001.
  • Lacan, Jacques. “The Partial Drive and Its Circuit.” In The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan, 174-86. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

9/28 Deconstruction, Katie Chenoweth (French & Italian, Princeton)

  • Derrida, Jacques. “Exergue” and “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” In Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 3-28. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
  • Derrida, Jacques. “Exordium” and “Injunctions of Marx.” In Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf, xvi-25. New York: Routledge, 2006.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass, 21-52. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

10/5 Biopolitics, Samantha Frost (Political Science, UIUC)

Required Readings

  • Agamben, Giorgio. “Anthropological Machine.” In The Open: Man and Animal, translated by Kevin Attell, 33-38. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004.
  • Agamben, Giorgio. Introduction to Homo Sacer, 9-14. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. 
  • Agamben, Giorgio. “Life Divided” and “A Life Inseparable from Its Form.” In The Use of Bodies, translated by Adam Kotsko, 195-213. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016.
  • Esposito, Roberto. “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18, no. 3 (2013): 83-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2013.834666.
  • Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In Power (The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984), edited by James D. Faubion, 201-22. New York: New Press, 2001.
  • Foucault, Michel. “One: 11 January 1978.” In Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, edited by Michel Senellart and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Graham Burchell, 1-23. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
  • Lee, Rachel C. “Chapter 1: How a Critical Biopolitcal Studies Lens Alters the Questions We Ask Vis-à-vis Race.” In The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies, 39-65. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 

Supplemental Readings

  • Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  • Cooper Melinda, and Catherine Waldby. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
  • Mbembé, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40. Project Muse. 
  • Meloni, Maurizio. “A Postgenomic Body: Histories, Genealogy, Politics.” Body and Society 24, no. 3 (2018): 3-38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X18785445.
  • Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  • Rabinow, Paul and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today.” BioSocieities 1 (2006): 195-217. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855206040014.
  • Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
  • Tallbear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

10/12 Postcolonial Theory, B. Venkat Mani (German, UW-Madison)

  • Gatrell, Peter. “Refugees—What’s Wrong with History?” Journal of Refugee Studies 30, no. 2 (2017): 170-89.
  • Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “On Being a Refugee, An American—and a Human Being.” In The Refugees, 211-18. New York: Grove Press, 2018.
  • Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile.” In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 137-49. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. 
  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “1996: Foucault and Najibullah.” In Other Asias, 132-60. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

10/19 Critical Race Theory, Curtis Marez (Ethnic Studies, UC-San Diego)

  • Marez, Curtis. “Precarious Locations: Streaming TV and Global Inequalities.” American Studies 60, no. 1 (2021): 9-32.
  • Melamed, Jodi. “Racial Capitalism.” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 76-85. JSTOR.
  • Robinson, Cedric. Preface to Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II, xi-xviii. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. See also chap. 4, “Resistance and Imitation in Early Black Cinema,” 180-202.

10/26 Environmental Studies, D. Fairchild Ruggles (Landscape Architecture, UIUC)

Required Readings

  • Fuller, Steve. “Making Agency Count: A Brief Foray Into the Foundations of Social Theory.” American Behavioral Scientist 37, no. 6 (1994): 741-53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764294037006003.
  • Gilbert, Scott, Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber.“A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 325-41. https://doi.org/10.1086/668166. 
  • Plumwood, Val. “Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 12, no. 4 (2001): 3-32. https://doi.org/10.1080/104557501101245225.

Supplemental Readings

  • Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. See esp. chap. 1, 27-68 and chap. 2, 71-100.

11/2 Disability Studies, Therí Pickens (English, Bates College)

  • Pickens, Therí. Black Madness::Mad Blackness. Duke University Press, 2019. See esp. the preface, ix-xii, the introduction, 1-22, and chap. 3, 74-94.

11/9 Queer Theory, Sharon P. Holland (American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill)

Required Readings

  • Benavente, Gabby and Julian Gill-Peterson. "The Promise of Trans Critique: Susan Stryker's Queer Theory.” GLQ Forum 25, no. 1 (2019): 23-28.

  • Hammonds, Evelynn. “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 2/3 (1994): 126-145.

  • Martin, Biddy. "Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias.” Diacritics 24, no. 2/3 (1994): 104-121.

  • Stryker, Susan. "Trans Studies Queer Theory's Evil Twin.” GLQ Forum 10, no.2 (April 2004): 212-215.

Supplemental Reading

  • “Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender.” GLQ Forum 10, no. 2 (April 2004): 211-313.

11/16 Indigenous Studies, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (American Studies, Wesleyan)

  • Kauanui, Kēhaulani J. “’A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity.” Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016). https://doi.org/10.25158/l5.1.7.
  • Kauanui, Kēhaulani J. “False Dilemmas and Settler Colonial Studies: Response to Lorenzo Veracini: ‘Is Settler Colonial Studies Even Useful?’” Postcolonial Studies 24, no. 2 (2020): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1857023.
  • Kauanui, Kēhaulani J. and Patrick Wolfe. “Patrick Wolfe on Settler Colonialism.” In Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders, edited by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, 343-60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
  • Somerville, Alice Te Punga. “OMG Settler Colonial Studies: Response to Lorenzo Veracini: ‘Is Settler Colonial Studies Even Useful?’” Postcolonial Studies 24, no. 2 (2020): 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1854980.
  • Speed, Shannon. “Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala.” American Quaterly 69, no. 4 (2017): 783-90. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2017.0064.
  • Veracini, Lorezno. “Is Settler Colonial Studies Even Useful?” Postcolonial Studies 24, no. 2 (2020): 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1854982.
  • Warrior, Robert. “Settler Sidekick Solidarity?: Response to Lorenzo Veracini: ‘Is Settler Colonial Studies Even Useful?’” Postcolonial Studies 24, no. 2 (2020): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1857024.
  • Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.