STAGING THE EARLY MOD MEDITERR

BLOOD/LUST: STAGING EARLY MODE

This course examines, in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain and England (1580-1640), how the two countries staged the conflict between them, and with the Ottoman Empire; that is, how both countries represent national and imperial clashes, and the concepts of being “Spanish,” “English,” or “Turk,” as well as the dynamic and fluid identities of North Africa, often played out on the high seas of the Mediterranean with Islam and the Ottoman Empire. We will consider how the Ottoman Empire depicted itself artistically through miniatures and court poetry. The course will include travel and captivity narratives from Spain, England, and the Ottoman Empire.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia E Grieve
  CULPA: 15 Info
• 4 points

Precision Medicine: Science, Ethics, and

Precision Medicine:Sci,Et

This seminar will cover the scientific foundations of precision medicine and its social and ethical dimensions, alongside fundamental humanistic questions and challenges raised by this discipline. It is designed as an introduction to precision medicine accessible to the non-scientist student, but will also explore issues relevant to students who are planning a career in science or medicine.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 3 points

SENIOR SEM-COMP LIT & SOCIETY

Prerequisites: CPLS UN3900 The senior seminar is a capstone course required of all CLS/MedHum majors and CLS concentrations. Only ICLS students may register. The seminar provides students the opportunity to discuss selected topics in comparative literature and society and medical humanities in a cross-disciplinary, multilingual, and global perspective. Students undertake individual research projects while participating in directed readings and critical dialogues about theory and research methodologies, which may culminate in the senior thesis. Students review work in progress and share results through weekly oral reports and written reports.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Irina Kalinka
  Info
• Instructor: Brent H Edwards
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

A Comprehensive Introduction to Sigmund

FREUD: Theories and Origi

This course offers a comprehensive understanding of the origins, foundations and evolution of Freud’s psychoanalytic theorizing during the four decades following 1895. Via close readings of his texts, with neither worship nor condescension, we will situate the development of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind within historical context, and explore its applications to education, society, culture, and the humanities.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• 4 points

TRAUMA AND PLEASURE

Can the words “trauma” and “pleasure” be put in the same sentence? If trauma epitomizes suffering and pleasure represents enjoyment, is there any relation between these experiences? And yet, how else to explain that people seem endlessly addicted to negative experiences, or that traumatized people often try to recreate the damage they endured?

We are living in an age of endless trauma, and everywhere we go, we hear that trauma is destructive, anathema to pleasure, that it destroys our sense of self, our security, our stability, and identity. We are taught to avoid trauma at all costs because it is harmful and inimical to flourishing. New statistics routinely confirm that we are living through a trauma epidemic in which ordinary people experience symptoms of extreme distress, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, and difficulty sleeping. Every year, new memoirs are published in which protagonists detail their endless battles with traumatic adversity and most television shows, across a variety of genres, include trauma as a subplot to character development (
Ted Lasso
,
Euphoria
,
True Detective
, to name a few). Referring to its growing pervasiveness, the
New Yorker
critic Parul Sehgal wrote a controversial essay, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” (2021) in which she criticizes our culture’s overreliance on trauma as a primary trope of character development, forcing us to ask: is trauma really as widespread as we think? how did trauma become such a popular ‘identity’? what work is trauma doing for us, as individuals and as a culture? Is it possible to recognize the ubiquity of trauma while also acknowledging that we often seek situations which are harmful, even traumatizing, that we might be attracted to suffering for reasons we don’t yet understand?

This course examines the complex relationship between trauma and pleasure by familiarizing students with the clinical and theoretical concepts at the core of contemporary trauma and critical theory. We will focus specifically on the topics of: sexuality, perversion, trauma, identity, relationality, narcissism, gender and attachment in order to explore how these concepts work today. Delving into theoretical writing by Foucault, Bersani, Edelman, Berlant, Butler, Dean and Preciado, as well as clinical writing by major psychoanalysts, Freud, Laplanche, Loewald, Lacan, Laplanche and Winnicott, we will redefine contemporary debates by exploring their clinica

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Gila Ashtor
  Info
• 4 points

The Narratology of Modernity

We have a consciousness of ourselves as placed specially in history, in an epoch which is essentially different from all that has come before: the modern. In respect of having such a discourse about ourselves, minimally, it may be true. Since at least the seventeenth century, intellectuals have been elaborating histories of modernity’s origin and theories of its distinction. This course does not attempt to adjudicate what is the true or best theory of the modern, but rather inquires into the discursive and historical conditions for telling narratives about modernity’s advent and constructing theories of its nature, and their aporiai. Topics will vary but may include the advent of “history” as a genre and non-Western “historical” genres; providential time, the saeculum, and prophecy; the dialectic of break and period; the delimiting of non-modernities, such as the primitive/traditional, the feudal, and the postmodern; the search for narrative agents, such as the nation, the state, and the class; schemes of the ontological disunity of modernity; modernism, the avant-garde, and the aesthetic forms of historicity; capitalism, socialism, and revolution; philosophy’s claim to historical diagnosis and the therapeutic refusal thereof; the desire for and attempts to construct anti-historical forms of narration and their limits.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Adam Leeds
  h-index: 2 Info
• 3 points

Advanced Topics in Medical Humanities

ADV TOPICS IN MED HUM

It is impossible to study Medical/Health Humanities now without emphasizing the COVID-19 pandemic and the social disparities it casts into relief.  This class studies how the arts can provide access to voices and perspectives on illness and health disparities that might be overlooked in news coverage, historical and sociological research on the current pandemic.    

 

This class begins by introducing the field of Medical/Health Humanities and the critical questions and tools it provides.  We will use these perspectives to study narrative and visual representations in different media that address the intersections of social inequity, biomedical pandemic, and aesthetic forms.  Our study of representations will be divided into four parts.  1.The last great global pandemic.  Representations of AIDS epidemic highlight the impact of social stigma on public health and medical care, as well as the use of art as an agent of activism and change.  We will consider such works as Tony Kushner’s
Angels in America
, Charles Burns’s
Black Hole,
short stories, and the art produced within and in response to the ACT-UP movement.

2.Race and medical inequity. We study the racialization of genetic science, and its connection new forms of white supremacy and a history of racialized health disparities.  Our readings include Rebecca Skloot’s
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
, the poetry of Maya Angelou and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and the speculative fiction of N.K. Jemison.  3.Fictional representations of pandemic that illuminate real life disparities in health and access to medical care will set the stage for our study of the current pandemic.  We will read Emily St. John Mandel’s
Station Eleven
and Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel,
Zone One
.  4.Literary representations of COVID, as represented by the short stories in
The Decameron Project
, as well as short film and visual arts. Seminar style classes will emphasize student interests and direction.  They will be heavily discussion-based with a combination of full class and smaller breakout formats.  Assignments include an in-class presentation and short paper on one week’s materials; a comparative narrative analysis, and an imaginative final project with a critical introduction.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Sayantani T Dasgupta
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points