Global Cultural Studies Program in Literature Spring 2024 Courses
Courses marked * are Major Requirements.
Courses marked ^ are taught by Core LIT Faculty.
LIT190S-01 Burnout: Cultures of Exhaustion
Taught by Cole Adams
WF 10:05AM – 11:20AM
Friedl 118
This course serves as an introduction to literary/cultural studies and the health humanities. Surveying a range of cultural objects including poems, films, fiction, and self-help, this course is centrally concerned with how representational forms mediate everyday experience and “burnt out life.” In that sense, this course is also an introduction to literary theory and the perspectives of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist criticisms. Potential readings include: Lauren Berlant, Jasbir Puar, Annie McClanahan, Kathi Weeks, Mel Y. Chen, Joseph Dumit, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Juliana Spahr, Ottessa Moshfegh, and others.
LIT190S-02 What was the Digital?
Taught by Rachel Tay
T/TH 3:05PM – 4:20PM
Classroom Building 106
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will trace genealogies of the digital as it has been conventionally articulated—in reference to media artifacts, in opposition to the analog, or even as an aesthetic, cultural technique, or habit of thought—to examine its various distinctions from the algorithmic, computational, and informational. Unravelling the premises and elisions involved in the production of a concept, the course aims to query the politics and protocols of our current digital technologies and ultimately re-evaluate our relations to them. We will consider how our ideas of digitization, recognition, and prediction arise, as well as the historical exigencies that chart the course of their development. Accordingly, we will interrogate the ramifications of such a mode of thinking, being, and creative expression, as digital culture and its media technologies become further imbrication within our lives.
LIT190S-03 The Global Novel
Taught by James Welch
T/TH 4:40PM – 5:55PM
Classroom Building 106
What is the relationship of the construction of a world inside the novel to the construction of a world outside of it? Combining theoretical texts with novels from a variety of contexts across the 20th and 21st centuries, this course engages with the diversity of literary responses to modernization as a global process. The course begins with exemplary novels of global modernism and postmodernism, paying special attention to the way they create a ‘world’ through experiments in point of view, narrative structure, and style. The rest of the course deals with recent novels that engage with the global dimensions of contemporary social life, including works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Lauren Beukes, Yuri Herrera, and Haruki Murakami. At its conclusion the course will consider the affordances and limitations of the novel as a mode of representing the constant evolution of contemporary society.
LIT301S Theory Now*^
Taught by Professor Michael Hardt
MW 1:25PM – 2:40PM
Friedl 102
*This course is a Major Requirement*
This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts of contemporary critical theory, broadly conceived. Readings will include key texts from the past 50 years in fields including gender and sexuality studies, literary and media studies, critical race studies, Marxism, postcolonial studies, and political theory. The course will involve close reading of difficult texts with the goal of obtaining facility with the concepts and modes of argumentations of contemporary theory.
LIT316S Film Theory*
Taught by John Winn
T/TH 1:25PM – 2:40PM
Friedl 102
*This course is a Major Requirement for the Film/Media Concentration*
This course will introduce students to film theory, from early critical discussions of cinema over the course of the 20th century to contemporary scholarship on cinema. The readings will cover a range of topics: Marxist aesthetics, structuralism, feminist film theory, ecocinema, as well as cinema’s relationship to changing technologies. Over the course of the semester, students will also be expected to watch a wide range of films: experimental films to Hollywood narrative films.
LIT320S Social Movements/Social Media^
Taught by Professor Negar Mottahedeh
T/TH 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Friedl 225
This course examines uses and abuses of social media by social movements. Interested in a broader historical study of mediating technologies and oppositional public sphere, course considers the uses of cameras, phones, cassette players, radio, and social media platforms, but also books, bodies, art, fashion, and automobiles as oppositional technologies. Studies political and ethical uses of technologies in social unrest. Investigates impact of technologies on social movements and social transformations in contemporary history. Student driven case studies will highlight contemporary engagement with social media by networked social movements.
LIT321 Sample & Remix^
Taught by Professor Anne Garreta
T/TH 3:05PM – 4:20PM
Friedl 102
Sampling & remixing of previous works is a major mode of contemporary cultural production cutting across media and cultural practices. This course analyzes its genealogy, technological underpinnings, legal presuppositions and aesthetic consequences. Tensions between copy and copyright, between claims to originality and mechanical reproduction characterize this contemporary regime, now deployed globally. Its cultural implications will be distinguished from related modes of making art and meaning (imitation, citation, collage, montage...) and tracked through various objects: popular and avant-garde cinema; videogames, ready-mades and Pop Art; Hip-Hop and Electro; literature and DJ culture.
LIT333S Bad Behavior^
Taught by Professor Nima Bassiri
T/TH 10:05AM – 11:20AM
Friedl 102
What does it mean to behave badly? How is ‘bad behavior’ distinguished from actions that are otherwise described as evil or criminal? This course addresses these questions by examining ideas of deviance, wrongdoing, and misconduct in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries — that is, modern behavioral categories that are considered to be aberrant without necessarily being strictly defined as transgressions of the law. We will consider how bad behavior concerns the disruption of implicit social norms rather than the explicit violation of legal or moral codes. Course readings will draw from a variety of disciplines, including sociology and social theory, history of medicine, psychiatry, political philosophy, and sexuality studies. We will end the course by considering the relationship between wrongdoing and privilege, and why ‘bad behavior’ for some is viewed as criminal behavior for others.
LIT354S Intro to Psychoanalytic Theory^
Taught by Professor Antonio Viego
WF 3:05PM – 4:20PM
Friedl 102
In this seminar we will read key works in psychoanalytic theory by its inventor, Sigmund Freud such as Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality, Interpretation of Dreams, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, The Ego and the Id. We'll also read the work of important psychoanalytic theorists, commentators, and historians that include Adam Phillips, Jamieson Webster, Darian Leader and Eli Zaretsky. We will explore psychoanalytic theory by focusing on specific topics such as hysteria, perversion, sexuality, repression, narcissism, the unconscious, and the id/ego/superego. Throughout the semester, we will examine the relationship in psychoanalysis between theory and practice as well as entertain the possibility that the theories based on clinical practice might have some applicability for grappling with questions concerning power, politics, conceived in a global context, and what philosopher Michel Foucault referred to in his later work as the “care of the self.” Is psychoanalysis dead? What is the point of psychoanalysis? Is psychoanalysis feasible in today’s world? How is psychoanalysis different from psychology? How is psychoanalysis taken up in the neurosciences? What are the differences between psychoanalysis and the relatively new field, neuro-psychoanalysis?
LIT380 Marxism and Society^
Taught by Professor Michael Hardt
MW 8:30AM – 9:45AM
Friedl 107
Introduction to Marx's core concepts, such as alienation, commodity, and revolution. Includes examination of Marx's own major historical & political analyses, his economic texts, and his philosophical writings. Students also gain familiarity with the role of Marxist thought in different fields and disciplines, including feminist theory, anthropology, history, political science, and literary studies.
LIT390S-01 East West Cinema^
Co-Taught by Professors Rey Chow and Roberto Dainotto
MW 10:05AM – 11:20AM
Crowell 108
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 cultural interactions, we will focus on a number of classics and less well-known films from Italy, France, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and India as well as the U.S. Topics will include the aesthetic and ideological aspects of film—e.g., images, sounds, narratives, characters, spectatorship, commodification, transcultural ambiguities, and ethnographic appeal. We will also explore theoretical and philosophical discussions pertaining to film as perhaps the most powerful mode of mass communication in the twentieth century and beyond, with major effects on subsequent forms of visual media.
LIT390S-02 Latinx Literary Worlds^
Taught by Professor Christina Leon
T/TH 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Friedl 102
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.
LIT390S-04 Underrepresentation^
Taught by Professor Christina Leon
T/TH 4:40PM – 5:55PM
Friedl 102
In a world where different peoples and cultures circulate, the task of ethically encountering difference is urgent. Yet, underrepresented literatures across are often read as a token or symbol of their cultures, which risks reducing communities to one story. This course will consider the ethics of reading literary pieces across the Americas in relation to their cultural context, noting how authors figure, rather than merely relate, the historical legacies of difference, trauma, violence, and marginalization. Moving beyond the multicultural imperative to merely include “other” voices, we will focus instead on how such literatures call out for us to responsibly listen to, or witness, these stories.
LIT390S-05 Saying ‘I’: Philosophy and Literature^
Taught by Professor Maya Kronfeld
WF 11:45AM – 1:00PM
Friedl 102
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 explores central problems of point of view and consciousness by focusing on first-person representation. Pairing lyric poetry and first-person prose fiction (Victor Hugo to Toni Morrison) with key readings in the history of the philosophy of mind (Descartes to William James), we will follow the intersecting paths of inquiry developed by both disciplines. Topics include: the privileged status of self-knowledge; the first-person diary as a fictional mode; the self as a mere bundle of impressions; lyric expression and fragmentation in romantic and modernist poetry; the so-called “stream of consciousness”; the “I” as a problem of linguistic reference (“indexicality”). This course wagers that fictional experiments in narrative perspective can prompt us to redraw our existing categories for the mind. Students will develop techniques for close reading and stylistic analysis of literary forms, as well as for philosophical argumentation and critical thinking.
LIT390S-9-01 Humanities vs. Sciences^
Taught by Professor Cate Reilly
WF 10:05AM – 11:20AM
Friedl 102
What makes fact different from fiction? How did the humanities and sciences emerge as distinct fields? What separates quantitative and qualitative reasoning? What is the basis for truth? For distinguishing objectivity and subjectivity? Course introduces students to key questions and debates shaping the separation of humanities and sciences since Enlightenment. Readings cover literature, continental philosophy, scientific treatises. Topics: representation and language in the sciences, gender and race in objective inquiry, the humanities’ role in the era of climate change, science denialism, pseudoscience, cognitive literary criticism, the digital humanities, and more.
LIT490S-1-01 Technofuture^
Taught by Professor Luciana Parisi
MW 8:30AM – 9:45AM
Friedl 102
How can the image of the future become a critical practice? If technology has always been a weapon of control and governance, it has also been a space for reinventing culture and re-versing existing relations of power. This course will use the speculative method of science fiction in the form of novels, movies, music videos, art and architecture, to explore how the technological engineering of time has laid open alternative temporalities that challenge from within the colonial enterprise of techno-capitalism. In particular, this course will focus on the period between post World War II and post 9/11 to discuss how the increasing investment in machines and automated systems of control has coincided with a re-invention of culture that challenges understanding of the subject, gender, race, class. Technofuture invites students to participate to discussions with examples and topics of interests in order to engage with critical practices through science fiction.
LIT490S-1-02 Spivak: Early Writings^
Taught by Professor Rey Chow
MW 3:05PM – 4:20PM
Crowell 106
This course examines the early phase of the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the preeminent contemporary theorist, translator, and critic who has influenced generations of scholars across disciplines in the humanities and the interpretative social sciences. Above all, her work has served as a unique lynchpin bridging studies of European onto-epistemologies of the liberal tradition with analyses of those onto-epistemologies’ social, economic, and political consequences around the globe. We will explore Spivak’s conceptual and practical shifts from comparative literature and continental philosophy to Marxist critique, poststructuralism, feminism, subaltern studies, and postcolonial studies. What are the modes of critical thinking enabled by such shifts, within and beyond the realm of scholarly inquiry? How do the questions raised by Spivak’s work help us dissect the past and present, and look toward the future in terms of knowledge production? In addition to Spivak’s publications from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, we will also read select writings of some of her contemporary interlocutors (e.g. Said, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Sakai, and others) who, together with her, have generated critical debates and interventions that remain entirely relevant today.
LIT576S Theory & Aesthetics^
Taught by Professor Anne Garreta
TH 10:20AM – 12:50PM
West Duke 108A
How do philosophers read and make sense of literary texts, movies, works of art and other philosophers? This course elucidates key conceptual and hermeneutic articulations undergirding a philosophical signature and delineate the status of aesthetic objects in theory. It explores Roland Barthes’ thought through 4 of his key theoretical moves: death of the author, reality effect, punctum, the neutre and the ground upon which he deployed them: the realist novel, techniques of cinema & photography, political antagonism, queer subjectivity. Texts to be read in English translation; students encouraged to consult the French originals.
LIT612S Theories of the Image^
Taught by Professor Negar Mottahedeh
TU 3:20PM – 5:50PM
White 106
Returning to Walter Benjamin's Art Work essay and its various sources and revisions, this course will discuss recent engagements with Benjamin's work in cinema, photography, and visual and media studies and will attempt to understand the role and functions of the faculty he coins 'the mimetic' in modern culture. Readings will be drawn from the English translation of Benjamin's Selected Writings, volumes 1-4, and including his work on photography, history, surrealism and his reviews of writers such as Charles Baudelaire. Readings will also include some of Benjamin's own primary sources, such as the writings of Kracauer as well contemporary discussions of Benjamin's work in academic journals.
LIT690-8-01 Paradigms of Modern Thought: Hegel, Bergson and Deleuze^
Taught by Professor Fred Jameson
T/TH 10:05AM – 11:20AM
Crowell 108
This course examines the opposition between historical/narrative time and existential/phenomenological temporality: a problem it follows from Hegel to Marx. We begin with classic theories of time (Augustine, Bergson, Husserl), then examine some recent and interesting comparisons of Hegel and Deleuze, and look at Hayden White’s theory of employment and narrativity (the tropes). After that, Marx’s conception of pre-capitalist formations and Deleuze/Guattari’s commentary on it; then follow up with some sample historiographies: Ibn Khaldun, and Vico; Foucault (The Order of Things); Deleuze (Cinema, Vol I); and DeLanda (A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History). We will conclude with a discussion of the problems of the historical novel (Lukács) and a sampling of novels (by Kim Stanley Robinson and Gore Vidal).
Undergraduates should consult the professor before enrolling.
LIT690S-01 Philosophy and Automation^
Taught by Professor Luciana Parisi
M 11:45AM – 2:15PM
Friedl 126
This course offers critical reflections about the post-World War II’s advance of a computational infrastructure that has formed networks of automated decision-making systems from the media ecologies of algorithms, data, metadata and interface to logistic operations, military strategies, and smart borders. Automation therefore does not simply correspond to the mechanics of the assembly line, but rather to the temporal dynamics of feedbacks, the recursive learning of know-hows in computational systems. As automated systems can think in time and infer decisions by means of trial and error, they have also challenged the exceptionalism of human thinking stemming from the colonial and patriarchal epistemology that grants ontology to Man’s reason. Automated systems have replaced the logico-cognitive model of rational procedures with computational processing, a mindless or non-conscious model of prediction. This course addresses this transformation as discussed in current debates about the crisis of the colonial and patriarchal model of modern reason, cognition and consciousness and thus of philosophy as unable to liberate thinking from techne (the medium or instrumentality), on the one hand, and the post-Kantian and speculative re-theorizations of the computational image of thought, and of general artificial intelligence on the other. Drawing from cross-disciplinary scholarship, this course addresses the alliance between gender and machines, race and techne, class and automation to investigate how intelligent systems can enlarge the epistemological enterprise into the question of thinking.
LIT690S-03 Critique, Anti-Science, Truth^
Taught by Professor Nima Bassiri
W 3:20PM – 5:50PM
Friedl 216
This course explores the specter of anti-science in the contemporary American political imaginary and, concomitantly, how the categories of humanistic ‘critique’ and ‘theory’ have been increasingly perceived as complicit with, and as providing intellectual succor for, scientific skepticism and, as such, allegedly culpable not only with the erosion of scientific truth but with the dismantling of core tenets of liberal democracy itself. Drawing upon readings from the fields of science studies and cultural and literary theory, this course considers, first, whether scientific adherence versus denialism is an adequate dichotomy with which to understand the current political-epistemic landscape. Rather than presupposing the givenness and self-evidence of modern anti-scientific sentiments, we will instead explore what precisely scientific denialism, in all of its multiplicity, is as an attitude and form of conduct, how it has transformed historically, how it has been motivated by various political, economic, and racialized vectors, and whether it really represents an antipode to a rational trust in science. The second major objective of the course is to consider whether theory and critique are actually complicit, even tacitly, with a truth-denying attitude, as has been frequently (and exaggeratedly) purported. Scholars of both science studies and literary theory have suggested for decades that the erosion of scientific authority and trust can be linked, in particular, to styles of scholarship indebted to poststructuralist thought. Through detailed examinations of the two thinkers most commonly accused of undermining the concept of truth—namely, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault—the course will consider the validity of so-called post-critique assertions that theory is structurally complicit with the obfuscatory tendency to deny the reality of scientific truth claims. If there is indeed no such complicity, then how might critique and theory be redeemed and revalued as vital forms of scholarly inquiry today, and, furthermore, how might we imagine humanistic theory as productively coinciding with other epistemic practices, such as scientific research, against which it is held often and irremediably apart?
LIT690S-04 Lacan? Still?^
Taught by Professor Antonio Viego
F 10:20AM – 12:50PM
Friedl 216
This course is designed to introduce students to the work of psychoanalytic theorist, Jacques Lacan. We will begin with the first seminars in order to understand Lacan's trenchant critique of ego psychology in the context of his "return to Freud." In addition to reading a selection of Lacan's seminars and writings, we will also consult with various Lacanian commentators and practicing Lacanian clinicians including, among others, Bruce Fink, Jacques-Alain Miller, Colette Soler, Alenka Zupancic, Jamieson Webster and Tim Dean. This seminar intends to provide students with a firmer grasp of Lacanian theory and how its insights might be extended beyond the space of the clinic.
LIT836S Freudo-Marxism^ [GRAD ONLY]
Taught by Professor Cate Reilly
F 1:40PM – 4:10PM
Friedl 216
The collision of psychoanalysis and Marxism in the first half of the twentieth century gave rise to a diverse set of efforts to synthesize Freud’s understanding of the psyche with Marx’s dialectical view of social transformation. This seminar examines how major philosophers, theoreticians, and literary writers from the 1920s onward imagined the intersection of psychological and socioeconomic structures.
LIT890S-02 Ways of Knowing: Philosophy and Literature^ [GRAD ONLY]
Taught by Professor Maya Kronfeld
TH 3:20PM – 5:50PM
West Duke 108A
Ways of Knowing: Philosophy and Literature Do works of poetry and fiction produce distinctive forms of knowledge, or are they simply vehicles for the circulation of independently-specifiable philosophical concepts? This seminar explores the mutual implications of philosophy and literature for critical epistemology. We’ll draw on debates on the aesthetics and politics of literary knowledge in the history of philosophy, contemporary literary cognitivism, Black studies, Frankfurt School, as well as romantic and modernist literary theory. Readings include Hume, Kant, Douglass, Baudelaire, Russell, Eliot, Woolf, Stevens, Wright, Morrison, Davis, Gilroy.