This seminar offers a chance to read and reflect on several influential works which have shaped contemporary understandings of space, place, the environment, and modernity at large. The course traces two pivotal movements in French and Francophone critical theory: [1] the “spatial turn” wherein modernity is associated with the experience of life in urban spaces in works by Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Marc Augé, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau, and [2] a wider “ecological turn” that spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and looks beyond Paris to non-urban spaces and the Francophone world when conceptualizing human experience. The latter “tradition” encompasses thinkers from Bruno Latour and Simone De Beauvoir to Édouard Glissant, Françoise Vergès, Felwine Sarr, and Achille Mbembe. Over the semester, we will closely read landmark and lesser-known texts from both of these “turns” in critical theory including Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, Augé's Non-Places, Bourdieu's Distinction, Mbembe and Nuttall's The Elusive Metropolis and Felwine Sarr's Afrotopia. 

Students will also have the opportunity to propose additional texts (including literary works and other cultural objects) not included in the core syllabus. This seminar is open to graduate students across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Most of the works to be studied flout disciplinary boundaries between literature, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. Students seeking acquaintance with or with existing interests in literary theory, ecocriticism, urban theory, or social scientific theories of space and the environment will find this course particularly relevant. English translations of weekly readings will be made available and class discussion will also take place in English.

This class is a meet-together with FRENCH 680.