Draper MA Program (DRAP-GA)

Explores relations among affect, literature, and music in the theory and practices of early modern Europe. Examines the theory of the passions in explicit contrast with late modern constructions of emotion.

Examines the representation of time in 20th-century European and American novels as well as relationships between such fictionally created time and descriptions of time in philosophical works of the same period. Reading works by Bergson, Husserl, Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, Heidegger, Nabokov, and others, students analyze the connections among innovations in narrative technique, fiction?s increased thematic focus on time, and nonfictional explorations of the experience of time during the last century.

The first of a two-course sequence designed to explore debates about the production, consumption, distribution, and interpretation of the arts. Incorporating methods and insights from anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, this course introduces students to issues in and methods for cultural analysis. Readings include texts by Adorno, Benjamin, Becker, Bourdieu, Weber, Williams, and others.

Surveys world historical trends by examining spaces and practices outside the normative expectations of national histories. Students read accounts from different historical periods of human encounters on and across the world?s major seas and oceans??contact zones? that blur conventional territorial and cultural definitions?and review related concepts, tools, and methodologies adopted by world and global historians in their analyses.

Introduces the complex nature of the city and the local and global political, social, and economic forces that shape it. As these forces manifest themselves differently in different localities, students study various city types, including the global city, the modern metropolis, and the informal city. New York City is the main platform for exploration, revealing as it does the continuities and congruencies in the forms and processes that characterize contemporary cities.

Surveys science from a variety of philosophical, sociological, historical, linguistic, anthropological, and critical perspectives. Explores debates over constructivism, relativism, and the uses to which scientific knowledge is put by examining how cultural boundaries between science and nonscience are constructed and maintained.

Examines how new and emerging knowledges and technologies, such as cold fusion, genetics, cloning, organ transplantation, and assisted conception, are problematizing boundaries that are assumed to be natural and fixed, while at the same time remaking the social structures that support science.

Focuses on questions of reception and interpretation, particularly on the distinctions between ?high? culture and other cultural designations. How have avant-garde notions and systems contributed to the ?culture wars?? What role do class distinctions have in the evolution of cultural controversies? How do notions of good and poor ?taste? emerge, and how are they defined? To what extent do debates over cultural freedom serve as proxies for other political struggles?

Investigates the relationship of the shape of the body to the shape of the self. Focuses on psychoanalytic discourse and its legacy in academic, artistic, and popular culture. Students read texts by Freud, Riviere, Fanon, Butler, Sedgwick, and others, and study material representations of sexuality in fiction, philosophy, photography, and dance.

Focuses on Foucault?s thinking about sexuality, power, knowledge, and the body. Students read several of Foucault?s most influential works and discuss the critical reception of his ideas and their application by a range of scholars in the decades since his death.

An intensive survey of foundational texts in contemporary literary theory. Reading literary works from antiquity through modernity, students investigate how language and the literary determine our various approaches, relations, and commitments to the ?true? and the ?real.? Touchstones for discussion include imitation, representation, subjection, transformation, resistance, and freedom.

Investigates the ethical and political dimensions of contemporary critical theory. Also explores the ways in which literary texts articulate and unfold the ethical and political paradoxes that traditional philosophical discourse too often characterizes as simply forms of error, unreason, contradiction, or transgression.

Studies colonialism from a comparative perspective. Examines the ways in which relations of power, subordination, and negotiation were constituted across time and space and poses questions about the most effective ways in which to understand the colonial ?moment? in world history. Themes that are covered include race and classification, political subjectivity, and nationalism

Topics in The City seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently.

Since the French Revolution, the idea of progressive evolution gave Western culture a unified sense of its place in the great scheme of things, but the decades leading up to World War I saw the gradual decline of that paradigm. From the linguistic turn in philosophy to the professionalization of sociology, from symbolist poetry to cubism, from Bart?k to Bauhaus, from the New Criticism to socialist realism, a preoccupation with form emerged as the defining characteristic of a modernism that could no longer rely on natural design. This course considers various examples of that preoccupation in a search for the roots of postmodern dissolution.

?Philosophy is an age grasped in thought,? Hegel once said, and if the 20th century was grasped in thought at all, it was by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. If their thought is elusive, no wonder?for their age made the very idea of comprehension suspect. In Heidegger and Wittgenstein we meet two philosophers profoundly inclined toward the unity that metaphysics promises but forced to confront that promise as a receding possibility in an incomprehensible historical moment.

It has become commonplace for theories of media to attribute massive psycho-cultural transformations to their influence. Homeric Greeks (like other "tribal" peoples) lacked an interior self because they lived in an ?oral? world. The phonetic alphabet made philosophy possible. Print underlies bureaucracy and mechanization. TV creates a ?global village.? Multimedia technologies on the Internet undermine (or realize) centralized attempts to control social meaning. And so on. The primary aim of this course is to raise the underlying, and as yet unanswered, questions upon which all such media theory depends: to what extent does the emerging age, the age we live in now (Post-industrial, Post-philosophical, Post-modern, Post-western, Information Age, Late Capitalism), recover certain characteristics of Oral/Traditional culture? To what extent does it preserve or intensify or dilute characteristics of Print/Modern culture? To what extent is it constituting something entirely new?

Topics in Global Histories seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently.

Topics in Literary Cultures seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently.

Topics in Science Studies seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently

Topics in Art Worlds seminars examine particularly focused subject matter and themes, which change frequently.