The New Eve is a distinctly modern creation, a radical and arresting re-imagining of her mythical original, the first woman venerated as the mother of humankind and blamed for its fallen humanity. We read the literary works of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers (e.g., Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Nella Larsen, James Joyce) and directors (e.g., Fritz Lang, Jane Campion) alongside psychoanalytic case studies and contemporary works of feminist, critical race, and trans theory to think anew Freud's notoriously unanswered question, what does a woman want. No prior knowledge of critical theory is required.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 15-20 page sample, with commentary, of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.
Filmmaking was always inspired by different kinds of texts (scripts, plays, novels, comics...) while raising crucial questions: Why retell a story that is already well-known? What makes a good adaptation? How faithful should it be? When does it become appropriation? Engaging comparatively with the texts and their cinematic transformations, we will examine the limits and possibilities of adaptation as an art through a wide range of genres and topics (social class, humor, love, homosexuality, intercultural relations, racism, colonialism, art...) and cultures from different countries (Canada, France, Japan, Morocco, Senegal).
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Japanese films held the attention of large international audiences, seeming to parallel the emergence of Japan from the disasters of the Pacific War and its aftermath. Recognition in film competitions drove directors such as Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi to international stardom, and reflected back upon the domestic box office. This course will engage with several of these major films to learn how they interrogated the ethical and moral complexity of postwar Japan and its broader international significance. Comparisons with Hollywood, French and Italian films of the era.
A seminar on the concepts, principles and uncertainties informing the theory and practice of teaching. We read a series of attempts from diverse periods and cultures to define the conditions and limits of learning, even as we seek to measure their potential today. Questions to be discussed involve the relations between the acquisition and the remembering of knowledge, the place of the teacher in the classroom, schools and society, and the roles of memory and writing in the development and transmission of skill and knowledge.
In-depth discussion and analysis of conceptions of the sensory in writings by philosophers, poets, art critics and theorists, and artists, from the early modern to contemporary periods. We will investigate the ways in which the sensory is understood as the necessary basis for conceptual thinking of diverse kinds, including systematic and dialectical philosophy (Kant and Hegel), sign theory (Saussure), imaginative and figural writing, and theory and practice of the plastic arts (Rilke, Mallarmé, Adorno, Greenberg, Serra, Stella, Scully, Buchloh, Warhol, among others).
Capital, vol. 2--the least well-known volume of Marx's opus--may paradoxically now be the most pertinent in global contemporaneity. In terse and highly formalized terms, it theorizes the total subsumption of society under interlocking yet clashing circuits of capital. It also gives a powerful account of how the system reproduces itself in and through the negotiation of its inherent crises. We read vol. 2 intensively and supplement it with Marx's writing on subsumption and Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital.
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This course studies contemporary Latin American & Caribbean literature and visual arts. Looking at the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, we will analyze how textual and visual works respond to different forms of violence and express other forms of imagining relations among bodies, communities, and territories. Texts will be available in the original & translation. Some classes will take place at the Art Museum study room at Firestone
This course explores questions and practices of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to social justice, structural violence, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.