- 5691 Topics in Comparative Studies
- 5957.01 Comparative Folklore
- 6391 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
- 6425/Spanish 6705 Introduction to Latino Studies
- 6750.01/ English 6751.02/ 6751.22 Introduction to Graduate Study in Folklore II: Fieldwork and Ethnography of Communication
- 7888/English 7888/ German 7888 Interdepartmental Studies in the Humanities
- 8802 Seminar in Life Narrative
- 8843 Seminar in Technology and Culture
- 8858/ English 8858 Seminar in Folklore
- 8872 Seminar in Religious Studies
- 8888/ English 8888 Interdepartmental Seminar in Critical Theory
- 8890 Colloquia, Workshops, and Departmental Seminars
5691 Topics in Comparative Studies
Professor: Nada Moumtaz
moumtaz.1@osu.edu
TR 11:10-12:30
Class #: 29448
From “private property” to “intellectual property,” the word property crowds daily conversations and newspaper articles. Ubiquitous and taken for granted, it appears to be a universal category of thought. But what is property? Is it an object, a possession? Is it a relationship between a subject and an object or one between subjects around an object? More importantly, how is it deployed and who mobilizes it? In this course, we will think critically about the term, analyzing its genealogy in Western thought and examining different approaches to and conceptions of the term in non-Western societies. In the first part of the course, we will read in parallel texts that tackle key-aspects and concepts of property in Western theory and others that engage these aspects in non-Western contexts. We will examine the context in which the term is deployed, its intricate connection to law, and its presupposition of separate categories of subjects and objects. In the second part of the course, we will examine the constant expansion of domains we call property by focusing on new objects of property relations: the body (blood, sperm, eggs), nature (CO2, medicinal plants), culture (music, writing, yoga). As we engage in contentions over the ‘propretization’ of body parts, heritage, and intellectual production, we will be thinking of property as a process to produce things, meanings, and relations. While we engage in these particular issues, we will remain attuned to the different political projects that different conceptions of property suppose and produce. Repeatable to a maximum of 12 cr hrs including credit for 651.
5957.01 Comparative Folklore
Professor: Sabra Webber
webber.1@osu.edu
R 3:55-6:50
Class #: 29419
It took an ex-physicist—Francis Crick—and a former ornithology student—James Watson—to crack the secret of life. They shared certain wanderlust, an indifference to boundaries. Robert Wright.
The king must have contact not only with the central power but also with the randomly scattered sources of unusual events in the magical field beyond his boundaries. If those sources cannot be vanquished and assimilated, at least some measured contact with them must be kept. Thus, for example, the king or his ministers may seek information from ambassadors, spies and travelers, prophets and soothsayers. Willeford, 157
This seminar takes a critical look at different sorts of travel and travelers--explorers, ethnomusicologists, migrant workers, anthropologists, folklorists, NGO and government officials and workers, missionaries, and tourists. We look at a wide range of travel narratives and their relation to “tricksters” and to trickiness in various 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. Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs.
6391 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies II
Professor: Eugene Holland
holland.1@osu.edu
Tuesday 2:20-5:15
Class#: 18422
This continuation course introduces students to a range of theories and methods of cultural analysis and comparison. We will read texts by authors from diverse historical and geopolitical contexts and engage with their approaches to culture. The keywords to be discussed include exchange, power, agency, affect, community, citizenship, state, disciplines, modernity, and postcolonialism. Not open to students with credit for 711.
6425/Spanish 6705 Introduction to Latino Studies
Professor: Frederick Aldama
aladama.1@osu.edu
W 5:30-8:15
Class #: 18455
Introduces graduate students to the broad themes, concepts, and questions raised in the interdisciplinary field of Latino studies. Not open to students with credit for 705, ArtsSci 705, or Spanish 6705 or 7705.
6750.01/ English 6751.02/ 6751.22 Introduction to Graduate Study in Folklore II: Fieldwork and Ethnography of Communication
Professor: Katey Borland
borland.19@osu.edu
M 9:10-12:25
Class #: 18362
This course provides an introduction to the ethnographic research method as deployed in the humanities. Readings and discussion will focus on methods and issues as well as exemplary case studies in folklore, performance studies, anthropology, religious studies, ethnic and american studies and science studies. We will explore how communities constitute themselves and negotiate with other communities. We will practice finding an object of study in the world—a community, issue, or practice; observing it; and documenting it through writing, still photography, audio recording and video technologies. We will discuss the ethics of various approaches to working with living people and creating a public record of their practices. Students will be required to select a field site or group that they can visit at least twice a week, write field notes for each visit, document the site or group using various technologies, identify and document the expressive culture of the site or group, develop an IRB protocol for a research project based on the preliminary fieldwork, label and organize all collected documentation, and deposit the work in the CFS archive. Team projects are encouraged.
Not open to students with credit for 770.02 or English 6751.02 (770.02).
7888/English 7888/ German 7888 Interdepartmental Studies in the Humanities
Professor: Nina Berman
berman.58@osu.edu
W 2:20-5:15
Class #: 29456
This course draws on the framework of critical translation studies to explore aspects related to translating literary and non-literary texts from one language into another, from one cultural context into another, and from one historical period into another. We will focus on issues such as the question of equivalence and/or incommensurability of different languages; historical dimensions of the field; intersemiotic translation; and ideological and institutional aspects. The notion that translation always “rewrites” a text, the fact that translations are composed for specific audiences, the role of editors and publishing houses, and the more recent phenomenon of creating and translating texts and media for global audiences are among the issues at the center of our discussions. In addition, we will consider situations where translation is crucial to cross-cultural interaction.
The theoretical part of the course will be accompanied by a practical part, that is, every student will be asked to produce translations into English from a foreign language he or she is familiar with. These translations will then be discussed in class. The emphasis will be on identifying problems that occur in the process of translating, and we will evaluate the translations presented in class in light of various theoretical approaches and methodologies.
Texts (at SBX and on Carmen)
Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies
Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation
Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader (includes a large selection of articles, from Jerome to Gayatri Spivak and Anthony Appiah)
André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens
Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”
Frances Karttunen, “Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors”
Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, eds. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation
Assignments and Grading:
Participation (10%); one class discussion summary (10%); one oral presentation and short paper (draft; presentation in class; final version; 30%), one term paper (either an annotated translation, an analysis of a translation, or a discussion of a translation related theoretical aspect; 50%; including abstract).
8802 Seminar in Life Narrative
Professor: Julia Watson
watson.235@osu.edu
W 11:10-2:05
Class #: 29451
We will explore forms of contemporary life narrative in global circulation, including testimony, graphic memoir, celebrity memoir, collaborative narrative, and a variety of self-presentations in online media. Topics to be addressed include: theorizing subjectivity, witnessing and human rights narrative, representing embodiment and disability, and narrative and posthumanism. Students will give reports on critical essays, lead discussions, and write an extended paper on a topic within course areas. Narratives may include: Beah, A Long Way Gone; Bechdel, Fun Home; Baker, Diary Drawings; Sangtin Collective, Playing with Fire; Forney, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir; Smith, Just Kids; and others, plus several critical essays. Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr hrs.
8843 Seminar in Technology and Culture
Professor: Leo Coleman
coleman.514@osu.edu
R 12:45-3:40
Class #: 29423
Einstein’s discovery that space and time are relative to each other and to any observer’s position, has the further implication that space and time are mutable, social categories—not subject to individual alteration, yet still shaped by shared observations, experiences, and human actions, and formed by the laborious collective crafting of knowledge and skill. This course focuses on the modern intellectual origins of a broad range of relativisms, from the cosmological to the cultural, and particularly surveys works from the 1890s to the 1940s that have been important in shaping current approaches in Science Studies and Cultural Studies. In this era, European physicists, anthropologists, and writers and artists—in encounter, exchange, and conversation with diverse intellectual traditions and peoples—were collectively and singly developing new tools of perception and description, and interrogating how everyday techniques can craft, ever anew, a common-sense and sensible world of shared experience. Their insights into the power of human action and the equal mutability of the human, social, and natural worlds provide a foundation and an indispensable reference for our contemporary conflicts and debates over natural knowledge, relevance, and relativity.
This course will provide foundational readings for any graduate student interested in contemporary science studies, post-humanist or object-oriented philosophies, and the recent turn to theories of materiality in literary and cultural studies more generally. It will also be of interest to those interested in the history of the social sciences, and modern intellectual history. Readings will include key primary sources from the first half of the twentieth century, including Einstein’s Relativity, works by members of the Année Sociologique, foundational inquiries into social relativity by Merton and others, and will focus extensively on the ground-breaking ethnographic work of Bronislaw Malinowski, Maurice Leenhardt, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who investigated in non-Western societies diverse theories of causality, magical action, and transformative relations across space and time. These readings will be set in context by Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), on the material history of modern physics, and read alongside more recent ethnographies of time, technique, and the transformative effects of both knowledge and technology in human social worlds.
8858/ English 8858 Seminar in Folklore Professor: Amy Shuman
shuman.1@osu.edu
F 12:40-3:55
Class #: 29450
The work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory provides a framework for understanding the discipline of folklore (including the high/low culture divide, the romanticist legacy, the “erosion” of tradition, and the idea of “collecting” culture). The Frankfurt School is especially useful for understanding folklore as critique. From Horkheimer and Adorno’s use of myth and romanticism as a critique of the Enlightenment and their discussion of the relationship between high and low culture in their essay, “The Culture Industry” to Walter Benjamin’s essays on the erosion of traditional culture, Frankfurt School scholars offer a critical practice for the study of culture. Recent work, especially the recent issue of Differences
“Feminist Theory and the Frankfurt School” provides an important critique of the Frankfurt School. The goal of this course is to give students theoretical background for understanding issues such as authenticity, technologies, subjectivity, gender, romanticism, and high/low culture.
Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr hrs.
8872 Seminar in Religious Studies: Religion and Law
Professor: Isaac Weiner
weiner.141@osu.edu
F 11:10-2:05
Class 3: 29466
This graduate seminar explores the complicated and changing relationship between religion and law. Recent scholarship across a range of academic disciplines has called into question long-held assumptions about the separation of religion and law in the modern world. It has revealed how religion and law intersect, interact, and influence each other in often surprising ways, which vary across different societies and cultures. This situation calls for new ways of thinking about, analyzing, and interpreting this vexed relationship.
The questions raised by this course should appeal to students from across the humanities and social sciences. What is “religion” under rule of law, and how has it been regulated in different times and places? What capacity does law have for accommodating and managing religious and other forms of human difference? What are the underlying social values reflected in the contemporary concept of religious liberty, and how do those values fit together with other fundamental social values, such as the equality of all citizens and the principle of governmental neutrality? Given recent critical scholarship on modernity, secularism, and post-secularism, what does religious freedom mean today, and what are its conceptual limits? Should religion be granted special protection as a distinctive aspect of human identity, or should it be treated on a par with other systems of belief and social practice? Should religious liberty be considered a universal human right? If so, how might it translate into cultural contexts very different from the modern West?
Readings for this course will include case law and other legal materials, as well as academic writings by legal scholars, religion scholars, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others. Although this class will focus primarily on the United States, historically and today, we will give some attention to the legal regulation of religion in other societies, as well.
8888/ English 8888 Interdepartmental Seminar in Critical TheoryProfessor: Martin Joseph Ponce
ponce.8@osu.eu
W 9:10-12:25
Class #: 29457
This seminar will focus on queer of color and queer diasporic critique as intersectional modes of analysis that examine the crossings of race, sexuality, gender, class, and location, to name the most salient. We will track the emergence of these lines of inquiry in the important creative and critical interventions published during the 1970s and early 80s, particularly by women of color feminists and lesbians, then turn to more recent scholarly work that has elaborated a variety of queer of color and queer diasporic approaches to literature, film, performance, ethnography, activism, and other expressive and political practices.
Possible authors include: Gloria Anzaldúa, Cathy Cohen, Samuel Delany, Qwo-li Driskill, David Eng, Roderick Ferguson, Gayatri Gopinath, Michael Hames-García, Grace Hong, Audre Lorde, Dwight McBride, Cherríe Moraga, José Muñoz, Jasbir Puar, Andrea Smith. Requirements: attendance, participation, presentation, annotated bibliography, and final paper.
Repeatable to a maximum of 15 cr hrs.
8890 Colloquia, Workshops, and Departmental Seminars
Professor: Barry Shank
shank.46@osu.edu
F 3-5
Class #: 18650
Departmental workshop, colloquium, or seminar. Topics vary. Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr hrs or 9 completions. This course is graded S/U.
