Cross-Listings

The following courses are credited towards the Psychoanalytic Studies minor. To view complete course descriptions, please see the Graduate School Course Atlas. If you have questions about courses not listed here,
please contact the program director

Spring 2010

 

Fall 2009

CPLT 751 The Problem of Life and the Philosophy of Life
Goodstein
[Cross-listed with ILA 790]

Content: As the de Anima attests, philosophical attempts to grasp the meaning of life are coeval with the western philosophical tradition itself. In modernity, however, the category of life became a problem in entirely new ways. Contemporary concerns about life center less on its definition, interpretation, and proper conduct than on its malleability, manipulability, reproducibility, and indeed technological producibility. This course will attempt a genealogy of what is quite literally a transformation in the meaning of life in modernity in an effort to understand not just the philosophical but also the historical and cultural significance of that transformation. After briefly considering predecessors from Aristotle to Emerson, we will focus on the “philosophy of life” that emerged in the late nineteenth century in response, on one hand, to Kant’s radical rethinking of philosophy itself and, on the other, to developments in the natural sciences.

Texts: Readings will include work by James, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Simmel, Bergson, and Freud. Time permitting, we will consider how Lebensphilosophie is criticized and extended in Husserl and Heidegger and explore later thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Maturana, and Agamben who take up the problem of life in new ways.

CPLT 751 The Work of Memory
Bammer
M. 1-4 pm [Cross-listed with ILA 790]

Content: This course will review some of the key texts in the emerging field of memory studies, with a particular emphasis on the links–and separations–between history (what happened) and memory (what we remember and/or forget). In this context, we will explore some of the terms in which memory is talked about, including the distinctions and connections, between public, collective, or cultural memory, on the one hand, and private, personal, or individual memory, on the other. We will consider the ethical, political, social, aesthetic, and psychological dimensions of remembering and its counterpart, forgetting, and examine some of the ways in which these acts of remembering and forgetting are given expression in ritual and material form.

Texts: Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life; Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past; Richard Terdiman. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia; James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning; Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDs Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering; François Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilli P re, History Beyond Trauma: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent; Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory; Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination; selected essays by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Marianne Hirsch, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida.

Particulars: Students will prepare and present two studies that may take the form of two separate projects or may be linked into one longer project. The length and scope of each may vary; together they will be somewhere around 20 pp. One will be a case study of a particular memorial or memorial practice. The other will be a critical analysis of an issue (or set of issues), concept (or set of concepts), or approach related to the work of memory as represented in one (or some) of the works we will engage with.

ILA 790/HIST 585: Histories of Medicine & Disease in the West
Kushner
T, 1:00pm - 4:00pm

Content: This seminar examines the competing claims about the purposes, meanings and uses of “history” for the understanding of medicine and disease in the West since the 19th century. While medical education has emphasized biographies of “great” physicians and stories of professional scientific progress to provide a means of professional identity, academic historians have been critical of this approach. In contrast academic historians have emphasized the need to place medical claims in wider social, cultural, and ideological contexts.  As a result physicians and academics often employ “history” for incommensurate purposes.   Recently, a third approach has emerged, drawing on the technical knowledge of medical practitioners and researchers along with the critical analyses of academic historians in order to use the histories of medicine as a tool for medical problem solving.  This seminar will examine these approaches, and others, in order to gain a fuller appreciation of the extent to which assumptions about what constitutes historical inquiry frames both the possibilities and limitations of cross disciplinary interdisciplinary collaborations.
Particulars: Permission Only. This class is simultaneously offered in Public Health and Nursing Schools.

ILA 790/WS 585: Disability
Gilman, Garland-Thomson
W, 2:30 pm - 5:30 pm

Content: “Disability” is both a medical and social concept.  The Health Sciences understand disability as a medical condition or set of symptoms to be addressed through treatment. Policymakers understand disability as a civil rights issue. Lawyers and courts understand disability is a legal issue. Most people understand disability as an undesirable condition and a loss of status. People with disabilities understand disability as a life management challenge. Disability Studies in the Humanities understands disability as an historical category, a source of art and culture, and an identity group.

 The course will have two components, a small, select seminar and a public lecture series. Students from the College, the Graduate School, the Medical School, Public Health, the Law School, and Nursing are eligible to apply to take part in this course and will be given credit for it within their own curriculum.  The public element will feature both local and invited speakers to address the major concepts of Normalcy, Dependence, Enhancement, Sexuality, and Selection. This class is simultaneously offered in Public Health and Nursing Schools.
Particulars: Permission required to enroll.

ILA 790: Nazi Politics and Medicine
Gilman/Eckert
W, 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Content: Medicine in Germany from 1933 to 1945 provides extreme examples of the excesses of modern medical culture.  This course, sponsored by the Holocaust Museum (Washington), will examine questions such as the biologization of politics; models of public health - euthanasia and sterilization; the death camps and medical research - race and genetics; alternative medicine; gender roles in medicine: doctors and nurses in Nazi culture; disability and citizenship -- the origin of informed consent and the Nuremberg Medical Code.  All of these questions will be introduced by an overview of the political history and ideology of German culture from the 1920s to 1945. This class is simultaneosly offered in Public Health and Nursing Schools.
Particulars: Permission required to enroll

FILM 502: Seminar in Genre/Criticism: Gender and Genre
Schreiber
W. 1:00-4:00 pm

Content:This course will examine film genres through the lens of gender.  How does the representation of “female-ness”, “male-ness”, and “queer-ness” instill particular film genres with meaning, and help us differentiate them from each other? How does the representation of gender within the genre affect the gender that is drawn to the genre?  And, what happens when particular directors choose to deviate from a genre’s usual gendered formula? We will read classic and contemporary writing on film genre, with a focus on comparing and contrasting what Steve Neale refers to as a “stable genre”– the western- with those that are more ambiguously defined – the women’s film/melodrama and film noir.  
Texts: Possible texts may include:
Rick Altman, Film/Genre
Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in the 1950s Melodrama
Mike Chopra-Grant, Hollywood Genres and Post-war America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir
Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Women’s Film of the 1940s
E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir
Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman, ed. The Western Reader
Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street:  Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity
Marcia Landy, ed. Imitations of Life: A Reader of Film and Television Melodrama
Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film
James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts
Will Wright, Sixguns and Society
Assessment: Students will be required to participate in a project proposal workshop, give an in-class presentation, and complete a 15-20 page final paper.

History 585-003: Special Topics in History: Violence: A History
Crais, W. 4:00-7:00 pm

This is an interdisciplinary seminar on violence and the human condition.  We will explore definitions of violence, the ways different interpretive practices and communities have understood violence, and issues such as violence and memory.  Readings will range across time and space, and will engage with disciplines such as anthropology, history, literary theory, and psychoanalysis.  We will also engage with classic historical problems such as the relationship between violence and the state, violence and empire, as well as contemporary issues such as insurrections and terrorism.  The seminar will be of interest to students in History, Anthropology, Literary Criticism, and allied disciplines.

Particulars:  Students will be required to produce short weekly responses, in addition to a substantial research project
.

SPAN 550: History, Fiction, and Memory in Modern Spanish Narrative
Gold, Thursday 1-4 pm               

Description: This course will examine the ramifications of Carlos Fuentes's injunction to “remember the future, imagine the past” by focusing on the relationship between history, fiction, and memory as reflected in Spanish narratives of the nineteenth through twenty-first century.  While tracing the changing nature of historical inquiry since the 1800s (for example, the shift from positivist to genealogical historical models, contradictory conceptions of what constitutes historical evidence, the replacement of History by histories), the course will examine the ways in which the novelistic rewriting of Spain’s contested past(s) problematizes key aspects of narrative: truth and meaning, representation, authority, temporality. Of special interest are the ways in which these texts work to legitimate or undermine a mythic vision of national history.  Hence, close attention will be paid to the role of collective and private memory–an arena of symbolic-cultural display–in the construction of national identities, a phenomenon perhaps best exemplified in the “memory wars” of present-day Spain. Theoretical and critical readings will address topics such as the politics of (imposed) memory; nostalgia and mourning; the critiques of historical knowledge found in modernist and postmodern fictional narratives; and the poetics of the genre of the historical novel.

Texts: Benito Pérez Galdós, La de los tristes destinos; Miguel de Unamuno, Paz en la guerra; Ramón del Valle-Inclán, La corte de los milagros; Camilo José Cela, La colmena; Luis Martín-Santos, Tiempo de silencio; Juan Marsé, Si te dicen que caí; Juan Goytisolo, La reivindicación del conde Don Julián; Lourdes Ortiz, Urraca; Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad; Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, or comparable texts based on availability.  Discussions of these texts will be supplemented by theoretical readings (Hayden White, Michel de Certeau, Roland Barthes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Le Goff, Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Andreas Huyssen, Svetlana Boym, Michel Foucault, Paul Ricoeur) and by selections from the writings of Spanish historians who are contemporaries of the novelists that form the core of the course.

Films: Selections from newsreel documentaries (“NO-DOs”) of the Franco period.

Particulars: Evaluation is based upon participation in seminar discussions, interventions via Learn Link or oral presentations, and a final research paper.  For the latter students may explore narrative texts or alternative constructions of historical memory (monuments, photography, museums, etc.).

 Content:  This new course serves as a thematic introduction to important themes in modern Jewish thought. We will focus on readings of important texts by writers like Freud, Levinas, Benjamin, Buber, Kook, Heschel and Soloveitchik (and maybe some Boas or Levi-Strauss?). Specific readings will be decided partly in consultation with interested students. Our goal is to gain an integrated picture of what makes modern Jewish thought distinctive in its religious and secular varieties, with a focus on questions of ethics, self-representation and responses to events like emancipation, the Holocaust, the State of Israel and the rise of post-modernity. One area of particular concern will also be the ways in which Jewish ritual and religious observance are interpreted, transformed, or rejected by different thinkers.
 No prerequisite.

RLHT 741M: Freud, Wittgenstein and Barth
David Pacini, Tuesday 8:30-11:30 am

JS 730:  Modern Jewish Thought: Rupture, Ritual and Redemption
Don Seeman, Thursday 12:00 – 3:00

Content:  This new course serves as a thematic introduction to important themes in modern Jewish thought. We will focus on readings of important texts by writers like Freud, Levinas, Benjamin, Buber, Kook, Heschel and Soloveitchik (and maybe some Boas or Levi-Strauss?). Specific readings will be decided partly in consultation with interested students. Our goal is to gain an integrated picture of what makes modern Jewish thought distinctive in its religious and secular varieties, with a focus on questions of ethics, self-representation and responses to events like emancipation, the Holocaust, the State of Israel and the rise of post-modernity. One area of particular concern will also be the ways in which Jewish ritual and religious observance are interpreted, transformed, or rejected by different thinkers.
No prerequisite.

History 585-006: Special Topics in History: Fin-de-Siecle Europe

Vick Tu 4:00-7:00

Content: This discussion-driven seminar will explore recent trends in the study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, with a focus upon the crisis-ridden transition to mass politics, mass culture, and urban modernity.  The course will touch on both high and popular culture, the development of urban modernity and modernism, the rise of radical nationalist and antisemitic politics, the relationship between colonialism and the metropole, changing conceptions and experiences of gender, the invention of tradition, and the spread of urban currents into rural areas.  You may also find yourselves becoming strangely familiar with the world cities of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, our prime examples.  The range of important and innovative approaches covered should make this course of use to students researching or preparing exams in other fields as well.   

Texts: Readings may include: Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture; Stephen Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900; Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris; Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900; H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany; Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux; Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town; Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria; and various articles available electronically. 

Particulars: Active participation in class discussion; a short analytical review; presentations; a longer historiographic review essay. 

CPLT 751 Foucault
Huffer
T  9-12pm

Content: For some decades now, it has been much easier to have a passionate opinion about Michel Foucault than a careful reading of him.  He is a saint or a demon, a liberator or a desecrator, the heroic promoter of an agenda or the debauched prophet of despair.  This seminar will be less concerned to foster impassioned uses of Foucault, or even to analyze his remarkable susceptibility to abuse, than it will be to think with and about some texts that bear his name.  We will be particularly concerned with his ‘ethical’ and ‘political’ texts – texts about the consequences of medicalizing madness or normalcy, about the powers coded into the category ‘sexuality,’ about ancient or contemporary alternatives to contemporary management of human life.  Members of the seminar will be encouraged to connect their readings in Foucault with their own intellectual projects. 

*Permission required (department only-not instructor)

Texts: The seminar will concentrate on texts by Foucault rather than by his interpreters. The major texts will include History of Madness, Abnormal, History of Sexuality 1, and Hermeneutics of the Subject.  We will also study some of the pieces collected in the English anthology, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.

Particulars: Members of the seminar will be expected to read the assigned texts attentively and to discuss them constructively.  The will also be asked to write three short exercises (5 pp. each) during the course of the semester and then a final paper (15-20 pp.) at its conclusion.  There will be no examinations – except for those imposed by Foucault.