Fall 2006 & Spring 2007 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 2005-06, click here.

I. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

GLIB 5101
Modernity and Its Discontents
Spring 2007. Three credits.
Noah Isenberg
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, 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 5502
Shakespeare and Philosophy
Fall 2006.  Three credits.
Paul Kottmann
Philosophical interpretations of Shakespeare have tended to emphasize Shakespeare's modernity.  For some, such as Hegel and German philosophers of his age, this has meant understanding Shakespeare in the context of its difference from, and relation to, ancient tragedy.  For others, such as Stanley Cavell, it has meant understanding Shakespeare's skepticism and its stakes.  Still others have identified in plays like 'Hamlet' something like an nascent modern subjectivity through the mise-en-scene of thinking itself.  Our aim in this course will be to consider significant philosophical engagements with Shakespeare alongside a reading of a number of the plays in order to gauge the plausibility and limits of these philosophical readings.  In addition to accounting for what philosophers get 'right' about Shakespeare, we will also consider ways in which Shakespeare's plays productively elude, and even frustrate, philosophical intepretation.  Readings will likely include several plays by Shakespeare, texts by Johnson, Hegel, Herder, Goethe, Bradley, Szondi, Cavell, De Grazia and others.
 

II. Art, Literature, and Society

GLIB 5509
Picasso: Artist of the Twentieth Century
Fall 2006.  Three credits.
Jed Perl
Picasso's titanic achievement--as painter, sculptor, and printmaker--reflects nearly every aspect of twentieth-century experience. And a close examination of his art and his life can show us how one immensely fertile imagination grappled with all the crosscurrents of modern culture. From his early days in Barcelona's hardscrabble bohemia to his later, living-legend decades on the Riviera, Picasso felt the pulse of modernity. His work embraces political radicalism and erotic experimentation, ivory tower formalism and popular culture. Picasso was a man of paradoxes, and by exploring his contradictions we can gain unique insights into the challenges that any artist faces in the modern world. He was a traditionalist but also a nihilist, a man who remained true to his Spanish origins even as he passed much of his life in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Paris. He painted some of the most delicately lyrical works of his century, but also, in Guernica, the ultimate political protest mural. His close engagement with Braque in the invention of Cubism may be the grandest collaborative effort in all the visual arts, but he was also the most solitary of creators, developing at the end of his life, in the prints of Suite 347, an unparalleled private erotic mythology. His friends and admirers included some of the essential authors of his time (both Gertrude Stein and André Malraux wrote books about his work), but he was also the first artist to be wholeheartedly embraced by a celebrity culture. In class we will examine a series of images and texts that are central to the understanding of Picasso--ranging from his early studies of circus performers, to his surrealist mythologies, to the aesthetic views reflected in his writings. At the same time,  students will work individually on various aspects of his life and experience--from his political activism and possible anarchist sympathies,  to his involvement with the performing arts, to the Surrealist photography of his lover Dora Maar, to his appearances in photojournalism and the movies. We will also visit museums and print collections in order to gain a closer understanding of his technical innovations in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and collage.

GLIB5283  Language and the Self in Modern Literature
Spring 2007.  Three credits.
Melissa Monroe
One of the defining characteristics of modernist literature is its linguistic self-consciousness – its engagement with the fact that we live in “a world of words.”  In this course, we examine the work of twentieth-century and contemporary writers who violate linguistic norms in order to question social, psychological and philosophical norms.  These violations raise questions about the role of the individual in society, challenge the notion of a stable, cohesive self, and break down accepted category distinctions such as concrete/abstract and real/imaginary. We read philosophers and stylistic critics such as H.P. Grice, John Searle, Roman Jakobson and Tzvetan Todorov, and apply their concepts, focusing on the ways in which linguistic disruptions embody thematic concerns in the works of major literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan, Franz Kafka, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Wallace Stevens, and contemporaries such as Lydia Davis, Stephen Dixon and James Kelman.  We also discuss effective use of language in academic writing; students write several essays, and we examine excerpts in class, considering issues of structure, style and tone.

GLIB5508
The Avant-garde
Spring 2007.  Three credits.
Terri Gordon
The avant-garde movements of the early 20th century ushered in a revolution on many fronts: a revolution in the arts, a revolution in political values, and a revolution in thinking itself.  In this course, we examine central literary and artistic works of the European avant-garde, studying the movements of Italian futurism, German expressionism, Dada, and French surrealism. At the heart of this course is an inquiry into the crucial nexus of art and politics.  What constitutes the central critiques made by the various avant-garde movements?  In what ways did these movements induce social and political change?  What legacy have they left on our thinking today?  Finally, what can we make of the complexities of the avant-garde?  How can we understand the futurist leaning toward fascism, the anarchist stance in Dada, and the gender violence in expressionist art and literature?  Attention is paid to the visual and verbal arts.  We read the genres of poetry, prose, and drama, as well as manifestoes and political tracts.  We also view slides of painting, photography, photomontage and performance art.  Works by André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Franz Kafka, Mina Loy, F.T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and Frank Wedekind, amongst others.  Theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Bürger, and Georg Lukàcs.

GLIB5501
Mythical Journeys - Then and Now
Fall 2006.  Three credits.
Ernestine Schlant Bradley. 
This course in World Literature surveys some of the great myths that originated in the Mediterranean basin. After distinguishing between myths, epics, and fairy tales, and will focus our attention on narrative journeys, beginning with Gilgamesh (3rd millenium B.C.E.), and proceeding to Isis and Osiris.  We will spend time with Homer’s Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy. Since many of these classic narratives of journeys are informed by a religious or quasi-religious underpinning, it may seem surprising that mythical journeys continue into the "secular" 19th and 20th centuries. In the course of our readings we will have to strive for a new definition of the term "myth" and arrive, by way of comparison with the older narratives, at a more nuanced understanding of who we are today.  Modern works will include Joseph Conrad, The Heart oft Darkness; Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps;Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky; Andre Brink, The Other Side of Silence; Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses; and Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Our discussions of these texts will take the form of an intellectual journey, in quest of new insights into ourselves and contemporary culture.

GLIB5279
Literature and the Experience of War
Fall 2006.  Three credits.
Randy Fertel
Much of literature treats of intense experience; war literature by its very nature deals with some of the most intense experience imaginable.  In this seminar, we will be concerned less with what the politicians and generals did and said, and more with what soldiers experienced and recorded in writing. We will explore how war shapes writers, and how poets, memoirists and novelists shape the raw, chaotic experience of war.  In the process we will deploy a number of different approaches to the literature of war, including myth analysis, post-colonial theory, and trauma psychology.  There will be weekly journals  posted on-line, and one final summative, integrative short paper.  Efforts will be made to have Vietnam era writers attend class.   (In 2004, both Philip Caputo and Jonathan Schell participated in class discussions of their books.)

GLIB5220
Outsider Art
Spring 2007.  Three credits.
Vera Zolberg
It is a cliché of current cultural criticism that traditional boundaries -- between high and low art; art and politics; art and life itself -- have become hopelessly blurred. When piles of bricks are displaced in museums, when music is composed for performance underwater — when a few minutes of silence is called “music”— the boundaries become so fluid that conventional understandings of art strained. This is manifest in the difficulties that arise among art historians, aestheticians, social scientists and policy makers when they try to delineate what is art, what it should include or exclude, whether and how it should be evaluated, what importance to assign to art, and whether or not to support the artistic community with public funds. This class we seek to understand these changes in the meaning of art in two ways. First, we survey recent sociological theories of art, reading texts by Becker, Bourdieu, Geertz, among others. We then examine how these theories illuminate a concrete empirical phenomenon, "outsider art" -- that is, works created by "pure" amateurs (be they folk artists, madmen, hobbyists or homeless people), putatively unsullied by academic or commercial pressures. Our larger goal is to explore myths and realities of the socially marginal and the aesthetically pure by analyzing the role each myth plays in the ongoing transvaluation of contemporary culture.
 

III. Cultural Studies

GLIB 5137
Cultural Criticism and the Emergency of Modernity
Spring 2007.  Three credits.
Robert Boyers
This course will offer a study of a dozen cultural critics who confront the idea of modernity and think in a sustained way about the death of traditional discourses and ideas. The course will focus on a variety of issues--from authority and order to one-dimensionality and the therapeutic, from authenticity and pornography to identity politics and the culture of narcissism. It will also promote discussion about the so-called “death of cultural criticism,” inviting participants to consider what understanding of culture is required to engage in a form of inquiry not always appreciated (or understood) by contemporary intellectuals. Beginning with discussion of the leading Victorian cultural critic, Matthew Arnold, who was acutely sensitive to the closing of “the traditional mind,” the course will move on to a variety of twentieth-century critics who had arresting things to say about the crisis—real and imagined-- of contemporary culture. It is a feature—and surely a virtue-- of the course that it studies a variety of figures, many of whom are not, in the main, invoked by current academic theorists.  Readings include    Matthew Arnold, Culture & Anarchy; T.S. Eliot, Christianity & Culture; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own; Jean Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?; James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, Notes of a Native Son; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man; Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism; George Steiner, Language and Silence; Susan Sontag, Under The Sign of Saturn; V.S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Peron; and Edward Said, The World, The Text & The Critic.
 
GLIB5178
Explorations in Modern Culture: The Crucible of Central Europe
Spring 2007.  Three credits.
Elzbieta Matynia
This course explores the culture and collective experience of that part of Europe which lies between Germany and Russia - a territory that includes Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Austrians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and, historically, the majority of Europe's Jews and Gypsies. A site of pogroms, wars, and frequently shifting borders, the Other Europe, as it is often called, has also long harbored a rich community of artists and intellectuals who have played a pivotal role in defining modern politics and culture, including  Witold Gombrowicz,  Bruno Schulz , Milan Kundera, Günter Grass, Czeslaw Milosz, Vaclav Havel, and Adam  Michnik. Looking at politics through the lens of arts and literature, we will examine how Central Europe -- the home of the first written European constitution -- became a seedbed of revolution, modern nationalism, fascism, and Communism, as well as the peaceful anti-authoritarian revolts of 1989, and - most recently - part of an expanded European Union.  We will discuss the role writers, poets, and artists have played in instigating and nourishing modern movements in politics and culture.
 

IV. Studies in Writing and Cultural Criticism

GLIB 5112
Methods of Cultural Criticism
Fall 2006. 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.

GLIB 6301
Proseminar in Intellectual History and Cultural Studies
Spring 2007. 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 also help them 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 2006, Spring 2007.
One, two, or three credits.
Staff
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 6992
Practical Curricular Training
Fall 2006, Spring 2007. One-half credit.
Staff
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.

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This page was last updated June 11, 2007.