New York University Bulletin - Gallatin School of Individualized ...

NEW YORK UNIVERSITYProseminar: Popular Objects/Popular SubjectsCORE-GG 2018 Hornick. 4 unitsHistorical and technological developments in media have changed the way we think aboutpopular audiences – are they products or producers of culture? Is an audience a mass ofsubjects, or is it comprised of individuals who freely express personal tastes? This proseminarattempts to reach students with interests, practical or theoretical, in one or more of thefollowing fields: media studies, literary and art criticism, history, sociology, anthropology, culturalstudies and philosophy (particularly aesthetics). Our gaze will most often fall upon objectsand events generated for transmission via mass media, but we will also consider otherphenomena (as studied and documented, for example, in legal studies, ethnography, or starstudies). Particular questions may concern such themes as: the difference between highand low art; the intersection of culture and politics; the globalization of culture, art as commodityand mass object; the value of fan studies and Henry Jenkins’s concept of “participatoryculture;” and the place of desire, pleasure, and the perception of beauty inmass-produced or popular culture. Major class readings may include classic arguments byMaxWeber, Karl Mannheim,Theodor Adorno, RaymondWilliams, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu,Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault and Edward Said.Proseminar: Silent Subjects: Critique and the Limits of LanguageCORE-GG 2019 Huber. 4 unitsThis seminar introduces students to critique, a mode of questioning and a practice ofanalysis that exposes the actions of power and denaturalizes social and political hierarchies.In this context, and drawing on perspectives from history, literature, philosophy, andpolitical and critical theory, this seminar will take up the difficulties of speaking and writingabout silence in order to consider the importance of what is unsaid or unsayable forour formation as subjects. How are our psyches and social worlds formed around a multitudeof silences—traumatic, enforced, and/or enabling? In Western philosophy and politicalthought silence has often been figured as the Other of speech and reason, and castas the domain of the abject or excluded, or associated with catastrophic experiences at thelimits of human reason (including the extremities of pain, violence, and death). In thecontext of this Continental tradition we will familiarize ourselves with recent scholarshipon testimony and the “unspeakable,” while also critiquing the assumption that silence isnecessarily solipsistic or signals only the failure of speech or freedom. Some silences areenjoined or imposed; others, like the recent silent protests of the indignados in Spain andGreece, propose alternative politics and constitute their own communities. Throughoutwe will consider how critique can help us recognize and account for the operations of silenceand those other concealed or disavowed forces that are in fact inseparable from theeveryday workings of language, knowledge, and ideology.82 NewYork University Bulletin 2012-2013