ELECTIVES 2011/12
WINTER TERM
CONCENTRATION SEMINARS
PL206 Aesthetic Categories
Art and Aesthetics Concentration Seminar II
Distribution requirements: Concepts
ECTS credits: 5
Tracy Colony (t.colony@ecla.de)
This seminar focuses on some of the most important categories used to describe and understand art. In particular we will look at how individual works of art create, modify and undermine our general conception of these categories. Focusing on such concepts as mimesis, the sublime, the frame, and the gaze, we will pair readings on these topics with specific works of art in order to understand the importance and limitations of these key terms in aesthetic theory.
PS202 The Violence in and of Political Life
Ethics and Politics Concentration Seminar II
Distribution requirements: Concepts
ECTS credits: 5
Michael Weinman (m.weinman@ecla.de)
This semester, we continue our year-long investigation of the relationship between politics and morality by focusing on the phenomenon of violence, which provides an especially salient locus insofar as it seems to be both morally inadmissible and politically necessary. We will begin with a brief survey of selections from the history of (not just) political thought that ask us to confront the possibility that there is no possibility of plural human life, thus no human life at all, without violence. Then, by reading Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and Arendt's On Violence, framed by some responses they have generated, we aim to see what light, if any, our recent "interesting times" shed on this issue. Throughout questions like the following will be foremost: In what ways, and for what reasons, is violence inherent to human life? Is there any possibility of developing higher human faculties absent violence? If not, what are we to think about the possibility of a good life in a political community? Which is to say, what are we to think about the possibility of a good life at all, if it is true that human life is inherently political?
LT214 History and Theory of the Novel: Tristram Shandy
Literature and Rhetoric Concentration Seminar II
Distribution Requirements: Genres/Styles, Books/Authors
ECTS credits: 5
Laura Scuriatti (l.scuriatti@ecla.de)
Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) was, from the date of his publication onwards, a case for debate. The originality of his protagonist and narrator, his constant digressions and failures to conform to a linear narrative about his life, the novel's bawdiness, its joking relationship to the readers, have been both deeply admired and deeply reviled, also becoming the stuff of contemporary literature.
The course focuses on Laurence Sterne's novel and on the explorations of some of the problems and categories of its genre from the point of view of its historical development and on the basis of relevant theoretical and critical texts.
The first part of the course will be mainly devoted to close-reading Tristram Shandy, and will be followed by a parallel reading of the source texts and critical material.
ELECTIVES
FM224 Visions of the Future: The Science Fiction Film
Concentration requirements: Art and Aesthetics
Distribution requirements: Genres/Styles
ECTS credits: 5
Matthias Hurst (m.hurst@ecla.de)
Hypermodern city landscapes and urban environments or wastelands of ruins and global destruction, intelligent computers, robots, androids and cyborgs, spaceships and explorations of distant planets, encounters with alien life forms and the shape of things to come - from Metropolis (1927) to The Matrix (1999) the Science Fiction film genre features fantastic sights and visions of the future that cover both utopian and dystopian aspects of the life and times that lie ahead.
The stories, distinctive worlds and characters of the Science Fiction films are rooted in reality, historical experiences and social conditions, but exceed and transcend our ordinary lives and our technologies in imaginative and sometimes disturbing ways. Science Fiction is a narrative means to explore issues of general interest (i.e. anthropological, cultural, technological, social and political topics) in new fictional contexts that enable us to see current problems and tendencies - through poetical transformation or symbolical exaggeration - more clearly.
In this course we will explore and discuss the aesthetics of the Science Fiction film genre and its ways of interpreting the human condition and the world we are living in.
PL220 Introduction to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Concentration requirements: Ethics and Politics, Literature and Rhetoric
Distribution requirements: Books/Authors
ECTS credits: 5
Tracy Colony (t.colony@ecla.de)
Friedrich Nietzsche's influence upon the intellectual history of the 20th century is perhaps unparalleled. This elective course is designed to provide an introduction to Nietzsche's major works and their history of reception. All texts will be read in translation with simultaneous readings in the original German being encouraged and supported.
PL234 Aristotle: Character in Poetics, Rhetoric, Politics
Concentration requirements: Ethics and Politics, Literature and Rhetoric
Distribution requirements: Concepts, Disciplines/Methods
Michael Weinman (m.weinman@ecla.de)
While focused on very different "research questions," and proceeding with different methodologies, these texts unexpectedly converge around the problem of "the development of character." Given that we see them as foundational in three quite different contemporary disciplines or subdisciplines, we might be surprised to discover just how much Aristotle's basic account of çthos-found in (Nicomachean and Eudemian) Ethics, owes to a line of thinking that can be traced through these works. What's more, readers who have not read Ethics will be surprised to see just how well equipped they will be to speak with those who have, having read (the selections we shall consider from) these three works. We will discover, that is, to what extent what we call ethics is, for Aristotle, intertwined with questions of literary theory, rhetoric and politics.
AH/LT260 Words and Images: Manifestos of Avant-garde
Concentration requirements: Art and Aesthetics, Literature and Rhetoric
Distribution requirements: Genres/Styles, Disciplines/Methods
ECTS credits: 5
Laura Scuriatti (l.scuriatti@ecla.de)
This interdisciplinary course focuses on manifestos and artworks of some of the most important European avant-garde movements, such as Futurism, Vorticism, Dada, and Surrealism, and investigates the relationship between visual and literary discourses in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Students investigate the genre of the manifesto and its various forms, the programmatic interpenetration of word and image, and examine the methodological issues implicit in the dialogue between visual and written texts. In the seminars students explore specific political, philosophical and cultural aspects of modernity.
PL250 Religious Morality and its Philosophical Grounds
Concentration requirements: Ethics and Politics
Distribution requirements: Disciplines/Methods
ECTS credits: 5
Martin Gak (m.gak@ecla.de)
At least since Aquinas, religion has developed as an autonomous form of discourse which has taken philosophy as its enemy--as with Paul and Damian--as its handmaiden--as in Aquinas famous phrase--or as its sub-discipline. Religion has claimed authority over morality, politics, epistemology, the sciences and the arts just to name a few. In so doing it has attempted with varying degrees of success to determine the direction of these disciplines and to set the agendas in cultural and social domains. And yet, in many ways religion can be understood as a particular mode of metaphysical, epistemological and ethical philosophizing and as a specific method to make normative claims by an appeal to divine authority. This claim of authority determines the role and power of religion in politics, morality, culture, etc.
In this class, we will approach religion as a category of philosophical systems which through the development of metaphysical models--in many cases, formally similar to each other--give rise to religion's moral agenda and thus to religious politics. We will read a variety of late ancient, early modern and contemporary works both from philosophers and theological authors as well as commentators on the relation between the moral and the religious. We will also discuss current debates in social and political issues in which religious morality has a declared or tacit stake.
SO101 Introduction to Sociology
Concentration requirements: Ethics and Politics
Distribution requirements: Concepts, Disciplines/Methods
ECTS credits: 5
Irit Dekel (irit.dekel@hu-berlin.de)
In this course we will explore the many branches of the discipline called sociology. We will study classic theory as well as recent contributions in the field of sociology and examine the major questions that guide sociological analysis. We will also practice 'doing' sociology by exploring our everyday social world and the forces that shape it which are often invisible or taken for granted. By studying topics in human action, economy, gender, social interaction, inequality, organizations and religion, we will see why it is impossible to make the many faces of sociology into a single scientific discipline. Instead of constructing a science, we will see how these theories and practices help us in understanding the society in which we humans live. In the first half of the semester we will discuss classical readings in sociological theory which we will then draw on for discussion of contemporary issues of gender, class, politics, organizations, knowledge and art.
AH228 Visual Culture and Historical Consciousness in the 20th and 21st Century Germany
Concentration requirements: Art and Aesthetics
Distribution requirements: Concepts, Periods/Places
ECTS credits: 5
Aya Soika (a.soika@ecla.de)
This introduction focuses on the question of how artists reacted to the particular political situation of Germany in the 20th and 21st century. We will spend the first weeks looking at positions in Weimar Germany (Berlin Dada, George Grosz and Otto Dix), and then move on to a discussion of the situation of artists', architects and film makers under the National-Socialist dictatorship (John Heartfield, but also Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl). The second half of the term will be dedicated to post-war positions: Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke or Gerhard Richter have dealt with both, the German past and present. In many of their works, the role of art within German society takes a central position. The class ends with the public's efforts of commemoration and the role of international artists and architects to design and conceptualise of the efforts of memorials which were created ever since the 1990s, reaching from Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, over Christian Boltanski's Missing House to Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial.
Visits of the Berlin collections, such as the Neue Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof, the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial will be an integral part of the course.
HI233 An Intellectual History of Feminist Thought
Concentration requirements: Ethics and Politics
Distribution requirements: Concepts
ECTS credits: 5
Ryan Plumley (r.plumley@ecla.de)
What makes thought "feminist"? Is feminism one important strand among the powerful discourses of liberation arising out of the Enlightenment? Or can it offer an alternative to the patriarchal and masculinist foundations of those very discourses? When and how did feminism arise as a major form of critical thought in the West? What transformations has it gone through? Is feminism still a vibrant mode of thought, or has it been supplanted by other concerns? How does queer theory emerge out of and continue feminist modes of critique?
In this seminar we will address these questions by tracing the history of feminist thought in the West from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century. Beginning with nineteenth-century efforts to articulate a feminist agenda within Anglo-American liberalism and European marxism, we will then turn to twentieth-century efforts to radically rethink the politics of gender in French feminism and more recent theory and reflection. Always attentive to relevant transformations in the social, economic, political, and cultural context, we will follow the lines of intellectual transmission and contestation within feminism. While our primary goal will be to reflect on the history of this particular tradition, we will also address the ways that feminism has engaged with and challenged other major traditions: liberalism, marxism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.
MA214 Logic and the Nature of Mathematics
Concentration requirements: n/a
Distribution requirements: n/a
ECTS credits: 5
Stephen Maurer (s.maurer@ecla.de)
This course begins with the study of propositional and then first-order predicate logic, material typically covered in a first college symbolic logic course given by either a mathematics or a philosophy department. The text is Lemon, Beginning Logic. The course will also address the nature of mathematics, by covering some particular topics and theorems that give a sense of how mathematicians think about things. The text is Stein, Mathematics: The Man-Made Universe. For both parts of the course there will be some supplementary readings.The prerequisite is that you mostly enjoyed the mathematics you learned previously and that you are curious to learn more.
AUTUMN TERM
CONCENTRATION SEMINARS
AH111 Representation
Art and Aesthetics Concentration Seminar I
ECTS Credits: 5
Aya Soika (a.soika@ecla.de)
This class sets out to investigate how artists have represented the world around them, from Egyptian and Ancient Greek sculpture, over Renaissance painting up to works created in the late 20th century. An important aim of the course is thus to acquaint students with changing modes of pictorial representation, and discuss the development and re- definitions of artistic practice. The focus on imitation of nature ("mimesis") on the one hand, and the wish to reach out beyond the world of appearances ("idea") on the other will b ea relevant theme throughout. The course will also address the shifts which occur with the emergence of modernism and postmodernism in the late 19thand second half of the 20th century. Art theoretical positions from Plato over Vasari to Kosuth will serve as reference points for the discussion. Weekly visits to Berlin's major art museums, where we will be discussing themes and concepts at the hand of original works, are an integral and important part of this course.
The course is prescribed for BA students who have chosen Art and Aesthetics as one of their concentrations. If space permits, the course is open to AY and PY students also. Syllabus
LT101 Introduction to Narrative: Fairy Tales
Literature and Rhetoric Concentration Seminar
Distribution Requirements: Genres/Styles
ECTS Credits: 5
Catherine Toal (c.toal@ecla.de)
Drawing on the two major collections of European folk and fairy tales, by Charles Perrault and by the brothers Grimm, this course offers an introduction to the analysis of narrative structure and its psychological logic through the exploration of stories that have been repeated to the point of reaching transmission to written record, and whose motifs still recur in literature and film. The tales are read alongside theories of narrative (structuralist, psychoanalytic and sociological), to provide an introduction to analysing the form of literary texts in general.
The course is prescribed for BA students who chose Literature and Rhetoric as one of their concentration areas. If space permits, it is also open to AY and PY students.
PT101 Individual and Society
Ethics and Politics Concentration Seminar I
ECTS Credits: 5
Katalin Makkai (k.makkai@ecla.de)
This course will focus on ethical and political issues concerning the individual's relation to society. In the first half of the course, we will study some pertinent classical texts; authors may include Sophocles, Plato, Kant, Marx, Emerson, and Thoreau. What is the ground of ethical and political authority? What is the nature of ethical and political power? Under what conditions (if any) may individuals disobey the law? How do-and how should-people effect social change? We will bring our work to bear in the second half of the course, as we shift to considering particular instances of social movement and resistance in the 20th and 21st centuries: specifically, protest oriented towards civil rights and environmental protection.
This course is prescribed for BA students who chose Ethics and Politics as one of their concentration areas. If space permits, the course is also open to AY and PY students.
ELECTIVES
AH203 Romantics, Realists, Revolutionaries: Nineteenth Century Art
Concentration Requirements: Art and Aesthetics
Distribution Requirements: Periods/Places
ECTS Credits: 5
Aya Soika (a.soika@ecla.de)
This course will look at 19th century painting in Germany and France, from "Romanticism" (Delacroix and Caspar David Friedrich) over "Realism" (Courbet and Adolf Menzel) and "Impressionism" (Edouard Manet, Max Liebermann), up to "Post-Impressionism" (Cezanne and Gauguin). These -isms can only be a rough summary of a variety of works by different artists which originated in direct (or indirect) response to the political, industrial, social and cultural revolutions of their period. We will approach selected works critically with reference to the writings by T. J. Clark, Michael Fried, Stephen Eisenman or Linda Nochlin, as well as with reference to texts or letters by the artists themselves, or by contemporary critics such as Charles Baudelaire (The Painter of Modern Life).
Visits to the Old National Gallery will allow the study of (both German AND French) originals, and allow us to reflect upon the role of this particular museum in late nineteenth century German culture. Syllabus
FM201 Introduction to Film Studies
Concentration Requirements: Art and Aesthetics
Distribution Requirements: Disciplines/Methods
ECTS Credits: 5
Matthias Hurst (m.hurst@ecla.de)
This introduction to film studies provides an insight into the basic knowledge of film history and theory, film aesthetics and cinematic language. Central topics are modes and styles of filmic presentation, film analysis and different ways of film interpretation, classical films, popular film genres and film directors, film as an art form and its representative function in our modern world and society, i.e. the ability of film to address important social and/or philosophical issues.
FM215 Outsiders
Concentration Requirements: Art and Aesthetics
Distribution Requirements: Concepts
ECTS Credits: 5
Matthias Hurst (m.hurst@ecla.de)
In films we meet all kinds of characters who could be called outsiders. These are unique individuals who are expelled from society and stand against their fellow men, defy common rules or despise common values. They are different, and they are outsiders for various reasons, some voluntary, some forced, some are perpetrators, some are victims. Sometimes the outsiders excite us or fascinate us, sometimes they frighten us and sometimes we have pity on them. In works of classic literature as in popular films these characters are pivotal to great stories about social issues, ethical questions and concepts of life, because stories about outsiders are - by definition - also stories about society, about community and rejection, about shared values and discarded norms and standards. The fate of the outsider reflects the heart of the society he or she is opposing - and, of course, the society in which his/her story is told.
LT243 Stendhal and the Napoleonic World
Concentration Requirements: Literature and Rhetoric, Ethics and Politics
Distribution Requirements: Books/Authors
ECTS Credits: 5
Catherine Toal (c.toal@ecla.de)
A French writer who took his pseudonym from a Prussian town where Napoleon's troops were garrisoned on their progress through the German lands, Stendhal's works were deeply influenced by his participation in the attempted post-French Revolutionary conquest of Europe. With The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) for its main focus, the course explores the central developments and transformations of the age of Napoleonic domination--its effect on the European political and legal order--and their connection with the themes evoked by Stendhal's novel: the charisma of leadership, the clash between tradition and modernity, and the relationship between history and ideology. We also consider why the Napoleonic era gave rise to the genre of the 'historical novel', not only as a portrayal of the distant past, but more often, an attempt to grasp the patterns and legacy of immediately preceding decades.
PE201 Financial Crisis and Neoliberalism
Concentration Requirements: Ethics and Politics
Distribution Requirements: n/a
ECTS Credits: 5
Katalin Ferber (k.ferber@ecla.de)
Since 1997,financial crises have been almost a cyclically returning paradigm of the world economy. This course offers a critical look at the current monetary and financial crises across continents and currencies. We start with the relatively short-lived, US-based international system, which collapsed in 1971. Then, we focus on the changing economic and financial balance between two groups of countries. One side is the US and UK as "financially-oriented" systems, and the other is the "production-oriented" systems including Germany, Japan and other East Asian countries. Relating to this divide, neoliberalism and its roles arealso examined in our course. We explore how neoliberalism is directly linked to the current financial crises.
The course does not require previous financial or economic knowledge.
PL205 „The Gaze"
Concentration Requirements: Ethics and Politics
Distribution Requirements: Concepts
ECTS Credits: 5
Katalin Makkai (k.makkai@ecla.de)
This elective explores a range of ways in which human relationships-with each other, with society at large, with the world in which we live-have been conceived as structured in terms of a "gaze" or "look". We begin with the idea of the human being as (in part) constituted by a need-or desire-for recognition in the eyes of another (Rousseau and Hegel). We then turn to analyses and critiques of modern Western society as based on a pernicious culture of seeing, drawing from work in philosophy (e.g., Sartre), cultural criticism (e.g., Foucault), feminist theory (e.g., Mulvey), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and film (Hitchcock).
PL241 Current Problems in Metaethics and Value Theory
Concentration Requirements: Ethics and Politics
Distribution Requirements: Disciplines/Methods, Concepts
ECTS Credits: 5
Martin Gak (m.gak@ecla.de)
As all scientific knowledge is ultimately reducible to the categories of "true" and "false", ethics is generally understood to be about the "good" and the "bad". And the good and the bad, in their many incarnations, are readily used and exchanged in our normative transactions be it in matters of politics, education, religion, aesthetics and law. We support our local library because it is good and we condemn murder because it is bad. But far from being simple concepts, moral categories are strangely mysterious and infamously hard to identify and locate. Not only we don't seem quite sure what are these properties which we attribute to things and actions, much of philosophy remains under the suspicion that such things might not exist at all. Yet we find it impossible to stop using-and abusing-these terms that we barely understand. This course will be a survey of current problems and debates in ethics which center on the nature, meaning and qualities of categories such as good and bad and on the way in which they are used to compel people to act. Insofar as it is important for us to know if we actually have good reasons to do and demand the things that we do and demand, our exploration will also help to shed some light on the way that these categories are employed in areas such as politics, religion and law which are built on moral categories.
PS251 Terror(ism), War and Violence
Concentration Requirements: Ethics and Politics
Distribution Requirements: Concepts
ECTS Credits: 5
Naomi Sussmann (n.sussmann@ecla.de)
The current wave of global terrorism and counter-terrorism has thrown some of the most basic and difficult questions of political philosophy into relief - indeed, also onto the forefront of public attention and concern. The unprecedented scope and reach of this wave seem to ensure that these questions will stay with us in the foreseeable future, becoming only more difficult and pressing, as well as more complex and challenging of our most basic beliefs and convictions, with the passage of time.
This seminar aims to consider the matter from a distinctly philosophical perspective - which is to say that its perspective is explicitly not practical but analytical and abstract. It seeks to raise and reflect upon such questions as: What is terror? What is the difference between terror and terrorism; terrorism and war; war and violence; violence and coercion? What distinguishes force from power, and power from violence? What - if anything - distinguishes the legitimate use[s] of force - e.g. war - from its illegitimate uses - e.g. terrorism? What does such legitimacy assume, derive from, and require?
The premise of the seminar is that terrorism is deeply related to politics and to political life more generally, but is not therefore a necessarily political phenomenon. Instead, terrorism challenges the conventional distinctions between the political and the social, the moral and the immoral and in so doing, effectively forces us to review and revise our understanding of the political itself.
Discussions in the course will heavily rely on weekly reading and refer to a variety of ancient, modern and contemporary sources, from Plato and Hobbes through Schmitt, Arendt and Camus, to Walzer and other writers in, and around, the "Just War" tradition.
TH232 Installation
Concentration Requirements: Art and Aesthetics
Distribution Requirements: n/a
ECTS Credits: 5
David Levine (d.levine@ecla.de)
This is a studio art class. Participants acquire the means to manipulate sound, light, space and video by creating a series of room-based installations during the trimester. Participants are assigned a new studio with each unit, to accustom them to working with different kinds of space.