Global Arc

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.

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.