Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A study of the counter-traditions within western civilization. Compares and contrasts diverse traditions within western culture that critique its central value systems. It will focus on the attempts of great artists and thinkers to break with tradition, and the subsequent creation of new ideas and forms of experience and expression. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

TERROR AND VIOLENCE IN THE MODERN WORLD

What is violence? What effects does it produce at the level of singularities and of the social? When does violence transform into “terror”? In this course we will discuss different approaches to the study of violencein the work of critical theorists and creative writers from the 20^th to the 21^stcentury to interrogate the role of political and economic institutions, and more broadly of power, in the material and discursive deployment of violence. We will bring our analysis to bear on the reading of past and contemporary events and responses to such events (e.g., Holocaust, refugee crises, street violence, “terrorism”, elision of electoral rights, urban segregation, racism, Black Lives Matter, sexual violence, violence of language and images, new colonialisms, or environmental violence, to name only a few) to deconstruct mainstream assumptions of liberal democracies about sovereignty, civil rights, and citizenship.

We will pair readings in critical/cultural theory to narratives about genocide (the Nürnberg trials, Rwandan testimonies, and the testimonies made available by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada), as well as works of fiction and non-fiction. Primo Levi’s memoir will take us to the horrors of Auschwitz during WWII, while the stories of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus will help us analyze the complex relation of the Law to subjectivity. Michael Ondaatje and Dionne Brand will help us reflect on the realities of genocide, recent or ongoing, such as Sri Lanka’s State terrorism in Ondaatje’s novel and the legacy of slavery in the US and Canada in Brand’s novel. We will also read historical accounts of colonial violence in Latin America, South Africa during the Apartheid system, and the former Soviet Union in Chernobyl.

In addressing the effects of terror and violence, its relation to the displacement of individuals or populations, as well as its enduring scars on the affective potential of individuals, we will consider the imagining of a “polis” to which human movement is constitutive, rather than exceptional, as a critical intervention in the “closure of meaning” that a culture of violence often enacts.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: