WSCP 81000 - Crime, Coercion and Community

JJ W 6:20-8:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. James Lynch [90979] [Cross listed with CRJ 88000]

This course examines the role of small areas in social control and their effect on the ecological distribution of crime. It is organized around two themes. The first is the elaboration of social disorganization theories to specify more clearly the interdependence of small areas, like face blocks, with larger social entities such as neighborhoods, communities, cities, metropolitan areas, states and nation states in the exercise of social control. The course will present alternative theories of how larger social entities facilitate or complicate the role of small area units in social control. Some use will be made of cross-national comparisons in order to observe the variation in nation-level institutional arrangements that are not possible in single nation studies, such as the fluidity of the residential housing markets. The second theme is the role of coercion in the maintenance of effective face blocks and neighborhoods. There is a growing literature and more than a little debate about whether the coercive power of the state builds and sustains small areas as units of social control or whether it destroys these areas. The course will offer a variety of definitions about what it means to “destroy “ or “sustain” an area as well as review and organize the burgeoning literature on the effects of “zero-tolerance” policing and mass incarceration on these places.

WSCP 81000 - Poetics of Dislocation

GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 4433, 3 credits, Prof. Meena Alexander [90722] [Cross listed with Eng. 87200]

The complex interconnection of poetry and place is what we will consider – how poems evoke place, how identity is bound up with places and how the loss of place can allow for a poetics of dislocation. What happens to identity when the symbolic space of the poem opens up thresholds, in between spaces, perilious disjunctions between places? Through poem cycles and long poems we will explore how poetic language is used to evoke a migratory, diasporic existence, how gender and sexuality are refracted, how traumatic loss, whether of place or language works its way through poetry. We will explore the work of poets of our own time such as Agha Shahid Ali, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo , Myung Mi Kim, Li-Young Lee , Nathaniel Mackey and A.K.Ramanujan. We will read Dorothy Wordsworth’s prose journals; William Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude and his Poems on the Naming of Places, as well as Derek Walcott’s Another Life (1973) a long poem that draws on the The Prelude. We will also read essays by the poets, where these are to be found as well as the work of postcolonial and other theorists – including Appadurai, Agamben, Bauman, Benjamin, Bhabha, Glissant, Merleau-Ponty, Soja . The course will be run as a seminar with weekly presentations on poetry and poetics, one mid term paper and one final research paper.

WSCP 81000 - Progress of Romance

GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3306, 3 credits, Prof. Rachel Brownstein [90724] [Cross listed with Eng. 84000]

Frequently set up as a foil to a truer, more modern, gritty and historical story, the idea of romance is arguably intrinsic to narrative “realism.” Self-consciously more sophisticated novels rely on deploying, more and less ironically, the elements and tropes of romance that readers will recognize. (And ironically, novels are read, in retrospect, as romances.) In this course we think again about the continuing presence of romance in fiction, and its debatable progress since the eighteenth century, giving special attention to passive protagonists for whom fate is character. We will begin with The Progress of Romance (1785), a work of literary criticism in the form of a philosophical conversation by the novelist Clara Reeve, looking briefly at a few examples of what she means by “romance.” Then we will go on to Northanger Abbey, Waverley, Byron’s Don Juan, Mansfield Park, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (and Henry James’s “conversation” about that novel).

The last book on the syllabus is Atonement (2001), Ian McEwan’s “Jane Austen novel.”

Students will make at least one class presentation and write two essays as well as weekly brief “response” papers.

You would do well to read Daniel Deronda during the summer.

WSCP 81000 - Performing Conjugality: The Medieval Heterosexual Marriage Debate

GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 4433, 3 credits, Prof. Glenn Burger [90726] [Cross listed with Eng. 80700]

From the twelth to the sixteenth century the married estate underwent a profound revaluation. The emphasis on marriage as a sacrament whose core was the consent of its two participants, and the conferring on this conjugal union of much of the signifying power previously reserved for friendship between two men, worked to elevate the lay married estate to a level on par with or even superior to that of the celibate clergy. The newly gendered and sexualized identities of self-controlled husband and good wife, conjoined in one flesh through sacrament and marital affection, not only founded a new household unit but also, to the extent that they showed how such marital relations could act as a systematic guide to a virtuous life, provided a model for civic society dramatically different from previous aristocratic or clerical ones. If by the Early Modern period, these changes had effectively ushered in a new sex/gender system—what we have come to know as modern heterosexuality—by selecting and controlling what and how marriage signified, the late medieval period’s engagement with conjugality remained much more open-ended and conflicted.

This course will consider some of the ways that attempts to represent late medieval conjugality as something “good to think with,” and thus useful in defining and authorizing selfhood for newly emergent groups in that culture, might also mark a certain experimentation with the real that is frequently difficult to align with traditionally normative clerical or chivalric gender roles organized around virginity or noble bloodline. We will begin by considering the legal, theological, and political discourses producing this new emphasis on the value of the married estate in relation to Chretien de Troyes’ romance Eric et Enide. We will consider the variety of conduct literature that developed to regulate and define this new gender system, particularly the wealth of literature related to “the good wife,” her carefully husbanded femininity, and the productive bourgeois household such conjugality makes possible. Here we will consider such works as Le Menagier de Paris and The Knight of La Tour Landry. In particular, we will focus on the enormously popular story of the absolutely patient wife, Griselda, as it travels across Europe. In addition to an important French play version of Griselda, we will consider the English Corpus Christi cycle plays’ depictions of Noah and his Wife, as well as Mary and Joseph. We will conclude with Early Modern assimilations of conjugality within an increasingly patriarchal and heterosexual social system, notably in an early seventeenth century play of Griselda as well as in Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost.

WSCP 81000 -Singularities: Eccentric Persons, Texts and Paintings

GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 4422, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Ann Caws [90728] [Cross listed with Eng. 86400]

The encounters aimed for in this course start from the premise that often the more peculiar confrontations we have in reading and viewing are the most gripping and memorable. The material will include some of the more obvious of these, such as the authors Henry Green, Ronald Firbank, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Antonin Artaud. It will also touch on some lesser-known eccentric writing and painting women, such as Suzanne Valadon, Judith Gautier, Carrington, Emily Carr, and Claude Cahun, as well as some of the more far-out artists such as Martin Ramirez, Adolf Woolfli, and Henry Darger – labeled as “outsider artists…”. It will investigate the strange sides of Hopkins, Ruskin, Vita Sackville-West, and others – to be to some extent determined by the interests of the participants in the experience of the course. To what extent does genius intersect with paranoia, with oddity, with downright madness? What about the boredom factor? How does extreme art break down into the everyday, and what systems have been employed to forestall that? One shorter paper, and one longer, as well as class presentations.

WSCP 81000 - Transnationalism, Postcolonialism and/as World Literature

GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Peter Hitchcock [90730] [Cross listed with Eng. 76200]

This course will consider three intersecting yet specific paradigms of border crossing in the current world system. Transnationalism is conventionally held to express the necessary supra-national agendas of the TNC, the trans-national corporation, an institutional cornerstone of capitalist globalization with a notable history within colonialism and imperialism, from the British East India Company to Halliburton. Postcolonialism announces and investigates a break with this history, yet it is clear that the logic of such globalization is not easily sublated. On one level, the course will investigate whether transnationalism can be creatively reaccentuated by postcolonialism without simply extending the former’s otherwise questionable genealogy within the longue durée of subjugation. The bulk of the course, however, will be dedicated to examining these political and theoretical symptoms in relation to the re-emergence of a global paradigm in literary study. World literature is much more than a comparatist’s nostalgia for Goethe’s famous pronouncement. In the current conjunction it offers to go beyond multiculturalism’s model of accretion and postcolonialism’s emphasis on imperial legacies and delinking from the same. Indeed, compared to the transnationalism of global capital, world literature appears studiously neutral and promises global circulation without all of that nasty extra-literary activity. Clearly, world literature is a much more contestable concept and practice. By discussing in detail the possibilities of its epistemological framework we will not only come to terms with its contemporary profile but also give new meaning to the other linked concepts. Thus, the course will not only serve as an introduction to three powerful examples of border crossing but also demonstrate the critical prescience of their imbrication.

Readings will be drawn from Goethe, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Moretti, Casanova, Damrosch, Said, Spivak among others. In the spirit of proposing postcolonial writing as world literature we will also explore some case studies, including works by Ngugi, el Saadawi, Djebar, Iweala, Ali, Farah, Condé, and Adichie.

Course requirements will include a class presentation and a term essay.

WSCP 81000 - Perverse Prosodies

GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 4422, 3 credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum [90732] [Cross listed with Eng. 80200]

This seminar will investigate a few crucial poets whose fracturings and extensions of the line gave liberties to verse and spawned full-blown philosophies of composition and experience. We will concentrate on Emily Dickinson’s quatrains, Stéphane Mallarmé’s balletic essays, Marianne Moore’s syllabics, Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic measures (especially his Cantos), Paul Celan’s compacted fragments, and Frank O’Hara’s improvisations. We might also read Gertrude Stein’s plays, Langston Hughes’s blues emulations, José Lezama Lima’s baroque indirections, and Hart Crane’s crisis-conscious lyrics. The course could well be titled “Crisis of Verse,” after Mallarmé’s essay, in which he observed that the Author was dead. (See also Dickinson’s “Crisis is a Hair / Toward which the forces creep...” Indeed, crisis will be our theme; for traversals of this topic, we may turn to poems by Georg Trakl and Ingeborg Bachmann.) To complete our study of stammering and ellipsis, we may see two films: probably Werner Herzog’s The Mystery of Kasper Hauser and Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. We aim to intensify the acuteness of our listening to the spasms, interruptions, and leaps of patterned, self-aware language. (Works in French, German, and Spanish will be read, in English translations, with close reference to the originals.) Requirement: a final essay, which you may treat as an experiment in prose poetics, involving stylistic deviations, extravagances, and constraints.

WSCP 81000 - The Spanish Civil War: British Writers of the 1930’s

GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 8202, 3 credits, Prof. Jane Marcus [90733] [Cross listed with Eng. 86100]

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) inspired a huge outpouring of poetry and prose internationally as well as throughout Europe. Using Valentine Cunningham's Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse and The Spanish Front, the seminar will study English poetry and translations of the international poets who fought and wrote against fascism. W.H. Auden's poem "Spain" and his subsequent rejection of it will be examined, as well as Nancy Cunard's "Authors take Sides on the Spanish Civil War" (Published in the Left Review). Writers include Auden, Spender, John Cornford, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Acland, George Barker, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Manuel Altolaguirre. As a project in Cultural Studies, the class will study issues of gender, race and class in a war in which women fought on the battlefield and the "Moors" were used by Franco's troops. Competing historical narratives showing the roles played by communists, anarchists, the church, etc., will be examined. The immense output of posters and photographs and brilliant journalism, as well as stunning bouts of propaganda, will give us a large component of the course to be spent on the visual discourses of the war.

WSCP 81000 -Ethnic “I”

GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3306, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy Miller [90736] [Cross listed with Eng. 87500]

Contemporary memoir and first-person novels about ethnic identity tend to follow the lines of a familiar autobiographical plot: the story of becoming American. This course will examine the ways in which problems of self-reinvention and cultural translation inflect literary forms—and how questions of language, memory, gender and place shape these narratives of longing and belonging. From assimilation narrative to diasporic experiment, writers of ethnic literature negotiate with the myth of the American “success story” and document the pressures of representing an “I” that is also a “we.” The seminar will consider interethnic affinities and differences among Jewish American, Asian American, and Latino/Latina American authors of fiction and nonfiction.

Readings include works by: Alvarez, Anzaldúa, Antin, Fitzgerald, Jen, Kingston, Lee, Paley, Rodriguez, Roth, Wong, Yamamoto.

Seminar presentation and term paper.

WSCP 81000 - Readings in Black Masculinity Studies

GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 3308, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr [90738] [Cross listed with Eng. 88100]

In this seminar we will push beyond the now standard assumption that race, gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive social constructions and toward a more historically grounded understanding of the ways in which competing versions of black masculinity have been manipulated within American culture. In particular, seminar participants will be encouraged to explore the history of the black male image within film and other popular media. The idea is not simply to detail the ways that film and television have been used to denigrate black persons but instead to look as closely as possible at the ways that media images actually teach and enforce particular methods of seeing black men, methods that change over time and that have vexed relationships with concurrent changes in basic socioeconomic structures. Thus we will focus less on how media images obscure the reality of black male existence and more on how this so-called reality is produced–at least in part–by these same images. Each week a student or students will be responsible for preparing class presentations based on the week’s readings. They will read these in class. The rest of the class will then be asked to critique and generally to build upon this work. These in-class presentations can be the bases for the longer essays that will be turned into the instructor at the end of the semester.

WSCP 81000 - Introduction to African American Literary and Cultural Criticism

GC R 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr [90740] [Cross listed with Eng. 80300]

This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant of recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of African American literature and culture. Participants in the seminar will be asked consistently to wrestle with the question of whether or not it is possible to produce a specifically black literary criticism. In relation to this question we will read a number of authors who seriously challenge our ability to utilize race as a critical category. We will also, however, be equally concerned with understanding how one might best define what has come to be known as the Black American literary tradition. Thus, the students who will be best served by this course are those who possess at least a basic knowledge of both nineteenth and twentieth century Black American writing. Questions of "black" corporeality, gender and sexuality will figure prominently in the course. In particular, participants will be asked to think through the manner in which developments in Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies and American Studies impact African American literary and cultural critique. Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation. Authors whom we will examine include, among others: Paul Gilroy, Brent Edwards, Hazel Carby, Robert Reid-Pharr, Henry Louis Gates, Claudia Tate, Philip Brian Harper, Maurice Wallace, and Anthony Appiah.

WSCP 81000 - Reading Relations in the British Novel

GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 3307, 3 credits, Prof. Eve Sedgwick [90742] [Cross listed with Eng. 87100] Permission of the Instructor is required.

This seminar will practice close reading of a sample of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British fiction in pursuit of “reading relations” in several senses, through several intertwined questions. What have been the implications of focusing realistic fiction so sharply on the desiring intensities of the bourgeois family? How have the familial “relations” of realistic fiction been both read by psychoanalytic thought and replicated within it? How do literacy and reading function as topic and as hermeneutic within these fictions? What forms of relationality get constructed in them--not only among characters, or between characters (or authors) and their own histories, but most importantly between the novels themselves and those who read them? We will look for alternatives to normative understandings of sexual, familial, and narrative relationality in a small group of works (two apiece) by Charles Dickens; Charlotte Bronte; the great experimental/reactionary, twentieth-century lesbian novelist, Ivy Compton-Burnett; and Penelope Fitzgerald, an exciting stylist whose work reopens in new ways many of the questions of the so-called realist novel of the nineteenth century.

WSCP 81000 - American Women’s History

GC M 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 5212, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Welter [90744] [Cross listed with Hist. 75500]

WSCP 81000 - Law and Crime in Modern Europe

GC R 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 5212, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Gibson [90746] [Cross listed with Hist. 71700

WSCP 81000 – Introduction to Lesbian and Gay/Queer Studies

GC R 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 3307, 3 credits, Prof. Rollins [90978] [Cross listed with IDS. 70100]

This course is designed to introduce students to the study of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities and identities. Readings will proceed somewhat historically, beginning with an examination of the theories and historical narratives that ground the field. We will then examine same-sex desire and identity as described at different periods of the late-Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. We will then shift our attention and ask: How has sexuality evolved as a field of research? During this section of the semester we will consider the ways that researchers have framed their questions, the methodologies employed to study sexual minorities, and the theoretical literatures that have emerged from this work. Here we will consider not only the discourses of social science, but also the contributions of science and the humanities to our understanding of sexual difference. The final section of the semester will be dedicated to contemporary politics and the globalization of queerness.

WSCP 81000 - Social Stigma and Damage: Myths, Realities and Abuses

GC M 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Room 6494, 3 credits, Profs. William Cross and Michelle Fine [90748] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103

The social sciences in general and psychology in particular have played a vital role in providing “scientific” support linking membership in a stigmatized group with a wide range of negative outcomes such as psychopathology, dysfunctional family history, cultural implosion, low academic achievement, criminality, hypersensitivity to stigma status, learned helplessness, poor performance on high-risk tests, etc. This seminar will conduct critical conversations about the history of theory and methods in psychology dedicated to stigma and damage (black psychology, women's psychology, disability studies, queer/lesbian/gay psychology). We are interested in students who want to interrogate the "damage/stigma" discourse and work toward alternative theoretical and methodological positions.

WSCP 81000 - Health Psychology–CANCELLED

GC R 9:30-11 30 a.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Tracey Revenson [90750] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103

WSCP 81000 - Development in Socially Structured Environments

GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 6494, 3 credits, Prof. Joseph Glick [90752] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103

Classical developmental theories have often been though of in terms of how the child is prepared for living in the world. There is an equally important, ecological analysis that looks at how the world is prepared for the child living in it. This course is intended to explore the interface between these views. The intention of this course is to explore the ways that the child, the social environment, and the physical environment intersect in the production of development.

WSCP 81000 - Gender, Crime, Media and Culture

GC M 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 7395, 3 credits, Prof. Lynn Chancer [90755] [Cross listed with Soc. 82800]

This course will explore a fascinating selection of sociological literature that combines, in myriad ways and through the use of diverse methodologies, the subject matters of gender, crime, media and culture. The first part of the course will offer students an overview of different theoretical perspectives currently exerting influence in the sociological subfields of gender, crime, media and culture respectively. In the second part of the course, we will turn to research in substantive topic areas. Among the topics covered will be school violence cases, domestic violence, sex work, gang research and the gendered division of labor in legal (as well as illegal) occupations.

WSCP 81000 - Social Theory: Information, Code and Body

GC R 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room 5383, 3 credits, Prof. Patricia T. Clough [90802] [Cross listed with Soc. 80000]

This course brings together two bodies of scholarship--on bodies and on technology—in order to explore their intersection and to locate in their intersection the possibility for rethinking the assumptions of social theory concerning nature, matter, life, death, memory, meaning, time and space, as well as race, gender and sexuality. We will engage those specific topics which often are treated in recent scholarship on bodies and technology such as affect, bodily capacity, labor, digitization, surveillance, war and terrorism. We will draw on traditions of social thought such as phenomenology, post-structuralism (especially the work of Gilles Deleuze), post-colonial theory feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory and political economy.

WSCP 81000 - Gender in Global Perspective CANCELLED

GC R 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hester Eisenstein [90759] [Cross listed with Soc. 83300]

WSCP 81000 - Cultural Sociology

GC W 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 8202, 3 credits, Prof. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein [90757] [Cross listed with Soc. 86800]

Theories of culture and its relationship to social structure and agency as well as empirical work on culture have grown in the last 20 years. Cultural practices and processes, symbolic and classificatory systems, repertoires of action, of contention, webs of significance, and cultural structures are topics comprising the “cultural turn.” in sociology.

We shall read the work of scholars who have conceptualized these topics, sought research sites and methodologies for exploring them in such arenas as music, art, fashion, communications, celebrity culture, sexuality, gender distinction and politics. For example, we shall read DiMaggio and Crane on the institutionalization of cultural categories, Zerubavel on cognitive sociology, Alexander on myths and narratives, Douglas and (Alexander) on the sacred and profane, Bourdieu on cultural capital, Brubecker on groups and ethnicities, Geertz on thick description and a webs of significance, Lamont on symbolic boundaries and status, Friedland on religious ideology and kinship, and Kunda on corporate cultures.

The course will also take advantage of the visits of Jeffrey Alexander, Hans Joas and possibly one other colloquium speaker whose work is immediately relevant to the topic (These talks will be given on two Fridays and will replace the class sessions).

WSCP 81000 - Social Welfare Policy and Planning I

H T 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mimi Abramovitz [90761] [Cross listed with SSW 71000] Permission of the instructor required.

This course is an advanced introduction to social welfare policy in the United States. It reviews the history of the U.S. welfare state, contemporary social welfare policies, forces contributing to the expansion and contraction of the welfare state, and alternate welfare state models. It develops a framework for analyzing social welfare policy and the skills for critical analysis. Special attention is paid to dynamics of race, gender and class and to feminist theories of the welfare state.