Selected sections of Kant's Third Critique, Jean-François Lyotard's The Differend and his reading of Kant's "Analytic of the Sublime" will form a departure matrix. The seminar might then consider attempting to embrace a multiplicity of figural manifestations of the witness, its "nowness," and the passage it (she or he) occupies or moves through. The coming into "witnessess" of the witness is proposed as a phenomenon to trace. Why? —Because it appears that in the guise of metaphors—metaphors, necessarily, in the visual arts, in literature, and even in philosophy—the witness, the time of the witness, and the passage constitutes a key figure in diverse explorations of the limits of responsibility. Can or should efforts be made to tame these surrogate witnesses by critical methods in view of harnessing them for practical use? or do they resist systemization? Must they resist systemization in order to conserve thier power as witnesses?

Immanuel Kant, "Analytic of the Sublime" in Critique of Judgment Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime [excerpts] Jean-François Lyotard, the Differend [excerpts] Marguerite Duras, "Sublime, necessarily sublime" Robert Harvey, Witnessworks [excerpts] Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology" Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho Prino Levi, Survival at Auschwitz [If This Is a Man] Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved [excerpts] Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz Fethi Benslama, "Representations and the Impossible" Michel Deguy, Ouïe dire [excerpts] ... works by Rothko, Duchamp, Soulage, Vermeer, Bosch, Holbein, Dü

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

Readings of selected novels of the pre-realist, realist, and naturalist corpus with discussions centered on literary representations of race, class, nation, gender and other interesting constructs of European subjectivity.

In this course we will examine contrasting realist traditions especially as they relate to modes of representation of race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality in nineteenth-century canonical novels. The primary focus will be on texts produced in Europe from the mid-to late nineteenth century, beginning with one of the first anti-slavery novels, Sab, by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. In the first group of novels, including Sab and Jane Eyre, we will look at the intersection of gender and race in the context of British and Spanish colonialism. Following we will discuss the revolution in modes of production and consumption of consumer goods in the urban environment in Dicken's Hard Times, Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, and Benito Pérez Galdós' That Bringas Woman. The discussion will focus on class and gender excess, as well as the economic links between nothern and southern Europe. In the third part of the course we will assess representations of falleness and adultery as they pertain to bourgeois family ideology in Spain (Alas' La Regenta), France (Flaubert's Madame Bovary), England (Gissing The Whirlpool). Critical readings will include articles/chapters by R. Williams, G. Lukacs, T. Tanner, P. Smith, C. Prendergast, and others. All texts (including all critical readings in the course pack) will be available in English. However, students with relevant language competency are urged to read the novels to be discussed in the original. Final papers may be submitted in French, Spanish or English.

Wednesday 4:00 - 7:00 p.m. Melville Library N 3062

 
This seminar will be a survey of the work of Julia Kristeva wtarting with her Revolution in Poetic Language and concluding with her most recent work in the Female Genius trilogy. We will concentrate on her theories of sublimation, melancholy and intimate revolt (creativity and imagination) from Black Sun and The Sense and Nonsense of Revolt. In addition we will discuss her notions of the semiotic/symbolic, the abject, and subjectivity. Throughout the course we will discuss the ways in which Kristeva's theory might provide the beginnings of a psycholanalytic social theory.

Thursday 2:00-5:00 p.m. Harriman 214

A general introduction to theories, methods, and topics on Cultural Studies, co-taught by Ira Livingston (English/CLT) and Nick Mirzoeff (Art), also featuring sessions with visiting lecturers on Queer Studies (Judith Halberstam) and Postcolonial Studies (Dipesh Chakrabarty).
 
Tuesday 1:00-4:00 p.m. Humanities Institute E 4340

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 606.01 - Victorian Fiction: Nation/Empire/Narration
Helen Cooper

This course is for students with an interest in noneteenth-century British fiction, and also for those who intend to work in the area of postcolonial theory or literatures. Many postcolonial wirters who work in English were educated in colonial or colonial-style schools in the colonies and ex-colonies and were required to read nineteenth-century British fiction.

Historians have along talked about the "scramble for Africa" and about how the "sun never set on the British empire." Yet recent books such as Ann McClintock's Imperial Leather, Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, Deirdre David's Rule Britannia, Robert Young's Colonial Desire, Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness, and Jennifer DeVere Brody's Impossible Purities focus instead on how the empire challenged notions of "white England," as trade introduced products from England's colonies into the metropolis, and travelers, colonial administrators and civil servants, and people from the colonies returned to, visited, or emigrated to England, introducing new habits, patterns of living, ways and racves to the country. We will examine thorugh a variety of fictional genres and periods the way in which fiction paradoxically represents both the building of the nation and its critique, and also the expansion of empire and its problematic complexities. We will read: C. Brontë, Villette; Seacole, Wonderful Adventures; Eliot, Mill on the Floss; Dickens, Great Expectations; Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and "The Beach at Falesà"; Kipling, Kim; and Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Short stories from Carlyle, Mill, Robert Knox, Engels, and Mayhew will provide us with necessary contemporary cultural information.

Our theoretical framework will be provided by selections from Michael McKeon's Theory of the Novel. We will also read selections from the works cited above and from Anoinette Burden's Reader, Politics, and Enpire in Victorian Britain and Deirdre David's edited The Victorian Novel. Thematically the course will proceed from works of fiction which reveal "fissures in the nation" to those alerting us to "g/rumblings in the empire."

I would like you to enjoy Austen's Mansfield Park, C. Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Thackeray's Vanity Fair over the semester break, so that you will have them as points of reference for our work, although we will not be discussing them in detail.

Thursday 1:00-4:00 p.m.
 
 

EGL 606.02 - The New Economic Criticism: Victorian Finances and Fictions

Adrienne Munich

This seminar explores an expanding area of literary criticism—one which considers economic questions or material objects, both as literary topics and as engines of literary production from positions other than (but sometimes growing from) Marxist criticism. Some of the questions involve the movement from economics to imagination and the status of some produced objects in literature and culture. The course focuses on the mid- to the end of the nineteenth century, the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution through the expansion of Imperial Britain. Under consideration as texts are critical works of Mary Poovey, Martha Woodmansee, Reginia Gagnier, Jeff Nunokawa, N. Feltes, and Catherine Gallagher. Victorian authors under consideration are Dickens, Tennyson, the Brownings, Kipling, Trollope, J. S. Mill, and perhaps a few other writers on Political Economy, as well as some generally unknown South African writers. The particiants in the seminar will present summaries of research to the class, add their findings to a bibliogrpahy of new economic criticism, and will write a seminar paper of approximately twenty pages.

Thursday 4:00 - 7:00 p.m.
 
 

MUS 555 - Berlin-Paris-New York between the Wars

Judy Lochhead

Developments in music and culture from 1918-1938: politics, debates about the social function of art, art and the everyday, influence of jass, impact of the new technologies of radio and gramophone, the "New Music," Neoclassicism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Gebrauchsmusik, Surrealism, primitivism, and the exotic, new music societies and festivals (ISCM, Donaueschingen, etc.).

Some possible composers to be considered: Krenek, Eisler, Weill, Milhaud, Poulenc, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Copland, Blitzstein, Thompson.

Students will prepare weekly projects on the readings and listening. A 15-20-page seminar paper will serve as the basis for a 30-minute presentation during the final weeks. Some reading ability in German or French will be helpful. The seminar will be capped at 15.

All interested non-music grads should see the instructor.

Thursday 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. Melville Library N 2001
 
 

PHI 616 - Technoscience

Don Ihde

Technoscience continues as an Interface seminar with its unusal format which includes:

* Readings in philosophies of science and technology, science studies and humanities and social science persepctives upon the sciences;
* Reading living authors, some of whom are "roated" upon invitation (spring term has a committment from Bruno Latour, Paris/Harvard, TBA);
* Themes changing with seminar participants involved in choices.

Spring terms will include a section on science and deep metaphors. Historical metaphors, such as the "clock-work universe," bodies constructed upon mechanical devices, and knowledge based upon the camera obscura, today are being replaced by computer, information, and "code" metaphors. We shall look at the role of codes in biology through Lily Kay's Who Wrote the Book of Life and Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life. A second theme will look at new practice-oriented perspectives upon science thorugh "new" philosophers of technologies including Ian Hacking, Isabelle Stengers, Peter Galison with particular reference to the role of technologies and instruments. Finally, we shall have some set of intensive readings in the works of Bruno Latour in preparation for the "roast."

Participants can expect to do fast readings, make presentations and develop a working research project during the seminar. Don Ihde directs the technosicence smeinar.

Monday 12:00 - 3:00 p.m. Harriman 249