Course Offerings 2009-2010
Fall 2009
CRI 200A - Approaches to Critical Theory
Neil Larsen
Thursdays, 5:10-8:00 p.m.
Location: 70 Social Science
CRN 17673
***Please note time & location change.
This approach to modern and contemporary critical theory will: a) advance a working definition of critical theory as, in essence, immanent critique, or theory ‘with a theory of itself’ b) trace the basic philosophical and scientific origins of contemporary theory (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud); c) focus on the ‘linguistic turn’ that largely corresponded to the introduction of ‘theory’ into the humanities in the U.S., beginning in the 1960s--here via the close study of key works by Saussure, the Russian Formalists, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan; d) review the more contemporary tradition of Marxian critical theory after Marx, focusing on works by Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno and Postone; and e) conclude with a focused study and discussion of feminism as a ‘battleground of theory’ via readings from Rubin, Butler and others. The standard, shopping-mall ‘theory’ anthologies will be avoided, and a photocopied reader made available.
CRI 200B - Problems in Critical Theory: Augustine and the Augustinian Tradition
Marc Blanchard, Brenda Schildgen
Tuesdays, 3:10-6:00 p.m.
Location: Sproul Hall
CRN 17674
This seminar proposes to analyze, review, and assess Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana, Confessions, and selections of the City of God as foundational works for western hermeneutics, confessional
narrative, and historical theory. Ambitious in its scope, nonetheless, given the fact that Augustine dominated interpretive and historical theory from the end of the Roman Empire to the Enlightenment
(indeed increasing in importance during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation periods) and that Augustinian studies outside a very few institutions are absent in US universities, taking on these
overarching issues seems an appropriate approach to grasping Augustine's contribution to western historical and interpretive theories.
Subjects to be addressed will include:
a. Augustine as a reader, his role in establishing reading as a discipline with a codification of how to read, and how this contribution ruled reading practices for the forthcoming millennium; the role of
the Augustinian tradition in establishing secular literary canons;
b. Augustine's Hobbesian historical theories, with particular attention to Books 5 and 19 of the City of God, with reference to Virgil's Aeneid and the Bible, and to the deliberate misreading
of Augustine, leading to the Just War Theory, still prevalent in contemporary thinking;
c. Confessions and the confessional tradition in the western literary canon. The significance of the emergence of first person writing, the sermo humilis, and its continuation in canonical
texts such as Dante's Divine Comedy, Petrarch's Secretum and selected letters, Pascal's Pensées, Rousseau's Confessions, and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.
Requirements: 2 short papers; 1 class presentation.
Reading List:
Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana
Confessions
City of God, selections
Reader: Canto 1, Inferno; Petrarch's
Pascal, Pensées, selections
Rousseau, Confessions, selections
Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Swann's Way)
Brief and Selective Bibliography
The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine's City of God, ed. Mark Vessey, Karla Pollman, and Allan D. Fitzgerald, Proceedings of a colloquium held at Green College,
University of British Columbia, September, 1997. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999).
Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993).
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Harper & Row, 1972).
Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1950).
Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1963).
Ernest L. Fortin, "The Political Implications of St. Augustine's Theory of Conscience," in Augustinian Studies 1 (1970). 133-52.
Harald Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics 1: Testimonia (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksall, 1967).
George Kennedy. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
Mark D. Jordan. "Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana," Augustinian Studies 11 (1980): 177-96.
Gaetano Lettieri, Il senso della storia in Agostino d'Ippona. Il "saeculum" e la gloria nel "De Civitate Dei" (Rome: Edizioni Borla, 1988).
Henri-Irénée Marrou, Saint Augustin et la Fin de la Culture Antique (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1958; rept. 1968).
Henri-Irénée Marrou. L'ambivalence du temps de l'histoire chez Saint Augustin, Conférence Albert-le-Grand, 1950 (Montreal, Institut d'Études Médiévales, 1950).
Santo Mazzarino, The End of the Ancient World, trans. from Italian George Holmes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).
Reinhold Niebuhr, "Augustine's Political Realism," in Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963). 119-46.
John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Harvard: Belknap, 1996).
CRI 200B - Problems in Critical Theory: Translation and Transculturation
David Simpson
Wednesdays, 12:10-3:00 p.m.
Location: 248 Voorhies
CRN 43508
Questions of translation are at the heart of all discussions of the relations between local and universalist categories of perception and description, of the evolution of the national languages
(German, Italian, French) and of the interaction of so-called dialects with approved or ‘received’ dictions. They pertain also to the current discussion of the nature (and desirability) of a
‘world’ literature generated (for example) by the work of Franco Moretti which suggests that literary form might have functioned as a transnational category; and to the efforts to ‘fight
back’ against a hegemonic world English by using the foreign dialects of English ‘itself’ (Amitav Ghosh, A. Roy, P. Matthiessen etc). Derrida writes that translation is the heart of
deconstruction.
We would read a selection of theories of and ideas about translation from the classical period (Greek into Latin) to the present day. Authors would likely include Benjamin, Derrida, Schleiermacher,
Quintilian, Boccaccio, du Bellay, Dryden, Holderlin, Burns, Moretti, among others. We would look at ideas about translation between languages recognized as different, and at translation within one or more
‘single’ languages.
Much of the reading would be provided in a course reader, but we might be able to make use of one or more of the anthologies, e.g. Schulte and Biguenet, /Theories of/ /Translation/; Wood and Bermann,
/Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation. /
CRI 200C - History of Critical Theory: Representation, Aesthetics and Economics
Evan Watkins
Tuesdays, 12:10-3:00 p.m.
Location: 248 Voorhies
CRN 17674
The emergence of conceptions of the aesthetic marks a very distinct break from earlier traditions of thinking about poetry. We'll begin the course looking at issues of representation in some classic
texts of Plato, Aristotle and Longinus. These texts are crucial to understand in relation to claims about aesthetics, and needless to say they are very frequently referenced throughout discourses on the
aesthetic. Nevertheless, one premise for the course is that in many ways aesthetic discourses have more in common with economics as their immediate neighbor than with classical criticism. Admittedly, in
their current avatars of MBA and English major the study of economics and the study of aesthetics don't seem to have a lot to do with each other. But as modern thought developed through the late 17th,
18th and into the 19th centuries in Europe there was a lot of interbreeding. Elaborating ideas of both modern economics and aesthetics required, for example, explaining (or explaining away) the force of
desire. Both required complex negotiations with moral values and ethical principles. Each, often surreptitiously, found support in the other, particularly in the matter of how to get from individual sorts
of things to universal things. In addition to Plato, Aristotle and Longinus, we'll try to take a look at some of this history, probably including among other things selections from Adam Smith's Wealth of
Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments; David Ricardo's The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation; Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication; Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful; David Hume's Essays; Kant's Critique of Judgment; Friedrich Von Schiller's Aesthetic Education of Man; Marx's Grundrisse...and just maybe some econometric based
game (aesthetic) theory from the 21st century. I'm hoping we can have a couple of options for papers. If you're interested especially in these historical periods or in the conceptual focus you can
certainly do a seminar paper. Alternatively, you can think in terms of two shorter papers, one primarily interpretive and the other elaborating ways of linking the course content to your direction of
research interest.
Winter 2010
CRI 200A - Approaches to Critical Theory
Nathan Brown
Mondays, 12:10-3:00 p.m.
Location: 248 Voorhies
CRN 37870
This course will offer an introduction to various traditions of, and contemporary approaches to, critical theory. In the first half of the course we will study foundational texts, mapping the ways in
which a postwar generation of French theorists-as well as the German Frankfurt school-situated themselves in relation to canonical texts of modern German philosophy. This will involve paired readings of
Kant and Adorno, Marx and Althusser, Nietszche and Foucault, Freud and Lacan, Heidegger and Derrida. In the second half of the course, we will track the pertinence of these traditions to key contemporary
approaches to critical theory by studying their influence upon the theoretical projects of Homi K. Bhabha (postcolonial studies), Judith
Butler (gender/sexuality studies), Friedrich Kittler (media studies), and Slavoj Žižek(psychoanalysis/Marxism).
Course Reader:
Immanuel Kant:
- "What is Enlightenment?"
- Selections from Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment
Karl Marx:
- Selections from Capital and The German Ideology
Friedrich Nietzsche:
- Selections from On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good & Evil
Sigmund Freud:
- The Wolf Man; Beyond the Pleasure Principle
- Selections from The Interpretation of Dreams
Martin Heidegger:
- Selections from Being and Time
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer:
- "The Concept of Enlightenment"; "The Culture Industry"
Louis Althusser:
- "Contradiction and Overdetermination"; "Ideology and the Ideological State
Apparatuses"
Michel Foucault:
- "What is an Author?"
- Selections from The Archeology of Knowledge and The History of Sexuality
Jacques Lacan:
- "The Mirror Phase as Formative of the I Function"; "The Instance of the Letter in
the Unconscious"
- Selections from Seminar XI
Jacques Derrida:
- "Différance"; "Freud and the Scene of Writing"; "Signature Event Context"
Contemporary Texts:
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990)
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999)
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989)
CRI 200B - Problems in Critical Theory: "Inheriting Hegel: Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida"
Gerhard Richter
Tuesdays, 1:10-4:00 p.m.
Location: 412B Sproul
CRN 37871
This seminar will devote itself to the question of what an inheritance is and what it would mean to show oneself responsible to its complexities. How do we relate to a tradition, a legacy, a canon,
an estate, a way of thinking and being? As Jacques Derrida once put it, "if the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy
interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it." Therefore, one "always inherits from a secret." The readability of an inheritance and its many ghosts only can be confronted in a proper
fashion in the moment when this very readability threatens to break down. We can truly inherit only when we do not know what it would mean to assume this singular legacy, inherit this particular
ghost. Our particular test case will be the thought of Hegel, whose age we, in many ways, still inhabit-in often secret or unacknowledged, but therefore all the more powerful, ways. We will read Hegel
along with three of the most creative (and different) attempts at "inheriting" his legacy by transforming it: Heidegger's ontology; Adorno's negative dialectics; and Derridean deconstruction, all of which,
in key moments of their development, draw, in both critical and affirmative ways, on Hegel's inheritance. By interrogating how each relates to, and seeks to inherit from, Hegel, and by analyzing how each
implicitly or explicitly comments on other attempts at inheriting, we also will be able to cast into sharp relief the convergences and commonalities among three of the most influential critical projects
of the last century.
Readings likely to include:
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies
Jacques Derrida, Glas and "The Age of Hegel"
CRI 200C - History of Critical Theory CANCELLED (as of 10/16/09)
Marc Blanchard CANCELLED
Tuesdays, 2:10-5:00 p.m.
Location: 422 Sproul
CRN 37873
In this seminar, we review the history of philosophy as critique and resistance. First we briefly introduce major constellations in the history of philosophy: Plato, the stoics, Augustine, Aquinas,
Machiavelli, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and post modern philosophy. Second we identify the discursive limits in those philosophies (ie., the limits of authority in Plato
and Hegel, the introduction of private property concepts into empirical philosophy (Locke, Hume), the fracture between individual and class consciousness in Marx). Third, we privilege alternative
philosophical discourses, such as Gramsci, Deleuze, and Butler, philosophies from third world and especially Latin American theology of liberation as possible loci for a history of philosophy of
resistance. Reader prepared.
This scheme has worked well over the years. With a lecture/discussion format and contributions from students who seek to apply findings from class discussions to their own research and the writing of
their paper. Team work emphasized. Students may work on final paper as a group of two or three. Short selections change every year.
Spring 2010
Critical Theory 200A - Approaches to Critical Theory
Kathleen Frederikson
Tuesdays, 3:10-6:00 p.m.
Location: 248 Voorhies
CRN 57820
The first portion of this course will examine some of the foundational texts that ground contemporary social and cultural theory, focusing especially on work in Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and
phenomenology. During the last third of the course, we will work with texts that deploy, expand, and challenge these traditions in order to rethink dominant social imaginaries around race, gender, empire,
and sexuality.
Texts (tentative):
Weeks 1-2
Hegel material on geist and master/slave dialectic from Phenomenology of Spirit
Karl Marx-selections from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1844, The German Ideology, Grundrisse, Capital I
Week 3-4
Sigmund Freud-Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; selections from On the Interpretation of Dreams, On the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id
Week 5
Ferdinand de Saussure from Course on General Linguistics
Gramsci-material on hegemony from Prison Notebooks
Week 6
Heidegger from Being and Time
Week 7
Jacques Lacan "The Mirror Stage" "The Signification of the Phallus" "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis"
Recommended: Alexandre Kojeve Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Week 8
Louis Althusser "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
Frantz Fanon "The Fact of Blackness" from Black Skin White Masks; "Concerning Violence" from The Wretched of the Earth
Week 9
Slavoj Zizek or Lee Edelman for work on Lacanian cultural criticism
Lauren Berlant for Gramsci-inspired cultural studies
Week 10
Dipesh Chakrabarty "Two Histories of Capital" in Provincializing Europe
Butler/Spivak from Who Sings the Nation-State?
CRI 200B: Problems in Critical Theory: Literature and Psychoanalysis: Studies In Interdisciplinarity
Joann Diehl
Mondays, 12:10-3:00 p.m.
Location: 248 Voorhies
CRN 27821
This course will introduce students to major texts in the history of psychoanalysis to demonstrate the possibilities offered by psychoanalytic theory for literary interpretation. Among the topics
considered will be the poetics of mourning, intimacy and estrangement, the secret, and the origins of authorial creativity. In addition to our reading of canonical theorists-Freud, Melanie Klein, and
Jacques Lacan, we will examine the work of Jean Laplanche, Luce Irigary, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in order to show how these contemporary
analysts, in revising the work of their predecessors, offer more nuanced and less heteronormative models of the unconscious. We will use our theoretical knowledge to interpret a wide variety of literary
texts including Hamlet, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Henry James's What Maisie Knew, Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, and Philip Roth's Indignation.
Bibliography:
Psychoanalytic Theory:
Jessica Benjamin, The Shadow of The Other
Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body
Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," "The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"
Luce Irigaray, "The Poverty of Psychoanalysis," The Irigaray Reader
Melanie Klein, "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States," "Envy and Gratitude" in Juliet Mitchell's The Selected Melanie Klein
Jean Laplanche, Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives
(selected background essays in class reader)
Literary Texts:
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
Henry James, What Maisie Knew
Philip Roth, Indignation
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
Critical Theory 200B - Problems in Critical Theory: The Destruction of Experience
Jeff Fort
Tuesdays, 2:10-5:00 p.m.
Location: 422 Sproul
CRN 83027
In his essay "Infancy and History: An Essay on the Destruction of Experience," Giorgio Agamben attempts to sharpen Walter Benjamin's diagnosis of the "poverty of experience" in the modern age. I would
like to take Agamben's essay as a point of departure for an exploration of the question of experience, its forms, versions and parameters, its possibility or impossibility, its endless shrinking and
minute expansions in the context of an increasingly technical, atomized, and fragmented historical period. We will read a number of the authors referred to by Agamben, but especially Walter Benjamin, who
will in turn provides a prism for a constellation of authors preoccupied with problems of experience and memory -- the "shock" experience, trauma, loss, recollection, time and the durée (Baudelaire,
Freud, Proust, Bergson) -- all the while maintaining a focus on the threats or promises perceived in the technical means of (re)production of experience. The stress will thus fall largely on the first
half of the twentieth century, a period when memory becomes invested with a privileged status, at times hyperbolically, precisely in an attempt to rearticulate or shore up the chances of something like
"experience." But we will also glance back at earlier notions of experience, particularly in Kant, Rousseau, and Montaigne. Finally, we will consider the historical rupture of the Nazi camps as an extreme
instance of experience rendered impossible (and yet made necessary...), in order to consider Adorno's provocative claims not only that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, but also that
Auschwitz "changed death" (this alongside some poems by Celan). Finally, we will look "forward" to some work by filmmaker Chris Marker, who has long been working through issues of memory and experience in the
technical media of image production (film, photography, CD-rom) and reflective commentary.
Tentative reading list
Agamben, "Infancy and History: An Essay on the Destruction of Experience"; "Tradition
of the Immemorial"; selections from Remnants of Auschwitz
Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"; "The Image of Proust"; "The Storyteller";
"The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility"; Berlin
Childhood Around 1900,
Montaigne, "Of Experience"; "Of Practice"
Rousseau, Walk 2, from Reveries of a Solitary Walker
Kant, selections from Critique of Pure Reason
Baudelaire, selection of poems and other writings
Proust, Combray, section I; selected passages from Time Regained
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Bergson, Matter and Memory; Time and Free Will
Deleuze, Bergsonism
Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society"; "Cultural Criticism and Society"; "Metaphysics
After Auschwitz"
Lacoue-Labarthe, "Two Poems by Paul Celan" from Poetry as Experience; and selected
poems by Celan
Marker, La jetée; Immemory
CRI 200C - History of Critical Theory
Neil Larsen
Thursdays, 5:10-8:00 p.m.
Location: TBA
CRN 57822
Rather than proceed panoramically, this seminar will focus intensively on ancient and early modern philosophical works that have both preconditioned but have also been occluded by the modern
philosophical and analytical currents grouped under the heading of "Critical Theory." These works will be: Plato's Phaedrus, Symposium and selections from The Republic; Aristotle's Poetics, and
selections from the Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics; Descartes' Discourse on Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy; selections from Hobbes' Leviathan; and Kant's Critique of Practical Reason.
Key notions to be traced include mimesis, ancient ideas of ethics, love, reason and the subject, and pre- and early modern concepts of society and the state. Secondarily, we will sample works of
contemporary Critical Theorists that take up certain of these precursors, among them Adorno's lectures on Metaphysics. Extensive class participation, oral presentations and a final seminar paper or take
home examination (15 pp minimum) required.