CMLT

This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV, and includes films that reflect on the impact of global trends in Africa and local responses, as well as changing racial and gender identifications. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), by the “father” of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga, Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno’s Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine 20th and 21st century films such as I am a not a Witch and The wound (both 2017), which show tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the implications of these tensions for women and men, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and fiction film. (20th/21st).

What is suffering, and what is its relationship to justice? This course explores the construction and circulation of understandings of suffering and justice through literary and aesthetic representations, the law, non-governmental organizations, and intellectual discourses. We will consider how local and transnational contexts shape understandings of suffering and the various attempts to respond to it (through, for instance, human rights advocacy, revolutionary politics, humanitarianism, and bearing witness). Readings will include works by Rigoberta Menchú, Antjie Krog, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Ariel Dorfman, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martha Nussbaum, Elaine Scarry, Didier Fassin, and Paul Farmer.

An investigation of the role(s) that poetry plays in Martin Heidegger's thinking. We will begin by focusing our attention on Heidegger's reading of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. We will then consider his interpretations of figures such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Georg, and Georg Trakl. We shall conclude by examining poetic responses to Heideggerian thought by figures such as René Char and Paul Celan, among others.

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?

Discussion in English, readings in English or German. Undergraduates by permission only. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Jesus holds particular significance for believers all around the world. But how is he portrayed in modern films? How faithful are these depictions to the Bible? Do these portrayals push a certain kind of theological position? In this course, we will examine film adaptations of Jesus, including biopics, dramas, comedies, and musicals. As we watch everything from Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), we will compare these modern depictions to ancient texts and theology. During the course, students will become familiar with significant aspects of Jesus's life both in canonical and noncanonical Gospels, as well as to how those texts have been understood in the antiquity and today. After the class, students will be able to analyze critically portrayals of Jesus in order to understand why certain decisions are made and address pivotal questions about biblical interpretation, cinema and adaptation, and the ethical challenges of representing religious figures in media. No prior familiarity with biblical studies or film criticism is required.

Do you believe that you are a good person and, if so, why are you good? This course will investigate the connections between personal intentions to be a "good person" and the fear of punishment. What do we owe each other as ethical actors? Do the intentions of our actions matter or only the results of our actions? How can one be good in an increasingly complicated web of intersecting needs, social developments, and understandings of morality? This course will examine conceptions of hell, eternal punishment, and justice in a variety of religious traditions. In addition to reading authors such as Dante and John Milton, students will critically engage The Good Place, a sitcom which tackles deep questions of faith, morality, and the complexity of the human person. We will think through competing understandings of justice (retributive, distributive, and restorative) alongside our individual beliefs surrounding fairness and deservingness. No prior knowledge of religious studies or ethics is expected.