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CL 402 Cross-Cultural Comparison This course will examine the significance of "culture" as a category in the work of some of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How does this category function in the texts of structuralist anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and post-colonialism? We will read selected works by Levi Strauss, Freud, Lacan, Marx, Gramsci, Adorno, Fanon, Said, Ortner, Geertz, and Werner Hamacher (among others). Our aim will be to study how "culture" is defined or understood by different analytic systems, and to gauge the force exerted by such definitions on the larger arguments of our texts. By doing so, we will also attempt to situate historically some of the assumptions that have guided the growth of "cultural studies" and "multiculturalism" in the past few decades. |