Spring 2018 Undergraduate Courses

Please check ALBERT for accurate course locations and meeting patterns.

 

Students must also register for Recitation 002 - 005. The course aims to introduce some thrilling aspects of reading and thinking in the void of achievement. We will explore the way literature exemplarily treats and exposes snags, flaws, addictive roller coaster itineraries, sexual confusion, rhetorical static, material abuse and gender trouble, permanent identity crises, the intrusive disruption of life’s narrative, forms of destructive pleasure, failing health and other disturbances that inflect the way we write and think and truck. Staying close to the texts in question, we will locate philosophical predicaments, cover-ups and distortions with which literature regularly contends, if according to covert maneuvers. All the while learning how to deconstruct, we will consider the way stupidity insinuates itself into themes of knowing, evades our cognitive scanners and becomes the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence. Promised: By the end of the class, you will have been able to comprehend this course description. Prepare to be reset!

Instructor: Professor Eduardo Matos-Martin

works and films that engage figures of social marginalization (the criminal, the poor, the delinquent, the drug addict, the prostitute, the “illegal” immigrant, the political outcast). With a particular focus on contemporary Europe and Latin America, we will address a wide range of topics, such as social exclusion, political violence, marginality, precarity, abandonment or poverty throughout the past century until the current moment of global economic crisis. Primary materials will be paired with texts by leading cultural and political thinkers working on questions of biopolitics, transatlantic studies, immigration, globalization, exclusion or violence.

Instructor: Professor Timothy Duffy

Writers of the Global Renaissance interrogated what the value and purpose of human emotions were. When, as a human, do we feel too much? When are our affective performances valuable evidence of devotion, both political and theological, and when are they disruptive, even revolutionary acts? This course will explore this through considering the works of Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Marguerite de Navarre, Sor Juana, John Donne, Robert Burton, the English Cavaliers, and, to conclude the course, Cervantes.

Instructor: Professor Vatulescu

What do we mean by document, documentary, and fiction? How have these concepts and their relationships changed through time? This course starts by considering the beginnings of documentary in literature, film, and the visual arts, from the controversial coining of the term in 1926. We will explore representative works from foundational moments in the evolution of documentary—the beginnings of the newsreel, Soviet and Nazi propaganda, American depression era documentary books, the cinéma-vérité movement, and the rise of autobiographical/personal documentary films, poetry, and archival art. How has the emergence of this new term and its development affected our other key concepts—document and fiction? What is the relationship between documentary modes and particular media and technologies—print, photography, cinema, video, and digital? Other topics include the role of the artist, indexicality and representation, literature as historical document, “fiction in the archives,” false documents and forgery, collage, illustration, and other uses of the document in twentieth century art. Critical and theoretical readings by Paula Amad, Eric Barnouw, Roland Barthes, Stella Bruzzi, Michel Foucault, Jane Gaines, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Johnson, Bill Nichols, Philip Rosen, Vivian Sobchack, Gayatri Spivak, Susan Sontag, Edward Said, Alan Sekula, Sven Spieker, Ann Stoler, Diana Taylor, and others.

Instructor: Professor Todd Foley

Mundane and nonspecific, everyday life has emerged as a central area of study through which the very understanding of culture may be questioned and re-imagined. Taken as an open and valueless category, and yet one that is already determined by networks of discursive and institutional power, everyday life seems to harbor within it the possibility of new forms of perceiving and feeling, and may even provide a vantage point to re-examine the nature of human existence. The goal of this class will be to bring theoretical perspectives on everyday life to the study of modern and contemporary Chinese culture. In a society that has undergone such dramatic and rapid transformations, we will aim to begin our critical inquiry on the level of the quotidian. While the field of Chinese cultural production has often been explicitly dominated by broad questions of history, politics, and the nation, we will not ignore these sorts of larger issues; rather, we will approach them by examining the contested arena of everyday life as it is registered in modern Chinese literature and film. Course materials will include theoretical selections, such as writings by Benjamin, Simmel, de Certeau, and Lefebvre, et al., along with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chinese works by figures like Lu Xun, Ding Ling, Wang Anyi, Jia Zhangke, and Zhang Yimou.

Instructor: Professor Mark Sanders

In our age of “new media,” in which most of the images that we see are digital, and transmitted to us by computers (including our smartphones), questions about automation have taken on an urgency perhaps unequalled since the advent of mechanization in industrial production.  Historically, the art form that has engaged most profoundly and critically with automation has been puppetry. Film, because of the automation of some of its basic processes, has both continued this engagement while raising new questions about its own workings. Recent work by Lev Manovich and Sean Cubitt has given greater historical weight than have past theorists to animated film. Taking this new theoretical emphasis as a starting point, our course centers around the charcoal-drawing-based animated films of South African artist William Kentridge in Nine Films: Drawings for Projection, and other films he has made. It moves from these films to a juxtaposition of his filmmaking with his collaborative work in puppetry with the Handspring Puppet Company, in order to provoke questioning about new media, medium specificity, animation, and automation. We shall pace Kentridge’s work in historical context, with reference to South Africa, but also to a genealogy of thinking about puppets (e.g. Heinrich von Kleist, Edward Gordon Craig), and multimedia performance (e.g. Richard Wagner on the Gesamtkunstwerk). Films by Dziga Vertov, Émile Cohl, and, of course Disney’s Pinocchio, will fill out our viewing list. Depending on what is on in New York City in the spring, we shall be on the look out for relevant puppet and/ or film performances to attend as a class.

Instructor: Professor Zakir Paul

This course examines leading discourses and representations of intelligence in various fields—from philosophy, psychology, and the history of science, to political theory, literature and cinema. Classic and contemporary texts will present us with evolutionary, anthropological, political, national, linguistic, and literary definitions of intelligence, allowing us to explore the nature and limits of the faculty both for individual subjects and political communities across time. Selected readings will include figures from the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Taine, Bergson), psychology (Galton, Godard, Binet) history of science (Daston, Gould, Carson), critical theory (Bourdieu, Kristeva, Malabou), AI (Dreyfus, Kurzweil) and film (Epstein, Bresson). Literary readings may include work by James, Conrad, Valéry, Proust, Beckett and others.

Instructor: Professor Matos-Martin

This course will explore the intersections of culture and politics in Spain and Latin America with a special focus on their recent entangled histories. In that light, we will consider different issues to engage “Transatlantic” perspective as a comparative paradigm to flesh out shared histories and experiences. These may include colonialism, dictatorships, immigration processes, exclusions, or today’s neoliberal States. We will analyze literary and visual sources such as short stories, novels, poems, painting, fiction films or documentaries. Primary materials will be paired with texts by leading cultural and political thinkers working on questions of biopolitics, transatlantic studies, immigration, globalization, exclusion or violence.

Instructor: Professor Manthia Diawara

The purpose of this class is to explore the relationship between African literature and film, in terms of their delineation of time and space, narrative functions and motifs, narrative point of view and affect. Going from the oral traditions to written texts, we fill analyze filmic adaptations of canonical texts like The Epic of Sunjata (the D.T. Niane version), Black Girl (Sembene Ousmane), The Visit (Friedrich Durrenmatt; adapted to film as Hyena by Mambety Diop) and Half of a Yellow Moon (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). A strong emphasis will be placed on African styles of storytelling from oral traditions to the modern novel.

Note: these courses do count as core courses toward the Major or Minor

 

Prof. Bianchi

CORE: The Body in Western Philosophy

Check CORE Website

 

Prof. Baer

Global Issues in Photography

COLIT-GA.1698

Tuesday, 2:00PM-5:00PM in Bldg:19W4  

Advanced Undergrads contact professor to apply

Room:102 Loc: Washington Square

Sponsored by Tisch

 

Note: these do not count as core courses toward the Major or Minor

 

The Passions of Elena Ferrante
Prof Falkoff

ITAL-UA.172

COLIT-UA.173

T/R 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Tuesday CASA_306

Thursday CASA_203

Sponsored by Italian Studies

 

The German Intellectual Tradition: The Age of Angst: German and Austrian Intellectual History, 1890-1933
Prof. George

COLIT-UA.244

GERM-UA.244

MW 2:00-3:15

19_UP 100D

Sponsored by German

 

Socrates and his Critics
Prof Renzi

COLIT-UA.701 

CLASS-UA.701

503V Silver Center

Sponsored by CORE

 

Historical Epics of China and Japan
Prof. Roberts

EAST-UA 726 

COLIT-UA.726 

T/R 3:30 - 4:45

Sponsored by East Asian Studies 

 

Literature and the Environment

Prof. Densky

COLIT-UA.800: Tues 2pm - 4:30pm

Silv_504

Sponsored by German

 

Language Culture & Identity in Italy
Prof. Cipani

ITAL-UA.260: 

COLIT-UA.801

Mond 12:30 - 1:45

Casa Library

Sponsored by Italian Studies 

 

Dante & His World
Prof. Ardizzone

ITAL-UA.161

COLIT-UA.852

Mond 3:30 - 6:10

Casa Library

Sponsored by Italian Studies

 

Walter Benjamin: Theory for Gleaners
Prof. Huber

IDSEM-UG 1590

COLIT-UA.866

Wed 2:00-4:45

Wave_369