http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/sct/html/courses.html
28th Summer Session: June 20-July 30, 2004
The School of Criticism & Theory was founded in 1976 by a group of leading
literary scholars in the conviction that an understanding of theory is
fundamental to humanistic studies.
Today, in an unparalleled summer campus experience, the SCT offers
professors and advanced graduate students of literature and related social
sciences a chance to work with preeminent figures in critical thought --
exploring literature's relationship with history, art, anthropology, and the
law; examining its role in ideological and cultural movements; and
reassessing theoretical approaches that have emerged over the last fifty
years.
In an intense six-week course of study, faculty members and graduate
students in literature, the arts, the humanities, and related social
sciences from around the world explore recent developments in literary and
humanistic studies.
Participants work with the SCT's core faculty of distinguished theorists in
one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty member offers, in addition, a
public lecture and a colloquium (based on an original paper) which are
attended by the entire group.
The program also includes four mini-seminars taught by scholars who usually
visit for one or two weeks. These consist of lectures, follow-up seminars,
and extensive office hours. Finally, throughout the six weeks, a series of
distinguished theorists visit the SCT as lecturers or respondents.
S i x - w e e k s e m i n a r s
LITERARY CANNIBALISM: A CARIBBEAN STRATEGY FOR SURVIVAL
MARYSE CONDÉ Writer
Cannibalism has become a metaphor in the Caribbean. In early travel
writings, we are reminded of the first encounter between Christopher
Columbus and the Indians as well as the emergence of the concept of
cannibalism. Subsequently, Shakespeare coined the word Caliban, an anagram
of cannibal, for one of the characters in his play "The Tempest." Since then
Caribbean writers have reclaimed Caliban as their ancestor. The seminar will
study the development of that metaphor and how it illuminates the scope of
Caribbean literature.
The seminar will focus on the following issues
1. Colonial Encounters. The Indians, the Europeans and the Blacks.
2. Who is the Cannibal?
3. Voices Lost, Voices Regained. Music and the Literature in the Vernacular
of the Caribbean.
4. Literary Cannibalism. Oswaldo de Andrade's Manifesto.
5. Surrealism and Cannibalism. André Breton's Manifesto.
6. Negritude and Cannibalism. The journal "Tropiques."
7. A few case studies
a) the cannibalization of the folk tale or orality and 'écriture.' "Between
Two Worlds" by Simone Schwarz-Bart and "Macounaima" by Mario de Andrade.
b) the cannibalization of world masterpieces. Césaire and Shakespeare, Jean
Rhys and Charlotte Brontë, Maryse Condé and Emily Brontë.
PARANOID EMPIRE: MASCULINITIES AND OTHER WAR ZONES
ANNE MCCLINTOCK Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Gender Studies,
University of Wisconsin, Madison
The seminar explores the crises of masculinity emerging within contemporary
globalization and what I call the "paranoid empire" of the United States.
Reading feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural theories, as well as novels
and films, we shall investigate how masculinities come into being in
articulated relation to other categories, such as race, nationalism, class
and sexuality.We shall focus, not on masculinity as a single, universal
gender, but on masculinities as a constellation of historically changing and
socially constituted practices and identity formations, in uneven relation
to power. The seminar engages with notions of masculinities as complex,
contested and contradictory, mediated through money, technologies of desire,
technologies of violence and the law. Masculinities, in this sense, are
situations under contest.
The following themes circulate through the readings: paranoid imperialism;
masculinity and abjection; money and sexuality; race and fetishism;
nationalism, race and gender; regimes of discipline and the right to punish;
violence and the carceral society; taboo and clandestine masculinities,
including queer, transgender and female masculinities; scopic imperialism;
the privilege of pleasures; monogamy and the female body as property;
geographies of resistance, especially the possibilities of non-violent modes
of political resistance; and the recurring question of how power is
constituted and transgressed.
I am specifically interested in exploring three notions of masculinity, what
I call militarized masculinity, paranoid masculinity, and wounded
masculinity. A central question of the class will be to ask, again, what
does it mean to say that the body is constructed?
RITUAL, PLAY, AND PERFORMANCE
RICHARD SCHECHNER University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies,
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Performance in the broad sense encompasses a very broad range of events,
activities, and behaviors. These range from behaviors common to many animals
to the highest, singular expressions of human arts and culture. The
underlying grounds of human performance-aesthetic performances, performance
in everyday life, sports performances, the performance of medicine and law,
and performativity-are "ritual" and "play." Looked at theoretically, these
events, activities, and behaviors are categories, tropes, genres,
structures, and systems that resist easy or settled definition. To be
understood, they must be examined and grasped from multiple, sometimes
contradictory, directions. During the seminar, ritual and play will be
investigated from a variety of these directions including the ethological,
anthropological, historical, intercultural, and theoretical. Readings will
include the work of Durkheim, Bell, Geertz, Goffman, Tambiah, Turner,
Spariosu, Sutton-Smith, Csikszentmihalyi, Severi, Carse, Caillois,
Winnicott, d'Aquili, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, and Schechner.
SECULARISM AND ANTISECULARISM
MICHAEL WARNER Professor of English, Rutgers University
Under current conditions of globalization, conflicts over secularism and
religion are no longer merely local. In many cases they are conflicts over
the nature of the global order itself, since secularism is often perceived
as a modern and Western imposition. This is particularly true in India,
where secular governance is often said to be a colonial legacy, and in the
Islamic world, where antisecularism tries to address the problem of Western
dominance. Because Americans perceive their own secularism as consonant with
a highly religious national culture, they are often blind to the intensity
of resentment against secular governance in other parts of the world.
Is there an underlying tendency or framework for secularism in the
nation-state system, or in global capital? Can locally varying models of
modernity supply alternatives to the secularism of the various Western
models? Is secularism defensible without liberalism? How is the critique of
secularism linked to the critique of liberalism, or of the nation, or of
capital? Do cultures and disciplines of the secular exist that could be made
visible as distinct from the official and negative language of secular
neutrality? What is the social imaginary that has established the current
polarization of secular and religious?
We will study these questions through a set of contemporary theoretical
debates, and then through some historical case studies. Topics will include
the redefinition of religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
the language of worldliness, and alternative secularisms in
nineteenth-century America. Special attention will be given to the so-called
Great Awakening and to the careers of Emerson and Whitman.
M i n i S e m i n a r s :
In addition to one of the four six-week courses, participants attend all of
the two-week or one-week mini-seminars. For 2004, these are:
BETWEEN HOSPITALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY: KANT, ARENDT, SCHMITT AND DERRIDA
SEYLA BENHABIB Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy
and Directory of Ethics, Politics and Economics, Yale University
Beginning with a close reading of Kant's "Perpetual Peace" (1795) essay,
this seminar focuses on transborder crossings as those practices and moments
which reveal the fragility and paradoxes of the territorially centered model
of political sovereignty. Liberal democracies are caught between the
imperatives of universal hospitality, whereby human beings have claims to
the earth as equal moral persons, and the imperatives of sovereignty,
whereby the policing of borders and the securing of territoriality are the
chief achievements of the modern state. What are the moral and political
quandaries created by these dual imperatives?
We will discuss, in addition to Kant, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Carl
Schmitt, the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees and the
Genocide Convention.
CULTURAL MODERNITY AND COMPARATIVE POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES: ENGLISH,
ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY
BIODUN JEYIFO Professor of English, Cornell University
Cultural modernity in general can be understood in the light of the
transformations that began in the colonial phase of imperialism and went by
the appellation of the "civilizing process" in the European metropole and
the "civilizing mission" in parts of Europe that were colonized, but mostly
in the non-European colonies. In the name of freeing humanity from both
mental and bodily enslavement to the "savage," unsanitary and destructive
predispositions of the natural order, these processes instituted diverse
forms of the modern disciplinary society and enabled new forms of servitude
and alienation. In the postcolonial, late modern epoch of imperialism, the
colonialist binary opposition between cultural modernity and anti-modernity
has been massively deconstructed. But while it is now allowed that becoming
culturally modern takes many forms and that there are divergent,
'vernacular' or alternative modernities, the circulation of the fictions and
discourses of the civilizing process and mission persist in the postcolonial
present-and cultural capital remains a pervasive instrument for
consolidating inequality between and within the various regions of the
world.
Postcolonial studies does not "belong" to any academic discipline, though
its strongest site of institutional consolidation is in literary studies.
This seminar will explore the transdisciplinary nature of postcolonial
studies at the key sites of English, Anthropology and Philosophy. These are
the disciplines which, above all others, have furnished postcolonial studies
with its greatest stock of intellectual resources. In exploring the
metadisciplinary convergence of crucial domains of the protocols and
methodologies of these three disciplines in postcolonial studies, we will
focus on the problematics of cultural modernity sketched above. We will
explore how the differential paths of articulatory practices between these
three disciplines in competing formations of postcolonial studies aid or
obscure emancipatory knowledge of the ambiguous legacies of becoming
culturally modern in the colonialist and postcolonialist/postmodernist
modes. We will also explore the comparative forms and stages of
epistemological and institutional "decolonization" within these disciplines
themselves. We shall address these issues through the writings of Edward
Said [Culture and Imperialism], James Clifford [The Predicament of Culture]
and Jürgen Habermas [The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity], but we will
discuss other relevant theorists and intellectual and social movements as
well, particularly in the developing world and the "minority" and immigrant
communities in the West.
IS LEVINAS 'USE-LESS'?
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities,
Columbia University
We shall read two sections from Emmanuel Levinas' Otherwise Than Being to
see how risk can help political activism. We shall consider problems of
translation as well. Background preparation includes Alain Badiou's
criticism of Levinas, especially in his Ethics, Luce Irigaray's earlier
dialogue, included in Margaret Whitford's The Irigaray Reader, and Jacques
Derrida's Adieu.
"LAW AND LITERATURE: TOWARDS A HERMENEUTICS OF EARTHLY JUSTICE"
RICHARD WEISBERG Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law, Cardozo Law
School, Yeshiva University
In a theoretical environment often explicitly directed towards the denial of
norms, stories have stood (in the Nietzschean sense) as "last signposts"
towards a hermeneutic of earthly justice. Is it possible to establish a norm
of just behavior, and to recognize justice's opposite (Derrida's
"monstrosity," which he claims cannot be identified until after it has
"become normal or the norm")? We shall explore, in a post-postmodernist
mode, Nietzsche's genealogical works, the novellas of Melville and Camus,
theoretical essays on human rights and poetics, recent judicial decisions
about Holocaust memory, and-as a coda-"The Merchant of Venice."
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