COURSE MANUAL
Current Research Topics in Cultural Analysis
2013-14, first semester
Instructors: Esther Peeren, Ernst van Alphen, Maaike Bleeker, Robin Celikates,
Murat Aydemir (coordinator)
Credits: 5 EC
Sessions: Mondays 13:00-17:00, October 21, November 4 and 18, December 2 and
16. All sessions take place in Amsterdam.
1. Contents
1.1. Course contents
This course enables students to engage with a series of topics that are central to
current and ongoing research in the field of cultural analysis, cultural studies,
and/or cultural theory. Students become acquainted with the actual practice of
doing research rather than its polished output. What are the obstacles and
possibilities of the investigative work in progress? How was it conceived, and how
did it change along the way? Students engage with and debate assumptions,
working method, and the findings of the researcher/instructor. Students also setup and carry out their own independent research project, in close relation to one
of the topics discussed in the course.
1.2. Course load
This course earns you 5 EC. Each EC is roughly analogous to 38 hours of work,
including the time spent in class and the time you spend on your own paper. Upon
successful completion of the course, you will receive a NICA certificate, which you
can have recognized officially at your institution’s administrative office.
1.3. Feedback
A large part of our two-weekly sessions will entail class discussion, during which
the instructor will frequently give feedback, as will other students. For your final
paper, you will receive feedback by the respective teacher.
1.4. Program
1. October 21
Topic: Spectralities
Instructor: Esther Peeren (e.peeren@uva.nl)
Place: Oudemanhuispoort, zaal C3.23
Located in the ambivalent realm between life and death, ghosts and other spectral
apparitions have always inspired cultural fascination as well as theoretical,
philosophical and theological consideration. It was, however, with the appearance
of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) that ghosts and haunting emerged as
compelling analytical and methodological tools across the humanities and social
sciences. The disjunctions produced by globalization, the ungraspable quality of
modern media, the convolutions of subject formation (in terms of gender, race,
and sexuality), the elusiveness of spaces and places, and the lingering presences
and absences of memory and history have all been reconceived in light of the socalled “spectral turn.” This session will explore the productivity of spectrality for
cultural analysis and will also explore how cultural analysis itself may be
considered a spectral endeavor. Readings will include the introduction from my
forthcoming book The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of
Invisibility.
2. November 4
Topic: Literature and Cultural Memory
Instructor: Ernst van Alphen (e.j.vanalphen@hum.leidenuniv.nl)
Place: Universiteitsbibliotheek, Potgieterzaal
In this session the function of literature in relation to cultural memory will be
discussed. During many centuries textual media were privileged as media that
were best in preserving and producing cultural memory. From Horace to
Shakespeare one claimed that verse as a medium is superior to great monuments
in preserving memory. Whereas monuments, buildings, bronze and marble are
eroded by time, literary texts defy that process. Francis Bacon expresses his
believe in the literary medium as follows: “have not the verses of Homer
continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or
letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been
decayed and demolished?” This privileged position of the literary medium has,
however, in the modern period radically changed. The introduction of new media
has accelerated a process that had already begun around 1800. The question is
whether the literary medium has become obsolete or not as producer of cultural
memory.
3. November 18
Topic: Character Aesthetics
Instructor: Murat Aydemir (m.aydemir@uva.nl)
Place: Oudemanhuispoort, room A2.11
At the ending of the nineteenth century, Michel Foucault argued, the homosexual
became a “character” [personnage]. The word highlights general covenant
between biopower and realistic narrative, between a particular form of power and
a particular aesthetic, a joint apparatus for constituting and controlling human
subjects. The apparatus also comprised the requisite counterpart of the sexually
authenticated modern individual: the racialized (or culturalized) non-Western
other. All individuals are equals, but not all people are individuals to an equal
extent. However, that once perhaps relatively simple formula of “sex for the West,
race/culture for the rest” is increasingly made more complex because of the
economic globalization that redistributes human “life forms” across the globe. The
aggressive export of the biopolitical “character” encounters new forms of
identification, affiliation, and contestation. In this session, we’ll look at the
concrete aesthetic forms, modes, and devices that individualize some people while
preventing (or exceeding) the individualization of others. What does it take for us
to recognize and empathize with someone as a “character”? And what are the
potentials, constraints, and drawbacks of that kind of recognition? With readings
by Foucault, D.A. Miller, Lynn Huffer, Christopher Bollas, and others.
4. December 2
Topic: Information
Instructor: Maaike Bleeker (m.a.bleeker@uu.nl)
Place: Oudemanhuispoort, room A.2.11
The topic of my session will be information. I will approach this topic from the
perspective of my research in what I have come to term corporeal literacy. To
prepare for this session, please read N. Katherine Hayles text “Virtual Bodies and
Flickering Signifiers” (available at
http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Flick.html). In this text, Hayles poses
the following proposition: “even though information provides the basis for much
of contemporary society, it is never present in itself”. Please think of two things:
(1) an example of an object, text, phenomenon, … that can be related to (parts of)
Hayles argument; (2) another academic text by a different author that can be
related to or, brought in dialogue with, Hayles text.
5. December 16
Topic: Civil Disobedience
Place: Oudemanhuispoort, room C1.23
In the last years, civil disobedience and other practices of resistance have returned
with force in the arena of politics but also in the theoretical debate. At the same
time, movements such as Occupy have been criticized for failing to develop a
lasting organization and for underestimating the capacity of the system to
neutralize and absorb them. Some of their practices, and amongst them especially
civil disobedience, are under the suspicion of being mere expressions of a helpless
desire for reform that remains purely symbolic. In this session we will address
questions such as the following: What was Occupy? Under what circumstances can
civil disobedience be seen as an emancipatory practice? What is the relation
between its symbolic dimension and its more confrontational aspects? What is the
role of the concept of violence in framing political practices of resistance?
Readings will include texts by Judith Butler, David Graeber, Jodi Dean, Michael
Taussig, and myself.
2. Study material and costs
Most of the readings will be made available digitally through Dropbox:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tolszn5p81ysxkm/Ycq_HqbtN7
Since you must bring readings with you in class, factor in the costs for printing or a
laptop or tablet computer.
3. Examinations
3.1. Components
Your grade for this course will consist of the following two components:
a. attendance and participation (pass/fail)
Please note: attendance to all the session in the series is mandatory;
b. independent research paper (graded, 100%)
Deadline: January 30.
Requirements: The topic for your paper is entirely free, but must in one way or
another relate to one of the topics introduced and discussed in class. Hand in your
paper through email with the respective teacher; she or he will grade the paper
and give feedback. The word-count of the paper is 5000, with a 1% margin. The
paper should include substantial reflection on the practice of research.
3.4. Resits
There is no formal resit for this class. However, individual instructors may (or
indeed may not) choose to allow for a resit for the paper if it has been handed in
before the deadline and if its grade is lower than 5,5.
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