Syllabus 2026-27
This year's module will be taught by 5 different staff members, allowing students to benefit from a variety of critical approaches and interests (see below for details). The module Convenor is Daniel Katz, so please contact Dan if you have any immediate questions or problems (d.katz@warwick.ac.uk). Note: the information below is provisional, and subject to minor modification.
WEEK ONE: GENERAL INTRODUCTION and PSYCHOANALYSIS AND REVOLUTION (Daniel Katz)
Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar, Preface and Introduction, Psychoanalysis and Revolution, 1968 Press, 2021 (handout)
David Pavón-Cuéllar, "Metapsychology on the Battlefield," in Samo Tomsic and Andreja Zevnik, reds, Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, Routledge, 2016 (available as e-text through library portal).
WEEK TWO: SEMIOCAPITALISM, LANGUAGE, DEBT (DK)
Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Semiotexte, 2012, pp. 7-70 (handout).
Alex McPhee-Browne, "Empire of Signs," Los Angeles Review of Books, July 12, 2026.
WEEK THREE: RETRO (Michael Gardiner)
Katy Shaw, Hauntology (2018), 1-23, 105-110
Mark Fisher, ‘The metaphysics of crackle’ (2011)
François J. Bonnett, Après la mort / After Death (2021/ 2017), 11-22
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism (2024), 17-28, 63-76
WEEK FOUR: SHANZHAI (MG)
Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Dekonstruktion auf Chinesisch (2011)/ Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese (2017), 60-78
Anna Greenspan, China and the Wireless Undertow (2023), 116-149
Xin Wang, ‘Machine Envy’ (2025)
WEEK 5: THEOLOGY AND THEORY (I) (Emma Mason)
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias (1142-1151), extracts (via email)
Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry, 8. 4 (1982), 777-795 [online in library]
Julia Kristeva, ‘Approaching Abjection’, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982/2024), 1-32 [online in library]
Michael Marder, ‘Prelude’, in Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St Hildegard of Bingen (Stanford University Press, 2021), 3-8 [online in library]
Further reading: Clayton Crockett and Catherine Keller, eds., Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene (Fordham University Press, 2022); and Ilia Delio, ‘Transhumanism and Transcendence’, in Beth Singler and Fraser Watts, The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
WEEK 6: THEOLOGY AND THEORY (II) (EM)
Raymond Carver, ‘Cathedral’ (1981)
John 9, ‘Jesus Heals a Man Born Blind’ (NIV Bible) [online, Bible Gateway]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility’ and ‘The Body as Expression and Speech’, in Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 1945), part I, chapters 3 and 6 [online in library]
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Exteriority and the Face’, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Springer, 1961), section III [online in library]
Further reading: D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Blind Man’ (1922); Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins(University of Chicago Press, 1993)
WEEK SEVEN: ECOCRITICAL THEORY (Emily McGiffin)
Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain.”
J. Drew Lanham, “Birding While Black”
William Cronin, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature“
Jordan Abel, Un/inhabited (excerpts)
WEEK EIGHT: POSTCOLONIAL ECOCRITICISM (EMc)
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.
WEEK NINE: QUEER THEORY: SEMINAL WORKS (Ross Forman)
Foucault, Michel. “The Repressive Hypothesis.” The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. Pantheon Books, 1978. pp.16-35. [library or online at https://suplaney.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/foucault-the-history-of-sexuality-volume-1.pdf]
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer and Now.” Tendencies. Duke UP, 1999. pp.1-22. [online in library]
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader. Duke UP, 2004. p.134-150. [online in library]
Recommended:
Halberstam, Jack. "Making Trans Bodies," Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability*. University of California Press, 2018. pp. 22-44.
Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex,” Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Duke UP, 2011. pp. 137-181.
WEEK 10: THE USES OF THE QUEER ARCHIVE (RF)
Rodriquez, Jesusa, and Liliane Felipe, “Juana la larga,” https://hemisphericinstitute.org/es/enc14-performances/item/2330-enc14-performances-rodriguez-felipe-juana.html [online video]
Taylor, Diana “We Have Always Been Queer,” GLQ, vol 22, no 2, 2006, pp.205–214. [online in library]
María Elena Martínez, “Archives, Bodies, and Imagination: The Case of Juana Aguilar and Queer Approaches to History, Sexuality, and Politics,” Radical History Review, vol. 120, 2014, pp.159-182 [online in library]
Recommended:
Martinez, Juliana. “Dressed Like a Man? Of Language, Bodies, and Monsters in the Trial of Enrique/Enriqueta Favez and Its Contemporary Accounts,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 26, no. 2, 2017, pp.188-206. [online in library]
Manion, Jen. “Introduction: Extraordinary Lives,” Female Husbands: A Trans History. pp. 1-14.