Course Code 22816, Thursday, 3:30-6:20PM, HIB 411

Is it time to abandon “the Westphalian label” of territorial states as the main actors on the global stage? The question is justifiable at a moment when corporate and civic, religious and secular (as well as academic) “globalizers” all around see the trans-nation as the only real present and the only possible future political form. In this course, in addition to actually reading the Treaty of Westphalia, we will consider how a series of literary and visual texts as well as texts of political theory from the period responded to nearly a century of modern European political and confessional turmoil, asking what it was that called for the erection of the (nation) state as a legitimate source of sovereignty. Readings will include select narratives of the tensions between the Church, the Empire, and the (national) State and, within the State, between the center and its internal and external peripheries, in texts by Tasso, Marlowe, Cervantes, Calderon, and Corneille, as well as the devastating account of the Thirty Years War in Grimmelshausen's novel, Simplicissimus, and the artist Diego Velazquez's highly ambiguous image of Spinola's siege of Breda in the painting, “Las Lanzas.” Using works by Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, Bodin, Hobbes, and Grotius, we will also investigate how, at a rhetorical and ideological level, the realm of the secular state eased its way into the shaky monopoly on power that the literary texts so often address.

Course Code 22810, M, W, 10:30-11:50AM, HIB 341

The course will take up a comparative approach to colonialism and its legacies in the Americas. Of particular importance will be theories about the technologies and genres of representation and knowledge (writing, mapping, literature) as well as theories about “the human”, ethnicity and race. Specifically we will ask questions about slavery and its legacies, differences in the construction of a concept of “race” and “racial difference” throughout the Americas, the relationship of writing to the colonial project, the provincialism of literature as a historical project, and the interaction between colonial forms of knowledge with idiosyncratic discourses and forms of knowledge produced both by the indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as those forced to migrate through the slave trade. Looming over these specific questions will be three broader ones: How can we confront a postcolonial theory has evolved largely out of reflections on British and French colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Africa and Asia with the much earlier colonization of the Americas in order to “decolonize scholarship and to de-center epistemological loci of enunciation” (in Walter Mignolo's words)?; How can we keep visible the politics behind the production of knowledge in the relationship between US. American Studies and Latin American Studies?; To what extent do contemporary forms of empire rehearse the earlier imperial projects in the Americas? We'll be reading texts from the 16th century to the present, written originally in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and which range from literary texts, historical accounts to theoretically informed ethnographic approaches.

In our Tricampus Classics Seminar this Spring we shall explor Lucretius' De rerum natura. Our focus will be on its ethical import, as a handbook for living the Epicurean life and finding salvation through serenity. For purposes of comparison, we shall also be reading from the contemporary Buddist writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, whose form of 'engaged Buddhism' shares a somewhat similar outlook on the nature of the mind and body, on a shared pathway toward mindfulness and peace.

This seminar will examine one of the most distinctive and important genres of Roman artistic production, and the foundation – both aesthetic and ideological – of the later Western tradition of portraiture until the present. The origins of the Roman portrait tradition in its creative adaptation of Hellenistic representational apparatus to the needs of Roman society will be scrutinized, as will its successive transformations in the changing social and political contexts of the later Republic and Empire. Problems of connoisseurship – the evaluation of the material evidence of surviving objects with regard to their origins, dating, original function and meaning – will be foregrounded. Principal work for the course will be a term paper involving close analysis of an actual ancient work in the collection of the Getty Museum in Malibu.

This course will focus on seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century French drama in terms
of the way in which the political interests of three dramatic poets, Corneille, Molière and
Beaumarchais, intersect with their poetic interests. In particular, it will examine the work of
these writers in relation to Aristotle's Poetics in order to understand better the influence of
“the Greeks” on the forms and themes of the French poets' plays, but also and in more
general terms the sense conveyed by each of these playwrights that they, like the ancient
Greeks, are witnessing a “foundational” moment in the history of theater and politics. The
problem, or rather the paradox of neo-classicism--of the “new old”--will also be at the center
of our concerns, along with the issues raised by the ambivalence of these purportedly
neo-classical writers towards the very poetic and political classicism that they take as their
model.