Courses: Fall 2012 (2131)
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to find out how to crosslist your graduate course with Cultural Studies.
FIRST: One course for SUMMER 2012
SPAN 2464
20th Century Latin American Topics: An Exploration of International Human Rights through Contemporary Latin American Literature and Film
Aurea María Sotomayor
CATEGORY "C"
We will examine basic concepts of Human Rights (Carrillo Salcedo, Bruno Simma/Philip Alston, Micheline Ishay, Jack Donnelly) in the context of genocides, gender violence, transitional justice, truth commissions, and massacres in Latin America and the Caribbean, as they are represented in literature and film. Visual and verbal narratives will guide our search in the contemporary poetics and history of violence. Authors such as Philoctete, Dorfman, Eltit, Thays, Rey Rosa and theorists such as Dianne Taylor, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, Idelver Avelar and Helen Scarry will be the foundation of our inquiry. The course is open to graduate as well as advanced undergraduates, and will be conducted in Spanish.
FALL Term AY2013 (Fall 2012=2131)
Humanities Center seminar:
CLST 2006
SPECIAL TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES:
Keywords:
History & Practice of a Cross-disciplinary Research Method
Jonathan Arac
3 Credits
Wednesdays 6:00pm-9:00pm
CL 602
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams (1976, 2d ed., 1983) is one of the most important works by one of the founders of Cultural Studies. Keywords is made up of short essays that take crucial terms in contemporary social and political debate and use their philological history as a means of engaging with their contradictory current uses and meanings. Its combination of scholarship with relevance has proved inspiring and offers a model for how academic work can prove socially significant. A group of scholars from Pitt with colleagues from other universities is working to update Williams's work. See the website: <keywords.pitt.edu/>
This course aims to introduce students both to methodological and substantive issues that formed Williams's work and the uses to which it may be put. The hope is that students' work in the course may contribute to the Keywords Project, which meets at Pitt in January, 2013 and has agreed to devote a block of time to presentations from members of this seminar.
Shared reading will include major works by Williams and William Empson (a remarkable figure in the history of literary criticism]. Students will be encouraged to develop projects germane to their own research interests. The kind of work done is applicable in all languages and literatures, as well as in reflective social sciences.
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Text and Theory |
Disciplines and Intellectual Movements |
Cultural Antagonisms and Cultural Crises |
Designated Courses |
ANTH 2750 Contemporary Theory in Anthropology
Andrew Strathern
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CLST 2006 Special Topics in Cultural Studies: Keywords
Jonathan Arac
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GER 2884/3884 (seminar AND lab) Randall Halle
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GER 2600/3600 Clark Muenzer
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ENGLIT 2324
Gayle Rogers
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ANTH 2782 The Ethnography of Writing and Recording Laura Brown
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LIS 2970 Patrick Keilty
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HIST 2500
Reid Andrews
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ENGLIT 2445
Susan Andrade
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COMMRC 3326
Brent Malin
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SPAN 2422
Gonzalo Lamana
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MUSIC 2621 Music & Materiality Andrew Weintraub
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FR 2400
Chloe Hogg
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ENGFLM 2462 Film Comedy: Theory, Culture, Style Lucy Fischer
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SPAN 2464 20th Century Latin American Topics
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RELGST 2710
Paula Kane
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ENGFLM 2451 Film History/Theory I
Marcia Landy
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SPAN 2461
Juan Duchesne-Winter |
ENGLIT 2105
Ryan McDermott
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ENGLIT 2287 Courtney Weikle-Mills
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HIST 2724 Lara Putnam
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SPAN 2465 America on the Periphery of Capitalism Joshua Lund |
Cultural Studies Course Descriptions
Fall 2012 (2131)ald Z
ay
ANTHRO 2750
Contemporary Theory in Anthropology
Andrew Strathern
This course is designed to cover contemporary theorizing in anthropology, with special reference to the transformation of grand theoretical schemes into post-structuralist, processual, and historical approaches. The topical arenas in which this thematic pathway are following include gender, development studies, globalization and cultural practices, religion and ritual, embodiment and healing, new directions in kinship studies, and the place of cognitive science studies in cultural theorizing.
While the whole discussion is pervaded by a realization of the effects of post-modernist thinking, the overall direction of the conversation in the course is toward the contemporary reconstruction of theory and its relationship to transformations in forms of fieldwork and ethnographic writing, in the wake of earlier work by authors of the Writing Culture persuasion.
ANTHRO 2782
The Ethnography of Writing and Recording
Laura Brown
What changes when music is recorded, when letters are written, when pamphlets are tweeted, or calls to prayer are electronically amplified? This course seeks to advance frameworks for a cultural analysis of writing, recording, amplification, and other semiotic technologies. We examine a variety of case studies – ranging from histories to medieval book selling, to debates about music piracy, and discussions of the ways inwhich literacy has change courtship in contemporary Nepal – in order to understand what it means to capture, copy, transmit, and archive material. This course eschews strong technological determinism and global projections of European history in favor of a contextual and historical approach.
Drawing on recent work in anthropology, literary criticism, and linguistics; this courses examines writing and recording as diverse forms of meaningful and interested action. The course is divided into three general units. From Talk to Text considers the histories of texts as material objects, the political economic histories ofwritten forms, and the significance of written genres such as love letters,newspapers, and bureaucratic documents. The second unit, Authority and Fidelity, considers how recordings are authenticated, the significance of differences between recorded and ‘live’ performance, and debates over the ethics of copying. The final unit, Interpreting Circulation, examines the ways in which movements of speech through broadcasting, print circulation, parody, and censorship participate in broader social and political transformations.
This course is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. No prior knowledge is expected, but participants should come prepared to read challenging texts. Assignments include: weekly discussion questions, two short response papers, and a final research paper on a self-selected case study.
COMMRC 3326
Foundations of American Media Theory
Brent Malin
Having established his "Office of Radio Research" at Columbia University, in 1941 Paul Lazarsfeld described the differences between "administrative research"-which focused on the more practical and empirical approaches supported by business and government entities-and "critical research"-which aimed towards social critique. This division was palpable for Lazarsfeld. Sharing the Columbia campus with fellow German émigré and Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno, Lazarsfeld's administrative radio research ran up against the other's powerful criticisms of the popular music industry. This course studies these and other moments in the intellectual history of media theory and research in the US, exploring its foundational approaches, tensions, paradigms, and programs of study. In investigating this history, we aim to understand a range of ways in which scholars in the US have dealt with questions about the public sphere, technology, democracy, propaganda, identity, and a host of other issues, as well as how this earlier research set the groundwork for future media studies-for both good and ill. Course readings will be drawn from the work of such writers as Walter Lippmann, John Dewey,Paul Lazarsfeld, Theodor Adorno, Herta Herzog, David Riesman, Harold Lasswell, Dallas Smythe, and Herbert Schiller. Students will write bi-weekly reading responses and complete one longer essay.
ENGFLM 2462
Film Comedy: Theory, Culture, Style
Lucy Fischer
Since the earliest days of the cinema, film comedy has been one of the most profitable, prevalent and persistent genres--ranging from the primitive burlesques of Edison or Lumiere to the popular features of today. While comedy appeals to a viewer’s sense of pleasure, it also addresses her intellect, for as Ousmane Sembene once said, comedy “makes people laugh but it also makes them think.” That is precisely what we will do in this course: think through comedy. Here, it is interesting to note that, in 2010, the academic journal Comic Studies began publication.
Drawing on texts from cinema, television and the Web-- class sessions will represent a variety of perspectives. In certain sessions we will take a Cultural Studies approach, examining: (1) comedy’s ties to its socio-historical moment; (2) the role of nation or ethnicity in comic style and reception; (3) the conflict between comedy and “political correctness”; (4) the role of gender and the body in comic discourse and (5) comedy’s focus on the machine. In other classes we will analyze comic theory, for instance (1) theories developed about other arts (e.g. by Freud, Frye, Bergson, Bakhtin, Hutcheon, Pirandello, etc.); (2) theories devised for the cinema (e.g. Agee, Cavell, Durgnat, Carroll, Paul, Shaviro, Fischer, Deleuze, King, Krutnick and Neale, Rowe, Seidman, Harries,Winokaur; (3) the relation of comedy to tragedy and melodrama; and (4) the role of laughter in comedy and society. In still other sessions, we will confront questions of comic authorship and style, as screen comedies have come to be identified with specific directors/performers and only “work” when presented in precise audio-visual configurations (involving shot distance, composition, editing, and deployment of sound). Finally, we will examine diverse comic modes (animation and live- action); genres (e.g. satire, slapstick, tragic-comic, romantic, screwball, “grossout,” farce, sitcom) and tropes (e.g. the chase and gender confusion.).
ENGLIT 2105
Drama, The Vernacular, and Material Presence
Ryan McDermott
This course is designed to dovetail with the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program’s and Humanities Center’s year-long series of seminars and speakers on “Manuscript and Book Culture and the Rise of the Vernacular,” and with Jennifer Waldron’s and Daniel Morgan's graduate seminar on media theory old and new. It will incorporate readings by the visiting scholars and some of them will lead seminars. Well before the Reformation, European culture embraced the vernacular. This phenomenon went beyond language, as the established Church often encouraged expressions of faith for and by the laity. Lay devotion and theology not only called on vernacular language, but also forms of rhetoric and popular culture that can be considered vernacular, in contradistinction to official clerical culture. Foremost among these forms was religious drama composed and performed in the vernacular language through a collaboration between clergy and lay people. How do we track this collaboration, which is not necessarily evident in the texts that survive? Drama is famously ephemeral, but scholars in the past 50 years have gathered a wide range of evidence from legal, municipal, commercial, and ecclesiastical sources, compiled in the Records of Early English Drama, as well as archaeology and material anthropology. Students will interact with this evidence in editions and also printed and digital facsimiles to understand how medieval religious plays sought to make present the stories they told. New approaches to the phenomenology of media help us to reconstruct how early drama employed multiple media to tap into the potential of embodied and distributed cognition. We will sample some of this research in order to inquire into the analogy between the human body and the vernacular.
ENGLIT 2287
Transatlantic Literature
Courtney Weikle-Mills
One of the legacies of the modern nation has been the creation of separate literary and critical traditions based on national borders, as well as a form of literary nationalism that sees the emergence of “national literature” as the ultimate sign of a nation’s independence. Novels and nations have been thought to be particularly strongly connected; for instance, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, often named as the first American novel, was published in 1789, the same year that the Constitution was ratified. Yet, nations initially arose and defined themselves within a period of exploration and discovery. As such, supposedly “national” literary forms such as the novel have always functioned in a context of geographical mobility and migration; the transatlantic circulation of books, goods, and persons; and an international literary culture and reading public. This course will consider what critical approaches and advances become possible when we think about eighteenth and nineteenth-century England and the Americas as a single historical field and read the literary productions of this era in a transatlantic context. Some specific issues that we might address are: How can we define the Atlantic world as a place and as a historical construct? How are concepts of enlightenment, freedom, and individualism inflected by transatlantic and interracial encounters, as well as by commercial trade? What do revolution and independence mean in the context of ongoing contact? How were concepts related to identity such as gender, nationality, race, and interiority shaped by transatlantic exchanges and codes? How do literary genres such as the seduction novel, the historical romance, and the gothic novel reflect transatlantic concerns? What use do categories such as “national,” “postcolonial,” and “transnational” have for understanding and organizing literature?
ENGLIT 2324
Translation
Gayle Rogers
As a literary practice and a metaphorical figure, translation has a long history that has taken on increasing political significance in the past century. This seminar will study theories, literature, methodologies, and receptions of translation in a variety of contexts, with an emphasis on world literature. Texts will include works by Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, André Lefevere, Susan Bassnett, Lawrence Venuti, Michael Henry Heim, Pascale Casanova, and more, along with case studies ranging from Ezra Pound to Roberto Bolaño. Students from across a range of disciplines and programs are welcome; reading knowledge or proficiency in any language other than English—is required (mastery is not necessary).
ENGLIT 2445
The Political Novel
Susan Andrade
How do novels narrate colonialism? And what, if any, relation is there between modes of representation and actual political action? Too often, the act of interpreting fictions that engage issues of imperialism or anticolonial nationalism involves neglecting broader aesthetic concerns in favor of whether that novel’s politics are radical or conservative, liberating or constraining. In this course we’ll pay particular attention to how it is that novels tell their tales, especially when the tales involve colonialism and sovereignty. We will read novels from the Global North and South in comparative relation, though more from South than North, i.e., England and France in dialogue with Ghana, Guatemala, India, Senegal, Trinidad. We’ll also give plenty of attention to the question of genre, as well as what work genres do. Some possible configurations: romances by Kipling, W. Scott and Ghosh, realist novels by Dickens, Mistry, Naipaul, Zola; modernist novels by Armah, Forster, Joyce, Woolf; postmodern or magical realist ones by Asturias, Chamoiseau, D. Lessing, Rushdie. Critical readings will come from Brecht, Jameson, Woolf, Zola, and we will read to place the fictions in historical context. Students are welcome to contact the professor in advance to discuss topics or readings.
ENGFLM 2451
Film History/Theory I
Marcia Landy
This seminar will focus on the history and theory of cinema up to 1960, taking up such topics as: the origins of cinema; the development of narrative; the rise of Hollywood and its global appeal; national and international cinemas; the relation between film and the other arts; the coming of sound; arguments between realist and modernist movements; the avant-garde; and the technological and social history of cinema. These topics will be addressed through consideration of major film movements and significant films. Students will also be introduced to key theorists from this time, including Kuleshov, Vertov, Eisenstein, Balázs, Münsterberg, Lindsay, Epstein, Kracauer, Benjamin, Arnheim, Bazin, and others.
FR 2400
Eighteenth-Century Irrational
Chloé Hogg
How did eighteenth-century men and women think about the irrational? What did it mean to be unreasonable in the age of reason? How can we understand Enlightenment and irrationality? This course takes up these questions by exploring eighteenth-century French literature and philosophy through the lens of the irrational. Eighteenth-century thinkers developed an entire lexicon to define and corral the irrational through their critique of zeal, enthusiasm, prejudice, and superstition. Yet the eighteenth century was also a time of a variety of “irrational exuberances,” from colonial land speculations and financial panics, to Jansenist convulsionnaires and experiments in mesmerism. Literature, meanwhile, explored materialist fantasies, oriental genies, debased fairies, and love addicts. As we study eighteenth-century regimes of the irrational and their impact on both Enlightenment thought and theories of Enlightenment, particular areas of interest will include print and the public sphere; religion; political economy and economic sentiments; constructions of the human; the literary marvelous; and aesthetic experience. Readings may include texts by Diderot, Rousseau, Prévost, Voltaire, Cazotte, Saint-Lambert, Rétif de la Bretonne, Cottin, and Galland; critical and theoretical readings from Gay, Goodman, Habermas, Dobie, Edelstein, Festa, Rothschild, Aravamudan, Pietz, and others. This course features seminars by Dena Goodman and Lynn Festa.
Course work will include brief response papers, an oral presentation, and a seminar paper preceded by an abstract and annotated bibliography. Course taught in French or English, according to the needs of the students (please contact me to discuss).
GER 2600/3600
18th Century Origins of Modern German Culture
Clark Muenzer
Using *Die Leiden des jungen Werthers *(1774) as a mapping device, this seminar will reconstruct the field of German intellectual and cultural life during the latter part of the 18th century in order to locate it as the matrix of modern German cultural production (*Bildung*). The novel’s informing topics will direct students to major documents and debates of the period to offer a topography of this transitional epoch by considering the network of competing social, political, and cultural practices/crises that defined it. These include absolutism, the aristocratic court, and the emergence of a critical public sphere (Habermas' *bürgerliche Öffentlickeit*); enlightenment and sentimental culture; family and patriarchy; bourgeois escapism and forms of utopian sociability (*Humanität*); revolution and reaction; reading and the institution of literature; faculty psychology; folk traditions and the indigenous voice; and the distinctions between nature and culture, the ancient and modern, tradition and innovation, and the beautiful and the sublime. Links to *Werther* that help define these discursive regions in detail include works by Lessing, Goethe, Herder, Lenz, Stolberg, Nicolai, Kant, Gessner, Sulzer, Lavater, Klopstock, Moritz, Schiller, and Hölderlin. A READING KNOWLEDGE OF GERMAN is necessary, as most of the reading assignments are in German, BUT all of the classes are in ENGLISH. Seminar papers may be written in English or German. In addition to students from German. the seminar should be of interest to students from history, philosophy, fine arts, and other national literatures, including English.
GER 2884/3884 (seminar) (+ GER 2884/3884 lab)
Weimar Cinema
Randall Halle
The Weimar Republic designates a period of intense social, political, economic, and cultural transformation. It began with the revolutions of 1918 and ended with Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933. Weimar Film likewise designates revolutionary change for world cinema. The new themes and representational strategies that appeared during this period continue to compel audiences to this day. Expressionism, New Subjectivity, Science Fiction, Horror, the vamp, the homosexual, the proletarian found first and lasting expressions here. This course will explore the Weimar Republic through Weimar Cinema, attending to recent scholarship that has opened up new areas of investigation. The focus on films by Lang, Pabst, von Sternberg, Reiniger, Ruttmann, Sagan will be extended by discussions of Arnheim, Balazs, Benjamin, Brecht, Deleuze, Eisner, Kracauer, and Lukacs. Knowledge of German is not necessary. Screenings will take place publicly in the evenings outside of seminar.
HIST 2500
Latin American Readings
Reid Andrews
This course introduces students to a series of texts in which authors in = different disciplines—history, political science, anthropology, sociology, economics—seek to conceptualize Latin America as a region and to analyze its long-term historical development. In exploring those texts, we will sample a variety of disciplinary and methodological approaches and will try to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. Students will also learn quite a bit about the history of the region.
HIST 2724
Black Atlantic
Lara Putnam
This seminar traces the development of the African diaspora as an intentional supranational collective in the century and a half after the end of the transatlantic slave trade. We explore the wide range of black internationalisms generated in the realms of popular culture, political radicalism, artistic production, and everyday life.
Research across multiple disciplines has shown that men and women from the Caribbean, North America, Brazil, West Africa, and beyond remade politics and culture both within their nations and beyond their nations' borders. Where Paul Gilroy's pioneering work, The Black Atlantic, illuminated the supranational ideas and initiatives of key black intellectuals, new scholarship has explored the ideas and actions of a far broader range of social actors, revealing the active participation of ordinary men and women from Accra to Bahia to Colón in the creation of the twentieth-century Black Atlantic. Examining performance, ritual, literature, social movements, and social history, this seminar traces evolving notions of race and nation, ancestry and authenticity, belonging and rights.
LIS 2970
LGBT Media & Resources
Patrick Keilty
The main purpose of this course is to study a range of LGBT resources and the historical need for their development, including health resources, legal/ advocacy resources, scholarly resources, and cultural resources across a variety of media and organizations, in both Western and non-Western contexts. This course incorporates several primary sources and readings that engage with the question of what digital media might mean for queer identity, activism and politics. Specifically, this course will consider a range of critical pressure points that have been central to the digital humanities as they relate to queer media and resources, including social networking, participatory media, digital archives, new media activism, new media performance art, the database as a genre of new media, and representations of race, gender, and sexuality online.
MUSIC 2621
Music and Materiality
Andrew Weintraub
Music is a deeply material practice. From the human bodies that perform music and the instruments those bodies use to perform it, to the spaces in which music is experienced and the physical constitution of sound itself, music always involves material processes and things. But the scholarly study of music has tended to de-emphasize these aspects, focusing instead on the form and structure of musical works (musicology and music theory), or on issues of identity construction (ethnomusicology). In this course, we will examine music’s materiality from a wide range of perspectives including: Marxism, organology, science and technology studies, anthropology of the senses, ecomusicology, and actor-network-theory. The main aim of the course will be to gain a thorough understanding of each of these approaches and to evaluate their relative merits and limitations.
RELGST 2710
Perspectives on Religion
Paula Kane
This seminar is designed to acquaint students with a broad spectrum of theorists of religion from the 19th century, when the study of religion first emerged as an object of scholarship, to the contemporary moment, when religion has been described variously as irrevocably in decline and as perennially present. Topics range from the relationships between culture, individuals, and religion to the role of ideology, mythology, ritual, symbols, and experience. Emphasis is placed on areas of conflict in the study of religion, including the quest to define the field and its implicit assumptions; competing theoretical approaches; secularization theory as a challenge to religion; the limits of phenomenology; and contemporary methodological pluralism. Readings include such scholars as Asad, Berger, Bourdieu, Durkheim, Eliade, Freud, Geertz, Marx, McCutcheon, Pals, J.Z. Smith, and Stark. Each student will produce a research paper that engages course readings and themes and participate in weekly discussions.
SPAN 2461
Latin American Novel
Juan Duchesne-Winter
A Theoretical Seminar on multi-realist texts. Readings of A Thousand Plateaux (Deleuze-Guattari), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (De Landa), Reassembling the Social: Actor-Network Theory (Latour), Coyote Anthropology (Wagner), and Metafísicas caníbales (Viveiros de Castro) that converge on postulating a relational onthology of posthuman collectivities will be used to construct critical tools for interpreting multiple-realist texts in Latin America by authors such as Felisberto Hernández, Amir Ahmed, Jorge Baradit, Domenico Chiappe and others. The course and most reading material will be in Spanish. Course work may be handed in in English.
SPAN 2464
Latin American Twentieth Century Topics: Queering the Latin American Canon
Daniel Balderston
This course will focus on questions of homosociality and sexual dissonance in Latin American literary works of the last two hundred years (1833-2011), some considered "canonical," others recently recovered or being read in new ways. The main theoretical works that will ground our analysis are Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet.
Languages of instruction: Spanish, English and Portuguese (mostly Spanish)
SPAN 2422
Colonial Topics
Andean Colonial Studies Seminar
Gonzalo Lamana
The goal of this seminar is to do a re-reading of indigenous critical thinking in the colonial Andes (e.g, Guaman Poma de Ayala, Garcilaso de la Vega, etc.). It is a space for reflexion; it is not about reaching a univocal conclusion or doing a literature review, but about examining seriously and creatively problems and indices which are ineludible but have been, nevertheless, largely ignored or marginalized. Some of the elements this seminar invites pondering are: the relations between Andinism, “lo andino,” orientalism and cultural particularism; the ways in religion, race and epistemology intertwines in the 16th century; the inherently dualist Western matrix that guides thinking in the 16th century and even today (e.g., distinction between structure and practice, form and content, the natural and the supernatural, etc.); and the key problem of the interplay of difference and similitude between Europeans and Indians, regarding their impact in both colonial practices and thinking and contemporary political claims.
Course material will include theoretical works (e.g., Saussure, Voloshinov, De Certeau, Bourdieu, Gates, Taussig, etc.), studies of Western colonialism at large, studies of colonial Andes (from anthropology, archaeology, history and literature), and texts produced in Measoamerica and the Andes during the 16th and 17th centuries. There are no pre-requisites in terms of courses or back-ground; but it is indispensable to be genuinely interested in this seminar’s proposal. You do not need to speak Spanish, but have to be able to understand perfectly written and oral Spanish. Final papers can be about anything related to what is discussed during the semester; they do not have to be necessarily about colonialism or the Andes.
SPAN 2465
America on the Periphery of Capitalism: The Geopolitics of Film
Joshua Lund
This course takes up the problem of “America” (in the broad, hemispheric sense), its shifting role in the geopolitical world-system, and its function as a trope in the representation of peripheral, marginal or excluded spaces and figures. Film is the formal medium through which we will explore these themes. Specifically, we will focus on four filmmakers whose narrative and visual mastery confronts the idea of America with the exceptionalism not of its triumphs, but of its failures. In a way, these very different artists—ranging in age from 45 to 70—are the storytellers of our time, the bards of late capitalist malaise. They include Alejandro González Iñarritu (Mexico), Werner Herzog (Germany), Lucrecia Martel (Argentina), and John Sayles (US). Students will be required to write either a series of short papers or one long paper.
Comparative work is encouraged. The language of instruction for this course is English.
Contact the Cultural Studies office with any questions:
Karen Lillis, Program Assistant 412.624.7232
http://www.pitt.edu/~cultural/