2008 Course Descriptions

AIS 495 (pending 501): Indigenous Critical Theory

Professor: D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark
Mondays 3-:540pm
CRN 49215

Course Description: Oriented toward imagining far-reaching social change through academically-based knowledge production as sites of indigenous activism and political thought, the course develops analytical frames at intellectual crossroads where the epistemologies that gather under the "indigenous" sign meet democratic inquiry (and its concerns with recognition) and a transhemispheric critical theory.  Three questions structure the course.  First, in what ways does indigenous critical theory construct a distinctive form of inquiry?  Second, what knowledges does this sort of inquiry provide in order to justify criticism of settler-colonial ideas (and ideals) and institutions?  Finally, what kinds of verification does indigenous critical inquiry require?

This course meets the requirements for the pending Graduate Minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies hosted by the American Indian Studies Program and is being offered as part of the Consortium on Institutional Cooperation's (CIC) CourseShare program.

Through state-of-the-art technologies CourseShare offers graduate students access to a variety of classes offered at CIC schools.  In addition to meeting through videoconferencing technology with students at CIC institutions, the course also meets VIRTUALLY with graduate students in the Indigenous Politics Division of the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

If you would like additional information about the course’s content or receive a copy of the course syllabus, please contact Tony Clark at tyeeme@gmail.com.

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CINE 504/ENGL 504/CWL 504: Theories of Cinema

Professor: Lilya Kaganovsky
Meets: TR 3:00-4:50pm, 147 Armory
CRN: 43351

Seminar on influential theories and accompanying debates about the textual/ extra-textual mechanisms and cultural/ political impact of cinema and related screen media. The course fulfills the theory requirement for the interdisciplinary Graduate Minor in Cinema Studies. This course will provide an advanced introduction to the by-now substantial field of film theory. Equal attention will be given to the classic texts of early and contemporary film theory. We will read the discipline’s founding texts (Munsterberg, Belazc, Eisenstein, Eikhenbaum, Kracauer, Benjamin, Bazin) and contemporarytheory (Baudry, Metz, Oudard, Mulvey, Heath, Williams, Doane, Silverman, Deleuze, Zizek). In our discussion we will rely on broadercategories of subjectivity, spectatorship, and ideology to expandthese theoretical parameters. We will screen a number of films inconjunction with the readings in order to develop a common cinematic vocabulary for speaking about film theory.

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COMM 580: Seminar on Advanced Interpretive Methods - Social Interaction

Professor: Norman Denzin    
Meets: : 12-3:00pm
Place: 336 Gregory Hall
CRN: 35458

This performance-based seminar will focus on the implications of decolonizing emancipatory discourses, and indigenous epistemologies for critical, interpretive inquiry.  The readings and assignments foreground localized critical theory,  critical personal narratives, ndigenous participatory theatre, interpretive inquiry as moral, political discourse. We will examine how the practices of critical inquiry can be used to imagine, write and perform a free democratic society. Traditional forms of qualitative inquiry are put into relief as we disrupt the notion of "business as usual" in the current interpretive social science community.  

COURSE PREREQUISITES: Previous coursework in qualitative research is desired. A background in critical pedagogy, critical race and  indigenous, decolonizing discourses will be useful. 

COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Three performance-based texts grounded in epiphanic, racialized  personal experience and ne take-home exam.  Writing/film groups will lead discussions of films and the major texts in the course. Students will prepare manuscripts for publication and/or presentation at the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, May 3-6, 2006. The class will co-participate in bringing food to the seminar. Each week a different performance group will stage a TEN minute scripted interpretation of the week's reading materials.

Assignment One: Due: 7 September: Experimental,  personal experience, autoethnographic text, based on an epiphanic moment in your own life connected to a moment of heightened racial consciousness.  Deploy the representational strategies of  Weems, Holman-Jones, K. Stewart, A. Smith. 

Assignment Two: Due: 5 October: Revision, ala the Denzin essays , of Sept. 7 manuscript, constructing a performance text  connecting this experience to a variety of popular culture texts which represent or comment on the experience in question.  

Assignment Three: EXAM: 12 October (take home) 

Assignment Four: Due: 26 October: Extension of 5 October text. Use, Kaufman, Saldana, Madison, Denzin and the mystory as a model for producing a dialogical, emancipatory  play to be co-performed by/with class. 

TEXTS:

1.  D. Soyini Madison. 2005. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics and Performance. Sage.

2.  Carver, Raymond. 1982.  What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Vintage.

3.  Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Qualitative Inquiry Reader. Sage.

4.  Denzin, Norman K. 2002. Interpretive Interactionism.  Sage.

5.  Denzin, Norman K. 2008. Searching for Yellowstone: Race, Gender, Family and Memory in the Postmodern West. Left Coast Press.

6. Saldana, Johnny. (Ed). 2005.  Ethnodrama:  An Anthology of Reality Theatre. Altamira

7.  Smith, Anna Deavere. 2003. House Arrest and Piano. Anchor.

8 Kaufman, Moises.2001. The Laramie Project. paper.Vintage.

9. Weems, Mary, 2003. Public Education and the Imagination-Intellect: I Speak

from the Wound in my Mouth. New York:Peter Lang, paper. 

FILMS:  Smoke Signals, Chan Is Missing, Flawless, Eve's Bayou, Whale Rider. 

Reserve Material m library 1)  Denzin & Lincoln, eds. Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3/e. 2005 (HBQR3): Chpts.:  1-7, 11-12, 14, 21, 26, 30, 37, 38, 40, 41; (2) Diaz Soto, K. Mutua, B. Swadner, "Decolonizing Research— excerpts"; (3) NKD, "Lewis & Clark..."; “Indians in the Park.”

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COMM 590: Foucault--Theory and Analysis

Professor: James Hay    
Meets: T 5:30-8:30pm
Place TBA
CRN: 49128

Michel Foucault has become one of the most widely cited and influential theorist of the last forty years.  This seminar is particularly interested in the ways that his writings, lectures, and interviews continue to be an important point of reference for academic research in a number of disciplines.  The seminar will examine the full range of Foucault's theory and research but will concentrate on recent debates, interpretations, and uses of his work for critical theory, political theory, communication studies, and cultural studies.Some of Foucault's most well known concepts and themes that thecourse will discuss include: madness and civilization, discourse anddiscursive formation, regimes of truth, the relation of truth, knowledge, & power, the birth of "social medicine," the history of sexuality, "archaeological" and "genealogical" analysis as ways of writing history, disciplinary societies and security societies, bio-politics, care and technologies of the self, governmentality and modern political reason, "heterotopia" and "technics of space," the subject and power, liberalism and neoliberalism, and authorship.  The course will follow how these and other threads of Foucault's work have informed or been taken up by theorists and critics such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacque Donzelot, Tony Bennett, Ian Hunter, Nikolas Rose, Wendy Brown, Aihwa Ong, James Ferguson, Judith Butler, Toby Miller, George Yudice, John Law, Michel Callon, Paul du Gay, Engin Isin, the contributors to Foucault & Political Reason (e.g., Colin Gordon, Graham Burchell, Andrew Barry), the contributors to Foucault, Governmentality & Cultural Studies (a book produced by graduate students and faculty from the University of Illinois several years ago), and some of my own work (most recently, Better Living through Television: Reality TV & the Government of the Self, with Laurie Ouellette).

The title for the course is mostly a matter of convenience.  The Foucaultian concepts that I have listed above more accurately represent the range of key words that the course will consider. I toyed with the idea of titling the seminar "Theory and Analysis after Foucault," though that title might have been too long to post on the university's website for registration.  I also considered titling the course "Foucault, Culture, & Technology" in order to suggest a nexus of issues raised by Foucault but also to suggest the seminar's relevance to my own departmental affiliation (in media and communication studies), to my longstanding interest in Cultural Studies on this campus, and to the varied disciplinary orientations of students from departments beyond my own.  The seminar should be relevant to students in media/communication studies, language and literature studies, history, geography, art & design, landscape & architecture, sociology, science studies, gender studies, race studies, and snthropology.  My longstanding interest in Foucault's work partly has to do with his attention to the disciplinarity of knowledge, and his impact across various disciplines of knowledge.

Because the seminar is an introduction to Foucaultian theory and analysis, I will design and encourage exercises for applying theoretical perspectives and key concepts in various kinds of analysis.  I want to emphasize that the course intends to devote equal attention to theory and its application.  Students will be expected to stay abreast of reading assignments, participate in class discussions, and complete a final paper-project decided with me.

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Professor:  Robert Dale Parker
Meets: T-TR 9:30-12:00pm, English Building 113
CRN: 32278

One course cannot "cover" the enormous chronological, cultural, or generic range of Native American literature, but it can gather a sampling of fascinating works, and it can introduce the fields of American Indian literature and American Indian studies both in themselves and in relation to the larger framework of contemporary
American literary study. We will begin with oral tales and the practice and theory of translating and writing down Native American oral literature, looking at both older and newer models. Then we will read two novels from the 1930s: John Joseph Mathews' Sundown and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded. In the second half of the semester we will concentrate on fiction and poetry from the great burgeoning of American Indian literature in the last thirty years, including Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, and Thomas King's Medicine River, as well as poetry by Ray A. Young Bear, Joy Harjo, Erdrich, Chrystos, and Sherman Alexie. Please note that students registered for the class will receive a possibly lengthy reading assignment for the first class at least one week before classes begin. Anyone considering the course is welcome to talk with me before registering (my office is English Building 329). Writing assignments will include your choice of either a) three short-to-medium length papers or b) one short paper followed by a paper that aspires to article scale. Assigned reading will include (tentatively) the novels and poetry listed above, the volumes listed below, and a large amount of additional material. (Students in the class will have the opportunity to prepare a paper for the annual CIC American Indian Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference, either for 2008 or for 2009.)

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Professor: Robert Markley
Meets: W 1:00-3:15pm, 123 English
CRN: 48036 

This seminar is devoted to reading and assessing some of the key works by recent thinkers in the postdisciplinary field called (variously) Literature and Science, the Cultural Study of Science, or Science Studies.  Our approach this semester has both theoretical and historical dimensions, and it will give us the opportunity to read in-depth some important works that, in various ways, explore humankind's complex relationships to the natural world and our built environments.  The theorists we will read come from a range of disciplines (literature, cultural criticism, anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, and biology) and will be structured within several broad areas in the cultural study of science: biology and gender; ecology; new media; and technoculture and the advent of the “posthuman.”  The syllabus will include several novels (by Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, and H.G. Wells) as well as critical works (including short selections) by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Karen Barad, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter, Marshall McLuhan, and Lynn Margulis.

The writers we will discuss offer us the opportunity to explore two fundamental and often antagonistic responses to “Nature”: the Baconian desire to master the world by exploiting its resources and developing ever-more sophisticated technologies to raise or maintain living standards and the wish to return to a golden age in which human desires and natural resources existed in what we now call ecological balance.  Because we will consider a variety of theoretical approaches and literary texts, the seminar will give you the opportunity to write on periods, texts, and literatures of your choosing.

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FR 541: Espaces littéraires:  French Spatial Theory and 20th-century Fiction 

Professor: Andrea Goulet
Meets: W 1:00pm - 2:50pm, 1038 Foreign Languages Building
CRN: 48357

This course will study shifting theories of political, social, and literary space through the work of Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefevbre, Guy Debord, Michel Serres, Michel Foucault, Marc Augé, and Georges Perec.  It will pair critical and secondary analyses with 20th-century French novels by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Louis Aragon, Michel Butor, Fred Vargas, and François Bon. 

Course conducted in French.  Students in departments other than French may submit written work in English.

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GER570: Modern Critical Theory: An Advanced Introduction

Professor: Laurie Johnson
Meets: Tuesdays, 7:30-9:00 p.m. (public lecture),
and Thursdays, 3:00-4:50 p.m. (meeting of GER 570 seminar)
CRN: 39732

This course provides a historical survey of the foundational thinkers, texts, and schools that orient contemporary work in the humanities, from Kant and Hegel to Cultural Studies, Queer Theory, and Postcolonial Theory. As an "advanced introduction," the course is intended primarily for beginning graduate students, but also for those who feel they have not covered the development of critical theory in a systematic way. The course will include significant discussion of figures such as: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Barthes, Levi- Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Williams, Hall, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Zizek, and Butler. Among the topics we will certainly address are: history, aesthetics, the subject, value, power, language, ideology, materiality, gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. The purpose of this course is to ensure that graduate students receive a rigorous introduction to critical theories and methodologies central to a variety of fields in the humanities and to provide the basis for interdisciplinary conversation and intellectual community among graduate students and faculty members from across the university. Modern Critical Theory has an unusual format. The course meets twice a week: once a week on Tuesday nights, in a public session that will include all interested graduate students, and once a week on Thursday afternoons, in a closed session limited to registered students. Drawing on the resources of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, guest experts from around campus and occasionally from off-campus will visit the public sessions of the seminar and lecture on particular topics throughout the semester. Public sessions include students from both sections of the course (Prof. Laurie Johnson's and Prof. Jim Hansen's), and all other interested students and faculty. Prerequisite: none. All readings and discussions are in English.

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HIST 502C: Global History

Professor: David Prochaska
Meets: TR 1:00-3:00pm, 300C Gregory
CRN: 32434

How we got from the Big Bang to Bush, with a few whistle stops in between.

Themes new to the 2008 edition: The history of secrecy since 1945, from the wartime OSS-become-CIA to our more than 19 spy agencies today, or why it is no longer paranoid to think somebody is after you. The history of terrorism, the car bomb, for example, and why it is as American as Oklahoma City. The atomic bomb, the original WMD, or late nights at the atomic café, where all the talk is surreal  (M.A.D., Mutual Assured Destruction). Why Cold War-era films such as Godzilla, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers say as much about history as the McCarthy documentary Point of Order. Why the remake of The Manchurian Candidate could not boldly go where the original had for fear of scaring the audience. From Ronald Reagan the movie to George Bush the horrorshow.

We will end with the history of the future: how the Iraq War will play out (badly for the Democrats), the next 100 years, and other inconvenient truths.

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ITAL 490: Italy, Modernity & Theory

Professor: Emanuel Rota
Meets: TR 3-4:15, Room 1112 Foreign Languages Bldg
CRN: 48176

This seminar is an introduction to Italian radical political philosophy. The main focus is on the Twentieth Century, but we'll place the intellectual history of contemporary radical thinkers in a longer political and philosophical tradition that starts in the Renaissance, goes through the Enlightenment and lives on at the end of the XX century. Utopia, modernity, states of exception, internationalism and transnationalism will be some of the keywords that we'll explore reading authors like Antonio Gramsci, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. The course is open to graduate and undergraduate students. Readings and discussion are in English.

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(3 undergraduate hours, 4 graduate hours)

Professor: William Schroeder
Meets: MW 11:30 - 12:50, 329 Gregory
CRNs: 39161/39162     UG/G                              

This course will introduce students to Hegel's philosophy by providing an exposition and evaluation of his famous treatise The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).  This is an extremely difficult text to comprehend even though it is probably the seminal text for much of contemporary European philosophy.  You will need to work extra hard simply to comprehend the book, but I will work hard to help you with this.  We will learn to discuss Hegel without his technical jargon.  Both the details of the book's specific sections and the overall sweep and organization of the book will be discussed in depth.  The course will examine the continuing importance of Hegel's treatise-both for philosophy and for everyday life-and will explain and evaluate his "dialectical approach" to philosophical thinking.  Much of the course will involve lecturing because the book is so hard, but there will be some time for discussion.  We will cover the entire book.  There will be a mid-term assignment, a final exam, and a term paper (12-15 pages).  This course is offered only once in five years; so if you are interested in this book, this is your chance to study it in depth.  Prerequisite: one course in philosophy, but the most helpful prior courses are Philosophy 325 or 411.

RLST 494: Indigenous Ecologies

3 hours

Professor: James Treat 
Meets: W 11:00-1:30pm
Place TBA
CRN: 48242

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the relationship between human experience and natural environment in native North America.  Assigned readings survey historical and contemporary case studies in New World ethnoecology, including noteworthy examples of adaptation in the context of settler colonialism and in response to the dominant paradigm of scientific ecology.  Class discussions are supplemented by audiovisual materials, guest speakers, and campus events relevant to the course.  Students have the opportunity to gain a basic understanding of ecological traditions among American Indians; to conduct a research project focusing on a particular theme, issue, region, or community; and to develop their critical skills for use in academic, professional, and personal settings. 

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SLAV 576: Methods and Approaches in Slavic Graduate Study

Professor: Harriet Murav
Meets: W 2:00pm-4:20pm, 1040 Foreign Languages Building
CRN: 48112 

NO RUSSIAN NECESSARY.   This course is also cross-listed with Comparative and World Literature. Focuses on the study of narrative and language, with readings from the Russian Formalists (the school that introduced “defamiliarization” as a literary technique, including the work of Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, and Tynianov), Roman Jakobson (who radically revised our notions of metaphor and metonym in “Two Types of Aphasia”), Bakhtin (whose concepts of dialogue, polyphony, heteroglossia, and carnival are often oversimplified), and Vladimir Papernyi, the historian of architecture, now living in Los Angeles) whose work “Culture two” explores different models of time and historicity in architecture, with important implications for the study of narrative.