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SELECTED COURSE SYLLABI


"Introduction To Literary Theory and Criticism"

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Examining several dozen key figures and texts in the history of literary theory and criticism, this graduate course focuses on five topics of pressing concern in contemporary times: (1) modernity and postmodernity; (2) ideology and hegemonic systems; (3) subjectivity, subjection, and the body; (4) interpretation, reception theory, and critique; and (5) literary history. Among the figures read are Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Marx and Engels, Freud, Lukács, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Lacan, Wimsatt and Beardsley, Althusser, R. Williams, Barthes, Lyotard, Foucault, Iser, Habermas, Rich, Bourdieu, Bloom, Adunis, Jameson, Said, Fish, Karatani, Ngugi, Spivak, Haraway, Bordo, Rubin, Zizek, Moretti, Hebdige, Butler, Berlant and Warner, Hardt and Negri, and Halberstam. Among contemporary schools and movements discussed are cultural studies, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, reception theory, philology, formalism, historicism, race and ethnicity studies, and queer theory.




"Major Works in Modern Cultural Criticism and Theory, 1740s to 1960s, I"

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course for undergraduate and graduate students discusses major figures and works in modern cultural theory and criticism (1740s to 1960s). It ranges from Vico’s New Science, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, plus Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and his Civilization and Its Discontents, and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Schools, movements, and methods discussed include historicism, philology, feminism, Marxism, existentialism, deconstructive genealogy, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and cultural criticism. Among the many aspects of culture examined are race, gender, social class, family, religion, ethics, law, psychology, the nation-state, modernity, imperialism and colonialism, the role of intellectuals, the literary canon, education, Enlightenment humanism, anarchy, and revolution.




"Major Works in Contemporary Cultural Criticism and Theory II"

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This dual-level undergraduate and graduate course studies major figures and works of contemporary cultural theory and criticism, focusing on several broad topics, namely globalization, postmodernity, decolonization and neocolonialism, surveillance society, identity theory, and multiculturalism. Schools and movements discussed range from structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis to feminism, poststructuralism, and race and ethnicity studies to postcolonial and queer theory to personal criticism and cultural studies. Figures and texts include Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Said's Orientalism, Foucault's Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality (vol. 1), Butler's Gender Trouble, hooks' Outlaw Culture, Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and Hardt and Negri's Empire.




"Major Works in Twenty-First Century Cultural Criticism and Theory III"

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This graduate seminar examines major works of theory and cultural studies recently published and influential during the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Key concepts explored include globalization, Empire, postmodernity, neoliberalism, nationalism, democracy, permanent war, media spectacle, the corporate university, immaterial labor, disposable workers, class struggle, identity, and counter-hegemonic resistance. Professional training focuses on how to do cultural critique as well as how to make a conference presentation and write a research paper.




"Late Derrida: Ethics and Politics"

COURSE DESCRIPTION

During the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Jacques Derrida published numerous books, approximately two dozen, but in the 1990s and thereafter to 2004, the year of his death, he brought out roughly three dozen more books. Many of these late works mark a shift to explicit considerations of ethics and politics such as Specters of Marx (1993), Of Hospitality (1997), A Taste for the Secret (1997), On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), For What Tomorrow ... A Dialogue (2001), The University Without Condition (2002), and Rogues (2003). During this period Derrida also gave many interviews and wrote many essays concerning ethics and politics some collected in Negotiations (2003), Without Alibi (2002), and Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003), the latter containing separate interviews on the 9/11 attacks with Jürgen Habermas and with Jacques Derrida. In this graduate seminar, we examine key texts on ethics and politics from Derrida's late period.




"Topics In Cultural Studies"

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In this course undergraduate students explore significant topics in contemporary cultural studies and theory, focusing on six key issues: subcultures, postmodernity, popular culture, body studies, globalization, and cultural studies (as a postmodern discipline). Among the major figures read are Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Susan Bordo, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Dick Hebdige, bell hooks, Fredric Jameson, and Immanual Wallerstein. Subjects discussed range from punk music, toy dolls, television, and movies to the rise of new social movements, the global privatization of natural resources, and the spread of advertising and commodification processes.