decisions decisions decisions...

ahhh too many cool classes...can't decide

1.

CLAR G4020 Building a Poem: Selected Topics in Poetry & Architecture (3pts.)

Professor: V. Di Palma and T. Smoliarova
Time: T 2:10pm - 4:00pm

See course description »

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.


2. ENGL W4503y 20th Century Poetry: Race, Gender, and Poetic Form (Golston) TR 2:40-3:55pm 3 pts. (Lecture). Intersections between discourses of race and gender physiology and the rhetoric of poetic form. Poets to include Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Stein, H. D., Lawrence, Eliot, Hart Crane, Williams, Langston Hughes, Zukofsky read against contemporary texts from various scientific and humanistic disciplines, including psychology, physiology, musicology, dance theory, philosophy, and poetics.

3. W4017. Chekhov. 3 pts. C. Popkin
Close reading of Chekhov's best work in the genres on which he left an indelible mark (the short story and the drama) on the subjects that left an indelible imprint on him (medical science, the human body, identity, topography, the nature of news, the problem of knowledge, the access to pain, the necessity of dying, the structure of time, the self and the world, the part and the whole) via the modes of inquiry (diagnosis and deposition, expedition and exegesis, library and laboratory, microscopy and materialism, intimacy and invasion) and forms of documentation (the itinerary, the map, the calendar, the photograph, the icon, the Gospel, the Koran, the lie, the love letter, the case history, the obituary, the pseudonym, the script) that marked his era ( and ours). No knowledge of Russian required.

4. philosophy of literature The course reviews and analyzes five topics in philosophical commentary on works of literature. The relationship between literature and truth is developed from Plato and Aristotle to analytical and existential philosophies of the twentieth century, including Graham Hough and J.P. Sartre. Theories of interpretation of literary writing are examined from classical rhetorical authors through medieval commentators including Dante and Maimonides to Northrop Frye's theory of myth and a critique of Jacques Derrida's views on deconstructionism. The question of the universality of works of literature or of the claims for pluralism are analyzed through accounts of classicism and enlightenment through interpretations of romanticism. The relevance of theories of the genesis of literature for the understanding of literature is discussed including Marxism, Freudianism and Modernism. The relationship between literature and morality is examined ranging from the thesis that art is necessarily moral to the thesis of art for art's sake. This course will be capped at 40 students.

5. Aesthetics: historical survey Spring 2012 Philosophy G4050 section 001 This course is a critical examination of the major texts in aesthetics including Plato, Aristotle, Suger, Hume, Winckelmann, Lessing, Hume, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

INSTRUCTOR LYDIA GOEHR lg131@columbia.edu

Week 1 1/23
INTRODUCTION CONCEPTS and THEMES
Week 21/30
PLATO.from the REPUBLIC, LAWS and ION]
Week 3 2/6
ARISTOTLE.POETICS [tragedy]
Week 4 2/13
HUME.“ON THE STANDARD OF TASTE”
Week 5 2/20
KANT. fromCRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT
Week 6 2/27
HEGEL. fromLECTURES ON THE FINE ARTS
Week 7 3/19
NIETZSCHE. THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
Week 8 3/26
CROCE. AESTHETICS [summary essay]
Week 94/2
HEIDEGGER. “THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART”
Week 10 4/9
MERLEAU-PONTY. “CEZANNE’S DOUBT”
Week 114/16
BENJAMIN. “THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGICAL
REPRODUCIBILITY”
Week 124/23
ADORNO.“ON THE FETISH CHARACTER IN MUSIC AND THE REGRESSION OF
LISTENING” AND “THE CULTURE INDUSTRY RECONSIDERED”
Week 13 4/30
DANTO.“THE ARTWORLD” AND “THE END OF ART”


6. W4300 Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Expressive Bodies

Days and times: F 4:10 - 6:00

Instructors: John Robinson-Appels

Location: 754 Schermerhorn Ext

Bodies appear to defy methods of categorization across nationality, race, and sexuality (and even within subcultures and localities). While bodies remain agile, normative theories of how bodies are construed, and how and why they act, are often rigid and formulaic. This course examines how phenomenological work on bodies and expression clarifies distinctions between varying "bodily world views." We consider research on race and sexuality of the last few decades, working with texts by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Charles R. Johnson, Laura Doyle, Gail Weiss, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., as well as essays by Foucault, Butler, and French feminists. Their work shows how geography, in conjunction with a specific socio-cultural nexus of lived experience, creates distinct expressive capacity. By examining their theories, in conjunction with the artistic representation of bodies (in literary works, and in the performing and visual arts), the course will critique the parameters of categories of African American race and sexuality. We will see how art contributes to the philosophical and cultural constitution of bodily forms and bodily analysis. In particular we consider choreographers and artistic directors Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell, Ron Brown, Katherine Dunham, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, playwrights Soyinka, Baldwin, Hansberry, and Suzan-Lori Parks, literary authors Lorde, Dove, Brooks, Alexander, Hurston, and Morrison, and visual artists Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. When possible we will make use of the cultural resources of NYC by visiting museums, galleries, and performances.

7. Contemporary Latino Literature
An examination of the imaginative writing of U.S. Hispanics in its cultural and literary context. Representative works in several genres (poetry, fiction, memoir) by Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Dominican-American, and Cuban-American authors, among them: Alurista, Rolando Hinojosa Smith, Richard Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Cherrie Moraga, Rosario Ferré, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Julia Álvarez, Junot Díaz, José Kozer, Ana Menéndez and Richard Blanco. Topics to be discussed include: the bilingual self, barrios and borderlands, from exile to ethnic, immigrant autobiography, Hispanic New York, mainstream or Gulf Stream, Latino literature and its readers.