Imre Szeman

Teaching

I’ve taught courses on a wide-range of subjects since starting my first full-time position at McMaster University in 1999.

At the undergraduate level, I’ve taught courses on Cultural Studies and Visual Culture; Cultural Studies: History, Theory, Practice; Globalization and Visual Culture; History and Theory of Criticism; Inquiry in the Social Sciences; Literature and Film; Modern Critical Theory; Reading Politics: Class and Ideology; and Reading the Tube: Television and Cultural Studies.

At the graduate level, courses include: The Frankfurt School; Globalization and Culture; Issues in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory; Karl Marx; Literary History: Collectivity; Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory; and Postcolonial Literary Theory.

I’ve also taught courses on Globalization and Mass Culture at the University of Sao Paulo; The Future of Culture: American Studies and Cultural Theory at Humboldt University in Berlin; Introduction to Cultural Studies at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) in Mexico City; and Culture as Resource: Culture and Democracy in the Global System at Central European University in Budapest.

Courses for 2012-2013

The French philosopher and intellectual historian Michel Foucault was one of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth-century. Perhaps his most significant contribution to intellectual thought and critical cultural analysis has been his re-framing of our understanding of power. In works such as Discipline and Punish (1977, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1977, Histoire de la sexualité 1: la volonté de savoir, 1976) Foucault argued persuasively for the need to view power in modern societies as decentred and as having no ‘outside’. The impact of these propositions on theories of power and the practice of political movements (and the critical orientation of literary and cultural studies, too) have been enormous. How does one challenge power if it is all-around us in capillary form? How should we think about freedom if our dreams and desires—that is, our very selves as subjects—are of necessity constituted by systems of power? What does Foucault’s view of modern power imply for our understanding of emancipation and of the nature of sovereignty, collectivity and belonging? And how might it re-orient our critical methods and approaches?

The posthumous publication of lectures offered by Foucault at the end of his life offers a new vantage point on his ideas about power. The concepts of “biopolitics” and “biopower” now in use by scholars across the humanities and social sciences were first developed in lecture series offered by Foucault at the Collège de France between 1975 and 1984, a number of which are now available in English translation. This course will examine Foucault’s ideas of power by working through five of the lecture series in some detail. We will look closely at his ideas of society, governmentality, biopower, biopolitics, and the care of the self, and consider the ways in which these concepts might shape our views and thinking about politics and culture in the modern period. In addition to reading Foucault, we will also look at texts influenced by his work, especially recent works of cultural criticism and philosophy that draw on his Collège de France lectures.

This course will give students a stronger sense of Foucault’s ideas as well as providing them with a genealogy of French intellectual thought as it develops in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Students will not be expected to focus their final papers on Foucault and his ideas, but may pursue inquiries related more closely to their own research in light of the insights opened up by our collective analysis of these texts.

READINGS:
François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (2008)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
—-. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I
—-. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976
—-. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78
—-. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979
—-. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982
—-. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982-1983

COURSE SCHEDULE (Tentative):
January 7 – Introduction: One, Two, Many Foucaults?
January 14 – Discipline and Punish
January 21, 28 – Society Must Be Defended
February 4, 11 – Security, Territory, Population
February 25, March 4 – The Birth of Biopolitics
March 11, 18 – Hermeneutics of the Subject
March 25, April 9 – The Government of the Self

Past Graduate Courses (@ U of Alberta)