Critical Theory Emphasis

Course Requirements:
Seminar: Long Paper
Pro-seminar: Commented Bibliography

Exploring the relationship between literature, ethnography and the cultural imaginary, this course views literature as a form of writing culture.  We will explore the particular role of the literary and its specific rhetorical tools and formal devices in relation to other discourses on culture.  We will develop a method of reading that emphasizes the complex transcodings (as defined by Jameson in The Political Unconscious) between the literary, the cultural, and the psychological.  In order to assess the cultural function of literature and reading, we will draw on theories of the cultural imaginary, paying particular attention to processes of cultural and literary transference.

The literary readings will foreground a set of three liminal cultural figures that have aggregated a kind of iconic value in the cultural imaginary:  the cannibal, the child, and the alien.  Performative encounters between literary and theoretical texts (relevant to these liminal figures) will explore the relationship between literary and theoretical knowledge.  The course is divided into four distinct sections

Theoretical Grounding
a. Writing Culture: The Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies
Readings include selected essays from: Clifford/Marcus, eds., Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Winnicott, "The Location of Cultural Experience"; Bollas, "The Aesthetic Moment and the Search for Transformation."
b.  Culture, Cultural Transference and the Cultural Imaginary
Readings include selected essays from: Freud, Totem and Taboo; "Mourning and Melancholia"; Kristeva, Black Sun; Abraham/Torok, The Shell and the Kernel; Derrida, "Fors"; Judith Butler, "Psychic Inceptions. Melancholy, Ambivalence, Rage" (in: The Psychic Life of Power); Jameson, The Political Unconscious; Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World.

The Cannibal
This section explores the transcoding of the figure of the cannibal along the axis of cannibalism ñ colonialism/incorporation ñ melancholia.
Readings include: Juan José Saer, The Witness; Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar
Theory: Freud, Kristeva, Abraham/Torok, Derrida, Pagden (see above).

The Child
This section explores the liminality of the child in the location of culture, the psychological and cultural transcoding of the figure of the child, and its reconfiguration under the forces of colonization and globalization.
Readings include: Marguerite Duras, The Lover; Richard Powers, Operation Wandering Soul.
Theory: Lyotard, The Inhuman; Sharon Stevens, ed., Children and the Politics of Culture (Selection).

The Alien
This section explores the alien as yet another liminal cultural figure marked by a pervasive psychological and cultural transcoding.  Cultural fantasies and phantasms of "alien reproduction" and "planetary colonization" indicate a shift not only in the "politics of reproduction" but in the very boundaries that define the human as a species.
Readings include: Octavia Butler, Dawn; Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones.
Theory:  Selected essays from: Lyotard, The Inhuman; Deleuze/Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Selections); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; Judith Halberstam/Ira Livingston, eds., Posthuman Bodies; Katherine Hayles, When Did We Become Posthuman?