This seminar will investigate contemporary trajectories of architecturalresearch and practice that intersect with questions of human rights, notions of democraticpublic space, and spatial politics. We will ask what role the discipline plays (or mightplay) in current debates over questions of political representation, defense, theorganization of territory, surveillance, warfare, political conflict, and cultural heritage aswell as in questions of citizenship, diaspora, humanitarian intervention, and justice.These questions mark out a profoundly fascinating and highly complicated field of study,and there is a growing body of important literature pertaining to them. The seminar willprovide a forum for considering aspects of this literature and practices associated with it,as well as for identifying new lines of research and further critical prospects for thediscipline of architecture.

[Lecture]. In chapter 4 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, a story is told about a confrontation between a Lord (Herr) and a Bondsman (Knecht). The story conveys how consciousness is born. This story, subsequently better known as the confrontation between Master and Slave, has been appropriated and revised again and again in figures like Marx and Nietzsche, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Fanon, Freud and Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Carl Schmitt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler. The premise of this course is that one can understand much of which is (and isn’t) most significant and interesting in contemporary cultural theory by coming to an understanding Hegel’s argument, and tracing the paths by which thinkers revise and return to it as well as some of the arguments around it. There are no prerequisites, but the material is strenuous, and students will clearly have an easier time if they start out with some idea of what the thinkers above are doing and why. Helpful preparatory readings might include Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Requirements: For undergraduates: two short papers (6-8 pages). For graduate students, either two short papers or one longer paper (12-15 pages).

Wednesdays 4:10-6pm

This course examines psychoanalytic movements that are viewed either as post-Freudian in theory or as emerging after Freud’s time. The course begins by considering the ways Freud’s cultural and historical surround, as well as the wartime diaspora of the European psychoanalytic community, shaped Freudian and post-Freudian thought. It then focuses on significant schools and theories of psychoanalysis that were developed from the mid 20th century to the present. Through readings of key texts and selected case studies, it explores theorists’ challenges to classical thought and technique, and their reconfigurations, modernizations, and total rejections of central Freudian ideas. The course concludes by looking at contemporary theorists’ moves to integrate notions of culture, concepts of trauma, and findings from neuroscience and attachment research into the psychoanalytic frame.

This course examines, in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain and England (1580-1640), how the two countries staged the conflict between them, and with the Ottoman Empire; that is, how both countries represent national and imperial clashes, and the concepts of being “Spanish,” “English,” or “Turk,” as well as the dynamic and fluid identities of North Africa, often played out on the high seas of the Mediterranean with Islam and the Ottoman Empire. We will consider how the Ottoman Empire depicted itself artistically through miniatures and court poetry. The course will include travel and captivity narratives from Spain, England, and the Ottoman Empire.

Today much of what is happening in literary, cultural, and theoretical studies points to the art of mapmaking as a fundamental paradigm. Our course explores the role of this renewed interst in cartography in both literature and the arts, and attempts to produce a conceptual framework for the definition of mapmaking as a cultural and material production. From a random walk through the city to the massive attacks out of global capitalism, the guiding question is how cultural practices make sense out of our actual conditions of existence. To address this issue, we will not only read a number of novels, short stories, essays, and theoretical statements but also engage in a close study of recent artworks and the development of what some critics consider to be nothing short of a “cartographic turn” in literature and the arts today.

Instructor: Ivan Sanders

Focus will be on the often deceptive modernity of modern Central and East European theater and its reflection of the forces that shaped modern European society. It will be argued that the abstract, experimental drama of the twentieth-century avant-garde tradition seems less vital at the century’s end than the mixed forms of Central and East European dramatists.

Introduction to Middle Eastern cinema as a unique cultural product in which artistic sensibilities are mobilized to address, and thus reflect, significant aspects of contemporary society, Arab, Israeli, Turkish, and Iranian cinema. Cultural and collective expressions of some enduring concerns in modern Middle Eastern societies. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.

This course studies the effects and strategies of the cold war on Arab writing, education, arts and translation, and the counter movement in Arab culture to have its own identities. As the cold war functioned and still functions on a global scale, thematic and methodological comparisons are drawn with Latin America, India and Africa.

Instructor: Emily Sun

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 18. Examination of concepts and assumptions present in contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning and interpretation (hermeneutics); questions of genre (with discussion of representative examples); a critical analysis of formalist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, and feminist approaches to literature.