What does it mean to write yourself into being? In this course, we will think of autobiographic writing as one of the technologies of the self, with a particular focus on captivity and fugitivity in a uniquely hemispheric genre: the slave narrative in early 19th C. hemispheric America. In the U.S., formerly enslaved people like Frederick Douglass used autobiography to assert humanity—“I am a man!”—as he made the pursuit of literacy central to the abolition of slavery and the larger project of human emancipation. Slave narratives by women like Hannah Crafts [late 1850s] and Harriet Jacobs [1861] will focus our lens on gender’s relation to notions of selfhood. Writing in translation by Juan Federico Manzano [1824] in La Habana, Cuba and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua [1854], enslaved in Brazil, and captivity narratives by settler-colonists like John Dunn Hunter [1824] and John Tanner [1830], who wrote of life as captives among the Native Americans, will guide us in interrogating the writing of the self in captivity, fugitivity, and racialization in an early hemispheric context. Thought by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Afro-pessimists like Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson III will give our seminar its critical armature. Students will be invited to write themselves into being for the final course project.
This course traces a genealogy of psychoanalysis, focusing on its entanglements with private property and forms of enclosure. With the aim of gaining historical perspective on theories of subjectivity and their changing relation to ownership and possession, we will start by reading the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir [1795], asking how this strange and raunchy novella lays the groundwork for the emergence of psychoanalysis. Then we’ll turn to Freud’s seminal Three Case Histories [1909], E. T. A. Hoffman’s uncanny short story, “The Sandman” [1817] and excerpts from Judge Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness [1903] to deepen our understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis as a form of thought. Along the way we’ll re-think intersubjectivity and desire, focusing on the Hegelian master/slave dialectic as a fundamental underpinning of the violent separation of self and other, and on Nietzsche’s provocative conceptualization of repression as the imprisonment of man’s instinct for freedom. 19th C. literature like Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil [1857] and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs [1870], mid-20th C. novels like Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train [1950] and Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. [1964], paintings and collage work by Henry Darger [1960s], and contemporary novels like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous [2019], will give us ample imaginaries to think the contours of new forms of subjectivity and sociality unencumbered by material and psychic forms of enclosure.
In this course, we will survey the Marxian account of how “so-called primitive accumulation” produces new categories, physical spaces, and forms of life. Beginning with early modern Spain, we’ll trace the changing contours of poverty in Lazarillo de Tormes [1554], and how the brute force of accumulation violently re-fashions time, space, and subjectivity. We’ll then study how capitalism and its accumulatory regimes produce a racial hierarchy of labor and poverty in the Americas, reading from Bartolome de las Casas [1550], Guaman Poma [1615], and Nahuatl poetry from after the destruction of the Aztec Empire [1520s]. Along the way we’ll read accounts of peasant organizing against land enclosures in Central America at the end of the 19th century, hemispheric American novels like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath [1939] and Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama [1956], novels from other regions of the world impacted by extractivism and accumulation like Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt [1984], and contemporary theoretical work on precarity and unhousedness. We’ll end with dreams of dis-accumulation and re-worlding in Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed [1974] and Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton [1979].
In Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno notes that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” Walter Benjamin tells us that “we have become impoverished”; real experience is no longer possible. Adorno and Max Horkheimer contend that magic died in the Enlightenment. Wrong life, poverty of experience, and the death of magic: how then can we live? The question animates critical theory as a kind of practical philosophy. Despite its sheen of nihilistic despair, thinkers from what is now called the Frankfurt School invite us to interpret the world, and to think how we should live. In this introductory course, you will learn about critical theory, its origins in the Frankfurt School, and its contemporary applications for interpreting literary texts, films, and art in global culture. We will survey foundational texts and thinkers with an eye to thinking theory as praxis, and as a set of strategies for living wrong life as well as possible.
The dystopian novel is the utopian’s nightmare. But when it feels like the End Times, dystopian fiction—in all its social, ontological, and political terror—can help us imagine our way to survival and even to a kind of thriving in the ruins of capitalized life. In this course, we will survey modern and contemporary dystopian fiction from around the world, reading these novels in relation to Thomas More’s utopian dream. We’ll begin with revolutionary terror in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We [1921] and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World [1932], before turning to a Cold War-era novel about nuclear war by Nevil Shute, On the Beach [1957]. Then we’ll turn to a more contemporary era, reading novels like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale [1985], Jose Saramago’s Blindness [1997], J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes [2000], and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road [2006], and recent fiction about pandemics—like Ling Ma’s Severance [2018]—and environmental collapse. As we read, we’ll ask how reading and thinking dystopia—the bad place—invites us to take action before the dream of utopia slips away.
Recent Courses at Pitzer College
Severed limbs, dancing feet, and fantasies of returning to live in the womb as a vampire: the final chapters of Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny read like a horror chapbook. Writing of the uncanny as something almost but not quite like home, Freud calls it “nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed”; the uncanny is that which “should have remained hidden and has come to the fore.” The thrill of the uncanny, what Freud describes as its lasciviousness, lays bare the connection between horror and suspense, and between abjection and delight in another’s suffering. In this course, we will focus on a particularly uncanny kind of horror, the American Gothic. Beginning with the earliest instantiation of the genre – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s strange short story, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” – this course treats the Gothic as a set of uncanny interactions with racial and economic fears, anxieties, and desires. Together with selections from The Uncanny, we’ll read classic modern novels like The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and creepy short stories like Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and we’ll watch contemporary Queer and Black Gothic cinema and television. At each step we’ll ask: “What terrifies us most, and why?”
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” writes poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In this course, we follow Browning’s lead, examining the diverse representation of desire in modern and contemporary world literature. As we learn to identify how literature intersects productively with historical and social conditions, we’ll focus on three main areas: desire and romantic love; desire and otherness; and desire, love, and immanence. We’ll read an essay by Lauren Berlant, love poetry by Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda, a novel by Djuna Barnes, and Tennessee William’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, to give us a starting point for exploring desire, sex, and love within distinct historical and social contexts. Then, we’ll shift our focus to ask how marginalized desire and otherness is represented in a post-WW II French novel by Jean Genet, Querelle. For our final topic, we’ll read Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, watch a film adaptation, and read from Theodor Adorno and Robyn Marasco on the promises and perils of love.
After a period of homelessness, Ben Reitman trained as a physician and cared for poor people, sex workers, outcasts, and unhoused people in Chicago and cities around the US. The book he wrote from that experience, Sister of the Road: the Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, will situate us in the shifting urban ecologies of the US in the early to mid-20th century. We’ll ask how literary works like this offer new ways of thinking, seeing, and describing street life and those who dwell in what John Rechy calls “the vast city of night.” John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath – the story of the Joad family’s dispossession, homelessness, and migration west – as well as his novel Cannery Row, will guide us in thinking about the forms of representation of the migrant and unhoused subject inside and outside the city. Rechy’s novel City of Night will cast a lens on the male hustler and on strategies of survival for queer and trans people on the streets in the early 1960s. Finally, contemporary poetry and short prose from sex workers, unhoused people, and undocumented immigrants in our urban ecologies will give us a starting point for interrogating contemporary structures of exclusion and inclusion, and their impact on the materiality of the city. Throughout the course, we will use Reitman’s text, short selections from Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, essays drawn from political economy and psychoanalysis, and Saidiya Hartman’s remarkable literary history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, to unsettle common tropes and assumptions about those who live otherwise.
The picaresque genre attempts to represent a subject outside History—in early modern Europe, the newly dispossessed peasant, “dissolute, crooked, thieving and idle”—who will eventually become the modern wage laborer. The genre uses parodic humor to make for witty stories that to this day retain their power to make us laugh out loud. But alongside the genre’s humor, the picaresque also figures its protagonists’ refusal to submit to the discipline of wage labor. This course reads picaresque novels from early modernity to present, attending to the ideological and aesthetic strategies that underpin representations of the making of peasants into workers, and to traces of refusal. We’ll examine three registers of symbolic violence beneath the humor of the picaresque: first, the violence of dispossession and early forms of capital accumulation in early modern Europe; second, the symbolic violence of representation; and third, the tactical violence of the rogue. We’ll start out by reading La Celestina, an early modern novel in dialogue with a female antihero, before turning our attention to what is widely considered the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, and the novel it inspired, The Swindler. Along the way we’ll read a semi-autobiographical account of a trans man and soldier from 1626 and an early English picaresque novel, Moll Flanders, before leapfrogging into the modern and contemporary picaresque novel.