Fall 2023 Core Corses
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.
Electives
Additionally, students in the DE are required to complete two electives from a wide selection of cross-listed courses offered each year. Electives include those listed on this site, but students can also request credit for other courses taken, especially if taught by DE-affiliated faculty.
Fall 2023
Core Courses
The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis core course requirements.
Comp Lit 221 (Critical Theory 205/290)
Adorno’s Aesthetic Critique
Robert Kaufman
Wednesdays 2-5 pm / 4104 Dwinelle
Class #: 30858
This seminar (“co-listed” as Critical Theory 205) is not an introduction to Theodor W. Adorno’s work; rather, it will involve sustained reading and discussion of Adorno’s last major text, which he was still finishing at the time of his 1969 death: AESTHETIC THEORY (1970). We will be reading Robert Hullot-Kentor’s English translation of ÄSTHETISCHE THEORIE. Though we will sometimes briefly consider the original German text, knowledge of German is not required (though it would of course prove very helpful). What can hopefully make a slowed-down, reflective reading of this dense, famously difficult work prove fruitful begins with at least some familiarity with the figures, texts, and artistic/aesthetic/political movements that Aesthetic Theory assumes its readers to have had some acquaintance with. This includes—among many others–Kant, Hegel, Marx and Engels, Lukács, the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871, Lenin, the Bolshevik Revolution, Marxism-Leninism, Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism, Naturalism, Modernism, Dada, Surrealism, Avant-Gardism, Social and Socialist Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Postmodernism!!! (Don’t worry, that’s only about 20 years worth of reading…) It’s worth knowing that Adorno’s final text is written with the expectation–though it of course won’t be our expectation or prerequisite–that its readers will have previously encountered, for example: Kant’s Critique of Judgment; Hegel’s Lectures on the Fine Arts and Phenomenology of Spirit; Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and Das Kapital (esp. the chapter-section “The Secret of Commodity Fetishism”); Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto; Walter Benjamin’s “One-Way Street,” “The Storyteller,” “Surrealism,” “The Author as Producer,” “Conversations with Brecht,” “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility [Mechanical Reproduction],” “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” “On the Concept of History [Theses on the Philosophy of History],” The Origins of the German Play of Mourning, and The Arcades Project; as well as Adorno and/or Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” “Cultural Criticism and Society,” “Commitment [Engagement],” “The Essay as Form,” “Parataxis”, Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectics. (Take a deep breath–and then realize that, depending on how you feel at any given moment, it gets better–or worse: that is, what you’ve just read has been, incredibly enough, a very minimal listing!) Meanwhile, AESTHETIC THEORY offers sustained and repeated yet often extraordinarily compressed responses to some celebrated political and aesthetic/critical-theory debates, and does so on yet another assumption: that AESTHETIC THEORY’s readers are aware not only of these debates, but likewise of the histories of key concepts and phenomena at issue within them. These debates, concepts, and phenomena include: the status of objectivist conceptuality vs. aesthetic quasi- or extra-conceptuality; the notions, in art and critical theory, of the constellation and force-field; the concepts and practices of use-value, exchange value, and reflective-judgment value; mechanical/technical/technological reproduction’s value, over/against aesthetic value; art’s political commitment (or engagement) vs. its aesthetic/artistic autonomy; mass, popular, and conceptually undetermined culture; relations among subjectivity, critical agency, and class consciousness. And finally, AESTHETIC THEORY presumes that among the artists we as readers will know include Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hölderlin, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Robert Browning, Swinburne, Mörike, Rilke, Stefan George, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Ibsen, Strindberg, Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, the Surrealists, Brecht, Lorca, Sartre, Joyce, Beckett, Celan, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Berg, Webern, Schönberg, Weill, Eisler, Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen, Goya, David, Ingres, Delacroix, Gericault, Courbet, Manet, Cezanne, Monet, Picasso, Braque, Grosz, Gris, Léger, Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Guston…. About the first half of the semester’s class sessions will be devoted to an extremely brisk sketching and discussion of the earlier texts, figures, political/artistic/critical movements, and concepts mentioned above (starting with the Kant and continuing through writings by Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues). The second part of the semester’s undertakings–our close, careful reading of AESTHETIC THEORY–will then seek to understand, interpret, and respond to the text’s treatments of modern art’s development on its own terms, and in relation to (1) mostly Kantian, Hegelian, Marxian, and earlier Frankfurt Critical-Theory traditions of aesthetics and critique; and (2) sociopolitical, cultural, and aesthetic-artistic history. We’ll pay ongoing attention to how and why the imaginative, potentially intersubjective activity traditionally understood to be at the heart of aesthetic experience turns out, with various twists, to be crucial too to Adorno’s overall analyses of modernity, mechanical/technical/technological reproduction and reproducibility (in both the economic and artistic-aesthetic spheres), and critical agency. We’ll also consider how AESTHETIC THEORY’S concerns and legacies might engage the changed sociopolitical circumstances–and the changed artistic-aesthetic, critical-theoretical tendencies—of the last four decades. Among the seminar’s emphases will be an ongoing inquiry into how attention to artworks’ formal, stylistic, and philosophical-theoretical dynamics (the relation of artistic technique to aesthetic form and aesthetic experience) may offer stimulus toward, and insight into, historical, sociopolitical, and ethical understanding and engagement.
German 256 (Critical Theory 200/290)
Problems of Literary Theory
Karen Feldman
Tuesdays 3-6 pm / 282 Dwinelle
Class #: 30693
This course will focus on the themes of epistemology, aesthetics, dialectics, and philosophy of history, centering on readings of Kant and Hegel. We will begin with excerpts of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and then turn to his aesthetic theories in Critique of Judgment. Our study of Hegel begins with his criticisms of Kant’s moral philosophy, which we will look at briefly, and with a comparison of their reflections on universal history. We will then move on to Hegel’s formulations of how philosophy works and we will spend several weeks studying selected sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit and Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Most weekly assignments will include short commentaries, aphorisms and criticisms from other prominent authors in the history of critical theory, most notably Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and Arendt. The goal is for students to understand not only some of the basic concepts and gestures in Kant and Hegel, but also to place those within the context of 19th- and 20th-century Critical Theory.
English 250 (Critical Theory 205/290)
Hegel after Marx
Dan Blanton
Wednesdays 5-8 pm / Wheeler Hall 337
Class #: 21378
This course will follow the renewal of–and critical return to–the work of G.W.F. Hegel in the wake and the midst of the twentieth century’s revolutions and counter-revolutions, and in the wake of its readaptation in and through Marxian thought. We will attend to some of Hegel’s most important readers in two distinct but closely related theoretical traditions: first in a German context, then in a French one, concentrating in each case on both the philosophical ends to which Hegel is put and the distinctive styles of reading that his work enables. Central figures are likely to include: Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and T.W. Adorno; Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others.
Rhetoric 240G (Critical Theory 240)
Rhetorical Theory and Criticism: International, World, Struggle
Samera Esmeir
Thursdays 2-5 pm / 7415 Dwinelle
Class #: 30968
This seminar tracks the juridical-political remaking of the world in the image of the international community of states, each appropriating a patch of the surface of the earth and the sky above it as territory. We inquire into the grammar of this juridico-international making, its political-theoretical foundations and historical instabilities, as well as its consequences for thinking settler-colonialism and the indigenous question. We then zoom in on the grammar of revolution that the materialization of the world as international engenders, and we consider other paths of struggle that are in excess of this juridical internationalization of the world as multiplicity of territories. Our readings will range from texts in legal and political thought (Grotius, Hobbes, Bentham, Schmitt), to theorizations of revolution (Marx, CLR James, Arendt, Getachew, Abourahme, Agamben ), to critical theorizations and poetic illuminations outside the juridical grammar of territoriality (Foucault, Kanafani, Wynter, Guha, Moten, Rifkin, Banerjee). Through these different paths of inquiry, we hope to better appreciate the limits and possibilities of a particular western juridico-political architecture in relation to which contemporary struggles and revolutions continue to be waged.
Core classes (Critical Theory 200, 205 and 240) may also be taken for elective credit
Elective Courses
The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis elective requirements.
Comparative Literature 202 (Critical Theory 290)
The Novel & Sociological, Linguistic Anthropological, and Other Forms of Knowledge
Michael Lucey
Mondays 2-5 pm / 4104 Dwinelle
Class #: 32384
What are the resources novels marshal to produce knowledge of different kinds? How does the social location from which they emerge impact what they say, the knowledge they can hold. Along with six novels, we will pursue a set of readings from sociology and linguistic anthropology, as well as some key essays from the literature on critical sexuality studies and decolonial thinking. Among the concepts that will be of central concern for us will be point of view, forms of capital, cultural fields, and language ideologies. In our discussions, point of view will refer not only the question of literary technique, but also to a position from which an author writes and a position from which a reader reads. All of these different ways of construing point of view have a relation to the kinds of knowledge a novel can be claimed to hold, and we will work to establish a critical relation to each of them. Forms of capital are for Pierre Bourdieu, part of makes the social world a space of “immanent tendencies” such that “everything is not equally possible or impossible for everyone at any moment,” an observation that seems related to the preoccupations of many realist narratives and to the cultural fields from which they emerge. Linguistic anthropologists think about language ideologies as representing, in the words of Paul Kroskrity, “the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group.” Readers and writers of novels form groups of this kind in different times and places. Occasionally novelists attempt to innovate regarding “the perception of language and discourse” that a novel communicates to readers. For linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, language ideologies are “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use.” Representing language-in-use becomes both a critical and an aesthetic task in many novels. Kroskrity further emphasizes that “language ideologies are productively used in the creation and representation of various social and cultural identities (e.g. nationality, ethnicity). Language, especially shared language, has long served as the key to naturalizing the boundaries of social groups.” So in this seminar we will also be investigating the possibility that novels can be taken to be archives in which language ideologies and their functions are recorded and critically examined, the possibility that novels are themselves linguistic objects (utterances) that are caught up in language ideologies of their own, including ideologies of the aesthetic, and the ways in which language ideologies and claims to certain kinds of knowledge contribute to the identity formations that novels instantiate.
Novels: Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education; Henry James, The Ambassadors; James Baldwin, Just Above My Head; Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty; Marie NDiaye, That Time of Year; Rachel Cusk, Second Place
East Asian Languages and Cultures (Critical Theory 290)
Anthropocene Fictions
Kevin Smith
Tuesdays 4 – 7 pm / 204 Dwinelle
Class #: 31489
“It may be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” goes the well-known phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson, and with irreversible climate change, we are racing blindly toward the end of the world as we know it. Tracing the origins and onset of the industrial era in the late 19th century, this seminar couples scholarly/theoretical insights on the many aspects of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene” (climate change, fossil capital, natural/social disaster, ecological racism, waste colonialism, viral pandemics, vegetarianism, animal liberation, blue humanities, degrowth communism, cyborgian and/or posthuman subjectivity) with creative works of fiction exploring the ecological metabolism between humans and their natural or built environments across China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan, Oceania, and Asian America. All readings will be available in English translation, though participants are encouraged to read primary sources in the original languages corresponding to their area(s) of expertise. Requirements: in-class presentation; final seminar paper.
Education 280A (Critical Theory 290)
Sociocultural Critique of Education
Zeus Leonardo
Tuesdays 10 am – 1 pm / Berkeley Way West 4244
Class #: 31125
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 280B (Critical Theory 290)
Sociocultural Critique of Education
Zeus Leonardo
Mondays 10 am – 1 pm / Berkeley Way West 4244
Class #: 14964
Description pending
Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) 290 (Critical Theory 290)
ENVIRO-ANTHROPO-GENESIS
Seth Holmes
Tuesdays 9-12 pm / Mulford 103
Class #: 16133
This course will utilize social theory and recent social science and humanities scholarship to explore the ways in which environments and people produce one another. How are environments – bodies of water, landscapes, plants – and their relations and economies produced by people? How are categories of people – classed, racialized, gendered, nationalized, othered – produced by and in relation to environments? How are these two processes of the production of environments and people simultaneous and interwoven? We will draw from multiple disciplines and subdisciplines to explore these questions, including medical and environmental anthropology, human geography, cultural and political ecology, medical and environmental sociology, medical and environmental humanities, “new plantation” and plantationocene studies, critical and phenomenological studies of the body, political economy, and beyond. The course will include the reading of ethnographic monographs, social theory, and social science and humanities articles and will culminate with the writing of a final paper focused on the topic of each students’ choosing in relation to what might be called “enviro-anthropo-genesis”.
Philosophy 290/History 280 (Critical Theory 290)
Philosophies of History
Andreja Novakovic and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman
Wednesdays 4-6 pm / Philosophy Hall 234
Class #: 31379
This seminar will examine a variety of approaches to history as an object of knowledge, focusing on philosophers and theorists in the history of European thought. We will discuss selected writings from figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, Koselleck, Ricoeur, Buck-Morss and Heller. Here is a sample of questions we will consider: how can the past become an object not just of empirical study, but of philosophy and theory? How do historical events or radical ruptures emerge, unfold and dissipitate? Are there underlying patterns or purposes to be found across historical changes, and if so, are these necessary or contingent? What does it mean to attain historical knowledge, or to ‘learn from history’? And what are the conditions of possible histories after cataclysmic catastrophes? Co-taught by faculty in philosophy and history, this introductory seminar is open to students without extensive pre-knowledge of these texts and their backgrounds.
Rhetoric 240G (Critical Theory 290)
Rhetorical Theory and Criticism: Revolts Against History: Historiographic Debates
Nasser Zakariya
Tuesdays 12-3 pm / 7415 Dwinelle
Class #: 25247
The course will examine debates and deliberations over the purposes and disciplinary nature of the field of history.
Rhetoric 240G (Critical Theory 290)
Rhetorical Theory and Criticism: International, World, Struggle
Samera Esmeir
Thursdays 2-5 pm / 7415 Dwinelle
Class #: 30968
This seminar tracks the juridical-political remaking of the world in the image of the international community of states, each appropriating a patch of the surface of the earth and the sky above it as territory. We inquire into the grammar of this juridico-international making, its political-theoretical foundations and historical instabilities, as well as its consequences for thinking settler-colonialism and the indigenous question. We then zoom in on the grammar of revolution that the materialization of the world as international engenders, and we consider other paths of struggle that are in excess of this juridical internationalization of the world as multiplicity of territories. Our readings will range from texts in legal and political thought (Grotius, Hobbes, Bentham, Schmitt), to theorizations of revolution (Marx, CLR James, Arendt, Getachew, Abourahme, Agamben ), to critical theorizations and poetic illuminations outside the juridical grammar of territoriality (Foucault, Kanafani, Wynter, Guha, Moten, Rifkin, Banerjee). Through these different paths of inquiry, we hope to better appreciate the limits and possibilities of a particular western juridico-political architecture in relation to which contemporary struggles and revolutions continue to be waged.
Rhetoric 200 (Critical Theory 290)
Ancient Rhetoric and Modern Theories of the Pandemic
Mario Telo
Mondays, 2-5 pm / 7415 Dwinelle
Class #: 25246
In this course we will consider ancient rhetorical discussions of plagues and epidemics (in the Iliad, tragedy, the Hippocratic corpus, Thucydides, Lucretius, and late-antique historiography) in relation to theoretical interventions on COVID-19 by J. Butler, R. Esposito, S. Hartman, J,-L. Nancy, A. Toscano, S. Weber, and S. Zizek, among others.