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
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 250/Critical Theory 205
Aesthetics and Antifascism: Reading Marcuse
Instructor: Ramsey McGlazer
Tuesdays, 2-5 PM / Dwinelle 4125A / Class 26785
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.
Gender and Womens Studies 235/Critical Theory 240
Instructor: Leslie Salzinger
Tuesdays, 2-5 PM / 602 Social Sciences Building / Class 33279
Capitalism is often seen as a system that overrides everything in its path. However, a closer look at its development suggests that it emerged and still operates within and in relation to gender and racial domination, reconstituting those meanings and systems in turn. In this seminar, we will investigate that imbrication, exploring the role and constitution of gender and race in ongoing primitive accumulation, in the labor of social reproduction, and in the unfolding of the neoliberal present. Over the course of the semester, we will explore exploitation’s ongoing operations amid a broad terrain of appropriation by other means.
Elective Courses
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
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