Department website: http://compthoughtlit.jhu.edu/
The faculty of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature shares an ongoing commitment to questions at the intersection of literature, philosophy and aesthetics. Central to these concerns is the analysis of literary and philosophical texts, ranging across a set of diverse traditions, genres, and languages, in juxtaposition to ethics, religion, history, art history, anthropology, media studies, political theory, and the natural sciences. Questions of literary theory, the history and value of literature, and the constitution and development of philosophical and literary forms in a global context are similarly at the forefront of the department’s research and teaching.
The department’s interdisciplinary nature is one of its main strengths and provides crucial common ground for scholars from humanities departments across the university. Faculty members work in a variety of fields but are unified by a common investment in intellectual curiosity, flexibility, open-mindedness, and careful reading and criticism. Graduate students are encouraged to undertake projects addressing authentic philosophical or theoretical problems without the restriction of disciplinary conventions. Students may also cultivate strong ties with faculty in other departments working in their areas of interest.
Every year, the department hosts at least two associates, who are faculty members from other institutions that stay for an extended period to present lectures, give seminars, and interact with faculty and students. Previous and current associates include many distinguished scholars, such as Anita LaFrance Allen, Susan James, Barbara Cassin, David Wellbery, Robert Pippin, Jean-Luc Marion, Eli Friedlander, Sari Nusseibeh, and Toril Moi.
History
In the mid-20th century, the department, which was then known as the Humanities Center, was established as a meeting ground for the various humanities departments. With Charles Singleton as its first director, the center aimed to strengthen the humanities at Johns Hopkins and provide a place where scholars could engage in theoretical reflections on the human sciences, including recent European movements such as structuralist thought and literary hermeneutics.
The department’s first full academic year was 1966–67, and from the outset, its founders sought to establish a focal site for structuralism in the U.S., based on the model of the “sixième section” of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris or the Institut für Sozialforschung at the University of Frankfurt. The conference held in the fall of its inaugural year, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structural Controversy” brought many of the leading figures of European thought together in the U.S. and continues to be cited as both the substantial introduction of structuralist thought into the American academy and an important moment of transition between structuralism and post-structuralism. This model of exchange and innovation continued into the 21st century with a robust program of visiting scholars, professors, and lecturers.
As of January 1, 2018, the name of the Humanities Center has been changed to Department of Comparative Thought and Literature. The new name recognizes the department’s ongoing commitment to serious interdisciplinary study, with a focus on questions at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. It also represents the various literatures, philosophies, religions, political systems, cultures, and methodologies that its faculty studies and applies.
The department offers several courses taught by its faculty. These courses provide a broad introduction to the documents and thought of Western culture for all students, from those interested in a general liberal arts preparation to those in one of the university’s pre-professional programs.
For qualified juniors and seniors preparing for graduate school, the department also offers the opportunity to pursue an independent and often interdisciplinary research project through the Honors Program.
The Department of Comparative Thought and Literature does not offer a departmental major or minor. Students who wish to concentrate on the courses that it offers should consider a major in another humanities department.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
Introductory survey of foundational texts of modern philosophy, social and political thought, and literature. This semester will include works by Plato, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Judith Butler, Kwame A. Appiah, Jacques Derrida, and others. The course is taught in lectures and in seminar discussions.
Area: Humanities
The Humanities Collaboratory is designed for new researchers from across the humanities as they gain the applied skills and experience to conduct their own independent research projects in the humanities. The Humanities Collaboratory model uses a high-tech classroom to allow students and instructors to work, learn, and research together. Three sections of this course will share a core list of materials focused on humanities research techniques, but your primary course materials will be individually selected. Students will have the unique opportunity to participate in a humanities lab section where all three course sections merge for discussion. You will choose your own topic to research with no limits of time period, subject, or genre, and through constant collaborative and independent research, each student will develop the expertise in that topic to both write a research paper and create a final oral presentation.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course brings the question of film's status as art into historical focus by approaching it through the various forms of writing that cinema inspired. Following a brief historical and philosophical preamble, each of the three sections will present a literary vantage point on the movies: "inside," "outside," and "alongside." The "alongside" section centers on poets who incorporated film into an adjacent art form, the "inside" section centers on those within the moviemaking industry who wrote about it in their fiction, and "outside" on those who criticized and theorized it. Films that exemplify the issues at hand will accompany each section. Relevant scholarly and theoretical texts elucidate the topics, texts, and films of concern. Students will have the opportunity to read works by H.D., Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Agee, and other notable writers from the first half of the 20th century.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
When you are working for a company, how do you distinguish your ideas, actions, and responsibilities from the firms’—if that is even possible? What is corporate culture or a corporate person, and how is it similar or different from any other kind of culture or person? These and related questions inspired and fascinated writers from the nineteenth century through the present. By reading and thinking about short stories, novels, film, a television series, and a play, we will explore these issues and potential resolutions to them. The course especially considers how problems of action, agency, and responsibility become an intriguing challenge for writers of a variety of modern and contemporary fictions of the business world. Texts will include short stories by Herman Melville, Alice Munro, Ann Petry, and John Cheever; novels by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Lydia Millet; films, plays, and television by Charlie Chaplin, David Mamet, and Dan Harmon (Community).
Area: Humanities
The Honors Seminar is a mandatory component of the Honors Program in Humanities, which offers qualified undergraduates the possibility of pursuing an independent research project in their Junior and Senior years in any humanistic discipline or combination of disciplines: intellectual history, comparative literature, philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, religion, film, etc., as well as points of intersection between the arts and the sciences. Sophomores who plan to study abroad in their Junior year should also consider applying to the Program. In the 2021-2022 academic year, the Seminar will focus on a close reading of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and associated texts by Plato, Montaigne, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Levi, Gawande, and others on death and dying.
Area: Humanities
This course offers an introduction to the political forces, cultural values, and social factors which have shaped the history of women’s labor in the US. This course will ask question such as: Why do we place a higher value on work which takes place in the public sphere than work in the home? How do representations of work in literature and popular movies reinforce or subvert gender roles? How have women negotiated gendered and racial boundaries through political action or writing? Focusing on racialized labor, domestic labor, sex work, and factory work, the course will provide an interdisciplinary cultural study of women’s work relevant to our current historical moment. Authors discussed include Saidiya Hartman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emma Goldman, and Kathi Weeks.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course surveys modern and contemporary Chinese literature with a focus on the interplay between nature and narratives. We will read fictions by Shen Congwen, Xiao Hong, Alai, and Chi Zijian, among others, to embark on a journey through different forms, ideas, and practices of storytelling with and about nature. As we traverse the landscape of Chinese literature - from West Hunan to occupied Manchuria, from Tibet to Inner Mongolia - we will pay special attention to how local geographies, aesthetics, and epistemes inform these works and help create their literary worlds. Literary texts will be brought into dialogue with ecocritical theories, as we explore storytelling as a world-making practice in which both human and non-human beings take active part. Such a perspective is helpful for reimagining a future that overcomes human exceptionalism and environmental exploitation. All readings will be provided in English translations; knowledge of Chinese is not required.
Area: Humanities
An in-depth introduction to the history of Japanese animation from its origins in the 1910s to the contemporary post-Studio Ghibli era. In this course, we survey the narratives, aesthetic forms, industrial practices, and multimedia marketing strategies that have helped Japanese animation emerge as a global cultural phenomenon with a transnational fandom. What distinguishes “anime” from other practices of animation, and what forms of animation practice are excluded by animecentric narratives of Japanese animation history? What types of consumer behavior and emergent forms of sociality has anime engendered, and why have they come to occupy a central place in debates about postwar visual culture and Japanese (post)modernity? And how has Japanese animation been continually reshaped through its dynamic engagement with traditional and emerging media? In tackling these questions, our inquiry will be guided by four distinct methodological approaches that are central to studies of animation and new media: film studies, fan and cultural studies, cyborg theory and posthumanism, and media ecology.
Area: Humanities
Most physicists and cosmologists still dream of a final theory for the cosmos, the one-inch mathematical formula that will explain... everything. From atoms to galaxies, from morals to daydreams. Is this possible? Can a single theory account for everything we see? Some physicists, such as Don Lincoln and Steven Weinberg believe so. Others, such as Lisa Randall and Carlo Rovelli are skeptical.In this course we will examine arguments for and against the existence of an all-encompassing theory from the point of view of philosophy and cosmology. We will read from a wide variety of sources, including popular science books, scientific articles, and classical texts in the philosophy of science. We will also trace the intellectual history of the notion of an all-encompassing theory in Western philosophy and in physics.
Area: Humanities
This course offers a conceptual and historical introduction to Intellectual History. What makes the “history of ideas” different from the history of other objects? What, if anything, distinguishes the history of ideas from the history of philosophy? What is it exactly that we call “ideas”? In what sense do they have a history? These are examples of the kind of questions addressed in the course.
Area: Humanities
This course introduces students to the nineteenth century Russian novel and considers its lasting impact on world culture. We will read classic masterpieces of the psychological and philosophical novel, and their experimental forerunners. Short lectures on historical and cultural context and on methods of literary analysis will be combined with intensive group discussion. Novels include Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Eugene Onegin, Dead Souls, and Hero of our Time.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The “founding father of modern Chinese literature,” Lu Xun (1881-1936) saw himself as a contemporary of writers like Gogol, Ibsen, and Nietzsche in creating his seminal short stories and essays, and likewise, he has been seen by numerous Chinese, Sinophone, and East Asian writers as their contemporary since his lifetime until today. In this course, we will survey Lu Xun's canonical works and their legacies through a comparative approach. What echoes do Lu Xun's works have with the European and Russian texts he engaged with? Why did his works manage to mark a “new origin” of Chinese literature? How were his works repeated, adapted, and appropriated by Chinese writers from the Republican period through the Maoist era to the post-socialist present, even during the Covid-19 pandemic? How do we assess his cross-cultural reception? Are his times obsolete now that China is on the rise? Or, have his times come yet? Through our comparative survey, Lu Xun's works and their afterlives will offer us a window onto China's long twentieth century and beyond in a transnational context. All materials are provided in English translation.
Area: Humanities
William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair together plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied: by Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale; by Ibsen, St. John’s Night, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken.
Area: Humanities
Comedy and musical comedy film flourished in the USA during the Great Depression as well as in the USSR during the Stalinist Great Terror. This course will compare films of the era in a variety of genres (musical, epic, Western, drama), examining the intersections between politics and aesthetics as well as the lasting implications of the films themselves in light of theoretical works on film as a medium, ethics and gender.
Area: Humanities
A survey of post-WWII literatures written in Japanese and/or by writers of Japanese backgrounds from the perspective of their engagement with the memories of war and imperialism. Reading novels, short stories, essays, and poems produced by representative postwar Japanese writers, zainichi Korean writers, and overseas Japanophone writers, we will discuss how their struggles with the contested, politicized, and/or un-historicized memories of suffering from war and imperialism shapes literary forms. These works will be coupled with critical writings on key concepts such as pain, trauma, victimhood, responsibility, nationalism, diaspora, and gender. Readings in Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Murakami Haruki, Lee Yangji, Yu Miri, John Okada, and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others. This course also serves as an introduction to postwar Japanese literature and culture. All readings are in English.
Area: Humanities
A survey of contemporary literature and film from the peripheries of the Chinese-speaking world, with a special focus on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe. We will not only examine literary and filmic works in the contexts of the layered histories and contested politics of these locations, but will also reexamine, in light of those works, critical concepts in literary and cultural studies including, but not limited to, form, ideology, hegemony, identity, history, agency, translation, and (post)colonialism. All readings are in English; all films subtitled in English.
Area: Humanities
Modern literature in East Asia is as much defined by creation of national boundaries as by their transgressions, negotiations, and reimaginations. This course examines literature originally written in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in light of contemporary understandings of political, social, and cultural boundary demarcation and crossings. How do experiences of border-crossing create and/or alter literary forms? How, in turn, does literature inscribe, displace, and/or dismantle boundaries? Our readings will include, but not limited to, writings by intra- and trans-regional travelers, exiles, migrants, and settlers; stories from and on contested borderlands and islands (e.g. Manchuria, Okinawa, Jeju); and works and translations by bilingual authors. All readings are provided in English translation.
Area: Humanities
Environmental degradation and disaster offer a steady backdrop to the 20th century in Russia and the Soviet Union. While the Soviet regime promised mastery over the environment and Russian culture valorized the harmonization of humans with the natural world, environmental catastrophe proved the folly of those dreams. We will read works by authors who havegrappled with this ongoing catastrophe and its implications for relations between human beings and the world. Texts range from short stories and novellas to modernist experimental fiction and documentary prose. We will also engage with materials in special collections and screen selected films. Authors include: Chekhov, Bulgakov, Platonov, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin,Petrushevskaya, and the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Much of what we know about love and desire we owe to fiction’s ability to evoke these experiences. Consider for example that the publication, in Germany, of The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired young men across Europe to dress and behave just like this lover. Just as nowadays film and television represent, as well as mold our conceptions of love, love-stories from the eighteenth-century onwards have given shape to gendered subjectivities in ways that still matter now. As, intriguingly, illness is a recurrent theme in many modern love stories, we will be prompted to decipher signs and symptoms in the bodies of mind of our protagonists. Why is it that in Western cultures, passion is tightly interwoven with a landscape of pain, suffering, and disease? In studying texts that represent major aspects of a romantic sensibility, we are indeed invited to trace the steps of a history of the body increasingly defined by gender and by medical knowledge. The readings for this class (all available in English) include: Austen, Persuasion; Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece; Barthes, Lover’s Discourse; Goethe; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Mann, Death in Venice; Winterson, Written on the Body.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.196 are not eligible to take AS.300.334.
Area: Humanities
Composer Matthew Aucoin has recently called opera “the impossible art.” Its impossibility feels particularly acute today, as it is buffeted by competing media, genres, and attention. Yet since 2000, opera has never seemed as vibrant, with composers new and old continuing to engage with its "generative impossibilities,” using a variety of literary genres as their sources. This class considers central opera examples from the past twenty years, looking at compositions by such creators as Thomas Adès, Unsuk Chin, Missy Mazzoli, Terence Blanchard, and György Kurtág, among others. These composers and their performers and critics engage with a variety of literary genres including novels, short stories, memoirs, and plays, as well as different media, chief among them film. They address opera’s tangled history and its possible roles in our contemporary world, asking questions about race, class, ideology, the environment, politics, and identity. This class will do the same, asking what opera today is capable of doing that other genres (musical and otherwise) cannot. How can—and does--opera speak to the present moment? The class will spend time developing a theoretical and practical vocabulary for considering both literary texts and how best to listen to, watch, and analyze opera. No musical background is required.
Area: Humanities
Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?
Area: Humanities
This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In weekly lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Brecht, Pirandello, and Beckett.
Area: Humanities
Sometimes brilliant ideas and plans don’t work as anticipated, or go very badly—for example, empowering the “invisible hand” of the market, building a huge hydroelectric dam, or plotting a double murder by two strangers. This course explores these and other fascinating literary instances of unintended consequences—the unanticipated results of actions that people planned ending up a very different way. Reading or watching mainly twentieth-century American literature and movies, as well as some essays and poetry, we will follow a range of different creators as they think about unplanned effects and why they matter. What can these works tell us about how we intend, act, or make meaning at the limits of our control? Texts will include films by Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock, poetry or fiction by Wallace Stevens, Patricia Highsmith, and Zadie Smith.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A survey of Japanese and Japanese- language literatures produced in Japan and its (former)colonies during the “transwar” period, or the several years before and after the end of WWII. This periodization enables us to take into account the shifting boundaries, sovereignties, and identities amid the intensification of Japanese imperialism and in the aftermath of its eventual demise. We aim to pay particular attention to voices marginalized in this political watershed, such as those of Japanese-language writers from colonial Korea and Taiwan, intra-imperial migrants, and radical critics of Japan’s “postwar” regime. Underlying our investigation is the question of whether literature can be an agent of justice when politics fails to deliver it. We will introduce secondary readings by Adorno, Arendt, Levinas, Derrida, and Scarry, among others, to help us interrogate this question. All readings are in English.
Area: Humanities
This course examines global political revolutions through cinema and the ways in which cinema helped to make political revolutions. Early cinema was intimately intertwined with the Russian revolution, and Russian revolutionary cinema had a profound impact on the ways in which media was used for revolutionary purposes through the 20th century and around the world. Students will be introduced to films from a number of different countries, and the history and context of their production and reception. They will also learn methods of film analysis and produce their own video essay.
Area: Humanities
This course interrogates how modern literature not simply reflects the world but functions as world-making power. What is a world? How do we conceive of, live in, and change it? What if there are multiple worlds? How are literature and other aesthetic forms crucial to tackling these questions? We will survey literary and philosophical texts in a comparative setting, engaging examples from both Europe and East Asia. All readings are in English. Open to graduate students.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
We are constantly immersed in narratives or, as Roland Barthes said, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . . international, transhistorical, transcultural." As a bridge between experience and language, narrative informs the way we understand history, gender, politics, emotion, cognition and much more. Through reading a series of philosophical and literary texts, this course will provide a systematic understanding of how narratives are composed, how they are experienced, and eventually, how they evolve. The first part of this course will focus on building a foundation in the formal study of narrative, focusing on elements such as genre, plot, character, narrator and reader. We will start with a brief consideration of ancient approaches to literary narrative in Aristotle's Poetics and Plato's Republic. From there, we will engage with a wide range of readings in narrative theory. The second part of the course will focus on critical approaches to narrative, such as gender and narrative, social and political critique of narrative, narratives in the age of artificial intelligence, and conclude with the evolving concept of narrative in the Anthropocene.
Area: Humanities
Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will pair literary works and films with texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion, that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge to our ways of making sense of the human condition.
Area: Humanities
This course offers a survey of modern drama, from the mid nineteenth century to the present. We will sample a broad range of dramatic styles and movements in order to uncover the variety of ways theatre has made sense of the human experience over the past two hundred years.
Area: Humanities
The purpose of this course is to ask the most important questions concerning the concept of time. What is time? Does time exist? Is it a fundamental aspect of the cosmos or just an illusion of human perception? Do different cultures, historical periods, or individuals have unique conceptions of time? Or are there universal aspects of time that transcend our differences? Do animals perceive time or is the perception of time a uniquely human phenomenon? Is time travel possible? The history of philosophy, both Western and Eastern, provides an array of different answers to these and other fundamental questions related to time. Additionally, there is much contemporary research on the concept that is entirely original. In the past four decades, time has been a major interdisciplinary theme, often bringing together humanists and scientists fascinated by its paradoxes. The guiding concern of this course will be to diagnose those aspects of time that are most relevant to us. What can we add to what has been written about time? Does our unique place in time—post COVID-19 pandemic, on the verge of a possible Third World War—prepare us in any specific way to examine the concept? The syllabus for the course will juxtapose canonical philosophical texts by some of the greatest thinkers of time with contemporary writings about time. The readings will support a problem-centered approach, exploring different possibilities for understanding the concept of time and different possible solutions for its many difficulties.
Area: Humanities
This course traces the changing idea of nature and our relation to it. We will study this topic through the close attention to a variety of exemplary literary texts from a range of different historical situations. These include drama, poetry, novels, and essays, as well as topics such as renaissance pastorals, the dream of dominating our environment through mechanical reason, the idealization of nature in romantic poetry, and contemporary confrontations with our planet’s sixth mass extinction, climate change, and problems of environmental justice. We will read texts by Tasso, Shakespeare, Defoe, Hölderlin, Leopardi, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, Hemingway, Carson, Albee, as well as writings in current ecological humanities.
Area: Humanities
Russian cinema was born out of the intense artistic experimentation of the fin-de-siècle avant-garde and developed in a climate of dramatic political and cultural change in the twenties and thirties. While subject to draconian censorship in the Soviet period, it nonetheless engaged in active dialogue with the film industries of Western Europe and America and had a lasting impact on world cinema. This course examines the extraordinary flourishing of avant-garde cinema in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s including films by Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko, their theoretical writings, and their far-reaching influence on film and film theory. All readings in English, films subtitled in English.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
It was more or less like this. They said:- You know, Hela, you’re an anxious human being.She:- I’m a human being?- Why, of course. You’re not a puppy.She pondered. After a long pause, surprised:- I’m a human being. I’m Hela. I’m a girl. I’m Polish. I’m mommy’s little daughter, I’m from Warsaw…. What a lot of things I am! (Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary) This course isn’t what you expect. It is not easy. It is not even fun. We will tackle painful topics: orphanhood, loneliness, jealousy, death. You will learn that “Snow White expresses, more perfectly than any other fairy-tale, the idea of melancholy.” (Theodor Adorno) We will also deal with parenthood, childhood, justice, and love. We will not watch any Disney films (but we shall analyze some memes). So who is a child? “Children are not people of tomorrow; they are people today,” wrote in 1919 Janusz Korczak, pediatrician, pedagogue, and children’s author who proposed the idea of inalienable Children’s Rights. We will read folk tales from different cultures, discuss authorial fairy tales (Oscar Wilde), fantasy books (Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls) and science-fiction (Stanislaw Lem’s Fables for Robots). We will also investigate the special connection between children and animals (Juan Rámon Jimenez, Margaret Wise Brown). Many iconic children’s literature characters, such as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, “a Betwixt-and-Between” with a Thrush’s Nest for a home, St.-Exupéry’s Little Prince, and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, are outsiders. All along we will consider how children’s literature reflects and shapes ideas of selfhood, from archetypal to post-humanistic ones.
What do films and philosophy have in common? Do films express, with their own means, philosophical problems that are relevant to our experience of ourselves and the world we live in? This term we will study such issues with a particular focus on questions of justice, truth, revenge, forgiveness, hope, hate, and fear.
Area: Humanities
Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.
Area: Humanities
What is China? This question has gained new relevance amid the nation’s recent rise as a global power. We survey how China was imagined, represented, and conceptualized in literature, film, and philosophical writings from mainland China, overseas Chinese communities, East Asia, and the West from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through exploring this complex history, we aim to understand China and the contemporary world in a diversified, historically self-reflective way. Topics of discussion include, but not limited to, representation, identity, form, allegory, exile, diaspora, modernism, translation, world history, and universality. All readings are in English; all films subtitled in English.
Area: Humanities
In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This seminar aims at providing a survey of some fundamental concepts and problems that shape modern and contemporary debates in philosophy, literary studies, and the humanities at large. This term we will study different notions of existence, language, truth, power, otherness, race, gender, and reality. This course serves as the proseminar in methods and theory for graduate students in Comparative Thought and Literature but is open to students in all departments.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Comparative survey of literary modernities in Europe and East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea). We will study works of modern literature as well as critical and philosophical texts from these civilizations in each other’s light. We will, as a working hypothesis, begin our examination by bracketing off the conventional center-periphery (Europe-Asia) scheme and considering literary modernities to be singular and contested, yet mutually resonating attempts at reconstruction, restoration, and revolution vis-à-vis the deconstructive forces of capitalist modernity. Ultimately, we will interrogate how we should understand literary modernities in the plural, as they emerged in distant civilizations. Topics of discussion include decadence, repetition, the trope of the human, ideology, the sublime, ritual, and translation. Readings in Hegel, Nietzsche, Mann, Benjamin, Baudelaire, Proust, Breton, Soseki, Kobayashi, Wang Guowei, Lu Xun, and Yi Kwangsu. All readings are in English.
Area: Humanities
Undergraduate student having directed work with a specific faculty.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
The Honors Seminar is a mandatory component of the Honors Program in Humanities, which offers qualified undergraduates the possibility of pursuing an independent research project in their Junior and Senior years in any humanistic discipline or combination of disciplines: intellectual history, comparative literature, philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, religion, film, etc., as well as points of intersection between the arts and the sciences. Sophomores who plan to study abroad in their Junior year should also consider applying to the Program. In the 2021-2022 academic year, the Seminar will focus on a close reading of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and associated texts by Plato, Montaigne, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Levi, Gawande, and others on death and dying.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
When word processing machines that can be held in the palm of a hand, why use pen and paper? Handwriting -- and its juxtaposition against digital forms of communication -- offers a unique approach to studying human interactions and the ways in which meaning, truth, intimacy, and agency are shaped by our changing technologies. At a time of exponential growth in machine writing, a study of this older form of communication enables a comparative approach that, perhaps surprisingly, opens up what are contemporary political questions. Centered on a few case-studies involving works by Sand, Chopin, Manet, Giacometti, Mallarmé, and Proust, this course takes a backward glance at a culture of written expression at a great remove from our word processing world and yet explicitly vested in an aesthetics of free expression. This modern graphological culture saw in the tracings of the hand, the uniquely personal marks of an intertwining of mind, body, and of subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty and recent word on embodiment will provide us with critical tools for our investigations into the “physics” of this activity, as will the methods of textual criticism and the new domain of creativity studies. The “metaphysics” of handwriting call, meanwhile, for a return to Heidegger, to Derrida and other major contemporary theorists of writing. They will help us see how hand and digital writing emerge as fundamentally different modes of human expression – philosophically and politically. Knowledge of French is not required for this course. Undergraduates accepted with the permission of the professor.
Area: Humanities
A close reading of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, one of the most influential works of philosophy in 19th- and 20th-century literature and art.
Area: Humanities
This course offers a survey of modern drama, from the mid nineteenth century to the present. We will sample a broad range of dramatic styles and movements in order to uncover the variety of ways theatre has made sense of the human experience over the past two hundred years.
In this course we will examine Hegel’s seminal claim that art has come to an end in the modern world. In addition to Hegel’s original argument, readings will include important elaborations of the idea by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Adorno. In a final section of the course, we will relate these texts to reflections on the function and prospects of art under the unprecedented condition of the Anthropocene.
Area: Humanities
Celebrated and reviled alike, Kierkegaard’s 1843 Either/Or has been viewed as both the culmination of the Enlightenment project and the birth of existentialism, a playful work of romantic literature and a piece of late-Hegelian philosophy, a vindication of the secular everyday and the articulation of a modern faith in a transcendent God. In this course we read the work closely and in its entirety and pay particular attention to the relation between its philosophical arguments and literary forms of presentation.
Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In its modern version cosmopolitanism is a defining aspect of Enlightenment that bespeaks its emancipatory aspirations as well as the shortcomings of its Eurocentric and gendered presuppositions. In our time of resurgence of violent nationalisms and mass refugees crises, this seminar aims at reassessing the conflicted legacies of cosmopolitanism and its critical value for the present. Authors studied include: Montaigne, Kant, Marx, Derrida, Lévinas, Kwame A. Appiah, Seyla Benhabib, and others.
Area: Humanities
In this course we will examine the idea of the world as it operates in a range of different literary, philosophical, and theoretical contexts. Beginning with the birth of the modern world in texts like Camões’s “The Lusíads,” Descartes’s “Le Monde,” and More’s “Utopia,” we will pursue its evolution through Baumgarten’s invention of aesthetics, Kant’s critique of dialectical reason, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, to the rise of world literature and the study of indigenous cosmologies in contemporary anthropology. We conclude with reflections on the end of our world in the Anthropocene and its implication for the humanistic disciplines. This course serves as the proseminar in methods and theory for graduate students in Comparative Thought and Literature but is open to students in all departments.
Area: Humanities
A dive into the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes (among a few others), exploring American modernism’s aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations. How do these texts’ formal ambitions engage with philosophical thinking as well as social concerns and political theorizing? Writing assignments: two short presentation papers and either two 10-12 pages papers or one, multi-drafted, 20-25-page seminar paper.
Since the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the struggle of consciousness for recognition has played an important role in moral and political philosophy. This seminar aims at studying Hegel’s account of subjectivity and its antagonistic encounter with the other as well as the responses and critiques it has elicited in contemporary philosophy. Readings include Foucault, Butler, Derrida, Lévinas, Cavell, Honneth and others.
Area: Humanities
Close reading of major authors from the Russian literary theoretical and critical tradition including Bakhtin, Eikhenbaum, Jakobson, Lotman, Shklovsky and Tynianov. Student will present primary sources or case studies from their own fields and research.
This seminar aims at providing a survey of some fundamental concepts and problems that shape modern and contemporary debates in philosophy, literary studies, and the humanities at large. This term we will study different notions of existence, language, truth, power, otherness, race, gender, and reality. This course serves as the proseminar in methods and theory for graduate students in Comparative Thought and Literature but is open to students in all departments.
This course explores recent developments and disputes in critical theory in relation to their longer philosophical genealogies. The three topics—form, autonomy, and critique—have been the subject of much recent debate, contention, and new analysis, yet each was also a source of critical and philosophical interest in years past. Our aim will be to make sense of today’s interventions in conversation with earlier theory. “Historical” theory writing will include Adorno, Lukács, Cavell, and Jameson; contemporary theory will include Nicholas Brown, Rita Felski, Caroline Levine, Mark McGurl, and Toril Moi.
Area: Humanities
Arguments for the immorality of literature, the morality of literature, and the amorality of literature. Can a literary text be evaluated on ethical grounds, and how? How do literary texts make ethical arguments? What does it mean to read literary texts or do literary criticism in an ethical mode? We will be concerned throughout with the philosophical uses, and abuses, of literary forms.
Writing Intensive
In his latest seminars Foucault shifts his attention from power relations and historical scientific paradigms to the study of the history and philosophical, ethical, and political implications of the knowledge and care of the self as well as its relation to truth. In our current context, where speaking of a supposed “post-truth” epoch is commonplace, the analysis of the later works of Foucault provides precious insights in the nature of subjectivity, social and power relations, and the enduring significance of the search for truth regardless of any particular epistemological attempt to define what ‘truth really is.’
Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?
This pro-seminar provides a brief overview and map of the theoretical and philosophical positions in the major debate, still ongoing, between formalism and materialism. Its aim is both theoretical and historical: to help graduate students understand the range and depth of these positions as well as their development over time, continuing to this day. We will study fundamental philosophical works (Kant, Hegel, Marx, de Beauvoir), classic theoretical texts (Propp, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu), and contemporary variations on these debates (Fish, McGurl, Moi, Pippin), to name a few. The course fulfills the pro-seminar requirements in comparative methods and theory for CTL but is open to all graduate students.
Area: Humanities
Russian cinema was born out of the intense artistic experimentation of the fin-de-siècle avant-garde and developed in a climate of dramatic political and cultural change in the twenties and thirties. While subject to draconian censorship in the Soviet period, it nonetheless engaged in active dialogue with the film industries of Western Europe and America and had a lasting impact on world cinema. This course examines the extraordinary flourishing of avant-garde cinema in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s including films by Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko, their theoretical writings, and their far-reaching influence on film and film theory. All readings in English, films subtitled in English.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Graduate student having directed work with a specific faculty.
Dissertation research and discussion of progress. Limited to students writing dissertations.
Teaching Assistant graduate student
New course
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Summer Research
Cross Listed Courses
Anthropology
The 18th century German philosopher Schelling has been hugely influential on 20th century thought (Freud, Heidegger, Nancy, Zizek, Pierce) but remains unknown outside of philosophical circles. This neglect is unfortunate given that he has so much to offer anthropological inquiries into the relations between mind and matter, nature and culture, theology and mythology among other topics. This course places Schelling’s writings and commentaries on his work alongside anthropological texts and figures to explore lines of productive conversation. The theme of a romanticism appropriate to our present will be consistently explored throughout the course.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Art
This course concentrates on the fundamentals of Lightroom and Photoshop for photographic post-processing and creative image-making techniques. Students will gain a proficient workflow for image development using such tools as adjustments, gradients, actions, masking, and other post-production methods. Course projects will include digital collaging and hand coloring techniques, and will pull inspiration from various artistic movements, field trips to local museums, and exploring the surrounding Station North neighborhood. Students will also learn inkjet printing as a mode for bringing their digitally crafted images to life. Students will receive instruction on DSLR cameras, which are available on semester loan. Attendance in first class is mandatory.
Area: Humanities
This studio art course will introduce students to the basic techniques and applications of fine art photography using digital technology. Emphasis will be placed on DSLR camera functions, image manipulation with Adobe Creative Cloud, and digital inkjet printing. Throughout the semester, students will engage in classroom critiques and discussions to aid their dialogue on art and their understanding of photographic imagery. In this course, creative exploration will be fostered through the visual language of photography. DSLR film cameras are available on semester loan. Attendance in first class is mandatory.
Area: Humanities
In this course, we will explore different genres and approaches to documentary photography and the questions inherent to this mode of image-making. We will explore such themes as representation, storytelling, research, records and archives, journalism, community engagement, and personal perspective. Contemporary issues within our culture and the local Baltimore community will provide inspiration for the work made in this course. Students will produce a final documentary project on a subject of their choice as the culmination of their semester’s work. DSLR cameras are available on loan for the semester. Attendance in first class is mandatory.
Area: Humanities
Classics
This course focuses on major and often intricate myths and mythical patterns of thought as they are reflected in compelling ancient visual and textual narratives. Being one of the greatest treasure troves of the ancient world, these myths will further be considered in light of their rich reception in the medieval and modern world (including their reception in the modern fields of anthropology and philosophy).
Area: Humanities
Emphasis on ancient Greek ritual, music, religion, and society; and on cultural institutions such as symposia (drinking parties) and festivals.
Area: Humanities
A study of the Roman poet Ovid’s timeless tale of change, explored in relationship to the philosophical Daoism of Zhuangzi and to recent critical and philosophical concepts such as becoming, transformation, autopoeisis.
English
The course considers the transatlantic writing of three women in the early modern period, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, and Phillis Wheatley. We will consider issues of identity, spatiality, religion, commerce, enforced labor, sexuality, race, and gender, along with literary tradition, formal analysis and poetics. We will read a good deal of these early women writers. Foremost in our mind will be the question of how perceptions of space and time are mediated through the global experiences of early modernity.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Concepts include expansion, crowding, data collection, the miniscule, temporality, the planetary and the cosmic in the first age of European mercantile activity and colonial expansion. With readings from world-systems theory and theories of the anthropocene, our case studies will comprise pre-modern English literary texts, including Milton, Paradise Lost, Anne Bradstreet, The Four Monarchies, early modern science (Hooke, Newton), Defoe, The Storm, and early British and colonial American holdings in the Garrett Library. The class will be hands-on, working with material from Special Collections, and will include working towards a digital project (no digital project background necessary).
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
First Year Seminars
A legal fiction is a fact assumed or created by courts to help reach a decision. In this First-Year Seminar, we study how legal fictions and fictions about law work in order to examine the possibilities and limits of fiction’s (legal) power. Drawing from legal and literary thought, as well as plays, short stories, cases, and legal commentary, we critically explore the capacity of words to reveal (or conjure) some fundamental features of our shared worlds and discuss their impact in contemporary debates about justice. The course is designed with first-year students in mind and requires no prior knowledge of law.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what it means to think and write across multiple cultures in the contemporary world. What do we gain and/or lose when we think and write crossing cultural boundaries? How do knowledge and experience of two or more cultures help us think and act critically, creatively, and ethically? What does plurality of cultures mean to universal discourses such as science and technology? How can cultural differences help or hamper our efforts to tackle global problems like climate change? These are some of the guiding questions that we will investigate together in this course by examining novels, essays, autobiographies, travelogues, philosophical writings, and films that engage with multiplicity of cultures between East Asia -- especially China, Japan, and Korea – and the West as well as within East Asia.
Area: Humanities
To the human imagination, the heart is more than a muscle and thumping pump keeping us alive. From the Renaissance to the present, writers have helped us make sense of our bodies, in health and in illness or pain. The history of the heart, meanwhile, starts in Antiquity, where it shapes our beliefs about life. One of our aims will be to trace the historical, cultural, and subjective meanings our minds have given to this “sublime engine.” The other will be to discover how our scientifically inquisitive minds, backed up with technical skills and technological devices such as the stethoscope, have found new ways to take care of this volatile organ. Our materials will involve a constellation of texts in medical history, modern fiction in the form of poems and short-stories, and recent scientific prose on such topics as heart transplants, heart-monitoring implants, xenotransplants as well as heartbreaks.
Area: Humanities
The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this First-Year Seminar, we will read closely a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Zola, and Tolstoy from the period in which the development of realism reaches its climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.300.429 are not able to take AS.001.116.
Area: Humanities
Trying to make sense of words I have written. But how do we do we do it? How do mere shapes and lines on the page suddenly begin to mean something? Is our brain wired for reading? Apart from our eyes, are other parts of the body involved? When did humans start to write and read? These are the kinds of questions we’ll pursue. This First-Year Seminar will explore two distinctive perspectives: one literary, the other is scientific. We'll divide our attention between the study of chapters and articles that present scientific findings about how we read and a practical exploration of a novel. Literary works tax our brains in multiple ways and our example will show why and how. Maylis de Kerangal's medical fiction The Heart will serve as our case study. The book and scenes from its adaptation for the screen will enable us to experience the power of fiction as it transports us into an enhanced reality made of images and words. We'll see how written words are able to redirect our attention in ways that make us more perceptive about a "real" world of human interactions. Slowed down and staged in the book, the life-stories, fateful accidents, and heroic gestures that make up a medical universe can paradoxically bring us closer the life and death decisions that begin in the ER.
Area: Humanities
Love is mad, love is obsessive, love can be painful or tragic, or an experience to be treasured forever. That's what books have taught us, by giving poetic souls a chance to imagine and develop romantic ideas – on paper. These books have in turn inspired films, or in earlier days, great operas. As a historian of ideas and a specialist of narrative with a keen interest in bodies, illness, and gender, I will explore with you in this First-Year Seminar a few favorite love stories. Each is chosen because it helps us uncover a universe of romantic feelings, often in conflict with social conventions (as in Romeo and Juliet for example). We meet once a week for two and half hours with a break in the middle. This format enables in-depth explorations of our texts, which will often be done in teamwork. We start with reading medium-length books, so be prepared to spend time engrossed in a novel. Later units of the course will involve film and opera. Among the readings for this class: The Legend of Tristan and Isolde, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; Jeanette Winterson's, Written on the Body.
Area: Humanities
A famous, very experienced clinician used the phrase "The Soul of Care," signaling that medicine is not merely about fixing bodies. He wants to remind us that scientific knowledge involves mastery as well as empathy. "Narrative medicine" as this domain is called, assumes that the close study of stories can play a decisive role in preparing doctors for the challenging humanistic aspects of their profession. We focus in this First-Year Seminar on stories connected to medical cases, stories that can take us beyond medical questions to deeper issues connected to the human condition. Our seminar will be centered on discussions, often prepared in teams, based on your attentive close reading and research. The aim is to exercise your observational skills and imagination. What is at stake, medically and humanly speaking, is our capacity to uncover problems, dilemmas, ethical questions woven into texts that take us into the worlds of doctors and patients. Readings will involve a combination of modern and contemporary short stories, some of them more obviously fictional than others, some of them geographically or culturally more remote. Part of our study will also involve one longer text, namely When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, and a small "anthology" of documents of a preparatory kind. We'll have at least one guest speaker, and also see a film together.
Area: Humanities
History
In this course we will explore how religion in general and Islam in particular informs the world of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, laying particular emphasis on how the messianic and mystical tradition within Islam pervades the first novel. We will also watch excerpts from the film adaption by Denis Villeneuve, and the forthcoming second part in its entirety together in a local theater. As we do so, we will also discuss questions of Orientalism, representation, adaption, and appropriation in both the books and the films.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The first half of this seminar course consists of non-mathematical introductions to, and discussions of, the fundamental motivations, vocabulary, and methods behind computational techniques of particular use for humanistic research. The second half combines selected readings chosen to address specific questions raised by these discussions with hands-on application to students' research goals. Each participant will lead discussion for one of the selected readings relevant to their interests.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course investigates the basic techniques of writing history and the matters traditionally covered in medieval historical texts by reading a series of exemplary medieval historiographical works. This is preceded by a section on theoretical orientations to the study of history and historiography in order to provide the analytic tools for analyzing medieval texts.
History of Art
This course offers an introduction to modern European painting. Our point of departure will be Charles Baudelaire’s famous essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) in which he suggests that painting must engage the tensions that inform everyday life, in all its novelty and banality. We will put this claim to the test by approaching a constellation of key works that unlock different aspects of modern life: freedom and alienation, labor and leisure, metropole and colony, art and life, and the troubled intersections of class, race, and gender. Rather than treating the works we look at as “masterpieces” emblematic of European modernity, we will consider how they contribute to a critique of the idea of Europe and the modern project. Works studied will range from Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May 1808, or ‘The Executions’” to Hannah Höch’s “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany,” from Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” to Carolee Schneemann’s “Up to and Including Her Limits.”
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Performance art is provocative and often controversial because it troubles, without dissolving, the distinction between art and life. Not just a matter of activating bodies, engaging viewers, or spurring participation, performance art asks what it means to perform, and what kinds of actions count, in contemporary culture. As such, performance art allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with form, perspective, and materiality, while offering critical insight into everyday life. We will explore how performance art addresses ingrained assumptions about action and passivity, success and failure, embodiment and mediation, “good” and “bad” feelings, emancipation and dependency.The study of performance art invites transdisciplinary approaches. Students from across the university are welcome. Our attention to a diverse array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and criticism, as well as in feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and political thought.
Area: Humanities
What would an art history of modernism look like that sought not to overcome or eliminate painterly figuration, but to attend to displaced and disparaged figures in it? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 warning about a “return to figuration” in European painting, figuration has been linked with questionable, if not highly suspect, aesthetic and political values – from nostalgia to repression. Buchloh inherits this this view from the historical avantgardes, which sought to counter conventions of figuration by developing disparate strategies of abstraction. And it is this view of figuration that guides both formalist and social art histories: For both share an anxiety about the authoritative figure of the human form.This seminar invites an alternative perspective on the artistic project of figuration. We look at modern and contemporary practices of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrogressive or authoritarian. These practices suggest ways of thinking the figure without an appeal to its coherent visibility or sovereign standing. We will read broadly in the contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black thought, and critical disability studies that share this investment (e.g. Butler, Cavarero, Garland-Thomson, Halberstam, Hartman, Honig, Sharpe, Wynter). We will critically reconsider Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’ project Formless: A User’s Guide, along with the turn of the twenty-first century debates about abjection, feminism, and “body art” it engaged. Artists under discussion include Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, Kara Walker, and Hannah Wilke, amongst others. For the final research paper, graduate students are encouraged to bring their own archives to the questions addressed in the seminar.
Area: Humanities
This seminar aims to excavate six distinct modalities of attention and attentiveness in the visual arts from Middle Ages to Modernity (cultic, narrational, speculative, ethical, sexual, and artistic). While emphasizing European developments, close consideration will be given to the role of visual attention in Hindu and Islamic visual cultures, providing the opportunity for cross-cultural comparison. Each case study will consider the historically shifting roles given to vision, cognition, imagination, affect, desire and power-knowledge in the culturally prevalent patterns of attention we study, and explore how specific kinds of pictorial schema or spatial environments served to structure and guide, or deflect and disrupt, the attention of their beholders. Finally, we will ask whether the historical study of attention can suggest analytical models or ethical lessons for the (re)mobilization of attentiveness in our own art-historical methods.
Area: Humanities
What is a vulnerable image? The Latin vulnus points us in two directions: toward the relational vulnerability arising from the sight of wounds and the action of wounding; and toward the raw disclosure of the body's interior. This seminar, team-taught so as to bring the perspectives of the modern and the long premodern era into dialogue, attends to vulnerable images in both senses: we will consider not only works that picture vulnerable subjects, but images that, in their vibrant materiality or through their use and circulation, themselves become vulnerable. Across both domains we will examine what is arguably their shared capacity: to make viewers aware of their own vulnerability, and to provoke a range of responses, from the "tragic" emotions of pity and fear, to horror and disgust, compassion and care, pleasure and pain. Each week involves the critical juxtaposition of artworks and texts drawn from modern and contemporary culture with those from the long premodern past. Topics include pain as spectacle and perceptions of pain; care, attention, and maternal inclination; the vulnerability of gendered and racialized bodies; representations of torture, punishment, and war; laughter and grotesque humor; the subjects and objects of iconoclasm; material decompositions and forms of fragility. Readings run the gamut from Aristotle to Arendt, Freud to Butler, Warburg to Hartman, Sontag to Scarry.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Interdepartmental
Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2020 include Homer, Plato, Dante, John Donne, George Herbert, Christina Rosetti, Mary Shelley, Friederick Nietzsche, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frederick Douglass.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will engage with 20th century critical theory and social inquiry that wrestles with the idea that new mediations have profoundly altered the character of human experience and subjectivity, and it will consider the questions that these theorists pose for our disciplines. How have modern subjectivity, gender, affect, reason, and politics been shaped by the technologies and structures of representation that mediate them? Among figures of interest: Marx, Freud, Eisenstein, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Adorno, Deleuze, Guy Debord, Haraway, Stuart Hall, Teresa de Lauretis, Kitterer, Sobchack, Berlant, Latour, Linda Williams, Ranciere, Orit Halpern.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An interdisciplinary seminar on Latin America’s role in global economic processes, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Participants will engage with scholarly and primary texts as well as share written work. The Fall 2022 seminar will examine the topic of Latin American political thought.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Modern Languages and Literatures
Nietzsche and Literature is devoted to exploring the philosophy and literary works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and studying his impact on literature and literary modernism. Readings will include works by Nietzsche and by the literary writers he influenced, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and William Butler Yeats, and Else Lasker-Schüler.
Area: Humanities
This seminar examines some of the ways we define, represent, and think about the concept of labor in capitalism. We will analyze and compare a wide variety of texts (literary, visual, and theoretical) that embody different, often contradictory, notions of the work we do, why we do it, and how it affects us. As we investigate different types of work—productive and unproductive, physical & intellectual, factory & office—a few of the questions we will ask are: What methods have writers and artists used to depict labor in the 20th and 21st centuries? How is labor stratified along racial and gender lines? Is it possible to imagine a post-work society? The course curates a range of cultural artifacts (short stories, manifestos, novel excerpts, visual art, and film) that employ aesthetic strategies like irony, humor, absurdity, and duration to represent the dynamics of labor in capitalism. Theoretical texts then provide varied conceptual viewpoints from which to compare, contrast, and synthesize our impressions and interpretations of art and literary works. By the end of the semester, we will have traced a trajectory of labor in capitalism from the early 20th century to our own strange and precarious present.
Writing Intensive
iddish was the language of European Jews for 1000 years. From the 19th century to the present day it has been a language that millions of Americans — Jewish immigrants and their descendants–have spoken, written in, conducted their daily lives in, and created culture in. This course will examine literature, film, newspapers, and more to explore how Jewish immigrants to America shaped their identities—as Jews, as Americans, and as former Europeans. What role did maintaining, adapting, or abandoning a minority language play in the creation of Jewish American identity—cultural, ethnic, or religious? How was this language perceived by the majority culture? How was it used to represent the experiences of other minoritized groups? What processes of linguistic and cultural translation were involved in finding a space for Yiddish in America, in its original or translated into English? The overarching subjects of this course include migration, race, ethnicity, multilingualism, and assimilation. We will analyze literature (novels, poetry, drama); film; comedy; and other media. All texts in English.
As is clear from current events and debates surrounding monuments to the Confederacy, monuments play an outsize role in the public negotiation of history and identity and the creation of communal forms of memory. We will study the traditions of monuments and monumentality around the world – including statues and buildings along with alternative forms of monumentality – from antiquity to the present day. We will examine the ways that monuments have been favored methods for the powerful to signal identity and authorize history. This course will also explore the phenomenon of “counter-monumentality”, whereby monuments are transformed and infused with new meaning. These kinds of monuments can be mediums of expression and commemoration for minority and diaspora communities and other groups outside the economic and political systems that endow and erect traditional public monuments. The first half of the course will examine the theoretical framework of monumentality, with a focus on ancient monuments from the ancient Near East (e.g., Solomon’s temple). More contemporary examples will be explored in the second half of the course through lectures and also field trips. We will view contemporary debates around monuments in America in light of the long history of monuments and in comparison with global examples of monuments and counter-monuments. All readings in English.
Area: Humanities
Beetles, fleas, bees, ants, ticks, butterflies: as the earth’s most abundant animals, insects affect our lives in countless ways. In this seminar, we will explore the diverse world of insects and other arthropods and analyze their appearance in philosophy, literature, and the sciences. Reading our way from John Donne’s “The Flea” and Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia” to Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees,” Uexküll’s biosemiotics, and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” we will ask how concepts and stories of insects reflect and shape the ways we imagine our ecological milieus. We will look more closely at how entomological imaginaries evolved over time and pursue lines of inquiry that will shed new light on human interactions with the environment, politics, and cultural diversity. This course covers a wide range of sources from different European languages (all made available in English translations) and is writing intensive.
Writing Intensive
The museum boom of the last half-century has centered largely around museums dedicated to the culture and history of identity groups, including national, ethnic, religious, and minority groups. In this course we will examine such museums and consider their long history through a comparison of the theory and practice of Jewish museums with other identity museums. We will study the various museological traditions that engage identity, including the collection of art and antiquities, ethnographic exhibitions, history museums, heritage museums, art museums, and other museums of culture. Some of the questions we will ask include: what are museums for and who are they for? how do museums shape identity? and how do the various types of museums relate to one another? Our primary work will be to examine a variety of contemporary examples around the world with visits to local museums including the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Area: Humanities
This course will explore Heidegger’s Being and Time with attention to such central concepts as Dasein’s unique relation to Being, worldliness, care, authentic and inauthentic existence, attunement, understanding, projection, and being unto death. The first eight weeks will be devoted to a thorough reading of Being and Time and selected critical texts. The last five will consider works of art that expand our understanding of Heidegger’s magnum opus.
Area: Humanities
How has the Holocaust been represented in literature and film? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the traditions of visual and literary representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that the visual arts and literature express? And where do art and literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer), as well as films from French documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters (including films by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg). All readings in English.
Prerequisite(s): Cannot be taken by anyone who previously took AS.213.361
Area: Humanities
Modern Jewish culture is full of monsters, ghosts, golems, dybbuks, and other occult creatures. We will study the rich religious and folkloric traditions that these works draw on in order to better understand why Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and English literature from the 19th century to the present and why film from its beginnings are so full of the occult and the supernatural. We will pay special attention to the ways that monsters, spirits, and the like were deployed in modernist literature and film, in order to ask and answer major questions about modernity: what are the social and aesthetic consequences of technology and automation? what aspects of human nature are revealed by new insights into the psyche? All readings in English.
Area: Humanities
This course explores the interplay between protest and cultural productions using the Israeli society as a case study. We will examine the formation and nature of political and social protest movements in Israel, such as the Israeli Black Panthers, Israeli feminism, the struggle for LGBTQ rights and the 2011 social justice protest. Dissent in the military and protest against war as well as civil activism in the context of the Palestinians-Israeli conflict will serve us to explore the notion of dissent in the face of collective ethos, memory and trauma. The literary, cinematic, theatrical and artistic productions of dissent will stand at the center of our discussion as well as the role of specific genres and media, including satire and comedy, television, popular music, dance and social media. We will ask ourselves questions such as how do cultural productions express dissent? What is the role of cultural productions in civil activism? And what is the connection between specific genre or media and expression of dissent? All material will be taught in English translation.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
How has the Holocaust been represented in literature? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the social and aesthetic traditions of representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that literature expresses? And where does literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — originally written in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer). A special focus will be works written during and in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. All readings in English.
Area: Humanities
Who were the witches? Why were they persecuted for hundreds of years? Why were women identified as the witches par excellence? How many witches were put to death between 1400 and 1800? What traits did European witch-mythologies share with other societies? After the witch-hunts ended, how did “The Witch” go from being “monstrous” to being “admirable” and even “sexy”? Answers are found in history and anthropology, but also in medicine, theology, literature, folklore, music, and the visual arts, including cinema.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken AS.214.171 cannot take AS.211.477.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
I feel, therefore I am: beginning with Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See (1749) and Rousseau’s Letter to M. D'Alembert on Spectacles (1758), the seminar will explore connections between various aspects of neurophysiological, bodily perception and their representations in culture. We will then consider the origins of the term Einfühlung in Robert Vischer's and Theodor Lipps’ seminal works. Embodied perception that informs Heinrich Wölfflin's Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture (1886) is also the focus of several of Georg Simmel’s essays. We shall discuss the environment as an extension of the self in Charles Baudelaire’s “The Swan” and in Andrzej Leder’s “Psychoanalysis of a Cityscape. A Case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: The City of Warsaw.” Aby Warburg’s notion of Pathosformeln will allow us to see the link between pathos and empathy. Finally we will read Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry and Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, whose narrator announces: “I write with my body."
Area: Humanities
Theories of aesthetics and representation addressing the Holocaust have been characterized by assertions of the unrepresentability of this genocide. From a maximal position cautioning against representing the Holocaust or denying its very possibility to moderate positions underlining the ethical and aesthetic challenges and problems of the endeavor, these theories have dominated discussion of the subject for decades and have lead to the formation of a canon of Holocaust literature that confirms the salience of these theoretical approaches. Beyond this canon, however, things look quite different. From writing in the ghettos and concentration camps to a proliferation of literature in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, works in a range of languages — but especially in Yiddish — have not only raised a different set of ethical and aesthetic questions about representing the Holocaust, but have arguably bypassed or even negated the broader theoretical consensus. This course will survey both “sides” of the debate, ranging over an array of theoretical approaches to and literary representations of the Holocaust. The objective of the course is to find where the two approaches meet and to account for their divergences.
This seminar will explore some key expressions of what could loosely be called existentialist writing from the early twentieth century to the present day, to the end of coming to terms with an emerging “new politics of existence.” While there will be some emphasis on Spanish language materials, including writings by José Ortega Y Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno, María Zambrano, and Jorge Luis Borges, we will also be reading important works by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Martin Hägglund.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This seminar will explore some key themes in contemporary media theory in an age when five tech giants have succeeded in infiltrating the daily lives of global citizens to an unprecedented degree in history. We will study the impact of this saturation on socioeconomic inequality as well as the implications of an almost total loss of privacy.Among the strategies of resistance to the capacity for surveillance these companies have developed we will focus in particular on current examples of feminist media art and voices from the global and cultural periphery as well as tendencies in these practices to emphasize a return to interpersonal connections and the embodied here and now. As case studies we nay include #metoo, slo-film movements from Southern Bahia in Brazil, and the financing and distribution of art films by mega media companies like Netflix.
Area: Humanities
This seminar introduces feminist film theory, queer film theory, and decolonial film strategies, analyzing and following their practical implementations in documentary, fiction films, and animation films. The films will be chosen from different global film traditions from East Asia to Latin America, Western Africa, Europe and North America. We will also invite several filmmakers into the classroom to discuss their practical strategies and how they are informed by specific theoretical approaches.
Prerequisite(s): Cannot be taken if student took any of AS.212.791, AS.213.791, AS.214.791, or AS.215.791
Area: Humanities
What does immunity have to do with literary studies? We will explore this question by examining the concept of immunity, not only as a medical and legal concept, but also as a cultural phenomenon. Students will analyze what “immunity” can teach us about the ideas of tolerance and defense and about the ways we come into contact and build relationships with others. Through attention to French novels and graphic novels, students will investigate the grammars and images linked to the concept of immunity and research how these languages and images shape how we think of mental and physical illnesses, vulnerability, exposure, as well as how they permeate body representations in French literature. Secondary sources such as philosophical texts, movies, and photographs will embed these narratives into larger issues within the history of medicine and postwar French literature.
Area: Humanities
(300-level, taught in English) critically engages the presentation and imagination of animals and other non-human life in modern literature, philosophy, and thought. We will examine the figure of the animal and the means of conceptual differentiation between the animal and the human, considering animals' relation to or perceived exclusion from language, pain, embodiment, sexuality, and the visual gaze. The course is ideal for students interested in fascinating themes in literature and how they reflect philosophical concerns. No prior courses in philosophy are required. Students will read philosophical texts alongside literary works in learning the conceptual history of animals and of humanity as a distinct species. Expect fascinating readings and engaging, lively discussions. Readings may include works by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger Derrida, Agamben, Poe, Kleist, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Pirandello, and Coetzee.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
What does it mean to exist, and to be able to reflect on this fact? What is it mean to be a self? This course explores the themes of existentialism in literature and philosophy, including the meaning of existence, the nature of the self, authenticity and inauthenticity, the inescapability of death, the experience of time, anxiety, absurdity, freedom and responsibility to others. It will be examined why these philosophical ideas often seem to demand literary expression or bear a close relation to literary works. Readings may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Rilke, Kafka, Simmel, Jaspers, Buber, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Daoud.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This graduate-level course will explore the material topographies of literature, both real and imagined, engaging the landscapes, geographies, and environments of literary works both as a vital dimension of the text and as contributions to 'cultural ecology'. We will explore how topography may be engaged not as mere background or setting for literary situations, but as a dynamic and vital dimension thereof, and how the human experiences evoked can be radically recontextualized and engaged through environmental attention to the text. We will read theoretical and philosophical works on geography and topography in literature along with environmental literary theory in approaching literary works by writers from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries. Readings may include works by Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Thoreau, Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Brecht, Woolf, Borges, and other writers from the late 18th through 20th centuries. Discussions will invite phenomenological, de- or post-colonial, and ecological perspectives.
This course will trace the tensions, antagonisms, and collaborations between poetry and philosophy as distinctive but fundamental expressions of human thought and experience. We will engage poetry as a form of artistic expression that compliments, completes, or challenges other forms of knowledge, and consider the range of philosophy's responses to poetry and poetics. Readings will include works by philosophical poets and poetic philosophers including Hölderlin, Schlegel, Rilke, Bachmann, Celan, Stevens, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Valéry, Wittgenstein, and Agamben.
We will examine the contribution of (post-)Enlightenment literature to the evolution of a modern social imaginary. First we will acquaint ourselves with some theoretical approaches to the concept of the social imaginary (Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor, Albrecht Koschorke). We will then read selected texts from European literature (from Rousseau and Ferguson to Lessing, Schiller, Kleist, Novalis and Fichte, among others) that are characteristic of the formation of a modern social imaginary at the epochal threshold between the 18th and 19th centuries. We will attend to the interface of social self-conceptions and the public sphere.
Area: Humanities
This course takes as its point of departure the position that language carries within it the traces of something that exceeds the cognitive grasp of the subject and to this extent undoes any claim to knowledge the subject might make. This position has been central to twentieth and twenty-first century thought from psychoanalysis and poststructuralism to media theory and new materialism. This course will not take issue with this position. It will examine instead how this position evolved from the Idealism of Fichte to the eerily inhuman, if not mechanical, talking figures in texts by Novalis (“Monolog”), Poe (“Maelzel’s Chess Player”), Hoffmann (“Die Automate”), Büchner (Leonce und Lena), and Kafka (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”). We will explore the literature of the personal and impersonal in romantic and modernist texts in order to ask what moves and motivates works in which the first-person narrator would seem to be nothing more than a fiction—a staged phenomenon or a mechanical device.
Area: Humanities
This course is devoted to close study of the writings of Franz Kafka from both philosophical and literary perspectives. Writings will include Kafka’s short prose works and novels along with philosophical and literary critical interpretations thereof. Readings may include commentaries by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Giles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben. Primary texts for students from the German section will be in original; any other students may read Kafka in translation.
What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.
Area: Humanities
The Great Recession—sometimes called the financial crisis or the economic crisis of 2008—brought financial markets to a halt and created significant political turmoil across the North Atlantic. But its impact on culture, and literature especially, has often been ignored. This seminar will travel across Europe, from Dublin to Madrid, from London to Reykjavík in order to examine how literature has registered this most recent economic crisis. We will focus on how crisis is narrated and the ways in which literary works have managed to provide a voice for marginalized social, economic, and political demands.
Area: Humanities
In this seminar we will examine the widespread deployment of cultural production in the early modern period in the service of generating social cohesion around an emerging national project, primarily in the case of Spain. At stake will be how cultural practices can determine a shared sense of reality, often at odds with the interests of marginal groups, as well as the strategies that emerge to counteract and question those practices. While reading knowledge of Spanish is desirable, graduate students from other disciplines who wish to explore these theoretical questions with regard to a different cultural corpus are welcome. Graded Pass/Fail.
In this seminar we will the examine the ways in which Jorge Luis Borges’s narratives intersect with lines of inquiry pursued by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida around perception, knowledge, language, time, and space.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Twentieth-century and contemporary Eastern European Literature is the locus of poetry and the essay. In this course we shall examine classic authors, such as Bruno Schulz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Adam Zagajewski, as well as those less known in the English-speaking world: Zuzanna Ginczanka, Ota Pavel, Henryk Grynberg, Oksana Lutsyshyna. We will consider verse, poetic prose and lyrical essays. The issues that will inform our readings will be internal and actual emigration, translingualism, and the persistence of war. Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, but also French and American English are the languages in which these authors speak to us. Eastern European literature resonates with voices that have, time and again, brushed against catastrophe.
Philosophy
Seminar on Beauvoir’s moral philosophy, covering the major works of the 1940s. Readings will include selections from The Blood of Others, Pyrrhus and Cineas, All Men are Mortal, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Second Sex. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. (Beginning undergraduates should contact Professor Kosch.) No prerequisites.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Political Science
This course investigates core questions of what constitutes political freedom, what limits on freedom (if any) should be imposed by authority, adn the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and political judgement. Spanning texts ancient, modern, and contemporary, we shall investigate how power inhabits and invigorates practices of freedom and consent. Among the questions we will consider: Can we always tell the difference between consent and coercion? Are morality and freedom incompatible? Is freedom from the past impossible? By wrestling with slavery (freedom's opposite) we will confront the terrifying possibility that slavery can be both embodied and psychic. If our minds can be held captive by power, can we ever be certain that we are truly free? The political stakes of these problems will be brought to light through a consideration of issues of religion, gender, sexuality, civil liberties, class and race.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The premise of this course is that a political perspective is tied up with a (meta)physical one, that is to say, with ideas about the nature of Nature and of the status of the human and nonhuman elements within it. How is the universe ordered? Who or what is responsible for it? What place do or should humans occupy within it? How ought we to relate to nonhuman beings and forces? We will read three different responses to such questions and show how they are linked to a particular vision of political life. In the first, the world into which human are born is ordered by gods whose actions often appear inexplicable: Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, and Hippolytus by Euripedes will represent this tragic vision of the cosmos. In the second, Plato , in Republic and in Phaedrus, the forces of reason and eros play central and powerful roles. In the third, Augustine of Hippo presents a world designed by a benevolent, omnipotent God who nevertheless has allowed humans a share in their own fate. We end the course with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy , which offers a perspective on these three visions of the world -- the tragic, the rational, and the faithful -- which will help us evaluate them in the light of contemporary political and ecological concerns.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In the years between World Wars I and II, a fascinating group of artists, manifesto-writers, performers, intellectuals, and poets, in Europe and the Caribbean, who were put off by conventional politics of the time, decided to pursue other means of societal transformation. This seminar explores the aims and tactics, and strengths and liabilities, of Dada and Surrealism, as it operated in Europe and the Americas in the years between the World Wars. We will also read texts and images from writers and artists influenced by Dada and Surrealism but applied to different historical and political contexts.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.193 OR AS.190.613 are not eligible to take AS.190.415.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
A close reading of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Ethics by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), with consideration of important commentaries on these works. What conceptions of the human being, nature, reason, God, and freedom are defended and affirmed by Hobbes and Spinoza? What rhetorical strategies accompany their theories of self, ethics, social life?
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
Women in Western Thought is an introduction to (the history of) Western thought from the margins of the canon. The class introduces you to some key philosophical question, focusing on some highlights of women’s thought in Western thought, most of which are commonly and unjustly neglected. The seminar will be organized around a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the mind/body question in Early Modern Europe, the declaration of the rights of (wo)men during the French revolution, the impact of slavery on philosophical thought, the MeToo debate and others. By doing so, the course will cover a range of issues, such as the nature of God, contract theory, slavery, standpoint epistemology, and queer feminist politics. Students will engage with questions about what a canon is, and who has a say in that. In this sense, Women in Western Thought introduces you to some crucial philosophical and political problems and makes you acquainted with some women in the field. The long term objective of a class on women in Western thought must be to empower, to inspire independence, and to resist the sanctioned ignorance often times masked as universal knowledge and universal history. People of all genders tend to suffer from misinformation regarding the role of women and the gender of thought more generally. By introducing you to women who took it upon themselves to resist the obstacles of their time, I am hoping to provide role models for your individual intellectual and political development. By introducing you to the historical conditions of the exclusion and oppression of women (including trans and queer women as well as black women and women of color), I hope to enable you to generate the sensitivities that are required to navigate the particular social relations of the diverse world you currently inhabit. By introducing philosophical topics in this way, I hope to enable you to have a positive, diversifying influence on you future endeavours.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
How far does it make sense to say, as Harry Burns put it in When Harry Met Sally, “that men and women can’t be friends”? What presumptions of female and male friendships underlie such a claim? Does it even make sense to talk of a distinctive difference between male and female friendships? Beginning with tracts on friendship from the Western philosophical tradition, and then weaving between sociological analyses and representations of friendship in literature and film, we will explore in this course how gender inflects friendship as we live it. Assignments include two 6-8 page papers and a short summary of readings due each week.
Area: Humanities