In Time Regained—the final, unfinished volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—World War I is inescapable. Proust’s magnum opus, begun in 1913, already bore the scars of modernity, but the War sounded the death knell of the rarified life he had known in his childhood. Yet, Time Regained is not merely about nostalgia or loss, even as it describes the ravages and reversals precipitated by war. It also concerns the problems of social form, the question of how art and artists are made, the way a form of life collapses, how to get on in a modern world, and the theory of involuntary memory Proust had been developing since the novel’s earliest drafts. ...

In 1990, Mike Davis published a book about his hometown, Los Angeles—“the city that American intellectuals love to hate.” City of Quartz depicted Los Angeles as a site of never-ending social war, where each new subdivision represented a desperate, self-undermining race to claim what he called the “Southern California Dream”—a dream rooted in whiteness, exclusion, anti-urbanism, and, ultimately, subordination to business and to the prerogatives of the rich. A New York Times reviewer, unable to dismiss Davis’s analytical acumen, nonetheless pronounced it “all a bit much.” Yet, more than any other book, City of Quartz created a generation of radical urbanists and is today regarded as among the most important books ever written about Los Angeles, or indeed any North American city. ...

Aesthetics is central to Kant’s philosophical project. In judging a thing to be beautiful, Kant maintained, we bridge “the great gulf” between nature and human freedom, and prepare ourselves to “love something, even nature, without interest”—that is, to exercise moral judgment. Immensely influential in its time, the so-called “third Critique” inspired and gave energy to both German Idealism, which attempted to provide a rational and holistic account of the unity of all of things, and German Romanticism, which emphasized loss, longing, and the fragmentary. How can we understand Kant’s approach to art and aesthetics today? ...

Today, it seems scarcely possible to speak of late capitalism without citing baneful examples of its spatial manifestations—the soullessness of Hudson Yards; the Grenfell Tower disaster; the (lethal to build) Qatari World Cup stadiums; aestheticized server farms and data centers. But how, precisely, does architecture register, reproduce, and respond to the logic of global, financialized capital—materially, formally, ideologically, and in its management and use? How does it participate in the instabilities and crises that characterize life under late capitalism, from climate change to epidemics to the militarization of everyday life?

The Iliad stands at the start of most histories of western literature, even as it remains enduringly strange—often, it seems, at odds with the very tradition it has been taken to inaugurate. In this course, we will read closely the entirety of Homer’s “poem of force,” attempting to recapture both some of its strangeness and its continued relevance. We’ll focus, too, on the following themes: the hero and his commemoration; the relations of men and women, of men and men, of humans, gods, and animals; exile and rebellion; violence and the making of epic art; the recompenses and failures of culture itself. How did an oral tradition of heroic poetry, enacted by singing bards for hundreds of years, coalesce into the written Iliad that we now know? ...