Fall 2007 & Spring 2008 Courses

Course descriptions are immediately following. Click to view the schedule for Fall 2006, including days and times. There may be periodic changes and additions, particularly to Spring 2007 courses, so please check back frequently.

To view courses for 2006-07, click here.

I. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

GLIB 5101
Modernity and Its Discontents
Fall 2007. Three credits.
James Miller
An introduction to liberal studies at The New School for Social Research, this seminar brings new students and faculty together to explore a variety of themes and texts that epitomize some of the critical concerns of our age. Among the topics discussed are freedom and the problem of progress; human rights; individualism; the end of slavery and the implications of European world domination; new views of human nature; the idea of the avant-garde; and the moral implications of modern war and totalitarianism. Among the authors read are Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Goethe, James Madison, Robespierre, Condorcet, Hegel, Marx, Emerson, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad, Darwin, Freud, Ernst Jünger, Georg Lukács, André Malraux, Jean Améry, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. Seminar, limited to 25 students.

GLIB 5513
Parallel Lives: Emerson and Nietzsche
Spring 2008. Three credits.
James Miller
By comparing and contrasting the two most prominent prophets of modern self-reliance—one a democrat honored in his day, the other an aristocrat consecrated only after he had descended into madness—this seminar will follow in detail how each forged his own strong style, after suffering through a crisis over what path in life to take. Emerson resigned a job as one of Boston’s most promising young ministers in 1832, in order to become an itinerant exponent of a new philosophy of life. A little over a generation later, Friedrich Nietzsche, a kindred spirit inspired in part by Emerson’s essays, resigned his professorship in philology at the University of Basel in 1879, in order to become a essayist and self-reliant philosopher. The course will begin with a survey of Emerson’s early journals and letters, a reading of the public lectures that first won him fame, and then a study of his first book, Nature, followed by a close reading of selected early Essays. The rest of the course will track Nietzsche’s development from 1872, when he first thought about resigning from his teaching job, to 1884; we will focus first on early notebooks and some unpublished essays, and then read seriatim the published works that followed—Untimely Meditations; Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; the first four books of The Gay Science; and the first three parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

GLIB 5514
The Dialectics of Women and Enlightenment
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Gina Luria Walker
In this course, we study the intersection of revolution, gender, and genre in late Enlightenment and early Romantic thought to reveal women’s challenges to enlightened discourse that helped shape the project of Enlightenment. We interrupt the conversation among “canonical male forefathers” (Mary Wollstonecraft’s phrase) to consider alternative contemporaneous theories of rights and responsibilities. We examine the dialogue between texts by women and men to interrogate the modern construction of knowledge, including the precincts of “natural philosophy,” “Science,” “Self,” “Sex,” and “Race.” Beginning at the end of the 17th century, we trace the gendered diffusion of Newtonianism and the Christian Enlightenment, the complex influence of Rousseau, and the radical deployment of the Cult of Sensibility by intellectuals in England, Europe, and America. We investigate the politics of fiction and life-writing as practiced by reformers and their critics in the print war of the 1790s that culminate in the works of Jane Austen. We read Descartes, Poullain de la Barre, and Anna Maria van Schurman; Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, and John Locke; Voltaire and marquise Du Châtelet; Phillis Wheatley, David Hume, and Thomas Paine; Catharine Macaulay and Edmund Burke; Diderot, Condorcet, Olympe de Gouges, and Marie Madeleine Jodin; William Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Hamilton, Austen—and, of course, Rousseau. We also track changes in the historiography and critical representations of Enlightenment feminisms from their time to ours.

GLIB 5515
Radicalism and Its Discontents
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Eli Zaretsky
A history of the Left since the 1960, including the civil rights movement, new left, women’s movement, gay liberation, ecology, European social democracy, Solidarity and the Samizdat, anti-globalization, and the Chinese “new left.”

GLIB 5516
On Love and the Social
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Paul Kottmann
This course considers various ways in which love, or eros, has been regarded as incompatible with, yet always born from, the context of social, civic or political life. We read some key texts in philosophy and social theory that treat this problem, from Plato and Hegel to Freud, Levi-Strauss, Foucault and others—but we also follow as our guiding model the most significant poetic-literary treatment of the problem: the myth of Romeo and Juliet, from Ovid through Shakespeare and beyond. The story of Romeo and Juliet allows us to rethink two questions that continue to resonate at the edges of contemporary social theory: 1) What are the conditions for a desired, livable human attachment without the cooperation and mediation of family, society, culture, or at least a shared language or sense of history? 2) Why should the fate of such an attachment be pre-dominantly represented as tragic; and might it be figured—indeed, lived—in any other way?
 

II. Art, Literature, and Society

GLIB 5132
Social Construction of the Avant-Garde
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Vera Zolberg
Avant-garde art of the early 20th century rose to acceptance and legitimacy as the foundation of what came to be called “the tradition of the new.” Its success in reordering aesthetic vision was so complete that contemporary works adhering to an earlier canon came to be rejected—until recently, that is. In this course we examine the processes whereby art styles—cubism, fauvism, futurism, expressionism, among others, against the traditional Academy, came to constitute a new “academy” without walls. Other art forms, such as music underwent equally revolutionary transformations: experiments with new and ancient modes, dissonance, tone-rows, operas without arias, blending of the popular with “the serious.” In the context of global processes in which artistic modernism emerged, we see its effects on artistic creation, production and dissemination; institution building; the sometimes conflicting ideologies of aesthetics.

GLIB 5135
Politics and the Novel
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Robert Boyers
This course studies the evolving relationship between politics and a literary form still thought by many to be an ideal vehicle for the expression of ideas. We examine works of an obviously political character, and a variety of other works, the political intentions of which are rather more difficult to discern. Emphasis is placed upon the tendency of major novels to subvert the very ideas they invoke, to call into question the confidently positivistic readings they often inspire. Students are prepared to discuss the relevant political and cultural context for each of the novels examined, and move back and forth between those contexts and a concern with issues of reading, interpretation and literary value. Works read include Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River; Ingeborg Bachmann, Milana; Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite; Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum; Nadine Gordimer, A Sport of Nature; J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Natalia Ginzburg, The City and the House; Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet; and Mario Vargas Llosa, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.

GLIB 5281
American Dialectics: Art in New York Since 1945
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Jed Perl
Since the end of World War II, art in New York has been animated by powerfully conflicting tendencies—between romanticism and empiricism; abstraction and representation; spontaneity and reflection; nihilism and tradition; the artist and the public. New York City’s melting pot excitement gave a new kind of weight, thrust and velocity to debates that had had their origins in Europe, and the dialectic in all its variety—ranging from Hegelian idealism to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or to Hans Hofmann’s Push and Pull—was shaping the artist’s sense of self and society in the rush-hour city of the postwar years. This course will present a reading of American art since 1945 by focusing on five themes, each of them tied to a specific period.

GLIB 5310
Faith in Modern Thought and Literature: Supreme Fictions and Gods That Failed
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Melissa Monroe
Reports of the death of God may or may not be exaggerated, but issues of faith and doubt, both religious and secular, continue to figure prominently in 20th-century literature, from Samuel Beckett’s God-forsaken seekers to Graham Greene’s whisky priests; from Charles Williams’ apocalyptic London to Flannery O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted south.” In this course, we look at works of fiction, poetry and drama that address either Judeo-Christian belief or the secular creeds that have been proposed as replacements for conventional religion. We read brief selections from theologians and philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain), but our principal focus is on literary authors such as (in addition to those mentioned above) T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, C.S. Lewis, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Paul Celan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Cynthia Ozick. We consider not only the religious (or anti-religious) views expressed in the work, but also how the literary form of each text contributes to its meaning. Our discussion of style extends to student work; several essays are assigned over the course of the semester, and we look at effective examples of student writing.

GLIB 5519
Theorizing the Novel
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Ernestine Schlant Bradley
In the revolutionary essays collected under the title The Dialogic Imagination, the Russian scholar Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) offered a theory of the novel that encompassed the narratives of classical antiquity, the middle ages and the Renaissance, as well as the eighteenth and nineteenth century works regarded as canonical by previous theorists of the literary form. In this seminar, we first explore Bakhtin’s key concepts: the openness of a text, the hybridization of genres and styles, the experimentation with narrative time, narrative voice, narrative instability, etc—the forces at work within a given text that reveal the limits of a given system of writing and hence produce the new, the “novel.” In addition to Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, we read Petronius’ “Dinner with Trimalchio” and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, followed by close readings of two more recent exemplifications of the novel: Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalker Trilogy (1930–32) and Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love (2005).

GLIB 5520
Realism: An Introduction
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Neil Gordon
The novel, wrote Stendhal, is “a mirror being carried down the side of a road.” The famous phrase aptly captures the ambition of the radical 19thcentury technique of realism, that is, to depict the actuality of the world in fiction. But it also serves as a prescient announcement of the huge complications of realism which would occupy artists and critics throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and which still animate our discussions of fiction today. Did Stendhal mean, for example, to express in his image only the pure objectivity of a reflection of reality, or did he mean also to imply the subjectivity of the mirror’s movement and placement? What of the mechanical problematics of the mirror’s materials and construction on which the acuity of its reflection depends and the huge metaphoric implications of the optical model—depth of field, point of view, focus? And what about the compositional and interpretive power of the frame? In this seminar, we study the ambitions and complications of realistic technique—particularly in expressing social and political insight—and trace the evolution of the creative practice and critical conception of realism from the 19th century through modernist and postmodernist paradigm shifts to the present-day debate about the novel of social relevance. Literary texts range from Balzac to W.G. Sebald; critical and theoretical texts will include Saussure, Freud, Henry James, Adorno, Benjamin, and Lukács.

GLIB 5522
Historical Roots of a “Fiasco”: Iraq
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Eli Zaretsky
The American invasion of Iraq has been described as a fiasco. In Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas E. Rick supports this view by characterizing the administration’s actions as the errors or bad intentions of the political right: e.g., the neoconservatives and the cabal around Bush. By contrast, this course explores the weaknesses and failures of American liberalism and the political left in providing the opening for the Bush presidency. The model for this approach is Marx’s explanation (in his Eighteenth Brumaire) of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1851. Other readings include both long-term critiques of American liberalism, such as those by Richard Slotkin and Patricia Seed, and more focused studies of the post-1989 period. Cross-listed as LHIS 4568 and GSOC 5044.
 

III. Cultural Studies

GLIB 5104
The Concept of Culture
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Elzbieta Matynia
A preoccupation of many philosophers with the phenomenon of culture long antedates J. G. Herder’s remark that “nothing is more indeterminate than this word.” Still, the preoccupation with culture has been widely shared ever since, by historians, sociologists and anthropologists. What, then, can this evidently indeterminate word, “culture,” mean? How should we approach the understanding and transmission of culture? In this introductory survey, we rehearse the main debates surrounding the idea of culture and its development. Whether discussing the Greek notion of paidea, the Romantic ideal of genius, or the historiographic essays of the Annales historians of our own day, we will be tracing the dynamics of two contrasting approaches to culture: the broadly empirical and anthropological approach, and the more narrowly normative and “humanistic” approach. The readings include works by Plato, Vico, Herder, Marx, Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Lucien Febvre, Braudel, A.L. Kroeber, J. Huizinga, Ernst Cassirer, and Raymond Williams.

GLIB 5304
Globalization and the Politics of Memory
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Elzbieta Matynia
This course examines controversies over the politics of public memory that have become particularly intense at a time when social and political systems are being dismantled and reconfigured, ethnic identity reemerges as a powerful source of conflict, and nation-states are challenged by new global arrangements. The concepts of nation, identity and globalization informs our analysis as we examine a wide range of emblematic locations, among them: Auschwitz, Krakow, and New York City. We discuss the relationship between history and memory, space and time (the usages of geography in constructions of the past), globalization and memorialization—as well as approaches to the crimes of the past in transformations from authoritarian to democratic order. We pay particular attention to a variety of representational strategies designed to elicit the “meaning” of memory sites, whether in the arena of public art, museum exhibitions, tourist attractions, or monuments and historic districts. Readings include Pierre Nora, Benedict Anderson, Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, Eric Hobsbawm, Hayden White, Jacques Le Goff, Maurice Halbwachs, and Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, as well as literary works by Milan Kundera, Ivo Andric, Gunter Grass, and Bruno Schulz.

GLIB 5465
Museum and Society
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Vera Zolberg
Museums as we know them are creatures of the 19th century. They embody the intersecting forces of nationalism and universalism, democratic revolutions and elite formation, socioeconomic transformations, and scientific and artistic traditions and innovations. Intended to tame, shape, represent, and glorify the modern era, museums were made to bear considerably more weight than most other cultural institutions. Their achievements in the twentieth century have been both astonishing and disquieting to many observers. This course examines the origins, development, and transformations that these cultural institutions have undergone. It scrutinizes the makeup of their creators and the continuing metamorphoses of their substantive bases from a multidisciplinary perspective. We consider the future of museums in light of technological, political, scientific, and artistic developments.

GLIB 5507
Fundamentals of Culture
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Vera Zolberg
Critically analyzing the ways in which the term culture is used by social scientists and other scholars, we consider a broad range of activities and objects, ranging from the rarified to the ordinary, the prestigious to the everyday. We consider culture in relation to certain groups’ power and authority in constructing and maintaining—or contesting and transforming—the symbols and legitimacy of art science, popular cultural forms, and the shared meanings of life. Among the forms we examine are social status, gender, race, and other social identities. The theoretical orientations on which we draw derive from Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Bourdieu, R. Williams, Geertz, Goffman, the Frankfurt School and the American production of culture approach.

GLIB 5518
East Asian Modernity
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Jee Soon Hong This seminar aims to critically examine theoretical questions of modernity while exploring various political and socio-cultural aspects of modern East Asia. Our approach to the issue of modernity will be multidimensional including surveys of literary texts and films. How to define ‘East Asia,’ a historically constructed concept, is a highly political question: does it signify a security bloc consolidated by cold war geopolitics? Does it denote a cultural locality, a view that often coincides with China’s challenge to the economic and cultural hegemony of the US and Europe? Or something else? In the first part of the course we will examine the question of the dialectic of modernity by reading relevant materials by Hegel, Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer, Berman, Mao Zedong and Takeuchi Yoshimi. In the second part we will examine literary and visual texts focusing on the questions of body, class, gender, city and empire. Our socio-political questions include: How did the body come under the control of state and the colonizer? How does this relationship constitute East Asian modernity? How was the body represented by male and female writers? How did the “intellectual” emerge in East Asia? How did social classes and the modern nation-state form in each country? How did Japanese imperialism burgeon and develop? What were the characteristics of Japanese imperialism compared with European imperialism? What were the politico-economic characteristics of Pan- Asianism? What are the characteristics of Korea’s modernization which coincided with Japanese colonization? How was the “modern woman” represented in East Asian cities and elsewhere? We focus on the first half of the 20th century. Our readings include Lao She’s Rickshaw (China), Hyun Jinkun’s “A Lucky Day” (Korea), Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s “The Christ in Nanjing” (Japan), The New Woman (dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934) Stray Dog (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949), Xiao Hong’s “The Field of Life and Death” (China), Kang Kyungae’s “The Underground Village” (Korea), Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic, Bruce Cumings’ Korea’s Place in the Sun, and Harry Harootunian’s Overcoming Modernity.
 

IV. Studies in Writing and Cultural Criticism

GLIB 5112
Methods of Cultural Criticism
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Christopher Hitchens, Melissa Monroe
A team-taught seminar, this course focuses on the elements that constitute a strong writing style and on how writers concerned with political and cultural issues deploy various rhetorical techniques in order to entertain and outrage, provoke and inspire. A part of the class, consisting of a close evaluation of student essays in cultural criticism, will be under the direction of Ms. Monroe, during which students will read key texts by a variety of cultural critics, including Matthew Arnold, Mark Twain, W.E.B. DuBois, H.L. Mencken, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lionel Trilling, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Joan Didion, and Edward Said. In the sessions that he will lead, Mr. Hitchens will analyze several exemplary cultural critics and discuss his own experience as a public intellectual. Our goal is to understand better how cultural critics make specific literary choices in order to elicit a political and cultural response from their readers.

GILB 5318
The Exiled Self
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Randy Fertel
Globalization means that the world is increasingly made up of transnationals, people in exile. But, once you cast your eye on exile, suddenly you realize how much of literature has always been about exile, rife with tensions about longing for home and needing to escape home. The Exiled Self will explore how these expressive tensions play out in major (and some minor) texts of the (mostly) Western tradition that are about the state of exile literally (banishment) or figuratively (wandering). During the course, we try to answer the following questions: What happens to cultures when they are displaced? How does one conceive of “home” when in exile, and is it possible to return? Is “rootlessness” a source of creativity, or a detriment to it? Readings will include: excerpts from Genesis and Exodus; excerpts from The Odyssey; The Homeric Hymn to Hermes; Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner”; Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Naipaul, A Bend in the River; selections from immigrant Vietnamese writers. (e.g. Andrew Lam). Reading Sidney Bechet’s memoir Treat It Gentle, we will consider American Jazz as a “literature of exile.” We will look at portions of Scorsese’s documentary on Bob Dylan: No Direction Home. Weekly journals are posted online and a short final paper explores each student’s personal notion of “home” and how the readings helped better understand it and perhaps modifying or enriching it.

GLIB 5517
Writing and Performing “Otherness”
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Margo Jefferson
Already, such terms as “difference” and “the other” have grown too rhetorically neat, even smug. How do artists and critics bring shape and precision to varieties of difference that can still blunt our perceptions and elude even the most sophisticated discourse? We are all marked by ethnicity, race, class, religion, gender, and sexuality. How do we negotiate our roles as readers and viewers, since, like those whose texts we study, we are sometimes an Us, sometimes a Them and sometimes a Neither/Nor? How do we resist proscriptions and expectations about cultural identity and authenticity? This course focuses on writers and performers whose work embodies these complexities, from the early modernists of the 20th century to the postmodernists of today. Performers studied include Louis Armstrong, James Brown, Michael Jackson, and Prince; Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and Lauryn Hill; Mae West and Madonna; Josephine Baker, Martha Graham, and Katherine Dunham. Writers include Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sui Sin Far, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Richard Rodriguez, Adrienne Kennedy, and Maria Irene Fornes.

GLIB 6301
Proseminar in Intellectual History and Cultural Studies
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Melissa Monroe and Staff
An intensive workshop for students writing theses, this proseminar is organized through an ongoing process of peer review supervised by the professor. The aim is to create a collective setting that will help students improve their style of writing and meet the challenge of refining and revising a scholarly essay. This course is required for all students within the liberal studies program. Before they can register for the course, liberal studies students are required to have a thesis advisor and an approved thesis topic.
 

GLIB 6990
Independent Study
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. One two or Three credits.
This student-initiated course gives students the opportunity to pursue advanced research on a specific topic with the guidance of a faculty member. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

GLIB 6991
Internship
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. Three credits.
The internship provides the opportunity to receive credit for professional training related to the degree. Students are expected to engage in such training for at least five hours per week. Training should take the form of teaching, research, or other work relevant to the student’s program of study. It may take place at institutions of higher learning, with governmental agencies, or at other sites as appropriate. Students meet regularly with an advisor and submit a written report at the end of the internship. Grading is pass/fail.

GLIB 6992
Practical Curricular Training
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. One-half credit.
This course provides the opportunity to receive credit for professional training related to the degree. Students are expected to engage in such training for at least five hours per week. Training should take the form of teaching, research or other work relevant to the student’s program of study. It may take place at institutions of higher learning, with government agencies, or at other sites as appropriate. Students meet regularly with an advisor and submit a written report at the end of the internship. Grading is pass/fail.
 
  

This page was last updated September 5, 2007.