ClassInfo - Spring 2017 Cultural Stdy/Comparative Lit Classes

Spring 2017 | CSCL 5833 Section 001: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche: Intellectual Foundations (68124)

Instructor(s): Timothy Brennan
Class Component:: Lecture
Credits:: 3 Credits
Grading Basis:: Student Option
Instructor Consent:: No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:: In Person Term Based
Times and Locations:: Regular Academic Session

01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017

Tue, Thu 11:15AM - 12:30PM

UMTC, East Bank

Nicholson Hall 110
Also Offered:: (Tentative) Spring 2025

Course Catalog Description:: Three thinkers who defined modernity: Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Central tenets of their thought/terms associated with their theories. Their careers portrayed against the background of their times; their place in intellectual history.
Class Description:: This course will attempt to give you grounding in the thinkers who helped define modernity: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. We will examine the central tenets of their thought, strive to define the terms associated with their theories, give a portrait of their careers as a whole (against the historical background of their times) and discuss their respective places in intellectual history, including their subsequent influences. Given the time we have, the course cannot hope to be comprehensive. It will from beginning to end be tantalizingly inadequate, and will at least, hopefully, set you off on your course of study by giving you direction, rather than bring it to completion. One is dealing here with a large and fluctuating body of work, whose later interpreters have been legion. The course should, however, be a good preparation for discussing intelligently what is meant by Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the Nietzschean tradition. Mode of Work: As we collectively work through these readings, each section begins with a ?global? perspective of their theories. The section on Freud, for example, will open with a recounting of the major features of his career in order to place him, intellectually and historically. We will then go on to characterize, collectively, the major features of his general theory, citing important or defining terms, trace the changes or refinements that his theory underwent, and attempt to account for his contribution by showing both what it was, and what it wasn't, within the human sciences. With this general vision firmly in view, we will then have time to go back to wrestle in more detail with a selection of his major work, dwelling on at least one longer work, and several shorter works (or sections of longer works.) The point of the procedure is both to show some of the range of thought, as well as the nuances of some of the key concepts. With some reluctance, I have structured the course chronologically so that it might become clearer who was taking what from whom, and who was reacting to the ideas of others. Both Freud and Nietzsche are in some ways responding to Marx, but in ways that have effectively repressed the latter's meanings. Hence, there is a special conceptual challenge to teaching Marx that argues for ending with him, rather than beginning with him. But I have decided more can be gained from chronology and we will reserve our more global retrospective about mutual influences for the review section at the end of the semester. Your grade will be based on faithful class attendance, class participation, and the results of three take-home essay tests -- one for each of the three sections of the course. Each of the tests will account for approx. 30% of your grade, with the remainder devoted to in-class performance.
Textbooks:: https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68124/1173
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:: 1 October 2013

ClassInfo Links - Spring 2017 Cultural Stdy/Comparative Lit Classes

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