FALL-SPRING 2023-24: I will be on leave at the Wissenschaftskolleg / Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin
SPRING 2023
Freshman seminar: Folk tale and fairy tale
In 1812 the German scholars Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first edition of their famous collection of fairy tales. They aimed to recover the voices of simple people whose way of life was now imperiled by urbanization. Read aloud by modern parents to their children, these stories became the shared substratum of modern culture: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel. Grimm’s tales are the pre-history of Walt Disney. Such stories communicate, in encoded form, the hard and not-so-innocent realities of the adult world: conflict within families and between social classes, the ambiguities of sexual desire, the threats of poverty and violence. Dense and mysterious, laden with symbols, the stories invite endless re-reading. This course will follow interpretive paths opened up by psychoanalysis, mythography, Marxism, sociology, anthropology, and feminism.
Undergraduate seminar: Three Avant-Gardes (co-taught with Lytle Shaw)
The avant-garde is the leading edge of artistic change, and the preview of the artistic future. An avant-garde is the picture, sketched by a gifted few, of where the many are headed. While there has always been innovation in art, not until the nineteenth century was the progressive or experimental artist expected also to point the way forward to social and political change. Some will deny that art has any single “direction,” or that art should be valued on the basis of its forward-pointing quality. And yet even today the metaphor of the avant-garde—the advance scouts of an army on the move—enjoys great prestige.
This course aims to rethink the modern history and concept of the avant-garde through close study of three epochal moments in modern Western art: Romanticism in Germany (circa 1800); Dada and Surrealism in Europe and the U.S. (circa 1920); and the “New York School” in poetry and art (circa 1960). We will discover that whereas progressive art is supposedly always looking forward, avant-gardes have in fact often looked backwards and compared themselves to these and other “canonical” moments. Is such meta-avant-garde consciousness compatible with true artistic freedom? We will also consider the avant-garde as a site for the emergence of Theory—a discourse in dialogue with but ultimately distinct from literary criticism and philosophy. How might our picture of Theory change if we situate it as a component of avant-garde practice? Does the avant-garde model still retain its normative power in our own complex and multipolar society, where old distinctions between “high” and “low” art are ever more difficult to uphold? If avant-gardes have never quite achieved their frequent ambition of breaking down the distinction between life and art, does this render them failures? Or might there be other evaluative frameworks in which to understand their contributions? Is it possible, for instance, to see some of the social and artistic relationships developed within avant-garde groups as generative models that might be exported to other contexts?
FALL 2022
Undergraduate lecture course: Cultures & Contexts: Germany
The Germans used to describe themselves as the “land of poets and thinkers.” The German and Austrian philosophers Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno reframed the problems of knowledge, ethics, and politics for the modern world. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin recalibrated European thinking about society, economics, technology, history, and the mind. The achievements of German and Austrian novelists and poets (Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, Kleist, Hoffmann, Kafka, Mann, Brecht, Celan), composers (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg), and visual artists (Friedrich, Runge, Menzel; Klimt and Schiele; Expressionism, Dada, Bauhaus; Fritz Lang), shaped the sensibilities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In 1933 the German people, by a democratic election, entrusted power to the National Socialist party under Adolf Hitler. Six years later Hitler initiated a catastrophic world war and a massive genocide. In the decades since the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the German nation has rebuilt its economy and its society. But the disaster of the so-called Third Reich casts a lengthy shadow on the image and the self-image of the German nation. The susceptibility of the German people, steeped as they were in learning and culture, to Hitler’s brutal and apocalyptic rhetoric raises basic questions about the value and effectiveness of civilization.
This course is an introduction to the achievements and the paradoxes of modern German history and culture. The course will track the shaping role that German literature, art, and thought have played within European modernity from the late eighteenth century to the present. The course will culminate in the regeneration of German society and culture from the 1960s to the present, involving such figures as Heinrich Böll, Christa Wolf, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, Christoph Schlingensief, and Hito Steyerl.
Students will read principally primary sources. Historical documents and literary, philosophical, and other texts will be supplemented by works of art, architecture, and film. The lectures will provide a historical framework as well as guidelines to interpretation of the texts and other works. Students will read, analyze, and discuss the texts and works of art in the recitation sections.
Graduate seminar: Archive Fever: Freud, Derrida, and Others (co-taught with Juliet Fleming)
Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) has provoked intense conversations among archivists, philosophers, historians, psychoanalysts, and social scientists about the archive and its relation to questions of memory.
This seminar is an attempt to account for this difficult text. The course will have four components. First, a brief introduction to the question with which Derrida began his career: what is writing? Second, we will study the Freudian texts that underlie Archive Fever, as well as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s study of Freud’s relation to his Jewishness, which served as the pretext for Archive Fever when Derrida delivered it at the Freud Museum in 1994. Third, fully armed, we will read Archive Fever itself. And finally, we will explore several modern cultural projects or fields of inquiry that reflect on the concept of the archive in ways that may be productively related to our prior readings.