Time: T/Th 2:45
Locale: CC 22
Office Hours: to be announced
Office: CC 20
Email: brownkm@millsaps.edu
Phone: 974-1323 (o) 353-3704 (h)

Objectives:

The purpose of this course is for students to develop an expanded set of tools for questioning and understanding what it means to have or 'live' a body. More specifically, students are to achieve an in-depth understanding of a tradition of twentieth-century philosophy called phenomenology, and to see how a phenomenological concept of body contrasts with a traditional enlightenment and scientific concept of body. Our goal will be have the distinction, between a phenomenological and enlightenment concept of body, clarify each of our own aspirations for how we want to live and experience ourselves and others. Our purpose, then, is for you to discern ways of being that make you feel most yourself, or most as you would want yourself to be, or how you hope to be and to fortify such this discernment with your own critique of theoretical schemas that we study. In order to bring into view aspects of your embodied experience, we will focus on three extreme body contexts: tortured body, disabled body and battered body.

Description:

We will begin this course by developing a deep and nuanced understanding of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, which was first published in French in 1945. Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) is one of the first philosophers to prioritize the significance of the body, for human experience. Next, we will draw on our phenomenological theories of body, as well as our inherited enlightenment (linear causality, subject-object dualism) theories, in order to critique philosophical texts with respect to three body topics: the tortured body, the disabled body and the battered body.
We will devote the first nine weeks of the course to understanding Phenomenology of Perception. This understanding will not come easily and it will involve some background lecturing by me on philosophical ideas of Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Henri Bergson, Edmund Hussurl, and Martin Heidegger.
We will focus on Phenomenology of Perception for several reasons. First, it is gradually being recognized by many philosophers as one of the most rich and effective philosophical arguments addressing the significance of the body, for human experience. It is especially known for revealing the body, self, and world in a manner that challenges assumptions imbedded in a web that includes Cartesian dualism, Galileo-Newtonian mechanistic logic and industrial- enlightenment epistemology. These are assumptions that have dominated philosophy and experience in the West since the seventeenth century. Their roots go back to the spread of literacy in the West, as David Abram shall point out for us--that is, to roughly 400 B.C.E. According to Abram, our modern and technological ways of living and being, can be linked to roots beginning to 'dig themselves down', so to speak, in the writings of Plato-writings which coincide with the rise of phonetic writing (or literacy).
Once we have done perhaps the hardest work, that is, interpreting Phenomenology of Perception (and with the added perspective of David Abram), we will turn, armed with the phenomenological fruits of our labor, to critique, analyze and explore three body topics: tortured body, disabled body and battered body. We will be in good shape to do this because we will have at our disposal not only the mainstream enlightenment theory of the body, but also a phenomenological account of the body.
Our exploration of tortured body will involve Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain. Scarry uses a theoretical framework that bears some similarities to phenomenology and to Marxism. She develops a theory of human self, body and world through an understanding physical pain. She turns to extreme cases: wartime torture, and less extreme cases: pain of standing afoot for hours, to make her case. We will ourselves consider how not only such extreme but also less extreme forms of physical pain, experienced by our forbearers and our peers, may directly shape our architectural, perceptual and even sentential (as in sentences!) worlds.
After critiquing a philosophy of body that hinges on an analysis of pain, we will critique several philosophies of body that hinge on an analysis of the so-called "disabled body." Just how different are disabled bodies from non-disabled bodies? At what point does one transform from "abled" to "disabled"? Does the architectural world of Mississippi and the United States reflect and support mainstream stereotypes of the disabled body? Does reflection on the disabled body yield any prisms through which we might view embodiment generally? The two sorts of disabilities on which we will focus, are paralysis and deafness. Analysis "disability" will inevitably raise issues "normalcy." We will consider, by extension, the media sensations of "ideal" bodies and how these entail an outbreak of struggles, for women and men, with their body image.
Our discussion of gender, as it relates to body image, will transition us to our final body topic: battered bodies. For several decades now, academic writing and mainstream media have churned out numerous texts about the objectification of women's bodies and, importantly, with the arrival of books like Susan Bordo's The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (1999), acknowledgement of the complex pressures facing adolescent boys and men. One aspect of gendered body that continues to stand in the shadows of public and academic discourse, however, is that of the battered female body. Not only is this an important topic, in its own right, but it also evens out our attention, in this course, to contexts in which males and females are more likely to be. When we read The Body in Pain, we will notice it focuses on contexts of violence (i.e., war). These traditionally involve men. When we read The Language of Battered Women, we notice that emphasizes contexts of domestic violence, contexts which traditionally involve women. We will read about the lives battered women living in a shelter in the Upper South; and we will consider side-by-side, the issues of sexism and racism, as they converge in the most publicized courtroom trial about domestic violence ever: the O.J. Simpson Trial.

TEXTS TO PURCHASE

Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (PP)
The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram (SS)
The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry (BP)
The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, Susan Wendell (RP)
The Language of Battered Women, Carol Winkelmann (LBB)

ASSIGNMENTS AND EVALUATION

1. Paper #1 2 pages Part of Participation Grade

1. Paper #2 5-7 pages 20%
(w/ rewrite option, best grade sticks)
2. Paper #3 5-7 pages 20%
(w/ optional rewrite, averaging the grades)
3. Paper #4 5-7 pages 20%
(no rewrite option)
4. Paper #5 20%
(no rewrite option)
5 Participation, Paper #1 and Field trip 20%

ATTENDANCE: you are permitted TWO unexcused absences. For every additional unexcused absence your final exam grade will be lowered one-third of a grade. A TOTAL OF FIVE ABSENCES may cause you to FAIL (receive a grade "F" for) the course.

PARTICIPATION: I will note those who come to class prepared having read and who stimulate or contribute fruitfully to discussion. Such habits are good and will pay off in your participation grade in the end!

LATE PAPERS: Unexcused late papers may be docked one full grade for each day they are late. If you foresee conflicts in your schedule, please tell me well ahead of time and I will be happy to grant you an extension. (Ehhh, uhhhhh: one or two days before paper is due is not well ahead of time!)

Daily Schedule (tentative)

T Aug 24 Introduction to the course
Discuss fieldtrip
ASSIGN, today or Thursday, Paper #1, 2 pages.

Th Aug 26 PP vii-xxi; 3-12; SS 1-29

T Aug 31 PP 13-25 and SS 31-44
DUE: Paper #1, 2 pages.

Th Sept 2 PP 26-52; SS 44-72

T Sept 7 PP 67-89

Th Sept. 9 PP 90-120 (you will notice that p. 120 is mid-chapter)
ASSIGN: Paper #2 (5-7 pages)

T Sept 14 PP 120-147

Th Sept. 16 Synthesis day

T Sept. 21 PP 154-173

W Sept 22 DUE: Paper #2 (5-7 pp)-no class meeting. Please place papers under my office door, room CC20 no later than 12:00 noon.

Th Sept. 23 PP 174-199

T Sept 28 SS 93-135; 262-274

Th Sept 30 Synthesis Day

T Oct 5 BP 3-45

Th Oct 7 BP 45-59; 161-180; 181-185
ASSIGN Paper #3 (5-7 pages)

T Oct 12 BP 278-307

Th Oct 14 BP 307-326

T Oct 19 Fall Break

Th Oct 21 Synthesis Day
RECEIVE readings for next week

F Oct 22 DUE: Paper #3 (Please place under my office door, CC20 by 12:00 noon)

T Oct 26 "The Need for Disability Studies"; RB 11-56

Th Oct 28 To be announced

T Nov 2 RB 57-116
RECEIVE readings for next week

Th Nov 4 "Construction of Deafness"; "Towards a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body: Sign Language and Literary Theory";
ASSIGN: Paper #4 (5-7 pages)

T Nov 9 RB 139-179

Th Nov 11 Synthesis Day
RECEIVE handouts with readings.

T Nov 16 Evaluations (today or Thursday); "An All White Jury: Judging Citizenship in the Simpson Criminal Trial"; LBB 1-13

Th Nov 18 LBB 15-52

F Nov 19 DUE: Paper #4 under my office door, CC20 by noon.

T Nov. 23 LBB 53-78; "The Menchu Effect: Strategic Lies and Approximate Truths in Texts of Witness"
ASSIGN: Paper #5, 5-7 pp

Th Nov 25 Thanksgiving Holiday

T Nov 30 Synthesis Day

Th Dec 2 Course Synthesis and Concluding Remarks

W Dec. 8 DUE: Paper #5 under my office door, CC 20, by noon.