Graduate Course Offerings - 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 acyhuanggwu [dot] edu (acyhuang[at]gwu[dot]edu) for information about this course.