Category: Archive courses

This course asks what makes social policies and institutions ethically acceptable, primarily through a discussion about justice and injustice. Topics may include: cultural relativism, the sources of competing conceptions of justice and equality, cost-benefit analysis, distributive justice, and beneficence.

In this course we will look at various theories of tragedy for purposes of distinguishing it from what Walter Benjamin considered the specifically modern predicament of absolute immanence as depicted in the Baroque mourning play.  In a post-Reformation world in which deeds don’t matter, tragedy is no longer up to the mimetic task prescribed by Aristotle.  Instead, the mourning play, in which the sovereign has no access to an absolute to legitimate his decisions, makes of the hero an anti-hero, of the world a valley of tears.  In that respect, we will also read Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play as a diagnosis of modernity and its ailments. 
We will begin, however, with Plato’s Ion in which ontology is juxtaposed with the constant becoming that goes nowhere or an  “Iontology.”  We will then interrogate Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly for its understanding of catharsis and mimesis.  What assumptions about the world underlie the Aristotelian notion of tragedy?  After reading Antigone we will jump to Hegel’s reflections on that play and tragedy overall in The Aesthetics: How does Hegel come to think of tragedy as something that has been overcome or rendered obsolete?  Next, we will turn to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy to understand how Nietzsche rethinks the Greeks to wrest it from the delicacies that framed its appropriation by the German classics. 
More important, we will identify those aspects of Nietzsce’s text that underwrite Benjamin’s Mourning Play.  How does Benjamin refute the ahistorical claims of Nietzsche?  What distinguishes the mourning play from tragedy, the German mourning play from Calderon? To prepare ourselves for Benjamin’s work, we will read  Andreas Gryphius’s Leo Armenius along with Pedro Calderon’s Life is a Dream.  We will conclude the course by questioning what is it that allows for the sudden dialectical reversal at the end of Benjamin’s text.  Has the project succeeded in rupturing the immanence of modernity; has that constellation finally exhausted itself; is it possible now to imagine with Heine a time when capitalism is finally over?
Readings in German (translations of all texts will be available).  Discussion in English.

What makes for a “good” scholarly project in critical race studies, feminist and queer cultural studies? How does one define a project? What is doable? What methods do we use?
To address these questions, this course has students read a series of well-received first monographs in the field, looking back at the dissertations these projects emerged from and considering fellowship materials and proposals written to support these projects. We talk about how the projects are framed; we detail the questions that are posed; we consider various methodological approaches; and we read reviews of the work. Along the way, students get an overview to key, contemporary issues in the field.
Assignments include writing a book review (hopefully for publication) and a literature review. Students also prepare a presentation for one seminar.

What is literary history? Ask scholars and teachers of literature and you’ll get several conflicting answers. For some it’s the structuring principle of the discipline, defining areas of expertise for journals, conferences, and job ads. For others it’s a curricular problem to overcome, or a normative view of culture. As a body of knowledge, it consists of exemplary works that transcend their time and representative ones that must be understood in context. It is the development of the spirit or identity of a polity (such as a nation) and the coming-to-voice of the marginalized. It is the internal evolution of genre, form, or style and the external force of the sociopolitical world on writing.
This seminar is intended for graduate students whose interests in literature and/or culture lie primarily in the past (i.e., in the time before our own) and who desire a better understanding of (1) the fascination with literary history, from the pull our objects of study exert on our imaginations to the public’s enduring enthusiasm about the works of the past; (2) the literary-historical theories and methods that come down to us, including new historicism, cultural materialism, reader response, book history, historical formalism, and distant reading; and (3) what it means to be “historical” at a time of narrowing horizons for the humanities in U.S. higher education and public life. Readings will cross periods and disciplines and will include work by the foundational theorists of literary history (Nietzsche, Auerbach, Jameson, Gallagher, Greenblatt), the leading voices of the last two decades (Guillory, Dimock, Felski, Damrosch), and three recent monographs that will serve as case studies: Stephen Best’s None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, Ted Underwood’s Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change, and Carolyn Dinshaw’s How Soon is Now: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. In addition to writing a seminar paper and carrying out three short archival research exercises on a primary text of their choice, students will gain practical experience in academic publishing through behind-the-scenes editorial work at UW’s in-house journal, Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History.

This course takes a key area of concern in Black studies: What does it mean to be a human being? “Blackness,” as a modern social category, signifies the contradictory condition of being human while at the same time being the position of doubted humanity.
To examine this question – what does it mean to be Black and human? – some scholars have focused on the topic of “liberal humanism” and the discourses that constitute the proper subject of western modernity as the universal center of knowledge and power in the economy and politics. As scholars have observed, liberalism humanism, with its ideology of the free, self-possessive individual, continues to define what being human means in social, cultural, and political life. At the same time, legal and customary freedom and protection that liberalism promises to everyone equally are unequally defined.
Thus, liberal humanism’s contradictions – “liberty for all” yet unending bondage, “universal suffrage” yet routinized disenfranchisement – has prompted two related questions for scholars of Black studies: How has Black life been lived and experienced within the contradictory rationality of liberal humanism? And: How have Black subjects conceptualized alternative modes of being human? More specifically, what ways of being, knowing, and perceiving have been endemic to Black life?
In this course, we will consider how Black scholars and cultural producers have theorized Black life and subjectivity through ontological “forms” that reveal alternatively human possibilities. Thus, Black “flesh,” “animality,” “objecthood,” and “non-being,” in addition to the conventional categories of liberal humanism, will guide our consideration of Black studies as an intellectual project that elaborates on the historical possibility of alternative humanisms produced before and through settler colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and slavery’s long afterlife.      

Katherine Cummings
This seminar is designed to introduce you to an ongoing critical conversation and to offer points of departure that you might pursue in your own scholarship. Its starting points, on which we will touch down briefly, are Marx, Nietzche, and—time permitting—Freud. In reading them, we will home in on critical concepts and interpretive methods that late 20th and early 21st century theorists have engaged and transformed. Among them are Balibar, Benjamin, Butler, Hartman, Foucault, Lowe, and Spivak. Short—one page—critiques of assigned texts will be required (figure on eight); the objective of this writing assignment is to hone your skills in reading, summarizing and assessing critical arguments that you might well want to put to use in your graduate study. To facilitate this critical ngagement, you’ll each be asked to identify a problem or question that animates your study and a short set of additional texts that promise to address it. We will share these contributions and build upon them as you work in peer groups to craft a final 10 page essay. The subject/text of this paper will be up to you , but it must draw on the critical archive that we’ve assembled.
 

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” –Oscar Wilde
It is arguable that to be modern is to be in, or a, fashion. It is inarguable that modernists from Baudelaire to Woolf have been invested in fashion. “Fashion and Modernism” examines some aspects in the constellation of English and European sartorial culture circa the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s, with a few dips into America, accessories, and the contemporary moment. “Fashion” in this context means both clothing and style, and while a major motif of the course is the consumption of female fashion, we will also explore the history of the dandy, theories of ornamentation, emergent forms of urbanism, spatiality, and embodiment. Topics will include shopping/the rise of the department store; anti-ornament and anti-fashion; the flâneur/flâneuse; fashion of the historical avant-garde (Italian Futurism, Surrealism), and literary and visual archival instances foregrounding the fashion industry. Readings will range from the literary, the contextual, the theoretical, and the sociological(ish).
“F&M” is a reading-intensive seminar. Students will be responsible for one class presentation and a final paper employing historical material from the modernist era, for instance culling from a period Vogue.
NOTE: Students are strongly urged to have taken at least one previous course (whether in grad school or college) in British, American, or European modernism. The methodology will be an historical one focused on the specified time period; this class does not take contemporary fashion as its focus. Prior to the first class, have (re)read Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman” from After the Great Divide, and make a dent in Zola’s wonderful novel Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), in the Nelson translation (Oxford World Classics, ISBN 978-0199536900). This is summer reading at its greatest, by the way. All readings will be in English.

Freud remarks at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents that the “fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance in their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” Using this theme as the framework for our discussion, the seminar will consider how British modernist writers responded to the prevalent sense of cultural crisis during and following the Great War. The growth of psychoanalysis during this period –as an explanatory tool for both individual and social malaise– will be one focus of our attention. Others might be contemporary politics, anthropology, science, and popular culture, depending on interests of members of the seminar.
Texts: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, and Between the Acts, and selected poems by Yeats, Auden, Owen, Rosenberg and other World War One poets.

“The Architecture of Hurry”:  British Modernists Confronting “Modernity”
This seminar will consider how British writers during the first three decades of the twentieth century responded to the social, cultural, and technological changes that were rapidly transforming their lives. The prevalent belief that modern industrialized society was in a state of crisis intensified during the years leading up to the Great War, which intensified a mood of increasing anxiety about the future of civilization.   Virginia Woolf’s famous remark that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed,” suggests that the process of modernization had impacted interiority itself.  Significantly, for Woolf and other modernists, this awakening to a new world called for correspondingly new approaches to the writing of fiction and poetry, which we will explore through reading works by T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, and of course, by Woolf,  herself.
The emphasis on interiority that characterizes several of these works is paralleled by the growth of psychoanalysis during this period—as an explanatory tool for both individual and social malaise—and it will be one focus of our attention in this seminar.  Another will be on changing attitudes about class, sexuality, gender roles and family relationships.  Depending upon the interests of members of the seminar, we might also explore other issues in relation to these texts, such as the conflicted history of modernist canon formation, the significance of personal relationships and coteries in literary production, contemporary British politics, science, anthropology, and popular culture. 
Texts:
M. Forster, Howards End; D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow; Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems; Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point.

“The wilderness needs your whole attention,” wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder about human perils in 19th-century American prairielands: “Sadness is as dangerous as panthers and bears.” Since her lifetime, and however ironically, the perils of wilderness are no less complicated and various—physically, emotionally, spiritually, technologically, politically. 1n 1992, for example, within a few months of proudly walking solo into the Alaskan wilderness, Christopher McCandless died from a natural poison that he himself tragically harvested and ingested. In 2012, Sherry Turkle in Alone Together cast a skeptical eye on fervent techies who romanticize the Web’s “wilderness” as purely creative “otherness as thick as a jungle”–thus blinding themselves to possible dehumanizing consequences of inhabiting uncritically that landscape.
Then until now, creative writers as diverse as Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild), Cheryl Strayed (Wild), Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) and Andy Weir (The Martian) have weighed in variously on this wilderness critique, just as Sean Penn, Jean-Marc Vallée, Ethan and Joel Coen, and Ridley Scott have employed a variety of digital innovations to adapt those wilderness print narratives from print to screen, quite literally amplifying wilderness themes while diversifying audience receptivity.
The contemporary print representation and film adaptation of wilderness forms the focus of this course. Course texts will draw from a variety of literary genres and may include some of the following print and/or film adaptations: The Homesman, Away from Her, In the Bedroom, We Need to Talk about Kevin, The Social Network, Tracks, Up in the Air, Smoke Signals.
Requirements include: enthusiasm for the seminar topic; sometimes leading and always actively participating in class discussions of the print and film texts; a short annotated proposal and bibliography on your term-end research project; a class presentation of your research ideas; and the project itself, a 12-15 pp. scholarly research essay due at the seminar’s conclusion.
The course is intended for participants in a variety of disciplines spanning English graduate program’s literature/language/culture/theory/creative writing tracks.