The Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series - Fall 2006

Once again, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory will be offering a series of public lectures intended for graduate students on Modern Critical Theory. These lectures will take place most Tuesday evenings during the fall 2006 semester and will meet from 7:30 – 9:00 pm in English 160. The lectures will be given by a series of guests from on and off campus. You may want to purchase Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (tr. Kaufmann) and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. This lecture series is open to all graduate students and to interested, advanced undergraduates. There is no need to register. 

 

Week 1

August 29: Kant

Barbara Sattler (Philosophy)


Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, B

Introduction; online: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/ch01.htm

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment: Introduction, Parts I-IV

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (selections in Norton; e-reserves) Frederick Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” from Cambridge Companion to German Idealism 

 

Week 2

September 5: Hegel

William Schroeder (Philosophy)


G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Introduction, “Sense-Certainty,” and “Self-Consciousness” [through “lordship and bondage”], pp. 46-66 & 104-119; )

 

Week 3

September 12: Marx and Marxism

Philip Wegner (English, University of Florida


Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, selections from Norton

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Norton) 

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Norton) 

Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” 

 

Week 4

September 19: Nietzsche

Richard Schacht (Philosophy)


Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Selections: Preface, Essay 1, Essay 2

Richard Schacht, "Of Morals and Menschen: Nietzsche's Genealogy and Anthropology,” in Making Sense of Nietzsche 

Richard Schacht, “ Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morals, and Menschen: A Commentary on GM II:16-25” 

 

Week 5

September 26: Freud

Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic/Comp Lit) and Rob Rushing (Italian/Comp Lit)


Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” and selections from The Interpretation of Dreams (Norton)

Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918; the “Wolf Man” case study) 

 

Week 6

October 3: Foucault

Matti Bunzl (Anthropology)


Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction

Secondary: Foucault readings from Norton

 

Week 7

No lecture

 

Week 8

October 17: Lacan

Nancy Blake (Comp Lit)


Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” & “The Signification of the Phallus” in Norton

 

Week 9

October 24: Derrida

Eleanor Kaufman (Comp Lit, UCLA)

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” “Differance,” and Archive Fever (pp. 1-47)

 

Week 10

October 31: Cultural Studies of Science

Robert Markley (English)


Karen Barad, "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality," differences 10 (1998)

Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, "Remediation," Configurations (1996).

Richard Lewontin, "Facts and the Factitious in the Natural Sciences," Critical Inquiry, 1991.

 

Week 11

November 7: Feminist Theory

Deborah Nelson (English/Gender Studies, U of Chicago)


Luce Irigaray, “This Sex which is not One”

Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”

Adrienne Rich, “Compulsively Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

 

Week 12

November 14: Postcolonial Theory

Jed Esty (English)


Frantz Fanon, "The Negro and Recognition," from Black Skin, White Masks (pp 210-222; )

Edward Said, “Introduction,” from Orientalism (Norton)

Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory” (Norton)

Gayatri Spivak, from Critique of Postcolonial Reason (pp. 112-140; )

Secondary: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” from Critical Inquiry (1991)

 

Week 13

November 28: Queer Theory

Stephanie Foote (English)


Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” and “Critically Queer”

Eve K. Sedgwick, “Introduction: Axiomatic,” from Epistemology of the Closet