Spring 2022

The goal of the course is to critically examine the history, culture, politics, concepts, and issues related to African/Black people and film. Films studied may include The Birth of a Nation (1915), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Blazing Saddles (1974), Foxy Brown (1974), Do the Right Thing (1989), and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).

Throughout the history of philosophy, there have been many “renegade” thinkers that deterritorialize the ground of the canonical works and the personas of the academic tradition. Students will examine the works of several renegade thinkers, including Diogenes, Ken Kesey, Robert Anton Wilson, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and Ken Wilber. We will investigate the syncretic and interdisciplinary aspects of each philosopher, as well as their relationship with the canonical works and personas.

In studying fictional, poetic and nonfictional narratives of the Holocaust, our task will be to witness the event through the texts we read: What does it mean to think of literature as a kind of witnessing? And just what are the limits of language in representing such an unrepresentable event? For the writer, there is a very real crisis of representation. In The Story of a Life, Aharon Appelfeld, the Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor, describes the feeling of being defeated by his own story: “Every time you talk about those days, you feel that this is incredible. You tell and you don’t believe that this happened to you. This is one of the most humiliating feelings that I’ve experienced.” And Charlotte Delbo testifies that “Auschwitz is there, fixed and unchangeable, but wrapped in the impervious skin of memory that segregates itself from the present ‘me.’” Included in the argument of this course is the idea that literature can and does respond vigorously to catastrophe. Our main focus will emphasize the roles of silence, memory, identity, and problems of representation, but we will also consider other issues along the way, such as the psychology and history of antisemitism, as well as the problem of articulating a new ethics for humanity. Drawing from European, American, and Israeli narratives, our readings will introduce some of the significant poets and writers who were witnesses to, survivors of, and in some instances victims of the Holocaust. Later in the semester, we will encounter narratives by Ozick, Spiegelman, Semel, and others, a second generation whose work is distinguished by a tension between the desire to write about the Holocaust and guilt at doing so. What does it mean to be the child or even grandchild of a survivor? What will the collective memory of the Holocaust be in the twenty-first century, after the last survivors have given testimony? The way that Jews and others deal with the Holocaust is not always wise. Sometimes we manipulate it, turning Holocaust-related fears into an outlook and a value system. Time and again, we discover that, whether we want it or not, nearly every one of us is a carrier pigeon of the Holocaust. So it is worth coming to terms with it more consciously. As Ecclesiastes (1:18) tells us: “For in much wisdom [is] much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

Many of us think that we somehow know what is in the Bible, even if we rarely encounter it directly. Yet when we do read it, we can sometimes be shocked anew by both its violence and moral energy, the myriad ways that it radiates human suffering, outrage, and spiritual insight, and sometimes even stupefies us with what can seem a bleak portrait of human (and perhaps divine) failings. As Matti Friedman says, “I loved Bible stories as a kid for the same reason that my kids love them now—because they’re not stories for kids.”

This course is also intended as an immersion in contemporary biblical interpretation, as well as contemporary secular and literary uses of the two-thousand-year-old tradition of midrash, with which the ancient rabbinic interpreters sought to provide fresh interpretation and meaning in contexts relevant to their present moment. Traditional midrash includes many opinions on a single verse often in dialogue or disagreement, an inherently democratic discourse. This traditional variant of storytelling is a close relative of intertextuality, which theorist Susan Handelman aptly describes: “Texts echo, interact, and interpenetrate.” In this class, we will also explore representative examples of how the modern literary imagination (poetry, stories, and a novel) responds to ancient stories and uncovers fresh and often disturbing truths there by brushing those sources up against contemporary realities. Particular attention will be given to identifying and studying specific biblical passages, stories, symbols, and motifs, as they are used today by fiction writers and poets. Especially for feminist writers, the midrash proves an irresistible genre. Given the paucity of women’s voices in the biblical text, the midrash genre, simultaneously modern and traditional, is an ideal outlet for feminist exploration.

The course is an elective that examines human behaviors in relation to race and gender from psychological, sociological, and technological perspectives. These perspectives will be viewed in terms of contemporary societies throughout the African diaspora. At the end of the term, students will demonstrate their knowledge by creating a presentation for an adverse audience while taking a supportive position of a social issue relating to race and/or gender.

What are the meanings of race and racism in Jewish culture, history, and politics? Are Jews an ethnic or racial minority? Is antisemitism a form of racism? Is Zionism a form of racism? Does Jewish ethics include a commitment to racial justice? What is the history of the relations between African Americans and American Jews? Who are the Black Jews, Arab Jews, and Indian Jews? This course discusses these questions by exploring various perspectives on race and racism in Jewish, Black, and other cultures, histories, and politics—from the Hebrew Bible up to most recent social and political events and their reflection in media and film.

Critical theory is a school of thought and a methodical approach which examines the interrelations of abstract thinking and concrete social reality. It questions the conceptual frame within which we perceive the reality we live in and seeks to detect the underlying social and ideological mechanisms that often lead to irrationality, injustice, and oppression. Integrating elements from philosophy, psychology, sociology, political economy, aesthetics, and film theory, Critical Theory provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the meaning of progress, freedom, individuality, ideology, and technology, by studying phenomena such as alienation, reification, authoritarianism, prejudice, and racism.

Developed in the 1930s by a group of German-Jewish thinkers, such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Fromm, together known as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, at first in Germany and later in the US, Critical Theory has always responded to social, cultural, and political developments—and their impact by and on individual life, consciousness, and agency. This course largely focuses on the main writings of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, but it begins by exploring foundational texts in social thought by Hegel, Marx, and Lukács, and it concludes by discussing the significance and implications of Critical Theory for feminism, gender and queer theory, and critical race theory.

This course will explore the crucial connections between translation and migration in contemporary global culture from an interdisciplinary humanities perspective. In our discussions, we will often draw on our familiarity with languages other than English, but knowledge of another language is not required for the course.

Migration and translation are distinct yet closely linked phenomena. They both relate to forms of mobility which deeply affect human lives and human cultures. In today’s political and cultural debate, translation often offers a generative as well as anxiety-producing metaphor to talk about migration as in the case of “relocations” or “translated people.” But there is a huge difference between “manipulating,” “translating,” or “betraying” ideas, words, or texts and doing the same with human beings. How does the idea of translation change when it is seen from the vantage point of migration and understood as a practical, political, and ethical matter rather than a purely linguistic one?

Drawing on an interdisciplinary corpus of texts and scholarship ranging from nonfiction to poetry, from art to film, and from translation studies, migration studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and sociology, we will study how translation affects the lives of those who move and settle in other cultures and how, in turn, migration affects modes of language, identity, and belonging. Our reflection will focus on Europe and the Mediterranean, on the one hand, and on North and Central America, on the other.

Primary Texts
Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New Directions, 2017).
Emily Jacir, John Lansdowne, and Christopher MacEvitt, Translatio (excerpts) (Neri Pozza, 2016).
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House, 2017).
Sara Uribe, Antígona González, trans. John Pluecker (Les Figues, 2016).
Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt (Flatiron Books, 2020).

A survey of the fantastic in literature and film, taught by a fantasy/magical-realist novelist. We’ll look at various types and patterns of fantasy, consider how these works arise from their very real cultural and historical contexts, and throughout the class, entertain the big question why the fantastic is so often the best way to tell about our experience in chaotic, crazy times. Four short papers and lively discussion.

The dream of utopia is perhaps as old as humanity itself. Coined by Thomas More in the sixteenth century, “utopia” has come to refer to the quest for the ideal society, that “good place” where all the evils of human civilization have been purged and people are free to live in peace, harmony, and security. The literature of utopia is vast. From the Garden of Eden and Hesiod’s “Golden Age” to Marxist political theory and the first architectural plans for Disney World, humans have dreamed the dream of utopia in an endless series of variations, each dream unique to the dreamer and to the time and place of its making. This course proposes to survey the utopian dream as it unfolds in Western culture. Beginning with More’s Utopia and continuing into the twentieth century, we will explore a sampling of utopian thought and consider in particular the ways in which utopian dreams have become the very real foundation of American life. We will also examine the darker version of utopian literature, the dystopian novel, which portrays cultures and civilizations that are the complete reverse of the “good place” in the author’s way of thinking. Ranging from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine to Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, we will discuss why dystopian literature has become much more common and popular in contemporary culture than its more optimistic cousin, the utopian novel. Where possible we will compare the literary visions of these works to representations in film and on television.

Critical theory is a school of thought and a methodical approach which examines the interrelations of abstract thinking and concrete social reality. It questions the conceptual frame within which we perceive the reality we live in and seeks to detect the underlying social and ideological mechanisms that often lead to irrationality, injustice, and oppression. Integrating elements from philosophy, psychology, sociology, political economy, aesthetics, and film theory, Critical Theory provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the meaning of progress, freedom, individuality, ideology, and technology, by studying phenomena such as alienation, reification, authoritarianism, prejudice, and racism.

Developed in the 1930s by a group of German-Jewish thinkers, such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Fromm, together known as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, at first in Germany and later in the US, Critical Theory has always responded to social, cultural, and political developments—and their impact by and on individual life, consciousness, and agency. This course largely focuses on the main writings of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, but it begins by exploring foundational texts in social thought by Hegel, Marx, and Lukács, and it concludes by discussing the significance and implications of Critical Theory for feminism, gender and queer theory, and critical race theory.

This course will explore the crucial connections between translation and migration in contemporary global culture from an interdisciplinary humanities perspective. In our discussions, we will often draw on our familiarity with languages other than English, but knowledge of another language is not required for the course.

Migration and translation are distinct yet closely linked phenomena. They both relate to forms of mobility which deeply affect human lives and human cultures. In today’s political and cultural debate, translation often offers a generative as well as anxiety-producing metaphor to talk about migration as in the case of “relocations” or “translated people.” But there is a huge difference between “manipulating,” “translating,” or “betraying” ideas, words, or texts and doing the same with human beings. How does the idea of translation change when it is seen from the vantage point of migration and understood as a practical, political, and ethical matter rather than a purely linguistic one?

Drawing on an interdisciplinary corpus of texts and scholarship ranging from nonfiction to poetry, from art to film, and from translation studies, migration studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and sociology, we will study how translation affects the lives of those who move and settle in other cultures and how, in turn, migration affects modes of language, identity, and belonging. Our reflection will focus on Europe and the Mediterranean, on the one hand, and on North and Central America, on the other.

Primary Texts
Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New Directions, 2017).
Emily Jacir, John Lansdowne, and Christopher MacEvitt, Translatio (excerpts) (Neri Pozza, 2016).
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House, 2017).
Sara Uribe, Antígona González, trans. John Pluecker (Les Figues, 2016).
Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt (Flatiron Books, 2020).