ENGL 559 A: Literature And Other Disciplines

The "Culture" of the Social Sciences

The course will introduce students to the debates about the status of 'culture' and especially cultural methods within the social sciences, especially as those debates pertain to knowledge about racial, sexual, gender, and class inequalities. We'll then explore varying methods developed by current scholars in the humanities to engage the social sciences and to intervene into the consolidation of social scientific knowledges about inequality. The course's point of departure will be both Kant's "Conflict of Faculties" written in the moment of the birth of the German university and the Gulberkian Commission's "Open the Social Sciences" written at the end of the twentieth century in the aftermath of the globalization of the U.S. university, which took as its model in the early twentieth century the German university that Kant presciently addressed.