ANTH 351 - Language and Expressive Culture

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This seminar provides the advanced student with an intensive investigation of theoretical and practical problems in specific areas of research that relate language and linguistics to expressive activity. Although emphasizing linguistic modes of analysis and argumentation, the course is situated at the intersection of important intellectual crosscurrents in the arts, humanities, and social sciences that focus on how culture is produced and projected through not only verbal, but also musical, material, kinaesthetic, and dramatic arts. Each topic culminates in independent research projects.

Topic for 2013/14b: Discourse & Subjectivity. This class introduces students to research and theory about the relationship between divergent patterns of language usage (i.e., “discourse”) and culturally local forms of thinking, feeling, and identifying (i.e., “subjectivity”). After a brief introduction to the origins of this question (in particular, its origins in the work of the anthropological linguist Benjamin Whorf), we take up a series of topics that illuminate the variety of ways in which discourse gets implicated in subjectivity: the relationships between language and affect, person reference and identity, narrative and self, and reported speech and social identity, among other topics. Students will write a major research paper in which they explore some issue related to the relationship between discourse and subjectivity. May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed. Mr. Smith.

Prerequisite(s): previous coursework in linguistics or permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.