Senior Honours Seminar – Theory
Term 2
M, 12:00 -2:00 p.m.
In this course, we will explore critiques of political theory, literatures of democracy, socialism, and dystopic collectives, technologies for the persuasion and control of crowds, and philosophies of bare life and biopolitics. It seems an appropriate moment to rethink the collective and some of the standard stories about its history, when global migrations, evolving democracies, virtual-digital crowds, and crowd-based political movements around the world are receiving wide attention. We will draw on the literary as a productive archive for this critique, and modernism in particular as a historical moment which serves as a hinge from the nineteenth-century citizen-crowd to the contemporary global multitude.
Readings include works or selections from Raymond Williams, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Le Bon, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Simmel, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Modris Ecksteins, Fritz Lang, Sean O’Casey, Hardt and Negri, Paolo Virno, Judith Butler, Jacques Ranciére, others. All non-English texts are with or in translation.
Presentation, prepared seminar discussions, research activities, final paper.
