Fall 2025
CTIH-T500, Introduction to the Theoretical Foundations of the Humanities: “Theory and Resistance” (3 credit hours)
Patrick Dove (Spanish and Portuguese)
Mondays, 3:55 PM – 6:25 PM
This course meets with HISP-S512.
This course provides a foray into theoretically informed work in the humanities, with a focus on key questions and debates that have shaped humanistic reflection on the ways in which we understand and move about in our world. The course does not pretend to be a survey providing comprehensive coverage of the intellectual traditions and methodologies associated with doing theory in the humanities. The primary goal, instead, is to explore how what we call “theory” is in fact the name for an unresolved torsion: between theory understood as knowledge production and theory understood as inquiry into where and how structures designed to produce and secure meaning and order sometimes do not work as intended. In his famous essay “The Resistance to Theory,” Paul de Man enigmatically asserts that “nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance.” The guiding double hypothesis for this course is that theory and resistance cohabitate, so to speak, albeit without ever coming together to form a unity or a stable ground. Unlike philosophy, which understands its task as that of generating systematic forms of knowledge, theory concerns itself with the inconsistencies, knots, and lacunae that inhabit thinking while resisting assimilation within the logic of any system.
We will read selections from variety of traditions including Continental philosophy, Marxism and post-Marxism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, subaltern/postcolonial studies, queer studies, and deconstruction. At the same time, we will explore some literary works from the Latin American tradition in which there may be some interplay or tension between literariness and theoretical inquiry. We will use works by César Vallejo, Rubén Darío, Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Germán Rozenmacher, and Luisa Valenzuela as starting points for thinking about how what we call “theory” seems to designate an unstable intermediate space between philosophical systematicity and literary language.
Discussions will be organized in seminar format, with each student responsible for presenting or leading class discussion on a topic to be chosen in consultation with me. While the course will be officially conducted in English, participants are welcome to intervene in whatever language they feel most at ease. Students will write a short response paper and a longer final research paper.
CTIH-T600, Topics in Critical Theory: “The Disappearance of Man” (3-4 credit hours)
Eyal Peretz (Comparative Literature)
Wednesdays, 3:55 PM – 6:25 PM
This class meets with CMLT-C602 and MSCH-C792.
From Foucault’s famous prophecy (in The Order of Things) regarding the disappearance and erasure of man to the apocalyptic visions of the thinkers of the anthroposcene (where, paradoxically, the appearance of man as a geological factor seems to announce his coming extinction); from the growing anxiety in the face of the surge of artificial intelligence to the pronouncements of the anti-natalists regarding the voluntary extinction of humanity, the contemporary moment seems to be haunted by the image or figure of man’s disappearance. Yet what is it that appears when man disappears? A new nature? A new god? A new technology? Perhaps a new understanding of the human as disappearance? The focus of this class will be double: first, we will test the hypothesis that the most profound engagement with the mystery of the image of man’s disappearance takes place in the works of art (paintings, literature, films) of the modern age, going as far back as the Renaissance to contemporary science fiction; second, that the most profound conceptual engagement with the above mentioned mystery takes place in the contemporary tradition responding to - whether implicitly or explicitly - the philosophical efforts of Martin Heidegger to replace the classical concept of man.
Readings will include Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Nancy, Stiegler, Harraway, as well as several other contemporary thinkers of technology, the environment, cyborgs, etc. Viewings and literary readings may include Leonardo, Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Celan, Kubrick, Antonioni, Nolan, Le Guin, Philip k. Dick, Georges Perec.
CTIH-T600, Topics in Critical Theory: “The Value of Nature” (3-4 credit hours)
Drew Dalton (English)
Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:35 AM – 10:50 AM
This class meets with ENG-L740.
A nearly dogmatic assumption plagues the Western theoretical imagination concerning the moral status of nature, an assumption that permeates all that we say and do in relation to the world. The assumption is that there is an order to nature and that, moreover, this order is good; and, if it weren’t for our meddling, then the earth would be in perfect symbiotic balance with itself. This assumption fuels the handwringing that accompanies our discussion of the so-called “Anthropocene.” It drives our escapist fantasies of “getting back to nature” and informs “sustainable” environmental policies and practices which endeavor to save nature from us. Here, the human being and its activities are understood as being somehow unnatural or nonnatural, as if they stood outside the bounds of the same laws of nature that govern every other existent thing.
The aim of this course is to ask: whence this assumption? And whence the concomitant presumption that the human stands beyond the realm of nature? Whence the status of nature in the Western theoretical imagination as an absolute good, sacrosanct and separate from our own activities? Are there other, perhaps better, or at least more justifiable theoretical positions we might take on the order, operation, and value of the natural world that would include our activities, destructive as they are?
To answer such questions, this course will: 1) establish a genealogy of the Western theoretical position on the order and moral status of nature, 2) examine how that theoretical position has become a dogma, 3) show how and where that dogma is still manifest in contemporary theories, even where one might otherwise expect to see it overturned, and 4) survey other, alternative theoretical approaches to the order, operation, and moral status of the natural world as well as the relation of human activity in and to it. We will read contemporary scientific theories, a few non-Western theories, and other theoretical positions typically rejected by the Western theoretical imagination, like pessimism.
Readings may include works by Plato, Augustine, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Philipp Mainländer, Jeremy England, and others.
CTIH-T700, Independent Study in Critical Theory (1-4 credit hours)
Students may receive credit for work done in the Center reading group. To be arranged with the convener(s) of the reading of group.
