This course focuses on novels and films from the last twenty-five years (nominally 1985–2010) marked by their relationship to extreme violence and transgression. Our texts will focus on serial killers, torture, rape, and brutality, but they also explore notions of American history, gender and sexuality, and reality television—sometimes, they delve into love or time or the redemptive role of art in late modernity. Our works are a motley assortment, with origins in the U.S., France, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Japan and South Korea. The broad global era marked by this period is one of acceleration, fragmentation, and late capitalism; however, we will also consider national specificities of violent representation, including particulars like the history of racism in the United States, the role of politeness in bourgeois Austrian culture, and the effect of Japanese manga on vividly graphic contemporary Asian cinema.
We will explore the politics and aesthetics of the extreme; affective questions about sensation, fear, disgust, and shock; and problems of torture, pain, and the unrepresentable. We will ask whether these texts help us understand violence, or whether they frame violence as something that resists comprehension; we will consider whether form mitigates or colludes with violence. Finally, we will continually press on the central term in the title of this course: what, specifically, is violence? (Can we only speak of plural “violences”?) Is violence the same as force? Do we know violence when we see it? Is it something knowable or does it resist or even destroy knowledge? Is violence a matter for a text’s content—who does what, how, and to whom—or is it a problem of form: shock, boredom, repetition, indeterminacy, blankness? Can we speak of an aesthetic of violence? A politics or ethics of violence? Note the question that titles our last week: Is it the case that we are what we see? If so, what does our obsession with ultraviolence mean, and how does contemporary representation turn an accusing gaze back at us?

This course analyzes theories of gender and politics, especially ideologies of gender and their construction. Also discussed are definitions of public and private spheres, gender issues in citizenship, the development of the welfare state, experiences of war and revolution, class formation, and the politics of sexuality.
Graduate students are expected to pursue the subject in greater depth through reading and individual research.

This course examines the definition of gender in scientific, societal, and historical contexts. It explores how gender influences state formation and the work of the state, what role gender plays in imperialism and in the welfare state, the ever-present relationship between gender and war, and different states’ regulation of the body in gendered ways at different times. It investigates new directions in the study of gender as historians, anthropologists and others have taken on this fascinating set of problems.

This course examines relationships between identity and participation in Japanese popular culture as a way of understanding the changing character of media, capitalism, fan communities, and culture. It emphasizes contemporary popular culture and theories of gender, sexuality, race, and the workings of power and value in global culture industries. Topics include manga (comic books), hip-hop and other popular music, anime and feature films, video games, contemporary literature, and online communication. Students present analyses and develop a final project based on a particular aspect of gender and popular culture.

Hearts of Men have been running community-based mentoring programmes, bringing older and younger men together in support circles in the Western Cape from 2001 to 2021. The approach and the materials included in this manual have been tried and tested in many different communities, working with diverse groups of men/young men, aged between 15 and 70 years. SIx experiential training courses for men and young men are covered in Parts One and Two of this manual. For more background information on Hearts of Men, and a detailed description of our work, please refer to our book In the Hearts of Men (published in 2015). Details are given at the end of this manual.

Hearts of Men have been running community-based mentoring programmes, bringing older and younger men together in support circles in the Western Cape from 2001 to 2021. The approach and the materials included in this manual have been tried and tested in many different communities, working with diverse groups of men/young men, aged between 15 and 70 years. SIx experiential training courses for men and young men are covered in Parts One and Two of this manual. For more background information on Hearts of Men, and a detailed description of our work, please refer to our book In the Hearts of Men (published in 2015). Details are given at the end of this manual.

The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don’t work.

The Wild at Heart Adventure forms part of The Manhood Experience which consists of six experiential training courses. It is the third course in this series and follows In the Heart of a Man (Part one) and Reclaiming Manhood (Part two). The Wild at Heart Adventure (Part three).  In this manual we include only the course content. Please refer to all the introductory comments, preparation notes, debriefing and follow through processes, team building, logistical details, safety procedures, and comments on the use of this material given in the accompanying The Manhood Experience training manual (Part one, course three). This information forms a vital part in the delivery of this course and is not repeated here.