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 205)
Mysticism as Method: Critique, Critical Theory, and the the Possibilities of Transcendence
Instructor: Poulomi Saha
Tuesdays, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM / Wheeler 337
Class #: 31184
The project of the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously announced in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, “was the disenchantment of the world.” While the two German sociologists credited as founders of the Frankfurt School and progenitors of contemporary Critical Theory are hardly the only ones to make this exact proclamation, the state of the (Western, post- Enlightenment) world’s enchantment, its lack, or its return remain an issue of perennial philosophical, social, and cultural concern. It is curious given the fascination of early Critical Theorists—not just Adorno and Horkheimer and their European contemporaries like Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, but also their intellectual antecedents Hegel, Kant, Marx, and Freud—with this condition of enchantment that so much of contemporary work in the field has hewed so stubbornly towards materialist and often hyper-empiricist investments.
This graduate seminar explores the intersection between mysticism and Critical Theory, focusing on how mystical modes of thought—particularly Kabbalistic traditions and other esoteric frameworks—can be employed as methodologies of critique. We will examine the historical development of the Frankfurt School, paying special attention to how its leading thinks engaged with questions of knowledge, empiricism, rationality, and their critiques of Enlightenment reason. The course also investigates how these critiques overlap with mystical traditions, offering alternative ways of understanding reality, truth, and social transformation.
This course returns to the emancipatory aim of Critical Theory that is imbued with mystical force, to ask how states of altered consciousness and ineffable experience may reimagine the very work of humanist critique. Mystical experience shatters the fantasy of knowing subject. In so doing, it furnishes the terms of a different form of knowledge, one which refuses the imperialism of coherence and representation. Together, we will delve into the historical and philosophical bases of the Frankfurt School, explore attendant and alternative theoretical traditions, to explore mystical modes can inform political and philosophical critique. From mystical consciousness to prophetic mysticism, we will develop an understanding of critical methodology inaugurated by states of ineffability and spiritual self-abnegation. At the same time, we will engage contemporary scholarship on mysticism and Critical Theory particularly attuned to questions of sexual difference, race, and empire that underpin these projects.
Texts and thinkers include: deCerteau, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, James, Eckhart, Bataille, Irigaray, Scholem
English 250 (Critical Theory 240)
Research Seminar: On Jameson
Instructor: Dan Blanton
Thursdays, 5 - 8 PM / Dwinelle 104
Class #: 26353
The late Fredric Jameson was the most important Marxist thinker of the last half-century, and perhaps its most influential literary and cultural critic. This course offers an introduction to, and a provisional survey of, both his vast intellectual career and the dialectical thinking to which it is committed. This course will answer to the requirements for Critical Theory 240.
French 270B (Critical Theory 240)
Literary Criticism/Recent Work in French: The Precision of Structuralism
Instructor: Liesl Yamaguchi
Thursdays, 2 - 5 PM / Dwinelle 4226
Class #: 31454
This course will investigate the major concepts, debates, and paradigms of thought generally grouped under the term Structuralism, beginning with the Course in General Linguistics published under the name of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) and extending through Camille Robcis’ Law of Kinship (2013). We will explore the asymmetrical relations and epistemological underpinnings of high-stakes binaries such as synchrony/diachrony, formalism/historicism, phonetics/phonology, and linguistics/poetics, tracing the contours that cleave the science of language to and from the language arts. Readings will include essays by Roman Jakobson, Émile Benveniste, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jean-Claude Milner; theoretical texts will be set in provocative juxtaposition with literary works by (at least) Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, and Velimir Khlebnikov. show less
Elective Courses
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. The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis elective course requirements.
English 203 (Critical Theory 290) Graduate Readings: Transcendentalism and Beyond
Instructor: ElisaTamarkin
Tuesdays, 3:30 - 6:30 PM / Wheeler 337
Class #: 27520
Our seminar will trace the genealogies of thought that inform American transcendentalism and that follow from it. We will focus in part on the life in letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on Emerson’s relationship to the intellectual and social history of the movement he defined. Reading Emerson alongside Henry David Thoreau (including Walden), also Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and others, we’ll look at transcendentalism as a program for labor reform, for abolitionism, for public intellectualism, for education, for environmentalism, and for new experiments in reading, writing, and living. We’ll consider efforts to define and detract from transcendentalism on religious grounds and also to see the movement as engaging with Kant, Coleridge, and Carlyle (and as engaging Nietzsche) on ideas of perception, consciousness, and experience, and as an American answer to philosophical thinking. Toward the end of the seminar, we’ll try to understand what pragmatism, especially in William James, takes from transcendentalism—to see where the histories of these ideas converge and depart—while also putting transcendentalists into conversation with process philosophers and phenomenologists a century later.
Books List: Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (Library of America) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Oxford) William James, The Essential Writings (SUNY) Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings (Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition) Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855 (Penguin)
English 250 (Critical Theory 290) Research Seminar: The Black Index
Instructor: Stephen Best
Wednesdays, 2 - 5 PM / Wheeler 337
Class #: 27519
An index (from the Greek deixis, “to point out”) is a sign that points to the context in which it occurs (think footprint); in poetics, it registers a mutual hereness, a framed habitation for speaker and audience, “the stored activity of the maker [being] simultaneous to an implicit and reciprocal capacity for animation in the receiver,” according to Susan Stewart. This sense of hereness and thereness is why deixis has given us words such as “predicament” (finding oneself here) and “diction” (a sort of unconscious betrayal of the place from which you came). Linguists capture this sense of immediacy in the idea of “phatic” communication, messages exchanged “to check whether the channel works” (Roman Jakobson), where the purpose is to establish and maintain the social bonds of the interlocutors. The burden of such maintenance has made the indexical a particularly useful portal into what Wittgenstein called shared “forms of life.” Except, it appears, in the black radical tradition, where the phatic is often shadowed by the apophatic, where the connectedness we call blackness often sticks to utterances of the cannot-be-said.
James Baldwin argued that wrestling with these black ways of worlding required the deliberate wreckage of American English (“No true account. . . of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. . . [T]he only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.”) Toni Morrison called this listening for “the sound that broke the back of words” (Beloved). This graduate seminar will examine the art of Baldwin, Morrison, Aria Dean, Arthur Jafa, Kerry James Marshall, and others, in the context of the many strains of apophasis in black thought: the “anagrammatical” (Christina Sharpe), “mu” (Fred Moten), “troubled eloquence” (Nathaniel Mackey), “the opacity gradient” (Tina Post), “acousmatic voice” (Nina Sun Eidsheim), “the black catatonic scream” (Harmony Holiday). One goal of the seminar will be to plumb the theoretical depths of this divergence toward sounding unsounding in poststructuralism, philosophy of language, and critical theory.
Book list (to include, but not limited to): James Baldwin, Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: The Library of America, 1998) Ashon Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordam UP, 2016) Toni Morrison, JAZZ (New York: Knopf, 1992) Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2017) Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (New York: NYU Press, 2023)
Ethnic Studies 250 (Critical Theory 290) Research Seminar: Is Critique Secular?
Instructor: Salar Mameni
Wednesdays, 10 AM - 1 PM / Social Science Building 187
Class #: 26330
This course takes its name from a symposium of the same title held in 2007 as the inaugural public event for the new critical theory program at UC Berkeley. The symposium, and the volume of published essays from the event, aimed to interrogate the notion of critique and its presumed secularity. Is Critique Secular, asked if critique was not an unexamined domain in which the great divide between the secular and the “religious,” the modern and the traditional, and ultimately the Western and the non-Western was defined. This course begins with this volume of published essays, in which the Other to secular, critical modernity is Islam. Through 5 modules of readings, the course examines genealogies of “religion” as an Enlightenment category that defined the “secular” in opposition to (non-Christian) “religion.”
The readings for the course show how the notion of critique is the bridge that has historically both upheld and allowed for a path across the secular/religious opposition. The course modules are designed to define “critique,” “secular criticism,” “religion” and the “critic” through a variety of perspectives and to highlight critical thought from the perspective of the Muslim, Black, Indigenous and Queer Others to secularism.
French 250B (Critical Theory 290)
Studies in 19th Century Literature: Balzac and Critique
Instructor: Michael Lucey
Wednesday 2 - 5 PM / Dwinelle 4226
Class #: 31452
We'll have three major goals: 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.Texts by Balzac that the seminar will take up include: "Sarrasine", "La Fille aux yeux d'or", "La Duchesse de Langeais", Le Père Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Illusions perdues, La Cousine Bette, Les Paysans.
Gender and Women's Studies 210 (Critical Theory 290)
Fanon and Feminism
Instructor: Eric Stanley
Tuesdays 3 - 6 PM / Social Sciences 650
Class #: 26092
This course will explore Frantz Fanon’s books, clinical notes, and other fragments of his writing to understand how he theorized gender and sexuality within the context of the colonial encounter. By staying with Fanon’s question of revolutionary violence, students will trace how contemporary thinkers have opened his texts toward a reading of decolonization as the necessary and contested work of feminism. The course will pay close attention to how Black trans/queer theory has worked with, and at times adjacent to, Fanon’s writing.
German 214 / Film and Media 240 (Critical Theory 290)
Critical Theory and Photography
Instructor: Anton Kaes
Mondays, 10 - 1 PM / Dwinelle 226
Class #: 33164 / 31497
The project of this seminar is to examine the theory and history of photography through the lens of the Frankfurt School. We will begin by discussing the seminal texts of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in the context of emerging media technologies from the 1840s to the 1930s, including the relationship between still and moving images at the birth of film. We will also pay special attention to the modernist photography of the Bauhaus and New Objectivity. In the second half of the seminar, we will analyze the vital impulses of Weimar visual culture for abstract and conceptual photography from the 1960s to the present. Critical theory (in its broadest sense) will also help us understand the changing status and function of the photographic image in the digital age. (Limited to 12 atudents.)
Rhetoric 240 (Critical Theory 290) Rhetorical Theory and Criticiscm: Rhetorical Theory On Destruction and the Destructible
Instructor: Samera Esmeir
Wednesdays, 9 AM - Noon / Dwinelle 7415
Class #: 31211
This course centers on the political history and present of destruction to consider what it means to be attuned to obliteration, loss, and the dead, as well as the consequences of this attunement to understanding the political practice of the survivor and the destructible. By centering destruction and catastrophe, we aim not to consider what destruction negates but to orient ourselves to the remainders of destruction, the obliterable, their practices, and their horizons. If modern politics are conventionally centered on acting, making, and building, we search for a political language adequate for destruction. Is the critique of destruction sufficient at this historical juncture? Should our modern political sensibilities be limited to regulating or condemning its denial of life, civilization, and worlds? Or is an attunement to a life in destruction also necessary? Who is the figure after genocide, wars of annihilation, and global capitalist liquidation? If she is a survivor, what is surviving? Or what is a life that remains after destruction, which is to say, remains tied to death and loss? And what is the relationship between the survivor and the destructible? If the survivor is marked by death, can she qualify as a political figure, and will the dead be admitted to modern politics? Is political resistance to obliteration thinkable, and what are its terms? These are some of the questions that will guide our discussions. The texts we read will anchor us as we try to orient ourselves to intensified destruction and the political and impolitical language and practice required in its wake. Our readings will include texts by Gil Anidjar, Hannah Arendt, Hadeel Assali, Étienne Balibar, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Roberto Esposito, Jairus Victor Grove, Saidiya Hartman, Basit Iqbal, Ghassan Kanafani, David Marriott, Fred Moten, March Nichanian, Stefania Pandolfo, Adania Shibli, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Peter Sloterdijk, and Neferti Tadiar.
Rhetoric 240 (Critical Theory 290)
Edward Said Beyond Humanisms
Instructor: Mario Telo
Tuesdays, 10 AM - 1 PM / Dwinelle 7415
Class #: 26037
In this seminar we will read a large portion of Edward Said's writings, with a particular focus on their uncanny resonances with and anticipations of the current war on Gaza. We will read Said with and against other thinkers influenced and affected, in various ways, by his political, theoretical, and also literary-critical and musicological writings. Among the goals of the seminar will be a reconsideration of Said’s humanism and an exploration of strategies for reading against the grain to locate a posthumanist Said.
Rhetoric 240 (Critical Theory 290)
Studies in the Relations Between Lterature and the Other Arts Seeing Convicts: Writing and Film
Instructor: Ramsey McGlazer
Tuesdays, 10 AM - 1 PM / Wheeler 124
Class #: 31493
This is not a course about “the prison film,” “prison literature,” or the writing of imprisoned intellectuals more generally. Although we’ll briefly discuss these traditions and critical constructions, our focus will be on efforts to counter what Michelle Brown calls “penal spectatorship”: the ways of seeing (and unseeing) that uphold the carceral state. According to Ashley Hunt, these habits lead us to view “dissent as crime,” “counterinsurgency warfare as law enforcement,” “and the people … as disorder.” How have filmmakers and writers—including critics and theorists—worked to challenge these spectatorial habits and to activate other ways of seeing and reading? What are the limits of visualization when it relies on technologies used to surveil the criminalized? How have filmmakers sought to address or to overcome these limits? And what alternatives to visual capture can writing (still) afford?
As we consider these questions, we’ll revisit aesthetic categories, like writerliness and medium specificity, that might appear to be outmoded. At the same time, we’ll work through ongoing critical debates on racialization, migration, and mass incarceration and its abolitionist alternatives. We’ll ask how, if at all, the old categories—and theories of the aesthetic more generally—might be brought to bear on these ongoing debates. We’ll do this not in order to “aestheticize” imprisonment, but rather in an effort to understand the sensibilities that sustain the current carceral order. How can these sensibilities be reorganized, and what poetic practices and media forms, if any, would be adequate to this undertaking?
We will study several critiques of the US carceral state, but the US will not be our exclusive focus; the seminar will also address responses to fascist and post-fascist states in Europe and to Cold War dictatorships in Latin America. We’ll study films by Cazals, Debord, De Palma, Dunye, Farocki, Gerima, Rivera, Rossellini, Solanas and Getino, Straub-Huillet, and Story. Assigned texts will include works by Barthes, Berger, Cárdenas, Dayan, Delany, Deleuze, Gladman, Halpern, Hartman, Moten, Revueltas, and Terada, among others.
Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies 266 (Critical Theory 290)
Ecology Across the Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Shannon Jackson
Tuesdays, 2 - 5 PM / Dwinelle 448
Class #: 27557
Scientists, politicians, activists, and policy-makers struggle to sensitize global citizens to the threat of climate change. Within this nexus, artists, humanists, and cultural critics work to articulate and propel the role of the arts and humanities in climate advocacy and in the re-imagining the systems of the world. How do differerent art forms and media —literature, visual art, performance, film, architecture, and more — activate a multi sensory understanding of the ecological? How are humanistic methods transforming and transformed by engagements with climate science? How do so-called “human” agents reckon with a “more-than-human” perspective on the world? How has the question of climate become politicized in a partisan landscape and in the context of growing authoritarianism? We will consider these and other questions throughout this graduate seminar, integrating methods such as aesthetic analysis, social contextualization, archival research, community engagement, art-making, and curatorial experiments throughout the Bay Area. Conceived in relation to the campus-wide Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative, we will welcome several visiting scholars and artists to our seminar. The seminar will also include a field trip to one of the UC Field Stations. Final essays and projects will be developed in relation to the skill sets, partnerships, and disciplinary goals of enrolled students.