LANGUAGE AND ITS LIMITS

This course examines language and its limits from the perspective of practice and theory, drawing on linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, semiotics, and deaf and disability studies. The first weeks focus on foundational texts and frameworks for language, semiotics, and communication, paying attention to the placement, and theorization, of boundaries that separate language from not-language and to the work such boundaries (are intended to) do. The second part of the course explores materials where the subjects and objects of study approach or even cross those boundaries, asking what kinds of ethical, intellectual, and relational demands these materials make in both social and analytic contexts. Focal topics may include linguistic relativity; semiotics; modality (signed, spoken, written languages); disability; trauma and colonialism; human-nonhuman communication; and gender. Please email for instructor permission.