CMLT

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

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.

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.

Aware of being observed. And judged. Inferior... Abject… Angry... Proud… This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the “West,” as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the “Rest,” as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other’s standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself—self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization—and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski.

Why did a University of Chicago undergraduate student set out in 1949 for Pacific Palisades, California, to visit the Nobel-prize-winning author Thomas Mann?
Susan Sontag, who would become one of the most celebrated writers in the United States, wanted to speak with the author of the novel that had shaped her thinking more than any other: The Magic Mountain. This course will afford you the opportunity to study that work, one of the most provocative novels of modern literature. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a window onto the entirety of modern European thought. It provides, at the same time, a telling perspective on the crisis of European culture prior to and following on World War I. In Thomas Mann’s phrase, The Magic Mountain is a time-novel: a novel about its time, but also a novel about human being in time. About life, death, reason, love, despair, and hope, against the background of European intellectual history. For anyone interested in the configuration of European intellectual life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mann’s great (and challenging) novel is indispensable reading. Lectures will relate Mann’s novel to its great European counterparts, to the traditions of European thought from Voltaire to Georg Lukacs, from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Heidegger, from Marx to Max Weber. This is a lecture course, with discussion sections. All readings and lectures in English. (German-language discussion session available.)

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended