Course descriptions of my self-designed courses at Cornell, Princeton, and Yonsei University.

Yonsei University’s Underwood International College

Introduction to Aesthetics

‘Aesthetics,’ though commonly associated with the pleasing or merely decorative, structure our perception, action, and conception of culture, nature, and reality. The word comes from Ancient Greek aesthesis and aisthetikos, signifying sensory perception, and was later adopted by the 18th-century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten to study how we experience art and the beautiful systematically (Ästhetik). In this course, we examine conceptions of the sensory concerning sound, touch, smell, vision, taste, and synesthesia, and how these have been central to the most innovative debates in fields such as philosophy, political theory, art history, and history of science. We discuss affective, immersive aesthetics that have emerged with new, digital media, in which the five senses are less and less differentiated. We consider the increased interest in non-human aesthetics and the breakdown of sensory perception, whether in noise, disgust or the formless. Some leading questions include: what are the racial components of aesthetics? How might aesthetics be relevant to politics? How do aesthetic experiences form (or alter) subjects? Guest speakers included Kat Austen, researcher and sound artist based in Seoul and Berlin.

Introduction to Media Studies

This course introduces students to a variety of critical approaches to study “media,” defined as the middle and the in-between, that which mediates us as embodied, sensing subjects, both private individuals and the broader public, with technology, cultural artifacts and their histories, and big data. Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary methods we evaluate our relation to media (technology, data, and the senses) critically rather than taking them as tools taken for granted. We consider how technology, in particular, affects our sensory perception and our relation to culture, both cultural artifacts such as art and music, along with the histories we tell about culture. We examine conceptions of the sensory concerning sound, touch, smell, vision, and taste and how they are affected by media and technology. Some leading questions include: How might media be relevant to politics, gender, race and class? How do new and old media technologies form (or alter) subjects and their way of approaching and experiencing life? Guest speakers included Melody Jue, the author of Wild Blue Media, and Elinor Carmi, author of Media Distortions: Understanding the Power behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media. In Fall 2022, a field trip to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary art in Seoul to view Hito Steyerl’s critical works on media. Readings include Ruha Benjamin’s Race before Technology, Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception, Raka Shome’s “When Postcolonial Studies interrupts Media Studies,” John Durham Peters’ Marvelous Clouds: An Elemental Philosophy of Media, Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media, Elinor Carmi Katherine Hayles on posthumanism.

Introduction to Sound Studies: Cultural Acoustics

This course introduces students to the exciting interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies with a focus on cultural acoustics. We read a variety of critical approaches to sound, and the role it plays in culture: in politics, racial ideologies, film, religion, warfare, surveillance, science, gender, law, literature, and other fields. We consider contemporary sound studies along with approaches to sound, speech, listening and auditory media from other historical moments. We approach sound studies as both theory and practice, examining the work of artists and scientists, in addition to scholars studying sound theoretically and/or historically. Questions we discuss include how vocal and listening techniques were used to construct either national cultures or other types of communities, and questions of gender in relation to what came to be identified as the “right” kind of canonical literary, artistic, and philosophical understandings. How was the distinction between human, `cultural` voices and non-human voices, noises, and sounds established and who had the power to establish it? How were (European or `non-European`) “oral cultures,” constructed and represented in European literature and philosophy? How did scholars and artists describe and conceptualize the voice, noise, and sound prior to and during the advent of sound film and sound recording technologies, and prior to and after the digital age with the rise of audiobooks and podcasts? We view the works on the politics of listening by artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the works of the deaf artist Christine Kim, Cultural Studies.

We examine how cultures are shaped by the ways in which we think about listening, touch, seeing, smelling, and tasting. What are the varying ways cultures in Europe and outside Europe think about sensory perception and how does it affect the way they think about their own cultures and that of the 'Other'? We will explore theoretical works in cultural studies, sound studies, anthropology, media studies and for each new concept we learn, we will see how these ideas are worked out in film, artwork, architecture, ethnography, scientific projects, and literature. We will move beyond anthropocentric thinking and explore how the senses are conceived by non-human cultures. Students will be exposed to cutting-edge research in a wide array of fields, both theoretical and scientific and in the arts. We will take advantage of the rich array of contemporary art exhibits in Seoul and visit and write reports about those which thematize the role of sensory perceptions in human and non-human cultures. The course will be highly interactive, with a wide variety of group activities, writing, discussion, and oral presentations. Students are highly encouraged to bring in examples from their own cultural backgrounds so as to take advantage of the diverse backgrounds of UIC students and learn from each other.

Literary Theory and Criticism

This seminar introduces students to the conceptual history of Western literary criticism and theory from antiquity to the present. Particular focus is placed on classical criticism and Romanticism, which served as sources for much of twentieth-century literary criticism (semiotics, hermeneutics, poststructuralism). While the course will proceed chronologically we will be tracing some of the major concepts that have occupied literary theory and criticism from antiquity including: representation, aesthetics, myth, and the tragic. Throughout, we will study literature from various genres including lyric and elegies, novellas, fragments. We will approach these histories and theories from a critical lens: how has literary history in the Western Canon been constructed over the centuries, and how have such histories themselves become canonized? Students are encouraged to draw on non-Western primary sources for their presentations and papers.

What is World Literature?

What we now considered “literature,” literary masterpieces, and canonical works of literature are by no means self-evident. This course looks at how “world literature,” far from its neutralized, idealized definition, is a cosmopolitan literature that bypasses national boundaries, but is rather reflective of the “world” and mediated through institutions such as the physical spaces of the library, canonized lists of “great books,” digital archives, book fairs, literary festivals, even distinctions such as literary awards/prizes and the politics that underlie them. We reflect on how the transformations in the way we read over time with the advent of new media technologies, and our increasingly globalizing world affects what we take to be “literature” as well as its ‘worldliness.’ How has the role of the author changed from the nineteenth-century, when “world literature” was first coined as a term by the German writers Wieland and Goethe, to today with the advent of privately-funded, massive literary festivals all over Asia and the pressure faced by contemporary authors of self-marketing on social media? What is the history of “world literature” and its establishment as an institution?

Introduction to German Romanticism

The course introduces students to “Romanticism,” a term associated with a literary and artistic genre which values the fantastical, exotic, and irrational products of the imagination over reason, particularly those which appear in poetry. It was a product of an age rife with a series of revolutions: the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the "revolution in female manners” (Mary Wallstonecraft). There were revolutionary efforts to redefine the limits of self, sense perception, consciousness, the very medium of the book, and theconcept of the ‘world’ and universality. There was a particular urgency in reflecting on Bildung, holistic education focusing on the formation of individuals through aesthetics, and cultivating perception and interpretation of natural phenomena. We read the foundational texts of German Romanticism. We focus on the representation and reflection through literature and philosophy of the senses (seeing, listening, smell, touch, synesthesia), and changing representations of non-European peoples and their languages and literatures. This course uses Romantic-era texts to introduce critical and theoretical methodologies such as Close Reading, MediaTheory, Post-Structuralism, Narrative Theory, and Psychoanalysis.

Literature and Media

From apocalyptic prophecies heralding the death of the book to accolades celebrating digital media, the rapid innovations in the ways we read and write are being fiercely debated. This course will look at the techniques, practices and technologies of two of the most fundamental communicative operations and their representations in literary texts. Paper will be our first topic. Even in our “digital age,” there is more paperwork now than ever before, used for storage, for recording and for bureaucratic purposes from legal documents, immigration records, filing systems and packaging. We will then isolate a number of writing practices with which we are familiar, tuning in to their media technologies and histories, notetaking, letter writing, typing, or “light writing” (photography). In the second half of the course, we will focus on the transformations of the technologies and formats of reading. Again, our focus will be on practice. We will discuss ordering, collecting, and experimentation with books and new forms of reading in our current media ecology (texting, tweeting, listening, distant reading). Throughout the course, we will continually reference discussion from previous class sessions when approaching newer material and practices (note-taking and letter-writing key to the section on books and book-making for example). We will discuss how media theoretical approaches may be used to study literature, and how literature may help us make sense of and process contemporary transformations in communication.

Classical Literature

Ancient Greek Tragedy, an art form linked to moments of crisis and transition, has left an indelible mark on contemporary discussions relating to aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and political thought. It has inspired deeper understanding of human psychology, gender and sexuality, community, identity formation, and kinship relations. In this class, we will study several of the most influential tragedies (including Electra, Oedipus, Antigone, Medea) and their rendering into cinema, comparing what we learn from both media. We will consider philosophical approaches to Greek tragedy, in addition to approaches gleaned from film studies and literary analysis. Course goals are for you to 1) develop the ability to read film, theater, and literature analytically, build arguments, and use innovative methods and frameworks to present your ideas in academic essays 2)engage with the ideas of your colleagues and develop your own voice and the confidence to respectfully argue for and against particular theses and ideas while understanding and acknowledging others’ point of views 3) Gain expertise on a particular topic related to your own interest and potential research methodologies and approaches to develop your own research project in the final paper and with the presentations leading up to it. Guest speakers include Pantelis Michelakis (Bristol).

Converting Cultures: Travel, Knowledge, and Identity in Classical and Early Modern Europe Literature

What happens to our own identities and self-conception and of our relation to our own home cultures when we travel? Travelling transforms our perceptions, and it provides us with new knowledge of what we previously took for granted about ourselves, our communities, and our own nation. In this course, we will explore the way in which literary narratives played a role in how Europeans conceive of travel and how notions of the “European” were in large part a result of confrontations with the non-European “other,” and even imagined travels beyond earth, to the sun, moon, other planets. Such narratives were written not only by authors confined to the field of literature, but by natural scientists, religious figures, musicians, and political philosophers. Such diversity of disciplines illustrates the importance they played in cultural history. We will focus on texts from antiquity (such as Homer, Herodotus, Lucian) to the18th century, the era of the Enlightenment or of “early modernity” (texts include Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire). Particular attention will be placed on the Enlightenment, a period with vast influence on concepts and philosophical categories such as free will, destiny, cultural difference, and nationhood. We will be reading texts from a variety of genres – treatises, novels, short stories, epic poetry, epistolary fiction (consisting of letter-exchanges), and philosophy. To place our critical, close readings of literature in a broader historical context we will also integrate the distinctions between periods like the “Enlightenment” or “Humanism” in different European literatures and consider stylistic differences and similarities between different national literatures.

Modern European Literature

This course focuses on key texts of the European literary tradition between the 19th century and the present. Through close reading, students explore the philosophical, political, and ethical issues raised in these texts and learn to situate their concerns in historical context. Sample readings include the works of Franz Kafka, Yoko Tawada, Italo Calvino, Bruno Schulz, and Thomas Mann. Guest speakers include Karolina Watroba (Oxford).

2) Cornell University

Self-designed courses for upperclassmen and graduate students

Technologies of Verse

Poems disrupt and interrupt reading. They make the medium explicit as a figure rather than the ground. For this reason, they have so often been a tool with which to experiment with print, audiovisual, and digital media. In this praxis-oriented course, we will begin with an overview of philological methods for collecting, editing and “making” oral verse. Prior to the invention of writing, oral epics were stored, transmitted and recorded through mnemonic techniques. With the advent of writing and “secondary orality,” oral meters were recorded in writing and transmitted, translated, and re-mediated through manuscripts, scrolls, codices, and books. Next, we will acquaint ourselves with paleography, the method of identifying, describing and analyzing medieval manuscripts, with the example of the oral epic Song of Roland. For the rest of our sessions, we will study a range of poems from the 19th-21st centuries that were at the vanguard of experimenting with and responding to the innovative media technologies of their times. A major emphasis will be on Stefan George and Stéphane Mallarmé’s experimentations with the book and Kurt Schwitters’s work with the radio. Topics include typography and design in Dadaist journals and magazines; French Symbolism and music; German verse (Gottfried Benn, Schwitters) and sound technology; algorithmic verse such as Oulipo; Baudelaire’s engagement with 19th century media technologies such as photography, newspapers, pre-cinematic devices in his prose poems. We will continually analyze the political implications of the readability (and audibility) of the formats, materials, and technologies through which verse is mediated vis-a-vis the publics they include and exclude.

The course was cross-listed in German Studies, Visual Studies and Romance Studies.

Sounds of Literature

"When we speak, we think of our voice as natural to us. This course will interrogate the basis of this assumption by focusing on the voice as a trained cultural technique.  In this course, we will look at the history of this topic from Plato to Nietzsche through close critical readings of literary and philosophical depictions of listening and acoustic performances up to and prior to the age of the phonograph. How did philosophers, pastors, and poets describe, observe, imagine sound before sounds could be recorded? Were there particular modes of listening or speaking more appropriate for the “right” kind of literary or philosophical understanding? How did listening intersect with the visual apprehension of the printed page, painting or sculpture? How do vocal techniques construct either a national culture or other types of communities? I will guide students in analyzing literary and philosophical depictions of sound from Plato’s Ion to Kleist’s novellas. The course was cross-listed in German Studies and Comparative Literature.

Cult of the Silent Woman: Male Fantasies in 18th Century German Thought

Idealized representations of women proliferated in the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophy, visual arts, dramaturgy, and literature. In this course we will interrogate how and why Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries’ concepts of aesthetics were illustrated, explicated and represented through the female body in its various configurations. What kinds of rhetorical maneuvers were employed to explicate the pleasurable, the beautiful, the virtuous and the sublime? In addition to the visual dimension of the female body, we will study the regulation and training of female actresses voice and gestures to analyze how they complicate or enable women’s silence. Besides Goethe and Schiller, we will read texts by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Immanuel Kant, Novalis and essays, texts and memoirs by female actresses, writers and poets such as Sophie Mereau, Rahel Vernagen Brentano, Charlotte Ackermann, Karoline von Günderrode and Anna Maria Kirsch. We will analyze literary depictions of women in the visual arts, such as the tableaux vivants (living paintings) scene in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities] and his writings as director of the Weimar theater to discuss how male spectatorialship of the female body constructed the more generalized and abstract philosophies of representation and aesthetics in this period. We will visit the Johnson Museum of Artand the Rare and Manuscript Collections and introduced students to historical material artifacts. Readings and discussions were in German, and the course was cross-listed in German Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Readings and Discussions in German.

Princeton University

Preceptor for Wendy Belcher’s “Growing up Global: Novels and Memoirs of Transnational Childhoods”

In this writing-intensive course for undergraduates, I led two discussion sections of this course, grading 30 students’ critical essays and creative memoirs. The course was cross-listed in African American Studies and Comparative Literature.

Full Sequence of German language courses

As a doctoral student in Princeton’s German Department, I taught the full sequence of German language courses (beginners, intermediate, and advanced). The advanced course was a discussion oriented course with a focus on the writings of Franz Kafka.