Fall 2018
REL 200A
Allison Coudert
Mondays, 3:10-6:00PM
Sproul 922
Consideration of the historical and philosophical formation of religion as a concept. Treats the emergence of religion as a category of analysis and understanding from the Reformation through the Enlightenment.
REL 210C
Eva Mroczek
MWF, 1:10-2:00
Sex and Gender in the Bible- Gender and sexuality in the Bible and its interpretation in Judaism and Christianity. Femininity and masculinity; gender roles; homosexuality; sexual violence. Historical origins in the ancient world; influence on contemporary views.
Winter 2019
REL 200B-Foundational Theories of Religion
Seth Sanders
Thursdays, 12:10-3:00P
Sproul 922
This course asks, what is the distinctive role of Religious Studies in the academy; that is, what is it able to tell us that other disciplines cannot? Our angle on the question is the very widespread human phenomenon of sacrifice. We will examine some classic and neglected theories from four angles:
1.The history of the comparative study of religion as a series of arguments over sacrifice
2.Sacrifice as a form of giving and sharing, a tool for forming bonds, that also creates loss via destruction
3.Sacrifice as performative, revealed through language and cognition, vs. sacrifice as material, revealed through archaeology
4.Sacrifice as suffering and trauma vs. sacrifice as skilled culinary activity
REL 210A-Special Topics in American Religious Cultures
Elizabeth Freeman
Wednesday, 12:10-3:00P
Voorhies 248
This course will examine several religious movements in the late 18th and 19th century United States that emerged from the Second Great Awakening—the Shakers, the Mormons, the Oneidians, and the Spiritualists—especially as they were framed by their detractors. We will be particularly invested in how these groups reimagined sexuality and kinship, how they eventually staked their claim to citizenship and acceptance through adhering to white and heterosexual gender norms, and how U.S. secularism operated by casting mainline Protestantism as common sense and other religions as “too religious,” meaning racially and sexually suspect. Beginning with a background examination of the Second Great Awakening and the “Burned Over District” in upstate New York in the early 19th century, we will then move back in time to the 1780s migration of the Shakers and their bid for whiteness through liturgical dance; the rise of Mormonism as a theory of the unfallen body and the Mormons’ attempts to distance themselves from Native American kinship forms; the Oneida Community’s transformation from advocates of “complex marriage” to sellers of bridal silverware, and the Spiritualists’ gender-bending, homoerotic, and interracial theories of transcorporeality. While we will explore some of the theology of each of these groups, we will be most interested in them as threats to the process by which the mainstream United States, tightly winding civic life to Protestant tenets while claiming not to establish a church, also constructed secularism as a sexual and racial project. Reading will be interdisciplinary, including theology, literary fiction, secondary historical accounts, theories of secularism, and visual images.
- Tentative list of readings:
- Primary Literary Texts:
- On the Second Great Awakening: Charles Grandison Finney, Religious Revivals, selections
On the Shakers: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Redwood, selections
On the Oneidians: Tirzah Miller, Herrick, Desire and Duty: Tirzah Miller’s Intimate Memoir; William Dean Howells, The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors, selections
On the Mormons: Metta Victoria Fuller, Mormon Wives, selections; The Writings of Joseph Smith, selections; The Book of Mormon, selections
On the Spiritualists: Henry James, The Bostonians
Secondary Readings
Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District, selections
Conforti, Joseph. "The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795–1842". Early American Literature (1991): 99–118.
Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America, selections
John Gordon Davies et. al, A Shaker Dance Service Reconstructed
Mary Marshall Dyer, A Portraiture of Shakerism
Selections from apostate Shaker literature
Peter Coviello, The Mormon Century, selections
Nancy Bentley, “Marriage as Treason: Polygamy, Nation, and the Novel.”
Ellen Wayland-Smith, Oneida: From Free-Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table
Selections from the digitized Oneida Community Collection at Syracuse University
Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of 19th-century America, selections.
Images of spirit-photography from Clément Chéroux, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occul
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, selections
Sabha Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, selections
Mark Noll, America’s God, selections
John Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, selections
Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden, eds., Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference, selections
REL 230B-Thematic Topics - Language, Rhetoric, and Performance
Flagg Miller
Tuesdays, 1:10-4:00P
Sproul 922
Ideals of freedom have long informed what it means to be religious. They have also accompanied and transformed hierarchies of material power that make emancipation contingent on histories of domination and violence. With special attention to global Protestantism and its relations to modernity, this course explores the contribution of religious freedom – a discourse, a performance, an ideology, a virtue as well as a peril – to understandings of rationality, sovereignty, citizenship and, of course, categories of religion themselves. In order to excavate the ways in which religious freedom has racial and gendered legacies indebted to developments in the West, in particular, we will devote special attention to readings on the topic by scholars focusing on non-Christian communities that extend across the Global South.
Spring 2019
REL 200C-Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion
Eva Mroczek
Wednesdays, 1:10-4:00P
Sproul 922
This is the final class in the 200-series of required courses for graduate students. The goal of the class is to prepare you to write and speak about religion in a way that:
a) is clear even to people who are not in your subfield;
b) helps you balance collaboration and critique in order to become part of a larger intellectual community, making a distinctive new contribution that fully recognizes the role and value of other participants in the field;
c) makes people want to read or hear more about your ideas—and remember your contribution.
We will work toward these goals by practicing several genres beyond the research paper that scholars of religion need to master: a book review, a conference paper/public lecture/job talk, and a short essay for a broader audience. This work is not separate from research but symbiotic with it, putting your rigorous, peer-reviewed work in dialogue with the questions that motivate it and the audiences that will support it and benefit from it. Throughout, we will study the work of key scholars and writers on religion who will serve us as models and interlocutors.
Working on these projects will help you develop your own voice as a scholar and articulate your project clearly and concisely. These skills will position you well for presenting at conferences, applying for funding, and planning for the job market in both research and teaching institutions, as well as the wider world where good research, new ideas, and convincing expression are always valued.
REL 210C-Special Topics in Mediterranean Religious Cultures -an We Talk?: The Semiotics of Dialogism in Ritual
Naomi Janowitz
Tuesdays, 1:10-4:00P
Sproul 922
While the course focuses on semiotic modes of analysis, the course is offered as REL 210C since the examples of rituals will be taken from ancient Mediterranean religions.
Weeks 1-2: Peirce’s path to linguistic ideologies
The Second Trichotomy also informs several foundational texts by Silverstein, who draws on the ‘‘Peircean framework’’ (1985: 217) to distinguish two broad kinds of function in language, the pragmatic and the semantic, which roughly correspond to indexical and symbolic grounds of the Sign-to-Object relationship. The pragmatic(-indexical) function pertains to the meaningfulness of linguistic signs as they are connected to ‘‘ongoing usage in contexts of communication’’ (1985: 217), and the semantic(-symbolic) function labels the abstract context-free relations among senses, the regularity of which across uses constitutes the synchronic structure of language (‘‘grammar’’). Thus, again adhering closely to Peircean conceptualization, Silverstein quickly points out that, while semantic meaningfulness must be instantiated in spoken tokens of general types — resulting in contextually realized linguistic forms — the meaningfulness of these does not depend on indexical factors. Correlatively, linguistic signs functioning along the pragmatic plane, like their semantic counterparts, are legisigns in that spoken utterances are tokens of general types, even though their rule of use requires the calculation of parameters from their contextual realization. Additionally, Silverstein invokes the Third Trichotomy to distinguish dicent and rhematic types of referential functioning, noting that dicent or ‘‘true reference’’ presupposes the entity picked out without characterizing it in any way, which is the domain of rhematic or ‘‘attributive reference’’ (1985: 218).
Parmentier “The Trouble with Trichotomies”
Readings:
Parmentier, Richard. Signs in Society Part 1 Foundations of Peircean Semiotics
Part 2 Signs in Ethnographic Context “The Semiotic Regimentation of Social Life” pp. 125-155
Weeks 3-4: From Linguistic Ideology to Semiotic Ideology
Silverstein, Michael. "Shifters, linguistic categories and cultural description."
“Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life."
Keane, Webb. “On Semiotic Ideology” Signs and Society Vol 6, No.1 Winter 2018
Wertsch, James. “Prerequisites” and “A Sociocultural Approach to Mind” Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action
Parmentier, Richard “Troubles with trichotomies: Reflections on the utility of Peirce’s sign trichotomies for social analysis” Semiotica 177–1/4 (2009), 139–155.
Weeks 5-6: Mapping Dialogism with an Eye on the Semiotics of Culture
It is a question of the role played by the second voice when we talk to ourselves. In most instances, this second voice lived y the individual confronting his or her own norm. A second instance puts together two voices with equal status such a situation implies that one feels that one belongs to two social groups at the same time, and that the conflict between them has not yet been decided by history. In finally, in a third instance, the second voice does not occupy a stable position but consists in an incoherent series of reactions exclusively determined by the circumstances of the moment, then the human being in question has lost his frame of reference, his appurtenance to a definite group, and is in danger of losing his mind.
Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin The Dialogical Principle
Bakhtin, M.M. “Problems of Speech Genres." Speech Genres and Other Late Essays.
“Methodology for Human Sciences” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Wertsch, James. “Beyond Vygotsky: Bakhtin’s Contribution,” “The Multivoicedness of
Meaning” and “The Heterogeneity of Voice” Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action
Priel, B. “Bahktin and Winnicott: On Dialogue, Self, and Cure” (1999).
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 9(4):487-503
Parmentier, Richard. The Pragmatic Semiotics of Culture. Pp. 1-30
Weeks 7 Not What we Can Say but What we Must Say
Wertsch, James “Sociocultural Setting, Social Langauges, and Mediated Action” from
Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action.
Parmentier, Richard. The Pragmatic Semiotics of Culture. Pp. 31-89
Weeks 8 Dialogism in Ritual (with an eye still on semiotics of culture)
The two basic functions [Lotman] sees text fulfilling are to ‘convey meanings adequately, and to generate meanings’…Lotman argues that this second, dialogic function of text is more interesting than the univocal function for the semiotic study of culture. M. Wertsch Voices of the Mind
Greg Urban "Entextualization, Replication, and Power." In Natural Histories of Discourse,
M. Silverstein and G. Urban, (eds.), pp. 21-44. University of Chicago Press
"Ceremonial Dialogues in South America." in American Anthropologist 88 (Jun., 1986), pp. 371-386
Du Bois, J. “Interior Dialogues: The Co-Voicing of Ritual in Solitude”
Week 9 Analyzing the results of our workshop examples
REL 231B-Theories of Language
Meaghan O'Keefe
Mondays, 2:10-5:00P
Sproul 922
REL 231B: Theories of Language
This course introduces graduate students to the relevant background in order to understand the ways in which post-modern and post-structuralist theory have formed in reaction to prior ideologies of language. An appreciation of the different ways language has been imagined in Western intellectual history is a prerequisite to fully understanding the corresponding ideologies of power and knowledge. This course gives an overview of historical ideas about what language is, and how language works, and how it achieves meaning.
Selected Readings
Plato’s Cratylus
Stoics on Logic and Semantics
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
Willaim Tyndale. “The Four Senses of Scripture” from The Obedience of a Christian Man
Thomas More, selections from A Dialogue Concerning Heresies.
Selections from Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning
Selections from the Port Royal Grammar
Selections from Locke, Condillac
Selections from Humboldt, The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind
Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language
Saussure A Course in General Linguistics