Materials are drawn from African and African American history, literature and film. Authors may include Ibn Khaldun, Peter Abrahams, Margaret Walker, Lorraine Hansberry W.E.B. DuBois, Nelson Mandela and others. Two 75-minute meetings weekly. Taught in alternate years. By mapping out the political, social, cultural, and national histories of various English, Irish, French, Russian, and German novels, the course explores how these works reflected and influenced the evolution of modern European history itself.
Students have the option of collaborating in a serialized web-novel.
This seminar examines the impact of Nietzsche's work on contemporary thought. Debates over postmodernism often pivot around the place of Nietzschethis is especially true of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural studies. His thought provides many of the axioms of this discourse. This course examines the most important interpretations and appropriations of Nietzsche's work by thinkers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, de Man, and Kofman. We explore the conflicts and complementaries among these different interpretations and assess their importance.