Courses

Course Archive

Fall 2025 Critical Theory Courses

Core Courses

English 250/Critical Theory 200

Alienation and Reification

Instructor: Dan Blanton

Thursdays, 5-8 PM / Wheeler 30 / Class 26206

This course will trace the emergence of the two great and dialectically intertwined thematics of nineteenth-century critical philosophy: alienation and reification. In so doing, it will attend not to the philosophy of the subject with which (after Kant and German Idealism) we are typically more familiar, but rather and more dialectically to the problems of others and objects, things and values: in effect, the philosophy of everything else, from nature to Second Nature.
Our reading will begin with Fichte and Schelling and the attempt to grapple with what the former called the Not-I: with ‘Will’ and problems of ‘Right’, with ‘Nature’ and ‘Intuition’.
But the bulk of our study will take up Hegel and Marx, moving from Hegel’s situation of alienation as the logical motor of the dialectic to Marx’s early attempts to synthesize psychological and historical versions of the same concept, before turning to Capital and tracing alienation’s reformulation in the systemic and totalizing problem of reification.
We will conclude by observing the early conceptual afterlife of this problem of reification, in thinkers such as Simmel, Weber, and Lukács.

Comp Lit 225/Critical Theory 205

Critical Art, Critical Theory: Modern Poetry & Frankfurt School Aesthetics

Instructor: Robert Kaufman

Wednesdays, 2-5 PM / Dwinelle 4125 A / Class 25146

(Please use this link(link is external) for a full description of the class)

 As a shared project throughout the semester, the class will read and continue discussing together in a sustained manner a facing-page, French-English volume containing Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal / The Flowers of Evil [1857] and Le Spleen de Paris/Petits Poèmes en Prose [1869]; and also poetry by a number of contemporary poets, likely including Nathaniel Mackey, Claudia Rankine, Barbara Guest, Ed Roberson, Michael Palmer, Emmy Pérez, Myung Mi Kim, D.S. Marriottt, Roberto Tejada, Fady Joudah, and others writing in the 20th and/or 21st centuries (e.g.: Vallejo, Duncan, Brecht, Hughes, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Ponge, Éluard, Rilke, Neruda, Ginsberg, Hansberry, Zurita, Celan, various Surrealists and Objectivists, W.C. Williams, Moore, Bishop, Stevens, Paz, Olson, Levertov, Creeley, Ashbery, Paz, O’Hara, Adonis, Monchoachi, Rich, Darwish, Avidan, Morejón, Césaire, Pizarnik, Bachmann, Castellanos, Daive, Albiach, Pasolini, et al.).

[ADDITIONAL NOTE: Texts of critical theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and/or criticism will be presented and studied in English translation, though, with texts not initially written in English, we will frequently consider the German, French, Spanish, etc., originals. Poetry not originally composed in English will be read and discussed primarily in English translation, but we will almost always also consult a poem's facing-page (or at-hand, xeroxed) original language--including German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, (as well as other languages, depending on students' own poetry selections). Knowledge of languages other than English --especially German, French, and/or Spanish—-is NOT required, though it will of course prove helpful.] 

Comp Lit 250/Critical Theory 205 

Aesthetics and Antifascism: Reading Marcuse

Instructor: Ramsey McGlazer

Tuesdays, 2-5 PM / Dwinelle 4125A / Class 26785

For a long time, to many readers, the work of Herbert Marcuse seemed dated. Like flower power or the peace sign, Marcuse's version of utopian speculation seemed to have gone the way of a naive and now embarrassing counterculture. Of all the members of the Frankfurt School, one critic concluded in 2004, Marcuse was "the least successful at weathering the storms of time." But recent years have seen a renewal of interest in Marcuse's work, and today, under storm-worsening conditions of climate change, his theories of technology, social domination, "repressive desublimation," and refusal are again undeniably relevant. In this seminar, we'll study Marcuse's work and its reception, paying especially close attention to his accounts of aesthetics and antifascism. How, if at all, are these two terms related? What does the development of new sensibilities, or the exercise or expansion of the senses, have to do with the struggle to oppose fascist regimes? Forming a bridge between first-generation Critical Theory and theory in its later forms, Marcuse's work looks backward to Marx and Freud, among others, and forward to queer theory and contemporary abolitionist thought. We'll follow it in both directions, reading the early Marx and Freud, on the one hand, and critical engagements with Marcuse, including the work of Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, and Alberto Toscano, on the other. We'll study Marcuse's major works, including Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964), An Essay on Liberation (1969), and The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), as well as selected essays. Finally, we'll consider a range of aesthetic responses to these texts, focusing on some of Marcuse's many readers in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, and the US. Students working on other contexts will be welcome to bring their interests into conversation with the materials assigned for the seminar.

Geography 200C/Critical Theory 240

Southern Questions: Antifascist, Subaltern, Earthly

Instructor: Sharad Chari

Thursdays, 9:30-12:30 AM / 183 McCone Hall / Class 31799

Why return to Antonio Gramsci today? Gramsci is the Marxist critic who diagnosed capitalism’s crisis-ridden endurance in relation to the spread of fascism in his time. He is also the militant who asked how popular ‘common sense’ might be understood, and how it might be galvanized to end this devastating counterrevolution. These aspects of Gramsci’s thought have prompted readers of his piece on ‘the southern question’ and his fragmentary and provisional prison notes to look for signs of a non-teleological, anticolonial, ‘open’ Marxism, engaged with multiple temporalities, with the corporeal and the earthly. This is the sense in which this course engages other ‘southern questions’ as challenges to (the possibility of) subaltern collective determination in dire times. We pay particular attention to aspects of Gramsci’s thought that remain unfinished and prescient, if enigmatic, like his call for an “absolute earthliness of thought.” This course introduces Gramsci’s changing formulations from his pre-prison to prison writings, to explore how we might read his diagnoses of antifascism, the subaltern and the earthly with our contemporary concerns. We read Gramsci with others who read him closely and others with resonant concerns including Michael Burawoy, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Manu Goswami, Gillian Hart, Alessandro Portelli, Shahid Amin, Henri Lefebvre, Alf Lüdtke, Nasser Abourahme, and Toni Morrison.

Elective Courses

Anthropology 250X/Critical Theory 290

Forms of the Unconscious and the Question of the Other: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, Psycho-politics

Instructor: Stefania Pandolfo

Thursday 11- 2 PM  / Social Sciences 192 / Class 33999

This seminar is an exploration of the problematic of the unconscious and psychic life at the intersection of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and critical theory. We will discuss the history of the concept of the unconscious and its other lives, the understanding of subjectivity it entails, and its relevance for thinking the time and worlds in which we are living now, surrounded, as we are, by destruction, war, and death. We will address the question of the unconscious’ translatability and limits, its Euro-American genealogy, as well as its philosophical and religious sources outside the conceptual boundaries of the modern West. And we will explore the agency of the unconscious and its forms (as inscription, image, dream, phantasm and myth), the insistence of trauma, and the way in which a reflection on psychic life is also, necessarily, a study of what Fanon called psycho-politics. Taking into account the agency of the unconscious and its forms enables a perspective on alterity, violence and ethics, which is crucially needed now. On the one hand, there is the “Other Scene” of desire and the dream (in Freud and Lacan’s terms), with their symbolic grammar, and the modes of encounter, recognition and sociality they make possible (but also the risk never at rest of the cohabitation with an internal Other.) On the other hand, as we witness in the current psycho-political solidifications of alterity, there is the fixing of the Other through fantasy, and the phobic construction of enmity, all the way to the obliteration of the other. Yet, as Freud explored in his theory of the drive, the two modalities of the unconscious are not simply opposed, and the ethics of psychoanalysis can be thought as an engagement with the risk of their overlap, on the ruins of symbolic forms. In this vein, we will reflect on some contemporary imaginations of the racialized Other through the figures of the slave, the migrant or the barbarian. We will conclude on the potentiality and political impasses of psychoanalysis today, and on the insight that can be drawn from its encounter with forms and conceptualizations of alterity in other traditions of the psyche and the soul. Readings will include selections from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Wilfred Bion, Gananath Obeyesekere, Franz Fanon, David Marriott, Hortense Spiller, Edward Said, Jacqueline Rose, Michel de Certeau, Walter Benjamin, Omnia El-Shakry, Veena Das, S. Pandolfo, among others. Requirements: Writing requirement: seven Précis and one short paper by the end of the semester (10 pages) Or alternatively: four précis and a long paper (15-20 pages) at the end of the semester. 

Law 267.4 /Critical Theory 290

Law and Foundation

Instructor: Christopher Tomlins

Monday 2:10 - 5 PM (instruction begins August 19) / JSP Seminar Room/2240 Pied 102 / Class 19228

Enrollment requires permission from the instructor. More information on this class can be found here(link is external)
Critical Theory electives are taught by core and affiliated faculty in the Critical Theory program and offer important treatments of theoretical materials significant to the intellectual traditions of the program's course of study in nineteenth-century social theory and philosophy, Frankfurt School and related currents in theory and criticism, and contemporary critical theory. In a typical Critical Theory elective, theoretical materials are presented in dialogue with an anthropological, artistic/aesthetic, economic, educational, historical, philosophical, political, rhetorical, sociological, or other disciplinary matrix that constitutes the course's primary materials for study and inquiry.

French 250A/ Comp Lit 250/Critical Theory 290

Balzak and Critique

Instructor: Michael Lucey

Wednesday 2-5 PM / 4104 Dwinelle / Class 32609

We'll have three major goals in this seminar: 1) to acquire a reasonable familiarity with representative works from the massive and massively influential "realist" novelistic project that Honoré de Balzac elaborated in the 1830s and 1840s; 2) to think about the way Balzac's project could be viewed as a version of critique by way of novelistic form; 3) to explore a range of major critical approaches (along with some of their theoretical underpinnings) from the last half century or so via the way they have taken up various texts by Balzac. Those approaches will include marxism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, speech act theory/performativity, and decolonial critique. Seminar participants will be encouraged to develop a writing project that involves exploring a bit further both in Balzac's corpus and in one of the critical literatures we will be engaging with. French Department students will be reading the Balzac texts in French. Other students are welcome to read in English. Texts by Balzac that the seminar will take up include: "Sarrasine", "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or", "La Duchesse de Langeais", Le Père Goriot [Old Man Goriot], Eugénie Grandet, Illusions perdues [Lost Illusions], La Cousine Bette [Cousin Bette], Les Paysans [The Peasants, aka Sons of the Soil]. Critical readings will probably include Lukács, Adorno, Auerbach, Barthes, Jameson, Shoshana Felman, Margaret Cohen, Naomi Schor, Barbara Johnson, Lisa Lowe, Aníbal Quijano, and some other contemporary criticism.

Education 240D/Critical Theory 290

Curriculum Theory and History: Education and the Cultural Politics of Knowledge

Instructor: Zeus Leonardo

Monday 10-1 PM / Berkeley Way West 4244 / Class 32990

This graduate-level course is a survey designed to introduce students to the specialization of curriculum studies. It regards curriculum both as a field of thought and a contested area of politics. It necessitates looking into the steady and sometimes sudden developments in curriculum theory as part of a historical process. That is, changes in curriculum thought occur within a historical context that defines the meaning of “which knowledge counts and is most worth.” As such, curriculum debates are part of the cultural politics of knowledge. We will study schools of thought, including: social reconstructionism, scientific management or social efficiency, romanticism, and humanism. Over and beyond the curriculum as “the stuff” of schools, the curriculum is a way to promote or discourage certain social relations between people. To this end, the class will examine the social functions as well as possibilities of particular forms of curriculum. Also, the class challenges students to reflect on the political nature of the curriculum, or how human values figure into their creation. Finally, no understanding of the curriculum is complete without the critical and central factor of freedom. Simply put, what kind of world does a particular curriculum open up for students, often children, and what kind does it close off?

Education 280A/Critical Theory 290

Socio-cultural Critique of Education: Or, Introduction to Educational Criticism

Instructor: Zeus Leonardo

Tuesday 10-1 PM / Berkeley Way West 4244 / Class 30616

This graduate-level course is designed to introduce students to a social and cultural critique of education and society by reading and analyzing classical and contemporary social theories. As a survey course, it examines both the theoretical and practical nature of a critical social theory of education. The concept or process of “critique” as well as discerning what it means to be “critical” will be central to the course. Together, they form the basic pillars of educational criticism. As a social practice, education is understood as something broader than schooling, the latter often understood as a function of the state, whether public or private. Some of the theoretical frameworks for study include: Marxism, feminism, antiracism and anticolonialism, and poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Additionally, the nature of power will be examined and the way that social groups position themselves in such relations. This understanding will be instructive for our ability to confront the structural contours of inequality and the everyday effects of privilege.

Portuguese 275 

Relationality: Networks of Art and Politics

Instructor:  Nathaniel Zlotkin Wolfson

Wednesdays 3-6 PM /  Dwinelle 204 / Class 26011

This course examines a number of crucial networks defining 19th, 20th, and 21st century Latin America, and especially Brazil: revolution, romanticism and affect, miscegenation, slavery and anti-slavery movements, cosmopolitanism, and global climate. How do genres, forms, and media feed and respond to such networks? We will focus on Brazil and Latin America as a region in an expanded sense—with a comparative approach that aims to think beyond national traditions. We will consider the connections between ideas of regionalism and internationalism with technologies of communication alongside the histories of slavery, emancipation, independence, and new geopolitical alignments. Given these themes, we will think together about the ways in which theories of relationality (affect theory, media theory, feminism, translation, psychoanalysis, etc) and networks from Latin America and elsewhere can be harnessed to explore transformative aesthetic and political shifts. Students will be encouraged to draw upon their own comparative and transnational interests in their papers.

Rhetoric 200/Critical Theory 290

Rhetoric Against the Grain: Ancient Texts and Practices

Instructor:  Ramona Naddaff

Tuesday 3:30-6:30 PM /  Dwinelle 233 / Class 31566

Working with texts from a variety of disciplines and traditions, especially those of critical theory, this seminar proposes a return to ancient rhetorical theories and practices so to better comprehend—and hence resist—acts of artistic censorship, sexual and moral policing and disciplining, colonial regimes of power and knowledge production, religious, bodily, and discursive confinements and constraints, exclusions and repressions (as well as the various uses) of so-called alien “others” and cultures. Readings of the ancient texts—from the sophists to Thucydides and the tragic dramatists, from Plato, Aristotle to Longinus, and from Cicero, Tacitus, to Augustine-- will be paired with commentaries from critical and post-colonial theorists; psychoanalytic, historical and literary texts; political and cultural theory; and feminist theory and black studies. Now, more than ever, with increasing threats to democracy and to critical inquiry and research, methodological reflection must be renewed, a new series of questions devised, and a possible future imagined that does neither obliterates nor erases the past. As Walter Benjamin writes, the “task [is] to brush history against the grain.” Ancient rhetorical texts and practices serve are the histories with which we will begin in order to disrupt our thinking about past and present alike.