Fall 2008

(All courses are 4 units unless otherwise noted.)

• Rhetoric 200: Daniel Boyarin
• Rhetoric C221: Anthony J. Cascardi
• Rhetoric 230: David Bates
• Rhetoric 240F: Marianne Constable
• Rhetoric 240G: Trinh, Minh-Ha
• Rhetoric 243: Linda Williams

Instructor: Daniel Boyarin
W: 2:00pm - 5:00pm
7415 Dwinelle Hall

Description forthcoming

The aims of this seminar are several fold:  to track the ways in which the goals of “critical theory” were from its earliest days associated with the project of an aesthetic critique; to assess the degree to which critical theory was (or was not) consistent with the major texts of Western aesthetics (Kant, Hegel, etc.); and finally to engage and evaluate the “return” of aesthetics since the 1970's in light of cultural conceptual challenges to the paradigm of Western Marxism.  We will devote special attention to the problem of reflective judgment, to the nature and limits of materialism, and to the ongoing negotiations between romanticism and modernism, including postmodernism.

During the semester we will read some of the “founding” texts of modern Western aesthetics in detail, but the course will be construed as an investigation of the relationships between critical theory and aesthetics rather than as an introduction to or survey of the philosophy or theory of art.

We will work collaboratively as much as possible.  Students will be responsible for leading one class meeting in an *informal* way.  Papers treating some question raised directly by the materials read and discussed in the course will be due as follows: paper topics submitted for review and approval by November 5; final papers due in both electronic and hard copy by December 10.  Papers submitted after December 10 will be read as they are received but grades will be recorded as “I”

In addition to the following books (on order), there will be a selection of readings from works by Hume, Habermas, Marx and Engels, Walter Benjamin, Terry Eagleton, Jay Bernstein, and Fredric Jameson.

Required Books:

• Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
• Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind
• Hegel, Introductory Lectures
• Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy   
• Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics      
• Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment
• Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
• Guy Debord Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Instructor: Marianne Constable
W: 10:00am - 1:00pm
7415 Dwinelle Hall

Modern law and history both privilege written texts as their sources.  In this seminar, we will consider documents as text, source and artifact.  We will deal with a range of materials, which will include not only the required readings below, but government documents and primary sources.   The aim of the seminar is not only to understand and articulate the ways that particular issues of documentation are and/or have been addressed in law and history, but also to develop background and skills in legal, historical and rhetorical analysis of documents. 

ISSUES:

* What counts as a document in what context?  What gives some documents and not others authority?  What gives the same document legitimacy in one context but not another?   In what ways are writings - and not sounds or images, for instance -  privileged? What values are represented by the reliance of law and history on documents?  Is there something peculiarly modern about such reliance? 

* How is a document used? How are documents made? How are issues of the making and using of documents interrelated?  What does a document testify to?  What makes it reliable?  Are there limits to its proper interpretation?  What are the limits to what it does or can say?  What is a forgery?  What can a forgery reliably testify to, in what context?  Does documentation itself have a history?  What do preservation and circulation have to do with documentation? 

* And finally, how do non-written forms of documentation - oral histories, photography - fit into practices of law and history today?  How does digitization challenge conventions regarding documents and documentation in law and history?

READINGS:

• Annelise Riles, ed.  Documents
• Marilyn Strathern, ed. Audit Cultures
• Michael Power, The Audit Society
• Annelise Riles, Network Inside Out
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
• H.L.A. Hart, Concept of Law
• Anthony Grafton, History of the Footnote
• Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
• Plato, Phaedrus
• Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist (pp. 214-244, Excursus on the Phaedrus)

REQUIREMENTS:

Students will be required to present readings and participate in discussion, to report on their investigation of some documentary practice, and to write 2 medium-length (10-page) papers, at least one of which will focus on a particular document

Instructor: LInda Wiliams
F: 11:00am - 2:00pm
226 Dwinelle Hall

This is a graduate seminar on the musical film. You do not “gotta sing” or “gotta dance” in this class but it is important to grasp the imperative of the title. While we will begin and possibly end with the all-important Hollywood Musical, we shall use these canonical musicals as diving boards to plunge us into some less familiar territory: most importantly backwards to musical theater’s traditions in blackface performance and forward to the musical traditions of the “race film” and then further forward to the transnational contemporary forms of the musical in Bollywood, France, Denmark, South Korea and the U.S.

Readings will include:

• Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity  Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.
• Rick Altman, The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987
• D.A. Miller, Place for Us . Harvard UP, 1998.
• Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin.’ New York: Overlook Press, 1987.
• Rick Altman, ed. Genre: the Musical. London: BFI, 1981.
• Steve Cohan, Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2006.
• Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy and the  African Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
• Catherine M. Cole. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
• Ann Douglas 1995. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Noonday Press.
• Forbes, Camille R. 2008. Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of  America’s First Black Star. New York: Basic Civitas Books.
• Gubar, Susan. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Lhamon, W.T. Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New  York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Rogin, Michael. 1996. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Films will include:

• Applause
• Top Hat
• Swing Time
• The Jazz Singer
• The Singin’ Fool
• Wonder Bar
• Swing!
• A Star is Born
• Hallelujah!
• Show Boat
• The Gold Diggers of 1933
• The Wizzard of Oz
• Ziegfeld Girl
• Cabin in the Sky
• Stormy Weather
• The Bandwagon
• Mother India
• Devdas
• Sopyonje
• Dancer in the Dark