- 651 Religion and Media
- 651 The Talmud
- 677.02 Studies in Folklore: Travelers, Tourists, and Tricksters
- 677.03 Studies in Folklore: Textiles and Material Culture
- 725 Theorizing Religion
- 770.02 Introduction to Graduate Study in Folklore: Field Research
- 792 Genealogies of Network
- 792 Translation Studies
- 890 Japanese Philosophies of Language
CS 651 Religion and Media
Instructor: Michael McVicar
MW 3:30pm-5:18pm
Class number: 23983
In the 21st century, it is impossible to detach religion from the dizzying array of media that amplify and circulate its ideas and practices. This course aims to provide students with a theoretical and historical perspective on the complex and shifting relationship between media and religion. Throughout the course we will work to understand how these two categories are increasingly understood in terms of one another.
The course will use a range of diverse religious expressions drawn from U.S. popular culture and history to explore not only the relationship between the mass media and religion, but also the problem of mediums and mediation as they relate to bodies, texts, images, and spirits. By focusing on mass culture, consumption, and the problem of mediation, we will explore methodological and theoretical issues in the study of religion related to questions of the autonomous subject, the methodological tension between belief and practice, and the relationships between modernization, secularization, and religion. We will cover a variety of media, ranging from the printed word and illustrations, cartoons and comics, radio and television, rituals and bodies.
Among other readings, the class will utilize a number of recent books in the field:
Jason Bivins, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (2008)
Heather Hendershot, What's Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (2011)
Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011)
W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (2011)
full list Contact instructor at mcvicar.2@osu.edu for more information.
CS 651 Topics in Comparative Studies: The Talmud
Instructor: Michael Swartz
T 2:30pm-5:18pm
Class number: 26491
Understanding the Talmud is essential to understanding Judaism and, indeed, ancient Mediterranean and Western religion. An ancient, diverse compilation of Jewish law, theology, interpretation, folklore, and dialectic, the Talmud has been the object of study and devotion for a millennium and a half. Compiled in the fifth and sixth centuries CE from sources going back to the first century, it is an ongoing conversation among sages, storytellers, legislators, and preachers on everything from the proper times for prayer to the nature of divine justice to whether magical charms are effective. This course will explore the historical, literary, and religious background of the Talmud from a multidisciplinary perspective. To understand the world of the Talmud we will use methods from religious studies, history, legal theory, and gender theory. Please note that all materials will be studied in English translation, although students are welcome to bring their language and disciplinary skills into the class.
full list Contact instructor at swartz.69@osu.edu for more information.
CS 677.02 Studies in World Folklore: Travelers, Tricksters, Tourists
Instructor: Sabra Webber
M 5:30pm-8:18pm
Class number: 26477
This seminar takes a critical look at different sorts of travel and travelers—explorers, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, NGO and government officials and workers, missionaries, and tourists. We will look at a wide range of travel narratives and their relation to “tricksters” and trickster stories as they arise in different cultural and historical contexts. It is to be hoped that students will produce papers that circle around these themes and that their projects will intersect in ways that will enhance the work of fellow students in the seminar and in turn will be enhanced by theirs.
We will start with works that address the trickster and, at least indirectly, the trickiness of travel. The book, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa, by Johannes Fabian, attends mostly to travel and exploration. The article, “’A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered,” by Barbara Babcock-Abrahams provides something of a check-list of trickster characteristics. We will then move from past to present travel and from explorers to travelers to tourists in the readings for the next few weeks.
full list Contact instructor at webber.1@osu.edu for more information.
CS 677.03 Studies in World Folklore: Textiles and Material Culture
Instructor: Willow Mullins (English)
MW 11:30am-1:18pm
Class number: 26478
Things are so much a part of our lives that we often don’t think about them at all, but they help us define who we are, personally and culturally, and literally shape how we live. This course is about things in general. Throughout the term, we will tackle a series of questions: What makes an object an object, especially in a virtual world? How do objects represent, what happens when they are on display? How do objects make meaning and become signs? We will begin by looking at what we mean by “things” – from gravestones to clothing, handmade chairs to tattoos, we’ll explore how objects function and help us to make meaning in everyday life. We’ll see how objects are crucially interwoven with other folk forms, including verbal art, ritual, and festival. From the things around us, we move to the display of things, in our homes, on our bodies, and in the museum. Bringing these discussions together, we will end in the marketplace, where things become signs to be exchanged for other things. Along the way, we’ll pursue some object studies of our own.
full list Contact instructor at mullins.169@osu.edu for more information.
CS 725 Theorizing Religion
Instructor: Hugh Urban
TR 9:30am-11:18am
Class number: 26479
Far from waning in significance in our increasingly globalized, technological and interconnected modern world, religion has reemerged as a powerful force with tremendous social, economic, and political implications. This course is an intensive seminar devoted to the close critical reading of a series of key theories in the contemporary study of religion. Students are expected to have some background in religious studies, such as Comparative Studies 520 or 620 or equivalent course work (or permission of the instructor). The approaches covered in the course will include: Neo-Marxism and critical theory, postmodernism and deconstruction, feminism and gender-theory, evolutionary theory and cognitive science. The authors we read will include: Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Grace Jantzen, Pamela Sue Anderson, Pascal Boyer, and others. Students will be expected to lead class discussions, write one original research paper and give an oral presentation based on their final project.
full list Contact instructor at urban.41@osu.edufor more information.
CS 770.02 Introduction to Graduate Study in Folklore: Field Research
Instructor: Amy Shuman
MW 1:30pm-3:18pm
Cross-listed in English
Class numbers: Comparative Studies 26744; English 26295
Second of a two-course sequence in current scholarship and methods necessary for advanced study in folklore.Introduction to ethnographic research design, participant observation and interview methods, ethics in human subject research, archiving of research materials, and ethnographic writing. Prereq: Grad standing or permission of instructor. 770.01 or English 770.01 recommended
full list Contact instructor at shuman.1@osu.edu for more information.
CS 792 Genealogies of Networks
Instructor: Philip Armstrong
M 1:30pm-4:18pm
Class number: 22868
This course addresses the ways in which networks have become a decisive feature of modernity, embracing at once information and communication technologies, the “network society,” new forms of community and belonging, and the tendencies defining contemporary globalization. The course also addresses the ways in which the discourse of networks has constituted a critical challenge to both disciplinary and epistemological thinking, transforming networks from their more specialized fields of origin to new assemblages of political, social and anthropological research, new materialist historiographies, and new languages and articulations of critical thinking. Opening toward different genealogies of networks, the course is organized around four terms—language, epistemology, ontology, and political anthropology.
Readings include texts by Daniel Ciborra, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Arturo Escobar, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Edouard Glissant, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour, Walter Mignolo Jean-Luc Nancy, Annelise Riles, John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro, and Cecilia Vicuna.
full list Contact instructor at armstrong.202@osu.edu for more information.
CS 792 Translation Studies
Instructor: Dick Davis
MW 3:30pm-5:18pm
Cross-listed in English and NELC
Class numbers: Comparative Studies792, 26704; English 792, 23662; NELC 792 23659
Although wide reading from texts about translation is expected and will be discussed in class, the emphasis in this class will be on practice. Students will identify specific non-English literary texts they wish to translate, discuss the specific (cultural, linguistic, temporal, and so on) problems involved in translating such texts, and produce translations that attempt to solve these problems and that “work” in English. Each week we will read and discuss a text by an author represented in Theories of Translation (ed. Schulte and Biguenet), as well as discuss translations or a presentation of problems provided by members of the class. Students should be fluent in English, have a good working knowledge of at least one other language, and have a strong interest in literature. Each student will complete several short translations and discussions of the particular problems of translation they encountered. Translation of one longer text may be an alternative for some students.
full list Contact instructor at davis.77@osu.edu for more information.
CS 890 Japanese Philosophies of Language
Instructor: Tom Kasulis
T 12:30pm-3:18pm
Cross-listed in Japanese and Philosophy
Class numbers: CompSt 890, 26081; Japanese 899, 26135; Philosophy 899, 26125
Japanese culture includes such unusual linguistic practices as mantras and koans; it has a rich poetic tradition written in both Chinese and Japanese; it adapted a writing system from a language (Chinese) with which it was linguistically totally unrelated; its syntactical structures reflect the changing relations between speaker and audience; it has interacted with Chinese, Korean, and (since the late nineteenth century) western philosophies. Therefore, Japan presents a particularly interesting cultural context for developing theories of language, a context quite different from that of the western tradition. In the seminar we will study how a range of major Japanese philosophical thinkers have addressed these issues from the early ninth century up to the present. The thinkers studied will include Kūkai (esoteric Buddhism), Dōgen (Zen Buddhism), OGYŪ Sorai (Confucianism), MOTOORI Norinaga (Shinto and classical poetics), KUKI Shūzō (modern aesthetic philosophy), YOSANO Akiko (feminist philosophy), UEDA Shizuteru (modern epistemological and religious philosophy), KARATANI Kōjin (literary criticism and critical theory),and KIMURA Bin (psychology and philosophy). In addition there will be readings from a variety of secondary critical essays and articles.
Because the course will include students from different departments, it will assume no particular prerequisite training in western philosophy of language, Japanese studies, linguistics, or rhetoric. Instead, students will be expected to share their expertise with other students of different backgrounds. A goal of such an interdepartmental seminar is to help us find ways of speaking that make the insights of our respective disciplines available to those from other disciplines. Besides active participation in the seminar meetings, the major requirement is a term paper.
full list Contact instructor at kasulis.1@osu.edu for more information.
CS 890 Transnationalism and Literature
Instructor: Nina Berman
R 3:30pm-6:18pm
Crosslisted in English, German, and NELC
Class numbers: CompSt 890, 26323; English 890, 26322; German 899 26095; NELC 25575
This seminar explores the relevance of the concept of “transnationalism” for the study of literature. Drawing on a wide range of critics and literary texts, we will discuss aspects of transnationalism in four different units. The first unit explores historical dimensions of the term, such as its relationship to colonialism and postcolonialism and to ideas of the “nation” and “nationalism.” The second unit focuses on transnational and intercultural aspects of the colonial period. The third unit takes a comparative approach to modernist literature, and challenges the eurocentric understanding of modernist literature by highlighting modernism’s transnational scope. The last unit explores transnationalism in the context of the contemporary phase of globalization, particularly with regard to the effects of migration on individuals and multicultural societies.
Literary texts will include “Songs of the Aztec Nobility”; Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World; Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise; Kajii Motojiro, “Feelings Atop a Cliff”; The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance; Orhan Pamuk, Snow; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Theoretical readings include texts by, among others, Dipesh Chakrabarty; Paul Gilroy; Adrienne Johnson Gosselin; Salah Hassan; Franco Moretti; Aihwa Ong; Shu-mei Shih and Francoise Lionnet; Arjun Appadurai; Saskia Sassen; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan; Thomas Faist; and Wolfgang Welsch.
Assignments and grading: Participation (20%); oral presentation (20%); term paper (60 %)
Contact instructor at berman.58@osu.edu for more information