Global Arc

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.

This course will use Modern Greek literature as a case study for formation of nationalizing literary canons. We will explore the historical roots of the Greek nation-state, the homogenization of its linguistic landscape, and the consolidation of a genealogically based, ethnic majoritarian understanding of citizenship and belonging, focusing specifically on the role literature and literary culture play in these processes. Who counts as a Greek writer? Who is excluded? How do writers and works enter the world literary sphere in nationally and ethnically coded ways? Knowledge of Greek is useful but not essential for the course.

Why have so many masters of verbal art relied on the stylistics and epistemologies of jazz musicians for the communication of experience and disruption of conventional concepts? We'll draw on musical recordings, live in-class performances by guest jazz artists, poetry, fiction, and recent debates in jazz studies, critical theory and Black studies. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students of literature and/or music are welcomed, but proficiency in both disciplines is NOT required. We will develop together techniques of close reading and listening. Optional performance component for music instrumentalists and vocalists.

This course explores the question of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to abolition, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

Historicization often proceeds by shorthand, assigning names to periods, movements, styles, even "content," and the points of view these are assumed to represent. No two such ascriptions are more frequently invoked than "romanticism" and "realism," whose conventional opposition defines to a large extent our own view of "modern" literary and aesthetic history across traditions. In this seminar we take a critical look at that opposition as it influences not only our view of literary and intellectual history in general but of literary representation itself. Works by Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Hawthorne, Balzac, Melville, Fitzgerald.

The course is designed to introduce the student with no previous training in the language to the basics of grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. A foundation is built in the first term for continuation in the spring-term course, 102. Four classes. No credit is given for LAT 101 unless followed by LAT 102.