What does it mean to think in public? How is public thought different from other kinds of thinking? When and how do public figures intervene in public life? How do they align themselves with social movements and cultural moments? Is it the responsibility of the thinker to be accessible? To persuade? Or to resist the jargon of a false society? On whose behalf does one speak when one speaks in public? And to whom? In this course offers students a series of case studies of public thinkers from Europe and America from the nineteenth century to the present who have adopted a range of approaches to both the philosophy and practice of thinking in public. Potential readings include: Heidegger, Marx, Arendt, Strauss, Ellison, Sartre, and Sontag.
This course studies the contemporary significance and influence of the group of Marxist scholars who came together in the 1920s to found the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as it came to be known, brought together social theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and anthropology to analyze questions as disparate as popular culture, authoritarianism, consumerism, and the politics of art. By pairing the thinkers' general audience texts with contemporary authors influenced by them, we will consider the school's complicated relationship to the social movements of the mid-century, while also exploring the example they set as "public intellectuals" and what light their approach, as thinkers and stylists, can shed on the political and cultural problems of the present.
It is said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. What then does it mean to be a public intellectual in America? This course surveys the changing position of the public intellectual in American life, from the colonial era to the present. We will identify and discuss the key ideas and fault lines of American intellectual life, taking stock of the confluence, as well as the conflicts, between intellectuals and the culture of their time: from Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening, to James Baldwin and the Civil Rights movement, to Peter Thiel and the digital revolution. The class culminates in a writing unit where students will cultivate their particular base of academic knowledge into a public intervention of their own.
Is there an aesthetics particular to fascism? And why does the imagery associated with the fascist movements of the early twentieth century continue to hold such power today? To answer these questions, this course will offer a survey of fascist and fascist-sympathetic artworks in Europe and America from the 1920s to the present. Looking at literature, paintings, music, architecture, and mass media, we will analyze European's fascism's cultural policies, its relationship to past artistic movements, and their recurrence, alongside new fascist aesthetics, in the post-war period and up to the present day. The class culminates with students evaluating a contemporary work of art in light of these concepts.
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century. She was and remains known for her extensive, stylistically dazzling essays on art, politics, and culture. This course examines Sontag's major essays, as well as her personal writing, her fiction, and her public appearances. We will also examine Sontag as a model of the "serious" thinker, who refuses to have their public contributions disciplined by the needs of any larger political or social group. While working out Sontag's particular stances and contributions to literature, art, and cultural criticism, we will use her as a lens to consider the changing role of the public intellectual during her lifetime.