Fall 2009 Course Offerings | Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory

ENGL 500: Introduction to Criticism and Research

Professor: Hina Nazar
Meets: TH 1-2:50, 113 English Building

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. The course will include significant discussion of figures such as: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Williams, Hall, Fanon, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, and Butler. Among the topics we will address are: aesthetics, 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 (Tuesdays, 7.30-9pm) that will include graduate students from Lilya Kaganovsky’s Comparative Literature 501 course and once a week in a closed session (Thursdays, 1-2.50pm) 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.

NOTE: Students wishing to take take part in the Unit's Fall 2009 Modern Critical Theory lecture series as part of a credit-earning graduate seminar may register either for Comparative Literature 501 (instructor Lilya Kaganovksy) or English 500 (instructor Hina Nazar). Registrations are handled directly through these departments and subject to each department's policies regarding registration.

CINE 503/ENGL 503/CWL 503: Historiography of Cinema

Professor: Ramona Curry
Meets: W 3:00-5:50pm
English Building Room 113

This graduate seminar examines practices and trends in writing the history of cinema, offering a meta-historical study focused on how film histories have variously construed their object of study, e.g., as an art form, an industry, a phenomenon of modernity, a cultural artifact, material expression of national character and/or collective social trauma, or site of ideological discourse. The seminar will also consider how cinema histories have articulated with accounts of the origins and
developments of other screen media.

After initially surveying issues including what stylistic elements and contextual records conventionally get privileged as film historical evidence and which cinematic canons have exercised lasting historigraphic influence, we will engage with “national cinema history” as a persistent, strategic and often productive but also now frequently
contested film historiographic approach. Alongside selected articles, we’ll comparatively read and discuss five distinctive (and in part "classic") cinema histories, each exemplifying an approach to national cinemahistoriography, even as we critically assess the organizational concept.

We'll jointly view a feature film and clips drawn from the cinemas addressed as case studies, including German cinema of the Weimar period, contemporary Chinese and Korean cinema production. and two instances of English language cinemas that stretch or recast the definitions of "the national." Each student will explore local cinema historical archives (amazing resources on campus and the Internet--and
to an extent the seminar will offer a practicum in undertaking such research), make several written and oral presentations, and as a final project compile an extensive annotated bibliography that proposes a cogent historigraphic approach to an individual topic formulated in relation to the overarching case study theme of “national cinema histories.”

PLEASE NOTE: the seminar has been scheduled to allow sufficient time for watching relevant case study films together; we will NOT arrange for a separate joint screening time, (although students may watch on their own a few additional key films that are readily available.)

Note: this seminar is one of two required courses for the Graduate Minor in Cinema Studies. You may learn more about that minor at http://www.cinema.uiuc.edu/gradminor.html and email Richard Leskosky
at cinema@illinois.edu with any remaining questions.

CWL 501: Theory of Literature

Professor: Lilya Kaganovsky
Meets: Thurs 3:00-4:50pm, 1040 FLB

Major issues of literary theory, critical approaches, and comparative research. NOTE: Knowledge of a foreign language is no longer a prerequisite for this course.

Modern Critical Theory will have an unusual format. The course will meet twice a week, once a week in a public session (Tuesdays, 7.30-9pm) that will include graduate students from Hina Nazar's English 500 course and once a week in a closed session (Thursdays, 3-4.50pm) 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.

CWL 551: Postcolonial Theory

Professor: Wail Hassan
Meets: Mon 3:00-4:30pm

This seminar offers an extensive introduction to the field of postcolonial studies: its development, theoretical frameworks, major debates, and new directions. We will also investigate discourses of racial, cultural, and sexual difference, decolonization movements, nationalism, neocolonialism, and globalization. We will begin with the early theorists of colonialism and decolonization in the 1950s and 60s, before examining the political and institutional context within which the field emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s as a subset of literary studies. We will subsequently explore the various directions of research in the field, including some of its famous polemics, from the late 1980s to the present.

ENGL 514: Medieval Exoticism: Diversity, Hybridity, and Identity in Early Medieval England

Professor: Renee Trilling
Meets: R 3:00-5:20
CRN: 34487

Images of alterity abound in early medieval literature, populating both accounts of the unknown East and relatively mundane narratives of the quotidian. Racial and ethnic others appear as characters in battles for national sovereignty and in the legal and religious codes that govern everyday life. Monstrous others also decorate the deluxe illuminated manuscripts in which many of these texts reside. Such representations of alterity help to define the boundaries of the Anglo-Saxon subject, but they do so in a variety of ways on many different levels. In the wondrous narratives of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle and The Wonders of the East, for example, monstrous bodies distinguish "us" from "them" in explicitly material and visible ways, and exotic locations clarify the geographical borders of "our" familiar territory, while images of the fantastic threaten to burst from the pages of the manuscripts themselves. Closer to home, religious and ethnic differences mark out distinct groups within the borders of the nation and are reinforced through law codes, homilies, and traditional charms and poems. In different texts, alterity can vary in both degree and kind; it can be partial or total, absolute or contingent, fixed or mutable, inherent or adopted. Exploring those variations will help us to plot the development of English identity in the early medieval period.

The great diversity of material in this course will allow students to become familiar with a variety of medieval discourses, including literary, legal, historical, religious, and administrative, as well as some of the material culture of the period through manuscript illumination and stonework. Primary texts could include The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, The Wonders of the East, the Liber monstrorum, selections from Beowulf, the Old English Genesis, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the homilies of Wulfstan and Ælfric, selected law codes and charters, saints' lives, and popular and occasional literature. Alongside these documents, we will use the theoretical languages of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek, and Julia Kristeva, coupled with secondary criticism by medievalists, to unpack the operations of alterity along the lines of race, gender, geography, religion, and nationality, and to think about how the differences in how these categories are determined and deployed by medieval texts.

Course requirements will include in-class presentations, an annotated bibliography, and a full-length (20-30 pages) seminar paper. Primary texts will be made available in translation as well as in the original languages (Latin, Old English, etc.) for nonspecialists.

ENGL 537: The Victorian "South"

Professor: Lauren Goodlad
Meets: T 1:00-3:15
CRN: 30193

This graduate seminar explores the geographical and geopolitical abstraction of "the South" in national, regional, and hemispheric contexts in part through study of three specific examples of the construct rendered from the vantage of the Victorian (British) global imaginary. Reading literary works from the turn of the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth we will discuss "Southernness" as figured by black Atlantic writers as well as self-consciously liberal (and often un-self-consciously imperial) Britons in Atlantic, European, and South Asian contexts. The "Southernness" we will find variously underwrites visions of world trade, liberalization in Europe (and elsewhere), cosmopolitan or transnational identity, as well as the idea of an imperial civilizing mission. Our literary texts include works by Olaudah Equiano, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Seacole, Wilkie Collins, John Ruskin, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Vernon Lee. Critical readings include Roberto Dainotto's Europe (In Theory); examples of recent work on cosmopolitanism, internationalism and postcolonial theory; as well as literary criticism by Victorianist scholars such as Elaine Freedgood, Helena Michie, Sharon Marcus and John Plotz.

ENGL 563: The Theory and Practice fo Holocaust Poetry

Professor: Cary Nelson
Meets: M 3:00-6:00, English Building

In Survival in Auschwitz holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi decribes 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 advertizing notice he found discarded. The poem predicts his death: "shot in the neck . . . blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear." On November 9th he met the fate he had anticipated, but nineteen months later, the war over, his body was distinterred and the blood stained poems recovered. Is it sufficient justification for poetry that his testimony now outlives his executioners?

There is no more severe challenge to the humane aspirations, social functions, and theoretical accounts 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 Radnoti's rhymes; others feel that is the worst choice possible.

Although studying holocaust poetry may seem a daunting way to spend a semester, the experience of discussing these poems in a group is actually tremendously restorative. Working through these powerful texts collaboratively, discussing what rhetorical strategies do and do not succeed, interrogating the relationship between the lyric and both history and contemporaneity, gives new importance to a collaborative model of criticism and to the help we can give one another.

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 Striar, 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 any questions at crnelson@illinois.edu

EPS/MDIA 575: Cultural Studies and Critical Interpretations

Professor: Cameron McCarthy
Meets: TR 12-1:50, Room 313 Greg Hall

Explores the history, applications and limitations of various theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary culture and popular media. Examines debates and issues within cultural studies and with other schools of thought. The impact of cultural studies across the disciplines.

Prerequisite: Consent of instructor.

FR 443: Proust and His Era, I

Professor: Lawrence Schehr
Meets: MW 3:00-4:50

Considered one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust was a pillar of modernist writing, as illustrated in his massive seven-volume novel, A la recherche du temps perdu. Witness to a changing world forged in the defeat of 1870, the Dreyfus Affair, and World War I, Proust catalogued the move from a traditional nineteenth-century, still grounded in aristocratic and upper-middle-class models, to a more democratic, republican society. In his novel, he provides analyses of social structures, family life, Parisian society, social movements, sexualities, gender roles, religion, citizenship, politics, science, and the arts. This (two-semester) course will engage Proust and his era, along with secondary readings and relevant material from the time in which he was writing. Course discussions in English; written work for graduate students will be in French. Undergraduates may opt to read some of the novel in English and write in either French or English. It is highly recommended that students take this course in order to be able to take the course taught in Spring, 2010: Proust and His Era, II. Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.

LAW 656: International Law

Professor: Francis Boyle
Meets: (TBD)

The nature, sources, and subjects of international law and its place in the control of international society; includes an examination of the law of jurisdiction, territory, recognition and succession of states, rights and immunities of states in foreign courts, diplomatic immunities, treaties, protection of citizens abroad, settlement of international disputes, war and neutrality, the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice.

MDIA590: Special Topics: New Directions in Television Stuides

Professor: James Hay
Meets: T 5:30-8:20pm

This course is an introduction to some of the current ways that television is analyzed and theorized. Central to the course is the question, “What is television today?” or “What does the word “television” refer to now?” Some have argued that television is being replaced by “new media.” such as the Internet. Others have argued that television is far from finished–that instead it is being reinvented and repurposed, and that it is a continuation of the nineteenth-century ideal of control and communication “at a distance” (tele-vision). Others discuss television as part of a current “media convergence,” in which television programs are watched on cell phones, and video games such as the Wii-software are played on TV monitors. In thinking about what TV has become today, the course examines various factors that are reshaping it and making it matter differently than in the past. These factors include changing televisual forms of representation and genres (e.g., Reality TV), television as a cultural form and as an engine of cultural economies, the role of television in verification, documentation, and truth-claims, changing practices and convergence of media industries, television’s relation to “new media” and “interactive”technologies, the sites, spaces, and environments of television, the new uses of television, television’s relation to new forms of transport and mobility, television’s relation to surveillance, televisuality’s relation to new forms of warfare and military training, television as instruction/guide (e.g., dating, cooking, designing, living, makeover), television and governmentality, television and citizenship, television andconsumption, television in everyday life.

Although most of the course focuses on how these various dimensions of television are converging, the course devotes some attention to earlier forms and practices of television, and to current historiographies of TV and media. Although much of the course will focus on television in the U.S., roughly 25-30% of the course will consider forms of television (past and present) around the world. Students need not have any background in Media Studies. The course emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives for the study of television and contemporary media, and it draws from a wide variety of theory and forms of analysis. The course will encourage students from different disciplines to designprojects relatively consonant with their research program, while introducing avenues for developing fresh, alternative, and timely heuristics and analytics of TV and media.

Students will be expected to stay abreast of assigned readings, to participate in seminar discussions, and to produce a final project to be designed in consultation with Prof. Hay.

PS 572: Histories of Political Theories II: Modern Political Theory

Professor: Samantha Frost
R 1:00-3:20pm

Seventeenth and Eighteenth century political theorists confronted questions that challenged the foundations of social and political life. In reconsidering what motivates and guides action, what the relationship is between religious and political authority, and what binds a multitude into a unity, modern political theorists developed ideas about rationality, autonomy, and the limits of sovereign power that continue to inform our ideas about political agency and institution building. In this course, we will read a range of theorists whose arguments not only constitute a part of our political and theoretical inheritance but also provide insights that might help us think anew about contemporary political phenomena.

Schedule

Thursday August 27: introduction to course
Thursday September 3: Richard Tuck, selections from Philosophy and Government Jonathan Israel, selections from Radical Enlightenment
Thursday September 10 Michel Foucault, "Governmentality" (201-222) in Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984 ed. James Faubion (the New Press, 2000) Giorgio Agamben, "The State of Exception as a Paradigm of Government" in State of Exception (U Chicago P, 2005); "Introduction" and "The Paradox of Sovereignty" in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Thursday September 17: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Thursday September 24: Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus (online version www.constitution.org/bs/poltr-00.html) Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics (Verso, 2008) [note: 128 pp] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy Spinoza, selections from Tractatus Theologicus-Politicus (ch 16-17, pp.195-208)
Thursday October 1: Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha John Locke, Two Treatises on Government
Thursday October 8: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Rousseau: On Social Contract [1762]
Thursday October 15: Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748] Montesquieu, Persian Letters [1721] (recommended, not required)
Thursday October 22: Robespierre, The Terror
Thursday October 29: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Thursday November 5: Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (recommended not required)
Thursday November 12: Jeremy Bentham, The principles of morals and legislation (1780s) Smart and Bernard Williams eds. Utilitarianism: for and against
Thursday November 19: Immanuel Kant, Groundwork to the metaphysics of morals Immanuel Kant, Political Writings
Thursday November 26: Thanksgiving Thursday
December 3: Last Class session: GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of Right
December 9: instruction ends December 10: Reading Day December 11-18: finals

PS 579: The Complexities of Human Subjectivity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Their Heirs

Professor: Melissa Orlie
M 3:30-5:50pm

Briefly, the aim of this course is to consider fuller, more subtle accounts of the self and its relations than either the standard bearers in the humanities and social sciences (for example, rational actor, autonomous subject) and the still necessarily reductionist accounts of subjectivity, especially of moral and aesthetic experience, in the life sciences. In addition to Nietzsche and Freud, we will read selections from Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Lacan, Kristeva, Laplanche, Kohut, Loewald, and S. Mitchell, among others.

To speak in more detail, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences continue to employ conceptions of the human person–as rational and autonomous, as self-knowing and self-mastering–which are increasingly challenged, if not altogether undermined, by current research findings in the life sciences. At the same time, accounts of important aspects of human subjectivity in those same sciences, especially accounts of freedom and creativity, moral and aesthetic judgment, appear rudimentary and impoverished when compared to our experience of being alive.

The premise of this course is that there are underappreciated and underused theoretical resources for conceiving of human experience in the gap between outmoded representations of the individual still prevalent in the humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and the still reductionist accounts prevalent in the life sciences on the other hand. Given the complexities of human subjectivity and the current specialized organization of knowledge in the university, I think it impossible at this moment to endeavor to bridge this gap in a single course. Instead, the aim of this course is to avail ourselves of a range of thinkers who do not fit neatly onto either side of this divide, namely, Nietzsche, Freud and their heirs.

The first part of the course explores in some detail Nietzsche’s and Freud’s revolutions in understanding of human experience. Both start with Darwin’s insight that human beings are part and parcel of nature, but then endeavor to do justice to distinctive capacities human beings have evolved, especially the most subtle forms of moral and aesthetic experience, as well as emphasizing individual psychological variation. In particular we shall consider, how we are to understand subjectivity, of what selves are, of their capacities and responsibilities, of their dependencies and creativity, after Nietzsche has said that “there is no doer behind the deed” and after Freud has “discovered” what is Unconscious?

The second half of the course explores representative, especially suggestive or compelling accounts of selves and their relations, our responsibilities and creativity, including selections from the writings of Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Lacan, Kristeva, Laplanche, Kohut, Loewald, and S. Mitchell. Our aim will not be to choose among these accounts nor to synthesize them to arrive at some comprehensive account of human subjectivity. Rather, the course aims to broaden participants’ awareness of the complexities of personal and collective experience so that we may be inspired to seek ways to do greater justice to these dimensions of human life in our work.