Elective Graduate Courses Fall 2008

ARS 525 Graduate Digital Arts/Electronic Media

Christa Erickson

An exploration of the experimental artistic practices utilizing computer and electronic technologies: digital imaging, video and audio, web and DVD production, and interactive installation. It will provide practical instruction in the use of computer media with an orientation towards relating this to the graduate student's own practice/research. It will also analyze the unique possibilities of this hybrid and developing art form through readings and examination of recent works, exhibitions, festivals, and the worldwide web.

Thursday 1:00-4:00 p.m. emedia SINC Site FA 1301

CLT 608 Territories Afterward: Camp, Plantation, Colony

Patrice Nganang

Inspired by Andrzej Wajda’s approach in his film Landscape after Battle, this course intends to investigate the topography of subjectivities after historically disruptive, but politically significant events. As such we will analyze diverse conceptions of territory and limitation, insisting particularly on Heidegger, Sofsky, Deleuze and Foucault. The camp, the plantation and the colony will serve as distinctive locations through which we will read and question both threoretical and fictional texts by Garcia Marquez, Fanon, Agamben, Mbembe, Fagunwa, Okri, Farah and Chamoiseau. From the nationalist myths of the constitution of selfs ‘out of rubbles’ and ‘out of ruins’, to fantasies of life after death or in ‘the bush’, and to satellite nationalities scattered around the globe after the ‘death of the nation’, we will analyze how landscapes of destruction ‘after a battle’ emerge in distinctive discourses as generic places for the formulation of new self-understandings. Our goal is to see if the increased numbers of refugee camps in some parts of the world, the move from plantation economies to economies of tourism in others, and the multiplication of sectoral and even genocidal wars in postcolonies, are not modes through which a modernity at large is currently being defined.

Monday     3:50-6:40 p.m.  Humanities 2052 

EGL 587.01 Topics in Race, Ethnic Studies: Literatures of the Pacific and the Transatlantic

J. SantaAna 

This course is a comparison of literature and cultures from the Asia/Pacific and Caribbean regions in critical relation to imperialism, colonialism, and North American race relations. Through reading literature and watching films, we will explore the experiences of Asians in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands and Black people of the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

We’ll examine globalization and colonialism in an America that has been shaped by the migration of people across and within its changing and contested borders. We’ll consider the pressures that capitalism and colonialism exert on national identity; displacement; multiple migrations; and constructions of home and family.

Texts may include: Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano; The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat; A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid; Down these Mean Streets by Piri Thomas; Typee by Herman Melville; Song of the Exile by Kiana Davenport; Blu’s Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Rolling the R’s by R. Zamora Linmark, and All I Asking for Is My Body by Milton Murayama. Films may include Life & Debt, Dirty Pretty Things, Picture Bride, and The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros.

Thursday      3:50 to 6:40 pm  

EGL 606.02 Period and Tradition: Modernism and Desire

Celia Marshik

According to D. H. Lawrence, modernism was an attempt to “smash the frame” of contemporary values. This phrase has been taken as a description of modernism’s sexual politics, which are often understood as dramatic departures from the comparative decorum on nineteenth-century literature. In this course, we will test Lawrence’s statement by examining how modernist writers represented desire for bodies and, to a lesser extent for commodities. We will read literary texts alongside a range of structuralist and post-strucuralist meditations on desire as we work to determine how modernism might itself theorize about sex, gender, commodities, embodiment, the dynamics of desire, and the ability of language to represent physical impulses and pleasures,. Primary texts will likely include literature by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, H.D. Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, Ford Maddox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, and Rachilde. Requirements include participation in seminar discussion, a twenty-minute presentation, and a 15-20 page seminar paper that students will present during a class conference at the end of the semester.

Wednesday     3:50 to 6:40 pm    

EGL 606.03 The Victorian Novel

Adrienne Munich

A milestone in Western culture, is such a vast field that reading one novel a week for a reading lifetime would only offer a comprehensive sample of them. Consequently, the seminar will focus on some of the significant genres, such as the realist novel, the social problem novel, the sensation novel, the horror novel, the mystery novel. Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, the Brontës, Collins, Gaskell, Trollope, Braddon, Stoker, Wilde, are among the authors being considered. In addition, comparative literature students who wish to write about nineteenth-century European novels may do so. The seminar is being conceived in conjunction with the seminar on the eighteenth-century novel, sharing a list of secondary works on history and theory. Students are welcome, though not required, to take both seminars and possibly write a paper covering both areas. The instructors plan to make a guest appearance in each other's class and hope to arrange a symposium where students from both courses can share knowledge. 

Tuesday      12:50-3:40 p.m. 

EGL 606.05 Period and Tradition: Romanticism

Peter Manning

Because I haven’t given a broad seminar in the British Romantics in some time, I’d like to start the cycle again with a wide reading course in poetry of the period, perhaps beginning with Burke’s essay on the sublime and beautiful 1756/57 and going as far as the so-called Age of Transition in the 1820s and 1830s. Three short papers and a long one at the semester’s end, which ideally will develop from one of the short ones.

Tuesday      5:20-8:10 pm   

HIS 515 Transcoeanic Migrations

Iona Man-Cheong

Before the 1960s, migration across the world most often involved boarding a ship, and depending upon your point of embarkation and arrival, often enduring a long and lonely voyage. Migration did not always mean emigration or immigration, but could also mean temporary overseas labor, such as implied by the term sojourning. Often empire was implicated, as were colonial relations-- with all the complexities and inequities of colony / metropole involved. And although it was frequently the poor who were attracted to this option, it could just as well involve the wealthy: these class differences also impacted the dynamic in multiple ways. After the mid-nineteenth century introduction of steam power and the steamship, migration increased both in volume and frequency, but even the eighteenth century witnessed a significant level of transoceanic migration. Migration could also be accidental. Many transoceanic communities had their beginnings in small overseas maritime communities, growing organically in the service of a floating, temporary population. Peopled by jumped-ship sailors, these working communities laid the foundations of later ethnic communities and employed socio-cultural strategies of interethnic / intercultural marriage to establish a foothold on land. Whether in the early modern or the modern period up through the mid-20th century, transoceanic migration always included issues of gender: if men were the voyagers, and family continued to be the way populations were anchored into society, how were these structural demands met? Examples in the 18th as well as 19th century also suggest that various national authorities enacted policy that transported women to answer such questions, complicating issues of interracial relations in the process. This seminar examines these themes through readings centered on historical analysis and understanding, and where useful, on theoretical constructs. Participants will be expected to produce a critical, historiographical and analytically focused paper relevant to one or more of these interrelated themes. 

Tuesday      4:30-7:30 p.m.

HIS 516 The Eighteenth Century Cosmopolis:  Global Cities and Citizens in the Age of Sail

Kathleen Wilson

The ‘citizen of the world’ is a famous Enlightenment concept, one that distilled a complex history of intercultural encounter and exchange in unexpected sites across the globe. As the period’s transoceanic crossings brought far-flung communities of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans into contact and people, practices, ideas and objects jostled en route to new destinations and new destinies, an array of entrepôts emerged that provided the stages for diverse and novel forms of cultural interaction. This course will explore the eighteenth century cosmopolis as a crucial space of modernity, where mobility and difference were expected, translation was continuous and identity was labile, a product of the ebbs and flows of incommensurability and similitude that shaped the ethics and experience of the everyday. The complexities of living in and with the cosmopolitan imperative—imaginatively and materially— will be the focus of the course.

Readings include: Hume and Kant on cosmopolitanism; Voltaire, Candide; Goldsmith, Citizen of the World; and selections from the following: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship; Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital; Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World; James Robertson, Gone is the Ancient Glory, as well as a number of articles accessible online related to Surat, Puebla, Lima, Macau and the South Pacific.

Course Requirements: two short position papers and one longer (12-15 page) analytical paper on themes and debates of the course. Students will also be REQUIRED to attend the two-day conference of the same title that will be held at Stony Brook, Manhattan Oct 23-24.

Thursday     4:30-7:30 p.m.

PHI 616 Technoscience Research Seminar

Don Ihde

The technoscience research seminar is contemporary in nature, reading in the areas of philosophy of science, philosophy of technology and ‘science studies.’ Normally, only living authors are read on themes which differ from semester to semester. Participants are expected to have their own or collaborative research projects on which they will make end of semester reports. Technoscience encourages ‘empirical turn’ or concrete cases which can also be developed as conference papers and possibly journal articles. For example, since 2006, through fall 2008, 41 presentations have been or will be given at professional societies such as the Society for the Social Study of Science and the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. Of these a first group has just been published in a special issue of Human Studies.

In terms of a theme for fall, we are making a new departure and will focus upon “Animals”.  The primary text will be Donna Haraway’s newly published When Species Meet. Haraway, known best for her figure of the cyborg [a human-technology-animal hybrid], began in the nineties to a focal interest in ‘companion species’ and When Species Meet is the first extended work on this new figure. We will make some short asides to Buber, Heidegger and Derrida on animals before looking at a range of important issues regarding humans and animals ranging from biotechnology to ‘uses’ of animals to animal intelligence and animal-human relations.

Address questions to Don Ihde, director of the seminar: dihde@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Monday 1:00-4:00 p.m.

Also of interest:

FRN 435/552: The Accursed Poets: A Modern Lesson of Malediction

Franck Dalmas

The course will explore the “accursed poets” of 19th-century France, followers of Baudelaire, who pioneered the avant-gardes in 20th century. In his essay Les Poètes maudits, Verlaine revealed among others Corbière, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. We will also consider Lautréamont, Laforgue, Cros, and Nouveau, along with some “accursed” painters (Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat) and discuss how these unfortunate artists changed forever modern thinking. All readings and discussions are in French.

Wednesday 5:20-8:10 p.m.