Spring

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.

Of the many emigrant communities in Chicago, Belarusians are the only group that does not yet have its own museum. Our course takes this lack as an opportunity to train students to create a grassroots community-driven initiative that empirically develops a conceptual foundation for a new type of multi-ethnic museum of emigration, one that is informed by the experiences of community members themselves and their relationship to the artifacts that define their identities and memories. This course will allow students to actively participate in a museum creation project which takes as its point of departure not a nation-state narrative but the everyday life of a multi-ethnic community with the goal of informing research, policy, and public discourse about emigration. We will center our course around the material heritage of Belarussia and its dispersal in emigration. We will analyze how a diasporic museum's main role is to collect, protect and curate the material legacy of the Belarussian community to ensure its future stability. The course participants will collaborate with the Chicago Studies Program, the NGO Belarusians in Chicago, and the Chicago History Museum to study the role of artifacts in museums. The students will conduct the field work about multi-ethnic Belarusian emigration to include experiences of Belarusian Jews, Belarusian Russians, Belarusian Lithuanians, Belarusian Tatars, and other groups from Belarus.

Engaging themes of agency and freedom, criminality and guilt, self-knowledge and identity, reason and truth, consciousness and the unseen, the story of Oedipus is among the most reworked and reimagined in world literature. This course explores a wide range of versions of the story across a variety of artistic forms. In the first half of the course, as well as reading both of Sophocles’ plays about Oedipus, we will explore the traces of the story as folktale and legend both before and after Sophocles. The second half of the course will be devoted to modern adaptations of the story. These will include dramatic versions from mid-twentieth-century Egypt; the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s autobiographical Edipo Re (1967), inflected with Freudian and Marxist themes; Philip Roth’s bestselling novel The Human Stain (2000); and the contemporary Chicano playwright Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey (2017), set between a California state prison and South Central Los Angeles. Students will be introduced to theories of adaptation and reception, and will have a creative option for the final assignment.

This workshop begins in Autumn Quarter and continues through the middle of Spring Quarter. While the BA workshop meets in all three quarters, it counts as a one-quarter course credit. Students may register for the course in any of the three quarters of their fourth year. A grade for the course is assigned in the Spring Quarter, based partly on participation in the workshop and partly on the quality of the BA paper. Attendance at each class section required.

A study of gangsta rap in from its American origins to its international manifestations. The aim is to graph gangsta rap’s aesthetic conception through a discussion of core “canonical” albums in the history of gangsta rap. Most weeks, album-texts will be paired with essays and book chapters as a way to engage with but ultimately critique Western White Supremacist Hetero-Normative Patriarchal Logo-centrism. To mark our engagement, we ask about the impact of gangsta rap in how we conceptualize other forms of art-making. The working thesis of the course is that gangsta rap is, ironically, the apex of Western culture. Readings in English. I will provide digital copies of the texts/films. All albums can be found on YouTube.

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.

This course investigates the individual experience of immigration: How do immigrants recreate themselves in this alien world in which they seem to lose part of themselves? How do they find their voices and make a place for themselves in their adoptive homes? If in the new world the immigrant becomes a new person, what meanings are still carried in traditional values and culture? How do they remember their origins and record new experiences?

In October 2022, two Just Stop Oil activists were arrested after throwing tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh's “Sunflowers” painting. Their environmentally-motivated protest raises the question: did their action degrade the famous painting, or, on the contrary, did they revitalize the artwork's relevance in a world where "Sunflowers" has become a cliché image, adorning the walls of corporate offices and printed on mass-produced T-shirts? In other words, did the activists make "good" use of art? In this seminar, we will study and debate different positions regarding the uses and misuses of aesthetic experience, particularly art, while also taking seriously the possibility that, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “all art is quite useless.” We will consider questions such as: What constitutes good art? Should art be political? Beautiful? Useful? Can the experience of an artwork redefine our understanding of these very concepts? Does art change us, and if so, how? We will explore these themes through a variety of philosophical and literary texts, works of art, and creative assignments designed to expand and enrich our discussions. Theoretical readings include Aristotle, Longinus, Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Artaud, Huizinga, Arendt, Nussbaum, and others.