Critical Theory 200/Rhetoric 240G, Fall 2009
Judith Butler
Tuesday 2-5PM

This course will consider a notion of critique, immanent and dialectical, that emerges from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and bears significantly on 20th century conceptions of critical theory. We will begin with an introduction to Kant’s notion of critical philosophy and then turn to Hegel, focusing on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, especially the sections “Lordship and Bondage”, “The Unhappy Consciousness,” and “The Ethical Order.” We will turn briefly to Marx’s critique of Hegel in the second part of the course.

Students should be prepared to conduct close readings of the text with some reference to the German in class. A list of secondary readings will also be provided.

The course is open to all students in the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis and graduate students in the Department of Rhetoric (who are not required to apply). Please note: graduate students who are in neither program may be accepted through instructor approval only. To apply, please attend the first session (September 1) to receive course syllabus and be prepared to write a 1-2 page statement on your reasons for wishing to take the course. Course requirements: one seminar presentation, a short paper (week 3), and a longer paper (last class) will be required. No auditors.

Texts:

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Preface I and II, Introduction, Transcendental Doctrine, and Division One)
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, Introduction, sections A and B; and “The Ethical Order”
Selections from Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, and The Logic (from the Encyclopedia)
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844, “On the Jewish Question”

History of Art 285/Critical Theory 205, Spring 2010
Adorno and Art
T. J. Clark

The seminar will center on reading and discussion of Adorno’s Aesthetics, using Hulot-Kentor’s translation (though Lenhardt’s still has its uses). The aim will be to understand Adorno’s arguments (to distinguish them, where necessary, from those of the “Adorno” who figures as totem or scapegoat in so much recent criticism), and to think about how certain of Adorno’s motifs and procedures might be usable in specific critical projects. Final papers might well take the form of an Adorno-type study of a single artwork. Among possible areas of study would be Adorno’s views on “late style,” on the culture industry, on jazz, and on Beckett; his critique of Benjamin’s Baudelaire, his essay on Wagner, his relation to Berg, and so on. Far too much for one semester – but an indication of directions the seminar might take.

History 280B/Critical Theory 240, Fall 2009
Western Marxism
Critical Theory students should enroll in or join the wait list for History 280B, which will satisfy the Critical Theory 240 requirement. Enrollment will take place after the first week of class.
Martin Jay

This course will follow the fortunes of the 20th-century European critical tradition known as Western Marxism, reading original works by Lukács, Sartre, Bloch, Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, Althusser, Gramsci, and others.

Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Adventures of the Dialectic
Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method
Louis Althusser, For Marx
Antonio, Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
Jurgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society
Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
Goran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism
Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality

Sociology 272C, Fall 2009 Comparative and Historical Research Tuesday 12-2PM
Dylan Riley

This course has two aims: to provide an introduction to some of the main substantive areas in historical sociology, and to identify the logic of comparative historical inquiry as a type of social science. The course is organized into three parts. Part one introduces debates about the nature of theory and evidence, the general characteristics of history, and what causal accounts of history might look like. Part two introduces strategies of concept of formation in historical sociology by drawing on Marx and Weber's conceptualizations of capitalism and the modern state. Part three surveys key works in historical sociology. Evaluation in the course is based on four pieces of work: class participation, a presentation, a brief essay formulating a set of "rules of comparative and historical method", and a set of five reaction papers.

Readings include:
John Stuart Mill, Karl R Popper, Edward Hallett Carr, William Sewell, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Perry Anderson, Robert Brenner, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Mann, Charles Tilly, Philip Gorski, Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, and Robert Paxton

Pasolini: Cultural Criticism in Words and Images
Alessia Ricciardi, Italian Studies

Pasolini might be considered one of the most important and versatile European intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, a crucial figure not only of modern cinema but also of modern poetry, and cultural criticism. Through his work in different media, Pasolini emphatically questioned the roles of power, Marxism, colonialism, religion, and sexuality in contemporary life.

The course will start with a selection of his poetry (from the volumes The Ashes of Gramsci, The Religion of My Time, and To Transfigure and To Organize) and continue with the critical essays written shortly before his assassination in 1975, particularly those collected in Lutheran Letters. We then will turn to Pasolini’s cinema (Accattone, La Ricotta, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Notes Towards an African Oresteia, The Walls of Sana’a, Pigsty, Theorem, Salò) and to his critical essays on film published in Heretical Empiricism. What are the limits of Pasolini’s apocalyptic tone and romantic aesthetics? What role does his “cinema of poetry” play in performing a criticism of what he called “the anthropological mutation” and “the cultural genocide”? We will seek to address these questions through a reading of Pasolini’s texts in dialogue with selected works of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben—who began his career acting the part of an apostle in Pasolini’s Gospel—may be regarded as a crucial inheritor of Pasolini’s legacy insofar as he philosophically elaborates his predecessor’s anxiety toward the biopolitical domain in works such as Homo Sacer and State of Exception. Finally, we will compare Pasolini’s provocative rhetoric to the measured tone of Foucault’s functionalist investigation of power and explore their respective approaches to queer forms of life. In particular, we will discuss Foucault’s decisive rejection of Pasolini’s last film, Salò.

Taught in English, seminar style
Requirements: participation in class discussion, one oral presentation, final paper (22-25 pages)

Comparative Literature 225 Modern Poetry and Frankfurt School Aesthetics
Robert Kaufman

[Note: Although this seminar emphasizes the fundamental importance of 19th-  and 20th-century poetry and poetics to the development of Frankfurt School aesthetics, criticism, and theory, as well as the role of later 20th- and now 21st-century poetry in more recent contributions to Frankfurt-oriented criticism, the course can serve also as a survey of some of the major texts in Frankfurt aesthetic, literary, and cultural theory more generally, provided students are willing actively to study and engage with modern poetry and poetics as the course’s primary literary field.]

 Seminar Description: Readings in modern, and especially modern lyric, poetry (much of it from the U.S., but also from Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Near and Middle East) in relation to major Frankfurt-School texts (on aesthetics, criticism, and social theory) that emphasize the significance to the Frankfurters of literature (as well as the other arts) in general and poetry in particular; special concentration on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and on their development of Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian traditions of aesthetics and critical theory; sustained attention to how and why poetry turns out to be so crucial to the Frankfurters' (and, in particular, to Benjamin's and Adorno's) overall analyses of modernity, mechanical/technical/technological reproduction or reproducibility (in both the economic and artistic-aesthetic spheres), and critical agency; consideration of how Frankfurt-School concerns and legacies might engage the changed sociopolitical circumstances and artistic-aesthetic tendencies--and the changed poetry--of the last three decades; analysis in turn of how later-modernist and contemporary poets' work may challenge Frankfurt analyses of and assumptions about poetry, aesthetic experience, and critical agency themselves. Readings of poetry throughout the course will tend to emphasize formal, stylistic, and philosophical-theoretical matters in order to highlight the consideration of how--and to what degree--artistic technique, in relation to aesthetic form and aesthetic experience (most specifically, lyric experience), may offer stimulus toward and insight into historical, sociopolitical, and ethical understanding and engagement. Some treatment of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry, and of 21st-century poetry, but the course will focus primarily on twentieth-century, modernist poetry (including modernist poetry written and published during the apparently postmodern period). As a shared project throughout the semester, the class will read and continue discussing together in a sustained manner two volumes of poetry (a facing-page French-English volume containing Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal [1857] and Le Spleen de Paris/Petits Poèmes en Prose [1869]; and Michael Palmer's Sun [1988]), while for each week's class, students and/or the instructor also will have distributed ahead of time xeroxed texts of work by other poets (whom they will have chosen to present to, and discuss with, the rest of the class).

Required Books:
Michael Palmer, Sun (North Point Press, 1988) ISBN: 0-86547-345-5.
[Note: This book of poetry is sometimes hard to get; but shipments of it can always be obtained from (the non-profit) Small Press Distribution, which can be reached at 1341 Seventh Street, Berkeley, CA 94710, tel (510)524-1668 or (800)869-7553, fax (510)524-0852, orders@spdbooks.org]
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Shocken, 1968)
Walter Benjamin, Reflections (Schocken, 1978)
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. (Harvard UP; 1999; 1st Harvard UP paper edition, 2002)
Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence: 1928-1940 (translation copyright Polity Press, 1999; first Harvard UP paper edition, 2001)
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Continuum; 1987)
Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature volume one. (Columbia University Press; 1991)
Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature volume two. (Columbia University Press; 1992)
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Verso, 1974)
Jean-Paul Sartre, "What is Literature?" and Other Essays, introduction by Steven Ungar (Harvard University Press, 1988)
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Revised edition (University of California Press, 1996)

Along with these books (which can be purchased at the ASUC Bookstore), a Course Reader will contain photocopied excerpts of additional required texts, including those by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Vallejo, Duncan, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre, Beauvoir, Brecht, Mayakovsky, Neruda, Zurita, Celan, various of the Surrealists, Objectivists, WC Williams, Moore, Bishop, Stevens, Paz, Duncan, Olson, Levertov, Creeley, Rich, and many others.