Course Descriptions

Term: F26W26S26Y26Z26F25W25S25F24W24S24F23W23S23Y23Z23F22W22S22Y22Z22F21W21S21Y21Z21F20W20S20Y20Z20 

Fall Quarter

Dept	Course No and Title	Instructor
HUMAN (F26)	260A  CRIT THRY WORKSHOP: THEORIES OF PROJECTION	TERADA, REI
In contemporary critical discourse, “projection,” unlike for example “disavowal,” functions more as an ordinary language notion than a psychoanalytic term of art: it means attributing one’s feelings to someone nearby, and we shouldn’t do it. This workshop will recover its complex itinerary, its proximity to hallucination and dreaming, and, more important, its underused capacities as a critical lens. In its intellectual history, projection marks the moment when Freud’s economic idea of displacement—a feeling takes a path of least resistance from a difficult site to an easier one— swerves into Melanie Klein’s interpersonal theory of human development. For Klein, a legacy of “projective identification” between mother and infant informs productive and coercive emotive exchanges in adult life. From here on, fantasy is co-involved with power. Lacan’s criticism and translation of Klein into negative and linguistic terms then generates his subordination of the imaginary and his interest in inverted messages. Analytic wildman and maybe-visionary theorist W.R. Bion develops an alternative metapsychology based on the ability or not of the mind to transform turmoil through a play of containers and contents: the norm is projection and hallucination, and the alternative is 24/7 “dreaming” as a model for thought. Clinical psychoanalysis is still developing a tension between projection as an inevitable entanglement of beings—in which it’s often the body that is unconscious and unknowable—and projection as the active ingredient of language, arising because beings do not meet. As interesting as projection’s journey is, the goal of the workshop is to avoid becoming intellectual history at any cost. Rather, the dynamics that projection brings up suggest questions and routes for future cultural analysis. Projection is not only a transfer from a hard to an easy site —which is itself an interesting storage strategy—but a divergent process of alliance, enmity, and transformation (of what, and how?); or a fantasmatic violence that is not a mere mistake but a symptom within psychoanalysis itself; or a model of language, demonstrating how it is possible to put a non-empirical object in a fictive container like an “image” or a “word,” change the “I” that is holding it, and move it somewhere, for worse and better. In the workshop, we read mostly clinical psychoanalytic literature that helps to give a feel for projection’s variability. Each participant is invited to perceive and work with projection in their own writing’s materials in a way that truly analyzes its instances and exposes the underlying rival theories of language and social violence to which it is connected. (Texts from Freud, Klein, Lacan, Winnicott, Bion, Isaacs, Searles, Ferro, Stern, Lombardi, De Masi; films TBA)
HUMAN (F26)	270  COGNITIVE MAPPING IN MINDS, MACHINES, AND METAPHORS	BORNSTEIN, A
"The cognitive revolution began with the observation that rodents could form mental ""maps"" useful for guiding navigation, planning, and memory. These findings portended the fall of behaviorism and the rise of a new scientific paradigm that centered these internal worlds. Shortly after, urban theorist Kevin Lynch introduced the term ""cognitive mapping"" to describe the distinct internal representations of shared city space that divide inhabitants and define the overlapping, but independent, extent of their experiences. This was taken up by many thinkers including, most famously, Frederic Jameson, to theorize the way in which built, cultural, and social environments propagate through the structures formed in individual minds. In parallel, the neurobiological study of cognitive maps continued in rodents and, later, humans, identifying key cell types that represent physical as well as non-spatial associations and the latent structure of our experiences. More recently, computer science has contributed rigorous quantitative theory to explain the various manifestations of cognitive maps in the brain, propelling advances in neurobiology and also artificial intelligence. These two lines of inquiry — cognitive mapping in critical theory and cognitive maps in the brain sciences — have continued largely independently, in parallel, for decades, making complementary and concordant discoveries. In this cross-disciplinary class, students from many departments we will gain a rigorous understanding of the foundations in each field, while examining how to put these works into productive conversation, and reveal areas where each discipline might make meaningful contribution to the gaps in theory raised by the other. We will see how the humanistic disciplines have, in some ways, more faithfully represented Tolman’s stated intentions for the study of cognitive maps in rodents, and also ask how recent advances in quantitative theory of cognitive maps may have implications for the further development of cognitive mapping. We will engage with works by psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, urban theorists, critical geographers, and literary and art critics.  Guest speakers will provide in-depth analysis of the various manifestations of cognitive maps in their disciplines. Assignments will include options for programming simulations or writing short critical essays."
HUMAN (F26)	270  FREUD TRUTH AND METHOD	AMIRAN, E
This course asks what makes Freud indispensable for critical and political theory and for cultural studies today even if Freud is wrong about the brain, is a patriarchal bourgeois from 19C Vienna, and is often speculative or even hallucinatory, by his own frequent admission. We will work through fundamental Freud, including the Interpretation, Three Case Studies, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the essays on mourning and on repetition, without which the critical theory world (from trauma theory to queer studies and Critical Black Studies) would not exist. We will consider fantasies of social origin—the bad Freud of Totem and Taboo—that connect with political theory today, aided by readings of Freudian paradigms of object relations and exchange. To develop this vision of the political, the course reads literary and visual works, including fiction, poetry, video, cartoons, and film. While trying to concentrate on the high-minded Freud overlooked by his small-minded detractors, we will also spend time in the bogs, fens, and marshes in order to develop college teaching topics and strategies that exercise Freud. Readings include Georges Bataille (Visions of Excess, The Accursed Share), Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, surrealist art and film by Dali and Bunuel, Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (selections), Henry Darger art, Isabelle Eberhardt’s nomad fiction, Edward Lear poetry, Winsor McCay’s dream comics, Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, Brother Voodoo cartoons, and more theory by Derrida, Marriott, Ricoeur, Sexton, Spillers, Zizek, and others. This course will have an experimental format, combining general lectures (some of them basic, others more technical) with shorter seminar sessions. Please see the instructor before signing up for this course to discuss the format and its uses.  Seminar presentations, two short essays.
HUMAN (F26)	270  CRITICAL THEORY DEBATES	REYNOLDS, B
"Many of the most important developments in the recent history of critical theory and 20th-Century literary theory were defined and facilitated by debates between different schools of thought. This course is an exploration into the main theoretical and methodological differences at the heart of debates between critical theorists influenced by, on the one hand, Marxism and poststructuralism, and, on the other, psychoanalysis and structuralism. Our focus, however, will be on theorists who move interdisciplinarily and transversally – fugitively disrupting and pushing beyond established paradigms – through the debates to achieve groundbreaking impact on the future of critical inquiry. With a sub-emphasis on theories of desire and subjectivity to further narrow the field for the course, we will study works by Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Kate Millet, Helene Cixous, Angela Davis, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Alice Jardine, and Avital Ronell."
HUMAN (F26)	270  PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MEMORY	SCHWAB, G
In this course, we will discuss a selection of foundational texts on psychoanalysis and memory, addressing issues including repressed memory, internal objects and unconscious phantasy, unintegrated experiences, the “untought known,” the transgenerational transmission of memory, the crypt, hauntology and the relationship between memory and language. Selection of Texts Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Moses and Monotheism Melanie Klein, Guilt, Shame and Reparation (Selections) Donald D. Winnicott, Fear of Breakdown Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object (focus on the concept of the “unthought known” Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy Jacques Lacan, The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis Abraham/Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: “The Phantom of the Dead”; “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation”; “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse.” Derrida, Specters of Marx (Selection)
HUMAN (F26)	398B  FOR LANG TEACH METH	JONES, L.
No detailed description available.
HUMAN (F26)	399  UNIVERSITY TEACHING	BEAUCHAMP, T.
No detailed description available.