The seminar will read recent texts in critical theory with special attention to the ways in which political questions are articulated with literary or aesthetic ones. Why is this a question again? How are contemporary theorists posing it? We will be guided by the provocation of Jacques Rancière's suggestion that "humans are political animals because they are literary animals: not only in the Aristotelian sense of using language in order to discuss questions of justice, but also because we are confounded by the excess of words in relation to things." What difference does this attention to words, and to excessive 'literary' words, make to the persistent theoretical and practical questions of dissent and consent, justice, rights, responsibility, equality, and freedom? Some possible answers will be examined in texts by Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Etienne Balibar, Gayatri Spivak, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, among others.

Ferrara in the Renaissance was four times the size of Rome and, it is sometimes said, the most brilliant court in Europe. It is a prime example of the city-state principality and a microcosm of widespread Renaissance concerns. Its ruling family, the d'Este, was at the center of Italian political affairs, which had ramifications throughout Europe, and in accordance with the concept of "magnificence," the family was important patrons of the arts, including music, painting, architecture, sculpture and literature. This is a collaborative seminar in which students will work both independently and with others. Students from all disciplines are encouraged: it will be possible to focus on literature, music, theatre, art history, architecture, sociology, urban planning, political science, history of science, even hydraulic engineering, and others disciplines. As a foundation for the work of the seminar, the group will consider several basic Renaissance texts; then the work will be to construct attributes of political and economic structures as they can be related to the society and the art. From the beginning students will construct a web page that will integrate the work of the seminar and present it to the "wide world" of the WWW, and invite responses from it. This seminar is not appropriate for First Year Students or for Second Semester Seniors¾ students in these categories who are interested nevertheless should consult Mr. Wilson as soon as possible, 758-4503). Computer expertise is not required.

This course will look at the idea of the Contemporary as an aesthetic value, as a way of positioning the critic, as well as the artist, within a particular matrix of historical events and cultural ideas. It will attempt to separate the Contemporary from such academic frames as Modern and Post-Modern, and focus on what it might be necessary to know in order to recognize art that is truly responsive to the conditions in which it is made. "Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen", Gertrude Stein remarks in Composition as Explanation, "and that makes composition." And Adorno, famously, wrote, in his 1949 essay "Cultural Criticism and Society", "Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." This course will look at the relation between composition (or form) and the temporal exigencies that animate it. Weekly readings and writings.

In this seminar we will explore the history and shifting status of maternity within 19^th and 20^th century feminist discourse. Constructions of maternity have figured in both a positive and a negative fashion to help women analyze sex and gender, as well as to critique existing systems of social organization. Looking backward to such foundational texts as Olive Schreiner's Women and Labour and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, we will investigate the foundational uses of motherhood in formulating feminist (and pacifist) politics. We will consider fictional representations of the maternal from Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Mansfield's At the Bay to Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child and Meridel LeSueur's The Girl. Moving into the latter half of the twentieth-century, we will examine the ambivalence of feminist writers like Firestone, Olsen, and Rich to the institution of motherhood, as well as the celebration of "maternal thinking" found in the works of Sara Ruddick and others. So too, through a close reading of the work of Emily Martin and Valerie Hartouni among others, we will discuss how modern reproductive technology has reinflected our perceptions and imaginings of the meaning of childbearing and child rearing in America today. Finally, we will look at contemporary cultural representations of motherhood that stress the socially contested, even grotesque aspects of this most "natural" of human experiences. Enrollment limited to fifteen.

In this course we will look at Gertrude Stein's theory and practice of language composition in relation to the arts of her contemporary moment and ours. Stein wrote "the whole business of writing is the question of living in [one's] contemporariness." For Stein that involved interest in the sciences of her time as well as a close kinship with the visual arts, most notably the Cubism of Cezanne, Braques, Gris and Picasso. Her interest in new Euro-American music led to extensive collaborations with the American composer Virgil Thomson. With this in mind we will be reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (a detailed evocation of her cultural-historical milieu), Stein's book on Picasso, her own language "portraits," and selections from her poetry, essays, operas and plays. We will also view/listen to art and music related to her work. Throughout the semester there will be attention to the implications of Stein's influence on late twentieth and twenty-first century arts-e.g., that of John Cage, Stan Brakhage, selected visual artists and poets. Students will have the opportunity to submit creative projects (in the media of their choice) related to Gertrude Stein's aesthetic. There will be regularly scheduled short essay assignments in response to the materials of the course. Enrollment limited to 15.