The main reading for each session is set by the visitor, and will be posted below by week, along with short, additional readings intended to provide some background and define terms. Each Friday by noon, two members of the class will post 300-500 word responses to the most recent seminar on our “Discussion” page. (A schedule of students assigned to this duty is to be found here.) Everyone else is welcome to comment. As our final project develops, specific assignments toward that work will appear below as well.
Week 12 (Nov. 30)
Our final visitors!—Martha Friedman, of the Lewis Center, and Brooke Holmes, of Classics (and former director of IHUM). Martha and Brooke are frequent collaborators, and we can expect to hear some about how they work together. They have set us readings from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things), as well as an essay of Brooke’s, “In Flux” (part of a larger project also worth investigating, called Fluid Matters), and an essay on Martha’s project Castoffs. Martha will also share some of her own work in the seminar.
Week 11 (Nov. 23)
No reading for this week—we’ll be discussing our work in progress for the exhibition, so each pair should be prepared to give a brief presentation of their ideas. We’ll do some collective brainstorming, and then at 3:30 head over to the Hagan Gallery to meet with Joe Arnold, who will talk to us about technical resources.
Week 10 (Nov. 16)
This week, David Levine, Professor of the Practice (what’ s that?!) at Harvard’s program in Theater, Dance & Media, will join us, and he has sent Adrian Piper’s “On Wearing Three Hats,” along with an essay of his own, “Edition of Eight,” from A Discourse on Method.
As a supplement to the first part of class, one more canonical reading in the critique of the disciplines, an excerpt from Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus. Given our history of getting to these extra readings, let’s treat this one as optional, but I may touch on some of its ideas as we talks about Eddie Glaude’s visit last week—especially his account of the founding of the Department of African American Studies.
Week 9 (Nov. 9)
Eddie Glaude of the Department of African American Studies will join us this week, and he offers up an excerpt from his recent book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (which will be our main text), along with an essay of Baldwin’s, Take Me to the Water, from his collection No Name in the Street.
Since we did not have a chance last week to talk about Foucault, let’s keep that excerpt from Discipline and Punish in play for our first hour. You might also have a quick look back at the discussion of knowledge and power in our reader on knowledge from our second week.
Week 8 (Nov. 2)
This week, Andrew Cole of the English Department joins us, and proposes an excerpt from Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. He has also sent along his dialogue with Julian Rose about race and architecture, A Bridge to Somewhere, and a deep cut (not obligatory, but for anyone who wants to keep reading), his article The Dialectic of Space: An Untimely Proposal.
After our discussion about knowing deployments of Foucault, we also decided to read some Foucault; here’s an excerpt from Discipline and Punish for us to consider in the first hour.
Finally, in the second session of our double-header this Tuesday, we’ll have dinner 6:30-8, location TBA. We’ll be discussing the direction of our exhibition, so come prepared with an idea or two to put on the table. You can consult some of the materials here for inspiration.
Week 7 (Oct. 26)
Our visitor this week will also be our host: we will be meeting jointly with Christy Wampole’s graduate seminar Essayism: Trajectory of a Genre. We’ll have our usual fifty minutes together in Scheide Caldwell, then walk over to Friend Center 109 for the combined session. Christy poses for us the question, “What do various media – the internet, cinema, video, multimedia – allow the essayist to do that print writing does not?” Some readings and viewings:
Christy Wampole, “The Essayification of Everything.”
Kevin B. Lee, “The Video Essay: Lost Potentials and Cinematic Futures” (https://vimeo.com/298734232)
Miklós Kiss, “Desktop Documentary: From Artefact to Artist(ic) Emotions”
Chloé Galibert-Laîné & Kevin B. Lee, “Reading // Binging // Benning” (https://vimeo.com/252840859)
Week 6 (Oct. 12)
This week, we will be joined with Devin Fore, of the German Department (and the Program in Media and Modernity and the Committee for Film Studies), and he proposes for us chapter three of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy, along with three sections from his own introduction to the English translation.
Because Erin Huang brought us so many questions about neoliberalism, and because we barely broached Wendy Brown’s article, let us keep “Neoliberalized Knowledge” on the table, and use some part of our first hour to set ourselves a tentative reading list for the remainder of the semester.
Week 5 (Oct. 5)
Erin Huang has given us the introduction to Shu-mei Shih’s Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007), as a way of thinking about “Sinophone studies (modeled after Francophone studies) and the questions of approaching critical race studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies in/out/beyond the disciplinary formation of area (China) studies.” As a sample of her own work, we have the introduction to her book Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility. “It is a way of reading “horror” in Marxist political theory and conceptualizing “urban horror” as a conceptual framework for examining ‘film’ as a medium of transmitting and rehearsing public sentiments of dissent in China and its neighboring Sinophone nations, Hong Kong and Taiwan, under the global imaginary of ‘post-‘ socialism.”
With our questions about access and the economics of the humanities in mind, let’s take up Wendy Brown’s “Neoliberalized Knowledge” together in the first part of the class.
Week 4 (Sept. 28/29)
Note our eccentric schedule this week: Tuesday 1:30-2:20 in our usual room, and Wednesday 2:30 to 4:20, in 301 Julis Romo Rabinowitz Hall.
Marshall Brown will join us Wednesday from the School of Architecture, and he has set us an essay from Henri Lefebvre’s Writing on Cities, “Industrialization and Urbanization,” as well as a couple of short pieces of his own, “Mashup City” and “The New Country.”
On Tuesday, let us avail ourselves of a little more institutional background, given the thinking we did in the last session about the structures of disciplines. I have posted two texts: an excerpt from Jerry Jacobs’ book In Defense of Disciplines, and Julie Thompson Klein and Robert Frodeman’s “Interdisciplining Humanities: A Historical Overview.” The first of the two excerpted chapters from Jacobs is the most directly relevant, but the second is worth a skim.
It might just be interesting to look over some of the ways different institutions carve up areas of study: a few I looked at were The University of North Texas, The University of Michigan, Raritan Valley Community College, Occidental College, and Princeton.
Week 3 (Sept. 21)
This week, Paize Keulemans joins us from East Asian Studies, and has set us a reading from Alexander Galloway, “Gamic Action, Four Moments.” He has also sent along a lecture of his own, “Immersion without Mimesis: Games as Virtual Worlds in Jin Ping Mei.”
In the first hour of class, before Paize joins us, let’s spend a little more time with the AAUP “In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education” and Judith Butler’s response, “A Dissenting View from the Humanities on the AAUP’s Statement on Knowledge.” (I am linking to PDF’s here; the original links are on our discussion page.) I’d like to put those into contact with our readings on experience from last week (refresh your memory of those before we meet), and I have a feeling that together they will help us reflect on what Graham brought us. Don’t forget to look at our discussion page once Joyce and Utku have posted on Friday, and if you want to add any reflections, please do!
Week 2 (Sept. 14)
Our guest this week is D. Graham Burnett, of the History Department and the Program in the History of Science. (You can see his personal website here.) He has set us two readings, in the usual configuration: Chapter XI of William James’s Principles of Psychology, “Attention,” which will be our main text; and also, by way of introduction to his own work, a catalogue essay on the artist Nora Turato.
For the first hour of class, we will put last week’s discussion of knowledge in dialogue with some readings on experience, and discuss directions in which we want our inquiry to go from here.
Week 1 (Sept. 7)
An introduction to the class’s protocols and tendencies, and to each other. Our reading will be a set of provocations, recent and not so, on the question of knowledge.
