This interdisciplinary seminar explores various ways that culture and cultural productions have been affected by 20th and 21st century antisystemic movements – that is, social and popular movements that have organized against injustices of the capitalist world-system, including socialist, communist, anticolonial, national liberation, antiracist, feminist, and ecological movements, among others. In addition to mobilizing and organizing people and transforming political systems and institutions, movements also shape culture, produce knowledge, engage in ideological struggles, and politicize sites that had been previously treated as extraneous to ‘politics proper.’ We will examine the ways that the multifaceted capacities of movements have been theorized by scholars, as well as by intellectuals of socialist, anticolonial, and liberation movements who have argued that radical or revolutionary projects of social transformation must also transform culture and produce new types of subjects. We will also examine critical analyses of the cultural apparatus and the social relations of cultural and intellectual production, as well as theories of the role of intellectuals in egalitarian and emancipatory struggles. We will examine specific movements and cultural productions that emerged from them, including 20th century national revolutionary movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, Black and Chicano liberation movements in the U.S., Zapatismo, the anti-globalization movement, and international socialist and communist movements. The cultural productions we examine will include manifestoes, poetry, novels, autobiography, visual art, theater, and film. Students will also have the opportunity to develop and workshop their own research project as part of the course.
INSTRUCTOR: JENNIFER PONCE DE LEON

This seminar will focus on the thought of Baruch Spinoza and Karl Marx, tracing the effects of their encounter, not only in philosophy and critical theory, but in fields ranging from literary studies to environmental humanities. The second half of the twentieth century saw a revival of interest in Spinoza across the humanities and social sciences as a means of rethinking the very terms of philosophical and political debates of modernity. Mobilized for political purposes and contemporary demands, especially among Marxist theoreticians, Spinoza's philosophy became virtually unrecognizable from its earlier forms of reception. This seminar departs from the following observation: on the one hand, this revival of Spinoza proved especially fruitful among Marxist theoreticians; on the other hand, the modes of interpretation of Spinoza and the adaptations of Spinoza and Marxism are highly heterogeneous and often conflictual. The seminar will ask: what is it about Spinoza's thought that lends itself to a revival of Marxism? To what extent is Marx's thought necessary for a reevaluation of Spinoza? Why Spinoza today? To address these questions, we will trace the multiple traditions that think Marx and Spinoza together: the deployment of Spinoza against Hegel to rejuvenate Marxism in France (Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze, Chantal Jaquet); the development of theories of the multitude in the tradition of Autonomism in Italy (Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno); the vicissitudes of Spinozism among the Soviet Marxists (Lyubov Axelrod, Abram Deborin, Evald Ilyenkov). Likewise, we will investigate the most recent turn to the Marx-Spinoza tradition in psychoanalysis (A. Kiarina Kordela), rethinking finance capitalism (Frederic Lordon), feminist theory (Moira Gatens), literary studies (Pierre Macherey, Anthony Uhlmann), and environmental humanities (Hasana Sharp, Beth Lord).
INSTRUCTOR: SIARHEI BIAREISHYK

This course is offered online in synchronous format.

This graduate seminar will explore how Italian writers, philosophers and film-makers responded to the impact of European modernity, touching upon difficult episodes such as the formation of race and nationalisms in the nineteenth century, the rise of fascism in the 1920s, the Second World War and the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary liberal democracies. A late-comer in the league of modern European nations and “backward” from many economic and cultural standards, Italy became, within a few short decades, a political laboratory of some of the most defining ideological forces of the 20th-century, including the rise of racial science and criminal anthropology, which paved the way to Nazi eugenics, Mussolini’s fascism, Gramsci’s original contribution of an “Italian-way” to Communism, and the birth of so-called Italian theory in contemporary philosophy.

How did writers, authors and film-makers react to these ideological formations and political events? What forms and genres emerged in response to these dramatic historical forces? In tackling these questions, this course will put novels and films in conversation with theoretical texts at the intersection of postcolonial studies, queer studies, feminist studies, critical theory, and cultural anthropology, focusing on a number of overlapping areas. We will address, for example, the long-lasting impact that the Holocaust had in European culture in Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved through Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the relationship between biopolitics and fascism in Homo Sacer. We will read Elsa Morante’s novel History in conversation with Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of micro-history. And we will analyze Pasolini’s cinema in connection to scholarship in postcolonial studies, reading his representation of the Roman periphery as a synecdoche of the Global South.

Critical readings may include texts by Ernesto De Martino, Antonio Gramsci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giorgio Agamben, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, Heather Love, Carla Freccero, Lee Edelman among others.
INSTRUCTOR: FILLIPO TRENTIN

What did it mean to be a reader in imperial Russia? What did people read, and to what ends? How was literacy cultivated, and what were the social implications? In this course, students will read several canonical works of nineteenth-century Russian literature that thematize and foreground the act of reading: as a pursuit undertaken for the betterment of self, society, nation, and world; as a light pastime for the bored or underemployed; but also as an enterprise fraught with potential for moral or civic ruin. In addition to closely investigating allusions to the specific texts and authors read by literary characters, we will also examine the reading habits of our own authors as both consumers and producers of literary culture. We will consider these dynamics against a backdrop of constant fluctuations in educational policies, the book market, and the circulation of texts within and beyond Russia as we work together to develop an understanding of the imperial Russian reading public(s).
INSTRUCTOR: D. BRIAN KIM

This graduate seminar will offer an introduction to histories and theories of the novel. Half of our time will be spent reading works of fiction spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and the other half will be devoted to theoretical works by Lukács, Bakhtin, Watt, Said, Jameson, Armstrong, Gallagher, Woloch, Kornbluh, Sánchez-Prado, McGurl, Brouillette, and more. We will ask what competing forms have shaped the novel as well as what historical and ideological conditions brought those forms into being. We will pay particular attention to the novel’s widely recognized but also quite variably understood intimacy with capitalism from its emergence to its current “advanced" incarnation. We will also consider fiction from the vantage point of world systems, and we will ask whether it is indeed possible to theorize "the novel" as such or whether there can only be theories of novels in the plural.
INSTRUCTOR: EMILY STEINLIGHT

The textual and physical remains of Greek and Roman culture and belief as 'myth' entranced the post-antique European world and its neighbors. Makers, patrons and viewers manipulated those survivals to challenge and speak to a contemporary world. This course focuses on how and why artists and their patrons engaged the mythic and examines the various areas of political and religious life that sought animation through an evocation of narratives from the past. Readings and case studies will engage with very late antique, medieval, and early modern art, turning to the modern and contemporary as well. Moving to the modern lets us examine, among other things, how artists address the exclusionary histories of the past, to enable critiques of myths of supremacy by one gender, race, or culture over others.
INSTRUCTORS: SHIRA N. BRISMAN, ANN L. KUTTNER

This seminar will be cruising in different locations and periods in search of connected histories of sexuality within a global context. Through an exploration of various queer historical methods and approaches (comparative, contrapuntal, intersectional, interdisciplinary, etc.) to a wide array of materials from literature to performance, biography, photography, film, and pornography in different geographical contexts, this seminar will trace sexuality within the global-historical contexts of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, trade, travels and discovery, cross-cultural encounters, religious conversions, and interracial romance. Our historical focus will mostly be on early modernity to address genealogies of contemporary crossings of sexuality (i.e. over different geographies as well as race, class, religion, immigration) revealing continuities, ruptures, dissonances, and interrelations between discourses and practices in the past and present. Our investigations of comparative methods in queer and history of sexuality studies therefore will include comparisons not only between western and non-western contexts, but also between sexuality and other critical issues such as race, religion, empire, and class.

This course is tentatively scheduled to be conducted remotely and synchronously on Zoom. Students should be able to attend synchronous sessions on the scheduled class time (W 3-6 pm Philadelphia time). Course requirements and assignments include regular attendance, timely readings of assigned materials, presentations, weekly forum posts, short reflection papers, and a final paper.

The list of required books to purchase will be posted on Canvas before the semester starts. For now, tentative reading list include work by Ann Laura Stoler, Anne McClintock, Joseph Massad, Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli, Joseph Boone, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Anjali Arondekar, Durba Mitra, José Esteban Muñoz, Roderick A. Ferguson, David Eng, Saidia Hartman, Riley Snorton, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Hiram Perez, Eng Beng Lim, Kadji Amin, Amber Musser, Howard Chiang, among others.
INSTRUCTOR: ABDULHAMIT ARVAS

In one of the most evocative frescoes of the Renaissance, Raphael juxtaposes Plato and Aristotle. The pairing would seem obvious, since the two thinkers had been for centuries symbols of philosophy and wisdom. But only the recent revival of Plato, begun in the mid-fifteenth century, had allowed Latin West to gain a better understanding of Platonic philosophy and therefore to compare Plato's doctrines directly to those of Aristotle. Were master and disciple in harmony? And if not, which of the two should be favored? Such questions were less innocent than one might think, and the answers to them had implications for philosophy, theology, speculation on the natural world, and even politics. The course will offer an overview of Renaissance philosophy and culture by focusing on the different ways in which Plato and Aristotle were read, interpreted and exploited between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The course will be conducted in English; a basic knowledge of Latin is desirable but not required.
INSTRUCTOR: EVA DEL SOLDATO

This seminar will listen attentively to the echoes of Franz Kafka in the novels of J.M. Coetzee. Building on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of a minor literature, elaborated on the example of Kafka’s oeuvre, we will situate Kafka against the backdrop of the German-speaking Jewish community of Habsburg-era Prague and read Coetzee within the context of apartheid and his native South Africa. Beyond an investigation of empire and its aftermath, this course will consider the arguably posthuman ethics of these authors, examining them through the lens of animal studies and the environmental humanities in order to reveal how they anticipate and participate in current thinking on the Anthropocene. Reading Kafka’s fables beside Coetzee’s allegorical narratives, the seminar will follow the twisted course taken by literary justice from the Josef K. of Kafka’s Trial to Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. Alongside these two towering figures, the influence of and affinities with other German-language authors (Heinrich von Kleist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Walser) and Anglophone contemporaries (Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Cormac McCarthy) will also be considered. Other works to be read will include Kafka’s Castle, In the Penal Colony, Metamorphosis and late animal stories as well as Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians and Elizabeth Costello. Advanced undergraduates may enroll with the permission of the instructor. Readings and discussions in English.
INSTRUCTOR: IAN FLEISHMAN

The language that we know today as Old Church Slavonic was invented, along with the Slavic alphabet(s), in the 9th century by two Greek scholars, Sts. Cyril and Methodius. They had been tasked by the Byzantine Emperor with bringing the Christian faith to the Slavic-speaking people of Great Moravia, a powerful medieval state in central Europe. From there, literacy, along with the Christian faith, spread to other Slavs, and even non-Slavic speakers, such as Lithuanians and Romanians. Church Slavonic and its regional variants were used to compose the oldest texts of the Slavic-speaking world, which today is comprised of Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russia, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Knowledge of this language and tradition aids in understanding the cultural, literary, and linguistic history of any modern Slavic language. For learners of Russian and other Slavic languages, Church Slavonic provides a layer of elevated stylistic vocabulary and conceptual terminology, similar to, and even greater than, the role of Latin and Greek roots in the English language. For historical linguists, Church Slavonic provides unique material for comparison with other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. For medievalists and cultural historians, it opens the door into the Slavic Orthodox tradition that developed in the orbit of the Byzantine Commonwealth. The course introduces students to the linguistic basics of Old Church Slavonic and its later variants, paying special attention to its cultural and historical context and its material culture - manuscripts. We will focus on the Russian variant of Church Slavonic but can also examine other variants (Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, or Ruthenian, should there be interest). The course is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Knowledge of a Slavic language is a significant advantage but is not necessary.
INSTRUCTOR: JULIA VERKHOLANTSEV