GRADUATE COURSE OFFERINGS 2024-2025
**all topics courses can be repeated for credit
Fall 2024
Professor Layne Little
Twilight Language and Apophatic Modes of Mystic Speech
TUESDAY, 2:10-5:00 PM, 922 SPROUL
Building Upon Michael Sells’ Mystical Languages of Unsaying (University of Chicago Press, 1994) this course explores apophatic modes or mystical speech. After examining Sells treatment of Plotinus and Ibn Arabi our study will focus specifically on the works of Asian mystics. Our main emphasis will be on South Asian modes of esoteric speech in India, Nepal and Tibet, which utilize secret tantric dictionaries and coded discourse through English translations of traditional works that are characterized as Sandhyā (or Sandhā) Bhāṣya (“Twilight Language” or “Intentional Speech”), Cūṉiya Camapāsaṇai (“A Dialogue with Emptiness”) of the Tamil Siddhas (Cittarkal), the Beḍagina Vacanas (“Fancy Poems”) of the Viraśaiva saints, and the Ulaṭ Bhāmsi (“The Upside-down Language”) of the bhakti poet Kabir. A special examination with be made of the Doha Kośa and Caryā Gīti poetic collections in an early form of Bengali, which are attributed to the Mahāsiddhas, the architects of Vajrayāna Buddhism. We will then shift to East Asian Literature beginning with Daoist classics of Laozi and Zhuangzi, as well as later Daoist works that explore Neidan (inner alchemy) where the inner body is an allegorical landscape that is transited through meditation, breath manipulation and visualization. Next, we study Sengzhao’s “Wild Words,” a Later Qin Dynasty philosopher and leading student of Kumārajīva. Lastly, we will turn to Ch’an and Zen works examining gongan/koan traditions, along with a host of other Buddhist poets and visual artists that find inventive ways to express their sublime epiphanies in diverse and intriguing ways in both China and Japan.
All texts in English translation.
Winter 2025
REL200B Foundational Theories of Religion
Flagg Miller
This course is an analytical survey of some of the prominent theories and approaches scholars use in the study of religion. Recurring themes in this course include race, gender, reduction versus interpretation, normative versus descriptive approaches, insider versus outsider explanations, and idealism versus materialism.
David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
GER297 Modernism, Spirituality, and Transcendence
Chunjie Zhang
CRN 42411
Wednesday 2:10-5pm
Sproul 412B (tentative)
In the graduate seminar, participants will explore the spiritual dimension in modernist literary texts and the discussion of transcendence in critical theory. While historical materialism has been a dominant approach to interpret literary modernism and its sociocultural contexts, this course focuses on the prominent yet less discussed spirituality and psychologism in modernism in conjunction with the transcendental in critical theory such as writings by Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and C. G. Jung. Literary texts include Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Franz Kafka.
Spring 2025
REL200C: Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion
Tuesdays 1:10-4:10 Sproul 922 (RST Library)
Professor Naomi Janowitz (nhjanowitz@ucdavis.edu)
This seminar on contemporary approaches to religion, focuses on a range of exciting scholarship from recent decades. The scholars we will read rework classical debates and add new dimensions and controversies. Topics include the semiotic analysis of religious “textuality” (Urban, Silverstein, Keane), claims about religious experience (Luhrman, Taves), transgender analysis of religion (Dachile, Strassfeld), race as related to religion (Jones, Wells-Oghoghomeh, Calvo-Quiros) and finally psychoanalytic approaches to religion (Pandolfo, contemporary interpreters of Winnicott).
Assessment will be based on presentations about the readings and a research project exploring the specific academic interests of the student.
Readings:
The Semiotics of Religious Texts
Silverstein, M. and Urban. G. editors. 2016. The Natural History of Discourse
Keane, W. 2016. Ethical Life: It’s Natural and Social Histories
Religious Experience
Luhrmann, T. M. 2020. How God Becomes Real.
Taves, Ann. 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered.
Religion and Racial Identities
Jones, Robert P. 2020. White Too Long.
Calvo-Quiros, William A. 2022. Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions
Wells-Oghoghomeh, Alexis. 2021. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South.
Transgender Analysis
Dachile, Rae Erin. 2022. Searching the Body: A Contemporary Perspective on Tibetan Buddhist Tantra. Strassfeld, Max. 2023. Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature.
Psychoanalytic Investigations related to Religion
Pandolfo, S. 2018. Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam
Contemporary Interpreters of Winnicott