Global Culture & Theory Program in Literature Spring 2025 Courses
Courses marked * are Major Requirements.
Courses marked ^ are taught by Core LIT Faculty.
LIT285S Existentialism^
Taught by Professor Toril Moi
MW 11:45am – 1:00pm
Friedl 102
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.
LIT301S Theory Now*^
Taught by Professor Christina Leon
MW 10:05 – 11:20am
Friedl 102
This seminar functions as an introduction to key theoretical concepts and debates that animate theory historically and in our current moment. Concentrating on the legacies and relevance of critical and literary theory for the now, this course will look at canonical texts and, also, current theorizations. We will read across several traditions of critical theory that allow us to think about questions of language, difference, power, subjectivity, and political economy. Moving into contemporaneous concerns, we will see how such historical theorizations emerge and shift in current theories of gender, race, coloniality, materiality, and the environment.
LIT320S Social Movements and Social Media^
Taught by Professor Negar Mottahedeh
T/TH 11:45am – 1:00pm
Friedl 126
The seminar considers the uses and abuses of social media by social movements. Interested in a broader historical study of mediating technologies and the oppositional public sphere, seminar participants focus their research on the uses of cameras, phones, cassette players, the radio, and social media platforms, but also books, bodies, art, fashion, drones and other vehicles as oppositional technologies. The seminar considers the political and ethical uses of technologies in social unrests in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America as well as the West, with a view to understanding the evolution of global social justice mobilizations on the ground and online. It investigates the impact of technologies on social movements and social transformations in contemporary history. Student driven case studies will highlight engagements with social media by social movements past and present.
LIT325S Understanding Mediation^
Taught by Professor Markos Hadjioannou
T/TH 10:05am – 11:20am
Friedl 102
This is a course designed for advanced undergraduate students invested in literary, critical, and cultural theory. Thinking through some of the primary theoretical models of the 20th and 21st centuries, the course examines the concept of “mediation” as the in-between process by which social formation and interaction, cultural production, individuality and subjectivity, and enworldedness come to be. Put differently, it examines experience as that which arises from the mediated and mediating relationship between a variety of social and cultural phenomena, as well as between our selfhood and our bodies, and the environmental fabric of the world that surrounds us and houses us.
LIT331/PHIL331 Kant^
Taught by Professors Maya Kronfeld & Andrew Janiak
T/TH 3:05 - 4:20pm
Friedl 107
An introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with an emphasis on the enduring relevance of Kant’s thought for current debates in epistemology, aesthetics and critical studies of race and gender. Discussion of Kant’s relation to his most important interlocutors, especially Émilie Du Châtelet and David Hume.
LIT333 Bad Behavior^
Taught by Professor Nima Bassiri
T/TH 3:05 – 4:20pm
Friedl 126
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, the history of medicine, psychiatry, political philosophy, and gender 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 11:45am – 1:00pm
Friedl 225
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 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.
LIT380 Marxism and Society^
Taught by Professor Michael Hardt
MW 10:05 – 11:20am
Friedl 107
The basic goal of the course is to help students acquire a clear understanding of the central concepts of Marx’s thought, such as alienation, capital, communism, and surplus value. The exams will focus on these concepts. A second goal is for students to recognize and evaluate the ways in which Marx’s concepts play a central role in different scholarly disciplines, such as Marxist cultural theory, Marxist history, or Marxist anthropology. Third, the course should give students basic familiarity with the historical and intellectual context from which Marx’s thought emerged, including the history of European philosophy, politics, and economics, as well as European colonialism and capitalist development. Finally, I hope that students will be able to situate Marxist theory in relation to a series of other contemporary theoretical paradigms with which they are already familiar, such as theories of race, gender, sexuality, and ecology.
LIT385 Mafia and the Movies^
Taught by Professor Roberto Dainotto
MW 11:45am – 1:00pm
Classroom Building 103
This course will be a study of the mafia as a regional, national, and global phenomenon. By looking at a wide range of films on the mafia, from documentary to comedy, the course will look at organized crime in its historical, social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions.
LIT390S-01 Algorithms of (Anti)Blackness^
Taught by Professor Zakiyyah Jackson
T/TH 4:40 – 5:55pm
Friedl 102
This course investigates how (anti)blackness informs the design and implementation of computation and automation as they pertain to pressing issues such as discoverability and data discrimination to mineral mining. Histories and contexts of AI and robotics, machine learning, software development and code-based media, such as search engines like Google, apps, and social networks will be closely examined.
LIT390S-02 Reading Islands^
Taught by Professor Christina Leon
MW 1:25 – 2:40pm
Friedl 102
The Caribbean is an archipelago made up of islands that both link and separate the Americas—islands that have weathered various waves of colonization, migration, and revolution. Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, this course will explore major issues that have shaped Caribbean literature, art, and thought: colonialism, indigeneity, iterations of enslavement, creolization, migration, diaspora, revolution, tropicality, and climate crisis. How do narratives of the Caribbean represent the collision of political forces and natural environments? How do island-writers figure this space and forge a poetics of relation that exceeds tourist desire and forceful extraction? How do island-writers reconcile (mis)representations of tropicality and address the existential threats of rising sea levels and increasing temperatures? During our readings, we will be attentive to the Caribbean as a space of first colonial contact, as a place where the plantation system reigned, and as the site of the first successful slave revolt (Haiti). We will consider how these past legacies haunt contemporary conditions across the Caribbean. In the mode of translation, we will read across the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone islands and see how they are, at once, related and singular.
LIT390S-03 Digital Architecture: Borders, Cities and Wars^
Taught by Professor Luciana Parisi
T/TH 8:30 – 9:45am
Friedl 102
This course will look at the digital reconfiguration of space in the way borders are defined, cities are lived and wars are being remotely conducted. In particular, the course will focus on how Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being deployed to advance smart technologies of border control, to generate new tools of navigation and mapping of cities and to implement predictive and smart algorithms in emerging forms of drone wars. The course engages with planetary computational modelling that employ artificial intelligence that have transformed logistics, zoning and wars across the world. In particular, the course will discuss how smart machines of border control, of prediction and remote decision making are determining global conditions of every day urban living, the movement of migrants and war refugees across the globe as well as the reconfiguration of strategies of war and strike.
LIT390S-9-01 Humanities vs. Sciences^
Taught by Professor Cate Reilly
WF 8:30 – 9:45am
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.
LIT590S-01 Eve’s Archive: Reading Sedgwick^
Taught by Professor Robyn Wiegman
T 3:05 – 5:35pm
Friedl 216
This course focuses on the academic and artistic work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a figure now credited with helping to inaugurate queer studies as a field. The seminar coincides with the Rubenstein Library’s exhibit of the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick papers, now archived at Duke, which opens in February 2025 and runs through July 2025. Student projects will be oriented around the materials in the exhibition and in the much larger Duke archive, offering a unique opportunity to do both archival research and to consider the complex issues of remembrance.
LIT620S Film-philosophers/Film-makers^
Taught by Professor Markos Hadjioannou
W 12:00 – 2:30pm
Friedl 107
Offering a deep dive into this field of inquiry, this course turns to some of the major works of film philosophy. Starting with examples of philosophical thinking in the work of early film theorists, it then moves to the major interventions associated with the work of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Stanley Cavell, the philosophy that inspired their thinking and the film theoretical work that they inspired in more recent decades. Additionally, each weekly session will be dedicated to some of the most representative filmmakers of film-philosophical study, treating their films as aesthetic forms of thought and philosophical investigation in and of themselves.
LIT651S Theories of Violence^
Taught by Professor Nima Bassiri
W 3:05 – 5:35pm
Friedl 102
Violence is a capacious concept that differs widely in terms of the context of its deployment. It can refer, for example, to expressions of state and legal authority, policing, and carceral practices; it can take on symbolic and epistemic forms in terms of processes of racialization, structures of social exclusion, and forms of bodily regulations; it can reflect the everyday enactment of personal injuries, entitlements, and power differentials; or it can designate the emancipatory force of revolutions, uprisings, and strikes. This course will attempt to explore these various facets of the concept of violence from a number of different disciplinary standpoints — including political philosophy, social theory, historical sociology, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory — but also with respect to a number of pressing uncertainties: How do we name violence? Does violence have a determinable historicity and ontology? How do we distinguish violence from non-violence?
LIT682S Simone de Beauvoir^
Taught by Professor Toril Moi
M 3:05 – 5:35pm
Friedl 102
Simone de Beauvoir was one of the leading intellectual women of the 20th century. A philosopher, novelist, and memoirist, she wrote the foundational analysis of women’s oppression in the 20th century. The Second Sex (1949) first showed the world the power of the concept of the Other when it is used to analyze women’s oppression in a sexist society. This course will discuss Beauvoir as a philosopher, feminist theorist and as a writer of literature. It will give a basic introduction to existentialist philosophy (concepts such as being-in-the-world, the situation, alienation, bad faith, ambiguity will be central), discuss the relationship between literature and philosophy, including Beauvoir’s understanding of reading, and the idea of a “philosophical novel,” and provide an in-depth analysis of Beauvoir’s feminist theory. The goal of this course is to give students a thorough understanding of Beauvoir’s thinking across genres.
LIT690S-6-01 Historicizing the Mother-Child Relation^
Taught by Professor Antonio Viego
TH 1:25 – 3:55pm
Friedl 102
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. Klein’s work has famously focused on the importance of the mother’s breast and the child’s unconscious fantasies whereby the breast is both persecutory and nourishing. This course will introduce students to the psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott in addition to Jacques Lacan’s specific grappling with the mother figure. We will in tracking the figure of the “mother” also, of course, be tracking the figure of the “child.” Some of our questions include: What kind of “child” is constructed in these literatures? What kind of “mother” is constructed in these literatures?
LIT690S-01 Cultures After Orientalism^
Taught by Professor Rey Chow
T/TH 11:45am – 1:00pm
Friedl 102
This course is guided by a couple of large questions pertaining to postcolonial studies. First, how should we reappraise the historical, socioeconomic, and global implications of Edward Said’s influential, polemical argument about Orientalism, which has generated decades of critical debate and countless publications? Second, since Said’s work triggered wide-ranging interests in issues of cultural difference, cultural transmission, and multiculturalism (against a backdrop of late capitalism and postmodernism), how should we assess the continuing valence of this post-Orientalist cultural turn, so to speak, in contemporary critical discourse? In what ways does culture remain an interventional concept, or does it amid technoscientific and legalistic hegemonies? We will examine a range of discussions by notable authors (including Said, Gayatri Spivak, James Clifford, Etienne Balibar, Naoki Sakai, Prasenjit Duara, Pheng Cheah, Anne Cheng, Naoko Shibusawa, Eva Illouz, and others), on topics such as imperialism and empire, nationhood, area studies, cultural authority and sovereignty, aesthetic representation, the rise of therapeutic discourse, and more.
LIT690S-02 Darkness^
Taught by Professor Zakiyyah Jackson
T 10:05am – 12:35pm
Branson 202
This course investigates the concept and phenomenon of darkness in relation to, and in distinction from, blackness, shadow, obscurity, blindness, invisibility, and opacity as ideas and experiences. We will trace the development, and complex nature, of dualist, kaleidoscopic, and gradational representational frameworks pertaining to darkness in the history of transnational literary and filmic narrative form and contexts. Exploring the evolving role of color and form as elemental forces in global artistic, cultural imaginations will enable us to identify their dynamic inextricability with historical relational hierarchies in U.S. society pertaining to race, complexion, gender, class, ability, and national origin. Course thematics will include the interrelation of vision and dreamscapes, fantasy and illusion, chromaticity and blanching, transparency and opaqueness, absence and presence, and part and whole.
LIT690S-4-01 Water & Media^
Taught by Professor Negar Mottahedeh
TH 8:30 – 11:00am
Classroom Building Room 106
This seminar explores the "elemental turn" in the humanities, drawing on foundational works in literature, film and media studies. Elemental thinking links media studies to infrastructural and ecological phenomena, including mines, oceans, and the clouds, underscoring the fact that media, whether analog or digital are not essential but relational and transformative; media create bonds, transmute, and affect change. Our discussions in this seminar will underscore that the strength of elemental thinking lies in its ability to destabilize and expand existing environmental thinking, offering new perspectives on infrastructure, hardware, and molecular transitions.
LIT836S Freudo-Marxism^
Taught by Professor Cate Reilly
TH 10:05am – 12:35pm
Friedl 225
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. We address two major questions: (1) Do theories of the psyche (psychoanalytic and beyond) have consequences for society at large, or are their conclusions limited to the individual/family? (2) What possibilities does a joint reading of Marx and Freud open for such concepts as cruelty, exploitation, and domination? For freedom?
LIT890S-01 Putting it Together: Jazz & Literature^
Taught by Professor Maya Kronfeld
F 11:45am – 2:15pm
Biddle 104
An advanced seminar for graduate students interested in working at the intersection of Black music studies and verbal art (fiction and poetry). We will combine hands-on musical analysis with literary and theoretical exploration, with an emphasis on critical writings by jazz practitioners past and present.
Artists include Mary Lou Williams, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Carmen McRae, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Art Taylor, Elvin Jones, Ahmad Jamal, Abbey Lincoln, John & Alice Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Henry Threadgill, Keith Jarrett, Lenora Helm, Thomas Taylor , Esperanza Spaulding, Georgia Anne Muldrow, KING / Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Eudora Welty, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas, Toni Morrison, Eugene Redmond, Nathaniel Mackey, Abiodun Oyewole, Harmony Holiday, Aja Monet
A background in either music or literature is required (but not both). The course will also feature guest musicians and poets.