Meaning and the Body

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course examines recent (20th- and 21st-century) retrievals of the body to understand "meaning." We will analyze varying construals of nature, materiality, matter, emotion, and thought. Readings will therefore be multidisciplinary, including selections from philosophy, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and religious studies. More specifically, we will examine the relationship between meaning and embodiment by way of the following: modern philosophies of the subject; analytic philosophies of language; deconstruction and the historicization of the body; feminist theories of discourse; new materialist conceptions of matter; new animist conceptions of the subject.