Fall 2019 Course Offerings

(Also COML 2750, ENGL 2950, GOVT 2755)
Fall. 4 credits.
Limited to 18 students.
Karen Pinkus.
T/R: 11:40am – 12:55pm

This seminar offers an introduction to the humanities by exploring the historical, cultural, social and political stakes of the Society for the Humanities annual focal theme. Students will consider novels, films, short stories and historical texts as they explore the theme in dialogue with literature, cinema, art, media, and philosophy. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to local sites relevant to the theme, and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in this seminar will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the Society’s theme and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research. For more information, visit https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/humanities-scholars.

Topic for 2019-2020: Energy

Humans are all “children of the sun,” as Alfred Crosby notes. We are energetic beings and we consume energy (with various consequences, some that threaten our very existence). Yet for the most part “energy” has been a subject for scientists. Some social sciences and policy makers have also considered energy production, distribution and consumption as crucial to global geopolitics and economy. But it is only recently that the humanities has begun to study this phenomenon, interweaving a variety of issues from human evolution to history; from the arts to literature; from slavery to racial (in)justice to the very question of what it means to be human.  This course has two main goals: 1) To introduce students to the humanities, broadly speaking: methods, ideas, possibilities for thought and practice in literature, history, philosophy, art history, critical theory, anthropology, media studies; 2)  To focus on the question of energy in various senses. We will move back and forth between these two aims. We will engage with scholars at the Society for the Humanities. We will make site visits to Cornell’s Combined heat and cooling plant and to the Cornell solar farm and hydropower facility and to the Kroch Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. We will view films (including Duncan Jones’s Moon and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood). We will read several novels (Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl) as well as short stories, historical accounts of fossil fuels and philosophical essays on the nature of energy. We will also consider art works that engage with energy. This course is open to all students who are curious about thinking energy as a complex problem and it is being offered (for the first time) in conjunction with a new initiative at Cornell for Humanities Scholars.

(also COML 4642, ENGL 4962)
Fall. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Erin Soros.
T: 10:10 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

When Sigmund Freud formulated his theories of mental energy, he drew direct inspiration from the first law of thermodynamics, as if we were each our own universe, compelled to keep our internal energy constant. How does this borrowing enable us to conceive of the energy humans possess? How is psychic energy constituted and developed, cathected or dissipated, saved or shared? And why does such energy often make us suffer? In this course we read foundational psychoanalytic texts, focusing on conceptions of the energy of the psyche— sources and functions, paths and pathologies. Key concepts include: the ego and the id, the life drives and death drives, mourning, melancholia, repression, manic defenses, alpha and beta elements, foreclosure, the symbolic, the imaginary, the real. But together we will do more than develop our vocabularies: we will attend to the texture, one might say the linguistic energy, of the psychoanalytic texts themselves, exploring not just what the theorists say but how they say it. We will also analyze literary works that reflect or reconfigure the psychoanalytic conceptions, examining how psychoanalysis provides tools for intricate literary understanding, and attending to the theories in the literature as we investigate what is literary in the theory. Ultimately we will be examining—through collective dialogue and private reading—the energetic fiber of our own minds, our constitutions and possibilities, our limits and breaking points. These investigations will be, then, both intellectual and intimate, both troubling and reparative.

Erin Soros is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University where she is researching psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic energy and psychosis as a response to trauma.  She has published fiction and nonfiction in international anthologies and journals, including Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Indiana Review, Exile Literary Quarterly, Geist, Prism, West Coast Line, Fiddlehead and enRoute, and her stories have been produced for the CBC and BBC as winners of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Award for the Short Story.  Her academic articles weaving psychoanalysis, philosophy and autobiographical narrative have appeared in such journals as differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, The Journal of Intercultural Studies, The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, and The Canadian Journal of Women and the Law.  New work has appeared in Literatures of Madness, published by Palgrave Macmillan, and in Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness, Lexington Press. Soros has been a visiting writer at four universities, most recently as the Harper-Wood fellow at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge, a position that funded travel to learn from Inuvialuit oral history in Canada’s Western Arctic.  She was also a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto where she researched correspondences and tensions between Indigenous and settler understandings of the mind.  She has received a Fulbright Award, the Governor General’s Gold Medal, and two teaching awards, including Columbia University’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching.

(Also ARCH 6308, ARCH 6408, COML 6369)
Fall. 4 credits.
Limited to successful applicants.
Tao DuFour and Natalie Melas.
R: 2:30 – 4:25 p.m.

This seminar explores the significance of climate imaginaries for forms of urban and hinterland migration and mobility in the Caribbean as these relate to colonial and postcolonial histories, and in contemporary contexts defined by the urgencies of environmental hazards. Taking “climate” in a wider sense, the seminar situates climate imaginaries – as mediated through literature, film, landscapes, and spatial forms – as intersubjective horizons within which understandings of climate change and the experience of its effects are enmeshed. 

For postcolonial Caribbean thinkers the horizon of the natural world is at the same time constitutive of a form of historicity. Édouard Glissant proposes a non-foundational postcolonial Caribbean imaginary in which the archipelago is a “multi-relation” where “this sea is here within us with its load of islands finally discovered.” The seminar is particularly concerned to explore relations between the more tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and intersubjective experiences of climate as mediated through literary and mytho-poetic forms: from historical accounts of climate as ‘catastrophe’ – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes on insular urbanities – to climate as a more general, atmospheric horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. Guyanese writer Wilson Harris frames the urban environmental question as an ontological one: “Cities have come to nestle in branches of clay or stone in valleys or mountains. […] Their hope is born of the life of imagination’s tree in which sculptor and painter and architect and carpenter and mystic sensitize and re-sensitize themselves to rhythms and pulses orchestrated through being and apparent non-being.” Thematically, the seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of “capitalist ruination” which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality and subject formation, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

The seminar will explore the migratory effects of climate imaginaries in the Caribbean from a variety of perspectives: mytho-poetic senses of migration such as interspecific morphoses – the becoming animal, plant or ‘spirit’ of the human – and the persistence of Amerindian horizons; the historicity of forcible deportations (slavery, indenture, etc.) as forms of colonial violence; the ecological constitution of the region as migratory formation; urban-hinterland and inter-island migration as a consequence of environmental hazards and catastrophes; rural-urban migration and the expansion and planning of cities as a function of modernizing and industrializing processes; and migration as a metaphorical schema in the generative constitution and literary and artistic articulation of Caribbean world-horizons.

The seminar will be structured along thematic lines, including: philosophies of relation and postcolonial theory; the anthropology of ‘nature’; phenomenologies of the ‘natural’ world and corporeity; philosophies of ‘atmosphere’; political ecology and feminist environmental theories; landscape theory; theories of urbanization and philosophies of territory. In exploring these themes, we will consider the Caribbean’s multiple linguistic and creole contexts, including those of Trinidad & Tobago, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Cuba and Guyana.

Call for Applications:

The Fall 2019 Expanded Practice Seminar, “Atmospheric Pressures: Climate Imaginaries and Migration in the Caribbean,” is an innovative traveling seminar for graduate students in the humanities and design disciplines. Expanded Practice Seminars are offered under the auspices of Cornell University’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant and are organized by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and the Society for the Humanities.

Selected students receive a $1,500 stipend and a funded, week-long travel program to Trinidad in Fall 2019.

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the Expanded Practice Seminar, a wide range of skills and backgrounds are welcome. Advanced undergraduate students may apply, but preference will be given to students in their first three years of graduate study. Applications require a recent CV and a 500 – 700-word statement of interest describing your background interest in the seminar topic. No letters of recommendation are required. Questions should be directed to Rebecca Elliott (re255@cornell.edu).

Applications must be submitted via http://urbanismseminars.cornell.edu/apply by June 15, 2019.