ACADEMIC DISCOURSE CLUB for Advanced Students

Prof Judith Butler - gender issues

CORNELL UNIVERSITY CELEBRATES PROF. JONATHAN CULLER AND HIS STUDENTS

Dominick LaCapra (born 1939) is an American-born European historian, best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.

LaCapra received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He began teaching at the Cornell University Department of History in 1969. (SOURCE WIKIPEDIA)

LaCapra's work has helped to transform intellectual history and its relations to cultural history as well as other approaches to the past. His goal has been to explore and expand the nature and limits of theoretically informed historical understanding. His work integrates recent developments in critical theory, such as post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, and examines their relevance for the rethinking of history. It also explores and elaborates the use in historical studies of techniques developed in literary studies and aesthetics, including close reading, rhetorical analysis, and the problem of the interaction between texts or artifacts and their contexts of production and reception. In addition to its role in the field of history, LaCapra's work has been widely discussed in other humanities and social science disciplines, notably with respect to trauma theory and Holocaust studies.

At Cornell, LaCapra holds joint appointments in the departments of History and Comparative Literature. He served for two years as Acting Director and for ten years as Director of the Cornell Society for the Humanities. He is a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory; of which he was associate director from 1996–2000 and director from 2000-2008.   LaCapra is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006–present).

STRUCTURALISM AND POST STRUCTURALISM

YALE UNIVERSITY LECTURE ON FREUD AND FICTION.

Gayatri Spivak: The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work

 

EDWARD SAID ORIENTALISM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/bookclub

THE TEXT IN LITERARY THEORY ESSAY by IAN HEATH
http://www.modern-thinker.co.uk/6%20-%20text.htm

KEY TEXT FOR CRITICAL THEORY

I have decided to make this book required reading for all students.
Here is a video on Postmodernism and other schools of thought in Literary Theory.

 

Theodor W. Adorno

First published Mon May 5, 2003; substantive revision Mon Oct 10, 2011

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/ 

Theodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.