The seminar will consist of three complementary parts:

1. Freud: A review of Freud’s renowned case studies —Dora (hysteria), Little Hans (phobia), the RatMan (OCD), President Schreber (paranoia), the WolfMan (narcissistic psychopathology)—, which will lead to Freud’s open-ended construction of inductive mind models emerging from clinical materials. Freud may have died in 1939, but the discipline he founded has grown exponentially since then amongst the about eight different and sometimes competing schools and methods of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy alive today across the globe.

2. Lacan &al.: Lacan’s original reading of Freud’s case studies will elicit a careful vetting of Lacan’s, as well as a few other more contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers’ extended and explicit comments upon these case studies. The above should interweave with our own readings and interpretations in the seminar discussions. There is a manifest renaissance in Lacanian studies today. Perhaps because of his cutting edge integration of philosophy and language studies within psychoanalytic theory, Lacan, who died 40 years ago, has ever since become more influential in Europe, Latin America and the US, and become of intense interest to various scholars in the humanities and to psychoanalysts themselves. Note: A careful evaluation of Lacan’s situation in the long history of psychoanalysis will also be discussed.

What is your field? The significance of this question seems all the more equivocal in an age where terms like interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and decolonization have come to saturate the way we talk about intellectual production. In this class, we will explore and discuss perspectives caught between or outside the spaces of discipline and knowability––particularly perspectives formed outside the lines that demarcate categories of national, regional, linguistic, racial, sexual, and gender identities within literary and cinematic representation. Secondary readings will focus on recent theoretical interventions in cultural studies and critical theory. Our interlocutors may include Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall, José Esteban Muñoz, Naoki Sakai, Saidiya Hartman, Rey Chow, Tiffany Lethabo King, Sara Ahmed, Rosario Castellanos, and Tawada Yōko. 

This course will explore recent cultural production in the Americas across genres and media: film, music, photography, narrative, digital media, sculpture, and performance art. We will pay close attention to the specificity of each medium (audio, visual, digital, narrative or otherwise), while underscoring the inevitable interdependence between what appear to be disparate genres and media (as well as the bodily senses that allow us to experience them—indeed, to mediate). We will cogitate over the distinct forms such transmedial relations can take—adaptation, translation, distortion, curation, ekphrasis—as well as the philosophical concepts that animate such crossings. Finally, we will analyze the ethical and political effects of multimedia cultural production, over and above questions of content or representation. Required and recommended critical reading will include the work of K. Barad, T. Campt, R. Chow, J. Derrida, A. Duformantelle, B.H. Edwards, D. Ferreira da Silva, Z.I. Jackson, E. Levinas, F. Moten, J.B. Napolin, N. Richard, W. Thayer, and S. Weber.

In one of her most recent books, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017), Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson insists that “a lot of what science fiction deals with—parallel universes, time travel, space travel, and technology—is what our Nishnaabeg stories also deal with.” In other words, science fiction (and speculative fiction more broadly) is nothing new, at least not for Anishinaabe/Ojibwe people. By making this claim, Simpson disrupts two dominant literary assumptions. First, that science fiction is a Western literary development. Second, that Indigenous literature is primarily preoccupied with realism. Our class takes up both of Simpson’s claims by engaging a series of questions: What is Indigenous speculative fiction? Is it a redundant literary categorization? What are the limits of such a framing? What are its possibilities? We will read across an array of texts to think through issues of Indigeneity, colonization, climate change, virtual reality, social inequalities, and numerous others in their writing. This seminar will include some student participant in text selection and will require collaborative final research projects.  

Este seminario es una introducción a la cuestión ecológica en América Latina con especial énfasis en el mundo andino. Partiendo de los primeros textos de la colonia (particularmente Guamán Poma de Ayala, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, las cartas de Colón y otros) trataremos de abordar los conflictos que surgen entre los conceptos occidentales de naturaleza y las epistemologías alternativas del medioambiente utilizadas por los pueblos indígenas para defender su autonomía y resistir las múltiples embestidas del patriarcado colonial capitalista. 

 “no one with monomaniacal interests or limited to a single talent or skill can … be creative, since nothing novel or worthy can emerge without making surprising links between things … To create is to combine, to connect, to analogize, to link, and to transform.” Robert S. Root-Bernstein, “Music, Creativity and Scientific Thinking,” Leonardo, 34:1 (2001)