Fall 2022 Graduate Courses

Prof. Apter

Prof. Garcia

The writings of critic and philosopher Alain Locke (1885-1954) provide a set of commentaries on modern racial formation in the first half of the 20th century. Focusing on the moment of The New Negro (1925) anthology as well as on prior and later phases of his work, this seminar examines Locke’s visions of historical transformation and philosophy of education. We will explore Locke’s theoretical formulations and thematic concerns for the ways they anticipated, and brought about a version of, black studies. Contrasting Locke with “American Century” discourses that arose during the time of his late work, we also ask what it means to think of Locke as a critic of the American century. Readings will include texts by W. E. B. Du Bois, Georg Simmel, Randolph Bourne, Jean Toomer, Melville Herskovits, and several critics in contemporary black studies.

Prof. Vatulescu

This first semester of the year-long Advanced Writing Seminar is designed to guide third-year Comp Lit PhD students in the process of preparing for their comprehensive exams and starting to articulate a dissertation prospectus. Workshop style, the seminar aims to provide a supportive and stimulating intellectual community that responds to work in progress.

Prof. Dopico

This course takes up cultures and theories of the American hemisphere to think beyond imperial cartographies and logics and center texts, art, music and performance that articulate modes of sovereignty beyond the state. We will consider works and cultural histories that challenge dispossession through placemaking (palenques, urban and rural autonomous territories, social rupture) and the retaking of home environments. Thinking with blackness, indigeneity, migration, and ecologies in the Americas, we consider how struggles over sovereignty and territoriality are accompanied symbolic and cultural practices, or world-making, that challenge the finitude of the present and the hegemony of capital. Works will include a conventional canon of "Americas"  articulation (Whitman, Martí, Darío, Neruda, etc) but will move on to narrative, prose, film, music and performance in English, Spanish, French, Kreyol, and Portuguese (also perhaps in Garifuna and other nation languages).

Prof. Bianchi

In the face of the rising popularity of “new materialisms,” this class examines the emergence of the notion of “matter” in classical antiquity. In short, matter, from the Latin ‘materia’ (related to mater, mother) is transmitted from Aristotle’s Greek innovation hulê (literally, wood). We will undertake close readings of key ancient primary texts, including various Presocratics, Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and Generation of Animals, and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, tracing the discourses of materiality that arise in concert with tropes of sex and gender. The guiding question here is: what can matter’s genealogical ties to the feminine tell us about the materialization of bodies and genders? At the same time, we will attend to the topographies and texture of ancient thinking about nature and materiality in the context of the emergence of metaphysics more broadly. Alongside a narrative of “emergence” we will also consider hermeneutic questions – what are the ethico-political stakes of a “retrieval” of antiquity and how can we determine our relationship to these distant texts? And how does a consideration of ancient modes of thought help to enrich contemporary discourses of matter and gender? To help orient our study we will draw on recent thinkers including Irigaray, Kristeva, Althusser, Loraux, Sallis, and Cavarero as well as critically engaging Bachofen’s 19th century conception of Mutterrecht. Some background knowledge of psychoanalytic theory is advised, as is knowledge of Greek, however all readings will be in translation.

Prof. Gadberry

In 1755, a massive earthquake came close to demolishing Lisbon, then the fourth largest city in Europe. The earthquake’s aftershocks, however, were also intellectual: Across Europe, writers struggled as they asked how God (or nature) could possibly be benevolent if so terrible an event could take place. The “justif[ication of] the ways of God to men” was an ancient project, of course, but writers in eighteenth-century Europe were unusually preoccupied with the problem, and it was also the first time that the task of defending God or finding meaning in a world in which there is horrific suffering got a name: theodicy (taken from the title of Leibniz’s 1710 work).  This semester, we will look in depth at works that explicitly frame themselves as justifications or vindications of God or nature, but we will also look at works that disavow the theodicies they undertake, works that justify the status quo in registers that appear to have little to do with the divine. As we do so, we will read seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works, along with twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism and theory. In what ways are defenses of existing orders or descriptions of “the way things are” the instruments of existing structures of power? What do philosophical and literary treatments of theodicy have to do with political and social life, with the modern invention of race and rationalizations of colonialism and slavery? How does the work of justification appear as a question of form? What does justification, rationalization, or theodicy have to do with the task we call “thinking,” with understanding correlation and causation? (In other words, “justifying” in the title above is both gerundive and present participle.)

Prof. Lopez Seoane

This course centers the figure of the loca, a term that originated as an insult thrown at sexual dissidents but that would become a form of identification carried with pride. Loca describes an array of gender expression and sexual orientations, a subjectivity if we will, but also a linguistic and rhetoric modality, a recognizable voice. In the last decades, this local but marginalized voice has trespassed the walls of the lettered city, producing subversive forms of writing and disrupting literary traditions with its explosive mix of Neobarroco lyricism and street wit. Seeking to define the contours of this peculiar Latin American tone, we will explore how different locas have figured childhood, sexuality, intoxication, exile and disease. The course will thus study texts and artworks by Severo Sarduy, Manuel Puig, Reynaldo Arenas, Néstor Perlongher, Pedro Lemebel, Helio Oiticica and others who have put the loca at the center of their artistic projects.

Prof. Sanders

Recently there has been an explosion in “theory from the South.” Some of the most exciting interventions have come from African theorists such as Ato Quayson, Achille Mbembe, Jean and John Comaroff, and Mahmood Mamdani. Taking recent works by these theorists as our starting point, we will explore the application and adaptation of metropolitan thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Schmitt, in order to theorize “necropolitics,” genocide, and xenophobia, among other burning issues. We will also take stock of earlier endeavors by Africanist and Afro-Americanist thinkers such as Du Bois, Senghor, Mudimbe, and Ngũgĩ to define critically Africa’s specific contributions to the making (and making sense of) the world that all of us inhabit. Since a number of these thinkers are also writers and/or literary theorists, we shall also be analyzing key recent texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ahmadou Kourouma, Phaswane Mpe, and Antjie Krog. This course will fulfill the CALAMEGS Proseminar requirement for the CALAMEGS certificate.

Co-taught by Profs. Paul & Freed-Thall

This seminar will examine the modernist, worldly side of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. We’ll consider Proust as a theorist of everyday life: a sociologist of culture, a queer aesthete, a botanical enthusiast, a gambler and stock market speculator, an investigator of media, a translator, a fashion connoisseur, and a tourist. We’ll also be interested in Proust as phenomenologist: a thinker who experiments with the grounds and limits of sensation and perception, exploring a variety of experiences—from states of unconsciousness to heightened, multi-sensory modes of awareness. An approach to reading Proust’s novel at the centenary of his death, this course will also offer a survey of his critical reception from the NRF critics, Benjamin, and Beckett to Barthes, Sedgwick, and Bersani.

Prof. Moten

In Francis Ponge’s The Making of the Pré we are given description, in a document of the making of description, so precise in its unfolding that the indefinition of the thing described is revealed. This fade to blur will be our preface to a consideration of “Black Poetry and Black Preformance.” This might seem a little crazy, but we’ll be thinking about the entanglement of spring, meadow (or field), emergence, description and making (as poetic experiment). We’ll see if putting the r before the e can be justified. Along with Ponge, we will read essays in criticism by Benjamin, Du Bois, Hamacher, Cadava, Spillers, Wynter in order to illuminate a selection of preformed poetry by Douglas Kearney & Val Jeanty, Olufemi & Ijeoma Thomas, Louise Bennett, Margaret Walker, Mikey Smith, Victoria Santa Cruz and Frankétienne.