Graduate Courses Spring 2008

CLT 601.01/EGL 611.01 Theorizing the Archive
E.Ann Kaplan, Susan Scheckel, Tuesday 12:50-3:40 p.m. Humanities 1008

The archive has long been understood as foundational to the study of history.  In recent years, the concept of the archive has emerged as a powerful site, both literal and symbolic, for the production and articulation of knowledge in the humanities.  In the wake of a heavy emphasis on abstract (often philosophical) theory, there has been a call from some humanities scholars to return to the archive. At the same time, theoretical investigations have opened up questions regarding the status of the archive itself as something constructed, mediated, fragmentary, and highly political. This course participates in this moment of re-evaluation by exploring, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the theories and practices of the archive.      
     We will begin by interrogating various definitions of the archive—as history, as memory, as affect, to name just a few.  We will proceed to question the role of forgetting in relation to the archive.  Is there such a thing as an “impossible archive”?  What histories are erased, not archived? Can silences be made to speak meaningfully?  Other questions we will consider include:  How does the archive maintain or disrupt power relations?  What is the nature and foundation of the representational and symbolic power of the archive?  “How might an “archive of the future” be conceived? 
     Readings will include works by:  Michel Foucault, Carolyn Steedman, Ann Stoler, Edward Casey, Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Ann Cvetkovich, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida.  In addition we will read articles from special issues of History of the Human Sciences and English Language Notes devoted to theorizing the archive, and selections from an anthology, Refiguring the Archive. 
     Students will be expected to participate fully in seminar discussion, to write a seminar paper applying the concepts and theories explored in the course to a particular project grounded in an “archive” from their particular fields of study, and to present to the class a portion of their own work in progress.

CLT 607.01 Ethics at the Limits of Translation
Robert Harvey, Monday 6:50-9:40 p.m. Humanities 2052

What does untranslatability mean when a literary text, an oeuvre (produced by a single "producer") or, more broadly, any artwork or body of work serves as its own translation? And if such a dynamics of being “always already” translated or what I’ve called “immanent translation” exists, as I propose it does, then what implications, effects, and repercussions might it have on the endless human quest for ethics (moral intersubjectivity, "perpetual peace")?  Can pushing translation to its wits end put an end to our sense that there is nothing to be done?
     This seminar will open the possibility of discussing the act of translation as the paradigmatic vicarious experience, of exploring the implications of speaking for the other or "proxy subjectivity".  It will begin with the hypothesis that once the subject is no longer infans (L. "unable to speak"), consciousness and conscience are of the same cloth.
     Readings will include Dante’s Purgatorio, Samuel Beckett’s major and minor trilogies in narrative form (Molloy, Malone meurt [Malone Dies], and L'Innomable [The Unnamable]; Compagnie [Company], Mal vu mal dit [Ill Seen Ill Said], and Worstward Ho [Cap au pire]), Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste and Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and The Drowned and The Saved.  In theory we’ll read from Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason or "First Critique"], his Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment or "Third Critique"], Diderot’s Salon de 1767, and from Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie [Aesthetic Theory]. We’ll also read Walter Benjamin’s "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers"[“The Task of the Translator”] and his earlier, and even more obscure, "Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen" [“On Language Itself and on the Language of Man”] and Jacques Derrida’s Demeure, which contains (and thereby returns us to) a "primary" text in its entirety: Maurice Blanchot's L'Instant de ma mort [The Instant of My Death].
     Extending the sense of reading, we’ll study parts of Jean-Luc Godard’s epic Histoire(s) du cinéma, consider some paintings by Jack Yeats, Paul Cézanne, Giorgione, Pierre Tal Coat, André Masson, Bram Van Velde, Botticelli, and Mark Rothko, listen to music by Beethoven, Luciano Berio, and Richard Pinhas.

CLT 608 Cross-Cultural Contexts: Creative Imagination in Islamic Thought
William Chittick, Wednesday 6:50-9:40 p.m. Humanities 2052

In 1958 the phenomenologist Henry Corbin published L’Imagination créatrice dans le Soufisme d’Ibn ‘Arabi (English translation in the Bollingen series, Princeton University Press, 1964).  With this and several other seminal studies of Muslim philosophers and mystics, Corbin argued persuasively that the reality of the imaginal (not the “imaginary”) played a central role in the more sophisticated Muslim understandings of the world and the soul.  He also demonstrated that the perception of the real presence of this third, intermediary realm, halfway between the spiritual and bodily, allowed scholars and poets to see into the symbolism of scripture, grasp the nature of visionary experience, and avoid reducing reality to the apparent.  It was the real perception of this intermediate realm, says Corbin, that prevented the sort of philosophical moves that in the West led to Cartesian dualism and all its consequences.  With Corbin in the background, we will look at a selection of translated writings from a few of the outstanding theoreticians and poets of Islamic civilization.   Besides Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), we will read philosopher-theologians like al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Suhrawardi (d. 1191), and Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) and mystic poets like Ibn al-Farid (d. 1235) and Rumi (d. 1273). 

CLT 609.01/CST 609.01 Politics of Cultural Studies
E.K. Tan Wednesday, 3:50-6:40 p.m. Humanities 2052

Building his theory of cultural translation based on the positionality of “the Other,” in relation and reaction to Western theories, Homi Bhabha problematizes the celebration of difference and hybridity. As a counter narrative, Bhabha promotes the examination of political and social inequalities generated by the hegemonic western discourses of cultural relativitism and multiculturalism. The topography of our world, demarcated into boundaries such as “first-worlds” and “third-worlds,” has conveniently naturalized a value system that legitimizes the unequal power dissemination in the realms of the economic, political and cultural. This course surveys works by both “Western” and “non-Western” theorists in order to examine the historical development, political agendas, and logical structures of cultural exchange. Culture, in this context, is employed as a general term to facilitate the discussion of interactions between national, communal, social and ethnic groups. By acknowledging the imbalance nature of cultural exchange, this course will focus on (re)conceptualizing cultural translation as a process that destabilizes and reevaluates the structural pattern of global cultural flows and productions.

Core course for Cultural Studies Certificate

CST 680.01 Research Seminar
Krin Gabbard, Monday 3:50-6:40 p.m., Humanties 2052

Any student in the Humanities will benefit from this course, a workshop on how to write a scholarly article worthy of publication in a journal.  Students will learn the methods and tools of research and familiarize themselves with the journals in their areas of special interest.  We will analyze exemplary articles selected by the students themselves in order to understand how a publishable essay is constructed and argued.  The final project, due in the twelfth week of the semester, will be an essay that the student can then send out for consideration at a scholarly journal.

Core course for Cultural Studies Certificate