Courses

Elective Courses

The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis elective course requirements.

Critical Theory 290

What if Anything, is The Human? Posthumans, Antihumanism, AI, and the Anthropocene

(German 214 / Critical Theory 290)

Hannes Bajohr
Monday, 2 - 5 PM
Class #33295

Since the mid-twentieth century, the notion “the human” has become highly contested: Do we have an essential nature, or are all such definitions historically contingent and exclusionary, shaped by power relations, colonial histories, and the legacies of Western humanism? Can we still speak meaningfully of “humanity” in an age of ecological crisis and artificial intelligence, or is the very category of the human dissolving in the face of these challenges? This class approaches these questions through several frameworks: German philosophical anthropology, French antihumanism, and contemporary posthumanism. We will ask: What is “man” after European colonialism, after the “Anthropocene” that bears his name, and after the prospect of a technology that is more-than-human? Drawing from thinkers such as Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, Sylvia Wynter and Donna Haraway, we will explore how notions of the human have been framed, contested, and redefined across the 20th and 21st centuries. (Learn More)

Translation: History, Politics, Praxis

(German 263A / Critical Theory 290)

Deniz Gokturk
Wednesday, 2 - 5 PM
Class #33296

In this seminar, we will take a historical approach to practices and theories of translation, analyzing translations as sites, not only of discovery and poetic creativity, but of sociopolitical design and market forces, patronage and struggles for recognition. Class materials will draw primarily on the German Turkish axis of cultural contact, addressing a long history of entanglement. The German Turkish comparison offers rich examples of translation in the service of nation-building through initiatives of celebratory acquisition or rejection of foreign canons. We will begin by looking at Luther’s Bible translation as an instance both of struggle against institutional power (the clergy) and an impulse toward vernacularization, considering the antagonists in his reformation polemics. We will then move toward 18th- and 19th-century translation and translation theory, reading selected writings by Schleiermacher and Goethe, the latter of whom engaged intensely with many Near Eastern works in translation. In this context, we will consider the role of translation in the emergence of “world literature” as a category of cross-cultural adoption and valorization. By the second half of the course, we will turn to late 19th- and early 20th-century works, including examples of Turkish literature that have circulated in German and Anglophone reading publics. In this context, we will also consider a growing body of work by authors writing in multiple languages. The power dynamics of cultural contact in contemporary societies shaped by migration, multilingual realities, and monolingual state policies will inform and motivate our engagement with historical case studies. Toward the end of the semester, we will look at the intersection of literary and audiovisual translation with new technologies, paying particular attention to where, how and why texts are translated, and how they are situated in contemporary societies, whose multilingual realities are often at odds with monolingual state policies (Learn More)

Contemporary Rhetorical Theory and Practice

(RHETOR 205 / Critical Theory 290)

Mario Telo
Thursday, 11 AM - 2 PM
Class #24521

An introduction to the questions around which contemporary rhetorical theory and practice are organized. Through an analysis of materials drawn principally from the 18th century to the present, the course will examine rhetorical inquiry in relation to critique as well as the disciplinary construction of knowledge-domains. The course will attend to rhetoric in relation to a range of fields, including but not limited to philosophy, history, literature, politics, religion, law, science, and the arts. (Learn More)

Research Seminars: Modernism Now

(English 250 / Critical Theory 290)

Catherine Flynn
Thursday, 4 - 7 PM
Class #24784

Modernism is often understood as an art of rupture: a response to the shock of living in a present unlike the past. But what is a “now” during war, when catastrophe may be anticipated long before it arrives, when daily news repeats what cannot yet be understood, and when people in different nations encounter the same events from radically unequal positions? This seminar examines how modernist writers made forms for that unsettled experience of historical time in radio addresses, newspaper columns, refugee dialogues, novels, and serial poems, each of which produce a different sense of “now.”
Our central concern will be comedy. Satire, parody, ventriloquism, and comic repetition can disrupt the stories through which a nation recognizes itself; they can also invite readers to disown a speaker’s judgments or to laugh past the violence those judgments entail. We will ask what kind of historical present a wartime joke creates and how the politics of a comic work depend on who speaks, to whom, through what medium, and under what conditions of war, neutrality, or exile. (Learn More)

Approaches to Genre: Lyric Poetry
Modern Lyric Poetry and Society (Lots of poems! Poetics! Criticism! Aesthetics!)

(COMLIT 202B / Critical Theory 290)

Robert Kaufman
Wednesday, 2 - 5 PM
Class #24898

THE FOUR TERMS in this seminar's title, MODERN, LYRIC, POETRY, SOCIETY (not to mention those in the subtitle: POEMS, POETICS, CRITICISM, AESTHETICS, THEORY) have been influentially re-historicized, newly approached, significantly re-defined, importantly re-conceived, and/or famously demoted over the last few decades.

Awareness of those recent and ongoing efforts will enter into most every session of our seminar. But those debates won't be our major focus. Instead, we'll concentrate on reading and responding to, as fully as we can, POEMS (emphasizing form, poetics, substance, experience, ranges of meaning)--along with some related art, criticism, aesthetics, philosophy/theory--that, without sharing any single aesthetic or political stance, evince a common point of departure.

What's that point of departure?

In their poetry (sometimes also in critical writings), the poets whose work we'll take up think of modern art--and especially of modern lyric poetry, in its intense focus on how kinds of musicality in language can regenerate our sense of capacity for expanded thought-feeling, experience, comprehension, meaning-making, and/or critical agency—as having among its central reasons for being the effort to help us ""get"" not only the specific, substantive dynamics and difficulties of modern sociopolitical and ethical life, but also to ""get"" why our formal experiences of the modern itself (our very ability to feel, sense, experience, process, know, reflect on, and/or address it) can be so fraught. We'll consider as much as we can of the varying ways, in form and substance, the poems these poets make try to do some or all of that.

The absurdly long list of poets whose poems we'll try to get into our readings and discussions will likely include: Sor Juana, Wheatley, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hölderlin, Bettina von Armin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Darío, Martí, A. Machado, Dickinson, Whitman, Rilke, H.D., Pound, Eliot, Williams, L. Hughes, N. Guillén, García Lorca; B. Varela, Brecht, Vallejo, Neruda, Mistral, Borges, Niedecker, Stevens, Oppen, Moore, Zukofsky, Paz, Hayden, Éluard, L. Aragon, Césaire, Celan, Pasolini, N. Sachs, Hansberry, Levertov, Duncan, Creeley, Ginsberg, B. Kaufman, Joans, Rich, Lorde, Castellanos, Bishop, Darwish, Joudah, Daive, Jones/Baraka, Albiach, Ashbery, O'Hara, E. Miles, Brathwaite, Pizarnik, Avidan, B. Guest, Monchoachi, M. Palmer, E. Roberson, Harjo, Bellesi, Bachmann, Rankine, R. Waldrop, H. and A. de Campos, Zurita, Adnan, H. Mullen, A. Arteaga, N. Mackey, Huenún, J. Yau, R. Tejada, M. Kim, D.S. Marriott, Royet-Journoud, Bei Dao, A. S. Ali, E. Pérez, C. Sigo, Enzensberger, Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), N. Parra, C. Bracho, E. Cardenal, J. Gelman, Bolaño, and (!!!) others . . .

We'll also read criticism by some of the poets listed above; we'll engage too additional critical writing that's likely to include texts (or excerpts from texts) by Kant, Marx and Engels, Du Bois, Benjamin, Adorno, Auerbach, S. Stewart, S. Cameron, Sartre, Beauvoir, J.S. Mill, Dewey, Mariátegui, Breton, B. Sarlo, D. Salcedo, Arendt, C. Greenberg, Kristeva, K. Taylor, and (!!!) others . . .

[NOTE: In this seminar we'll read lots of poems originally written in English. We'll also read many poems NOT originally written in English: they'll be read and studied in English translations, but we'll also almost always, at least briefly, look at and discuss some aspects of those poems in their original languages. Students taking this course do NOT need to read or speak any languages other than English: our shared language for the course, and for reading, discussing, and writing about poetry (as well as related writings in poetics, criticism, theory, and philosophy) will be English. But many of our poems not originally written in English--after having first been read, heard, engaged, and discussed in the English translations provided--will then also be read aloud and looked at in their original languages (including Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin, Portuguese). Students will be asked to consider how hearing and seeing something of the ways that the poems work in their original languages may then affect how they experience the poems when returning to the English translations. 

[ADDITIONAL NOTE: Students will need to bring hardcopy printouts, to this seminar's class sessions, of texts that will have been uploaded to the course's b-course site. No devices--no laptops, ipads, phones, etc.--to be in use or open during class sessions. Materials in use during class sessions will be: hardcopy of texts; pens and/or pencils; paper.] (Learn More)

Special Topics in Interdisciplinary Italian Studies
Gramsci Then and Now: Marxism, Subaltern Studies, and Postcolonial Theory

(Italian 248 / Critical Theory 290)

Diego Pirillo and Abhishek Kaicker
Thursday, 11 AM - 2 PM
Class #24642
Must be taken for 4 units

Foucault's claim that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci is 'an author who is cited more often than he is genuinely known’, is still relevant today, when only a section of the Notebooks is available in English. Combining our different expertise, we will explore the work of Gramsci, considering both his role in the creation of Western Marxism and his enduring importance in the development of critical theory from the Global South.

We will read Gramsci’s work closely, examining not only the Prison Notebooks but also the Letters and the Pre-Prison Writings. We will discuss some of Gramsci’s key contributions (such as the concept of hegemony, the theory of intellectuals, the southern question, as well as his non-linear and anti-teleological view of history), and understand them in dialogue with other classics of Western Marxism such as Rosa Luxenburg, Walter Benjamin, and György Lukács. Much of the semester will be dedicated to study the major interpretations of the famous Notebook 25, entitled On the Margins of History. History of Subaltern Social Groups.

A central objective of the seminar is to study the reception of Gramsci’s thought as it influenced intellectuals, theoreticians, and political actors through the course of the twentieth century, including our present day. Readings will engage a wide range of authors including but not limited to Ernesto De Martino, Carlo Ginzburg, James C. Scott, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Prathama Banerjee, to think about the contemporary dialogue between Marxism and postcolonialism. (Learn More)

Graduate Topics in Film
Politics, Images: Anti-Colonial and Counter-Colonial Film and Media

(Film 240 / Critical Theory 290)

Natalia Brizuela
Wednesday, 3 - 6 PM
Class #25339

This seminar examines the relationship between images and politics, particularly film and digital media, and the practices of freedom in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first half of the seminar will explore the genealogies, histories, and circuits of so-called “political cinema” that emerged through anticolonial struggles and movements of international solidarity. Taking the mobilization of cinema for emancipation and liberation from the 1950s through the 1970s as our guide, we will reconsider the meanings of the “global,” the “radical,” and the “revolutionary.”

The second half of the seminar begins from the recognition that, despite decades of anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggle, settler colonialism persists, and dispossession, displacement, destruction, and obliteration remain organizing forces of our contemporary world. We will turn to contemporary Palestinian and other Indigenous film and media practices that articulate an embodied refusal to relinquish relations with land and life—a counter-colonial praxis. These works will guide our exploration of the politics of images and the images of politics in the present. (Learn More)