Narrative Thinking
Co-taught by Professors Giulia Sissa and Zrinka Stahuljak
The 2021-2022 seminar on “Comparative Thinking” took the predisposition to think in comparison, and by comparison, as a fundamental way of looking at the world, as it explored non-contiguous, non-continuous, and asymmetrical comparison. Building on these insights, the 2022-2023 seminar on “Narrative Thinking” invites reflection on how different forms, angles, lenses, perspectives, and storylines create, frame, or alter our thinking through the same problematic, thereby shifting the disciplinary and epistemological logics, mechanics, and findings. One of the most challenging claims of psychoanalysis has been that truth is structured like a fiction and that, as Paul Ricoeur would argue, we can only hope to achieve a narrative identity. Narration makes us subjects, both individually and socially.
In recent years, hi/stories have been retold from the perspective of the minor, oppressed, colonized, non-binary, non-hegemonic. This work has exposed how narratives subtend, organize, inflect, and predetermine the way hi/stories are written, thought and taught. Reaching beyond the stance of alternative narratives, “Narrative Thinking” aims to explore non-linear, non-teleological, non-ethnocentric, and non-idealizing narratives. The seminar intends to grapple with multiple, interconnected questions, such as: How do we narrate complexity, can we tell more than one narrative at one time? Can we avoid narrative fallacy, which attributes a large-scale (historical, unprecedented) event to one cause? Can we narrate complex causality, reconcile scale and causality in narrative (small event, major consequences), and narrate in a non-linear fashion? Can a world comparative model accommodate parallel narratives? Can we rely on narrative, not as discourse that organizes human consciousness (Hayden White) or language that structures society (Claude Lévi-Strauss), but as dance, sound poetry, theater, music? Finally, can we avoid the temptation of retrospective predictability – of using the past for the lesson of the present – and instead open the narratives of the past and present to speculative futures, the possible and the potential as opposed to the necessary and instrumental, the descriptive vs. the quantitative, and take narratives as manners of emplotting, embodying, enacting, in order to tell, not the narrative of what was, but what can be. In short, this seminar aims to explore the challenge of narrative complexity as systemic change.
Winter 2023 Guests:
Amy Allen (Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University)
Patrick Boucheron (History, Collège de France)
Yala Kisukidi (Philosophy, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis)
Markus Messling (Romance Literature and Cultural Studies, Universität des Saarlandes)
Mélanie Traversier (History, Université de Lille)
Miguel Valerio (Spanish/Performing Arts, Washington University in Saint Louis)
CL 250A: Narrative Thinking (W23)
Prof. Zrinka Stahuljak
Public Sessions
January 30: “Reparations of the Republic. Champollion and French Universalism”
Markus Messling (Romance Literature and Cultural Studies, Universität des Saarlandes) [Zoom]
February 6: “Black Sovereignty”
Miguel Valerio (Spanish/Performing Arts, Washington University in Saint Louis) [in-person]
Co-sponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies
February 13: “Literary Geopolitics (About Diaspora, Black France, and Wonder)”
Nadia Yala Kisukidi (Philosophy, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis) [Zoom]
Co-sponsored by the French Embassy Center of Excellence at UCLA
February 27: “Political Fictions”
Patrick Boucheron (History, Collège de France) [in-person]
Co-sponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and the French Embassy Center of Excellence at UCLA
March 6: “A Greater History of Music in the Age of Enlightenment: Colonial Gaze and Uses of Non-European Acoustic Objects”
Mélanie Traversier (History, Université de Lille) [in-person]
March 13: “Universality, Necessity, and Progress: Marx and the Problem of History”
Amy Allen (Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University) [in-person]
REQUIRED READINGS FOR WINTER QUARTER
- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, chapters 1-4 from Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology
- Silvia Federici, excerpts from Caliban and The Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
- Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth
- Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
- Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”
- Laurent Olivier, “The Future of Archaeology in the Age of Presentism”
- Isabelle Stengers, “Another Science is Possible: A Plea for Slow Science”
RECOMMENDED READINGS:
- Silvia Federici, excerpts from Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology,” from Structural Anthroplogy
- Jacques Rancière, “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth” and “Anachronism and the Conflict of Times”
- Paul Ricœur, “The Self and Narrative Identity,” from Oneself as Another, https://archive.org/details/oneselfasanother0000ricu/page/n9/mode/2up?view=theater
- Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” from The Content of the Form