This course will focus on new critical issues as the basis for reading and writing about literature and culture. The emphasis will be on clarifying conceptual paradigms as much as possible, outlining their spheres of dissemination and contradiction, and exemplifying how they can be deployed in analyzing literary and cultural texts (short stories, novels, poems, films, videos, music or other forms). The list of issues and questions will include the following:

· Are contemporary subjects part of a new citizenry that is subject to a powerful aesthetic pull which post-humanistic theories fail to address? Is there such a thing as an aesthetic of globalization? Can it be studied critically?

· Literature after Postmodernism. Have deconstructive methods exhausted or liberated modern literature and the legacy of textual critiques that derive from Sausurean, Frankfurt School, reception theory, close reading, semiotics, and post-structuralist modes of reading?

· Postcolonial and Subaltern proposals. Do they offer a departure from postmodern paradigms or just a graduate school version of multicultural pluralism? Are the profound differences between the British and Hispanic legacies of colonialism in the Americas highlighted or erased through these discourses? How do new Latino and Asian American discourses speak to or through these proposals?

· Are new concepts of Latino, Asian and African American discourses changing the American literary scene as English turns into the lingua franca of globalization?.

· Performativity: A look at various notions surrounding this general trope; specifically how it impacts modes of writing and reading, as well as the idea of creativity, autobiography and culture brokering.

The final list of writers, critics and theorists is still in progress. It will constitute a selection of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Tony Morrison, G. García Márquez, Junot Diaz, Richard Rodriguez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Antonio Negri, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, J. Derrida, R. Barthes, Walter Benjamin. A. Dirlik, R. Guha, S. Hall, L. Lowe, R. Chow, Yen Le Espiritu, T. T. Minh-ha, Stephen Greenblat, Theodor Adorno, Luisa Valenzuela, Clarice Lispector, H. L. Gates, Damiela Eltit, Mario Vargas Llosa, Wim Wenders.

This seminar fulfills requirements for the CCS certificate in Cultural Studies.

Thursday 4:00-7:00 p.m. Melville Library E 4305

So-called "post-structuralist" readings of the notion of the sublime (as it was elaborated in eighteenth-century critical aesthetics) have captured the attention of thought concerned with ethical possibilities for art and literature in a "post-Auschwitz" world. Far from being a sudden disruption in some monolithic thinking about the sublime, these recent developments are the necessary consequence of an evolution readable in the very first modern readings of Pseudo-Longinus. The practicality undissociable from Longinian sublime leads logically to speculation about contributions which the movement between the artwork and the spectator that we now call the sublime might make to the creation of ethical intersubjectivity. What remains of the sublime in present-day experience? If the movement between artwork and spectator has a correlate in the movement between event and being, then the sublime remains not only in the aesthetic but also in the social. What can that remainder do for "us"? This challenge is proposed for the semester.

The seminar group will read and interpret the "canon of the sublime" as well as consider works from a variety of genres in their relation to the sublime. The genres explored will be mostly, but not exclusively, literary. "Theory" by Pseudo-Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Diderot, Kant, Baudelaire, and Adorno; "practice" by Blake, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Duchamp, Forster, Beckett, Levi, Blanchot, and Duras.

Wednesday 7:00-10:00 p.m. Melville Library E 4305

This seminar examines the interface between technology and utopia, concentrating on current debates regarding digital culture. Will technology offer a new utopia or are we seeing a repeat of the Futurist fantasy of technology that collapsed into fascism? Are utopian discourses appropriate to discuss the virtual reality of digital culture? Do gender, sexuality and ethnicity become virtual in cyberspace or has a new cybertyping emerged?

Using the Humanities Institute conference on the same theme as a key resource (featuring a performance by Sandy Stone and a day of discussions), the seminar looks at discourses of e-topia and dystopia as an example of the way in which the imagination has now become a social practice in global culture. In this context, the visual and corporal dimension to digital culture is a key topic for our discussions. As practice is a central element, the seminar meets in conjunction with ARS 525 and all students will be asked to undertake both critical and practical work, though assignments will be worked out individually. Readings/assignments will include: William Morris, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Allucquere Roseanne Stone, William J. Mitchell, science fiction, Lev Manovich, recent collections: The Digital Dialectic, Race and Cyberspace, & The Cyberculture Reader and hot spots on the Internet.

This seminar fulfills requirements for the CCS certificate on both Cultural Studies and Visual Culture tracks.

Monday 4:00-7:00 p.m. Staller 3212

CLT 597 Directed Readings, M.A.
CLT 599 Independent Study
CLT 690 Directed Readings
CLT 698 Practicum in Teaching
CLT 699 Directed Readings: Ph.D. Candidacy
 

EGL 611/WST 601

Feminist Literary Theory

This seminar will explore a very broad range of feminist theoretical topics -- including race, ethnicity, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, lesbianism, queer theory, new historicism, popular culture, and ecofeminism, among others. We will read from an assorted array of critical and theoretical texts -- in an attempt to gain a sense of the "big picture" -- but students will be encouraged to delve into a specific area of feminist theory of particular interest to them. This individual area of interest will evolve into an oral presentation and the seminar essay. We will read a selection of feminist literature as well (to gain a sense of a feminist literary tradition), including texts by Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Margaret Atwood.

Thursday 12:00-3:00 p.m. Humanities 239

Heidi Hutner

SPN 612

Twentieth-Century Spanish Women Writers

A reading and discussion of twentieth-century works by Spanish women novelists beginning with Carmen Laforet and ending with Lucía Etxebarria. In tandem with the readings, we will examine key issues and concepts of twentieth-century feminism: "images" criticism, writing and sexual difference, psychoanalysis and literature, feminine masquerade, the politics of gender identity, écriture féminine, women writers and the canon, gender and reader response, materialist feminism, and 'gender trouble.' All primary readings in Spanish, critical readings in English and Spanish.

Tuesday 4:00-7:00 p.m. Melville Library E 4305

Lou Deutsch

WST 601/PHI 615

Race & Gender in Literature, Theory, and Film

In this course we will examine the intersections of race, gender, and class as they are discussed or portrayed in theory, literature, and film that deal with the issue of "passing."  We will use psychoanalytic theory to analyze the ways that racial, gender, and class passing challenges and/or solidifies notions of identity.  We will discuss the implications of these discourses of passing on larger issues of identity and identity politics.  We will read texts by Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Rey Chow, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, and Judith Butler, among others.  Some of the films that we will analyze include Stahl's "Imitation of Life," Kazan's "Pinky," McGehee & Seige's "Suture," and Cronenberg's "M Butterfly."

Monday 2:00-5:00 p.m. Harriman Hall 249

Kelly Oliver