Global Arc

What is "passing" and why is it such a persistent obsession of great literature and film? Why does the act of changing one's identity fascinate, excite, and repel us? At once a universal phenomenon and the most intensely personal of experiences, passing is a site where history, culture, law and society collide with individual identity and desire. This course examines narratives from the African-American, Jewish-American, and LGBTQ contexts in order to explore the idea of passing through the lenses of race, ethnicity, and gender. We will consider both the promise and the limits of comparison in working in and between these multiple frames.

The age-old relationship between literature and war is fundamentally a problem of ethics. This course is centrally concerned with ethics and aesthetics: the ethics of war, the aesthetics of war literature and film, and the ethics of making art about war. It explores the triangulation of warfare, literature, and ethics in the 20th-21st centuries, approaching this relationship through multiple thematic frames and genres (poetry, fiction, film, photography, and critical essays), with texts drawn from a diverse array of world cultures. Topics include total war, memory and trauma, translation, partition, war and comics, and virtual warfare.

What does it mean to say (or think) "I"? What accounts for the unified character of our experience? What disruptions and gaps in experience can be made perceptible through philosophical scrutiny and daring literary experimentation? This interdisciplinary course for undergraduates as well as graduate students explores central problems of point of view and consciousness by focusing on first-person representation. Pairing lyric poetry and first-person prose fiction with key readings in the history of the philosophy of mind, we will follow the intersecting paths of inquiry developed by both disciplines.

Theory and philosophy of formal educational practice with specific attention to ethical questions and political implications. How have ideals and practices of education changed over time, especially with the unprecedented emergence of common or universal public education in the last two centuries? How is learning braided with power and desire; with nations and subjectivities; with class, race and gender; with colonial structures; with the reproduction of norms, and challenges to them? This course is not a survey of all educational philosophies, but a selection of critical writings that we will study intensively in the classroom.

This seminar will investigate how literary authors use language both to create a sense of "the real" and to question what "the real" may be. Looking closely at forms of description and narration including verbal tense, figural patterns (such as repetition, simile and metonymy), vocabulary, voice, irony, and grammatical construction and syntax, we will study some of extraordinarily complex ways fictions generically termed "realist" bring about an "effect" or apprehension of the real we could not otherwise perceive, including its relation to temporality, causality, historicity and historical reflection in general.

As Hegel, most discursive philosophers, and every poet demonstrate, "sense" is a uniquely complex, necessarily temporal thing, as divorced from organic replication and animal mimicry as curiosity and history from transmissible illness or the concept of violence from violence itself. In this course we study primary modes of signification- from acts of indirection and association Freud called "detours" to "formal" delineations and transpositions of "content"--in which literary, cognitive and aesthetic sense are made. Works by Diderot, Kant, Lessing, Hegel, Wordsworth, Saussure, Freud among those we read. Open to all undergrad and grad students.

This course studies literature dealing with contemporary regimes of violence and forced migration in the Americas. Focusing on the passage from the Cold War to the War on Drugs, it analyzes the history of the current "migration crisis" in relation to structural adjustments, regimes of accumulation, border patrolling, and immigrant incarceration. Working with poetry, narrative, essays, and film, it explores the ways in which artistic interventions and cultural imagination have become crucial spaces for creating systems of legibility and resistance that reflect on the migrant experience and the historicity of multiple injustices.

Global publishing today - both book and digital - remains one of the major ways that ideas and culture, hegemony and resistance all cross borders. Essential to its effects are translation, media, and migration. How has the publishing industry in fact contributed to our ability to "think globally" and led to cultural transformations? In what ways and to what extent has it remained national or regional, focusing largely on the US and Europe? What might allow for a more wide-ranging dissemination of texts, culture, ideas? How are current crises around race, economics, and global health affecting the industry today?

This course examines the unique status of "justice" as an idea whose very conception depends on its inherent relation to practice. Beginning with Plato, we explore why attempts to define the idea of "justice" result in theories of the polis or State, why ethical conceptions of justice require conceptions of freedom, and why conceptions of freedom require aesthetic and linguistic articulation. The aim of the course is to approach these critical issues gradually, through careful readings and discussion of ancient to modern texts, incl. Plato, Locke, Kant, Schiller, Kleist, Hegel, Adorno, Rawls, Derrida

Do works of poetry and fiction produce their own distinctive forms of knowledge, or do they simply help preexisting philosophical concepts get absorbed more easily? This course explores the mutual implications of philosophy and literature for epistemology. We'll read lyrical poems, short stories and novels alongside philosophical accounts of language and mind, linking textual phenomena with features of cognition. Topics include conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality, argument vs. narrative, metaphor and image schema, knowledge by acquaintance vs. by description, defamiliarization and estrangement, logic vs. association, form and spontaneity.