TLC 2003

GRADUATE CERTIFICATE IN THEORY, LITERATURE, & CULTURE Summer 2003: Globalization, Nationalism, and Nostalgia COLLOQUIUM IN TLC AUGUST 1, 2, and 3 VISITING FACULTY
Introduction to TLC (ENG 599), Prof. Lucinda Cole (English) Summer Session 1B (May 12-June 6) MTW 12:30-3:45 PM	Topics in TLC: The Politics of Nostalgia (ENG 599), Prof. Ron Schmidt (Political Science) Summer Session 1B (May 12-June 6) MTW 6:00-9:15 PM	Topics in TLC: The Balkans as Forbidden Desire (ENG 599), Prof. Dusan Bjelic (Criminology/Honors) Summer Session 2B (June 30-July 25) MTW 6:00-9:30 PM

Introduction to Theory, Literature, and Culture is designed to introduce students to questions and concepts that have dominated literary and cultural studies over the past thirty years: questions about language, about history, about the body and its place in the social order. Our primary goal is to examine how contemporary philosophers Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault used the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and/or Freud to break away from the “modern,” with its largely formalist or structuralist interpretive paradigms, and thus to create the conditions for “postmodernity.” We will thus be reading foundational essays by the above thinkers. “Postmodernism,” of course,” has sometimes been accused by its politically-progressive detractors of being “apolitical” or “politically conservative.” Our secondary goal is to interrogate this perception by focusing on how postmodernist insights have informed contemporary debates about race, ethnicity, and nation. To that end, we will be reading excerpts from, among others, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Etienne Balibar, and Homi Bhaba. Students should expect to write weekly papers, to make an oral presentation, and to participate in lively debate.	Nostalgia, a word that combines the Greek words for “pain” and “returning home,” originated as a medical diagnosis for the peculiarly intense homesickness of Swiss mercenaries. Thus from the outset, nostalgia has been defined in reference to a national definition of home. Nevertheless, the concept’s political nature has often been obscured and nostalgia is shrugged off as apolitical sentimentality. This approach simplifies the role nostalgia plays in nationalist movements, however, and ignores the political and temporal disruptions it can create. Indeed, nostalgia plays a central role in our politics, but it undermines the foundations of legitimacy it is meant to serve. In this class, we will study the use of nostalgia by different nationalist movements in the United States from the nation’s founding to the present day. Students will be asked to read in a number of different genres, including autobiography (The Education of Henry Adams), fiction (The Last of the Mohicans and The Jolly Corner), political theory (Imagined Communities and Blackface/White Noise), and film. Although the course readings will be drawn from several different genres, an emphasis will be placed upon political theory. In addition to the texts listed above, we will also read selections from more canonical theorists such as Machiavelli and Nietzsche as well as Michael Rogin's "Blackface/White Noise," Bonnie Honig's "Democracy and the Foreigner," and Anne Anlin Cheng's "The Melancholy of Race," all of which suggest the large role played by nostalgia in American understandings of political and racial identity. Students will be required to write a series of short papers in which they will be asked to provide critical readings of course texts and an analysis of nostalgia within assigned works.	This course will analyze the Balkans' relationship, both political and aesthetic, to Western literary and academic discourse. We will focus on the Balkans as metaphor in order to see how the region embodies those desires suppressed in the West in the service of rationality and a stable social order—those things considered necessary for the construction of ‘modern’ subjectivity. Countless representations of the Balkans in literature and the media--from Marx to Freud, from CNN to Hollywood--reveal, upon analysis, how repressed needs and desires are projected onto the region. Thus the Balkans have become, for the West, an aesthetic and sexual abject whose identity, because of its marginality and performativity, offers a critical perspective on identity formation itself. Our examination will take place through the perspective of literary works, films, and cultural criticism from the region, as well as Western academic discourse devoted to the Balkans. Sections of the following books will be read and critiqued: Edward Said, Orientalism; Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans; Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction; Dusan I. Bjelic & Obrad Savic, eds., Balkan As Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation; Irving C. Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse; Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. Articles: Stephen D. Arata, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization"; Milica Bakic-Hayden , "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia"; Slavoj Zizek, "Enjoy Your Nation"; Arjun Appadurai, "Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization." Films to be shown: Cat People; Before the Rain; No Man's Land; Predictions of Fire, among others. Literary work to be reviewed: Ivo Andric, The Bridge On The Drina; Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; Ismail Kadare, The Three- Arched Bridge; Ivan Minchov Vazov, Selected Poems; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Requirements will include one theoretical essay; one literary essay; one film essay.