Courses: Fall 2008 (2091)
Fall Term 2008 (Fall 2008=2091)
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Category B: |
Category C: |
Category D: |
Text and Theory |
Disciplines and Intellectual Movements |
Cultural Antagonisms and Cultural Crises |
Designated Courses |
ENGFLM 2455
Anderson, Mark L.
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ANTH 2782
McEwan-Fujita, Emily |
ANTH 2782
Lukacs, Gabrielle
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ENGLIT 2258
Smith, Susan H.
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FR 2406
Nouis, Lucien |
SOC 2102
Gould, Deborah
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ENGLIT 2647
Novy, Marianne
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GER 2612/3612
Muenzer, Clark |
HIST 2711
Rawski, Everlyn and Scott, Jonathan |
RUSS 2117
Condee, Nancy
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GER 2865
von Dirke, Sabine
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HAA 2401
Smith, Terry
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ENGFLM 2471
Fischer, Lucy |
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HIST 2715
Livezeanu, Irina and |
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SPAN 2464
Duchesne-Winter, Juan
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Cultural Studies Course Descriptions
Fall 2008 (2091)
ANTH 2782
Special Topics in Cultural Anthropology: Language, Ethnicity & Nationalism
Emily McEwan-Fujita
Language is a powerful means by which groups define their collective identity. Using a broad range of cross-cultural examples, this course looks at the ways that language may be used to construct ethnicity, and the role that language plays in theories and ideologies of nationalism. We will consider themes such as language standardization and planning, multilingual nation-states, ethno-linguistic separatist movements, colonialism, pidgins and creoles, and the spread of English as a global language.
ANTH 2782
Special Topics in Cultural Anthropology: Gender, Work, Anthropology
Gabriella Lukacs
The globalization of neoliberalism has transformed the conditions of work by valorizing the service-, finance-, and information industries, devaluing jobs from full time to part time employment, and by devalorizing manufacturing more generally. This course will explore how the shifting forms, meanings, and conditions of work have differentially disenfranchised or empowered men and women in the realm of work. We will trace the changing forms of labor and the formation of new productive subjectivities in contexts such as transnational factories, the service industries of waitresses or flight attendants, the sex industry, and the information industries of the internet. We will be reading studies that analyze how strategies of transnational corporations to bypass high production costs or labor militancy have facilitated the feminization of the transnational labor force. We will also examine how new forms of work—such as the production of affect that tends to draw on female labor—has become the motor of advanced capitalist economies. Lastly, we will also look at the ways in which neoliberalism has weakened an organizational mode of capital accumulation that was dependent on the concentration of production in offices or factories. We will ask if paid work in the home has disengaged women from social institutions that perpetuate gender inequalities or rather it has reinserted them in new structures of socio-economic marginalization.
ENG 2647
Adoption and Culture
Marianne Novy
In recent years, an increasing number of adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents have been writing memoirs. More historians and anthropologists have been analyzing practices related to adoption and their places in culture and across cultures, and the benefits of many of these practices have become subjects of debate. Adoption as an institution in itself raises questions about meanings of family, identity, and parenthood, especially motherhood, as well as, often, about political and economic inequities. Transnational and transracial adoptions also raise questions about how individuals and families navigate between cultures. This course will read memoirs from a range of perspectives together with ethnographic, theoretical and historical analyses and a few of the many fictional works that portray adoption.
ENG 2258
Dramatizing American History
Susan Harris Smith
The point of departure will be Herbert Lindenberger's contention that historical plays provide a special opportunity to examine the transactions between imaginative literature and the external world, which the drama variously attempts to imitate, to attack, to influence, and to transcend because historical writings make a greater pretense at engaging with reality than do overtly fictive writings. The course will consider the historical materials on which the plays are based as well as the ways in which historical narratives have been reified or imaginatively tested
The first few weeks of the course will consider the dramatic strategies which were deployed by early playwrights to authorize genocide and slavery, insist on cultural assimilation, and employ propaganda to control public perceptions. Materials include Percy MacKaye's civic pageants, Jane Addams' Hull House plays and the DuPont Company's Cavalcade of America.
The major thrust of the course will be devoted to a consideration of modern and contemporary playwrights who interrogate the dominant narratives of American historical events and call into question the formation of a homogeneous national identity. Strategies include:
multi-cultural adaptations and appropriations, pastiche, documentary theatre, and theatre of testimony; writers include: Charles Mee, Tony Kushner, Howard Zinn, Luis Valdez, Emily Mann, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Anna Deveare Smith
ENGFLM 2455
Film Historiography
Mark Lynn Anderson
Film history has a history, and this seminar engages that history to consider a range of methodologies, problems, and possibilities in the research and writing of film history. Our considerations of various contemporary debates in film historiography will be informed by a return to earlier works in the discipline in order to gain an appreciation of the continuities and discontinuities of film historical discourse and practices. While the primary sources for the seminar are principally drawn from the first eighty years of North American film history, many of our readings in the philosophy of history and in film historiography will have relevance for the histories of other cinemas, as well as for the histories of other media. Film history’s relation to social history will also be central to our discussions, as we consider how sexuality, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and national identity have determined the institutional development of the American cinema. Students are instructed in methods of archival research and are required to develop and conduct original research on a film historical topic of their choosing.
ENGFLM 2471
Cinema Psyche
Lucy Fischer
1. Ever since 1916 when German psychologist Hugo Munsterberg wrote The Photoplay: A Psychological Study in which he compared aspects of cinematic discourse to mental states (like attention, memory, and anticipation), the film medium has frequently been conceived as analogous to the human psyche. Subsequently, numerous writers and artists have probed this issue. Some (drawing upon psychoanalytic models) have likened cinema to the dream and many filmmakers (including Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Ingmar Bergman, Buster Keaton, David Lynch, etc.) have created oneiric works. Other theorists have been interested in cinema’s potential to project human subjectivity through first person narrative, and movies as literal as The Lady in the Lake or as complex as Adaptation have attempted to visualize such dramas. Other scholars and artists have been intrigued by cinema’s capacity to embody memory, while others still have been concerned with film’s potential to mimic intellectual thought or human perception. Furthermore, a group of theorists has recently examined audience reception to explore the dynamics of cognition and film--how screen information is “processed” by the viewer. In a related move, another camp has focused on questions of emotion and cinema --how particular spectator affects are encouraged by a film. While the topics above deal with how film discourse can approximate mental activity or how a film can solicit certain mental responses from the spectator, other resonant issues arise from the portrayal of psychological states on screen (e.g. madness, nostalgia, paranoia, jealousy, hallucination, etc.). The class will seek to examine all these areas.
2. The class will run 3 hours and 50 minutes but will include a screening of a film each week (as well as lecture, discussion, student presentations, etc.)
3. There are no prerequisites for this course.
4. This course counts for the Film Studies MA and PhD Certificates.
5. The course will be offered approximately every 3 years.
FR 2406
Reading Rousseau: from Diderot to Derrida
Lucien Nouis
Whether he was mocked as “the bastard of Diogenes’ dog” by Voltaire, denounced as an impostor by Diderot, hailed as a visionary genius by the German poet Hölderlin, or viewed as the father of the French Revolution by Mercier, Rousseau elicited passionate reactions from the very start. This course aims at retracing the contrasting fortunes of this extraordinary thinker right up to the postmodern period. Drawing on a variety of written and visual sources—and current criticism by thinkers such as Lacoue-Labarthe, Balibar, de Man, and Derrida—we will read Rousseau and read about Rousseau. In the process, we will raise wide-ranging questions about the relationship between politics and literature, the creation of a national identity, and the insights and blind-spots of criticism. Course taught in French.
GER 2612/3612
Goethe’s Faust, or Philosophy on Stage
Clark Muenzer
Goethe’s Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) was written over a sixty-year period that spanned the writer’s entire creative life. While its first scenes were conceived and drafted during the last, pre-revolutionary days of the Holy Roman Empire and its initial publication as a fragment appeared just one year after the outbreak of the Revolution in France, it was only following a second revolutionary epoch and its reaction well into the nineteenth-century that Part II was posthumously published in 1832.
This seminar will explore a number of philosophical and cultural conflicts in Goethe’s Faust that also marked the European landscape between Enlightenment and Romanticism as constitutive of its special unity. Through a series of close readings, participants will follow the extensive arc of the play—from the “small” worlds of Faust’s study and Gretchen’s bedchamber in Part I to the “large” worlds of history, science, art, and politics in Part II—paying special attention to the drama’s competing sub-plots (the scholar’s tragedy, Faust’s erotic attachments, the cosmic wager, creative and destructive forces in nature and society, etc.); its metamorphosing characters; and its metaphorical investments. While informed by an array of difficult oppositions that resist interpretive closure (ancient/modern, visual/verbal, real/ideal, male/female, nature/art, revolution/reaction, deed/thought, etc.) Goethe’s compelling object of interpretive desire, we will find, actually stages a philosophical whole that re-invents metaphysics—in accord with Kant’s critical project of the same period—in epistemological, moral, and aesthetic terms.
The seminar’s language of instruction will be English. German Department students will read the original German text, while students from other departments may read the play in English translation. All participants will be encouraged to attend the special Faust sessions of the First Annual Meeting of the Goethe Society of North America, which will take place November 6-8 in Pittsburgh. The year 2008 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Faust I (1808), and a number of scholarly panels and events devoted to the play and its philosophical contexts have been planned.
GER 2865/3865
Contemporary German Literature and Culture
Sabine von Dirke
This seminar investigates the intersection of economic and cultural production in the German-speaking world since the past century. Using the economic crisis that overshadowed the Weimar Republic as its starting point, it analyzes how cultural artifacts register and negotiate the increasing penetration of the social world by economic principles in the 20th and 21st centuries. Considering language and the economy to be the most important means through which modern society articulates itself, the course pursues the following questions: What happens when the economy no longer functions properly? What kinds of fears are created by a loss of trust in the economic underpinnings of democratic society? How does a culture affected by the breakdown of its economic model try to conceptualize a material reality that appears to be increasingly unpredictable, bizarre and beyond rational comprehension? What happens to individual and collective identity formation? What role does aesthetic culture play in this context? Can we discern a difference between economic and cultural production at the height of Modernity, i.e. pre-World War II, and today in the Age of Globalization? Textual examples will be drawn primarily from the German-speaking world and not available in translation.
Hence, excellent German language skills are necessary to attend this graduate seminar.
HAA 2401
Special Topics in Contemporary Visual Culture:
Time, Space, and Being in Contemporary Art, Architecture, and Everyday Life
Terry Smith
Taking advantage of the 55th Carnegie International, which is devoted to the theme “Life on Mars,” the seminar will explore the ways in which contemporary artists are exploring the widespread sense of the ever-increasing strangeness of everyday life. In parallel, it will also explore the ways in which architects are responding to the challenges to their practice posed by contemporary conditions.
Both topics will be considered in the light of methodological questions concerning the nature of the (incomplete) transitions from late modern to contemporary art and architecture. Key texts that treat these topics will be reviewed. The seminar will pay special regard to the ways in which artists and architects are imagining place within larger world pictures, time within asynchronous temporalities, and space as zones of mobility and fixity between both.
The 55th Carnegie International is showing at the Carnegie Museum of Art throughout the semester. Its curators will participate in the seminar.
HIST 2711
Texts and Contexts core seminar
Evelyn Rawski
Jonathan Scott
Texts and Contexts links aspects of the history of ideas (historical, political, religious, scientific, legal and cultural) to the modes of their transmission (objects, concepts, languages, spoken, manuscript and printed texts). This course relates a wide variety of texts to the specific cultural as well as historical circumstances of their generation. It asks how our awareness of these contexts should affect the historical interpretation of such materials, while also introducing methodological issues of more general importance to history as a discipline.
HIST 2715
Gender and Nationalism
Irina Livezeanu
Martha Chaiklin
Nationalism is one of the defining features of the modern world. It led to the break-up of multi-national empires and to the formation of the modern nation-state which in turn has used nationalism to enhance the power of the state. In addition, nationalist rhetoric has informed movements for self-determination and independence and has accompanied modern wars. This course will engage students in an examination of how gender differences and sexuality have affected, and how they have themselves been represented in and shaped by nationalist discourse and action in Europe and “the East.”
SOC 2102
Themes in Contemporary Social Theory
Deborah Gould
Centrally concerned with questions of human freedom, inequality, identity, difference, the nature of reality, knowledge production, practices of meaning-making, power and resistance, and social transformation, this course introduces students to some key theorists and texts in social theory. Our focus will be on theory written since World War II, but we will reach back to earlier theorists as well. Any exploration of contemporary social theory could take one in many different directions. In this course, we will focus our analyses by reading the texts through a set of broad questions: how does the theorist conceive of the relationship between the individual and society; what sort of self does the theorist posit and how does it come into being; how does the theorist conceive of difference; how does the theorist understand power and its modes of operation; how does the theorist conceptualize agency and practice; what sort of theory of knowledge does the theorist posit; how does the theorist understand processes of social reproduction and social change; what ways of thinking are opened up by a given theory and what foreclosed? Those sorts of questions and themes will act as guideposts for our analyses, but the richness of the texts likely will push our discussions in other ways as well, presenting us with additional questions and thematics that might newly guide our reading and discussions. My hope is that the readings and our discussions will not only expose you to important themes in contemporary theory but that your engagement with this material will also hone your critical analytical skills and provide you with material “to think with” as you pursue your own research projects. Theorists we will read include: Pierre Bourdieu, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stuart Hall, David Harvey, Saba Mahmood, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Joan Scott, Raymond Williams. This course will be taught in a seminar format. Requirements include active participation in discussions, weekly memos, student presentations, and a final 15-20 page paper.
SPAN 2464
Guerrilla, narration and philosophy in Latin America
Juan Duchesne-Winter
Long title:
‘Thou shalt not kill’: Narrative configurations and philosophical interrogations of the guerrilla experience and the role of the state in Latin America.
The course will examine testimonial narratives and fictions depicting the experience of political armed actions vis-a-vis state violence in various geopolitical contexts of the region. This examination will engage in a dialogue with philosophical expressions that interrogate the political and ethical limits of violence, as found in philosophers Oscar del Barco, Enrique Dussel, Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Alain Badiou and Paul Ricoeur. The relationship between event, text and memory, and the (im)possibility of the political within an ethical realm will guide this exploration. Oral and written, passive comprehension of Spanish is required, but the student may choose to deliver all of her/his oral and written work in English.
RUSS 2117
Russian Speculative Philosophy
Nancy Condee
Russian speculative philosophy and philosophical culture have tended to confound existing markers familiar to analytic and continental philosophical systems. On the one hand, they have produced a radically materialist line, culminating in Leninism. On the other hand, they have retained features of an enduring mysticism, with only grudging concessions to the vexation of secular life. These oddly compatible systems exist not only as declaredly philosophical thought, but also in cultural texts—the major novels, poetry, and visual arts—where claims to "philosophical thinking" dominate to a greater extent than in Western culture. The course is likely to move from Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Andrei Kurbskii, Catherine II (the Great) and Radishchev, through the nihilists and populists, Soloviev and Berdiaev, Lenin and Stalin, to the recent writings of Mamardashvili and Podoroga.
Contact the Cultural Studies office with any questions:
Karen Lillis, Program Assistant 412.624.7232
http://www.pitt.edu/~cultural/