Teaching
A sample of the courses I have taught in the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley
Contemporary philosophy and literature place significant emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge production. We will study this emphasis, as it is taken up in a variety of literary and critical works. But what is the body? Is it my epidermis, my senses, the complicated nexus of impulses called drives, my emotions, the lump of meat known as the brain? Where does my body end and my mind (or my ideas or whatever the not-body is) begin? Is the contemporary emphasis on the body an oblique response to a set of historical and political developments? If so, what are those developments? We will study how literary and philosophical works attempt to think through these questions.
Readings include Balzac, Flaubert, Stevens, Borges, Butler, Fanon, McGinn, Mau, Park, and Cabezón Cámara. Film by Glazer.
Readings include Balzac, Flaubert, Stevens, Borges, Butler, Fanon, McGinn, Mau, Park, and Cabezón Cámara. Film by Glazer.
Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom we borrow our course title, is one of the most famous critics of morality. But he is by no means the only one, the critique of morality having been the focus of intense literary and philosophical attention for some time before and after Nietzsche. We will study literary, philosophical, and critical texts that take up this critique, as well as related issues: the difference between ethics and morality; the relation between morality and happiness; the possibility of morality without God; the meaning of the good life; and so on. Our assumption will be that these philosophical issues, though they seem timeless, are historical through and through, and so we will also spend some time considering the social arrangements or situations that produce these reflections and make them necessary in the first place.
Readings include Cervantes, Las Casas, de Navarre, Diderot, Poe, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Woolf, Ross, Stevens, Anderson, Borges, Morrison, Korsgaard, Bersani, Jameson. Films by Pontecorvo and Loach.
Readings include Cervantes, Las Casas, de Navarre, Diderot, Poe, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Woolf, Ross, Stevens, Anderson, Borges, Morrison, Korsgaard, Bersani, Jameson. Films by Pontecorvo and Loach.
Definitions of modernity are legion and hotly debated. A related, though distinct, word—modernization—has taken on a life of its own, usually referring to a wider variety of phenomena than those usually associated with modernity. What does it mean to modernize? What is involved in this process, at a local, concrete level (a building can be modernized) or at a global, more abstract level (a country can be modernized)? In this course, we will study literary, aesthetic and critical works that engage these questions.
Readings include Baudelaire, Carpentier, Wordsworth, Lu Xun, Woolf, Borges, García Márquez, and Stevens. Critical writing by Benjamin, Brown, Foucault, Meiksins-Wood, Polanyi, and Kennedy. Painting by Rivera and Kahlo.
Readings include Baudelaire, Carpentier, Wordsworth, Lu Xun, Woolf, Borges, García Márquez, and Stevens. Critical writing by Benjamin, Brown, Foucault, Meiksins-Wood, Polanyi, and Kennedy. Painting by Rivera and Kahlo.
The term fanaticism is ubiquitous in the current political landscape. In its everyday use, fanaticism denotes behaviors that are beyond the pale or beyond reason. Academic treatments of fanaticism, however, suggest that the term might also denote an excess of reason, unyielding passion or energy, and a profound commitment to historical change. In this course, we will study the many connotations of this ambiguous and politically charged term, as well as some fictional and historical characters to which it has been attached. We will begin with Robespierre, known to his contemporaries as The Incorruptible. (Ruth Scurr’s study of Robespierre gives our course its title.) We will study his sources of inspiration in Antiquity, as well as his influence on revolutionaries across the Americas. Although we will cast a wide net, historically and geographically, our main exhibits in this course will be drawn from the modern Spanish-speaking world.
Readings include Sophocles, von Kleist, Freud, Borges, Toscano, Ocampo, Spence, Carpentier, Hazareesingh, James, and Moshfegh.
Readings include Sophocles, von Kleist, Freud, Borges, Toscano, Ocampo, Spence, Carpentier, Hazareesingh, James, and Moshfegh.
In this class we will study cases of people living in the margins of mainstream rationality or commonsense—people whose rejection of this world takes the form of a flight to fantasy, utopianism or outright madness. We will investigate what about their respective societies makes such flight compelling or necessary. In the process, we will ourselves question the mainstream rationality, reality or commonsense these characters reject. Examples of the questions we will deal with are the following: How do these characters invert labels like the sane and the insane, the normal and the abnormal? What do they tell us about civilization and the drive to civilize? How might their purportedly individual pathology be a sign of a social pathology instead?
These questions will serve as a general framework for exploring the individual richness of the texts in our syllabus, each of which will provoke its own particular set of questions. This course aims to put a series of works in dialogue that show how male and female authors from around the globe, working in a variety of narrative forms, have responded to the themes of madness and marginality in their own ways.
Readings include Borges, Cervantes, Diderot, Rousseau, Poe, Flaubert, Morrison, Whitman, Lu Xun, Plath, and Le Guin.
[Co-taught with Haley Stewart]
These questions will serve as a general framework for exploring the individual richness of the texts in our syllabus, each of which will provoke its own particular set of questions. This course aims to put a series of works in dialogue that show how male and female authors from around the globe, working in a variety of narrative forms, have responded to the themes of madness and marginality in their own ways.
Readings include Borges, Cervantes, Diderot, Rousseau, Poe, Flaubert, Morrison, Whitman, Lu Xun, Plath, and Le Guin.
[Co-taught with Haley Stewart]
The literature on parvenus, charmers and swindlers is vastly popular, betraying the secret or not so secret admiration our culture reserves for these characters, who are often among the keenest observers of the social world. In this course, we’ll read accounts of characters that, through great cunning and skill, manage to rise through the social ladder, accumulating all manner of goods and favors. We’ll examine what made their actions particularly effective in their respective societies—what pulls and levers did they activate, what forms of capital did they acquire to make their ascension possible—as well as what is it about their societies (and ours) that stimulates social climbing in the first place.
Readings include Wordsworth, Austen, Larsen, Poe, Borges, Anderson, Kennedy, and Bourdieu. Films by Clément and Riley.
Readings include Wordsworth, Austen, Larsen, Poe, Borges, Anderson, Kennedy, and Bourdieu. Films by Clément and Riley.