Fall 2017

Core Courses

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

Comparative Literature 225
Modern Poetry and Frankfurt School Aesthetics

Robert Kaufman
Tuesdays, 2-5 pm, 4104 Dwinelle

Readings in modern, and above all modern lyric, poetry (much of it from the U.S., but also from Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Near East) in relation to major Frankfurt-School texts on aesthetics, criticism, and social theory that emphasize the significance of literature (as well as the other arts) and especially poetry. Focused concentration on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and on their development of Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian traditions of aesthetics and critical theory.  [Note: Critical Theory DE students who wish to take the course to satisfy their CT 205 “Frankfurt School”  core-course requirement are entirely welcome to do so, provided they are willing actively to study and engage with the modern poetry and poetics that will be treated as the seminar’s primary literary field, along with its primary critical-theoretical field.]  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 and reproducibility, 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 question of  how—and to what degree—artistic technique, in relation to aesthetic form and aesthetic experience, may offer stimulus toward and insight into historical, sociopolitical, and ethical understanding and engagement. Some consideration of Romantic and nineteenth century poetry, and of twenty-first century poetry, but the seminar will focus primarily on twentieth-century, modernist poetry (including modernist poetry written and published during the apparently postmodern period). For a more extensive course description, go to: http://complit.berkeley.edu/courses/studies-in-symbolism-and-modern-literature/#more-16654

This instance of Comparative Literature 225 counts towards Critical Theory DE students’ Critical Theory 205 requirement.

English 250
Paranoid States: Empire and the Rise of the Surveillance

Poulomi Saha
Wednesdays, 3-6 pm, 107 Mulford

This course examines the long, intimate relationship between technologies of surveillance and the making of British and American empires. While digital technology and state surveillance has been significant in the post-9/11 world, identifying, monitoring, and tracking populations and individuals has been central to the consolidation of state power for much longer. We will consider the development of technologies such as photography, fingerprinting, biometrics, and aerial drones in the context of their imbrication with imperial governance. Beginning in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment, this course will track the shifting forms that surveillance and the state take from the decline of British colonialism to the rise of American empire. It will look to South Asia, the Philippines, North America, and the Middle East to ask how discourses of security, risk, and vulnerability have rationalized state policies of containment and scrutiny on the one hand, and justified and catalyzed the expansion of imperial power on the other.

Readings and films may include: Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; LeFebvre, The Production of Space; Hardt & Negri, Empire; Orwell, 1984; Pontecorvo, Battle of Algiers; Scott, Seeing Like a State; McCoy, Policing America’s Empire; Hathaway, The Real Glory.

This instance of English 250 counts towards Critical Theory DE students’ Critical Theory 240 requirement.

French 265
I Confess: Self-Narration and Self-Representation from the Novel to New Media

Damon Young
Fridays, 2-5 pm, 226 Dwinelle

Is the “self” of Rousseau’s Confessions the same as the self of the twenty-first century digital selfie? To what extent is subjectivity bound up in the means of its technical mediation? This course stages an encounter between histories of autobiography, theories of the subject/subjectivation, and recent developments in media theory. We will ask how the “private self” of an earlier colonial modernity was given form in the novel and the autobiography, then explore how the invention of photography and film refashioned the subject as “ideally visible,” before considering how digital media cultures generate forms of subjectivity for which the defining imperative would no longer be confession but rather circulation. We will spend some time with Foucault’s discussions of the confessional imperative that situates sexuality at the opaque foundation of the modern subject, reading them in relation to critical commentaries on the production of the “I” in literature and philosophy (works by Butler, Paige, Lucey, De Man). We will explore the interrelation of medium, subjectivity, and apparatus in theoretical works by Althusser, Deleuze, Debord, Baudrillard, Stiegler, Preciado, and others. Throughout, we will draw on specific examples of autobiography and/or self-portraiture in various media forms, from Rousseau to Proust, Varda, Godard, Sophie Calle, and contemporary vloggers. Taught in English, with texts available in French or English translation.

This instance of French 265 counts towards Critical Theory DE students’ Critical Theory 240 requirement.

Elective Courses

The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis elective requirements.

Education 280A
Sociocultural Critique of Education

Zeus Leonardo
Mondays, 1-4 pm, 5527 Tolman

These interdisciplinary seminars address a series of questions. In what ways can philosophical, sociological, anthropological, historical, and psychological forms of inquiry be brought together to bear on the analysis of learning, on schooling, and on education more generally? What do we mean by critical and interpretive theories, and what are their relations with social practice? How can education come to constitute itself otherwise than in its current form?

Education 290
Race, Whiteness, and Education

Zeus Leonardo
Tuesdays, 1-4 pm, 2320 Tolman

Circa 1990, Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the White Knapsack,” David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness, and Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters arguably represent the beginnings of a focus on whiteness and white experiences. Since then, there has been a veritable explosion of critical work on whiteness across the disciplines. This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the area of Whiteness Studies, particularly how it has been taken up by education scholars. As a relatively recent innovation (quarter of a century old), Whiteness Studies has become a burgeoning literature across many disciplines and shifted race discourse from focusing on people of color to focusing on white racial experience. The course asks students to assess what this innovation within general race theory (as well as secondarily within other theories, such as class and gender analysis) produces in terms of greater knowledge and understanding of a general racial predicament. For example, what is particular about Whiteness Studies as a field, which classical race scholarship could not have explained adequately? In addition, the course asks what the conceptual and practical applications of Whiteness Studies might look like in education, but also broadly in the social sciences and humanities. Additionally, what does focusing on whiteness accomplish in the end, even if it aims to study it critically? Finally, the course asks what can be done, in the name of Whiteness Studies, to ameliorate racial disparities.

English 203
Graduate Readings: Materiality

Catherine Flynn
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00-3:30 pm, 186 Barrows

In recent years, new theories of materiality have emerged to account for physical processes and eventualities outside of human volition and identificatory categories. In this course, we will examine these theories in relation to the older paradigms—philosophical, psychoanalytic, Marxist, phenomenological and anthropological—on which they build and from which they depart. Exploring materiality in the opposing but interrelated senses of the physical world and of social, productive forces, we will read a set of foundational thinkers, such as Lucretius, Aristotle, Marx, and Freud, along with a series of theorists who respond to them in divergent ways. Two key contemporary directions under consideration will be speculative realism’s shift away from socio-linguistic and anthropocentric modes of thought and, contrastingly, the exploration of consciously queer subjectivities in feminist and other phenomenologies. Readings will be arranged in strands that develop, diverge or reflect critically: for example, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sara Ahmed; Descartes, Judith Butler and Diana Coole; Marx, Derrida, and Fredric Jameson; and Hume, Quentin Meillasoux, and Martin Hägglund.

Reading list: Derrida, Jacques: Spectres of Marx; Dolphijn, Rick: New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies; Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and Its Discontents; Lucretius: The Nature of Things; Marx, Karl: Capital; Meillasoux, Quentin: After Finitude; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: The Visible and the Invisible.

English 250
Gender, Sexuality, and Modernism

Elizabeth Abel
Thursdays, 3:30-6:30 pm, 102 Barrows

“Is queer modernism simply another name for modernism?” The question Heather Love poses in her special issue of PMLA will also guide this seminar on the crossovers between formal and sexual “deviance” in modernist literature. We will read back and forth across a century (Henry James to Colm Toibin, James Joyce to Alison Bechdel, Gertrude Stein to Monique Truong) to stage a series of encounters between the aesthetic practices  and discourses of modernism and those of contemporary queer theory and cultural production.  As we map the shifting contours of some key forms and terms, we will pause to consider (among other things) the mobile dimensions of queer time and space; the historical migration of concepts such as perversion, inversion, masquerade, transvestism, abjection, and shame; the mutual implication of race, gender, and sexuality; the formal attributes of the closet; the legibility of transgender bodies; and the composition of affective histories. To complement (and complicate) the chronological axis of this inquiry, we will also attend to the metropolitan spaces in which sexual boundaries blurred and subcultures thrived, especially the three urban sites central to modernist experimentation: London, New York, and Paris.

French 251
Francophone Literature: Le Surrealisme et la Francophonie

Soraya Tlatli
Thursdays, 2-5 pm, 4226 Dwinelle

Dans ce cours, nous analyserons dans un premier temps la poétique surréaliste de l’image à travers un certain nombre d’extraits littéraires et théoriques du groupe surréaliste. Dans un deuxième moment, nous interrogerons la question de l’influence surréaliste, aussi bien à propos de la politique coloniale de la France, qu’à propos de l’écriture poétique elle-même en prenant comme exemple principal le corpus d’Aimé Césaire et l’oeuvre de Kateb Yacine.

French 260B
Poetic Thinking: Valéry Before and After Jacques Derrida

Suzanne Guerlac
Wednesdays, 2-5 pm, 4226 Dwinelle

With the success of Charmes, Paul Valéry became the public face of poetry in twentieth century France.  He was also an influential prose writer (Monsieur Teste), a theorist of poetics, and an author of prose poems. In private, he was a wide-ranging thinker who kept Notebooks for decades, in which he addresses issues of language, science, politics, time, and images from, we could say, the perspective of a thinking poet.

It has been noted that the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who wrote a number of essays on Valéry, alludes to him frequently and often elliptically throughout his work. Some believe that Valéry anticipated Derrida on a number of important questions; others note that Valéry appears to haunt Derrida’s work.

The first part of our seminar will be devoted principally to reading a range of Valéry’s works – poems, prose pieces, critical essays and some fragments from the Notebooks, along with a few critical essays on Valéry (Adorno). One of the questions we will pose is: what does it mean to think from the vantage point of a poet?

This question will lead us to consider a few essays by Derrida on Valéry, and a few other texts by Derrida that allude only indirectly to Valery.  Does reading Derrida enrich our understanding of what is at stake in the poetics and thinking of Valéry?  Along the way we will consider how the “brand” Valéry enters into debates about literature, first in Sartre’s What is Literature?, and then in the context of the group Tel quel  which challenges Sartre from the perspective of Valéry in 1960, before going on to publish the major thinkers of “French Theory” including Jacques Derrida.

Readings will include works such as the following of Valéry:Charmes,Monsieur Teste, “L’Idée fixe,”  “Degas, Danse, Dessin,”  “Le Cours de poétique,” “La Crise de l’esprit,” “La Politique de l’esprit” and selections from theCahiers;essays  by Adorno and  Sartre (What is Literature?) and works by Derrida such as L’Autre Cap, “Qual quelle,”L’Animal que donc je suis, andPsyché: Inventions of the other.

Italian 204
From Gramsci to Agamben: Philosophy, Politics and Italian Theory

Diego Pirillo
Wednesdays, 2-5 pm, 6331 Dwinelle