2024-2025 GRADUATE COURSE OFFERINGS
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Winter 2025
CRI 200A/CST 200B - Approaches to Critical Theory: Theory (of) The Introduction
Kris Fallon
Monday 1:10-4:00
Cruess Hall 1107
This course will introduce students in the Humanities and Cultural Studies to some of the many touchstones that comprise what we call theory (or more specifically, ‘critical theory’) by isolating and analyzing that moment when theory seeks to introduce itself: the “Introduction”. The “Introduction” to a text is something of an aberration. On one hand, it is often thought of as outside the text proper, ancillary to the body of the work, an appendage or afterthought. Although they are the first thing read, they are often the last thing written. And yet, the introduction also functions as a threshold, bringing readers into the world of the book by providing the layout for what’s to come. In theoretical work, it situates the author in relation to other theorists and concepts, offering a sort of theory of the theory that sketches out its main parts in the forthcoming chapters. Like theory itself, the intro is a kind of deferral or deixis, a pointing toward elsewhere where the theory itself manifests. Isolating the “Introduction” and a key selection from each text, the course will cover a broad swath of contemporary theory and its antecedents, including work from foundational figures (Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche), late 20th century interventions (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze) and a range of contemporary theorists and theories (Butler, Ahmed, Munoz, Morten, among others).
Pre-approved CRI 200B
GER297: Modernism, Spirituality, and Transcendence
Chunjie Zhang
Wednesday 2:10-5:00
Olson 53A
In recent decades, “cognitive literary studies” has emerged and forayed into the intersectional area between literary studies and neuroscience. This seminar probes into this novel research field and aims to introduce students to key questions and interpretive attempts in this area. Readings in the philosophical discussions about neuroscientific findings in the works by Catherine Malabou, Thomas Metzinger, and Antonio Damasio serve as the theoretical foundation of this course. At the same time, participants explore the spiritual dimension in literary modernism as well as the discussion of transcendence in critical theory in the early twentieth century. While historical materialism has been a dominant approach to interpret literary modernism and its sociocultural contexts, cognitive literary studies lead us focus on the prominent yet less-discussed area of spirituality in modernism in conjunction with the transcendental in critical theory, for example in the writings by Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Max Weber, and C. G. Jung. Literary texts we read may include those by Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Franz Kafka.
Pre-approved CRI 200B
ANT 210: Forces of Language
Fatima Mojadeddi
Thursday 2:10-5:00
Olson 109
This seminar offers students the opportunity to probe the relationship between language, the social unconscious and the matters of social violence, desire and representation. It is concerned with the question of interpretation, both in the discipline of Anthropology (as the problem of ethnographic authority) and the ethico-political stakes of representation in critical theory, psychoanalysis, literature, and post-structuralism. The course is organized thematically around important notions like the unconscious, death, condemnation, the uncanny, fantasy, the gift, and writing. It is also seeks to understand how these bear on the collective experience of desire, identity, and meaning-making that elude the notion of a “self” or “tradition” or “discourse.” Course readings include key ethnographic and theoretical texts as well literary analysis and fiction. Examples of the latter include the works of Franz Kafka, Magda Szabo and John Berger and demonstrate that a literary approach to issues erstwhile considered to be the domain of anthropology or philosophy is a rigorous and dynamic mode of interpretation.
Pre-approved CRI 200C
POL219C: Self-Creation in Nietzsche and Beyond
Shalini Satkunanandan
Wednesday 3:10-6:00
Kerr Hall 594
We read Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and key selections from his other works to understand his account of self-creation and its difference from philosophical liberalism’s accounts of self-creation (including those found in Mill and Rawls). We also consider the reception of Nietzsche’s account of self-creation by thinkers like Foucault, who draw on Nietzsche to challenge accounts of sovereign agency/freedom and have been influential in contemporary political theory and adjacent fields of study, including in anthropology (e.g., consider Mahmood’s treatment of Foucault in Politics of Piety).