Instructor: Jack Halberstam
In this seminar, we will read a wide range of authors from Hobbes to Haraway, from Thoreau to Coviello, from nature writing to science studies and we will study the emergence of a persistent set of conversations about the human, the inhuman, the liveliness of the material world and the death-dealing nature of social systems organized around wealth and success. The seminar will use the keyword “wildness” to see what, if anything, escapes hegemonic iterations of self, other, world, being, power, classification and definition. At times, in this course, the category of the wild will refer to something we vaguely recognize as “nature,” but at other times it will name a strain of aesthetic production that falls more easily under the heading of “culture.” Sometimes the wild is a force of human creativity, at others it is a current of non-human wisdom and wonder; at all times the wild is something that eludes our attempts to explain, contain, manage and know. This elusive quality, the sense that another realm of meaning lies just out of reach, stretches towards the wild; as do plans for alternative political futures and dreams of new modes of community and economy. Reaching for the utopian, we will find that the dystopian becomes an easier destination and we will ask about the multiple queer terrains that lie between these markers of modern hope and despair.
