ANTH480: Intrepretive Anthropology
Gottlieb, A T 1:30 - 4:30 Credit: 4 hours.
Focus on recent developments in symbolic and interpretive anthropology; topics covered include
writing the ethnographic text, subject-object relations, critical reflection on fieldwork, construction of the self,
dialogism, practice, performance, narrative, power, and representation. Prerequisite: ANTH 421 and ANTH 463, or
similar courses in anthropology, the social sciences, or the humanities, and consent of instructor.
ANTH512: LANGUAGE AND CULTURE (4 hrs)
Professor Janet Keller Office: 395 Davenport Hall; PH: 333-3529
This course offers advanced students an introduction to theoretical foundations and practical methods of anthropological linguistics. An historical review of seminal ideas and debates provides the initial groundwork for understanding contemporary issues. Transcription techniques and analytical approaches to meaning will be explored with a linguistic consultant (assuming we can make arrangements for someone to join us), following the discussions of intellectual history. The final third of the course is devoted to an overview of active research arenas and detailed study of two or more current problem areas. Student evaluations are based on 3 take home examinations. The first and last sections will each be followed by essays requiring critical review of the theoretical literature. The practicum section of the course will be concluded with an assignment based on methodologies and analytical techniques.
Texts:
Blount, Ben (ed.) 1995 Language, Culture and Society. A Book of Readings. Second Edition. Prospect heights, IL: Waveland.
Chomsky, Noam 1984 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. NY: Praeger.
Hanks, William 1996 Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Duranti, Alessandro 1999 Language Matters in Anthropology: A Lexicon for the Millenium. Journal of Linguistic Anth. 9:1 and 2.
Lyons, John L. 1981 Language and Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jakobson, Roman 1978 Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Available at Dup-It Copy Shop.
Bauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles 2003 Voices of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de [1959] 1966 Course in General Linguistics. NY" McGraw-Hill Book Co.
Austin, J. L. 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
These will be augmented by on-line reserve readings.
ANTH515B: NATION AND THE POLITICS OF FERTILITY AND SEXUALITY
(2 or 4 hrs)
Professor Laura Bellows Office: 391 Davenport Hall; PH: 244-7459
This course explores the impact of feminist scholarship on studies of nationalism in Asia, the result of which has been an efflorescence of work that attends to gender within nationalist ideologies, discourses and agendas. This course takes the gendered nature of nationalist discourse as a point of departure to explore general issues around the construction of nations through control of subjects' bodies and fertilities and the specificity of these processes globally.
We will examine the particular attention states and state-like groups pay to sexuality within projects designed to shape nations through control of subjects' fertilities, such as in pro-natalist movements or family-planning campaigns. This focus on sexuality and fertility entails considerable scholarly attention to the impact on women's reproductivity of particular nationalist projects. In this course, we expand our view of what counts as sexuality to include an examination of how explicit rejections of conjugality play into nationalist debates, specifically monastic vows of celibacy, rejections of marriage, and preservation of virginity.
This course situates these conceptions of nation and nationalism within the context of scholarship devoted to colonial genealogies of race and nation and their deployment, expressed through the policing of gendered ethnic relations and modes of sexuality. In addition to working through the multiple ways sexuality and fertility are implicated in the construction and delineation of nation in these discourses, this course takes a critical look at the place in these debates of erotic desire. Following Anne Stoler's exploration of how particular desires are created through forecasts of the consequences of certain kinds of couplings and sexual behaviors, we will attend to the question of desire for the potential it has to augment our appreciation of post-colonial states' and religious groups' efforts to create nations and maintain control of subjects, but more than that, to determine who counts as a subject and how subjects will be (re)produced.
Over the course of the semester, students will be required to turn in a critical paper (1-2 pages) each week based on the readings. At the end of the term, each student will complete a research paper (20-25 pages) on an approved topic of the students choosing. Students may be asked to work in small groups to do an in-class presentation on one book from the recommended reading list and to collaborate on a one page overview to be handed out to the class during the presentation and used to prompt discussion. Students may engage in short fieldwork projects under the rubric of the Ethnography of the University Project, results from which will contribute to their research papers.
ANTH515F: BODY, PERSON AND CULTURAL THEORY
(2 or 4 hrs)
Professor Brenda Farnell Office: 209E Davenport Hall; PH: 244-9226
During the past twenty-five years there has been a virtual explosion of interdisciplinary literature on ‘the body’. The immediate theoretical background to this interest lies in a tension between Freudian theory and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. Foucault, Bourdieu and Giddens are three social theorists who have attempted to respond to this tension. Growing out of this, in anthropology, Jackson, Csordas and Desjarlais draw upon Merleau-Ponty’s experiential body, whereas Williams, Farnell and Varela offer an integrative approach that unites experience and agency. In contrast, contributions from literary/cultural studies by Lacan, Kristeva and Butler draw inspiration from the Freudian tradition. In this course, we will examine anthropological contributions to, and critiques of, these approaches to the problem of ‘embodiment.’ Why has attention to ‘the body’ emerged so recently? Why is ‘the body’ a theoretical problem for anthropology and ethnographic research? We will develop a critical, historically and theoretically informed understanding of these various contributions, identifying approaches to “the body” and “personhood” which meet the requirements of anthropological theorizing for cross-cultural and comparative adequacy. Students will be encouraged to apply theoretical resources explored in the course to their own research interests.
ANTH564: MUSEUM THEORY AND PRACTICE
(4hrs)
Professor Helaine Silverman Office: 295 Davenport Hall; PH: 333-1315
We will examine the history and social life of museums and how museums have been studied by anthropologists. We will consider early collecting activities and the development of the museum in the 19th and 20th centuries and into the postmodern present. We will examine the relationship between museums and evolutionary ethnology, cultural relativism, physical anthropology, archaeology, natural history, as well as relationships between museums and communities (e.g., issues of repatriation, diversity, multiculturalism). We will seek to understand the cultural and political contexts of building ethnographic collections and displays and education programs. We will examine changes in the roles of museums, notably as the museum has become part of the culture industry. We will examine the emergence of the museum as a focus of anthropological and theoretical inquiry and as a subject of ethnography itself. We also will pay attention to legal and ethical issues surrounding the development and use of collections. Assignments include: (1) a critical analysis of the articles that have appeared in the Museum Anthropology section of American Anthropologist since the beginning of this section in the journal (1999); (2) study visit to Krannert Art Museum, Spurlock Museum and Champaign County Historical Museum with write-up of comparative analysis of the two museums; (3) development of a proposal for an exhibition and accompany it with textual explanations, diagrams of the layout of the exhibit, photocopies of the pieces you will exhibit and where they go in the exhibition, etc.
ARTH591, Dana Rush: Seminar in African Art: Modern and Contemporary (client-driven) African Art
Wednesdays, 3:00-5:50 p.m. Art and Design 315
*although listed as Independent Readings, this class may count as a graduate seminar.
This seminar will explore the predicament of “modern” and “contemporary” client-driven African art from the 1960s to the present. We shall discuss the inevitable issues of marginalizations; the Western perceptions of “Africanness” and “authenticity,” as well as charged and contested tags of “traditional,” “modern,” “urban,” “international,” and “contemporary.” The main struggle contemporary (global) African artists face is not Western resistance to African difference, but rather a Western obsession with and insistence upon difference. Why does the contemporary art market perpetuate “exoticism”? What can be done? Can an artist born in Africa make “contemporary art,” or must his/her work have a direct reference to Africa, whether fictive or not? How then do the fictions of “Africa” play out in the contemporary art world? What strategies must contemporary artists from Africa employ to transcend this predicament? Contemporary African diaspora art and artists will also be discussed. Requirements: weekly readings and reactions, research paper, and presentation.
CINE503, Hay. "Current Directions in the Historiography of Cinema and Technologies of Visualization."
T 2-4:50
While there is a history of the historiography of cinema, this seminar is mostly concerned with recent issues and directions in the historiography of cinema and of modern technologies of visualization. The seminar also is interested in forms of historical analysis that are not directly about cinema and image-technology but that are impacting (serving as templates for) how the history of cinema and technologies of visualization is conducted. For instance, recent histories of cultural economies, governmentalities, medicine, anthropology, sport, warfare, surveillance, cybernetics, criminology, education, pornography, (post-)colonialism, globalization, the production of space (i.e., histories of architecture or cities), transportation, and even refrigeration all are shaping how historians are rethinking cinema and/or technologies of visualization.
The seminar will review current historical approaches that conceive of cinema as an institution, a body of representational/signifying practices, a assemblage of technologies, an apparatus of power and control, a product to be consumed, and a cultural form–approaches that, in short, understand cinema as a relatively discrete and distinctive set of practices. In these times, however, it has become difficult to discern the specific features, technologies, and uses of something called “cinema”. More than ever, cinema is conjoined to, and even difficult to separate from, various screen media, audio/video communication, recording technologies–a broad regime of visualization. And more than ever, watching “movies” can occur almost anywhere. Therefore, to what exactly does “cinema” refer any longer, and about what exactly is one writing or analyzing when one writes a history of cinema? Now, more than even ten years ago, one might ask whether cinema has (or ever has had) its own history? Is it fair to think about the history of cinema purely or primarily as a history of the “moving image,” screens, visual recording through cameras, or particular sites of exhibition such as the movie theater? What conditions (in pedagogy, academic research, and publishing) now make it necessary, challenging, or impractical to study and write about the history of cinema, TV, or any medium–or to analyze broader categories such as “technologies of visualization”? By posing questions such as these, this seminar seeks to emphasize the disciplinarity and the inter-disciplines of current directions in the historical studies of cinema and technologies of visualization.
COMM580 Denzin W 12 – 1:50 Qualitative Methods and Performance Ethnography
Analysis of social interaction based on the social psychology of C.H. Cooley, G.H. Mead, and W.I. Thomas; presentation of problems of theory, concepts, and method. Same as SOC 580. Prerequisite: 4 hours graduate credit in sociology.
COMM590 McCarthy MW 2-3:50 Globalization Communications and Culture
The events of 9/11 and their repercussions have provoked a particular urgency within the field of communication studies to better understand how modern human actors are connected across the particularities of ethnicity, nation, region, culture, language, and identity. Indeed, in the broad theater of the human sciences, across disciplines and fields of affiliation, there is now a collective intellectual desire, perhaps not always fully articulated, to explore the matter of global interconnections---inequalities, uneven development, movement and migration of people, ideologies, images and economic and cultural capital--- in a far more rigorous way than we have considered these issues in the past. Recent scholarship has tended to subsume these issues under the general concept of “Globalization” (Castells, 2001; Hoogvelt, 2001). In this sense, globalization refers to elaborated processes that have affected the relations among human groups across local, regional, and national borders from the very earliest beginnings of modernity. However, these large-scale processes have in the last few decades achieved a level of unparalleled acceleration and diffusion, owing in no small measure to the amplification and multiplication of the networking and interactional practices made possible by computerization and electronic mediation generally. In a very practical sense, globalization defines that configuration of everyday processes by which events, decisions, and activities conducted in one area of the world can now have immediate effect in an entirely different and distant part of our globe. Sometimes, these effects can be positive---as in the growing ecology awareness movement. At other times, the dynamics of globalization can be completely devastating—as in the immediate and prolonged recessionary ripple effects on national economies around the world as a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York City.
But the matter goes beyond spectacular events. Globalization is expressed in the everyday movement of goods, services, finance, people, information, images, communication, crime, pollutants, drugs, fashion, culture, ideologies, and beliefs across modern territories--- large and small (McGrew,1996, p. 470). Scholars and commentators have tended to take one of two approaches to these developments. On the one hand, there are those, like Christopher Jencks (1996) who regard globalization as the effect of a generalized liberating, postmodernist trend towards a diminution of the authority of centralizing powers and institutions such as the state. They associate this pattern toward decentralization with a corresponding augmentation of personal freedom, movement, migration and the cultural and the political heterogeneity of the expression of the broad masses of the people. On the other, there are those such as Masao Miyoshi (1998), Ankie Hoogvelt (2001), Andy Green(1997), and others who are more cautionary, who point instead to persistent patterns of global domination by the leading capitalist powers of the West. Theorists of this more pessimistic school of thought call attention to such matters as the accelerating homogenization and commodification of global culture (the world dressed in blue jeans) and the persistence, indeed the intensification, of the political and economic asymmetry of the North- South divide.
This Fall’s Emphasis
This fall, the emphasis in the “Pro-seminar in Globalization, Communications and Culture” will be on the relevance of Foucauldian analysis to the examination of modern forms of power and state rule. A central question that we will be asking is how do Foucauldian theories of power--particularly as related to the consideration of such topics as “discipline,” “surveillance,” “government,” and “biopower”– contribute to our understanding of contemporary forms of governance in the area of globalization? The course will continue to take the form of a public forum as part of a standing student/faculty reading/writing/research collaborative the principal objective of which is to make a pragmatic scholarly intervention into current debates on globalization with a strong disposition toward mentoring students’ prospective scholarly publication. Student participants registered for the course can choose either (a) to work on a manuscript for a journal or other publication or (b) to work on a term paper. The course should appeal to a wide range of students from a variety of disciplinary interests and backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, communications and educational policy, and the fine arts. Readings for each weekly session will be determined as we go along and as suggested by participants. But special attention will be paid to a set of core readings from the texts listed below. Each seminar session is regarded as a public forum. So, all and sundry are invited to participate.
COMM577 Christians M 3-4:50 Philosophy of Technology
Introduces students to those thinkers who understand technology philosophically as a central component in modern culture. Examines major perspectives on the nature of technology, rooted in Norbert Weiner, Karl Marx, and Martin Heidegger. Links media technologies, information systems, and global communications background problems and basic issues to technology more generally. Develops instrumentalism, feminist and critical approaches, ethical concerns, alternative technologies in the context of technology as a cultural activity.
CWL501 Rushing, Modern Critical Theory T 7:30-8:50 R 3-4:50
Nota bene: Despite what Banner says, this course does not require any languages other than English.
This course provides a historical survey of the foundational thinkers, texts, and schools that orient contemporary work in the humanities, from Kant and Hegel to Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory. As an “advanced introduction,” the course is intended primarily for first-year graduate students and for those who may not have covered the development of critical theory in a systematic way. The course will include significant discussion of figures, including: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Adorno, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Williams, Hall, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Zizek, and Butler. Among the topics we will address: history, the subject, value, power, language, ideology, materiality, gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. 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.
Modern Critical Theory will have an unusual format. The course will meet twice a week, once a week (the Tuesday evening meeting) in a public session that will include graduate students from Michael Rothberg’s English 581 course and once a week in a closed session limited to registered students. Drawing on the resources of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, we will invite to class “guest experts” from around campus (and occasionally from off campus); these guests will visit the public sessions of the seminar throughout the semester. Those Tuesday night sessions will meet at the IPRH Building (805 W. Pennsylvania, Urbana).
Requirements: Attendance at all sessions; active participation; 10-pages of analytical writing during the semester; a timed, 72 hour take-home essay exam of approximately 10 pages at the end of the semester.
We will meet for an unscheduled introductory session in the English Building on Wednesday, August 24, from 5:00-6:30 pm. For that session, please read: Jonathan Culler, “What is Theory?” from Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (pp. 1-17) and Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” in the Norton (pp. 2255-66). The Culler text will be available shortly before the semester begins on electronic reserves. More information about the course will be available by late summer on the Unit for Criticism website: criticism.english.uiuc.edu. Please contact me if you have any questions about the course: rrushing@uiuc.edu.
Texts ordered: Vincent Leitch, et al, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (tr. Kaufmann); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. The Norton will provide the base readings for many of our sessions, but will be supplemented by many xeroxed readings.
CWL581, Blake. "Que vuoi ? symptom and desire." T 1-2:50
Neurosis: phobia, hysteria, obsession, these are the bread and butter of Freudian psychoanalysis. From the plethora of clinical insights to be mined in the case studies of the inventor of the psychotherapy, many if not all students of Freud come to recognize those strategies that underlie all psychic life. Dora, the Rat Man and Little Hans no longer need to be judged in pathological terms for the lesson is that almost inevitably the human subject will “choose” a neurosis (SE I, p. 220) The psychic symptom is a means of negotiating the imperatives of desire faced with the nameless fear of losing the ability to want. Hence these “compromise formations” come to be viewed as no less respectable than any other creative productions.
Perversion, on the other hand, if it is a structure of desire, seldom evokes sympathy or kinship. Lacan enjoys the paradox involved in praising its economy as the ultimate model of ethical life, as he insists in his famous essay “Kant avec Sade”. Moreover, in Lacan’s view, the logic of perversion is that of human desire itself. Lacan reminds us that Freud teaches how human desire is perverse in that it defies the laws of adaptation and survival which are necessarily operative in the animal world.
Like neurosis, perversion is a strategy to negotiate desire. Unlike the neurotic subject, however, the pervert can only obtain satisfaction by becoming the object of the other’s fantasy, in order to expose the fundamental anxiety that all fantasy comes to camouflage. This ‘abjectification’ explains the negative reactions, from disgust to horror, which perversion commonly elicits. In uncovering the workings of desire, the fantasy of the other, the pervert de-idealizes the social bond: family, clan, nation. The goal of the pervert is not, difficult as this idea may be to grasp, to obtain personal gratification. The pervert is under the power of an epistomophilic drive, s/he wants to discover a law, beneath the mask of social order and values. While the neurotic succeeds in nurturing his desire by devising strategies to prevent its realization, the pervert succeeds in fulfilling the desire of the neurotic at he cost of sacrificing himself. The precision and the correctness of the pervert’s analysis of social bonds leaves him little space for the illusion necessary to maintain his own desire. Lacan’s contribution to the understanding of perversion has allowed us to apprehend this structure, not as faulty sexual drive, Freud has already taught us that all human sexuality is aberrant, or as Tim Dean puts it,”All sexuality is queer sexuality”. Rather Lacan has helped us trace this type of psychic functioning to one more method of interpreting the vicissitudes of desire.
Michel de M’Uzan notes that practicing psychoanalysts have only rare opportunities to encounter perversion in the clinical setting, firstly because perverts are even more deeply committed than neurotics to their structure and are so satisfied with their perversion that they do not request a cure. M’Uzan, and others, owe their chance to study perversion to the intervention of the medical legal authorities who, having apprehended a subject displaying the scars testifying to masochistic practices for example, have recourse to the analyst for an expert evaluation of the pathology. Under the present legislation in the European Union, we could expect in the near future an increase of case studies of pedophilia for this very reason.
With neurosis and psychosis, perversion constitutes one of the major categories of human libidinal organization. While much is to be obtained from further exploration of clinical data concerning perversion, another fertile area of investigation is opened by the prevalence of insights concerning perversion unveiled by numerous contemporary creative productions. This seminar will examine writing and film portraying, overtly or covertly, the logic of perversion.
EALC550, Xu. "Globalization and China."
This course focuses on the impact of globalization on China. Through close reading of literary, filmic, and theoretical texts, we dissect cultural symptoms of contemporary China in order to understand the ways in which China’s globalization is related to marketization, neoliberalism, and neo-imperialism. We also address effectiveness and inadequacies of theories on globalization.
ENGL559G: SEMINAR AFRO-AMERICAN LIT, Maxwell. M 3-4:50
TOPIC: The Jazz Page: Modern Black Music and American Literary Modernism
This seminar will explore how key makers and modes of American modernist literature responded to jazz—the music Ralph Ellison dubbed the African-American “art of individual assertion within and against the group.” Do the lower frequencies of T. S. Eliot’s high modernist monument “The Waste Land” channel Louis Armstrong’s allusive, syncopated cornet? Was Duke Ellington the foremost Renaissance man of Harlem ’s cultural renaissance? When all is said and heard, is jazz the maestro most responsible for rousing a distinctly U.S. modernism? We’ll address such questions in pursuit of two major revisionist agendas: namely, (1) measuring the way in which the New Jazz Studies has productively unsettled assumptions about the representational, ideological, and formal habits of African-American writing; and (2) revisiting the interracial construction of American modernist writing in general by way of a music that celebrates both “cutting contests” and collegial improvisation. Our syllabus will mix poems, stories, and (short) novels by a host of consequential black and white American authors, including James Baldwin, Rita Dove, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, and Eudora Welty; musical memoirs by Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday; essays in literary criticism, cultural studies, and the old and new musicology by Theodor Adorno, Amiri Baraka, Hazel Carby, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Norman Mailer, Albert Murray, and John F. Szwed; and an on-line soundtrack of classic jazz recordings. Musically trained or fan-based knowledge of jazz is welcome, but is neither assumed nor necessary. Course requirements will entail several short reading response papers, one in-class presentation, and an article-length final essay.
ENGL563E: SEMINAR THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, Hansen. M 1-2:50
TOPIC: Terror and the State of Modernity
Much has been made of the Bush Administration’s claim that “everything changed after 9/11,” but the political practices and rhetorical poses enacted in response to the concept of terror are by no means new . In fact, following Edmund Burke’s polemical retro-fitting of the idea of sublime “terror” in his 1790 anti-Jocobin treatise, Reflections on the Revolutions in France, the term has become a permanent part of the vocabulary of legitimation for the modern nation-state. In response to Burke’s arguments that the anti-traditionalist French masses were the purveyors of political terror, many of the rebel “United Irishman,” the leaders of Ireland’s 1798 uprising, claimed that terror could never be enacted by an eternally disempowered and feminized peoples, but rather always came from on high. From an historical perspective, then, the identity “terrorizer” or, if you will “terrorist,” seems evacuated of any substantial meaning almost from the very moment of its first invocation. By acting as the eternal other of one’s own political cause, “terror” plays the simple, equivocal role of label in the political and social rhetoric of legitimation . Any terrorist is always already an illegitimate political entity. The dynamic seems driven by what we might call the logic of the justified victim, a logic that is further complicated by the fact that any victim, as the claims of the United Irishmen underscore, is also invariably identified as feminine. Each side identifies itself always and only as terrorized in order to justify its own occasional terrorism. This peculiarly persistent double-bind appears to be an integral part of the foundation of the modern state. By exploring the underlying gender and social structures at play in “terror” fiction, this course will attempt to find a language that short-circuits this dichotomy. A 1797 review of Anne Radcliffe’s The Italian referred to the Gothic Romance as “the Terrorist Genre” because “it makes us fall in love with what we fear to look on.” The kind of “Terrorist” fiction written by the Gothic novelists actively manipulates the reader’s identification with fictive characters, but the narrative desire for conflict that subtends these fictions also places the reader in a rather precarious position that relies on identification with both the terrorized and the terrorist. That is, the novels rely on their readership’s unacknowledged sadistic identification with the terrorizer as much as they rely on a more overtly narcissistic identification with the victim. By reading a certain tradition of “Terrorist” fiction alongside later political, philosophical, and literary writings about “Terror” and the “State” this course aims to interrogate what we might call the Gothic double-bind that underwrites and shores up the logic of modern nationalism and of its other, terrorism.
Readings will include Anne Radcliffe’s The Italian, Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Oscar Wilde’s Vera, or the Nihilists, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, with selections from James Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Immanuel Kant’s Political Writings, The Marx-Engels Reader, Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State, George Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, Walter Benjamin’s Reflections, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth¸ Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer.
ENGL563G: SEMINAR THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, Nelson. W 3-5:50
TOPIC: Holocaust Poetry
In Survival in Auschwitz holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi describes an indicative incident during his first days at the camp. Desperately thirsty, he reached out a window to grasp an icicle. A beefy guard knocked it away. “ Warum?” Levi asked. The succinct answer carried a certain uncanny ethical and philosophical depth: “ Hier ist kein warum.” Here there is no why. If the question could not be posed in the death camps, can it be posed in poetry instead? Can poetry put forth its humanity in the face of a world where all such values were extinguished?
In 1940 the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) was drafted into a labor battalion along with thousands of his fellow Jews. As the war progressed and Hungary brought its policies into greater compliance with those of its German ally, these labor battalions, brutal from the outset, became increasingly lethal. Beaten and starved, the Jews were now randomly murdered. Radnóti nonetheless transformed the horror into poems and wrote them in a small notebook. On August 29, 1944 , nearing the end, he wrote the first of four poems under the title “Razglednicas,” Serbo-Croatian for “picture postcards.” A month later he writes the last of the “Razglednicas” on the back of a cod-liver oil advertising notice he found discarded. The poem predicts his death: “shot in the neck . . . blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.” On November 9 th he met the fate he had anticipated, but nineteen months later, the war over, his body was disinterred and the blood stained poems recovered. Is it sufficient justification for poetry that his testimony now outlives his executioners?
There is n o more severe challenge to the aspirations and social functions of poetry than that posed by the holocaust. Leo Haber calls it “pale consolation, dear God of poetry, of justice, of mercy, / of explanations, for the murder of little children.” Adorno famously remarked that to write poetry after Auschwitz was obscene. Yet poetry was written both during the war and after, including anti-Semitic poems produced by the Nazis themselves. In that context we might conclude that the genre was so marked by its demonic uses that its myths of transcendence became a cruel joke. We will examine this whole history—poems written by wartime victims, witnesses, and perpetrators; poems written by later generations seeking to keep the historical memories alive and make the events more real. We will read poems from many different countries, using English language texts but comparing them to the original language texts whenever possible. In some cases multiple translations of individual poems exist. Again, we will compare them. Some translators feel one should find equivalents for Radnóti’s rhymes; others feel that is the worst choice possible.
Among the poets we will study in detail are Paul Celan, Jacob Glatstein, William Heyen, Dan Pagis, Radnóti, Charles Reznikoff, Nelly Sachs, W.D. Snodgrass, and Abraham Sutzkever. We will also read poems by Brian Daldorph, Jorie Graham, Anthony Hecht, Denise Levertov, Primo Levi, Czeslaw Milosz, János Pilinsky, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Hilda Schiff, Anne Sexton, and many others, among them the Yiddish poets Aaron Kramer has translated. For general background we’ll read War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust by Doris Bergen. In addition to a selection of poems, each week’s readings will include essays from The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, edited by Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg. Anthologies we will use include Marguerite Stiar, ed. Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, Charles Fishman, ed. Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, Hilda Schiff, ed. Holocaust Poetry, and Aaron Kramer, ed. The Last Lullaby. You may want to get discounted copies of these books in advance from amazon.com or abebooks.com. We will conduct the class as a collective, collaborative project of interpretation and analysis. The seminar does not assume expertise on the holocaust, merely willingness to discuss the relevant issues. Please email me with questions at crnelson@uiuc.edu.
ENGL564: SEMINAR LIT MODES AND GENRES, Lesser & Foote. M 3-4:50
TOPIC: Discipline or Publish: Theories of Form and Professional Developments
This course addresses some of the most fundamental aspects of our professional work as literary critics, and it aims to develop students’ understanding of and facility with both the theory and the professional practice of this work. Our theoretical focus will be the central issue in the history of literary theory, an issue which has remained constant in its appeal to a wide range of otherwise antagonistic critical schools: the theory of literary form. Through an intensive study of this theoretical history, we will also seek to chart changes in the institutional and disciplinary history of the study of literature, from its creation as a university course of study through its successive transformations in recent decades. Finally, our overriding goal is to further the professional development of graduate students by linking these theoretical and disciplinary histories to the contemporary academy and helping students to enter professional conversations in their respective areas of study. For this reason, we have designed the assignments for this seminar with the explicit goal of facilitating publication, grant applications, conference presentations, and other scholarly forms of writing.
Readings will be drawn primarily from theorists of form and genre, probably including William Empson, Georg Lukacs, Northrop Frye, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Paul de Man, Peter Brooks. We will consider form not only as a verbal structure but also as a material practice of printing, publishing, and reading, examining some historians of the book, print culture, and reception, probably including Meredith McGill, Janice Radway, June Howard, Roger Chartier, D.F. McKenzie, Pierre Bourdieu, and work from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Finally, we will read some histories of the profession, probably including John Guillory, Gerald Graff, some early histories of university curricula, and early issues of scholarly journals like the Kenyon Review and Scrutiny.
The work for the course will differ from the typical graduate seminar. As a preparatory assignment, each student will undertake a history of an important journal in her field by reading ten complete issues of the journal, spread across thirty years. The course will culminate not in a seminar paper, but rather in one of three possible forms, depending on the student’s interest and her position in the graduate career:
1) Students in their first or second year of graduate work will write a 10-15 page review essay, focusing on three or four recent and important books in their field, positioning these works in relation to each other and to the history of the field as understood through the 30-year journal survey;
2) Students in their second, third, or fourth year will undertake a closely directed revision of a seminar paper from a previous semester in preparation for submission to a peer-reviewed journal;
3) Students preparing for the Special Field Exam will complete and circulate a detailed dissertation prospectus of 10-15 pages, outlining the central and distinctive argument of their proposed dissertation and proceeding to a summary of the topic and tentative claims of each chapter.
This course is appropriate for students in all fields and at all levels of Stage 1 and Stage 2, and indeed will work best with a mix of fields and levels. Students currently writing the dissertation are welcome to audit.
ENGL581E: SEMINAR LITERARY THEORY, Markley. W 1-2:50
TOPIC: Literature, Science and Ecology: Contested Pasts, Alternative Futures
This seminar will offer students the opportunity to read some essential works by recent theorists in the post- or cross-disciplinary field called (variously) Literature and Science, science studies, or the cultural study of science. It is intended to allow students to explore the complex relationships that link and divide different disciplines and disciplinary modes of inquiry, and it is also intended to serve as a heuristic means to foster seminar papers or (longer writing projects) that investigate some of these relationships. Because we will consider a variety of theoretical approaches and texts, the seminar will give each student the opportunity to write a long paper on a period, literary text or texts, or theoretical problem of his or her choice. No specialized knowledge of mathematics and science is required, and there will be no pop quizzes on partial differential equations.
The seminar will address four overlapping areas of inquiry: 1) the theory and practice of postdisciplinary inquiry; 2) human biology, with a particular emphasis on gender and race; 3) ecology and constructions of nature; and 4) technoculture and new media. During the opening few weeks of the seminar, we will read theorists (some represented by key articles rather than full-length studies) nominally affiliated with a range of traditional disciplines (literature, anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, and biology) but who spend much of their time and energy calling into questions the very bases of disciplinary thought: Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, and Richard Lewontin. The section on biology will include works by Stephen Jay Gould, Nancy Stepan, Haraway (again), and science fiction by Octavia Butler to explore the ways in which the practice of science has both structured and been structured by the ideological predispositions about race and gender that characterize a Eurocentric modernity. The section on ecology will examine the different ways in which humankind’s relationship to the natural world has been figured before and after the industrial revolution. After reading Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, we will discuss poems by Aphra Behn, Andrew Maravell, and Oliver Goldsmith; prose by John Locke and (it’s inevitable) by Henry David Thoreau; and Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction. These texts will allow students to explore two fundamental and often antagonistic responses to “Nature”: the Baconian desire to master the world by exploiting its resources and developing ever-more sophisticated technologies to raise or maintain living standards and the wish to return to a golden age in which human desires and natural resources exist in what we now call ecological balance. The final weeks of the seminar will be devoted to technoculture and new media, and we will read works by Marshall McLuhan, Jay Bolter, Richard Grusin, and Katherine Hayles, among others. Rather than a grand synthesis, we will conclude by exploring the dialectical relationship between new media and the discourses of the natural world.
Course Requirements: Participation in class discussions; oral presentations; one short paper (5-7 pp.); and a final paper (25 pp.).
ENGL581V: SEMINAR LITERARY THEORY, Rothberg. W 5-6:50
TOPIC: Modern Critical Theory: An Advanced Introduction
This class meets on TU 7:30-8:50 at IPRH
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 Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory. As an “advanced introduction,” the course is intended primarily for first-year graduate students and for those who feel they have not covered the development of critical theory in a systematic way. The course will include significant discussion of figures such as: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Adorno, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Williams, Hall, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Zizek, and Butler . Among the topics we will certainly address are: history, the subject, value, power, language, ideology, materiality, gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. 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.
Modern Critical Theory will have an unusual format. The course will meet twice a week, once a week in a public session that will include graduate students from Robert Rushing’s Comparative Literature 501 course and once a week in a closed session limited to registered students. Drawing on the resources of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, we will invite to class “guest experts” from around campus (and occasionally from off campus); these guests will visit the public sessions of the seminar and lecture on particular topics throughout the semester. Those Tuesday night sessions will meet at the IPRH Building (805 W. Pennsylvania , Urbana ).
Requirements: Attendance at all public and closed sessions; active participation; 10-pages of analytical writing during the semester; a timed, 72 hour take-home essay exam of approximately 10 pages at the end of the semester.
We will meet for an unscheduled introductory session in the English Building on Wednesday, August 24, from 5:00-6:30 pm . For that session, please read: Jonathan Culler, “What is Theory?” from Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (pp. 1-17) and Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” in the Norton (pp. 2255-66). The Culler text will be available shortly before the semester begins on electronic reserves. More information about the course will be available by late summer on the Unit for Criticism website: http://criticism.english.uiuc.edu. Please contact me if you have any questions about the course: mpr@uiuc.edu.
TEXTS: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent Leitch, et al, ed.; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (tr. Kaufmann); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. The Norton will provide the base readings for many of our sessions, but will be supplemented by many xeroxed readings. William Schroeder’s Continental Philosophy: A Critical Approach will be a recommended secondary text.
ENGL591: Theorizing History, Historicizing Theory (Prochaska) R 1 - 2:50 pm
Any good work of history arguably raises the question of what history is all about: what is it that historians do when they "do" history? We can agree that after reading and researching, historians write up their results, they present their results in a narrative format, that is, they construct a narrative. But where do these narrative constructs come from? In this course we will plot a cognitive map of history and interpretive communities; together we will construct a genealogy of historical studies today by successively inquiring into the intellectual and political fields in which historians practice their craft. Topics include Marxism in theory and practice, Weber in theory and practice, the now old 'new' social history and the French Annales school, Geertz and interpretive anthropology, the now middle-aged 'new' cultural history, Foucault and poststructuralism, women and gender, history after the 'linguistic turn,' postcolonial studies, and history and postmodernism.
HIST591: Theorizing History, Historicizing Theory (Prochaska) R 1 - 2:50 pm
Any good work of history arguably raises the question of what history is all about: what is it that historians do when they "do" history? We can agree that after reading and researching, historians write up their results, they present their results in a narrative format, that is, they construct a narrative. But where do these narrative constructs come from? In this course we will plot a cognitive map of history and interpretive communities; together we will construct a genealogy of historical studies today by successively inquiring into the intellectual and political fields in which historians practice their craft. Topics include Marxism in theory and practice, Weber in theory and practice, the now old 'new' social history and the French Annales school, Geertz and interpretive anthropology, the now middle-aged 'new' cultural history, Foucault and poststructuralism, women and gender, history after the 'linguistic turn,' postcolonial studies, and history and postmodernism.
HIST502MT: PROB IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY (Todorova) M T 1 - 2:50
Topic Comparative Nationalism
Nationalism, an issue which was considered to have passed its peak, now dominates world politics and permeates political discourse. What explains its recurrence, persistence and ubiquity? In its first part, this graduate seminar will focus on the theories of nationalism, and will deal with problems of definition, the ancient or modern origins of nationalism, its main chronological and geographical varieties and the models proposed to describe them, the typology of nationalist movements and, finally, the articulation of the nationalist discourse. The readings draw on a variety of approaches histoorical, sociological, anthropological, literary, psychological -- and aim at providing a solid introduction to the scholarly literature. The second part of the course is supposed to lead to the completion of a paper which can deal with a particular aspect of any one of the world's nationalisms, with its characteristics in a given historical period, or its evolution over time, as well as comparisons between the manifestations of different nationalisms. Topics for the research papers will be as close as possible to the main geographic interests of the graduate students; they will be discussed and approved in separate individual meetings with the professor.
PSYC525 Garnsey W 2 – 3:50 Psycholinguistics
Critical survey of methods and theories in the psychological study of the communication process; emphasis on linguistic, information-theory, and learning-theory approaches; psycholinguistic analysis of language decoding and encoding; and the development and measurement of symbolic processes, including meaning. Same as COMM 525, and LING 525.
SOC560, Pieterse, R 4:30 - 7:20 Globalization Dynamics Debates
An advanced study of the multidimensional character of globalization. Discussion of key processes of globalization and areas of consensus and controversy in the literature and examination of the premises of major approaches to globalization in social science and fundamental analytical questions and policy dilemmas that globalization presents. Discussions on scenarios and policy options of global futures.