Fall 2024 Courses

Across the world, babies call mother Mama. As children, they grow into Mama’s language, myths, thought, feeling, society. They grow in her house. Each of these takes place imperfectly. Each of these offers an exemplar for a structuralism that aspires, through the particular, to map the universal. At stake in these structuralisms are questions of development, ontology, and proliferation.

We are now inevitably poststructuralist, attentive to the weaknesses and limits of structural definition. "The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does" and populist utopianism are respective victories of function and agency against structure. The filing cabinets documenting the grand theories of global universals now seem if not empty then uninteresting. Yet the questions that undergird structuralism remain essential building blocks for critical thought. What is a given system and its capacities? Which of their differences constitute differences in genre, and which differences in form? By what mechanisms do systems (appear to) sustain themselves? Why do polities, families, practices, stories, words so often rhyme across place and time?

Over seven sessions, we will explore how this terrain is navigated by key structuralist thinkers. Throughout, we will keep attention to the questions that follow the meeting points of agency, norm, capacity and function: about ritual, the contestation of power and the mediation of change.

Very few modern works have been as influential and as closely scrutinized as the massive body of texts comprising Marx’s unfinished magnum opus, Das Kapital. But what is the status of Marx’s monumental attempt at a critique of the political economy of his day in the 21st century? In particular, what are the implications of present-day fiat currency systems, the very possibility of which Marx rejects, for his economic theory as a whole?

The course aims to provide students with a broad overview of Marx’s economic system - from the theories of surplus value and exploitation to lesser-discussed elements such as Marx’s theory of rent - to foster an in-depth, critical engagement with this body of work and its relevance to contemporary concerns. As such, this will not be just another Capital reading group (nor does it take a specifically Marxist perspective). Instead, it will offer an opportunity to engage with the breadth of Marx’s mature writings on economics, via carefully-chosen selections from Volume I as well the later, unfinished volumes, and earlier works including the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the manuscripts known as Theories of Surplus Value. Students will thus gain a “roadmap” to this voluminous body of work, enabling them to identify where particular topics of interest arise for further research according to their own interests.

This course delves into the "myth of the monomyth", or the so-called "Hero's Journey", and examines the role of infanticide in the Bible and legends across various cultures. Prophecy and cultural upheavals often intertwine to produce intergenerational conflict, giving rise to influential figures said to have defied death from their very beginnings. We will uncover the often-ignored aspect of these stories, collapsed and polished into a single epic narrative by European authors, of how the father's initial murderous intent sets the stage for tales of survival and triumph. The realities of infant and animal sacrifices reveal social values, religious beliefs, and the qualities of hierarchies in different contexts, and these rituals often symbolise attempts to appease deities, ensure prosperity, or avert disaster. Still, the question of why it is that the death of children is required to accomplish these ends remains unanswered. Cross-culturally, girl children frequently bear the brunt of such sacrifices, though, unlike male counterparts who might be mythically rescued, girls are seldom afforded the same epic salvation, underscoring systemic gender biases and the undervaluation of female lives in these cultural contexts. Moving through the confused Abrahamic and Oedipal blend of myth, psychoanalysis and history, the class will culminate in an examination of Mohammed’s approach to female infanticide and the success of Islam.