Through a careful exploration of the argument and style of three vivid anticolonial texts, C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Albert Memmi’s Colonizer and Colonized, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, this course aims to inquire into the construction of the image of colonialism and its projected aftermaths established in anti-colonial discourse.

This lecture course will address key developments in architecture during the period from the end of World War II until the early 1990s. The class will cover both the continuation and transformation of modern architecture after the war—including corporate modernism, New Brutalism, regionalism, the variegated work of Team 10, the AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture, and important trajectories of late modern formalism and Good Design—as well as the emergence of diverse practices that in different ways challenged the modernist legacy or even set out to proclaim its end. These include: the turn to systems theory and cybernetics of the 1950s; the experimental and “Pop” architecture of the 1960s such as Megastructure, Metabolism and the turn to environment; the engagement with linguistic theory and notions of “meaning,” the neo-modernism of the New York Five, and the rise of a semantic and historicist post-modernism during the late ‘60s and 1970s; the post-post-modern turn, from the architecture of deconstruction to the architecture of “event”; and their legacy in contemporary experimentations with new programs, sites, materials, and media. The course will pay particular attention to the manner in which architects and architectural institutions (schools, museums, publications) have engaged historical transformations in the aesthetic, socio-economic, political, material, and technological realms, including the impact upon the discipline of globalization and the emergence of the information age. This survey will not be able to cover every aspect of work from this period, but through focusing on specific examples in their historical context will provide a detailed map of important buildings, projects, movements, events, publications, and recent transformations in the discipline, as well as outlining their stakes, strategies, and ongoing impact on the profession. The legacy of this period remains in many ways central to contemporary architectural practice and this course will provide students with both historical knowledge and critical tools vital to positioning their own work within the ever-shifting field of contemporary architecture.

This course is an introduction to some key works by major French philosophers and literary critics. We will be covering selected works by Blanchot, Bataille, Lévinas, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, looking at the way these authors conceive of community, writing, death, the literary and its relation to philosophy, the question of style, sexual difference, and subjectivity. This course is open to those who do not read French (and therefore need to read works in translation) as well as those who are able to read in the original language. While this is a lecture course, students will be expected to participate actively in class discussion. No background required, although an appetite for dense theoretical works is essential. Requirements: Two papers, one presentation, and weekly responses.

Same as ENGL W3991

Analyzing Bertolt Brecht’s plays, aesthetic concepts, and ideas of theatre, this seminar furthers theoretical thinking as a means to revise conventional notions surrounding theatre and theatre making. We take up written texts, films, and numerous performances in NY theatres and galleries, developing a sense of theatre/performance through a Brechtian lens.   The class will be conducted in English and all readings are in English; students who wish to do so will have the opportunity to do readings in German.

Barnard Course

Instructor: D. Tenenboym

A central concern of modern theory and philosophy is the place of the aesthetic and its relationship to feelings and politics. How are feelings articulated with aesthetic judgments? How do different aesthetic apprehensions shade into different affective experiences? What are the political implications of these aesthetico-affective complexes, particularly under conditions of advanced capitalism, virtualization, and mass mediation? Starting with Longinus’s On the Sublime and Kant’s philosophy of the beautiful and the sublime, the course will consider aesthetico-affective experiences left out of formal philosophy but important in everyday life. Minor aesthetic concepts like the uncanny, the grotesque, and the cute will be intermixed with consideration of affects like anxiety, stupefaction, and hopefulness. Examples, cases, and inspiration are drawn from life in the United States (and elsewhere), from fiction, music, art, and film; disciplinary approaches are taken from literary criticism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. Theoretical readings include works by Kant, Hegel, Freud, Lyotard, Gaschï Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and others.

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,” often played out on the high seas of the Mediterranean with Islam and the Ottoman Empire. We will also consider how the Ottoman Empire depicted itself artistically through miniatures, book illustrations, and court poetry, and will include travel narratives from Spanish, English, and Ottoman voyagers.

Instructor: V. Di Palma and T. Smoliarova

This graduate seminar explores the complex and persistent interrelationship between poetry and architecture within European culture from Antiquity to Modern times.  How do poems and buildings reflect different cultures, epochs, and styles?  When and why do poets turn to architectural metaphors, similes, or descriptions?  What do architectural analogies do for literature and literary theories, and what do poetic analogies bring to architecture and its theory?  Do we “read” buildings?  Can buildings “speak”?  Why might one want a building not merely to conform to functional requirements but also to move the soul?

This seminar investigates and interrogates points of intersection between poetic and architectural traditions by focusing on a particular set of literary concepts or strategies, including genre, decorum, rhetoric, ornament, grammar, and style, and architectural “places” such as the villa, garden, ruin or fragment, city, and utopia. Readings will range from ancient to contemporary, and will be drawn from different ancient and modern European traditions–Greek, Roman, English, French, Russian, and German.  By examining poems from an architectural point of view, and buildings from a poetic point of view, the seminar hopes to shed new and perhaps unexpected light on the long association between poetry and architecture within European culture.

Instructor: I. Sanders

Examines prose and poetry by writers generally less accessible to the American student written in the major Central European languages: German, Hungarian, Czech, and Polish. The problematics of assimilation, the search for identity, political commitment and disillusionment are major themes, along with the defining experience of the century: the Holocaust; but because these writers are often more removed from their Jewishness, their perspective on these events and issues may be different. The influence of Franz Kafka on Central European writers, the post-Communist Jewish revival, defining the Jewish voice in an otherwise disparate body of works.