The main course meetings with be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 1:00-1:50pm, in BioMed 081. So far as possible, the course will be conducted as a discussion, not a lecture. Students should arrive appropriately prepared: not just having read the material for that class, but with questions about it, comments on it, and criticisms of it.
Auditors will not be permitted in this course.
We will generally discuss one article each meeting. Reading notes will be posted to the course website to help guide students through the reading, together with some questions worth considering as you read. These are, essentially, the notes I'd use if I were going to lecture.
At the beginning, every enrolled student will be required to post a 'reading response' to Canvas for each meeting. Once we settle down, students will generally be required to post only every other class. Details will be provided on Canvas. Reading responses are due no later than midnight the night before class. This is to give everyone (especially me) time to read and digest the responses.
Students are (not specifically required to but are) encouraged to read each other's postings and to comment upon them.
There is also a course forum (or discussion board) which can be used for general discussion. You will need a username and password, distributed in class, in order to access the forum, and you will also need to register. Note that you therefore will often need to 'sign in' twice: Once to access the forum at all (with the username and password everyone has), and once to log in as yourself (using your own username and password).
Students do not need to answer any (let alone all) of the questions raised in the reading notes in their 'responses'. What I am really interested to know is which parts of the articles students felt they understood, which they felt they did not, and what questions they have about the readings, so I can structure our discussion appropriately.
As we shall see, it's a peculiar fact about the philosophical literature on pornography that there is little discussion of actual pornography. It tends to be assumed that pornography is a monolith, that all pornography is more or less the same, that “If you've seen one porno, you've seen them all”. That was never true, however, and it is not at all true today (as Internet Rule 34 attests).
So we are going to learn something about the history of pornography, as well, and practice analyzing pornographic media. Students will be asked to watch one film per week, privately, and every other week we'll devote a class to discussing two films. Alongside these films, there will be readings, first from Linda Williams's book Hard Core, a now-classic study of ponography as film, and then some other articles in the same tradition.
Please note that, while there is more reading, page-wise, for the viewing sessions than for the others, it is not (with one exception) philosophy, so it is not so dense. Still, I would recommend that you not leave the reading for these session until the night before but get started on it ahead of time. I think you'll find Williams, in particular, to be a lot of fun, anyway.
We will also have two viewing sessions during the semester, when we will watch a few short films as a group and discuss them. We'll break up into smaller groups to do this. We also expect to have a visit, for one of these sessions, from a woman who has received a number of awards in recent years for pornographic films she has directed. Times for these will be arranged later.
Grades for the course will be determined as follows.
If they wish to do so, graduate students are welcome to write a single `seminar paper' instead of writing the shorter ones. This should be discussed with the instructor.
Grades will be recorded on the course's Canvas site. Pay no attention to Canvas's report of your cumulative grade. It is useless.
Warning: I do not accept late work, under any circumstances. On the other hand, I am extremely flexible about due dates. That is to say: If someone should need an extra day or two, they need only ask; no reason even need be given. If someone should need more time than that, then some reason does need to be given, but the request will usually be granted. Since I am so flexible, there can be no excuse for one's not asking for an extension. It's really just a matter of respect.
Jim Pryor, a friend and former colleague who is now at UNC, has written two pieces that address the questions how to read philosophy papers and how to write philosophy papers. You may find them here:
If you are new (or newish) to philosophy, then they are very highly recommended. And, even if you are an old hand, you are sure to find something of value in what Jim has to say.Here is another set of pages, written by Joe Cruz, who is at Williams College, about how to write a philosophy paper. It presents an example of a short philosophy paper and shows how it develops, from initial sketches through a series of drafts.
You should thus expect your total time commitment for this class to be about 190 hours.