 TEACHING
Doctoral Seminar 1
E57.3100, Fall 2007
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Time: Thursdays 4:55-7:05pm
Location: Conference Room, 239 Greene St, 7th Floor
Office Hours: Wed 2-3:15pm; Thurs 2-4pm
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This is an advanced graduate seminar designed primarily for
first-semester PhD students in the Department of Media, Culture, and
Communication. The aim of the course is to provide students with a set of foundational
readings in the areas of media studies, cultural theory, and
communications. Attention will be given to debates around ideology, subject formation,
representation, meaning, and interpretation. Together with the spring
doctoral seminar, this course serves as the basis for the PhD candidacy
exam in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.
SYLLABUS
September 6 — Course Introduction
Suggested titles for general overview and background:
Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794-2000.
John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
François Dosse, History of Structuralism, Volume 1: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966 and History of Structuralism, Volume 2: The Sign Sets, 1967-present.
September 13 — Dialogue and Dissemination
Plato, Phaedrus (PDF).
Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context" (PDF).
John Durham Peters, "Dialogue and Eros in the Phaedrus" (PDF).
Optional:
Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," Dissemination.
September 20 — Aesthetics
Aristotle, Poetics.
David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste" (excerpt) (PDF).
Edmund Burke, "...The Sublime and Beautiful" (excerpt) (PDF).
September 27 — Media and Technology
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" (PDF).
Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media" (selections) (PDF).
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" (PDF).
Jean Baudrillard, "Requiem for the Media" (PDF).
Optional:
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 6, chapters 3-4.
Vilém Flusser, "On the Theory of Communication."
October 4 — Marx
Karl Marx, "So Called Primitive Accumulation," Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 873-940.
Karl Marx, Preface and postface, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 89-103.
Karl Marx, Commodities and money, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 125-209.
October 11 — Marx (continued)
Karl Marx, "The General Formula for Capital," Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 247-257.
Karl Marx, Labor-Power and the labor process, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 270-329.
Karl Marx, Relative surplus-value and cooperation, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 429-454.
Karl Marx, Factory and machine, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 544-564.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (fragments on machines) (PDF).
Karl Marx, Wages and reproduction, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 675-682, 709-724.
October 18 — Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, pp. 1-23, 65-78 (PDF).
Roland Barthes, Mythologies.
October 24-25 — 24 hour midterm examination
November 1 — The Historical Construction of Vision
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.
November 8 — The Problem of Authorship
Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer" (PDF).
Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text" (PDF).
Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author" (PDF).
Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" (PDF).
Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding" (PDF).
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (excerpt) (PDF).
November 15 — Looking/Seeing/Regarding
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.
Optional:
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."
Jacques Rancière, "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" The Future of the Image.
November 22 no class -- Thanksgiving
November 29 — Representing the Outside
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (abridged version).
Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness" (PDF).
Rey Chow, "Where Have All the Natives Gone?" (PDF).
Optional:
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, meditations 1 and 2.
December 6 — Postmodernity and the Subject
Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn, pp. 1-49.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 1-34, 79-149.
Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" (PDF).
Optional:
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp. xxiii-xxv, 3-17, 71-82.
December 11 — Current Debates
Giorgio Agamben, "Author as Gesture"
Philip Agre, "Surveillance And Capture: Two Models of Privacy"
Alain Badiou ???
Judith Butler, "Indefinite Detention"
Critical Art Ensemble, "Electronic Civil Disobedience"
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "On Software, Or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge"
Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript On Control Societies"
Mary Ann Doane, "Information, Crisis, Catastrophe"
Peter Galison, "War Against The Center"
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Empire" (pp. 3-66)
Friedrich Kittler, "Gramophone Film Typewriter" (pp. 1-19)
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses"
Lisa Nakamura, "Menu-Driven Identities: Making Race Happen Online"
Jacques Rancière, "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?"
Vivian Sobchack, "The Scene Of The Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic 'Presence'"
Eugene Thacker, "What Is Biomedia?"
George Yúdice, "We are Not the World"
Slavoj Zizek, "Welcome to Desert of the Real!" (pp. 1-57)
December 13-14 — 24 hour final examination
REQUIREMENTS & GRADING
The course contains both midterm and final examinations (40% each). Each exam is take-home and has a period of 24 hours.
Students are expected to write around 3,000 words total for each exam (i.e. 6,000 words total for the whole semester).
Students are also required to participate in seminar (10%) and
lead discussion in rotation (10%).
REQUIRED MATERIALS
Aristotle, Poetics.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble.
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (abridged version).
Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.
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