Course meetings:  Wednesdays per 9-11
Instructor:    Susan Hegeman
Telephone:  392-6650, x 289
e-mail:   shegeman@english.ufl.edu

"Modernity" is an enormously complex concept, focusing our attention both on a set of fascinating historical, historiographical, and theoretical issues and on a profoundly unsettling lived experience of newness, rupture, and change.  In this course we will read some of the canonical works in the theorization of modernity in order to develop a better understanding of this, and related  concepts, including postmodernity and globalization. Focusing our inquiry into modernity will be the issues of gender and sexuality. The preliminary argument of the course will be twofold: 1) that women are often relatively invisible in the classic accounts of modernity and 2) that it was nevertheless often through questions related to gender and sexuality that the upheavals and anxieties of modernity were registered.  The scope of the course will be broadly international; indeed, the readings are designed to some extent to take us out of the Anglo-American context and into an exploration of continental European and global considerations of these issues.

This course is intended for students working in nineteenth-, twentieth-, century literature and culture who wish to explore broader historical and theoretical frameworks for thinking about issues of gender, sexuality, modernity, and globalization.

Dennis Altman, Global Sex (U Chicago P 0226016056)
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Penguin 0140109625)
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Belknap 0674341945)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, part 1 (Vintage 0679724699)
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (Norton 0-393-30158-3)
Mary Beth Hamilton, When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (U California P 0520210948)
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (Verso 1859844502)
The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker (Norton )
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (U California P 0520059298)
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Trans. T. Parsons (Routledge 0-04-331101-6)
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism:  A Longer View (Verso 1859843921)

All course books are available at the Goering's textbook store ("Books and Bagels").  There are also additional readings, which I will make available for you to photocopy at a time and place to be arranged.
 
 

1. Attendance and active participation in the seminar is expected. You should be prepared to be called upon.

2. You will hand in 25-30 pages of written work over the course of the semester. Depending on your needs and goals for the course, this may be in the form of three short papers of 8-10 pages in length, one long paper, or a long and a short paper. Students choosing to write one long paper should show me a prospectus of 1 page by March 17. I recommend that advanced students working on extended projects related to the course material write one long paper. Students whose goals are to develop a strong familiarity with the material should consider writing shorter papers of a more explicatory sort.

February 4, March 17: recommended dates for turning in short papers.

March 17: prospectuses for longer papers due

April 23: last day to turn in papers and receive comments before the end of the semester

April 29: last day to turn in a paper and receive a GRADE for the semester
 

Course policy on Incompletes: I am willing to let students take Incompletes to have more time to complete a long final research paper. However, in the interest of not excessively prolonging the work of this course, I will accept seminar papers and grade them for full credit until the end of the fall 2004 semester. Students who turn in papers after this date will not receive an "A" in the course.
 

Section 1: Modernity and/or Capitalism

 Week 1 (January 7). Marx,  "The Communist Manifesto"
 Week 2 (January 14). Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air
 Week  3 (January 21). Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View

Section 2: Modernity and Lived Experience

Week 4 (January 28) Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Week 5 (February 4) Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey
Week 6 (February 11) Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

Section 3: Reconsiderations

Week 7 (February 18) no class
Week 8 (February 25) Jameson, A Singular Modernity
Week 9 (March 3) Rey Chow, "Protestant  Ethnic"  and Rubin, "The Traffic  in Women"

Section 4: Modernity, Gender, and Sexuality

Week 10 (March 10) No class: spring break
Week 11 (March 17) Foucault , The History of Sexuality, part 1
Week 12 (March 24) Felski, The Gender of Modernity
Week 13 (March 31) Hamilton, When I'm Bad, I'mBetter: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment
Week 14 (April 7) Altman, Global Sex
Week 15 (April 14) no readings assigned (yet)