Browse Items · Legacies of the Enlightenment

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Tsing traces the rhythms of disturbance-based ecologies through the biological and economic lives of matsutake mushrooms. Attending to the fortuitous multispecies assemblages of lifeforms and lifeways that arise within the ruins of capitalist…

Tags: capitalism, climate, ecocritique, ecology, environment, In-between

Nature's Queer Performativity

Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than represnetative mode. Barad expands…

Tags: gender and sexuality studies, In-between, materialism, nature, new materialism, queer studies, science

Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno

Hansen explores the promise of cinema as it defined and changed the notion of experience in modernity and modernist thinkers. Here Hansen proposes a materialst theory of the cinema to help work understand the radical potential that the cinema and…

Tags: critical theory, experience, film, In-between, materialism, media history

Critical Theory: Essays

Collection of Horkhiemer's early essays that define the program of critical theory. Includes seminal essays such as "Traditional and Critical Theory" and "The Latests Attacks on Metaphysics," providing background and context for many of the wartime…

Tags: critical theory, disciplines, history, In-between, Marxist criticism, materialism, sociology

Critique of Instrumental Reason

A series critical essays that connect the rise of Enlightenment thinking with the emergence of state bureaucratic apparatuses that oppress human societies through a distinctive form of ‘instrumental rationality’.

Tags: critical theory, history, In-between, modernity

The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization

Written over the scope of 20 years of research, Mignolo argues that European colonizers used writing technologies (like the alphabet) as a weapon of war in Mesoamerica, with subsequent political and cultural projects in the Enlightenment serving to…

Tags: colonialism, In-between, Latin America, literacy, modernity

ENG820: Sade and Feminism

A graduate seminar on Sade and feminism.

Tags: feminism, gender and sexuality studies, graduate course, In-between, syllabus

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science

Cook's magisterial study explores Jean-Jacques Rousseau's abiding interest in botany and botanical science and the significance of his botanical writings in the context of the history of plant science. She gives a wide-ranging yet exquisitely nuanced…

Tags: botany, ecology, ethics, In-between, philosophy of nature, Rousseau, science

Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

A by-now classic and deeply influential critique of the foundational assumptions of ecocriticism (and strands of Romantic literature), Morton’s book issues a challenge to the idea of Nature as a transcendental term—and to the fantasy of a…

Tags: aesthetic, ecocritique, ecology, environment, ethics, In-between, Romanticism

Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life

Nealon explores the (liminal yet significant) role played by concepts of vegetable life within biopolitical discussions of life in the humanities today. Where Nealon, following Foucault, suggests that modernity has been primarily invested in an…

Tags: agency, climate, climate change, In-between, philosophy, plants, subjectivity, world

WGSS 497: "Bad Mothers"

An undergraduate women's studies course that examines why women are often judged on their ability to have and raise children, and that charts the evolution of attitudes toward mothering. We begin by reading works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Sigmund…

Tags: disciplines, gender and sexuality studies, In-between, kinship, syllabus, undergraduate course, women's studies

FR597: The Abnormal Early Modern

A graduate seminar in French that examines texts from the 16th-18th centuries organized around the theme of abnormality. Students also read critical theory in gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and queer studies, among others.

Tags: disability studies, disciplines, gender and sexuality studies, graduate course, In-between, materialism, queer studies, syllabus

FR543: Studies in the Enlightenment: Kinship, Community, and State

A graduate seminar in French that examines 18th-century novels and poems from France and Haiti exploring the relation of kinship and community to the State. Students also read critical theory in psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies,…

Tags: disciplines, gender and sexuality studies, graduate course, In-between, kinship, materialism, political theory, syllabus

WGSS 497: "Bad Mothers," Presentation of Cultural Object Assignment

Description of cultural object presentation for Women's Studies course on mothers and mothering.

Tags: assignment, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, In-between, kinship, women's studies

WGSS 497: "Bad Mothers," Creative Project description

Final project for Women's Studies course on mothers and mothering. Students have the option of creating an artistic piece or a blog that analyzes motherhood from multiple perspectives.

Tags: creative project, disciplines, final project, gender and sexuality studies, In-between, kinship, women's studies

Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France

Vila's study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose.

Tags: 18th century, biology, disciplines, France, In-between, materialism, medecine, philosophy, physiology, science, sexuality

The Republic of Letters

A ground-breaking consideration of the social history of gender in the Enlightenment. As well as an invaluable source on the social history of the Enlightenment overll, this study gave rise to a meaningful and revaling debate about the lack of…

Tags: 18th century, collective identities, Europe, female authors, feminism, France, gender, In-between, materialism, philosophy, sexuality

Mapping the Republic of Letters

This website provides interactive, visual tools that depict the vast networks of people and information during the Enlightenment. Using archived letters, travel logs, and other resources, it depicts visually the routes traveled by letters, people,…

Tags: 18th century, citizenship, civilization, collective identities, colonialism, education, Europe, In-between, interdisciplinarity, philosophy, upheavals

“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny's Lettres
d'une Péruvienne.”

Discusses 18th-century author Françoise de Graffigny's important novel (Lettres d'une Péruvienne), focusing on the form of the letters in the novel, which are constructed first in quipos (a peruvian form of communication involving knotted cords), and…

Tags: 18th century, colonialism, disciplines, female authors, feminism, France, Graffigny, In-between, literature, materialism, sexuality

Special Section: Interdisciplinary Integration: The real Grand Challenge for the life sciences?

This set of articles considers how integration manifests in interdisciplinary contexts. Integration as a topic of philosophical investigation extends beyond socio-political philosophy and into philosophy of science and interdisciplinary theory. These…

Tags: In-between, integration, interdisciplinarity

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