Graduate

This PhD seminar will examine arguments about the intersections and frictions between aesthetics and politics in high, middle, and mass cultural forms of literature, performance, film and other media, in the work of the above influential theorists and the formations that link and divide them, including Marxism, Critical Theory, and the Cold War in Europe, the US and beyond. Depending on class participants, readings may also include contemporary theorists influenced by the above.

This course will involve reading Freud’s major texts, including, e.g., parts of The Interpretation of Dreams, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” and his later work on feminine sexuality. We will consider Freud’s views on bisexuality as well. We will also read case studies and consider theoretical responses to Freud’s work, by Derrida, Lacan, and other important theorists.

La esclavitud en las Américas no fue únicamente un sistema de organización socio-económica fundamentado en el trabajo coactivo. Este también conllevó la gestación de complejas y heterogéneas formas de producción cultural. En el contexto del moderno sistema de la plantación, ello en parte implicó una inédita articulación filosófica de las relaciones entre poder, raza y cuerpo, sofisticadas formas sincréticas de musicalidad y religiosidad populares, así como la producción de numerosas representaciones artísticas en las que se simbolizaron las conflictivas y a veces insólitas relaciones entre amos y esclavos. En este seminario nos enfocaremos en una serie de artefactos en los que se dramatiza puntualmente la intersección entre cultural visual y dominación esclavista en el mundo iberoamericano, prestándole especial atención a sus encuadres transatlánticos y a sus relaciones con los proyectos de constitución nacional en el siglo XIX. Nuestro objetivo es identificar el lugar de lo visual al interior de las cultura de la esclavitud --las lógicas de sus funcionamientos-- a partir del reconocimiento de algunas de sus zonas menos estudiadas. Examinaremos una selección de expresiones relativas a la "alta" pintura, las dimensiones visuales de los reglamentos de esclavos, ciertas modalidades performáticas de las prácticas evangélicas y del teatro popular, y la dialéctica de lo visible y lo invisible en narrativas de esclavos y en algunas producciones efímeras de la cultura material.

How are Others represented in Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian canons? Is the Other purely a mirror of the self who represents it? Or do self and Other interact? Can we trace and compare patterns of representation and taxonomies for human difference across cultures, genres, regions, periods, and sciences? How can we develop new critical frameworks and concepts for this task, if we refuse to take for granted the categories and conventions of today's academic disciplines? What might this new approach to the Other help us to learn, or unlearn, about the making of "the West"?

In order to answer those questions, our course will survey the most influential literary models of the Other, from Herodotus to the early medieval "Life of Jesus" polemic tradition. Beyond developing a new framework for exploring and connecting these diverse sources, it has three historical aims. First, to interrogate the limits of modern anthropology as the institutionalized site for writing and knowing the Other. Second, to reveal the centrality of the figure of the Jew in the prehistory of anthropology, where it plays a neglected but crucial role in the European history of human difference in general. Finally, to expose the premodern roots of "scientific" categories–"primitive," "civilized," "Oriental," "Aryan," "Semite," etc.–where racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural differences still intersect today.

What makes us human? What is our place in the cosmos? What common condition unites us as a species across race, gender, and ethnicity? In this course, we will explore these questions through the lens of twentieth-century German thinkers who placed the human being at the center of philosophical inquiry. Seeking an alternative to both religious and scientific accounts, the philosophers Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, and Helmut Plessner developed new conceptions of the human that sought to do justice to both our spiritual and our biological being. We will take an historical approach to this intellectual movement, considering how philosophers such as Herder, Kant, and Nietzsche laid the groundwork for a reevaluation of who we are. In the conviction that literature also plays a vital role in formulating a philosophical anthropology, we will also consider several poets, in particular Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. All texts will be read in English translation.

What sort of subject is the musical self? Within the already brief historical moment of subjectivity in its Western modern shape that is no more than a few hundred years old, an even briefer moment is associated with the idea of a musical subject, a subject or self entirely made up of music. This idea seems of one piece with the idea that music can be pure – or, as it was called at the time, absolute – that it can fully be an end in itself. What does this even mean – that music could be its own end, and that a self could entirely consist of it?

Amongst the accounts explored by this seminar is Hegel's conception of musical self-consciousness, Schopenhauer's thought of a negation of the will through music, Nietzsche's notion of ecstatic musical selfhood, next to programmatic and literary texts by Tieck/Wackenroder, Kleist, Hoffmann, and Hanslick. To what extent musical scores of the time will play a role in the seminar is to be determined by the participants. We'll also read present-day criticism of this tradition, and we'll ask whether the idea of musical selfhood can still serve us today, when considered beyond its historical context of emergence. For example, we'll discuss the self at work in Dub, Techno, Free Improvisation, or other places. Discussion in English, readings in English or German. Undergraduates by permission only.

Although Hannah Arendt is not often thought of as a theorist of aesthetics, art plays a central role in her thinking. Arendt described the public sphere as a “space of appearance,” putting special emphasis on the category of “work,” which she defined as the production of objects of permanence and meaning. This seminar focuses on the implications of this model of the political for our understanding of art and examines Arendt’s use of examples from the arts in her writing. Readings include Arendt’s major philosophical work, The Human Condition, and her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. We will consider the place of art in Arendt’s thinking and writing on key political issues that preoccupied her: totalitarianism, Jewish politics and Zionism, and the politics of race in America. Together with Arendt, we will read literary texts by Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, watch films by Charlie Chaplin, and look at photos by Gary Winogrand. We will draw on the work of scholars such as Cecilia Sjoholm, Amir Eshel, and Ullrich Baer, and engage with artistic depictions of Arendt by Volker März, Shai Abadi, and Margarette von Trotta.

This course examines the literature, aesthetics, and theory of global anarchist movements, from nineteenth-century Russian anarcho-syndicalism to Kurdish stateless democratic movements of today. We will also study the literature of “proto-anarchist” writers, such as William Blake, and stateless movements with anarchist resonances, such as Maroon communities in the Caribbean. Authors will include Ursula Le Guin, Kaneko Fumiko, John Keene, Kafka, and Dario Fo. Theorists and historians will include Macarena Gomez-Barris, Dilar Dirik, Nina Gurianova, Paul Avrich, Luisa Capetillo, Emma Goldman, and J. Kehaulani Kauanui. Particular attention will be given to decolonial thought, religious anarchism, fugitivity and migration, and gender and race in anarchist literature.

The poet and novelist Ulla Hahn (b. 1945) ranks among Germany’s best-known living writers. Yet, her work remains largely untranslated and thus little known outside the German-speaking world. In this course, we will read her 2001 novel Das verborgene Wort (The Hidden Word) in the original German. The book is the first of an autobiographical tetralogy and beautifully illustrates issues of gender, class, post-war trauma and Germany’s so-called Wirtschaftswunder (“economic rise”) following World War II. We will read the entire novel slowly and carefully, paying particular attention to the nuances of Hahn’s poetic prose style. Since the novel contains sentences in the Cologne dialect (Kölsch), the instructor will provide explanations and an introduction to the regional culture. Based on the novel, we will also discuss the larger historical and cultural context of Germany post-WW II.

The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students and class discussion will be in English, but advanced reading knowledge in German is required. The course will be useful to students who wish to expand their German-language skills and learn about West Germany in the 2nd half of the 20th century.

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments and a living epic tradition.This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political and anthropological, perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition first-hand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”