Fall 2026 Critical Theory Courses
Core Courses
The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis core course requirements.
Critical Theory 200
A seminar in 19th century philosophy and social theory concerned with key texts undergirding critical theories in the 20th century. This seminar may include Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and/or Weber, and will be organized around the concept of “critique” and “critical theory.”
Critical Theory 205
A seminar on the Frankfurt School in conjunction with other critical trends, e.g., Adorno and Benjamin and aesthetic theory, or social theory from Bloch to Habermas.
Critical Theory 240
A seminar on contemporary critique and critical theory. This course may include critical race theory, postcontinental political theory, norms and values in critical theory, seminars on the tradition of critique and theology, comparative forms of critique, geopolitical conditions of theory-formation, critical theory and Marxism, critique and the problem of political dissent and citizenship, gender and race in relation to critical practices, psychoanalysis, and literary and art theory and criticism.
Core Courses
Ethnic Studies 250 / Critical Theory 240
Critical Ethnic Studies without Guarantees: Thinking with Stuart Hall
Instructor: Keith Feldman
Wednesdays, 11-2 / 587 Social Sciences Building / 25704
This course takes up the work of Stuart Hall, among the most influential scholars in the fields of cultural studies and ethnic studies. Preferring contingency and complexity over the limited guarantees of analytical reductionism, Hall’s extensive engagement with culture, politics, and theory has informed contemporary debates about: identity and difference; race and capitalism; Marxism and deconstruction; nationalism, migration, and diaspora; popular culture and cinema; authoritarianism, post-colonialism, and neoliberalism. Students are invited to think through the detour of Hall’s theorizing as a way to animate, reconsider, and refresh their own intellectual projects.
Electives
Film 240 / Critical Theory 290
Hermeneutics of Doubt: Media, Philosophy, Meaning
Instructor: Weihong Bao
Mondays, 9:30-12:30 PM / Dwinelle 226 / 31725
This graduate seminar considers doubt as historically varied modes of inquiry and understanding that unsettle a determinist worldview. We will trace a genealogy of doubt by placing the history of philosophy in conversation with the philosophy of technology. The course tracks the history of skepticism and hermeneutics but dwell on three significant moments: the turn of the twentieth century American Pragmatism; the postwar rise of hermeneutics; and the rise of poststructuralism which heralds a post-hermeneutic and posthuman turn but also opens up meaning through an aesthetics of doubt. We will consider these three particular moments because of their historical relationship with experimental science, their bearings on questions of medium, form, and meaning, and their close association with phenomenology but also philosophy of history and philosophy. Readings include René Decartes, Immanuel Kant, Charles Peirce, Bernard Stiegler, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Ian Hacking, Karen Barad, among others.
German 215 / Comparative Literature 250 / Critical Theory 290
Studies in Literary Theory:
Imagination, Fantasy, ‘Einbildungskraft’
Instructor: Niklaus Largier
Mondays, 3-6 PM / Dwinelle 4144 / 32325
In literary and philosophical traditions, the imagination has been understood in a wide range of ways: as the space where sense impressions take on a shape and an affective charge; as the interface between material forms and psychic life; as a conduit between the human and the divine; as the organ of prophecy and dreams; as the faculty that is at the core of innovation and the creation of fictional worlds. In this seminar we will discuss the significance of notions and practices of the imagination in philosophical and literary traditions, as well as the potential to think with the imagination in current contexts. We will start with a discussion of texts by Plato and Aristotle; move on to the treatment of the imagination in classical rhetoric and in the medieval Arabic tradition; and focus on four key areas where imagination, fantasy, and 'Einbildungskraft' play a significant role: the so-called mystical tradition up to Jacob Böhme; Baroque cultures of the imagination; poetic imagination in the 18th and 19th centuries; and 20th century philosophical approaches up to new materialism. Based on the interests of the participants, a final syllabus will be established at the beginning of the semester.
History 280 / Critical Theory 290
Nature, Power and Technology
Instructor: Matthew Shutzer
/ / /
Portuguese 275 / Crtitical Theory 290
The Senses of the Avant-Garde
Instuctor: Nathaniel Wolfson
Mondays, 3-6 PM / Dwinelle 204 / 25676
The seminar approaches the avant-garde not only as literary and artistic history but as a reorganization of perception. We consider how literature and visual art recalibrate modes of seeing, hearing, touching, and inhabiting space. From this perspective, the avant-garde becomes an inquiry into how art transforms not only representation but the felt experience of the social and political.Centered on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Brazil, this seminar explores how the historical avant-gardes transformed cultural fields, leaving lasting marks and establishing practices that continue to shape production today. We'll moves across a wide theoretical spectrum: from canonical theories of the avant-garde to phenomenological approaches to aesthetic experience, and from structuralist poetics to intermedia semiotics.The avant-garde is far from an exclusively Western aesthetic tradition or the sole product of exchanges with Europe. We examine the impact of African diasporic and Indigenous cultures on Brazil’s modernist and avant-garde traditions, while also situating Brazilian experimentation within transnational circuits of exchange.
Rhetoric 200 / Critical Theory 290
Classical Rhetorical Theory and Practice
Instructor: James Porter
Tuesdays, 2-5 PM / 7415 Dwinelle / 27069
This seminar offers an introduction to classical rhetorical theory from Homer to Augustine. Secondary readings will be drawn from scholarship in Classics (Vernant, Loraux, Svenbro, Carson, Telò) and from modern philology, philosophy, and theory (Nietzsche, Adorno, S. Weil, Arendt, Auerbach, Balibar, J. Butler, Foucault, Jameson, Moten, Pedilla Peralta and others working in Black classicisms). One of the primary concerns will be to ask what it means to critically engage the Greek and Roman past today. Some of the threads running through the seminar will include speech and writing; rhetoric and philosophy; language and reality; persuasion, seduction, and epistemological critique; literal and figurative meaning; agency and responsibility; worlding and unworlding; aesthetics, politics, and religion. Requirements: bi-weekly blog post responses; one to two in-class presentations (depending on the class size); a final research paper geared towards the participants’ own fields.