Graduate Course Archive Spring 2014
6130.10 Selected Topics in Criticism: Disability Studies
Mitchell
T 3:30-6:00 CRN 95472
“New Materialisms: Disability, Cross-species Identifications, and Environment.”
This course will examine the materialist turn in theory and literature. New materialisms are critical to re-thinking subject-object relations in a more dynamic way; particularly since materialist processes and the agency of matter operate in terms of a return of the repressed. Nature bites back, and those who have experienced the bite of the denaturalization of their bodies have turned increasingly feral toward normative lessons of a mutant deviancy. Disability Studies, for instance, has slowly turned its attention to questions of the alternative ways of living with each other in the world. In part, this has signaled new interdependencies of supported living; but it also means moving our attentions elsewhere including cross-species identifications, the inorganic and inert, as well as the radical porosity of bodies within environments teeming with pathogenic agents. As Mel Y. Chen a philosopher with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity states, “I am perpetually itinerant, even when I have a goal; it means I will never walk in a straight line . . . Communion is possible in spite of, or even because of, this fact” (2450-2453).
Some theoretical works we will discuss in excerpts or as entire works include: Diane Coole and Samantha Frost’s New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Donna Haraway's Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Mel Chen's Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow’s Sex and Disability, Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership, Elizabeth Povinelli's Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip, and Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation.
We will also read a couple novels serving as centerpiece of the course’s contemplations such as: Richard Powers's The Echo-Maker, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Finally, we will view a series of independent international disability film shorts including: "Sang Froid (Cold Blood) {FR}, “La Joi (The Joy)” [FR], “The Playmate” [FR], “goodnight, liberation” [USA], "Outcasts" [AU], "Berocca" [UK], “Yolk” [AU], “What it is like to be my mother” [PO], “I’m in away from here” [IR], “Body and Soul: Diana and Kathy” [IR], "Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer” [USA], “Invitation to a Dance,” [AF], among others. The crip/queer symposium, “Composing Disability,” held at GWU on April 2-3 will provide an important event in which we all participate.
6260.10 Medieval and Early Modern Studies: Shakespeare and Performance Studies
Thompson
R 3:30-6:00 CRN 96861
What counts as a performance is still a hotly contested question in performance studies. While Richard Schechner has proposed “twice-behaved behavior” as a definition, the field is interdisciplinary and often encompasses actions and behaviors in everyday life. In this course we will explore how to apply the various approaches, theories, and practices of performance studies to the study of William Shakespeare. Key questions that we will consider are: What constitutes a Shakespearean performance, and how does the medium employed affect that definition? What is the relationship between performance history and performance studies when one addresses Shakespeare? And what roles, if any, do nostalgia and authenticity play in a performance studies approaches to Shakespeare?
6450.10 Twentieth Century
Miller
M 3:30-6:00 CRN 96862
6560.10 Postcolonial Theory & the Q of Intimacy
Daiya
W 3:30-6:00 CRN 94367
This course has two aims: to survey the seminal texts that have been constitutive of the field of postcolonial studies as we know it today, and to engage key postcolonial literary and film texts through the lens of intimacy. Taking up intimacy from multiple locations, as referring variously to romantic coupledom, family, domesticity, national and cultural belonging, and biopolitical notions of community, the topics we will explore include: land and colonial/colonized citizenships, difference and solidarity, capital and gendered inscriptions, secularism and conflict, violence and representation, and the ethical articulation of community. Accordingly, we will read Edward Said's "Orientalism", "Homi Bhabha's "Location of Culture," Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak's "Critique of Postcolonial Reason", the Subaltern Studies scholars, among others; we will engage the multidisciplinary scrutiny recently afforded to questions about gender, intimacy and environment in the work of Beth Povinelli, Ramchandra Guha, Jasbir Puar, Robert McRuer, Lauren Berlant, Deborah Grayson, Judith Butler and others; and we will engage key fictional works like E. M. Forster's "Passage to India", V. S. Naipaul's "A House for Mr. Biswas", Bessie Head's "Out of PLace", "Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small of Things," Alexandra David Neel's "My Journey to Lhasa" and Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss."
6811.10 Folger Institute Seminar
TBA
TBA CRN 90211
Contact Alex Huang acyhuang
gwu [dot] edu (acyhuang[at]gwu[dot]edu) for information about this course.
Graduate Course Offerings -- Fall 2013
6100.10 Introduction to Literary Theory
Cook
M 6:10-8:40 pm
6130.80 Popular Music Cultures
Wald
W 3:30-6 pm
(Cross-listed with AMST 6190.81)
This course provides an overview of the field of U.S. popular music studies for graduate students interested in cultural theory, cultural studies, and media studies. It grounds its inquiry in influential texts of popular music studies—from the 19th century writings of Frederick Douglass on the slave songs to Zora Neal Hurston’s anthropological studies of the “sonic archive” of the Negro folk to Theodor Adorno’s definitive Frankfurt-School takedown of the music industry to Dick Hebdige’s seminal study of British punk (the book Subculture: The Meaning of Style) to musicologist Christopher Small’s theory of “musicking.” We will supplement such canonical, field-defining work with case studies drawn from the range of excellent literature on music cultures.
Our inquiry will focus on questions of identity (how are identities articulated in musical expression? what struggles over identity are staged in—or sounded through—popular music?); audience (what is the relationship between musical texts and listeners?); and affect (how does music communicate and mediate affect, including “political” emotions?). We will also be interested in the mediation of popular musical expression (through recordings, radio, television, music videos, digital files, and the like) and in the discourses of musical genre.
Although our focus will be on the United States, we will be interested in the ongoing transnational and/or African diasporic circulation of sound, and in popular culture’s refusal to be bound by national borders. Depending on the interest of students, we may also investigate the relationship between popular music studies and the burgeoning field of sound studies. Students will do annotated bibliographies, try their hand at experimental music writing (the “Critical Karaoke”), and pursue research into a question of their choice. The goal will be the production of either a conference paper or draft of an article to be submitted for publication.
6240.10 Literature of the British Archipelago
Cohen
M 3:30-6 pm
Ecologies of Conquest: This version of "Literature of the British Archipelago" will gather polyglot texts (in translation) from Britain's postcolonial past around the theme of "Ecologies of Conquest." We will be interested in what happens in contact zones not only among diverse peoples, but among humans and the legions of animal, vegetal, mineral, climatic and topographical nonhumans forming the roiled environment. Primary texts include Beowulf, Gildas, The Life of St Columba of Iona, Voyage of St Brendan, Gerald of Wales (Irish and Welsh writings), Wace, Marie de France, Grettir's saga, and perhaps The Tempest. Secondary texts will be readings in environmental criticism and ecotheory.
This course is open to anyone who wishes to take it, including those whose focus is in later periods. The pedagogy is multimodal and experimental.
6240.10 Nineteenth Century
DeWispelare
R 6:10-8:40 pm
Dispatches from Globalization’s Infancy: Romantic Literature and the “Empire of English”
“There is no mother tongue,” proclaim Deleuze and Guattari, “only a power seizure by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.” Written in 1980, this claim subverts Enlightenment ideologies that had governed thinking about the relationships between vernacular language, nation, and empire for more than two hundred years (the notion of the “mother tongue,” for instance). In this class, we will
track the development of language and translation theory alongside late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century anglophone literature. Specifically, we will interrogate the problematic and global rise of what critic Alok Yadav has called the “Empire of English,” and in so doing, we will ask questions about how imperial politics pursuing compulsory linguistic standardization could exist alongside an irrepressible zeal for authentic displays of linguistic “naturalness,” which is an aesthetic phenomenon that permeated much of the period’s literature and theater. The goal is to think through the way discourses of proto-linguistics—which include language theories, linguistic ethnography, literacy guidebooks, and translation manuals—mediate anglophone literature of this period while also
creating spectacular new expressive and political possibilities for arts made of language as they unfold in public. More generally, we will work through the theoretical problem of how to account for
discourses mediating one another, and this is a critical skill students can deploy in various humanistic research projects.
In our specific study of discursive mediation, however, our attention will continually be drawn back to the paradoxical weight and yet contingency of linguistic power, which Deleuze and Guattari highlight when they assert, “Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital […] It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.” In addition to the institutional, geographic, and circulatory patterns alluded to here, our focus will be on the way writers configured and normalized certain types of relationships between language and community, language and nation, language and class, language and ethnicity, language and gender, and of course, the coup de grâce, language and the literature, which was increasingly evaluated, made exemplary, or canonized based on the presence or absence of “linguistic propriety.” Course readings will include a transnational and transgeneric list of likely and unlikely suspects from the global nineteenth-century—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, Phillis Wheatley, John
Horne Tooke, Maria Edgeworth, Sir William Jones, Thomas Spence, Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Hannah More, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, the Schlegels, Charles Dickens, Laetitia Landon—all of these and more alongside a hitless of contemporary theorists working to historicize and parse one of our contemporary period’s most pregnant and philosophically troublesome contronyms: “World English.”
6451.10 Twentieth Century
Chu
R 3:30-6 pm
Introduction to Asian American Literature: Asians have been coming to America since 1849, but the writings of the immigrants and their descendents didn’t become “Asian American” until the discipline as such was formally recognized as a response to student strikes in 1968. In fact, there was no such racial group in 1878 when the United States Congress created a new legal category, “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” just for Chinese, and then began to pass laws that also excluded other Asians and Pacific Islanders from immigration and citizenship—setting them apart from Europeans and placing them into a middle category, neither white nor black.
Asian Americanist scholars argue that the treatment of Asian Americans in America has always been shaped by U.S. foreign policy objectives, by the Orientalist perception of Asians as unassimilable aliens, and by a suspicion of “orientals” borrowed from European colonialism and re-framed just for America. In response, Asian American writers have turned from writing only about their efforts to claim identities as fully American citizens to questioning American “exceptionalism” and to reconceiving themselves as citizens of the world. Or have they?
This course introduces Asian American literature as a tradition that questions mainstream constructions of Asian American race and ethnicity and provides alternative accounts of Asian American experiences. We’ll discuss the political roots of the terms “Asian American” and “Asian American literature”; nineteenth-century East-West encounters; Chinese immigration and exclusion; Japanese American internment narratives; feminist, national, and postcolonial influences; adoption; transnational migration; theories of narrative, genre, mourning, and loss.
Primary authors include Anita Desai, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Michael Ondaatje, and other writers of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, and Sri Lankan descent. Critics include Lisa Lowe, Elaine H. Kim, Margaret Homans, Susan Koshy, and David L. Eng.
6720.10 Independent Research
Huang
6720.11 Independent Research
Huang
6810.10 Folger Institute Seminar
Huang
6998.10 Thesis Research
6999.10 Thesis Research
8998.10 Advanced Reading and Research Huang
8999.10 Dissertation Research