Spring

When somebody tells us about the nature of God or the gods, about what such beings want from us, about our experiences before this life or our destinies after it—why should we believe them? With equal and opposite force, why shouldn’t we believe them? Are the standards of acceptable belief entirely independent of what we’re told by religious authorities, or is it impossible to arrive at any such standards without presuming something we’ve been told? When confronted with diverse claims about the divine, should we try to ascertain which ones are true, should we combine or harmonize them in some way, or should we dismiss the entire conversation as wrongheaded? In this course, we’ll think through these questions with the help of influential texts drawn from the Buddhist, Hindu, Platonic, and classical Chinese traditions.

The Psalms are the most cited book of the Old Testament in the New Testament. No book of the Bible received more commentary by early Christian and medieval theologians, representing the foundation of all religious knowledge. Lay people through the ages used it in personal prayer and meditation, drawing strength and consolation from this unique Biblical genre. Teachers employed the Psalms to teach children how to write, ensuring that they became part of the linguistic vocabulary and mental imagery of literate people. Not surprisingly, the poetic sensibility and practice of major Western writers from Augustine, Judah Halevi, and George Herbert to Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan was informed by their reading of the Psalms. Given their importance for the religious and literary culture of the Judeo-Christian world, we will begin our course by closely reading a good number of the 150 Psalms, focusing on how they model a paradoxical communication, namely the conversation between a fallible self and an almighty and distant God. We will then hone in on the role of the Psalms for the conversion and formation of the self in number of seminal Christian thinkers such as Augustine, John Cassian, Saint Benedict, Martin Luther, among others. Since the Psalms were disseminated so widely, we will pay particular attention the material and medial forms in which they were read and performed. Readings and discussions in English.
 

The course will examine the long history of parrhesia, the Greek term for free and fearless speech, from ancient Athens to its current renaissance through the rediscovery by Michel Foucault. Focusing on the relation of truth and discourse, the course will consider not only the extraction of truth as a form of subjection to disciplinary power but also acts of telling truth to power as a practice of self- formation and exercise of freedom. Parrhesia implies a relation between the human self and the act of truth-telling that is suffused with interesting political, philosophical, and ethical possibilities, which students will be encouraged to explore. The course will begin by reviewing Foucault’s final lectures on parrhesia and “the courage of truth.” It will then examine some of the ancient Greek and Christian texts that Foucault analyzed. It will go on to consider early modern instances of parrhesia (e.g. Galileo and Descartes) and will conclude by surveying relatively recent versions (e.g. Greta von Thunberg and James Comey, JD’85), including contemporary feminist and queer practices of parrhesia. Lectures and discussions in English. No prerequisites.

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.”

This course introduces students to the various theories of militant or “fighting” cultures engendered by global struggles for decolonization throughout the twentieth century. Beginning with the global upswell of revolutionary movements at the end of World War I, intellectuals and artists from the colonial world began to enlist poetry, novels, art, music and other cultural forms in the struggle for decolonization. At the same that culture was instrumentalized for larger political struggles, meanwhile, “culture” itself was increasingly understood as a distinct site of struggle: The decolonization of culture was part and parcel of the decolonization of peoples. This course traces this evolving global discourse linking culture and decolonization across the twentieth century, exploring how writers and activists from the colonial world articulated a new cultural agenda within the context of broader programs of social transformation. Throughout we will contend with key questions and dilemmas faced by culture producers in the age of decolonization: What is the role of artists in a revolution? How does culture serve as a staging-ground larger political and ideological conflicts? What are the promises and pitfalls of treating decolonization as a metaphor? To answer these and other related questions, we will draw on case studies from the Harlem Renaissance, the Proletarian Literature movement, Haitian and Latin American Indigenist movements, Négritude, and Third Worldism.

Money is everywhere: in people’s pockets and minds, behind their actions and beyond their dreams. And yet, what money is, how it works or organizes a society are questions that appear to elude us. For some, money is merely a tool used to carry out forms of exchange ingrained in human nature; for others, it is the most fundamental form of cultural mediation affecting from the manner we relate to each other to the way we think. This class aims to understand the functions, uses and representations of this peculiar object from a variety of perspectives. We will read short stories, ethnologies, philosophical texts, or analyze paintings and movies to try to understand money in its different milieux and as the complex institution it is. Other questions addressed in this course are the relation between money and value, the link between commoditization and ethics, or the different substances that historically have functioned as monetary tokens. Materials for this course will include a variety of sources from Marx and Smith to Marco Polo and Shakespeare among many others.

TBD

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. Theorists and historians will include Dilar Dirik, Nina Gurianova, Paul Avrich, Luisa Capetillo, Emma Goldman, Maia Ramnath, and Thomas Nail. Particular attention will be given to decolonial thought, religious anarchism, fugitivity and migration, and gender and race in anarchist literature.

TBD