Spring 2007

(More will be posted as they come in)
(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)

• Rhetoric 200: Classical Origins of the Rhetorical Tradition - Ramona Naddaff
• Rhetoric 230: Constitutional Violence: War and Sovereignty in Enlightenment Political Thought--David Bates
• Rhetoric 240F: Legal Rhetoric and Philosophy--Marianne Constable
• Rhetoric 240G, Section 1: Prosecuting Violence: Genocide, Sexual Violence, Torture, and Crimes Against Humanity in the International and Hybrid Tribunals--David Cohen
• Rhetoric 240G, Section 2: Transformations Without Becoming: Heidegger and Foucault on Post-Historical Change--Catherine Malabou
• Rhetoric 243 Section 1: Essays in Images and Words--Kaja Silverman
• Rhetoric 243 Section 2: Pornographies On/Scene--Linda Williams

In the post-world war II period, ancient Greek and Latin rhetorical theory has witnessed an unprecedented rejuvenation, extending its research methods and topics to the center of debates in both the social sciences and the humanities.   Once the exclusive terrain of philological investigation, ancient rhetorical theory has become a site to explore crucial questions about not only theories of democracy, language, and the arts. Interpreted from an interdisciplinary framework, classical rhetorical theory has also been incorporated into contemporary psychoanalytic, gender, and cultural studies.  In the first instance, this seminar proposes to read the seminal texts in classical rhetorical theory—from Homer, Thucydides, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle to Cicero, Tacitus, Longinus and Augustine.  Complementing close textual readings with recent scholarship in the classics, this seminar aims to understand the changing contexts and perspectives from which these canonical texts have been read.  How, for example, has Plato’s Gorgias, once a revered anti-rhetorical diatribe, become a “sourcebook” for learning about the seductive, violent and mimetic powers of rhetorical language?  How has the figure of Helen of Troy become the topos par excellence for the inextricable weaving of persuasive sophistic and poetic logic and sexual politics?  Finally, drawing in particular on the work of French classicists such as Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre-Vidal Naquet, Marcel Detienne, and Nicole Loraux, this seminar revisits ancient questions and quarrels about orality and literacy, the relation between soul and the body, myth and philosophy, tragedy and democracy.  All texts are in translation.   Students who wish to read in the original source language are encouraged to do so.  Course reader as well as book purchases.  Students are required to read the translations assigned.

First seminar:  We will study together the standard list of rhetorical works as well as read a selection on rhetoric from Roland Barthes.  Copies will be available before class in my mailbox.

Required Books:

• Plato, Gorgias, focus pub; 1585102431
• Plato, Phaedrus, Hackett Press, 0872202208

Provisional Reading List:

Antiphon, “First Tetralogy”, Anon. Dissoi Logoi., Gorgias, On the Non-Existent; Encomium of Helen., Demosthenes, Against Meidias, Thucydides, selections from The Peloponnesian War” Pericles’ Funeral Oration., Euripides, Helen of Troy; Medea, Isocrates, selections from Against the Sophists., Plato, Gorgias; Phaedrus; Book X, The Republic, Aristotle, Selections from the Poetics; Rhetoric., Cicero, De Oratore and selections from Tusculan Disputations., Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators., Longinus, On the Sublime., Augustine, De doctrina christiana and selections from the Confessions.

Secondary Criticism:  Works by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Marcel Detienne, Nicole Loraux, Paul Woodruff; Anne Carson; Froma Zeitlin; Josiah Ober; Martha Nussbaum; Andrea Nightingale; Alexander Nehamas; Jacques Derrida, Simon Goldhill, Charles Segal, Gregory Nagy, Thomas Cole, Peter Brown, among others. 

While Enlightenment thinking is usually associated with concepts such as sociability, constitutional division of powers, and liberal notions of individual rights, the problem of war and violence loomed large in the eighteenth-century imagination. We will trace the constitutive role of violence in new understandings of the state through close readings of major texts in this period. Beginning with an overview of the natural law tradition on sovereignty and warfare (Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf), we will discuss a range of European thinkers to see how violence and war structured their ideas concerning the origin and development of democratic political institutions. Although we will organize the seminar around the primary texts, we will supplement our readings with discussion of some key theoretical and historical works, including Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, and Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of The Jus Publicum Europeaum. Students will write one research paper.

Required Texts:

Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace; Hobbes, Leviathan; Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen; Locke, Second Treatise; Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws; Rousseau, Social Contract and Fragments on War; Diderot, Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville; Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments; Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society; Sieyes, What is the Third Estate?; Kant, Perpetual Peace.

Law and history both make claims about truth, often in the form of stories based on particular sorts of evidence. In so doing, modern law and history accord texts primacy and rely on written materials as authoritative sources. While history tells listeners and readers what happened, law relies on accounts of what happened (or what generally happens), to tell its addressees what to do. In this seminar, we will explore a constellation of issues (such as source, origin, authority, voice, narrative) surrounding the writing of law and of history.
We will read three sorts of materials:
1) works about legal rhetoric (including James Boyd White, Peter Goodrich, J.L. Austin);
2) works about the rhetoric of history (including Hayden White, Nietzsche, Koselleck; Arendt);
3) works of law and legal history (examples will largely but not exclusively concern US women in the late 19th/early 20th century and may include Gordon, Hartog, Lunbeck, Kerber, Pleck).
Underlying such questions as how law and legal histories begin, repeat, select, and vary the tales they tell, is a concern with understanding modern positive law and the ways that empirical (law in action) and doctrinal (law on the books) approaches, even in combination, struggle to grasp law as practices and events.

Written Requirements:

1. Three brief discussion papers
2. A book review on a book of your choice which you will try to place somewhere
3. A 20-page term paper

Required Text: Forthcoming

Prosecuting Violence: Genocide, Sexual Violence, Torture, and Crimes Against Humanity in the International and Hybrid Tribunals

The seminar will examine the way in which the various international and hybrid tribunals, from the ICTY and ICTR to East Timor, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and Cambodia have attempted to define and assess individual responsibility for genocide, and for sexual violence and torture as crimes against humanity. We will also consider the relationship between international prosecutions for torture and the "redefinition" of torture by the Bush administration in the context of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and
the "war on terror." Several guest speakers will participate
in our meetings, including individuals involved in the East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Bosnian investigations and prosecutions. Readings will primarily consist of judgments and other court documents, supplemented by selected secondary literature. Participants will be expected to complete a seminar paper (25-30 pages) and to make a presentation about their research.

Required Texts: Forthcoming

Transformations Without Becoming: Heidegger and Foucault on Post-Historical Change

Can there be a meeting and dialogue between Heidegger’s thinking on change as a tension internal to Being, unrelated to any kind of subject, and Foucault’s thinking on change as self-transformation, as constituting subjectivity?  Are there passageways that link ontological change with techniques for self-transformation?  We will work out these questions, starting from an axis that is fundamental: the readings of Nietzsche given by these two authors. Curiously, despite their admiration for Nietzsche’s thought of the return, both Heidegger and Foucault abandon the concept of becoming, each considering it to be too traditional and ill-suited to express what they seek to bring to light: a concept of transformation after history.  Foucault sets out the need in this way: “To replace the theme of becoming . . . with the analysis of transformations in their specificity.”  We will wonder, then, what a transformation freed from becoming could be.

To do so, we will bring together three lines of investigation: First, a study of Heidegger’s development; beginning in 1928, he abandons the project of working out the concept of Dasein’s “modification” (Modifikation) in Being and Time, to explore instead the concepts of “change” (Wandel), “transformation” (Wandlung), and “metamorphosis” (Verwandlung) in texts such as Contributions to Philosophy or Time and Being.

Second, a reading of The Hermeneutics of the Subject, in which Foucault considers techniques of the self as transformations that are irreducible to the dominant political and philosophical concepts of transformation and technics in the West.

Third, the complex relationship of the two thinkers to Nietzsche; they challenge the formal, uniform aspect of “becoming.” Constant interweaving of these perspectives should allow us to call into question the boundaries between ontology, genealogy, and practices or techniques for care of the self.  What paradigms of change can be put into place with these new perspectives?

Bibliography:

Heidegger, M., Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh, Alabany, State University of New York Press, 1996.

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics : World, Finitude, Solitude, tr. William Mc Neill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1995.

Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr. parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999.

Nieztsche, vol. I : The Will to Power as Art, tr. David Farell Krell, New York : Harper and Row, 1979; vol. II : The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, ibid., 1984.

Time and Being, in On Time and Being, tr. Joan Stambaugh, New York : Harper and Row, 1972.

Foucault, M. , The Hermeneutics of the Subject, tr. Graham Burchell, Verso Books, 2006.

The Essential Works of Foucault, New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, T. N. Foulis, 1909 :Thus Spoke Zarathoustra, Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo

Dreyfus, H. , Rabinow, P., Michel Foucault : Beyond Structuralism andHermeneutics, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Required Texts: Forthcoming

Instructor: Kaja Silverman                

We generally think of "art" and "theory" as distinct practices, the latter having as one of its functions the critical interrogation of the former. During the heyday of structuralism and semiotics, this distinction sometimes congealed into an opposition; the theoretician was a "scientist," whose job was to reveal the hidden codes--or undo the ideological mystification—of the work of art. Late in his life, Roland Barthes, who was for a time one of the representatives of this way of thinking, began writing in a very different mode: one which can best be characterized as "essayistic." In the essay form, which was invented by Michel de Montaigne, art and theory are intimately conjoined, a conjunction that has important ramifications for how we think about each.

The essay form has traditionally been literary in nature, and this might seem difficult to change; language has a "flexibility" that other mediums lack. However, in the past few decades, a new kind of essay has begun to emerge: one made up of words and images. It has done so, moreover, within many different domains: film, photography, performance, installation art, video, and publishing. This seminar will be devoted to an exploration of

important works from each of these domains, and to the kind of thought and perceptual experience which they make possible. As we will see, there is a strong autobiographical dimension in almost all of these works, although it takes a diversity of forms. This is because one of the events at the center of the contemporary essay is a renegotiation of the relationship between subject and object.

We will begin the semester with a group of essays  by Michel  de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay form, and two books by Roland Barthes which expand this form to include the photographic image. We will devote the rest of the semester to the following works: James Agee and Walker Evans's  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Chris Marker's Sans Soleil;  Mary Kelly's Postpartum Document; Hollis Frampton's Nostalgia;  Allan Sekula's "Aerospace Folktales," and "Meditations on a Triptych";  Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I;  Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen; Isaac Julien and Mark Nash's Frantz Fanon; W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz; Chantal Akerman's News from Home;  Jeremy Blake's Winchester; James Benning's Four Corners; and Jeffrey Skoller's The Malady of Death.

Because so many seminars are scheduled on Wednesday, I have moved this seminar to Monday, which means that the only possible screening time is Sunday evening. Although we will not need to screen films every week, students must be free during this screening time if they wish to take the seminar, because five of the films on the syllabus cannot be found in video stores.

The course assignment will be to produce an essay, which has both a visual and a verbal component.  By "essay," I mean something comparable to our objects of study, not a paper with accompanying illustrations. Students are strongly encouraged to  enroll in Jeffrey Skoller's Graduate Production Seminar (FILM 230), where they can work on a creative project under his supervision that will satisfy the requirement for both courses. We will have an end-of-semester exhibition of everyone's work.

Required Books:

James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise  Famous Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988).

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, l977).

Reda Bensmaia, The Barthes Effect: the Essay as Reflective Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, l987).

Mary Kelly, Post Partum Document (Berkeley: University of California Press, l999).

Michel de Montaigne,  The Complete Essays (London: Penguin, 1993).

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

Alan Sekula, Performance Under Working Conditions (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2003).

Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, l983).

Recommended Books:

Ursula Biemann, ed.,  Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age (Zurich: Edition Voldemeer, 2003).

Alex Hughes, ed., Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative (University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, l993).

Jean-Michel Rabate, ed., The Image after Roland Barthes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, l997).

Liz Wells, The Photography Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Pornographies On/Scene

This seminar will bring together debates about the nature of pornography with  debates about the nature of the visual.  Both will be considered in relation to the (mostly unwritten) history of American visual pornographies and with an eye towards imagining, and even contributing to this history. What, for example, is the canon of hard core pornography?  We will concentrate on two moments in the history of moving image pornography: an earlier era of “obscenity,” in which  explicit sexual images were kept off-scene for the consumption of private elites in the era of the stag film, and a  more contemporary, and increasingly electronic era of “on/scenity” in which pornographies of all sorts  become available to wide varieties of consumers, including those to whom it was once forbidden. Although moving-image pornographies will be our primary objects of study, this seminar will also consider the different rhetorics of still and image moving images which aim to arouse, techniques of arousal, and related popular images which also  aim to "move" the bodies of spectator/users. Approximately one third of the class will be devoted to general readings in the growing “field” of pornography studies, another third to the question of what constitutes the canon of the stag era (here I will invite those interested to imagine a two disk DVD with notes arguing for what constitutes this canon) and another third to the burning question of electronic, interactive pornographies on small screens. 

Requirements:

A short response paper and oral presentation on one or more reading;  a 20-page paper on some aspect of visual pornography; ten-minute conference presentation  of this final paper; active participation in all aspects of the seminar and the final conference. NB:  Some of the images to be studied in this seminar may be offensive or arousing.  Please realize that curiosity about this course does not mean that you are actually  prepared to look closely at a wide variety of explicit sexual representations for an entire semester.  Most of our class sessions will have required prior screenings. Because of the sensitive nature of the material, auditors are discouraged.

Required Texts:

---Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Random House, 1978

­--Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture.  New York: Viking  Press, 1996

---Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. Grove  Press, 1996

---Peter Lehman, ed. Pornography: Film and Culture. Rutgers U.P, 2006--Annie Potts. The Science Fiction of Sex: Feminist Deconstruction and the Vocabularies of Heterosex.

---Linda Williams. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. U.C.Press, Revised  Edition. 1989/1999.

---Porn Studies. Duke U.P., 2004.