Spring 2008 Course Offerings

(also ENGL 408.02, COML 411.02, COGST 425, FREN 423)
Spring.  4 credits.  Limited to 15 students.   
W. Jones.  
T 12:20-2:15

Quick quiz: what’s the most important sexual organ for humans? The brain, of course! Cerebral Seductions concerns both sex and the brain in various ways. We will explore the emergent field of cognitive literary theory and criticism, reading the work of cognitive critics (e.g., Hogan, Richardson, and Zunshine) and cognitive scientists  (e.g., Damasio, Gazzaniga), while also considering the ways that other types of literary theory (historicist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic) might be incorporated within a cognitive framework. With this approach in mind, we will read texts within a literary tradition that recognized—right from the start—the cerebral element in human sexuality: the libertine tradition in eighteenth-century England and France. Authors will include Rochester, Behn, Richardson, Laclos, de Sade, Austen, and others. 

Wendy Jones is the author of Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism, and the English Novel (U of Toronto Press, 2005), as well as articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Her “Emma, Gender, and the Mind-Brain” is forthcoming in ELH. She teaches literature and writing in the English Department at Cornell.

(also ENGL 408.03, COML 454, HART 416)
Spring.  4 credits.  Limited to 15 students.   
B. Maxwell.  
T 10:10-12:05

Modernity can be provisionally defined as the aggregate condition of life attendant on the massive dislocations commencing in the 16th century with the process defined by Marx as the "primitive accumulation" of capital.  The more familiar phases (or faces) of modernity, the 19th century urban regime of "transcendental homelessness" (Lukacs) and the "exploded picture puzzle" (Bloch) of the 20th century, generated extraordinary critical examinations by Marxist and anarchist thinkers, extraordinary often in their insight and often enough in their blindness to the world beyond Europe.  Surrealism, some would argue, breached the self-enclosure of European radical thought and found a world of anger and analysis already largely formed, ready to speak its own languages of critique.  In the later work of Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, and the others of the Situationist International, we arguably have both the ruins of the earlier critical projects as well as exceptionally important means for living critically in and against our moment.
 
The course will take up three concerns:
1) Critiques of modernity advanced by Marxism and by anarchism.
2) The aesthetics targeted by these critiques, and the aesthetics, if any, desired by them.
3) The Situationist advance into new dimensions of social critique and aesthetic theory.
 
The reading list will include texts by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, André Breton, Herbert Read, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Jacques Camatte, Amiri Baraka, Samir Amin, Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, T. J. Clark, Hal Foster, Giorgio Agamben, the Retort group, and the Midnight Notes collective.  All readings in English.

Barry Maxwell teaches in Comparative Literature and American Studies at Cornell, and holds graduate degrees from Stanford and Simon Fraser University.  In recent years, he has developed courses on surrealism, Melville, the literature of the outlaw, policing and prisons in American culture, and hemispheric American literatures.  He has published on Benjamin, Bloch, Burke (Kenneth), Crane (Stephen), Davis (Miles), Douglass, David Hammons, Hawes (Hampton), Nathaniel Mackey, Pepper (Art), Sun Ra, and Whitman.  He is at work on a book titled The Grammar of Enclosure, which traces dramas of expropriation and enclosure of the commons in hemispheric American literature and culture.  In 2004, he received the John M. and Emily B. Clark Distinguished Teaching Award.

(also S&TS 417)
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.  
G. Ortolano.  
T 2:30-4:25

This seminar considers a series of episodes in which the dichotomy between science and religion has been contested and defended. Topics will include debates about Darwinian evolution, Victorian education, animal experimentation, Christian fundamentalism, literary Modernism, "two cultures" quarrelling, and sociobiology. The approach here will be contextual and historical, with a primary goal in each case being to identify and discuss the rhetorical strategies that have been available to advocates and critics of scientific authority. The focus will primarily fall on debates and developments within Britain, with some consideration of the American context, but the issues and problems considered are likely to interest students of scientific authority, cultural politics, and the public culture more generally. 

Guy Ortolano is Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches British history and the history of science. His research examines the relationship between science and literature since the Victorians, and he is currently completing a book on that subject titled "The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain" (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Guy's other research interests include the 1960s, the New Left and New Right, and urban planning.