FALL 2025 COURSES – PROGRAM IN LITERATURE
IMPRTANT DATE: April 2, 2025 Class Registration begins
LIT109CN (CONSTELLATION) Imperialism, Anticolonialism, Decolonization
WF 1:25 – 2:40PM
107 Friedl
With Professors Michael Hardt and Jessica Namakkal
This course will investigate foundational texts that analyze colonial and imperialist political formations, as well the movements that resist and combat them. The texts will consider coloniality in a wide range of geographical contest and spanning time periods from early modernity until the present. Topics will include racial forms of domination, economic exploitation, resource extraction, and political control. Evaluation will be based on class participation, short papers, and exams.
LIT110S Intro to Digital Culture: Media Theory, Politics, Aesthetics
T/TH 10:05 – 11:20AM
102 Friedl
With Professor Luciana Parisi
What is digital culture today? In the 90s digital culture studied how the internet transformed our interactions. In the 00s digital culture is driven by social media platforms (from youtube to tiktok), data profiling and recommendation algorithms. We visit iconic places through our constantly updating city apps. Our identity profiles are fashioned by social media influencers. We match with new friends and become followers. We know that biases of race, class, gender and sexuality are internal to search algorithms. Everyday decisions, behaviours, and desires are linked to our smart media. This course explores how digital media affect our subjectivity, our body, social and collective actions, political power and control.
LIT190S Literature, Philosophy, Everyday Life
T/TH 1:25 – 2:40PM
102 Friedl
With Instructor Carson Welch
What is everyday life? What should everyday life be like? Or is day-to-day routine something to be escaped? Exploring the concept of everyday life in modern European literature and philosophy, this course asks how writers have taken the emergence of “everydayness” as a sign of both democratic progress and widespread dissatisfaction. The course surveys some of the ways in which the concept of everyday life has proven difficult to capture in traditional philosophical discourse and has motivated various kinds of literary experimentation. Readings span the themes of existentialism, alienation, psychoanalysis, feminism, and literary modernism.
LIT201S Intro to Global Cultural Studies
T/TH 3:05 – 4:20PM
102 Friedl
With Professor Robyn Wiegman
No one doubts that we live in a globalized world, but how can we understand its complexity in cultural terms? Under the framework of everyday life, LIT201 pursues an answer to this question by approaching culture from the perspective of the quotidian: as an analysis of the ways that people live, work, shop, create, struggle, and dream in the daily contexts that comprise their globalized worlds. By interpreting the daily life through its cultural expression in film, memoirs, literature, and art, this course revises familiar understandings of globalization by thinking about culture as both distinct from and complexly related to economics, politics, and social policy.
LIT285S Existentialism
MW 11:45AM – 1:00PM
102 Friedl
With Professor Toril Moi
Key themes are existence, ethics, freedom, death, experience and meaning. Texts may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Fanon, Murdoch, Gordon, Feinberg, etc. Existentialism asks about the foundations of mind, morals, and the meaning of life. As a philosophy it is intertwined with the advent of modernity, and thus with modern literature. Placing literature and philosophy in conversation with one another, this course asks about ways of living, ways of reading, and ways of writing.
LIT290S Mind/Body in Philosophy & Literature
WF 10:05 – 11:20AM
107 Friedl
With Professor Maya Kronfeld
A critical introduction to the classic mind-body problem in philosophy and its literary afterlife in Romanticism and Modernism. We will also engage the basic methodological question of how to do philosophy and literature together without reducing one to the other.
LIT314 What is Critical Theory?
T/TH 11:45AM – 1:00PM
107 Friedl
With Professor Nima Bassiri
The term “critical theory” has recently become a hot button issue in the United States. Over the past few years, critical theory along with related fields of study like critical race theory have become flashpoints of moral panic. But what exactly is critical theory? Why is it so dangerous, and why are some so aggrieved by the ideas that it offers? This class will offer an introduction to fundamental texts and concepts in the history of critical theory broadly conceived. All our readings will be primary literature from what might be dubbed a ‘critical theory canon’ and are intended to introduce students in the humanities and qualitative social sciences to essential and foundational materials. We will not only come to understand what critical theory is but also how it allows us to interrogate and reimagine core social, political, and ethical concepts such as freedom, capitalism, subjectivity, colonialism, race, violence, and secularism.
LIT350 Brains, Everywhere
WF 1:25 – 2:40PM
102 Friedl
With Professor Antonio Viego
Over the course of the last 3 decades, we have the witnessed the spectacularly speedy rise of the “neurosciences,” an historical event characterized by some critics as a “neuro-revolution” that has, in turn, given rise to a “neuro-society” and “neuro-cultures” and “neuro-subjects.” In this seminar we will track this history and ask ourselves precisely what kind of change in meaning might “neuro” effect in the disciplines that were previously “neuro”-free? If there is a neuro-turn in the humanities and social sciences, what is it exactly that’s “turning”? The “brain” plays a special role in all of this. The “brain” now possesses star power, celebrity status. Its endless imaging makes it the 21st century “centerfold.”
LIT390S-01 Latinx Literary Worlds
T/TH 4:40 – 5:55PM
102 Friedl
With Professor Christina Leon
This seminar will think at the border of contemporary movements and ongoing crises surrounding migration, colonization, and environmental racism as we read Latinx literature and encounter Latinx art. We will consider how Latinx writers from the United States, as well as the broader hemisphere, bear witness to historical movements built of dreams and resistance—border crossings lived and the crossing of borders over lives. So too will we pay attention to the fraught fault lines of race, class, language, and gender that put pressure on the word Latinx. Questions, rather than answers, will guide the seminar.
Where does the term Latinx come from? What stories, bodies, and worlds are built into its etymology that operates as a hope, a threat, and a long, variegated story? How does latinidad encompass contradiction and reverberate differently across space and time? Whom does the term serve? Whom does it eclipse? And how can the voices of writers and artists tell us a story that unsettles the terms under which we receive it? What can art and literature tell us about latinidad that cannot rendered in contemporary media headlines? How can ongoing and overlapping crisis give us direction on how we might begin to read these stories—this hemispheric archive of so much narrative, poetry, art, and movement?
LIT390S-5-01 Black Feminist Experimentation
MW 1:25 – 2:40PM
106 White Hall
With Professor Zakiyyah Jackson
This course examines black feminist experimentation in literature, historiography, theory, and film. It investigates what yields when literary and film art breaks out of the confines of genre, tradition, and reified depictions of black womanhood and femininity. What new forms emerge from the ruins of convention and the expected? What is left of gender and sexual identity in the face of black feminist rule breaking? If standard protocols of narrative and “authentic” and “positive” representation are refused, what might be gained? This course is a laboratory for thought, for the exploration of the limits of literary and visual forms and what lies beyond the strictures of racialized notions of type and aesthetic taste.
LIT396S East-West Cinema
MW 3:05 – 4:20PM
126 Friedl
With Professors Rey Chow and Roberto Dainotto
This course is an introduction to intellectually stimulating cinematic works, discourses, and cultures of the post-Second World War period. With the recognition that Hollywood, like the United States of America, dominates postwar global interactions, we will focus instead on the film works of four major Asian and European directors—Vittorio De Sica (Italy), Akira Kurosawa (Japan), Satyajit Ray (India), and Michael Haneke (Austria)—who together represent a noteworthy range of cinematic poetics and politics.
LIT490S-2-01 Power of the Story
MW 10:05 – 11:20AM
102 Friedl
With Professors Rey Chow and Markos Hadjioannou
When elaborating on the age-old figure of the storyteller, the German-Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote that the story is essentially different from information. Whereas information has to do with instantaneous verifiability (and thus, one might say, disposability), the story’s lifespan is much longer as its meanings resonate through different storytellers, communities, artistic and narrative traditions. Does Benjamin’s argument about storytelling still hold relevance in the days of social media, AI, and misinformation, when we are inundated every minute with so called “breaking news”?
LIT615S Media Philosophy: Systems, Information, Capital
M 12:00 – 2:30PM
118 Friedl
With Professor Luciana Parisi
This course investigates media and media systems through a close analysis of key texts and authors in this field. It draws on and compares scholarship in the field as developed in the German, French and US theories of technology, information and communication, and mediation. This course understands media as much from an engineering point of view as from a philosophical one. It accounts for the specificity of media as information systems and accounts for the historical significance of cybernetics and computation in the development of feedback oriented and interactive systems that have transformed theories of aesthetics and politics.
LIT650S History of Mental Illness
W 3:05 – 5:35PM
216 Friedl
With Professor Nima Bassiri
What is madness? Historical analysis offers a variety of answers to this question. This course will provide students with a broad introduction to the modern history of mental illness, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will cover a diverse set of issues, including the disciplinary formation of psychiatry and neurology, new medical understandings of pathology, and the political assumptions and ramifications of defining and redefining madness in the North Atlantic and abroad. The course will end with an examination of some contemporary issues framed in historical context — namely, the rise of pharmacological treatments, transcultural views of madness, and the growing prevalence of brain-based theories of mental disorders.
LIT681S Wittgensteinian Perspectives on Literary Theory
M 3:05 – 5:35PM
102 Friedl
With Professor Toril Moi
An introduction to Wittgenstein’ Philosophical Investigations and its relevance for literary studies. Wittgenstein’s vision of language, and philosophy; the relationship between the inner and the outer (the soul and the body; pain and its expressions), and aspect-seeing (“seeing as”). Relevant texts by Austin, Cavell and Diamond, and Moi. Literary theory by thinkers such as Saussure, Barthes, and Derrida.. We will examine one novel, and one film (Blade Runner), to see how Wittgenstein’s philosophy enables us to respond to them. The course aims to give students interested in philosophy and literature a solid foundation for further work.
LIT690S-01 Difference & Contemporary Philosophies of Technology
M 3:20 – 5:50PM
216 Friedl
With Professor Zakiyyah Jackson
The goal of this course is to think critically about the nature of technology and its role in our lives and society as well as contend with its development and uses impact on the earth. We aim to investigate how technology participates in the ongoing complex causal networks that allocate difference, as provisioned and deployed by powerful societal systems with an eye towards where we might be headed and where we might want to go. As technology evolves and continues to affect every facet of human life, philosophical thinking on its nature will allow us to reflect on different dimensions of its impact, especially regarding metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political questions. We will consider the ethics of emerging technologies including the ways in which new technologies both shape and are shaped by the broader social context in which they are designed and implemented. What is technology? What are the ways we might understand the development of technology, and how are social values embedded in technologies and technical systems? Has technology indeed become autonomous, or even out of human control, determining the very ways we think, live, and act? What does it mean to argue that new technologies, particularly biotechnologies and information technologies change the very meaning of what it means to be human? Under what conditions might it be possible to bend existing technology to liberatory ends? Recent technological developments array pressing ethical questions that we need to confront, both as a society, and as individuals. The aim of this class is to introduce students to some of these questions and equip them with the conceptual tools needed to engage with them productively and responsibly.
LIT690S-02 Critical Foundations: The Object, After Theory
T 10:05AM – 12:35PM
225 Friedl
With Professor Robyn Wiegman
As a graduate level introduction to the foundations of critical inquiry, this course begins by surveying prominent academic movements that now populate humanistic inquiry—cultural studies, thing studies, new materialisms, Afropessimism, queer theory—before returning to various issues that persist beyond contemporary turns toward the “new.” These include capitalism, identity, kinship, narrative, form, politics, and of course interpretation. Throughout the course, we will pose our theoretical readings and deliberations with, against, and to the side of a number of objects drawn from a familiar set of media forms: the novel (both graphic and traditional); the documentary film; theater and performance; memoir; television serial; and visual art.
LIT690S-03 Early Jameson
W 8:30 – 11:00AM
Smith Warehouse Bay 6 B177
With Professor Ranjana Khanna
The course will introduce Fredric Jameson’s work as a window on theory concerning cultural production and its emergence in the world over the last century. It will also highlight the singularity of Jameson’s project over his thirty or so monographs published between 1961-1990 (in Part One in Fall 2025); and 1991-2024 (in Part Two in Spring 2026). In addition to examining his own thought, the courses will also, of necessity, engage with that of some of his major interlocutors: Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Hitchcock, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Ursula LeGuin. Importantly, it will examine how his work exemplified and also attempted to engage with a worldview of cultural production (in literature, architecture, cinema, opera, the visual arts) such that any site of cultural production was understood as emerging in the context of a rich and varied world that nonetheless emerged from a singular modernity.
LIT690S-04 Figuring the Caribbean
W 3:05 – 5:35PM
102 Friedl
With Professor Christina Leon
This seminar will consider how Caribbean writers, thinkers, and artists figure the Caribbean. As a space, the figuration of the Caribbean has been a site of contest at the level of border, map, and empire; and it has morphed, echoed, and transmuted in global resonance. How do Caribbean writers articulate literary and theoretical imaginaries that shift our thinking about this archipelago of islands, its diaspora, and the globe? How does the Caribbean demand an account of entangled legacies of indigenous decimation, enslavement, colonization, and revolution? This seminar will center what the Caribbean necessitates in thought and figuration: relation, ruination, decolonization, environmental precarity, revolution, the plantation matrix, and translation. In our readings, we will pay attention to how Caribbean writers have conceptualized counter-humanisms that shift and texture critical theorizations of race, feminism, and queerness.
LIT690S-05 Foucault: Theories of Power
F 10:05AM – 12:35PM
102 Friedl
With Professor Michael Hardt
This seminar is aimed at understanding Michel Foucault’s innovative theories of how political and social power functions and is organized. Foucault reoriented the understanding of power from a centralized, state-centered attribute to a series of practices distributed in different social institutions. We will approach his theorical propositions through his writings primarily in the 1970s: on the history of the prison and the history of sexuality, along with his journalistic accounts of the revolutionary movement in Iran. Most of the seminar will be dedicate to Foucault’s own writings, but we will also consider recent secondary literature on the relation between Marx and Foucault.
LIT692S Historicizing the Mother-Child Relation in Psychoanalysis
TH 3:05 – 5:35PM
108 Crowell
With Professor Antonio Viego
This seminar addresses the figure of the “mOther” and the “mOther-child” social tie as theorized in 20th century psychoanalytic literature primarily through the work of Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Donald Winnicott. We will in tracking the figure of the “mother” also, of course, be tracking the figure of the “child.”
LIT850S Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy
T 3:05 – 5:35PM
216 Friedl
With Professor Markos Hadjioannou
This course is an advanced graduate-level course examining Gilles Deleuze’s two books on cinema: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In order to achieve a good grasp of Deleuze’s film philosophy in these two books, we will explore in detail his two primary concepts of images—the “movement-image” and the “time-image”—by also reviewing the subcategories that make up their broader structures. Moreover, we will look at how these concepts are informed by Deleuze’s other philosophical studies on individual philosophers: specifically, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Baruch Spinoza.
LIT881S Critical Posthumanities: The Human in Question
TH 10:05AM – 12:35PM
225 Friedl
With Professor Mark Hansen
Beginning in the 1990s, the “posthuman” has evolved as a chameleon-like concept designating everything from the transhumanist project to assure the continuity of humanity beyond the limits of human embodiment to the critical interrogations of suspect ontological boundaries separating the human from the non-human world writ large. Our discussion will be framed around two contemporary challenges to the human: how climate change repositions the human within larger, cosmological process; and how AI seeks to subsume the human into a generic model of intelligence. Beginning with post-structural “anti-humanism,” we will explore a diverse set of materials that critically engage the human, including work by scholars of feminism, animal studies, black studies, media studies, and non-Western epistemologies.
LIT890S Kant & Critique
TH 1:25 – 3:55PM
107 Friedl
With Professor Maya Kronfeld
A graduate seminar on the foundations of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy with an emphasis on epistemology and aesthetics and its afterlife in Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School through Foucault to Angela Davis. Special attention will be paid to the complicated legacies of Kant’s notion of “critique,” and the impact of his correlation between aesthetics and critical agency on literary theory and other fields. We will explore ways in which contemporary studies of race and gender may both dismantle Kant’s project and realize its critical potentialities.