Modern Critical Theory: Public Lectures

Once again, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory will be offering a series of public lectures intended for graduate students on Modern Critical Theory. These lectures will take place most Tuesday evenings during the fall 2006 semester and will meet from 7:30 – 9:00 pm in English 160. The lectures will be given by a series of guests from on and off campus. If you would like to follow along with the readings that accompany the lectures, most are available on e-reserves under ENG 581/Rothberg. You may want to purchase Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (tr. Kaufmann) and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction , which will not be on reserve. This lecture series is open to all graduate students and to interested, advanced undergraduates. There is no need to register. For more information, please contact Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory (mpr@uiuc.edu).

Schedule

Week 1
August 29: Kant
Barbara Sattler (Philosophy)


Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, B

Introduction; online: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/ch01.htm

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment: Introduction, Parts I-IV; online: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (selections in Norton; e-reserves)

Frederick Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” from Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (e-reserves)

Week 2
September 5: Hegel
William Schroeder (Philosophy)

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Introduction, “Sense-Certainty,” and “Self-Consciousness” [through “lordship and bondage”], pp. 46-66 & 104-119; xerox)

Week 3
September 12: Marx and Marxism
Philip Wegner (English, University of Florida

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, selections from Norton (e-reserves)

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Norton) (e-reserves)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Norton) (e-reserves)

Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (e-reserves)


Week 4
September 19: Nietzsche
Richard Schacht (Philosophy)

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Selections: Preface, Essay 1, Essay 2

Richard Schacht, "Of Morals and Menschen: Nietzsche's Genealogy and Anthropology,” in Making Sense of Nietzsche (e-reserves)

Richard Schacht, “ Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morals, and Menschen: A Commentary on GM II:16-25” (unpublished essay; e-reserves))


Week 5
September 26: Freud
Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic/Comp Lit) and Rob Rushing (Italian/Comp Lit)

Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” and selections from The Interpretation of Dreams (Norton)

Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918; the “Wolf Man” case study) (e-reserves)

Week 6
October 3: Foucault
Matti Bunzl (Anthropology)

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction

Secondary:

Foucault readings from Norton

Week 7
No lecture

Week 8
October 17: Lacan
Nancy Blake (Comp Lit)

Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” & “The Signification of the Phallus” in Norton

Week 9
October 24: Derrida
Eleanor Kaufman (Comp Lit, UCLA)

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” “Differance,” and Archive Fever (pp. 1-47) (Xerox)

Week 10
October 31: Cultural Studies of Science
Robert Markley (English)

Karen Barad, "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of
Reality," differences 10 (1998)

Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, "Remediation," Configurations (1996).

Richard Lewontin, "Facts and the Factitious in the Natural Sciences," Critical
Inquiry, 1991.

Week 11
November 7: Feminist Theory
Deborah Nelson (English/Gender Studies, U of Chicago)

Luce Irigaray, “This Sex which is not One”

Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”

Adrienne Rich, “Compulsively Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

Week 12
November 14: Postcolonial Theory
Jed Esty (English)

Frantz Fanon, "The Negro and Recognition," from Black Skin, White Masks (pp 210-222; xerox)

Edward Said, “Introduction,” from Orientalism (Norton)

Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory” (Norton)

Gayatri Spivak, from Critique of Postcolonial Reason (pp. 112-140; xerox)

Secondary:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” from Critical Inquiry (1991)

Week 13
November 28: Queer Theory
Stephanie Foote (English)

Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” and “Critically Queer” (Xerox)

Eve K. Sedgwick, “Introduction: Axiomatic,” from Epistemology of the Closet (Xerox)