ANTH484: Asian Diasporas. 5-6:20pm  TTh, Davenport 113

Professor Martin Manalansan                          

Comparative study of Asian migration and disporas worldwide.  The course

considers the mobility of Asian peoples as part of emerging political and

cultural forces of globalization and transnationalism.  Of particular

interests are the gendered and sexualized dimensions of human movement

across political and cultural borders.

 

ANTH 504: COLONIALISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM  (1 unit)

Professor Alejandro Lugo                    

This course takes the position that the history of colonialism concerns us in our present, that it fashions it and deserves ongoing reinterpretation.  It interrogates anthropology's relationship to colonialism and the politics of anthropological representations of it.  The course considers contemporary theories of coloniality/postcoloniality and the literature which takes exception to the generalities of those theories.  The bulk of the reading will be historicized, ethnographic investigations of colonialism, "postcolonialism," and neocolonialism.  We will read theoretically informed works on "development" and "race." Reading requirements are heavy.  A research paper is required.  The course is a graduate seminar.  At least one course in social and/or cultural theory is a prerequisite for this course.

 

ANTH508: FEMINISM, GENDER AND SEXUALITY  (1unit)

Professor Alma Gottlieb                        

What is feminist anthropology, how does it relate to broader feminist theory, and how does it relate to anthropology?  Can feminism and cultural relativity engage in a productive dialogue?  What is feminist ethnography, and is/can/should it be written "differently"?  In this graduate seminar we will take a roughly chronological look at how a range of authors, from founding mothers to contemporary scholars, have reshaped the subdiscipline of cultural anthropology by reminding us that we are all gendered.  We explore a range of theoretical perspectives, from political economy to postcolonial to literary.  Although we mostly focus on writings by anthropologists, we will also look at relations between feminist anthropology and some other related disciplines.

 

ANTH 515F: DISCOURSE  (1/2 or 1 unit)

Professor Brenda Farnell                      

As ethnographers, we collect, translate and interpret “discourses” of all kinds.  We engage in conversations with our informants/consultants, shift to an internal dialogue when trying to analyze what it all means, talk with teachers/colleagues in the discipline and engage in writing texts.  Discourse centered approaches to anthropology consider language-in-use to be the primary means by which social action, cultural knowledge and social institutions are achieved, maintained and enacted.  “Culture” thus becomes a dynamic, emergent, dialogical process arising from the embodied interaction of agents in social and cultural spaces.  In this course, we explore a number of theories and methods from linguistic anthropology for analyzing discursive practices in some detail.  We connect these with Foucault’s use of the term “discourse” and “discursive formations” as they apply to language and power.  Students will be encouraged to apply the theories and methods of transcription and analysis learned in the course to their own research interests.

 

ANTH 515K: RACE AND RACIALIZATION  (1/2 or 1 unit)

Professor Bill Kelleher                         

This graduate seminar will examine a variety of theoretical positions on race, its construction, and its effects.  It will survey the position of race in the development of anthropological thought and the debates surrounding it.  It will attempt to discern the interconnections between racialization practices and racist institutions in a variety of geographical locations.  Throughout the course emphasis will be placed on the articulation of racism to other social practices/ institutions/ categories.  The course will examine issues of whiteness, normativity, and race/class struggles in the U.S.A.  Racist institutions, particularly in settler states, will be taken up throughout the semester and analyzed at length.  Australia, the United States, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel will be important sites of examination on this topic.  Racialization processes will be explored from both a comparative perspective and from a globalizing, interactive one.  Liberalism’s relation to racism will be discussed and examined.  Capitalist social formations of the past and present will be related to these considerations. Immigration and emerging racial formations in Europe will be addressed.  Neoliberalism’s articulation to contemporary transformations of global race relations will be a focus.  Essays by Franz Boas, Ashley Montague, George Stocking, Leith Mullings, Faye Harrison, Jane Hill, Lee Baker, Jr. and other anthropologists will be assigned along with ethnographic and historical works throughout the semester.  These anthropologists and their ideas will be subjected to rigorous debate and discussion by relating them to these empirical works.  The differences between ethnicizing and racializing processes and theorizations of them will be discussed, critiqued, and examined.

*** Students taking this course should have a background in both anthropological and social theory and should be prepared not only to read abundantly in several disciplines but also to discuss those readings cogently and constructively.

Readings for the course will be derived from the following texts among others:

George Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History.

W.E.B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn, The Philadelphia Negro, Souls of Black Folk.

Gargi Bhattacharyya, J. Gabriel, S. Small, Race and Power: Global Racism in the 21^st Century.

Vernon J. Williams, Jr.  Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries.

Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape.

Gillian Hart, Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics.

Unni Wikan, Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe.

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, selections from ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:’ the cultural politics of race and nation.

Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.

George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics.

Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation.

Seth Garfield, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism.

Dan Rabinowitz, Overlooking Nazaret

 

ANTH 557  SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SPACE   (1/2 or 1 unit)

Professor Helaine Silverman                  

A critical review of current literature offering major theoretical and empirical perspectives on space, place, landscape and the built environment.  Readings are drawn from the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, architecture, landscape architecture, geography, and cultural studies.  Among the topics to be covered are the following.
 
* social space
* lived space/phenomenology of space, place, landscape
* architectural space
* monuments and memorialization
* the afterlife of monuments
* representations of space, landscape, place
* symbolism and iconography/society and cosmology in architecture/worldviews
* pilgrimage
* sacred space, sacred place
* tourism,  place, and placelessness
* otherness: gender, race, ethnicity
* abandoned space
* settlement pattern analysis, spatial analysis
* urban space and spatiality
* the spaces of colonialism
* landscapes of power
* contested public space
* virtual space
 
The professor will contextualize each topic. Students will lead the discussion of the week's readings.  Students will write critical notes about the readings so as to facilitate discussion.  A term paper is required, a summary of which is to be presented in class during the final weeks of the semester.  The final written version is due one week after the last class session.

 

COMM 560 - Feminist Media Studies – Paula Treichler; Thursday, 3-5:50PM, 336 Gregory

COMM 560 addresses major areas of theoretical debate or interest in the broad topic of "Feminist Media Studies" and looks in depth at a number of theoretical issues which define it.  Develops an understanding of historical, psychoanalytic, interpretive, and social scientific approaches to the study of film and television texts, their reception, and their production.  Readings are extensive and directed toward illustrating the range of theoretical and empirical approaches applied to addressing questions of central interest in the field.  Viewings will emphasize some lesser-known historical texts central to theoretical debates in the field.  Viewings and readings are focued on "popular" film and television.  Same as GWS 560.  Prerequisite:  Graduate standing or consent of instructor.

 

Comparative and World Literature 581 Topic: A New Knowledge of Reality: Psychosis and Poetics

Nancy Blake

When the Surrealist Antonin Artaud confessed, “I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality,” he anticipated on psychoanalyst and sometime Surrealist fellow traveler Jacques Lacan’s later theorization of the register of the “Real”.  Lacanian analysis, both as clinical practice and as method for understanding cultural production, insists on the role of symbolization, or the defects thereof, in achieving access to the realm of the unconscious, which will most often encounter madness in its quest of the real.  “It is an accident in this register and in what takes place in it, namely, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the Other, and in the failure of the paternal metaphor, that I designate the defect that gives psychosis its essential condition and the structure that separates it from neurosis.”

Most fundamentally for our purposes in this seminar, Lacan came to prefer working with psychotics, distinguishing himself from his master Freud who seems to have found insanity distasteful. Lacan went so far as to identify psychosis with the kernel of humanity: “Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.”

During the course of this seminar we will attempt an approach to an experience at the limits of the human, yet which, according to the above opinion, has something to tell us about what it is to be human.  Madness has assumed various roles throughout the history of western and non-western civilization, but has always remained closely linked to the sacred and to religious insight.  Poetry has, from the beginning, had the function of exploring the frontiers of this experience.  In secular societies, the arts are perhaps the only means of access to this experience which is at the basis of our reality.

Readings:Theory: Freud, “Psychoanalytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (Schreber); Foucault, Madmess and Civilization; Lacan, “On a Question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis”; Zizek, On Belief; Poetry: Euripides, Medea; Artaud, Selection; Ingeborg Bachman, Malina; Film: Roman Polansky, Repulsion; K. Kieslowski, The Double Life of Veronique; Michael Haneke, The Piano Teacher

 

English 504  - Theories of Cinema – Pr. Curry

Seminar on influential theories and accompanying debates about the textual/ extra-textual mechanisms and cultural/ political impact of cinema and related screen media. Same as CWL 504, and Cinema 504

 

English 537, Seminar in Victorian Literature: “Victorian Gothic” - Peter Garrett

Recent studies of nineteenth-century fiction have shown an increasing interest in writing that draws on Gothic forms and themes.  Monster stories, sensation novels, crime fiction, and fin-de-siècle fantasies have attracted the sort of critical scrutiny previously reserved for more realistic mainstream fiction, and the effect has been to change our sense of the whole period.  The violent passions and extreme situations of Gothic, its cultivation of excess and transgression, put intense pressure on normative conceptions of the self, gender roles, and social class.  Gothic terror and mystery pose counter-narratives to more optimistic stories of civilized progress and domestic moderation, and their disturbing effects may linger beyond the plot resolutions that seek to contain them.  Through a series of Romantic and Victorian texts, this seminar will explore such cultural conflicts while also considering an aspect that has so far received less attention: how Gothic writing produces self-conscious reflections on narrative form itself.

TEXTS: Austen, NORTHANGER ABBEY; Shelley, FRANKENSTEIN; Hogg, CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER; Poe, TALES; Brontë, WUTHERING HEIGHTS; Dickens, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD; Collins, THE WOMAN IN WHITE; Eliot, “The Lifted Veil”; Le Fanu, “Carmilla”; Stevenson, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE; Stoker, DRACULA; Wilde, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY; James, THE TURN OF THE SCREW; Doyle, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

 

English 543: Seminar in Modern British Literature -Sex, Gender, and Colonialism in Modernist Fiction

(Esty)     W 3:30-5:20         Room 125 English Bldg

In this seminar, we will concentrate our analysis on Anglophone womenwriters from the so-called peripheries of the British empire, many of whommigrated to London in order to pursue a literary career and all of whom have meditated on the relation between geographical marginality and other(real or metaphorical) brands of outsiderness.  Ranging fromlate-Victorian to contemporary fiction, the readings strike a variety of relationships to high modernist narrative technique and reveal a shifting set of intersections (or disconnections) between sex, gender, andcolonialism.  For comparative purposes, we will read Virginia Woolf's The Waves (with an eye towards intertwined themes of imperial and sexual ideology) and, perhaps, some Conrad or Joyce.  Secondary readings will bedrawn from diverse sources in both feminist and colonial-discourse theory.Primary texts will likely include the following:  Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm;  Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career;  KatherineMansfield, selected stories; Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark and/or Wide Sargasso Sea;  Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September; Doris Lessing, Martha Quest and/or The Four-Gated City;  Janet Frame, The Edge of the Alphabet; and Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place.  Seminar members will contribute occasional response papers, a short annotated bibliography surveying recent critical approaches to one of the main texts, and a final paper of20 pages.

 

English 553: American Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s -Robert Dale Parker

This course, deliberately organized more by time-period than by any particular argument about the time-period, will study a wide range of novels and stories and their varying refractions of formal, historical, and social interests, including city fiction, southern fiction, race and ethnicity, stream-of-consciousness, modernism, poverty, the grotesque, and literary and social value. We will also address questions about gender, agency, representation, narrative form, literary history, and close reading that I might bring to almost any course. We will read a good number of works that rarely appear on a syllabus and a modest assortment of related materials: works by the same or related writers, contemporary magazines, contemporary responses, history, criticism, etc. Writing assignments will probably include your choice of either a) three short-to-medium length papers or b) one short paper followed by a paper that aspires to article scale. Please note that there will be a reading assignment for the first class posted by my office door at least one week before classes begin. Anyone considering the course is welcome to talk with me before registering (my office is EB 329).
Reading list (highly tentative): Selections from The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Nella Larsen, Passing; Dorothy Parker, selections from Complete Stories; Anita Loos,Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing; Henry Roth, Call It Sleep; Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed; Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; and selections from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.

 

ENGL 581: Seminar in Literary Theory and Criticism – Michael Rothberg

Meets with: CWL 501 and HUMAN 495Monday and Wednesday, 7:30-9:00 pm

This course will provide a historical survey of the foundational thinkers, texts, and schools that orient contemporary work in the humanities from Kant and Hegel to Queer Theory and Postcolonial Studies. As an “advanced introduction,” the course will be appropriate both for those with some background in critical theory and those with relatively little. The course will include significant discussion of figures such as: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Benjamin, Adorno, Beauvoir, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Geertz, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, and Butler. Among the topics we will certainly address are: history, the subject, power, language, ideology, materiality, gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism.

Modern Critical Theory will have an unusual format. It will be associated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory’s Colloquium Series and Criticism Seminar; this means that it will meet twice a week, once a week in a public session with other graduate students and faculty members and once a week in a closed session limited to registered students. We will draw on “guest experts” from both on and off campus who will visit the seminar and lecture on particular topics throughout the semester. The purpose of this course is to ensure that graduate students receive a rigorous introduction to critical theories and methodologies central to a variety of fields in the humanities and to provide the basis for interdisciplinary conversation and intellectual community among graduate students and faculty members from across the university.

Requirements: Attendance at all public and closed sessions; active individual and group participation; one 10-page analytical paper during the semester; a timed, take-home essay exam of approximately 10 pages at the end of the semester. Readings for the first meeting on August 25 will be posted here before classes begin. The course schedule will also be posted here. Please contact me if you have any questions about the course: mpr@uiuc.edu.

 

French 543: Seminar topic: September 11 and After in France – Larry Schehr

The seminar will focus on the discourses produced about September 11, 2001 in France in three key areas: literary discourse as a reaction to and mourning of the events of that day, ideological and philosophical discourses on the left and on the right, and discussion of the relations in the West, specifically the relations between France (and Europe) and the United States in the wake of the events.   In order better to understand the play of discourses, literary and non-literary discourses will be alternated. All discussion and readings in French.

 

History 502AS: PROB IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY     (Sutcliffe & Hartnett)

            Topic:  Atlantic Enlightenments: The Flow of Ideas Between Europe and America in the Revolutionary Era, c.1750-c.1800

            The foundation of the United States was perhaps the most emblematic achievement of the European Enlightenment. For many Americans, and some Europeans too, it was only in the New World, free from the burdens of theocracy, aristocracy and oppressive government, that the Enlightenment vision of a rationally ordered and progressive polity could be realized. However, the Enlightenment was an immensely variegated movement. Which strands of European thought influenced the American revolutionaries – and did the interpretation and significance of these thinkers change as their ideas crossed the Atlantic? Events in North America were also avidly followed in Europe, and made a profound impression on intellectual life in Britain and France in particular. This course will attempt to trace these flows of transatlantic intellectual exchange, asking equally how America was shaped by European thought and how western Europe responded to America in the revolutionary era.

            This course is thus an exploration of the intellectual dimension of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. “Atlantic Studies” is currently one of the fastest-growing historiographical subfields, and is at the forefront of challenges to the traditional insularity both of early American history and Europe-centred Imperial histories. The course is equally suitable for Americanists, Europeanists and specialists on Empire: all these fields are very valuably deepened through an Atlantic perspective. While the focus will be on the later eighteenth century, participants specializing in earlier or later fields will be welcome in their written assignment to apply the perspective of intercontinental intellectual exchange to their own areas and periods of interest.

            Primary readings will include, from the European side, selections by Cesare Becaria, Jeremy Bentham, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Voltaire, the Abbé Raynal, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others; and, from the American side, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Gardiner, Thomas Jefferson, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Paine, and others. These will be supported by a range of secondary readings, focusing on historiographical classics in Atlantic- and ideas-oriented early American history (by historians such as Bernard Bailyn, Henry May and Garry Wills), and on pioneering and influential recent work in Atlantic history, by David Armitage, Linda Colley, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, and others.

            When applicable this class will meet with a parallel seminar taught by Stephen Hartnett (Speech Communication). The seminar will thus have specialist input both from a Europeanist and an Americanist, and will also explicitly explore interdisciplinary contrasts between History and the more rhetoric-focused approach of Speech Communication.

 

History 502CC: PROB IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY     (Crowston, C. & Chandra, S.)

            Topic:  Universal History and Its Discontents

            This course will study the role of chronology, territoriality and narrative as tools of historical understanding and as crucial components in the construction of historical knowledge. We will examine how oppositions like West/non-West, modern/pre-modern, history/tradition have shaped historical understanding and the formation of the historical discipline itself. Critically examining the relations implicit in these oppositions, and the manner in which they have been imagined and deployed, we will question how history might look different if we moved beyond and outside them. The course will focus specifically on the movements of goods, people and ideas across the premodern and modern worlds, in and between Europe and Asia. In addition to reading primary and secondary sources in transnational and global history, we will engage a variety of theoretical literatures. A central aim of the course will be to shape questions for research and teaching in global history.

 

History 502PF: PROB IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY     (Fritzsche)

            Topic:  History and Memory

            This is an interdisciplinary, comparative course.  Themes will include the rise of historical consciousness; the presence of the past; commemorative politics; the Holocaust; nostalgia; forgetting; attics; quilts; collecting; antiques; and museums, and will embrace private and public spheres, and will pay special attention to literary genres of remembrance. 

            The course will be run both as a problems and a research course; topics will be drawn primarily from modern Europe and the United States, and emphasize theoretical and methodological approaches.

 

History 502PF1: PROB IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY     (Fritzsche & Harris)

 Topic:  Suburban Space, 1945-1960   Meets with LA 590

            This interdisciplinary graduate seminar explores the spatial and cultural dimensions of suburban space in the United States from 1945 to the present. Our primary focus will be the house, the garden, and the neighborhood, examined from a historical perspective, and through the use of a wide range of primary and secondary visual, material, and literary sources. But we will also investigate the suburban dreamscape. We welcome graduate students from a wide range of disciplines including history, sociology, landscape architecture, architecture, art history, geography, and urban planning. We will examine the ways race, gender, class, national identity, and self-fashioning (among others) have shaped the suburban spaces we have inhabited and constructed over the past half century, and we will inquire into the ways in which such spaces construct culture.

 

History 551B: PROB EUROPEAN HIST SINCE 1789     (Matheson, T.)

            Topic:  Problems and Directed Readings in Modern European History, 1789-1989

            This course is intended as an introduction to graduate study in Modern European History.  Our goal is to become familiar with a selection of the major theoretical and methodological debates that have shaped the field, to sharpen our abilities to identify and critique historiographical arguments and to develop an awareness of the issues and topics now influencing new directions in historical research.  Pervasive thematic concerns include: modernity and modernizaton; paradigms and peculiarities; identity and difference; continuity and rupture; nationalism and transnationalism; and time, space and culture. Necessarily partial in scope, our syllabus will draw on both classic texts and recent scholarship.  Readings may include works by Roger Chartier, Franois Furet, Lynn Hunt, Peter Sahlins, E.P. Thompson, Anna Clarke, Edward Said, Elizabeth Thompson, Stephen Kotkin, Daniel Goldhagen, Christopher Browning, Stephen Kern, T. J. Clarke, Modrus Eksteins, Geoff Eley, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Robert J. C. Young, Kristin Ross and Padraic Kenney.  In addition to sharing the responsibilities for introducing weekly discussions, assignments will include weekly one-page response papers, a 5 page critical review and one longer historiographical essay (12-15) pages, which may be submitted in two drafts.

 

History 572A: PROB IN US HIST SINCE 1815    (Reagan)

        Topic: US Core Readings.

        This course is designed to introduce students to core questions and debates in United States History.  The goal is to create a critical and stimulating discussion of American historical scholarship.  In this course, we will be engaging with problems and questions that have driven generations of historians of the U.S. as well as more recent topics that have sparked new insights and new debates.  Readings will range from the colonial period through the twentieth century.  Gaining knowledge of the content of American history is only part of the point of the class.  We will gain a sense of how historians’ interpretations of the past have changed over time by reading and comparing a selection of older texts as well as current historical work.  Throughout the course we will be analyzing how historians have done their work, what questions they have asked–or ignored, the historical methods and sources used, how historians construct historical arguments, and the theoretical underpinnings of historical research.

        The course will also include an introduction to the major references for secondary literature and archival materials in American history and probably a library field trip.

            Corn, newspapers, desire, paranoia, whiteness, cotton, slavery, germs, the Communist Party, children, laws, guns, gender, welfare, war, the vote, and much more will be part of our conversation.

 

History 573A: SEMINAR AMER HIST SINCE 1789     (Barrett)

            Topic:  Race, Class and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America

            This will be a research seminar in American social history of the twentieth century with a special emphasis on class, race, and ethnicity.  We will focus particularly on the historical experiences of common people -- at home, in the workplace, or in the community.  In addition to more traditional labor history topics, it is possible to do political, immigration and ethnic, women's, family, urban, intellectual and cultural, and other types of historical research while still focusing on non-elites.  My own interests at the moment involve the social and ideological bases of American labor radicalism in the twentieth century / ethnic and racial identity and relations among workers from diverse backgrounds / and the cosmologies of common people.  I am also interested in religious belief, the nature of emotional bonds, and generational conflict within immigrant wage earning families.

            There are several goals in the seminar:  The first is to develop an impression of the key historiography up to this point.  The reading part of the seminar will be concentrated early in the term with the remainder of the term set aside for research and writing.  A second goal is to consider some new conceptual approaches  -- not in the abstract but as they might be implemented with new sources and research methods.  The course also aims to introduce students to the research process itself -- choosing and refining a topic; developing analytical questions to frame your work; identifying and securing sources; writing and revising one's work; criticizing and helping others with theirs.  We will be looking at a wide variety of sources and methods by visiting parts of the library and other research venues and by talking with colleagues who have particular research skills.  The ultimate aim, of course, is to produce a substantial, original research paper that will be shared with others -- in the seminar itself, at a conference, and through publication.

            In order to equip students with the information they need to do their research and writing, we will meet twice each week, once at the scheduled meeting time and once at a mutually convenient time in the evening, for the first several weeks of the term.  From that point on, students will be working on their own, though I will meet with you individually to discuss your projects.  The group will reassemble around the middle of the term to discuss research proposals and again toward the end of the term to discuss rough drafts. Although we have a wonderful research library and other resources on campus, it may be necessary to do some traveling and to use inter-library loan.  We will discuss these and other scheduling problems early in the term, but students should be thinking about them and developing a topic, in advance of the seminar.

            Grades in the course are based not only on the final paper, but also on one's role in the collective work of the seminar -- discussions of the literature, sources, and methods and constructive criticism of one's own and other students' work.  Shorter written assignments will include ideas for research topics, research proposals, bibliographies, and critiques of other students' papers.  The exercises will constitute steps toward the final paper.  Please be prepared to work collectively by sharing ideas and sources and reading one another's work seriously.  Final drafts of all papers will be due during the final exam period at the end of the semester and, in the interests of the students involved, I will not provide extensions on the deadlines.

            I will be glad to discuss your research interests with you before the beginning of the fall semester.

 

History 590: HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY      (Symes)

            This seminar examines changing conceptions of history and the historian’s craft from antiquity to the present.  Its goal is to familiarize future historians with the many different ways of writing history, while at the same time exposing them to some of the great achievements of historical interpretation.  Emphasis will fall on the role of the historian in society, as a commentator on contemporary events or as a teller of stories about the past; the problems of objectivity, motive, and evidence; the powerful influences of religion and chauvinism; and the impact of methodologies borrowed from philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory.  Readings will be drawn from the works of Herodotus and Thucydides, the historians of ancient Rome and China, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, Machiavelli and Vico, the European historians of the nineteenth century, W.E.B. DuBois, and a number of contemporary scholars.

 

Political Science 572, 40368, A History of Pol Theories, II,  W 1-3:20, 116 LH

M.A. Orlie-Politics and Ethics: Classical Texts, Contemporary Illuminations

    The objectives of the course are twofold. First, to offer an advanced introduction to certain classical texts. Second, to explore contemporary theoretical debates as they emerge from the interpretation of these texts. Greek tragedies and the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine as well as Hellenistic Ethics have informed recent articulations of western intellectual traditions and challenges to them. In particular, the seminar will address contemporary critiques of metaphysics, genealogies and contestations of the subject or human character, understandings of politics, tragic perspectives in response to the contingency of the human and natural worlds, and formulations of ethics in light of the foregoing themes.

    We will focus upon classical texts such as the following: Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Antigone; Plato, Republic; Aristotle, Politics  and Nicomachean Ethics; Augustine, Confessions. We will consider a range of contemporary texts, including: J. Butler, Antigone’s Claim; J.P.Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory; M.Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness and The Therapy of Desire; A.MacIntyre, After Virtue; W.Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative; F.Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; H.Arendt, The Human Condition; P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life; J. Habermas, Theory and Practice; H.Gadamer, Truth & Method and Dialogue & Dialectic; G.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense; C.Taylor, Sources of the Self; M.Foucault, History of Sexuality II. The Use of Pleasure and History of Sexuality III. The Care of the Self; J.F.Lyotard, Just Gaming; M.Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays; E.Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic.

 

Soc 596 - The sixties and cybernetics

Andrew Pickering -336 Lincoln Hall: 3.00-5.30 pm, Mondays

This graduate seminar will try to get to grips with two historical cultural formations. One can be loosely but suggestively described as the psychedelic 1960s—the strange and fascinating counter-culture or underground that flourished in that decade. No satisfactory scholarly history of this period and culture presently exists, but we will study primary texts from the period (fiction and nonfiction) and later reflections, and we can watch some classic movies and listen to a few LPs. The other cultural formation we will examine is the strange and fascinating antidisciplinary field of cybernetics that flourished after World War II, especially in Britain—as manifested in very distinctive approaches to science, engineering, robotics, computing, philosophy, brain science, psychiatry, management, politics, the arts, entertainment, architecture, and religion.

 The object of juxtaposing these formations is twofold. First, I want to explore the real historical connections between them, going, for example, from cybernetics to the practice of such legendary 60s figures as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and R. D. Laing, and, more generally, into explorations of consciousness, the antipsychiatry movement, Eastern spirituality, etc. Second, I want to explore what one could call the ontological resonances between the two formations. Both, it seems to me, presupposed a world that is not exhaustively knowable, not subject to human domination, but rather to be experimentally explored in a performative and adaptive fashion. In this sense, both acted out, often in very different ways and arenas, the ontology I tentatively laid out in my book, The Mangle of Practice—which my current interest in cybernetics and the 60s has grown out of

The seminar has a political edge. In cybernetic terms, we now live in a low variety world, in which, crudely, the only response to free-market globalising capitalism and associated military ventures seems to be brute opposition. The 60s and cybernetics both appreciated and exemplified higher variety, and the hope is to find some inspiration there (without being uncritical) for novel ways forward that might be explored in the present

FORMAT: open-ended discussions of assigned readings/topics

TEXTS: to be announced

GRADES: based upon one or two essays and contributions to class discussion

CONTACT: pickerin@uiuc.edu

 

SOC 400 – Classical Sociological Theory

Analysis of major classical sociological theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stressing the social, historical, and philosophic foundations of sociological theory; primary emphasis on Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.

 

SpCom 538, “Theories of Communication and Power”-Prof. James Hay

This seminar will be an introductory review of contemporary theories about the relation between communicative practice and power. Although the seminar and assigned readings will devote some attention to writing about communication and power that is not particularly recent, the seminar will focus primarily upon current writing.  The seminar is open to students from any department and discipline interested in the general topic, and the seminar will emphasize the interdisciplinarity of understanding the relation between communication and power.

 The course takes as its subject two widely theorized but also potentially inflated terms.  Therefore the course asks the following preliminary questions. Given that communication involves particular practices, technologies, and institutions, what does the expression “communication” refer to in these times?  How have current theories and research about communication understood relations of power in these times?  Are all theories of communication, theories about power?   Why should or shouldn’t communication be central to thinking about power, control, agency, and/or the political?  Some of the topics and issues pertinent to these questions and the course include:

-Logics of Mediation (Modern, Postmodern, and counter-Modern)

-Technology and Technologization

-After “Mass Communication”: Broadcasting, Narrowcasting, and New Information (Cyber-)Technologies

-Screen Theory and Network Theory

–Audiences

-Communication and New Economies: Rethinking Commodification, Commercialization, and Consumption

-Communication as Culture

-Conceptualizing Dominant, Alternative, and Oppositional Practice

-Governmentalization and Managerialism (juridical, corporate, institutional, communitarian, “non-                governmental”)

-Legislating and Regulating Communication

-Citizenship

-Rights and Access to Media and Communication Resources

-Agency

-Technologies of the Self

-Communication and Power in Everyday Life

-Changing Conceptions of Public and Private Spheres

-The Production of Social Space (the domestic sphere, the city, the nation, trans-national space, “air space,” “outer space,” “cyberspace”)

-New Models of Mobility: Communication as Travel and Transport

-Surveillance and Security

-Globalization and Empire

-Warfare and Communication

-Disciplinarity, Research, and New Knowledges about Communication and Power

 

Students will be expected to complete one of the following kind of projects:

-a final paper that takes a position vis a vis at least three of the assigned readings,

- an analysis (decided with me) that relies upon at least three of the assigned readings

-two book reviews that engage three of the assigned readings.

 Students also will be expected to keep up with class readings and to participate in class discussions. Each class meeting will be organized into two sections--a first part wherein I will discuss the week’s assigned readings, and a second part wherein we will discuss questions and issues related to the readings and possibly my lecture

 

Speech Communication 538, Fall 2004, Wednesdays 5:00-8:00 PM

Transatlantic Enlightenments & The Rhetorics and Politics of Revolution, 1750-1800with Stephen Hartnett, Associate Professor of Speech Communication

Delivering a July Fourth oration in Boston in 1785, John Gardiner offered this observation on the relationships among the different forms of government and their corresponding stages of Enlightenment:The introduction and progress of freedom have generally attended the introduction and progress of letters and science. In despotick governments the people are mostly illiterate, rude, and uncivilized; but in states where CIVIL LIBERTY hath been cherished, the human mind hath generally proceeded in improvement, learning and knowledge have prevailed, and the arts and sciences have flourished.Thus expressing a belief held widely at the time by post-revolutionary Americans, Gardiner argued that Old World monarchies lead to stupid and unmannerly followers, while New World freedom and CIVIL LIBERTY lead to brave seekers of higher truths. The fact that Gardiner offers this nation-stroking claim on July Fourth does not diminish the representative grandeur of its vision, for Americans of all classes and parties believed on every day of the year that their political revolution had initiated a golden age of cultural, religious, and scientific progress. The Enlightenment may have been initiated in Europe, the argument went, but it could reach its fruition only in America, where “learning and knowledge” were free to develop outside the stultifying grasp of “despotick governments.”  Such nationalist versions of the Enlightenment elide the fact that America’s most advanced practitioners of “letters and science” did so largely either under the leadership of or in collaboration with European intellectuals.  Indeed, as we will study in this seminar, the fact is that the American Revolution and its multiple Enlightenments blossomed as part of a transatlantic community.  Our goal, then, is to study the flow of ideas (and goods) between Europe and America, to watch as the Old World and New World debate competing versions of Enlightenment, and to wonder about the ways these conversations contributed to revolutions on both continents.

  Primary readings will include, from the European side, selections by Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Abbe Reynal, Adam Smith, Voltaire, and others; from the American side, works by John Adams, Ben Franklin, John Gardiner, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, and others.  We will read major philosophical works alongside public speeches, thus mediating the printed and spoken word.  Likewise, the figures considered here will enable us to think not about one Enlightenment but about competing and collaborative transatlantic enlightenments, and to do so while engaging in debates about modern capitalism, prison and punishment, science and ethics, law and government, race and slavery, and, woven throughout all of these topics, the politics and rhetorics of revolution. 

Secondary readings will include selections from Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon, 2000); Gary Wills’ Inventing America (Vintage, 1978); Henry May’s The Enlightenment in America (Oxford, 1976); David Armitage’s The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard, 1967); Michael Meranze’s Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (North Carolina, 1996), and selected journal articles.

Note that when applicable this seminar will meet with a parallel History Department seminar taught by Professor Adam Sutcliffe.