Autumn 2012 Graduate Classes
- 5668 Studies in Orality and Literacy
- 5691 Topics: Global Culture Studies
- 5957.01 Comparative Folklore
- 6390 Appr to Comparative Cultural Studies I
- 6750.01 Intro to Graduate Study in Folklore I: The Philology of the Vernacular
- 7301 Theorizing Literature
- 7350.01 Theorizing Folklore I: Tradition and Transmission
- 7360 Theorizing Culture
- 8842 Seminar in Science and Medicine
- 8866 Seminar in Culture and Capital
- 8890 Colloquium/Reading Group: New Materialisms, New Ontologies
- 8896 Seminar in East Asian Philosophy
CS 5668 Studies in Orality and Literacy
Instructor: Sabra Webber
R 3:55-6:50pm
Class# 12311
Cross-listed in NELC.
This course takes place thirty years after the publishing of Walter Ong’s influential 1982 work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Ong touches briefly on what he called, secondary oral cultures, those emergent with the advent of television and radio, but perhaps for our purposes in this course more usefully with the advent of hypertext/hypermedia phenomena. As we move forward in the course we will keep an eye on these emerging phenomena and those who study them considering, at the suggestion of Fowler and others, how hypermedia processes and products might lead us to understand more complexly oral, manuscript, as well as book cultures as they interweave across time and space.
The focus in this course is on theoretical trends in orality and literacy studies that engage with expressive or aesthetic (“performative” as linguistic anthropologists or folklorists understand the term) examples of oral or written communication, sacred or secular, that consider texts, textures and contexts, especially audience, in their analyses. We will also privilege theoretical studies that consider the permeable boundaries among the oral, written, and secondary oral rather than, for example, setting up absolute dichotomies between various manifestations of oral and written. We will test these theoretical claims with recourse to case studies particular to one or another of a spectrum of local communities.
Students are urged to bring their own projects based in any language or combination of languages to the metaphorical and actual course table, though all readings will be in English. Student projects can address any culture and any time period, but the work done on it in this particular seminar will be expected to draw on our mutually considered course readings as the means to move the particular study forward.
Global theories of both orality and literacy owe much to studies of Near Eastern data, ancient, medieval, and contemporary, but we will also draw on comparative examples that apply similar theory in alternative places and times, and those that engage with dissimilar theory applied to the same expressive phenomena. Among others, we will read excerpts from works by Martin Jaffee, John Foley, Roman Jakobson, Michael Zwettler, Donna Haraway, Joyce Coleman, G. Bauman, Ong himself, Robert Fowler, and Galit Hasan-Rokem.
Contact instructor at webber.1@osu.edu for more information.
CS 5691 Topics in Comparative Studies: Introduction to Global Cultural Studies: Histories, Theories, Practices
Instructor: György Túry
TR 3:55-5:15pm
Class# 10811
This course will introduce students with some prior knowledge of the field to the discipline of Cultural Studies as it is seen, understood and researched from a different perspective than usually found in Western academic centers. Three areas will be given special attention: 1) the history of the discipline; 2) modern, postmodern, and contemporary theories of culture; and 3) case studies of Cultural Studies research. In all three areas students will become familiar with the more mainstream, generally accepted approaches to a given issue as well as less well known aspects of the very same problems from deep in the history of Cultural Studies and its regional “variations.” Possible topics and readings include: Leitch and During on the origins of the discipline; Gramsci, Althusser and Hall on Culture and Power; parallel studies of culture in socialist-era Eastern Europe; McLuhan and Burroughs on electronic media criticism of the late 60s and early 70s; current-day redefinitions of culture by Szeman, Jenks, Negri & Hardt.
Contact instructor at labov.1@osu.edu for more information.
CS 5957.01 Comparative Folklore
Instructor: Katerine Borland
TR 9:35-10:55am
Class # 12075
In this course we will trace the various paradigms forstudying women, gender and feminism in folklore and ethnography that have emerged over the last quarter century. After reviewing the foundations of feminist folklore in the 1970s and 1980s, we will pay particular attention to contemporary approaches, theories and projects that illuminate the relationships between performance, gender and power.
Contact instructor at borland.19@osu.edufor more information.
CS 6390 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
Instructor: Leo Coleman
T 12:45-3:40pm
Class# 10818
A graduate introduction to social thought and critical theory, this course offers a survey of key interpretive theories that have guided social and cultural analysis of modernity in all its diverse colonial and postcolonial locations. We will read core sociological, anthropological, and philosophical works including writings by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Roland Barthes, and Ruth Benedict, in order to explore the workings of culture, history, and difference in the present. In addition to introducing social thought and social-science methodologies of comparative cultural and civilizational analysis, we will study critical epistemologies including psychoanalysis, ethnography, and feminism. The course concludes with the post-structuralist turn to the cultural analysis of power. This is the first course in a two-semester introduction to critical and cultural theory, while also offering a stand-alone introduction to key concepts for formulating interdisciplinary and critical research projects, with a particular emphasis on anthropological approaches to culture. Primarily designed for graduate students in the Department of Comparative Studies, this course is also open to graduate students from across the university.
Contact instructor at coleman.514@osu.edu for more information.
CS 6750.01 Intro to Graduate Study in Folklore I: The Philology of the Vernacular
Instructor: Merrill Kaplan (English)
W 9:10am-12:25pm
Class# 7340
Introduction to the canonical folklore genres and the history of folklore as a discipline. Why and how do we examine the vernacular? Folklore GIS course.
Cross-listed as English 6751.01.
Contact instructor at kaplan.103@osu.edu for more information.
CS 7301 Theorizing Literature
Instructor: Naomi Brenner (NELC)
WF: 11:10am-12:30pm
Class# 12054
Cross-listed in NELC.
This graduate course will provide an accelerated introduction to literary theory and criticism, surveying significant developments in modern and contemporary literary and cultural studies. Our readings will combine a wide range of critical and theoretical texts with poetry and prose from a variety of languages and time periods. We will consider both the formal elements of literature (like genre) as well as theoretical approaches to the study of texts (like deconstruction and post-colonialism). Underlying seminar discussions, lectures and written assignments will be the following questions: How does a particular critical or theoretical text change how we read literary texts? How do literary texts change how we read critical and theoretical texts?
In addition to providing students with a strong grasp of major concepts for graduate studies in literature, this course also will provide students with the opportunity to analyze texts from their own area of interest through a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. Each student will prepare written responses to weekly readings, present a “work-in-progress” presentation of their individual project, and a final seminar paper.
Contact instructor at brenner.108@osu.edu for more information.
CS 7350.01 Theorizing Folklore I: Tradition and Transmission
Instructor: Dorothy Noyes, WF 9:35-10:55am
Class# 7339
This course examines the transmission of cultural forms through time and space across social networks. We pay special attention to the tension between conservation and innovation, fixity and process. We look also at the interplay of conscious intentions and valuations with more inattentive or habitual forms of practice. As an extension of this dynamic, we look at the concept of tradition itself as a keyword of Western modernity, which circulates between general and scholarly usage and picks up ever more ideological baggage in the process. We also review the contributions of historical approaches including diffusionism and the comparative method, formalism and structuralism, oral-formulaic studies, literacy and entextualization, network theory, memory studies, and memetics. We conclude with reifications of tradition including folklorismus, the nationalist and colonialist "invention of tradition," and today's "intangible cultural heritage" and "cultural property."
Readings for the course (posted on Carmen) include theoretical texts as well as ethnographic case studies from a wide variety of cultural and social settings. Students will share in preparing for discussion and write a research paper on a topic relevant to their own interests.This course fulfills the core theory requirement of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Folklore.
Contact instructor at noyes.10@osu.edu for more information.
CS 7360 Theorizing Culture
Instructor: Morgan Liu (NELC)
M 2:15-5:00pm
Class# 12420
How does culture provide insight into ways of being human? Is the concept useful to understanding what people do, say, and think? We will think about “culture” variously as a tactic of power, as conflated with race and nation, as masking agency and voice, as discourse and practice, as neither local nor global but “networked”.
Readings are centered on ethnographies that plumb specific cases and simultaneously theorize subjectivity, knowledge, representation, gender, identity, embodiment, space, colonialism, complexity, the state, the global, etc. We will consider these case studies with respect to perspectives from cultural anthropology, human geography, linguistic anthropology, urban studies, cultural studies, history, political science, and sociology. Students from all disciplines are very welcome in this course.
The central portion of the class is the Course Essay you write (perhaps a piece of your future thesis) in light of the theories and perspectives of the course. The course’s seminar/lecture format involves close engagement among students and with me. There will be a mini-conference where students present their own work to the class for feedback.
Contact instructor at liu.737@osu.edu for more information.
CS 8842 Seminar in Science and Medicine
Instructor: Allison Fish, W 3:55-6:50pm
Class# 19654
The historical development of the medical humanities as well as science and technology studies has been shaped by a series of questions regarding health and illness, scientific inquiry, and technological development. How can critical scholarship contribute to an understanding of disparities in access to health care, as well as differences in health outcomes based on social characteristics? How might new digital media and social networking technologies transform not just health care institutions and practices, but understandings of “health” itself? Why is it crucial to understand social and cultural specificity when considering questions of technology design? How has social science and humanities research contributed to the fields of medicine and technology, broadly conceived?
This seminar is predicated on the idea that the social phenomena studied by the “medical humanities” and “science and technology studies” (taken together as MSTS) are in fact inextricably connected, and understanding these linked formations requires moving between disparate fields of inquiry. In doing this, we will approach MSTS as 1) an emergent or (merging) discipline(s) on it with hardly settled genealogies, 2) as a growing emphasis within the humanities and social sciences, and 3) as a mode of thinking and moving through social theory. In exploring this, we will ask: Is MSTS a "case study" of larger social phenomena that exist to be theorized? or Has medicine, science, and technology become a constitutive component of emergent social phenomena in ways that increasingly force social theory to take account of "science studies", however broadly construed?
Contact instructor at fish.88@osu.edu for more information.
CS 8866 Seminar in Culture and Capital
Instructor: Philip Armstrong
F 12:45-3:40pm
Class# 10821
The course will address the concept of precarity as it has emerged within a range of contexts, including the decline of the welfare state within neoliberalism, globalization, immigration, labor and class composition, the environment, activism and mass mobilization, and the “postcolony.” In these contexts, the concept of precarity will be further situated in light of recent debates concerning poverty, risk, social contract, theories of affect, the financialization of life, “bare life,” and economies of abandonment. Texts by Bourdieu, Mbembe, Butler, Agamben, Berlant, Sachs, Butler, Barchiesi, Weeks, Beck, Povinelli.
Contact instructor at armstrong.202@osu.edu for more information.
CS 8890 Colloquium/Reading Group: New Materialisms, New Ontologies
Instructor: Brian Rotman
W 6:00-9:00pm
Class# 152890
The past decade has witnessed an upsurge of theoretical writing challenging long-held understandings of ‘matter’ as inert and lifeless in opposition to ‘mind,' thought and agency. Writing from many directions – feminism, science studies, speculative philosophy, ecology – a variety of thinkers ask across a range of texts what materialism entails, what might or could it mean to say that something exists as an ‘object,' how we are to understand a process possessing/exerting agency in the world.
This is a 2-credit graduate colloquium in the form of a reading group that will offer a first encounter with these ideas. The class will be held in the evenings from 6 to 9 in the Comparative Studies seminar room, Hagerty Hall 451. The first meeting will be Wednesday August 29.
A provisional reading list includes:
Jane Bennett: Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things (2010)
Levi Bryant et al (editors): The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (2011)
Diana Coole + Samantha Frost (editors): New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010)
Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005)
Karen Barad: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007)
Contact instructor at rotman.3@osu.edu for more information.
CS 8896 Seminar in East Asian Philosophy
Instructor: Thomas Kasulis
W 12:45-3:40pm
Class# 10822
Zen Buddhism often purports to be nonphilosophical or even anti-philosophical. Yet, it has been the inspiration behind much contemporary Japanese philosophy (and western philosophical writing about East Asia). The seminar will have two parts. First, it will focus on philosophical developments within the Japanese Zen tradition with special emphasis on the great thirteenth-century thinker, Dōgen. The second part of the course will examine various (Japanese and western) philosophers who have either commented directly on Zen Buddhist thought or have used Zen ideas as a major resource for developing their own contemporary philosophies. These include such philosophers as Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō, Izutsu Toshihiko, Nishitani Keiji, and Abe Masao. In general, major themes will include philosophy of language, ethics, and aesthetic.
Contact instructor at kasulis.1@osu.edu for more information.