Fall 2008 Graduate Course Listings

These courses welcome the participation of qualified graduate students from other departments or programs. All are taught by members of Temple's graduate faculty. Please contact the instructor for full details.

Special Topics in Sociocultural Anthropology: Visual and Material Consumption

Anthropology 5310: Professor Jessica Winegar, R 1:40 - 4:10

This course examines anthropological approaches to visual and material consumption in social life. Through readings in both classic social theory and contemporary theory and ethnography, we will investigate how images and things acquire meaning, organize social life, and constitute identities through different consumptive processes. Questions to be addressed include:  How do people create social identities, hierarchies, or senses of collective belonging through consumption practices?  How do images and objects acquire value or significance in different consumption contexts – from gift exchange to internet surfing to shopping?  What is the relationship between images, objects, money, and morality in different societies?  How can we understand the commodity form ethnographically? What can consumption reveal about processes of state formation and globalization – from the creation of imagined communities to the creation of inequalities? What are the differences between the consumption of visual media versus material objects?

Studies in the History of the Book

English 5032: Professor Priya Joshi, W 12:00 - 2:45

Book history sits at the intersection of matter and mentalités, exploring within its practices the material conditions of textual production, the circuits of circulation and distribution, and, above all, the varied nature of consumption. Our seminar is an introduction to the methods and opportunities of book history and its many transdisciplinary practices. While our focus will be the literary text and print, we will review scholarship on orality, explore books and authors as commodities in a marketplace of ideas and ideologies, and pay particular attention to research on readers and reading as they have shaped the social lives of books. This course is designed for students with historical interests ranging from the early modern to the contemporary. While our geographical focus will mostly be on the US and the UK, it will include forays into Western Europe and the British empire in Asia and parts of Africa. Readings include theoretical writings by Darnton, Roger Chartier, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, among others, and empirical cases by Jane Tompkins, Franco Moretti, Carlo Ginzburg, Michael Denning, Walter Ong, etc.

History of Critical Theory

Eng 5501: Professor Dan O'Hara, T, 9:00 - 11:45    

We will read closely, in the best available editions, classic texts from the history of criticism. These texts are definitive in large part for determining the nature of the discipline of literary study and infuential for other disciplines. They include: Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Longinus' On the Sublime, Kant's Critique of Judgement, Hegel's Introduction to the Lectures on Aesthetics, Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, and Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art. In addition, we will read excerpts from other important texts, from Plato's Ion and Sidney's Apology through the major essays from T.S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood. Finally, I have invited a few guest seminar participants, critics from around the world, who will lead class discussion to provide a wide variety of perspectives promoting, I hope, lively critical debate. Requirements: Active class parti! ! cipation,  bi-weekly response papers to questions provided by instructor, mid-term and final take-home exams.   

Advanced Study in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Nineteenth-Century Child

English 8109: Professor James Salazar, W 3:00-5:45

This course examines the fluid and frequently contested figure of the child in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. We’ll begin by considering some important child narrators and characters in the literature of the nineteenth century, while tracing out the intersections between the debates over literary genre and theories of child development. This will lead to a broader consideration of the different theories of childhood, child-rearing, and pedagogy in the period as well as of the complex ways that national identity, racial difference, and gender roles were articulated in terms of the nature, identity, and development of the child. Possible topics of discussion will include: the articulation of democratic consent in terms of the passage from childhood to adulthood; race and gender in the national family romance; race and recapitulation theory; the invention of adolescence; moral suasion and the child reader; pedagogy and the character-building agency; literacy, language, and self-formation. Readings will include: Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography; Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator; Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick; Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (selections), Harriet Wilson, Our Nig; Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux; Thornstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (selections), G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Ernest Thompson Seton, Boy Scouts of America: A Handbook of Woodcraft, Scouting and Life-Craft; Juliette Low, Girl Scout Handbook ­; Stephen Crane, Maggie. We will also read selections from Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Freud, Bederman, Brown, Ariès, and others.

Foundations in Judaism

Religion 5401: Professor Laura Levitt, R 5:10-7:40

This course offers students a critical introduction to issues within Jewish studies and the study of Jews, Judaism and Jewishness.  Who are Jews and how have these designations shifted and changed over time?  What is Judaism?  How and in what ways is it a religion or not?  What role do texts and practices play in defining Judaism?  How do these enactments work as forms of Jewish cultural and/or Jewish religious expressions?  What are some of the other forms in which Jewishness has been and continues to be expressed?  The course asks these questions in order to both build on the legacy of how Judaism has been studies within the academic field of religious studies and to challenge some of these long held assumptions.  In other words, the course both appreciates and challenges this scholarly legacy by offering students Religious studies, Jewish studies and, feminist, queer, and literary critical tools to better appreciate Jewish texts and practices.  And, by looking at Jews, Judaism and Jewishness in the plural, the course offers students a broad historical vision of Jewish culture.  The course is organized, more or less, chronologically offering students a critical overview of Jewish history moving from the biblical period to the present with attention to specific Jewish texts and artifacts from specific periods and geographical locations within this history while not presuming any simple linear narrative.