2021-2022 GRADUATE COURSE OFFERINGS
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For expanded course descriptions, see below.
Winter 2022
Critical Theory 200C. History of Critical Theory
Jeff Fort
CRN 18594 Tuesdays 3:10-6:00pm
This course will focus on readings of canonical Western philosophical texts alongside more recent and contemporary readings that problematize their fundamental frameworks. We will give special attention to the question of of universalism, its limits and blind spots, and its progressive pretentions, along with the exclusions it enables in practice. Philosophical discourses of political theory and legitimate authority will be placed alongside the violences these discourses by turns defend, dramatize and overlook, such as slavery, colonialism and other forms of subjugation. We will also read nineteenth and twentieth century figures (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) who work to dismantle, but also retain, important elements of this tradition.
Readings will be drawn from: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Susan Buck-Morss, Charles W. Mills, Judith Butler, Silvia Federici, Achille Mbembe
Spring 2022
Critical Theory 200A. Approaches to Critical Theory
Kathleen Frederickson
CRN 61680 Tuesdays 3:10-6:00pm
248 Voorhies
Description
This course is designed to enable you to read work in contemporary critical theory. With that aim in view, it sets out to offer a partial overview of key movements and thinkers, from Kant onward, that retain theoretical relevance in the current moment. Readings will include work by GWF Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Huey Newton, Jacques Derrida, the Combahee River Collective, Gayatri Spivak, Sylvia Wynter, Lauren Berlant, Fred Moten.
Grading
Participation and Reading
Weekly discussion posts
Preliminary Paper Proposal
Seminar Paper
Texts
Capital Vol1, Karl Marx
External Elective
ENL 233: Structures of Racial Feeling (Pre-approved CRI 200B equivalent)
Erin Gray
CRN 42299 Tuedays 12:10-3:00pm
120 Voorhies
This class explores the entanglements of conscious, unconscious, and nonconscious racial feeling within the ideological infrastructures that facilitate capitalist accumulation. Guided by Raymond Williams? concept of a "structure of feeling" as an emergent cultural formation, this class interrogates the complexity of racism as a material force we may track at all levels of intimate and institutional life. To facilitate such a course of study, the class proposes an alternative genealogy for affect studies that emerges not in opposition to the so-called linguistic turns of structuralist and post-structuralist critique, but before and alongside these ?turns? ? in the criticism, theory, and artistic praxis of subjects relegated to the sensible margins of political life. We read works by Frantz Fanon, George Jackson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, and Gloria Anzaldua which explore the affective, sensory, and unconscious dimensions of racializing forms, signifiers, systems, and schemas. We read them alongside more recent theorists of affect and biopolitics (Gilles Deleuze, Lauren Berlant, Saidiya Hartman, Jose Estaban Munoz) whose work examines the violence of sentimentality, the sensory politics of the British empire, the afterlife of American slavery, queer utopias, chronic illness, indigenous pessimism, and black aspiration.