Anthropology 330  THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 

Professor Matti Bunzl Office:  386B Davenport Hall PH:  265-4068 bunzl@uiuc.edu

This course will provide a selective overview of the history and historiography of anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The class will move chronologically and topically, paying particular attention to the social, institutional, and historical contexts of paradigmatic shifts, the interconnections between various national traditions, and the negotiations of the discipline's boundaries.  Within this framework, we will be especially concerned with the historicization of American anthropology, comparing its conceptual organization to other national traditions and exploring the unique perspectives it engenders.  Students will be encouraged to pursue their individual interest in the history and theory of anthropology.

 

Comm/Sp Com 308-1- Hay- Cultural Analysis of Screen Media 3:30-4:50 TuTh, 130 Lincoln Hall

This course is an advanced introduction to issues, concepts, and forms of analysis in media and cultural studies.  Each semester the course focuses on a specific topic.  This semester the course will examine the changing relation of media and other technologies to house and home in the U.S.  It will consider the domestic sphere as concept (represented and defined through media such as television) and as a setting where various media are installed and engaged.  Other issues to be considered include concepts and practices of (domestic) labor and leisure, changing conceptions and relations of the public and private sphere, concepts of Home, the regulation of media and domestic space, the regulation of privacy, the changing relation of household media to one another and to other domestic appliances, the relation of media to architecture, lawn and garden, interior design, and furnishings, the relation between media and suburbanization, the relation between media and urban _gentrification,_ the home as a site of citizenship, the home as a site of consumption, and the formation of social relations through media technologies from the home. (For a longer course description contact Prof. Hay at <j-hay@uiuc.edu>.)

 

Comm/EPS 475-G  - McCarthy

- Proseminar in Cultural Studies and Critical Interpretation   3-450 MW

This course will offer students the opportunity to become familiar with the history, applications and limitations of several theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary culture and popular media that have been developed in the emergent research field known as cultural studies. It is intended to provide students with analytical frameworks for understanding contemporary cultural life. Debates and issues within cultural studies and debates between cultural studies and other schools of thought will serve as the organizing agenda for exploring the relationships between culture, experience and unequal social relations of gender, race, class, nation, and sexuality; youth cultures, resistance through rituals; popular culture, power and public policy; cultural imperialism and center-periphery relations; poststructuralism and its implications for the study of culture; and the impact of cultural studies across the disciplines. This course is interdisciplinary and should be of interest to students with backgrounds in several different areas, including a) research methods that combine textual analysis of contemporary popular media and culture with sociological analysis; b) theoretical encounters and bridges between continental thought and American traditions; c) feminist theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, cultural geography, psychoanalysis, queer theory, marxist political economy analysis, postcolonialism and critical race theory; and d) the application of literary and rhetorical theories to the media and popular culture. The pro-seminar will meet twice per week (for approximately 2 hours per session).

 

Comm 490-T/LIS 450-GC Schiller

-Political Economy of Global Information and Communication    3-4:50 Tu, 109 LIS Bldg

The Political Economy of Global Information and Communication is an entry-level Ph.D. research seminar; it assumes no previous knowledge in the area. To acquaint graduate students with leading themes and breaking research in the field, we will read 6-8 recent monographs and critically assess them. Each student will also write a long research paper, working closely with the two professors.  Themes of direct interest to understanding the structure and control of global communications and information in today's world include the rise of vertically integrated, transnational corporations in this sector, alongside the characteristically recent emergence throughout much of the world of national and regional units of capital; the ongoing transformation of the earlier system based on cultural/informational exports and imports by transnationalized production and distribution systems; institutionally stratified opportunities to influence the informational environment; stratified access to communications systems and services; attempts to expand private property rights in information and culture; propaganda in the contemporary world; ways of evaluating the changing economic importance of the information and communications sector.

 

Comm 490 - TRANSNATIONAL MULTICULTURAL STUDIES - Valdivia

Within the study of communications and popular culture, only recently have we begun to consider the integrated study of issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class from a global perspective. Given that such an enterprise requires the study of many related and overlapping but previously separate disciplines, this course strives to provide illumination on areas of intersection while including contemporary approaches aiming toward a communications studies framework of analysis.  Communications studies are a highly diverse interdiscipline so that in case you might be unfamiliar with it, you should have no difficulty finding a place within its broad terrain.  Furthermore, given that one of the themes is “global/local” our attention will include issues of border studies and national [US] immigration and constructions of difference as they are related to the transnational.  Since the bulk of the literature comes from an interdisciplinary set of sources ranging from international communication studies, postcolonial studies, Latin American Studies, English literature, anthropology, US Latina/o studies, feminist and multicultural studies, we will, in fact, be building and creating a framework of analysis and highlighting the connections, theoretically and methodologically, which allow for the study of transnational and multicultural issues within communications.  Toward this end, we will examine several case studies in the third part of the semester. 

 

Comp Lit 396-A – Violence and Space - Prof. Herscher - Tu/Th 3:00-4:20pm - English 123

From sites defined by remembered or anticipated damage, through injuries located in “domestic” space or “natural” disaster, to geographies of centers of power and peripheries of fear, insecurity and terror, violence is enmeshed with the spatial.  Yet violence does not simply occur in space; rather, violence always transforms space, a transformation that is left unanalyzed when violence is understood merely as a rationalized instrument of power and space is understood as a container or context in which that instrument is applied.

Approaching violence as a situated social practice and space as a social product, this course will focus on where and how violence takes place.  Against the prevailing understanding of violence as a means to gain control of space or destroy space, we will here examine violence as a production or reproduction of space that engenders subjects, objects, and extrinsic sites of power, authority and domination.  The course will thus offer a re-assessment of readings of violence that are based on or invoke pre-constituted subjects or communities, imagined or actual; territorial referents; civil laws; origin myths; or “power” separated from situated practice.  In so doing, we will approach “space” as a phenomenon encompassing forms, from the bodily to the territorial; representations, both visual and textual; and practices, from the quotidian to the professional.   We will thereby move back and forth from the sites of buildings, cities and nations, through textual representations of journalism and literature and visual representations of photography and film, to the practices of architecture, urbanism and everyday life. 

The course will be organized in four parts.  In the first part, we will examine and discuss a set of concepts for theorizing space from geography and urban studies, focusing on the work of Lefebvre.  In the second part, we will examine and discuss a set of concepts for theorizing violence from the work of anthropologists such as Appadurai, Daniel and Feldman.  In the third part, we will explore the relationship between space and violence through case studies of episodes of war, terrorism and civil conflict, such as the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War, the 1985 Handsworth Uprising in the United Kingdom, and “ethnic cleansing” in the 1998-99 Kosovo Conflict.  In the fourth part, students will present their own research on topics related to the course themes.  This organization should not be construed to mean, however, that the outcomes of the course are at all pre-determined; rather, the course is conceived as an open framework to initiate, develop and intensify thinking on space, violence and their interactions, and to unfold within the various disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts that course participants bring.

 

Educational Policy Studies 490 – Critical Race Theory - Parker

Course Overview: This seminar will focus on critical race theory (CRT) as a critique of racism in the law and society and discuss current applications of CRT to the field of education. The writings in this area have been developed mainly through the legal and education scholarship of Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado, Kimberlie Crenshaw, Daniel Soloranzo, Gloria Ladson Billings and William Tate. Critical race theory has its roots in previous discipline-based critiques related to the history, philosophy, politics and social construction and reality of race and discrimination. Given this foundation, CRT has evolved around a number of general themes: 1) racism is a normal daily fact of life in society and the ideology and assumptions of racism are ingrained in the political and legal structures as to be almost unrecognizable. Legal racial designations have complex, historical and socially constructed meanings that insure the location of political superiority of racially marginalized groups; 2) as a form of oppositional scholarship, CRT challenges the experience of White European Americans as the normative standard; rather, CRT grounds its conceptual framework in the distinctive contextual experiences of people of color and racial oppression through the use of literary narrative knowledge and story-telling to challenge the existing social construction of race; and 3) CRT attacks liberalism and the inherent belief in the law to create an equitable just society. CRT advocates have pointed to the frustrating legal pace of meaningful reform that has eliminated blatant hateful expressions of racism, but has kept intact exclusionary relations of power as exemplified by the legal conservative backlash of the courts, legislative bodies, voters, etc., against "special rights for racially marginalized groups."

 

English 427 R SEMINAR IN RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE, Markley

        TOPIC: Trade, Colonialism, and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century

This seminar will explore the complex relations among trade, colonialism and literature (fictional and non-fictional) in the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Drawing on the work of a variety of feminist and postcolonial theorists as well as on work in economic history and historical ecology, we will read and discuss some of the major texts of the period as well as a number of narratives that traditionally have not made it into the canon.  Participants in the seminar will be encouraged to explore projects that  resonate beyond the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Those students who are not primarily scholars of the early modern period are more than welcome to use the seminar in ways that will further their own interests and research. 

This seminar will devote attention to texts concerned with the Far East as well as those set in or concerned primarily with the Americas.  Some of the topics we will adrress include the literature of commerce and its effects on the literature of the period; reactions to the European the slave trade in Africa and the Americas; recent trends in postcolonial criticism; representations of the native woman as “other” in light of recent  feminist criticism; piracy and piratical literature and its influence on the development of the novel; and the limitations of British commerical and naval power in the South Seas and the Far East.   The texts we will read include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter; John Dryden’s The Indian Queen, “Annus Mirabilis,” and Aureng-Zebe; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the little-read but extraordinarily popular (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Captain Singleton; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and poems and letters by (among others) Samuel Johnson, John Dyer, Oliver Goldsmith, Joseph Addison, Behn, Swift, and others.  Theory and secondary criticism will include works by feminist scholars (Felicity Nussbaum, Laura Brown, Bridget Orr, Heidi Hutner; Charlotte Sussman); historians and historical ecologists (Jack Goldstone, Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, Carole Crumley); and postcolonial critics (Peter Hulme, Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Neill, Hans Turley, Robert Young, Rajani Sudan, Srinivas Aravamudan).

Students will write a long seminar paper, a shorter paper, and two brief annotated bibliographies—one on current criticism or theory, and one on a primary text available in the Library.

 

English 437 G SEMINAR IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE, Garrett.  W 3-4:50

        TOPIC: Realism: Dickens and Eliot

Realism is a slippery and suspect concept, but it is indispensable for studying Victorian fiction.  It’s slippery because it has been used in so many differing ways, suspect because it always carries ideological baggage.  Even if we are careful to restrict its scope, specifying “realist” as a nineteenth-century period style rather than invoking a transhistorical notion of the “realistic,” we must contend with its applicability to novelists as different as Dickens and Eliot.  Realism is nevertheless indispensable because the claims by these and several other Victorian novelists to offer truthful representations of social and psychological reality are a crucial part of their bid for cultural authority, and we need to understand how those claims were established and contested.  This seminar will read work by Dickens and Eliot from early, middle, and late stages of their careers, as well as both contemporary and later critical and theoretical accounts, considering how their fiction explores both the power and limits of realism.

TEXTS:  Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend; Eliot, Essays, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda

 

English 453 G SEMINAR IN LATER AMERICAN LITERATURE, Foote.  M 3-4:50

 TOPIC: Realism and the Age of Distinction in Late Nineteenth Century U .S. Literature

Literary histories commonly call the late nineteenth century in the US the “age of realism,” but no term was more contested than the “real.”  In the literary and social arenas, mechanisms for determining who and what counted as real were multiplying.  But at the same time, opportunities to change one’s social place or to become someone else, even if momentarily, were increasingly available.  This class will track two narratives that intersect with the crisis of the real in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  One trajectory of the class will give students of American literature and culture some grounding in the debate over the value of the genre of realism in literary history.  We will look at the self-conscious formation of realism, studying its relationship to the social field that produced it and that it in turn helped to produce.  We will look at the strategies of the realists for making sense of a world whose very social multiplicity challenged any easy ways to classify persons.  We will also look at the tradition of literary criticism in the United States that helped to privilege realism as the generic totem of the nineteenth century.  The second trajectory of this class will contextualize our inquiry into realism.  As we look at debates over the meaning and proper expression of the real, we will also look closely at the development of the social world as an object of study itself.  Through the lens of social distinction and the rise of the middle class, we will study the meaning of the social distinctions that helped to create the middle class readers of realism.  How were they solicited by advertisements?  How did they make (quite unstable) distinctions between high and low culture?  How did they understand the relationship between money and status?  How did the category we now think of as “class” develop as a cultural sign in the age of realism? 

        Primary texts may include. Novels by Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jacob Riis, Abraham Cahan, Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, selected photographic texts and magazine texts.

        Secondary reading is likely to include: Bourdieu, Distinctions and The Field of Social Production; Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, Amy Kaplan, Michael Davitt Bell, Richard Brodhead, Brook Thomas, John Kasson, Janice Radway, George Levine, Richard Ohmann, Nancy Glazener. Thorstein Veblen, Althusser, examples of period magazines and advertisements, and a packet of reading consisting of a history of critiques of American realism including Werner Berthoff, Vernon Parrington, Fred Lewis Pattee, and FO Matthiesson. 

 

English 463 E SEMINAR IN LITERARY THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, Castro.  W 1-2:50

        TOPIC: Americas Studies: Reading Hemispherically

What happens to our study of American Literature if we read “America” as not simply a synonym for the United States? This seminar explores the recent critical trend toward “New World” or hemispheric focuses, as one aspect of current “post-national” formulations of American Studies. What perspectives on race, nation, slavery, imperialism, and historiography do such vantages afford?  While we will sample recent critical writings on the subject (for example, see the January 2003 issue of PMLA, on “America, the Idea, the Literature”), our primary focus will be on two sets of primary texts: First, we will read key theoretical essays on the culture of the Americas by intellectuals from Latin America and the Caribbean--essays whose impact can be traced in the vocabulary of mestizaje, creolization, and hybridity common to both postcolonial and U.S. studies. Here’s a chance to read the essays that helped launch these terms and to evaluate the stakes of their afterlives. Second, we will read selected works of U.S. and Caribbean fiction (from the 19th-century forward) that trace inter-American connections and thus invite us to assess how their narratives of the Americas construct American culture and history. Throughout, we will consider African Diaspora and Latino/a Studies as engines of this current trans-American focus. Essayists will be chosen from among Martí; Vasconcelos; Rodó; Freyre; de Andrade; Ortiz; Paz; Fernandez Retamar; Lamming; CLR James; Fanon; Césaire; Brathwaite; Glissant; García Canclini; and Confiant, Bérnabé, and Chamoiseau. Fiction will be drawn from works by Bryant, Melville, Ruiz de Burton, Delaney, Hopkins, G. Jones, Condé, Cliff, Brodber, and Alvarez.  All readings will be available in English, but projects on relevant texts in other languages are more than welcome.  In addition to vigorous preparation and participation in discussion, responsibilities include short responses, a class presentation, a five-item annotated bibliography related to your topic, and a final seminar-length paper.

 

English 481 R SEMINAR IN LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM, Hansen.  TH 1-2:50

        TOPIC: Frankfurt School Aesthetics

Contemporary trends in critical theory ranging from Feminism and Marxism to Post-colonialism have re-discovered the work of the Frankfurt School modernists, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Theodor W. Adorno (1902-1969). In fact, it would be fair to say that Benjamin’s writings on technology and art, despite overt ties to Marxian thought, have been appropriated by nearly every theoretical school to emerge in the last thirty years. In addition, spurred in part by recent translations of Aesthetic Theory and Critical Models, English-speaking critics are beginning to grasp the full scope of Adorno’s work, which may well embody the most rigorous philosophical defense of the politics of modernist art to date. Beginning with the debates about art and politics found in the works of Kant, Hegel, and Lukács, the course will move on to consider Benjamin and Adorno’s writings on historicism, allegory, and autonomous art, while paying careful attention to their analyses of such individual artists as Kafka, Brecht, and Beckett.  We will spend a great deal of time working through the much-discussed Adorno-Benjamin debate surrounding Mass/Popular Culture and the possibility of revolutionary art and to related essays by other Frankfurt School writers such as Herbert Marcusé and Friedrich Pollock . At the most basic level, when read together Adorno and Benjamin ask whether or not art can have any real critical impact on society, whether mass culture is democratizing or totalitarian, and whether modernist experiments with form succeeded in changing the ways in which we perceive the Other and the world.

        Readings will include: Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Hegel’s “The End of Art,” Georg Lukács’s “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and selections from Theory of the Novel; Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations along with selected pieces from Reflections, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and The Arcades Project; Theodor W. Adorno’s The Culture Industry, along with selections from Dialectic of Enlightenment, Prisms, Notes to Literature, and Aesthetic Theory;  Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, and essays by Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcusé, Martin Jay, Frederic Jameson, and Susan Buck-Morss. 

 

English 482 E TOPICS IN RESEARCH, INQUIRY AND WRITING STUDIES, Hawhee.  W 1-2:50 - Same as

C & I 465       TOPIC: Classical Rhetoric

 This graduate seminar will serve as an introduction to rhetoric and oratory in the ancient world. The bulk of the course will focus on primary texts in the best translations beginning with the Older Sophists of the 5th century BCE up through the Roman Republic. While reading works by and about the sophists, Aristotle, Diotima, Plato, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Cicero and Quintilian, we will consider rhetoric’s development in relation to ancient cultural values and practices. In doing so, the course will pay particular attention to rhetoric’s emergence as an art with rich and interrelated traditions of pedagogy, politics, and performance.

 

FRENCH 478 / CLIT 478 / WS 490. – Lawrence Schehr -Seminar in Twentieth-Century Literature. 

Topic:  Post-Modern Sexualities:  from Lust to Lucky Pierre. 

A critical examination of the articulation of sexualities in literature and film in post_modern western culture.  The course will consider the ways in which contemporary writing and cinema represent current understanding of a multiplicity of sexual categories and participate in the subversion of older, stable, bivalent models.   Readings include Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis, Elfriede Jelinek, Guillaume Dustan, Verena Stefan, Catherine Millet, Mark Ravenhill, Dennis Cooper, J.G. Ballard, A.M. Homes, Robert Coover, Michael Nava.  Tuesday 3-4:50.  1024 FLB.

 

 History 487A PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1815 (Burgos)


Topic: Latinos and Cities: Culture, Race, and Community

The U.S. Census figures released in the past year have sparked much debate about the significance of Latinos assuming the position of majority-minority. Discussions have focused on the impact of the demographic shift in terms of national political landscape, racial politics, and American identity. Despite the recent attention, most remain unfamiliar with the process wherein Latinos became fellow Americans and the particular history of Latino and cities. This course examines this history through its focus on the formation and development of U.S. Latino urban communities during the long 20th century. In so doing, the course interrogates the institutional infrastructure, internal social relationships (class, gender, color, and generational), and cultural expressions of urban Latino communities. Assigned materials explore the theories and paradigms, past and present, by which scholars have interpreted urban Latino experiences, and explores the particular articulations of racism, sexism, and capitalism that establish the context and contours of Latino self-transformation and self-development in specific urban areas.

 

History 487B PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1815 (Roediger)


Meets with Hist 453A
Topic: Slavery, Expansion and Race in Antebellum U.S.

This course, taught in a seminar format, centers on the reading and discussion of ten books and several articles. The readings open onto broad questions regarding the ways in which ideas about race, and racist practices, developed out of the experience of settler colonialism as well as out of racial slavery. With exceptions drawn from the writings of Herman Melville, the books are historical, albeit interdisciplinary, in their approaches. Students will report on one book not read by classmates and will lead discussion (with a partner) once during the semester. Short (2-3 pp.) writing assignments accompany those tasks. A longer (12-15 pp.) final paper puts a primary source (or sources) of the student’s choosing into dialogue with the historians’ works. For that reason the course may also be taken as a research seminar.

 

History 487C PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1815 (Reagan)


Meets with Hist 492E.
Topic: Disease, Bodies, and Society

Disease has been an essential component of the processes of categorization, division, and unification of various populations by nations, by the state, and by “the sick” and “the healthy” themselves. By using the history of disease as an organizing principle for the course, students will not only gain knowledge of the history of medicine, public health, and patients, but will also analyze power, politics, and society. For instance, we will analyze how health and disease have historically been part of immigration policies and the definitions of “foreign,” “citizen,” “native,” “criminal,” or “degenerate.” Discussion will include thinking about disease as socially constructed, culturally understood, and historically changing, as a "metaphor" for society. We will discuss how the understanding of disease causation has changed and the implications for public policy. Does biology create diseases or does society or do individuals? Who is responsible for spreading disease and for caring for the sick? How is disease defined and when and why are some diseases noticed and others ignored? How have gender, race, class, religion, and sexuality shaped and defined disease and a society’s responses to the sick? We will discuss how the state has responded to different diseases over time and when the interests of public health and individual civil liberties have come into conflict. This course will also provide an opportunity to think about the body and how it is seen and understood over time. How have the body’s abilities and disabilities defined, divided, and been sources of power and oppression? Selections from the new literature in disability studies will be part of our conversation.
Students will be expected to write historiographic or small research papers, selected from a broad range of topics with the guidance of the professor. Along with in-depth reading in history, readings from other disciplines such as anthropology and communications will be included. Readings are comparative, although the emphasis will be on the U.S. through the twentieth century. Articles and books from Europe and the Non-West will be included.
Readings are likely to include Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic; Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin; Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years and/or Katherine Kudlick, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary France; Joan Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease; Gerald Geison and Nancy Tomes on Louis Pasteur and the “Gospel of Germs;” Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the U.S.; Susan Reverby, ed., Tuskegee’s Truths; Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s China Town; Barron Lerner, The Breast Cancer Wars; David Arnold, Megan Vaughan, Warwick Anderson, and Michelle Moran on Disease and Empire in India, Africa, Asia, and the U.S.; Paula Treichler, Paul Farmer, Cynthia Patton, on global AIDS, and more!

 

History 490A HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY (Oberdeck)


A readings course in classic and contemporary social and cultural theory for history graduate students. Will include readings of classic "modern" theorists of social structure and process (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel), twentieth century approaches to culture and society (Frankfurt School, Habermas, Gramsci, Geertz) and recent theories of social construction and fragmentation (postmodernism; Foucault; post-colonialism; theories of gender, race, and identity; and theories of transnationality and spatial relations). Class participation and three 10-12 page papers required--two on course readings, one on student's choice of historiographical examples applying theoretical approaches discussed in class.

 

History 492C PROBLEMS IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY (Todorova)


Topic: Travel and Travelogues

This seminar offers an introduction to the ways scholars are thinking about the phenomenon of travel in a historical perspective. It will survey the ars apodemica, or "art of travel" in antiquity, the medieval and early modern period, and will focus on the rationale and mechanisms of travel from the Enlightenment to the present. Key topics to consider are the delineation of types of travel in different periods according to a variety of characteristics: motives, provenance, social class, duration, means of transport, etc., in a word, the sociology of travel. Other topics include aspects of the role of travel as a method of research, i.e. the accumulation and systematization of descriptive and evaluative knowledge through travel for the formation of new disciplines and genres in the humanities: anthropology, sociology, political science, comparative history, literature, etc. We shall explore different regions of "discovery"--Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Southern and Eastern Europe, finally Europe as a whole and North America itself, and will deal with questions of identity and representation. Special attention will be devoted to the problem of women travelers and their work. Throughout, our central objective will be to attempt to evaluate travelogues as historical sources, their genres and reception

 

History 492D PROBLEMS IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY (B. Edwards)


Topic: Race and Science

Many historians have characterized the mid- to late-nineteenth century as the period in which science constructed “race.” Is this the story? This seminar introduces students to the study of the race concept through a comparative focus on historiographies and conceptual issues around race, focusing particularly on how race theories have developed over the last three centuries in the West. This is a reading seminar intended to examine the development of race in theories of science and the role of science in theories of race, focusing specifically on the histories of modern biology, anthropology and American politics. Our main goal in this seminar is to explore how the ideas and methods associated with the design of race, from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century, have informed various histories. We will examine the relationship between scientific and social conceptions—that is, focusing more on the invention of race than on racism.

 

Landscape Architecture 490 (call # 04336) RACE AND SPACE: CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES/CONSTRUCTING PLACE

- Professor Dianne Harris -Thursdays, 10:00 – 12:00Room 18 Temple Buell Hall

This seminar will examine the relationship between the social construction of race and the construction of the built environment (architecture, urban space, landscapes), focusing primarily on the United States. Themes for examination will include:

  • Housing segregation and exclusionary design practices
  • Neighborhoods,  ethnic enclaves, and the idea of the ghetto
  • Urban open space: exclusion, inclusion, appropriation
  • Suburbs, developers, and the real estate industry
  • Environmental justice
  • Memorial and commemorative spaces (who/what gets memorialized and how?)
  • Landscapes (gardens, parks, waterfront areas---to whom do they belong?)
  • The development of the professions of architecture and landscape architecture (why have they remained so “white?”)

Participants in the course will be required to attend the symposium “Constructing Race: The Built Environment, Minoritization, and Racism in the United States” which will be held on March 5-6, 2004. The symposium is being organized by Professor Harris and sponsored by the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society , the Department of Landscape Architecture, and the College of Fine and Applied Arts.

 

Philosophy 312/412: Classical Modern Philosophers


Nietzsche's Ethics TT 4-5:20 PM 317 GH
Prof. Schroeder

Over the past several years now, I have been developing an interpretation of Nietzsche's ethics that includes discussions of his general theory of value, his own distinctive virtues, his theory of self-improvement, of culture, and of the revaluation of values, his critique of morality, and his moral psychology. I will present summaries of this research in the first three weeks of the course. Then we shall engage in a close examination of two crucial texts: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (which I regard as a kind of summary of all his writings up until then, plus some entirely new perspectives in addition) and Beyond Good and Evil. We will study these texts section by section, examining the subtleties of Nietzsche's ideas and his arguments for his conclusions. We will see how this material supplements the understanding of Nietzsche's ethics that I have already developed, and also explore searching criticisms of Nietzsche's often-controversial views. If there is time, we will consider Nietzsche's relationship to some theorists in recent analytic ethics, and we will certainly try to develop original extensions of his ideas in all the areas listed above. I try to capture how Nietzsche's ideas are relevant for actual living; this will be the main focus of the course, but it will also consist of a thorough intellectual examination of his main ethical conclusions. There will be plenty of class discussion, but also significant amounts of lecturing as well. Students will learn how to read a philosopher carefully, in addition to learning an important ethical position. There will be some short paper assignments, a term paper, and a final exam.

 

Philosophy 401 - Seminar in the History of Philosophy - Philosophical Anthropology - Schacht

In this seminar we will look at some of the writings of a number of philosophers associated with the movement in early 20th-century Central European philosophy known as “philosophical anthropology” (philosophische Anthropologie).  This movement emerged in rivalry with phenomenology and existential philosophy in the period between the two world wars, and may be conceived as a direct descendent of the naturalistically-minded post-religious and post-metaphysical reinterpretation of human reality in the tradition of Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Dilthey.  We will focus primarily on the two most important and influential figures in the emergence of this movement, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, and may also give some attention to the later Sartre (Search for a Method), Ernst Cassirer (An Essay on Man), and some related writings of Susanne Langer and Marjorie Grene, and Charles Taylor.   Since English versions of most of the material we will be considering are either out of print or very expensive, readings will probably be assembled in a large course pack.

 

Sociology 482 Globalization: Dynamics and Debates – Pieterse


Globalization is a kaleidoscopic process involving interacting
technological, economic, political, social and cultural changes.
Understanding globalization requires combining different social science
disciplines. Under the heading dynamics, this course gives an overview
of key processes. Under debates, the course examines controversial
current concerns: Which trend is most significant, globalization or
empire? What is the difference between globalization and neoliberalism?
After Cancun, what is the future of the WTO? Are we headed for a global
monoculture? The course concludes with discussions on global futures
probing scenarios of global change and policy options.

 

Soc 482 - Science & technology studies: the mangle of practice -Pickering

Meets Tuesdays, 3.00-5.30pm, 336 Lincoln Hall

 This course is a research seminar organised around discussion and critique of selected works. It centres on the analysis of practice set out in Andrew Pickering’s book, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, and work that has grown out of that. Alongside The Mangle, a selection of Pickering’s subsequent writings, and related publications, the primary focus will be on the work in progress of a group of advanced UIUC graduate students currently elaborating a mangle-ish approach in their own dissertation research. The aim will be to clarify and extend the mangle as a distinctive theoretical and methodological approach within the social sciences and beyond, and to explore its reach and pay-off in a variety of areas of study. The range of empirical studies to be discussed remains to be settled, but will include: Korean traditional medicine; the development of magnetic resonance imaging techniques (MRI); the history of cybernetics and computing; and governmental interventions against domestic violence.

It is envisaged that papers discussed in the seminar will form the basis for an edited volume. It may be possible to bring in outside speakers during the course of the semester or for a workshop to be held at the semester’s end.

 Readings: as above.

 Grades: To be based on active contributions to seminar discussions and written work on topics to be individually negotiated (but somehow related to the theme).

 Contact: pickerin@uiuc.edu

 

SPAN 442. Urban Desires: Sex and the City in Caribbean Cultures.


07374 LECD G 3-500 TU 1126 FOR LANG - GOLDMAN D

During their unexpected trajectory through the decidedly non-urban
spaces of Australia, Bernadette (Terence Stamp) comments to the other two
drag queens making the journey that‹although the city is traditionally
viewed as a liberating space‹perhaps the suburbs are ³really about keeping
us in.² Over the last several decades, increased critical attention has
been paid to questions of space, and it has become an important focus within
several academic disciplines. We are now attending to the encounters between
different cultures and the repercussions that these have on definitions of
space and identity. More specifically, major metropolitan centers
throughout the hemisphere are often studied as sites of development (whether
productive, excessive or insufficient), hybridity, transgression and
transnationalism.
This course seeks to explore visions of the metropole in Caribbean and
U.S. Caribbean cultures. We will analyze the intersections between urban
spaces and the formation of local/global subjectivities. That is, to what
extent do real-and-imagined urban spaces constitute a site of containment,
possibility, uneven development, hybridity and/or homogenizing hegemony in
Caribbean cultural production? How does desire--understood in terms of
sexuality, cosmpolitanism (i.e. desire for the urban), as a mechanism of
territorialization and/or the negotiation of power--interact with urban
spaces in Caribbean cultures?
We will explore these issues through the analysis of theoretical texts
on urban spaces (i.e. Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, David Harvey, Jose
Munoz, Celeste Olalquiaga, Edwatd Soja) and contemporary Caribbean
literature and culture (i.e. Pedro Juan Gutierrez's _Trilogia sucia de la
Habana_, Luis Rafael Sanchez's _La guaracha del Macho Camacho, Achy Obejas's
_Days of Awe_ and films such as _Memorias del subdesarrollo_, _Fresas y
chocolate_ and _Suite Habana_). Readings will be in both Spanish and
English, but class discussions will be conducted in Spanish

 

Speech Communication 438: Rhetorics of Globalization & Empire

Tuesdays from 5-8 PM, with Professor Stephen Hartnett

Many observers have argued that 9/11 triggered a shift in world politics from a course of law-drien economic globalization to a course of weapons-driven empire building. Indeed, conflating Afghanistan, Iraq, and a host of other “rogue states” and terrorists into one catch-all “axis of evil,” President Bush has proposed that the U.S. forego entangling alliances and instead strike where and when it chooses in the name of self defense.  In the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States (NSSUS), the text articulating “the Bush doctrine,” President Bush warns that “we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.” While enacting this new policy of unilateral military adventurism in the name of self defense, the Bush administration has also pursued multilateral economic globalization. Claiming that globalizing free markets inevitably produce economic opportunity, political reform, and judicial fairness, the president has portrayed unfettered capitalism as the only model for continued world development. In fact, the NSSUS’s opening sentence proclaims that all history points to the triumph of “freedom, democracy, and free enterprise,” while its closing sentence proclaims that the future security of the U.S. “comes from” the nation’s “entrepreneurial energy.” The “Bush Doctrine” therefore begins and ends with the understanding that democracy is capitalism and that capitalism is democracy.  We will accordingly spend the semester studying the relationships among markets and militaries, trade deals and terrorist strikes, public speeches and secret dealings, force and forgiveness, and democracy and deception.  While drawing from economists, political scientists, sociologists, reporters, philosophers, and historians, we will also focus each week on seminal speeches, thus tracking the ways globalization and empire are debated in public.

Course Materials: The first half of the semester’s readings will establish a common base of knowledge, while the second half of the semester’s readings will be chosen by students.  To fathom the complexities of globalization we will read Ellen Meiskins Wood, Empire of Capital (Verso, 2003); Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton, 2003); and Amy Chua, World on Fire (Anchor, 2004). To grasp the consequences of empire we will read Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Owl, 2003); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003), President Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, and State Department, CIA, and Congressional Briefs.  To track the status of public speaking about these topics we will examine President Bush’s post-9/11 speeches (at www.whitehouse.gov) and the responses to them from 50 Years is Enough (www.50years.org), CorpWatch (www.corpwatch.org), the Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org), and others. To think about the role of culture in the face of globalization and empire we will read Seyla Benhabib’s The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, 2002). To understand the ways violence and forgiveness circulate throughout these topics, we will read Priscilla Hayner’s Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocities (Routledge, 2002). Additionally, each student will be responsible for sharing materials each week from an assigned source, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, UK Guardian, The Nation, Middle East Report, New Left Review, New Political Science, and others. 

Please Note that everyone is asked to come to the first class having read Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (use the Vintage paperback, ISBN # 067-972-1754)—studying this text will enable us to hit the ground running.  Also please see the harrowing film, Dirty Pretty Things, and listen closely to Bruce Cockburn’s stunning new CD, You’ve Never Seen Everything—these two instances of artistic brilliance will help us think about the implications of globalization and empire.

 

 Gender and Women's Studies 396 R:  Representing Sex, Power and Politics


 
            Frost                                        TuTh                                       1-2:20

Debates about sexuality have shaped the self-conception, the self-representation, and the agendas of contemporary feminist theory and practice.  Different conceptions of the relationship between sex and power have generated conflicting representations of the nature of women’s oppression and the kinds of feminist politics necessary to fight it.  This course examines how different representations of the relationship between sex, power, and subjectivity have shaped feminism.  While we will situate our exploration of this issue against the backdrop of the bitter disagreements about the social and political significance of sexuality in the early years of the second wave of feminism in the United States, the bulk of our analysis will be theoretically oriented.  We will draw on the theoretical frameworks provided by Freud, Deleuze, Bataille, and Foucault in order to explore how to think about and represent the relationship between power, desire, prohibition, subjectivity and political agency in the context of racial and class differences, in situations of rape and sexual slavery, and in the lives of those who are queer or who are prostitutes.

Gender and Women's Studies 396 SC: Real or Imagined Women?: Subjectivities in Postcolonial Histories



             Chandra                                  Tu                                            1-4

The production and maintenance of gender is fundamentally connected to the cultural histories of definite locations.  This course seeks to build a method by which to understand aspects of female subjectivity, while remaining attentive to the power of history and cultural detail.  Evaluating colonial and postcolonial India in this case, we will discuss the production of gender through the articulation of tradition, sexuality, domesticity and community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Each of these terms intersected with the constitution of a somewhat fixed ideal of womanhood, while simultaneously drawing in the participation as well as forcing the marginalisation of large sections of the population.  Extricating these themes through a close reading of texts produced by men and women from this period, we will view the manner in which these subjects themselves negotiated the constituent elements of gender.  Where did the experience of womanhood start for people in this period, how did they traverse the knowledge of gender difference, and when were they able to envision resistance to these identities?  Specifically interrogating the role played by gender binaries, and the subjectivity endowed by the act of writing, our aim will be to research, imagine, and write about alternative ways by which to understand gender in this context.  Finally, we will attempt to address the ongoing feminist quest to unite an understanding of cultural detail with the agenda for collective social action. 

 

Gender and Women's Studies 490 CM: Sexuality, Education, and Varieties of Queerness.


Meets with EPS 490 B3

             Mayo                                       Th                                            5-7 p.m.

One of the key insights of queer theory is that all sexualities are at some level queer.  Whether through a too enthusiastic embrace of norms or a seeming repudiation of norms, varieties of sexualities verge into queerness.  This class will examine the place of educational projects in helping us to understand a fuller variety of what it means to be queer. We will examine the resurgence of virginity and chastity, non-discrimination policies and speech codes in public schools, queer youth, and the relationship among sexuality, race, class, disability, and gender.  We will consider the term 'education' broadly, examining school policies, public health education, and the educational projects of political and social movements.  Readings will mainly concentrate on a U. S. context, though AIDS and sex education information from international sources will also be included.  Students will do one class presentation and a seminar paper.  Readings may include: D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters; Nestle, Howell, and Wilchins, eds., Genderqueer; Irvine, ed., Sexual Cultures; Thompson, Going all the Way; and a reading packet.