COL 525 Latina/x Feminist Aesthetics
Andrea Pitts
Tues/Thurs
11:00am-12:20pm
Capen 1004
Class #22924
Through a survey of differing forms of music, dance, visual art, theater, film, food, and literature, this course examines how U.S.-based Latina/x feminists have imagined and created new worlds of sensibility, desire, and aesthetic possibility. Often by defying racial, gender, and sexual norms, Latina/x artists and theorists push at the boundaries of societal expectations for Latinx and other racialized and colonized populations. This creative work includes shaping new spaces for community connection, constructing new or retrofitting forms of self-expression, and moving across and within oppressive spaces in resistant and transformative ways. Themes woven throughout the course include queer embodiment and desire, trans/travesti life and futurity, disability and crip of color critique, analyses of state and interpersonal violence, transnational feminist solidarity and conflict, and in-depth explorations into the relationship between politics and art. ***No prerequisites required – all are welcome to enroll!***
COL 735 Left of Marxism: Feminist, Queer, Indigenous, and Black Critiques
Elisabeth Paquestte
Tuesday
3:30pm-6:10pm
Clemens 708
REC Class #10024 SEM Class #10023
The focus of this course is the various feminist, queer, Indigenous, and Black critiques of Marxism that have circulated for decades. Derived from a variety of geopolitical locations (from Europe, to the Caribbean, and North America) scholars and activists have been critiquing the way in which marginalized subjects are excluded from the narrative of "universal emancipation" that the socialist revolution promised. Furthermore, drawing from feminist, queer, Indigenous, and Black theorists, we consider the various ways in which these scholars suggest that we can stretch Marx to seek emancipation that is "actually" universal. The course will begin with a cursory reading of Karl Marx, after which we will delve into these various critiques. (core seminar)
COL 738 Athen, Jerusalem, Rome
Rodolphe Gasche
Tuesday
12:30pm-3:10pm
Clemens 708
REC Class #10015 SEM Class #10014
Europe (or the West in general) is commonly retraced to the double legacy of Greek and Judaic thought and civilization. The names of the two cities: Jerusalem and Athens, are often used to refer to this origin and heritage of the West. Apart from Mecca, the importance of Rome is often neglected in this scheme even though it is via Rome that the Greek legacy became bestowed on Europe. In this seminar about the multiple origin of European thought and culture, we will inquire into some of the distinctive features of the Greek and Jewish legacies in the formation of Western thought, and in particular Western literature. We will start with a reading of Leo Strauss’ lectures from 1950 on “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections,” before proceeding to Erich Auerbach’s essay on “Figura,” and the introductory chapter, “Odysseus’ Scar,” to his classical study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
Time permitting we will also include in this seminar, Remi Brague’s study on Excentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, as a basis for a discussion of the Roman heritage as one that consists in adopting foreign cultures without destroying them, as well as his essay “Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca” as a critical counterpart to Leo Strauss’ lectures. (core seminar)
COL 525/ FR 526: “Psychoanalysis and Ecopoetics”
Fernanda Negrete
Tuesday 4:00-6:40 Clemens 904
Class# 23825
This seminar examines experiences of and relationships to time, space, and transition zones in psychoanalysis and in a range of ecopoetic practices.
In a short paper written around the same time as the better known "Mourning and Melancholia" (1915), Freud explored the connection between beauty, joy, and ephemerality in nature beside a poet friend of his who was stricken with a kind of pain that today might be considered a case of solastalgia, a state of homesickness for the impending losses related to environmental change. To Freud, embracing the intimate link between joy and impermanence was crucial, but if it involves letting go of stasis and aversion to change, how does this attitude face up to the very practical problem that the planet can very well become totally inhospitable to human and non-human life? This destructive trend gained its momentum, as we know, in an industrialized world where collective life takes place under the threat of nuclear escalation and neoliberal policy, so what would be a different choice after mondialisation and who would be able to make it? Where do current concepts and practices of care stand in this situation, and how do these practices differ from ecopoetics and from the ethics of psychoanalysis? The answer involves beauty: in psychoanalysis it promptly shows the horror that is its underside, so in the seminar we consider both this dialectic and the fact that it does not exhaust what is at stake in aesthetic feeling and creation, particularly with regard to crisis, drive, subjectivity, freedom, and action. We will consider artworks from impressionism to Land Art to current time-based and ephemeral art, and read texts by Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, Willy Apollon, and other analysts, as well as by philosophers and writers such as Suzanne Césaire, Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé, Gilles Deleuze, Frankétienne, Édouard Glissant, Félix Guattari, Immanuel Kant, Julia Kristeva, Leda Maria Martins, Bénédicte Meillon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Johanna Oksala, Suely Rolnik, Cécile Sauvage, Jonathan Skinner, Robert Smithson, and Cecilia Vicuña.
COL 690: Dissertation Writing Workshop
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Monday 12:30-3:10 Clemens 708
Class #15167
The Dissertation Writing Workshop (DWW) is a one-credit hour, mandatory course for all COL PhD students to be taken in the fall semester immediately following the completion of the Oral Examinations. The DWW serves two basic purposes: 1) facilitates the transition from seminars and exam preparation to the writing of the dissertation; 2) professionalization and job market preparation. Requirement for the DWW include the following: 1) production of a substantial and complete draft of a chapter of the dissertation, which will be presented to the workshop participants for comments; 2) presentation of a shorter version of the chapter (40 -50 minutes, approximately 20 pages) during the session in which the longer chapter will be discussed; 5) reading and discussion of other workshop participants' work. Dissertation directors and other faculty will be invited to attend the oral presentations of the student’s work·. The DWW meets the first week of the fall semester to organize the schedule of presentations and any other meetings. In most cases, the DWW will reconvene during the second half of the semester in order to critique the work of the workshop participants. Student grades depend on successful completion of all requirements. Failure to complete successfully the requirements results in the student's having to repeat the DWW in the following fall semester.
COL 721 REC/ SEM:” Popularity, Nationality, Universality”
Rodolphe Gasche
Tuesday 12:30pm-3:10pm Clemens 708
Class #22868 (Extensive) 22869 (Intensive)
In this seminar we will pursue several goals. Through selected passages from mainly Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, this seminar will explore the Enlightenment demand for a popular form of philosophy, and ask the question whether such a demand however desirable is possible without eclecticism, and banalization of the singular level of thought on which philosophy operates. The other issue that will be explored concerns the relation of philosophy to nationalities. Is there something like national philosophies? What does the cliché of German, French, or British philosophy, mean? How does philosophy’s claim of universality go together with its alleged, or even explicitly proclaimed nationality? Selected passages from Nietzsche’s will help us flesh out and answer these questions. In addition, we will read sections of Derrida’s The Other Heading, as well as his essays “Popularities,” and “Onto-Theology of National Humanism.” (counts toward COL core seminar requirement)
COL 722 REC /SEM "Testimony and Survival"
David Johnson
Tuesday 3:30pm-6:10pm Clemens 708
Class #22870 (Extensive) 22871 (Intensive)
This seminar concerns with the structural possibilities and limitations of testimony. What makes my testimony possible as mine and how is my testimony always that of another? We will also be concerned with the structural relation of testimony to fiction and of the truth to mendacity. Finally, we will ask about the relation of testimony to survival, to living on or survivance. We will read Jacques Derrida’s Fiction and Testimony (Demeure: Maurice Blanchot) and “History of the Lie: Prolegomenon” (Histoire du mensonge), as well as Alexandre Koyré’s “The Political Function of the Modern Lie” (Réflexions sur le mensonge). From there, we’ll take up Robert Antelme’s The Human Race (L’espèce humaine), Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (Si c’est un homme), Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après and Le Convoi de 24 Janvier, Elie Wiesel’s Night (La nuit) and Jorge Semprun’s Literature or Life (L’écriture ou la vie). Secondary readings will include Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz; Catherine Coquio, Parler des camps, parler de genocide; Rodolphe Gasché, Storytelling; Élise Lamey-Rested, Parole vraie, parole vide; Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (L’ère du témoin).
The first half of the seminar will advance via lectures on Derrida. The second half will be organized around student “kick-offs” of the primary and secondary readings. Final research paper (15-20 pages). (counts toward COL core seminar requirement)
COL 723 REC / SEM “Contemporary Poetry and the Task of Language”
Krzysztof Ziarek
Wednesday 13:30pm-3:10pm Clemens 708
Class #22872 (Extensive) 22873 (Intensive)
In the context of AI and ChatGPT, it is imperative to rethink the cultural and political roles of aesthetic practices and the inventive task of language in them. What is singular about poetic practice that AI and “large language models” cannot replicate? Although we will focus on poetry, these issues are at stake today in all artistic practices. With this framework in mind, we will examine poetry written after 1945 in the larger context of modernist and avant-garde poetics. To address this question, we will read a range of poets and interdisciplinary thinkers. Reading will include poetry by Oppen, Cage, Celan, Coolidge, Howe, Kim, Williams, and Bervin, with theoretical texts by Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy, and selected writings from critical AI studies. (counts toward COL core seminar requirement)