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Monday, June 14, 2010

Back to Work

My brief break has flown by and I'm already resuming work. My summer course at SFAI begins this morning -- and a second intensive begins after Independence Day (how apt) at Berkeley. Here's the Syllabus for the course beginning today:

Critical Theory A, "The Point Is to Change It," San Francisco Art Institute, Summer 2010

Instructor: Dale Carrico; dcarrico@sfai.edu; dalec@berkeley.edu

Course Site: http://thepointistochangeit.blogspot.com/

Grade Breakdown: Att/Part 15%; Precis/Cofac 20%; Essay 1 35%; Essay 2 40%

Provisional Schedule of Meetings:

June

Week One
Mon 14 Administrative Introduction | Personal Introductions.
Wed 16 Course Introduction | Oscar Wilde, "Soul of Man Under Socialism"

Week Two
Mon 21 Nietzsche: Ecce Homo
Wed 23 Marx on Idealism and Materialism and on Commodity Fetishism

Week Three
Mon 28 Sigmund Freud, Schreber (Handout)
Wed 30 Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" | Adorno and Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry"

July

Week Four
Mon 5 Independence Day Holiday
Wed 7 Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Week Five
Mon 12 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle | Naomi Klein, No Logo One and Two
Wed 14 Carpenter (dir.), They Live, In-Class Screening

Hand in Mid-Term Essay

Week Six
Mon 19 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality, College de France lecture excerpts (Handout)
Wed 21 William Burroughs, "Immortality" and "Coincidence" | Valerie Solanas, "SCUM Manifesto"

Week Seven
Mon 26 Hannah Arendt, "On Violence" | Must Eichmann Hang? and Human Condition Section 33 (Handout)
Wed 28 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Purchase or Check Out Whole Book! also excerpts from Judith Butler Undoing Gender, and "Precarious Life"

August

Week Eight
Mon 2 Hannah Arendt, Conquest of Space | CS Lewis Abolition of Man
Wed 4 Week Fifteen | December 8 -- Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” | Bruno Latour, A Plea for Earthly Science

Hand in Final Essay

Course Objectives:

Contextualizing Contemporary Critical Theory: The inaugural Platonic repudiation of rhetoric and poetry, Vita Activa/Vita Contemplativa, Marx's last Thesis on Feuerbach, Kantian Critique, the Frankfurt School, Exegetical and Hermeneutic Traditions, Literary and Cultural Theory from the Restoration period through New Criticism, from Philosophy to Post-Philosophy: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud.

Survey of Key Themes in Critical Theory: Scientificity, Figurality, Humanism, Post-Humanism, Judgment, Equity-in-Diversity.

Survey of Key Critical Methodologies: Critique of Ideology, Post-Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Science and Technology Studies.

Connecting theoria and poiesis: thinking and acting, theory and practice, creative expressivity as aesthetic judgment and critical theory as poetic refiguration, etc.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Debord and Foucault being somehow related just makes the whole thing for me. Excellent reading list. I wouldn't necessarily kill to take the class, but I'd certainly spend the next hour wishing I could.

yvonne said...

Most of the readings are available online, and Dale has a 'how to write a precis' page that's useful for analyzing the text. Yes it's an excellent class, the most useful one I took at SFAI (where there're a lot of great classes and instructors). Not to be missed...