3 classes matched your search criteria.
ENGL 5090 is also offered in Spring 2024
ENGL 5090 is also offered in Fall 2022
ENGL 5090 is also offered in Fall 2021
Spring 2017 | ENGL 5090 Section 001: Readings in Special Subjects -- Science and Scientism in the Humanities (51958)
- 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:
- Topics Course
- Meets With:
- CSCL 5910 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:
- General background preparation for advanced study. Diverse selection of literatures written in English, usually bridging national cultures and time periods. Readings specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?brenn032+ENGL5090+Spring2017
- 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/51958/1173
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 30 September 2016
Spring 2017 | ENGL 5090 Section 002: Readings in Special Subjects -- Writing About the Visual Arts (67158)
- Instructor(s)
- Ramon Gonzalez (Proxy)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Meets With:
- ENGW 5130 Section 001
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017Wed 03:35PM - 06:05PMUMTC, East BankLind Hall 207A
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- General background preparation for advanced study. Diverse selection of literatures written in English, usually bridging national cultures and time periods. Readings specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?gonza049+ENGL5090+Spring2017
- Class Description:
- This course is designed to create informal writing about the visual arts without having a background in arts criticism. Through poetry, short fiction, and essays, students will write about famous artworks of the past, contemporary movements, and their own work. The goal is to use the imagination, some knowledge of art, and personal experiences, to respond through visionary, original pieces that show how important art is to writing. Each student will complete a portfolio of writing in various genres and design an art project that will be shared with the class. Personal essays on art and ways of seeing will be read and discussed.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/67158/1173
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 27 September 2016
Spring 2017 | ENGL 5090 Section 003: Readings in Special Subjects -- Minnesota Poets (68490)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 4 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
- Topics Course
- Meets With:
- ENGW 5310 Section 001
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017Mon 04:40PM - 07:10PMUMTC, East BankLind Hall 207A
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- General background preparation for advanced study. Diverse selection of literatures written in English, usually bridging national cultures and time periods. Readings specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?spren001+ENGL5090+Spring2017
- Class Description:
- This course will focus on contemporary Minnesota poets and their editors and publishers, in conjunction with the discussion of student writing in a workshop environment. Poets whose work we will read and who will visit our class will be chosen from former classroom visitors, such as Michael Bazzett, Todd Boss, Jim Cihlar, Dobby Gibson, Patricia Kirkpatrick, Jim Moore, Kathryn Kysar, Matt Rasmussen, Lynette Reini-Grandell, Sun Yung Shin, and Jenny Willoughby. I may also choose other poets who live and work in this area. Editors and publishers will include Chris Fischbach (Coffee House Press), Jeff Shotts (Graywolf Press) and Daniel Slager (Milkweed Editions). They will meet with us to discuss the work of the poets they have edited and published as well as more general matters of manuscript submission, editing, marketing and publicity, and their individual press profiles. Classroom time will be divided between classroom visits and presentation and discussion of student writing.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68490/1173
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 19 October 2016
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