Spring

Aesthetics and Politics: Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Lowenthal, Lukacs, …
This PhD seminar will build on the work covered in Marxism and Modern Culture to examine in more detail and where possible in the original German the 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 theorists.

Consent required, please email the professor, Loren Kruger (lkruger@uchicago.edu) by Friday, March 17th with details about your program, and preparation to take the course.

This course explores the rich traditions of the description - ekphrasis -- from Greco-Roman antiquity to modernity. It tackles texts (both prose and verse) in order to establish the ramifications of a genre in the European tradition, and its applications in particular to visual culture and religion. There will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond these into questions of comparative literature, art (history) writing, religious imagination and ekphrasis in all periods or contexts, as well as into the use of images or films as themselves forms of descriptive response. The course is primarily intended for graduates but interested undergraduates are welcome. The course will be taught over 5 weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter.

Humanism in the Renaissance was an ambitious project to repair what idealists saw as a fallen, broken world by reviving the lost arts of antiquity. Their systematic transformation of literature, education, art, religion, architecture, and science dramatically reshaped European culture, mixing ancient and medieval and producing the foundations of modern thought and society. Readings focus on primary sources: Petrarch, Poggio, Ficino, Pico, Castiglione, and Machiavelli, with a historiographical review of major modern treatments of the topic. We will discuss the history of the book, cultural and intellectual history, and academic writing skills especially planning the dissertation as a book and writing and submitting articles to journals.

Although the culture concept and the science of anthropology are a product of modernity, ethnographic inquiry and prose genres go back to Greek, Near Eastern, and Huaxia historians. These sophisticated styles of thinking and writing about one's own people in light of others-styles which crossed a broad range of premodern disciplines like medicine, geography, and law-shaped the identities of ancient imperial/colonial powers and of minorities within their borders. As ethnography developed and spread throughout Roman, Persian, and Islamic civilizations, it continued to function as a crossroads for traffic between politics and the sciences, where both durable and long-forgotten ideas about the nature of humanity were drafted and sedimented. By tracing a wide arc of ethnographic inquiry and writing from Herodotus to the Renaissance, we will examine patterns in ethnographers' self-representations across periods and genres, considering both the political and the scientific implications of ethnographic literature. We will conclude with a reflection on the afterlife of ancient ethnographic tropes (e.g. "barbarian") and the reception of ancient ethnography in the invention of modern categories (e.g. "Aryan" and "Semite") which continue to circulate at the intersection of race, religion, and culture.

The sublime has traditionally been thought to have had a merely marginal place in ancient Greek and Latin aesthetics and literary theory; but some scholars have recently argued that it was instead more central, and it is difficult not to apply this category to many ancient literary works. However the explicit category of the sublime did not become central to European aesthetics until the 17th century and then continued until the 19th century to play a central role in discussions not only of art and literature, but also of religion, politics, and other fields. By the middle of the 19th century the wave of interest in the sublime seems to have subsided, but in the past forty years this concept has returned to play an important role in aesthetic theories. The seminar will consider the odd history of the sublime, examining central texts from ancient (Longinus), early modern (Boileau), and modern aesthetics (certainly Burke, Kant, Schiller, and Hegel; perhaps also, depending on students' interest and preparation, Tieck, Schlegel, Schelling, Solger, and Jean Paul) as well as some more recent discussions (again depending on student preferences, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Adorno, Zizek). It will also ask whether the concept of the sublime can still play an important role today, or, if not, then what has taken its place. We will deal primarily with theories of the sublime but also to some extent with works of art. Open to undergraduates with consent.

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 firsthand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, "Balkan Dance."

The course will provide a close reading of Cervantes' "Don Quijote" and discuss its links with Renaissance art and Early Modern narrative genres. On the one hand, "Don Quijote" can be viewed in terms of prose fiction, from the ancient Greek romances to the medieval books of knights errant and the Renaissance pastoral novels. On the other hand, "Don Quijote" exhibits a desire for Italy through the utilization of Renaissance art. Beneath the dusty roads of La Mancha and within Don Quijote's chivalric fantasies, the careful reader will come to appreciate glimpses of images with Italian designs.

What separates love from lust? How do our erotic desires and sexual practices intersect with our beliefs? This interdisciplinary class explores these questions in conversation with foundational thinkers from the Islamic tradition alongside insights from feminist and queer theory. We will delve into questions on the relationship between romantic, familial, and divine love; gender, sexuality, and the body; and Orientalism and the politics of reading desire cross-culturally. Exploring a diverse set of primary sources that range from the Qur'ān to Rūmī's Masnāvī to contemporary Bollywood, we will encounter different representations of love, desire, and sexuality in religious and philosophical discourses, literary representations, and visual media. We will examine not only how these representations reflect different historical norms, but also how and to what extent texts and images can inform or impact the norms of their contexts as well. No prerequisite knowledge of the topics or time periods discussed is needed, and students will have the opportunity over the course of the class to develop a project that relates our content to their own interests.

In this course we will be reading closely and discussing the controversial novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (Бесы, 1871-72) about political tension and terrorism in late nineteenth century Russia. Based on the historical incident of the "Nechaev cell," a group that killed one of their own members as an act of political provocation, the novel gives a broad picture of the socio-political landscape, ideas about human agency in society, and the sensibilities of different social groups and classes in the late nineteenth century, and offers a philosophical meditation on the nature of political evil. We will read and discuss the novel in Russian. The final paper can be written in Russian or English.

This course examines the intersection of narrative in print and film (fiction and documentary) in Southern Africa since mid-20th century. We begin with Cry, the Beloved Country, a best seller written by South African Alan Paton while in the US, and the original film version by British-based director (Korda), and American screenwriter (Lawson), which show both the international impact of South African stories and important elements missed by overseas audiences. We continue with fictional and nonfictional responses to apartheid and decolonization, and examine the power and the limits of the "rhetoric of urgency" (L. Bethlehem). We will conclude with writing and film that grapples with the contradictory post-apartheid world, whose challenges, from crime and corruption to AIDS and the particular problems faced by women and gender minorities, elude the heroic formulas of the anti-apartheid era. (Fiction, Film/Drama, Black Studies)