Fall 2024 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Magic: Spirituality in Late Capitalism (33920)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/03/2024 - 12/11/2024Thu 02:30PM - 05:00PMUMTC, East Bank
- Enrollment Status:
- Closed (10 of 10 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- In the modern West, magic is traditionally relegated to the ancient past and tied to the customs and belief-structures of archaic societies. On this view, invocations of magic are invocations of the supernatural, the logic of which cannot be fully grasped or understood. But how has magic persisted and evolved in the era of late capitalism? Since 1940, despite the rising tide of science, technology, and secularism, the concept of magic lives on in new terrains of global spirituality, philosophies of life, the ineffable, the unknown, the alien and the paranormal, and the broad framework of what has been termed "the New Age." In this seminar, we will undertake a broad multidisciplinary investigation of the concept of magic in the era of late capitalism. Our readings will range from Marxism to psychoanalysis, anthropology, religious studies, intellectual history, and popular culture. This course is team-taught with Aisha Ghani (Anthropology/Religious Studies)
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/33920/1249
Spring 2024 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Silent Cinema for Today (67774)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/16/2024 - 04/29/2024Tue 02:30PM - 05:00PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 135
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (7 of 30 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- Have you ever seen a silent movie? In films made over a century ago, magicians juggle their own heads while playing the banjo, teenage pranksters electrocute the police, and hashish smokers are visited by tiny nicotine fairies. Over 80% of all silent films are lost forever. Miraculously, thousands of beautiful, weird, incredible silent films do survive, and they are enjoying a popular global resurgence in 2023! There are archival silent film festivals all over the world where viewers flock to see new restorations of 35mm film prints projected with live musical accompaniment. In this class, we will study the history of silent-era filmmaking (1890s-1920s) and its vast afterlife in the present, with a focus on its relevance for media culture and social politics today. We will watch promiscuously across a range of genres and movements. We will explore the art of silent film gesture, the emergence of narrative film language, the work of archival film preservation, the craft of musical accompaniment, and the revival of silent film fan cultures in the twenty-first century.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/67774/1243
Fall 2023 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Carceral Media (33594)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3-4 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/05/2023 - 12/13/2023Tue 04:00PM - 06:30PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 325
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (11 of 20 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- This course explores the the carceral logics of media culture. We examine the prison as a subject of mediation, a site of media-making, and an institution that gives shape to modes of surveillance and control that are increasingly intertwined with cultural technologies and media forms. The course will be discussion-based with screenings.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/33594/1239
Fall 2023 | CSCL 5910 Section 002: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Economies of Music (33747)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3-4 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/05/2023 - 12/13/2023Wed 02:00PM - 04:30PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 135
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (11 of 20 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- Under capitalism, musical content creation, performance, recording and audio reproduction technologies overlap with one another in complex and contradictory ways. In this course we'll discuss various approaches to the labor of music making, the intricate histories between musical production and technology, the emergence of music as a commodity (published, recorded, performed, licensed, streamed) and the widespread evolution of the global music industry. This course will take a Marxist perspective on the economies of music and launch into broader conversation about income inequality, intersectional analysis, vocational vs. avocational labor and ultimately, the medium - and long-term viability of the capitalist mode of production itself.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/33747/1239
Spring 2023 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Advanced Literary Theory and Criticism (68220)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3-4 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/17/2023 - 05/01/2023Tue 05:00PM - 07:30PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 135
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (7 of 15 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68220/1233
Fall 2022 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Gender, Race, and Mediumship (34165)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- A-F only
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Meets With:
- COMM 5110 Section 001
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/06/2022 - 12/14/2022Tue, Thu 02:30PM - 03:45PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 135
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (12 of 13 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- From spirit photography to Deepfakes and TikTok, all popular media promise to deliver us into a different realm. But when does suspending our disbelief transform our very perception of material reality and what's possible? This class will explore the gender and racial politics of mediumship broadly defined: as both technological mediation and undead communication. We will focus on US history and popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present day. Readings will include cultural theory, social history, and speculative ethnography, and viewings will span cinema, television, photography, video games, and viral videos.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34165/1229
Fall 2022 | CSCL 5910 Section 002: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Ukrainian and East European Film and Literature (34322)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3-4 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Meets With:
- SLAV 3900 Section 001SLAV 5900 Section 001
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/06/2022 - 12/14/2022Mon 02:00PM - 04:30PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 135
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (7 of 17 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34322/1229
Fall 2020 | CSCL 5910 Section 002: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Critical Debates in Comparative Literature (34089)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- Completely Online
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/08/2020 - 12/16/2020Wed 02:30PM - 05:00PMOff CampusUMN REMOTE
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (10 of 25 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?CSCL5910+Fall2020 This course is completely online in a synchronous format. The course will meet online at the scheduled times.
- Class Description:
Since their "first" appearances in Noël and de Laplace (France, 1816) and in Goethe (Germany, 1827), comparative literature and its corollary, world literature, have defied easy definition: a problem, perhaps, all to the good. In this seminar, we will confront questions that have vexed the discipline from the start. If the act of comparison presupposes both the similarity and the dissimilarity of two things, what does it mean to "compare" literatures or to study "comparative" literature? If comparison establishes equivalence between two things only to claim the superiority of one over the other; or to mask the inequality of one and the other; or to erase the uniqueness of each, what are its measures, and its ethics? How do we liberate--can we liberate--comparative literature from the tautological tyranny of difference and likeness? Our approach in this seminar will be transhistorical. After a look at foundational problems of comparison (Radhakrishnan, Mignolo, Spivak, Derrida), we will probe the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century roots of modern comparative and world literature, criss-crossing Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. At each turn, we will interleave post-World War II, postcolonial, and contemporary reinterpretations of the meaning, method, and compass of the field. We will focus on three axes of critical debate: 1) historicity, scientism, and the literary (Chasles, Shackford, Gayley, Posnett, Melas, Liu, Bhattacharya, Griffiths); 2) markets and literary circulation (Goethe, Marx, Tagore, Zheng [via Tsu], Damrosch, Casanova, Moretti, Tiwari, Mufti); and 3) philology and un/translatability: the openings and impasses--across languages, literatures/oratures, and old/new media--that wrinkle unified worlds with difference (al-Ṭahṭāwī, Meltzl de Lomnitz, Auerbach, Said, Ahmed, Allan, Kilito, Apter, Gikandi, Ngũgĩ, Glissant). Along the way, we will connect big-picture questions to literary texts. In class discussions and in papers, you are encouraged to relate your interests to key debates. By the end of this seminar, we will come away with a sharper sense of the history of our field; its constant restatement of the relationship of the "literary" to geopolitics, science, other media, and linguistic and economic exchange; and its struggle to replace a Eurocentric worldview with a polycentric vision.
- Who Should Take This Class?:
- This class is open to both advanced undergraduates (majors and non-majors) and graduate students (across fields). There are no prerequisites.
- Learning Objectives:
- 1) to understand the foundations and the futures of the discipline of comparative literature and its place in the interdisciplinary humanities and sciences2) to explore past and present modes of defining, "doing," or reimagining comparative or world literature across a range of cultural contexts3) to analyze and critique the assumptions and the politics that underpin the terms "comparative," "world," and "literature"
- Grading:
- 20% Class Participation (includes mandatory attendance, two mandatory office hours, three 500-word posts to Canvas, contributions to discussion)20% In-Class Oral Presentation and Handout25% Paper #1 (midterm paper, undergraduates only)25% Paper #2 (final paper, undergraduates only; will take the place of a final exam)10% Paper #1 + Paper #2 Proposals (undergraduates only)10% Final Paper Prospectus (graduate students only)50% Final Paper (graduate students only)
- Exam Format:
- There will be no final examination; the final paper will take its place.
- Class Format:
- 30% Lecture
50% Discussion
20% Student Presentations - Workload:
- Up to 100-150 pages of reading per week20 pages of writing per term1-2 paper(s)1 presentationGraduate students will write one formal 20-page seminar paper; undergraduates will write two formal 8- to 10-page papers. In both cases, students will submit 2-page proposals/prospectuses for their papers in advance of the respective deadlines, in the interest of developing strong thesis statements and supporting arguments. All students will give one in-class group oral presentation and will be expected to post three 500-word responses to Canvas, on assigned readings of their choosing, over the course of the semester.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34089/1209
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 9 September 2020
Fall 2020 | CSCL 5910 Section 003: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Media Madness: Hysteria, Anxiety, and Contagion (34856)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 32 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- Completely Online
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/08/2020 - 12/16/2020Thu 02:30PM - 05:00PMOff CampusUMN REMOTE
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (11 of 25 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?CSCL5910+Fall2020 This course is completely online in a synchronous format. The course will meet online at the scheduled times.
- Class Description:
- Is the media gaslighting us to feel like we're all "going mad" for attempting to envision a different kind of world? This course will consider the media dynamics of catastrophic pandemics, emphasizing their dually therapeutic and anxiety-inducing roles to raise public health awareness and to sow disinformation and panic. We will study a variety of pandemics, both real and imagined - from the medieval bubonic plague to the 1518 Dancing Plague; from influenza outbreak to the Tanganyika laughter epidemic; and from AIDS, SARS, and Covid-19 to Gulf War Syndrome, the history of hysteria, and the symptomology of "fake news." Above all, this course is about the dialectic between transformative political consciousness and exploitative media spectacle that circulates around the lures & dangers of "madness." When is the accusation of madness a way of foreclosing the potentiality to envision a different kind of world? And when is it a vital critique affirmed by science to pull the brakes on conspiracy-mongering, far-right authoritarianism, and capitalism's apocalyptic drive toward predatory development & unending resource extraction? And what kind of radical vocabulary can fields like critical disability studies offer us for complicating the terms in which we imagine and debate all of the above? Readings will include works by Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Elaine Showalter, Antonin Artaud, and Therí A. Pickens. Multi-media screenings will run the gamut from dystopian horror cinema, to television news coverage and political satire, to Covid memes and quarantine TikTok videos.
- Who Should Take This Class?:
- This class is open to both advanced undergraduates (majors and non-majors) and graduate students (across fields). There are no prerequisites.
- Learning Objectives:
- To imagine otherwise through passionate but focused critique.
- Grading:
- Learning is its own reward.
- Exam Format:
- No exams.
- Class Format:
- Synchronous Zoom meetings (during scheduled class time) will consist of group discussion, presentations, and collective viewings. Accessibility is also paramount--anyone with difficulty securing reliable internet access and private space during class meetings is welcome and will be accommodated.
- Workload:
- Weekly readings and viewings; Zoom presentations; a creative multi-media project; and students will have the option of writing 1 longer seminar paper at the end of the semester OR a midterm paper + shorter final paper.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34856/1209
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 31 July 2020
Fall 2019 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Theories of the Other: Alterity and Representation (34282)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/03/2019 - 12/11/2019Tue, Thu 11:15AM - 12:30PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 325
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (9 of 20 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- This course presents an interdisciplinary exploration of alterity and representation. It addresses themes of otherness and difference in the disciplines of philosophy, history, cinema, and literature. We will examine the strategies by which demarcations between Self and Other and corollary distinctions between high/low, First World/Third World, local/global, and masculine/feminine, are produced and deployed in various discursive formations. Readings will (1) take up the question of how the Other is imagined and constituted by Western forms of knowledge production; and (2) examine the possibilities for the Other's reformulation of dominant ideas about historical and political subjectivity. (Lecture-discussion; two papers; some familiarity with basic semiotic concepts and vocabulary is assumed.)
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34282/1199
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 8 November 2010
Fall 2018 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- The Soviet Avant-Garde (34960)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/04/2018 - 12/12/2018Tue 01:00PM - 03:30PMUMTC, East BankArmory Building 202
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (13 of 25 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?CSCL5910+Fall2018
- Class Description:
- In the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a diverse group of artists, philosophers, musicians, filmmakers, architects and writers worked to radically transform the cultural landscape of the newly socialized Soviet state and produce a fundamentally modern world. This course will first examine the height of the modernist Soviet avant-garde between the 1910s and 1920s up until its illegalization by Stalinist forces in the early 1930s. We will then place this diverse philosophical and aesthetic movement in trans-national and trans-historical contexts to understand its influence on movements ranging from African American dissident literature to Soviet nonconformist art between Khrushchev's "thaw" and Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. We will closely read texts across various media to interrorgate concepts such as formalism, ideology, (socialist) realism, freedom of expression, and the nation. The course will include texts across media and from a variety of authors such as Eisenstein, Rodchenko, Mayakovsky, Zamyatin, Shostakovich, Groys, Boym, Komar and Melamid, Popova, and Kollantai. Movements to be considered include cosmism, constructivism, futurism, and others. Students will have the opportunity to present on class readings and write critical research essays.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34960/1189
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 20 April 2018
Spring 2018 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- The Animal in Literature and Philosophy (52588)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/16/2018 - 05/04/2018Wed 06:20PM - 08:50PMUMTC, East BankFolwell Hall 122
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (11 of 25 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/52588/1183
Fall 2017 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Sound Studies (35657)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3-4 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/05/2017 - 12/13/2017Mon, Wed 04:00PM - 05:15PMUMTC, East BankFolwell Hall 31
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- What is sound? And among the various ways of absorbing the world through the senses (reading, looking, watching, tasting, touching), what is unique to the actions of listening and hearing? Sound Studies is a fast developing interdisciplinary field that brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences who engage sound as an object of study. The new field is in part linked to the study of music, but its disciplinary linkages range widely. Anthropology, geography, sociology, languages and literatures, art history, philosophy, history, cinema and media studies, ethnic studies, psychology, and theater, dance, and performance studies all fall within the range of sound studies insofar as sound is taken to be a central object of concern. This course will provide advanced undergraduates and graduates students with a comprehensive introduction to this ongoing interdisciplinary area of international research. The syllabus is structured around Jonathan Sterne's recently published Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) as well as the recently published book Keywords in Sound (Duke University Press, 2015). We will cover a diverse range of materials from philosophical chapters on sound and phenomenology, to cultural histories of gender and telephones, psychoanalytic theories of the voice, close critical analysis of the social diffusion of mobile media technologies, and cutting age approaches to music and sound art.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/35657/1179
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 3 November 2015
Spring 2017 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Science and Scientism in The Humanities (68112)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3-4 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Meets With:
- ENGL 5090 Section 001
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017Tue 05:30PM - 08:00PMUMTC, East BankLind Hall 207A
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- Topic: Science and Scientism in The Humanities
- Class Description:
- This course will question the effects of the natural sciences on the humanities, especially recently, but also historically. We will study the public and media devaluation of the humanities, the deference to the sciences, and the assumption that there is nothing uniquely "scientific" about the humanities themselves. Also, and more significantly, we will explore the tendency by humanists (literary critics, artists, philosophers and social theorists) to defer to the claims of science: its evidentiary models, its futurisms, its speculative materialism. We will be interested as well in counter-trends: the critique of scientism, for example; resistance to technological or instrumental reason, to a pure productivity without negation, to the death of the subject, and the rhetoric of "being," which is almost everywhere today. We will discuss the many forms of scientism in the humanities: thing theory, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism; object-oriented philosophy, the neo-positivism of distant reading, and the digital humanities. If Julien de la Mettrie in eighteenth-century France regarded man as a self-moving machine, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, calls for "strip[ping] the human sciences of any hermeneutic privilege and assign[ing] the position of chief importance to technoscience, the history of which he equates with Being." Scientism, in short, has a long history.But there is another side of the coin. The sciences are more and more reliant on ideas taken from the humanities without acknowledgement - the "Big Bang," for example, "the God particle," the "selfish gene." The infiltration of the sciences by the humanities (again, without acknowledgement) is explored in the work of many of the most celebrated theorists of science in practice: viz, Ian Hacking (Historical Ontology and The Emergence of Probability) and Paul Feyerabend, Against Method. We will assess these trends, explore what is methodologically unique to the humanities, weigh the meaning of the word "materialist," discuss the politics of scientism, and think about the reasons for its current prominence. It would have been possible to find relevant readings from many genres: novels, criticism, manifestoes. But for reasons of time, we will concentrate on position pieces, methodological inquiries, and histories of science and the humanities in order to cover as much territory as possible. There are a number of important works on our theme, obviously, that we will not be able to consider. Time permitting, I will be supplying you with supplementary bibliographies to point you in the direction of relevant work by: Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Francis Bacon, Benedict de Spinoza, Rene Descartes, G. W. Leibniz, Giambattista Vico, William Blake, Auguste Comte, Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, J. D. Bernal, Douglas Hofstadter, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruno Latour, Henri Atlan, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Stanislaw Lem, R. F. Georgy, and others.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68112/1173
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 30 September 2016
Spring 2016 | CSCL 5910 Section 002: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Sound Studies (68407)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/19/2016 - 05/06/2016Mon, Wed 04:45PM - 06:00PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 325
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?mgallope+CSCL5910+Spring2016
- Class Description:
- What is sound? And among the various ways of absorbing the world through the senses (reading, looking, watching, tasting, touching), what is unique to the actions of listening and hearing? Sound Studies is a fast developing interdisciplinary field that brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences who engage sound as an object of study. The new field is in part linked to the study of music, but its disciplinary linkages range widely. Anthropology, geography, sociology, languages and literatures, art history, philosophy, history, cinema and media studies, ethnic studies, psychology, and theater, dance, and performance studies all fall within the range of sound studies insofar as sound is taken to be a central object of concern. This course will provide advanced undergraduates and graduates students with a comprehensive introduction to this ongoing interdisciplinary area of international research. The syllabus is structured around Jonathan Sterne's recently published Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) as well as the recently published book Keywords in Sound (Duke University Press, 2015). We will cover a diverse range of materials from philosophical chapters on sound and phenomenology, to cultural histories of gender and telephones, psychoanalytic theories of the voice, close critical analysis of the social diffusion of mobile media technologies, and cutting age approaches to music and sound art.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68407/1163
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 3 November 2015
Spring 2015 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Art and Space (60036)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- Instructor Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Meets With:
- ARTS 5490 Section 003
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/20/2015 - 05/08/2015Tue, Thu 01:00PM - 02:15PMUMTC, West BankRegis Center for Art W257
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- Topic prereq - Instructor Consent. Contact John Archer at archer@umn.edu for permission.
- Class Description:
- Space is neither a constant nor a uniform thing. People conceptualize, understand, fashion, and utilize the spaces in which we all live, in distinct and varied ways, the diversity of which becomes especially apparent when examined across time and disciplines. Writings that tackle the question of space are constantly present throughout the history of humankind; to examine them critically is to examine the very nature of culture and society as they have been formed and changed over time. One of the principal ways in which people have explored what space is, how it works, and how to understand it, is through the production and dissemination of art. In many respects artists are at the forefront of articulating the means and media by which people and society construct, and engage with, space - and in turn shape the contours and parameters of society itself. One primary goal of this class is to obtain a sense of several principal strands of spatial thinking that have come to inform our present culture; and to inquire into the interests that they serve and sustain. To this end we will undertake a number of readings drawn from various disciplines, including anthropology, architecture, geography, history, landscape design, philosophy, planning, and sociology. In order to afford a focused critique of our own spatiality, within the confines of a single semester, our readings will concentrate on just the Western Enlightenment heritage from Locke to the early 21st century (including, among others, Bachelard, Heidegger, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lefebvre, de Certeau, and hooks). We will examine these readings in dialog with specific works of art and architecture; examples will range from medieval altarpieces, Renaissance cityscapes, Alberti, Durer, and Vermeer, to urban parkour and BurningMan, with emphasis along the way on Minimalism, Land Art / Earth Art, the Light and Space Movement, and their more recent offshoots. The payoffs include a heightened insight not only into the import and implications of certain foundational texts, but also an enhanced understanding of the stakes and consequences involved in artistic and architectural production - and how the interplay of one with the other affords a constant reshaping and multiplication of the spatial foundations of human culture and society.
- Grading:
- 50% Reports/Papers
50% Special Projects - Class Format:
- 30% Lecture
50% Discussion
10% Small Group Activities
10% Student Presentations Percentages will be adjusted according to the class dynamic as the semester proceeds. - Workload:
- 75 Pages Reading Per Week
1 Paper(s)
1 Presentation(s)
1 Special Project(s)
Other Workload: Students will write a research paper OR undertake an artistic project. Students will also be expected to do 1-2 presentations during the semester. - Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/60036/1153
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 29 October 2014
Fall 2014 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Authors and Their Critics (23880)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3-4 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Delivery Medium
- Meets With:
- ENGL 5510 Section 002
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/02/2014 - 12/10/2014Tue, Thu 11:15AM - 12:30PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 355
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- There are a number of examples in literary criticism in which a critic gets so deeply into an author that the result is a collaboration, and the work of art and the art of criticism are mutually displayed in a reading of each. At times a critic, in other words, interpreting a novel or poem, composes a work that rivals its object. The critical work may even be longer, or have taken more time to write, than the work of art itself. How often do we study this relationship? What can we learn about the art of literary criticism by examining in depth, and at length, the original work of art alongside its critical response, often itself a tour de force? The idea is to explore the art of criticism at its limits, pairing single works with single works of criticism of single works. I am drawn to those cases where critics have written long and involved books, not just on single authors, but on a single work by one author. To pore over them alongside the work itself is to learn the art of criticism and fiction at once. A possible reading list pairings includes Pierre Bourdieu's The Rules of Art and Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education; Roberto Schwarz's Master on the Periphery of Capitalism and Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas; Walter Ben Michaels' The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carry; Fredric Jameson's Brecht and Method and Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle; Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies of Value and a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets; Jean Franco's The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence and Cesar Vallejo, Poemas Humanos. Requirements: One short theme essay, and a final essay of 15-20 pages.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/23880/1149
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 2 April 2014
Spring 2014 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Understanding Kant (66944)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Meets With:
- GER 5610 Section 001PHIL 5760 Section 001
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/21/2014 - 05/09/2014Tue, Thu 02:30PM - 03:45PMUMTC, East BankFolwell Hall 112
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- The work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is widely considered as marking a new era in Western thought. Kant himself considered his critical philosophy a "Copernican revolution": it reversed entirely and counter-intuitively the relation of subject and world. According to Kant, we recognize the world, and we experience objects as beautiful or certain actions as moral not because of their objective qualities, but because of our subjective capacities. In other words, the world conforms to us, not the other way round. Yet should this prove to be true, the consequences would be severe. More than a few of Kant's contemporaries were plunged into deep crisis through an encounter with his critical philosophy. This course will provide an introduction to Kant's philosophy. Through lectures, close readings and group work we will reconstruct themes, motifs and arguments of Kant's thinking, drawing on the three major critical works as well as on earlier, less known philosophical essays. You will eventually be able not only to comprehend (yet hopefully not re-live) the sense of crisis that came along with Kant's philosophy, but also understand its lasting impact.
- Grading:
- 50% Reports/Papers
50% Class Participation - Class Format:
- 60% Lecture
20% Discussion
20% Small Group Activities - Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66944/1143
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 26 December 2013
Spring 2014 | CSCL 5910 Section 002: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Masters: Ford and Hawks (66945)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Delivery Medium
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/21/2014 - 05/09/2014Thu 02:30PM - 05:15PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 315
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- The course focuses on the films of the great American directors John Ford and Howard Hawks. We will study the directors' different and at times intersecting filmmaking methods and how style shaped and was shaped by the cultural, historical, artistic, and political changes that took place in pre- and post-war America to define a drama that captures the conscious of the times. We will look how each filmmaker approached different genres: comedy (Bringing Up Baby/Donovan's Reef), drama (Four Sons/How Green Was My Valley/Only Angels Have Wings), noir (The Informer/The Big Sleep) and the western (The Searchers/Red River/Rio Bravo/The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). We will also study their relationship to realism, spectacle, and melodrama, as well as to literary, artistic, and musical figures and examine how their films explore the human condition.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66945/1143
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 9 December 2013
Spring 2014 | CSCL 5910 Section 003: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Neorealist Cinema (66946)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Delivery Medium
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/21/2014 - 05/09/2014Mon 01:25PM - 04:45PMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 325
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- Indissolubly associated with the shoestring, newsreel-like aesthetic that characterized the movement's emergence in 1940s Italy, neorealist cinema is, Roberto Rossellini once stated, ?above all, a moral position from which to look at the world. It then became an aesthetic position, but at the beginning it was moral.? Similarly, the French film critic Andre Bazin characterized the neorealist outlook on the world as a simultaneous ?love and rejection of reality.? ?The recent Italian films,? Bazin writes, ?are at least prerevolutionary. They all reject implicitly or explicitly, with humor, satire or poetry, the reality they are using, but they know better, no matter how clear the stand taken, than to treat this reality as a medium or a means to an end. To condemn it does not of necessity mean to be in bad faith. They never forget that the world is, quite simply, before it is something to be condemned.? Taking its cue from Rossellini's and Bazin's statements, this course approaches neorealism as a category that entangles ethics and aesthetics, phenomenology and ontology, politics and religion, and art and reality. The course will begin by investigating neorealism's conditions of emergence in fascist Italy. It will proceed to study some of the most iconic films of Italian neorealism. We will watch and analyze films by Rossellini Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe de Santis, Vittorio de Sica, as well as by filmmakers whose early works were rooted in neorealism and who developed, and in doing so took neorealism, in different directions, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the last weeks of the course we will also investigate the heritage of neorealism, in French new wave cinema?we will look at the examples of Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers, which was based on a screenplay by Roberto Rossellini, and Le Mepris, a loose remake of Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia?and in the ?new realist? tendency, ?less a style than an impulse,? that we find in contemporary world cinema. In that context we will discuss films by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, as well as by Jia Zhangke. Throughout the semester, we will relate these films to both historical and theoretical engagements with neorealism (and new realism). These include texts by Andre Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, Noa Steimatsky, Angelo Restivo, Millicent Marcus, Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, and Lauren Berlant.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66946/1143
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 3 January 2014
Spring 2014 | CSCL 5910 Section 004: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Alternative Media (66947)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Delivery Medium
- Meets With:
- ARTH 5413 Section 001
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/21/2014 - 05/09/2014Mon, Wed 01:00PM - 02:15PMUMTC, West BankBlegen Hall 220
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66947/1143
Fall 2013 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Photography in Other Media (30664)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- A-F only
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Delivery Medium
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/03/2013 - 12/11/2013Tue, Thu 09:45AM - 11:00AMUMTC, East BankNicholson Hall 135
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- "German Cinema" is usually perceived of as three labels and ten films. There is Weimar Cinema, mainly of the 1920s, with films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, M and Metropolis. There is the West German New Cinema, mainly of the 1970s with films such as The Marriage of Maria Braun, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and Redupers. And there are the East German DEFA Films, also of the 1970s, which include I was Nineteen, The Legend of Paul and Paula, and Traces of Stones. Since then, four more films have been made: Run Loa Run, The Edukators, The Lives of Others and Good Bye, Lenin! Currently, we see a new label in the making: Berlin School, created by those eager to group together a number of German films made since 2000. Films such as Ghosts, Sleeper, This Very Moment, Vacation, and Marseille. Our class will introduce these films and analyze the fantasies and effects that go along with their label. What are the aesthetic strategies of these films? What are their production and distribution strategies? Why does one draw on the concept of national branding within the context of European film and current global film production? How do these films relate to other films under different labels and cinemas such as New Austrian Cinema, Nouvelle Vague, or World Cinema. The class will be taught as a short course in the month of October. It is the starting point of the CGES teaching and research collaboration, "National Branding in Contemporary European Cinema," between the Universities of Minnesota, Bremen and Frankfurt and will be co-taught by faculty from all three institutions. As part of the class, award-winning director Benjamin Heisenberg will present his most recent film The Robber at the Walker Art Center on October 27th (co-presented by the Walker Art Center). Heisenberg will also attend one of our class meetings on October 28th. Next year, a sequel to this course will be taught simultaneously as an interactive television class on the campuses of the UofM, the University of Bremen, and the University of Frankfurt.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/30664/1139
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 5 October 2010
Spring 2013 | CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Figure of the Stranger: Readings in World Lit (59464)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Delivery Medium
- Meets With:
- ENGL 5090 Section 003
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/22/2013 - 05/10/2013Thu 03:35PM - 06:05PMUMTC, East BankLind Hall 325
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Description:
- The stranger leaves and enters space without appearing to alter it. Not necessarily alien (darker than others, speaking a different language, misunderstood), the stranger nevertheless has no home. S/he wanders even as s/he stays, the victim of restlessness and disgust, but always a certain clarity about being alone in a crowd. Is this the paradigm of the artist? Does the artist play the role of the alien, the foreign, the pariah, standing in for the real-life outcasts? Is art by its very nature about representing those on the social margins, or pretending to live there? This will be an introduction to world literature and to the basic methods of comparative literary study. We will discuss the origins of comparative literature ? that is, the study of literature written in a variety of languages ? and explore how it differs from studying ?English.? We will concentrate on reading literary texts in this course, and mastering some of the classics of world literature. We will read two lengthy classics (an epic and a novel,), the work of the early 20th-century Chinese short-story writer, Lu Hsun, the poems of Naguid Bargouti, and we may read a novella by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. We will also read selections from Erich Auerbach's Mimesis ? one of the central critical texts of the 20th century. This schedule will allow us to examine at a leisurely pace some of the problems of literary form, and the way that form is conditioned by place, culture, and situation. Our primary task will be to develop a vocabulary and a set of critical options for the close reading of imaginative texts, and we will mostly be involved in basic literary interpretation. Our looking at narrative, representation, translation, genre, and figural language will give way to a questioning of another sort ? one that places literary form itself in a world context. Comparative literature has undergone a decisive change in recent decades. Students of English, cultural studies, and national literatures have all been influenced to various degrees by new scholarship on colonialism, postcoloniality, and transnational systems of value. How does all of this affect literature? Is there such a thing as a world literature? What happens to comparative literature when forced to confront the world outside Europe and the United States? I have structured the course around the theme of the stranger because it evokes so many different ? often antagonistic ? meanings. It marks in many ways the passage from a European bohemian, artist-as-outcast, view of literature to the more literal and politically potent concept of the ?foreign? or ?alien? implied by the contact of peoples on a world scale. The syllabus itself suggests the different ways the ?stranger? might be understood in The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Lu Hsun and Dostoevsky.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/59464/1133
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 9 October 2012
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