Courses

Building on Edward Said’s anti-colonial study, Orientalism, this course will examine German representations of Asia since the Enlightenment. We will trace the fascination and fear that motivated German painters, philosophers, novelists, and poets in their representations of China, India, and the Holy Land. The visual depiction of Asia by Europeans will help us understand how Germans sought to know, desire, and possess Asian cultures both as colonial territories as well material artefacts. To show just how broadly the term “Orient” was construed, the course will discuss the history of German colonialism generally, in Asia as well as Africa. Topics include: Romantic fascination with religions on the Indian subcontinent, stretching from Novalis to Schopenhauer to Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka and other Habsburg writers’ ironic appropriation of China as a political foil, Anti-Semitism as Orientalism, the revitalization of Muslim stereotypes in immigration and assimilation debates across Europe. Readings and discussions will be in a mix of German and English. Student will be asked to give a class presentation and to write a 15-page research paper. Most reading assignments will be available in English as well as German.

This seminar is a comparative and methodological inquiry into the ways in which the discipline of art history reconstructs the religious ideologies of Indigenous communities for which we have little written documentation. By analyzing the visual material, and ritual cultures of the Maya peoples of Mesoamerica and the Puebloan peoples of the southwestern United States, we will historiographically chart how scholars have understood these complex societies from a broad disciplinary perspective, borrowing methods from anthropology, archaeology, technical art history, ethnohistory, and religious studies, all placed upon a backdrop of postcolonial theory. The course will pay particular attention to the centuries surrounding European/Amerindian contact, 1400–1700, thus centering these Indigenous societies within the larger frame of global early modern art history.

 

CAS597.001 “Media and Memory”
Professor: Ekaterina Haskins
Tuesdays: 2:30 – 5:30 PM

Although the concept of “memory” suggests individual recollection or ability to recall one’s experiences, the main presumption of this course is that most memories of the past take shape and persist through a variety of representational and performative mechanisms (discursive, visual, spatial, and bodily). In the past twenty years, collective memory has become a lively topic across the humanities and qualitative social sciences in the wake of global political and technological transformations. The goal of this course is to explore the workings of collective memory from several disciplinary vantage points, including history, philosophy, rhetoric, anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, and visual studies. In addition to developing a comprehensive multi-disciplinary theoretical perspective on memory and its mediation, we will also practice interpreting specific cases of mediation by focusing on artifacts and sites of memory—photographs, films, museums, and monuments, both physical and virtual. Upon the successful completion of the course students can expect to

• be able to define and trace the theoretical lineage of major concepts in memory studies
• be able to synthesize the insights of major disciplines involved in the study of collective memory
• gain proficiency in critical analysis of memorial artifacts, sites, and practices

This course will explore many of the key works and perspectives focusing on the critical study of advertising and promotional culture.  This involves examining advertising — and other forms of mediated promotion — as economic institutions and socio-cultural/textual artifacts.  Topics to be explored include critical orientations to the study of advertising’s economics and semiotics, the history of US advertising, methodologies, representation, globalization, activism, children, and advertising’s role in digital culture.

Wednesdays 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM

 

 

SPRING 2022

FALL 2021

This course examines scholarship grappling with race in the art and visual culture of the United States. Organized around a series of chronological case studies, the bulk of this discussion-based seminar focuses on a range of media produced between 1850 and 1950. We will read and analyze art historical and critical writing that addresses examples of painting, sculpture, photography, and cinema. As we consider the centrality of race to the American experiment and its visual legacies, topics include, but are not limited to, slavery, power, assimilation, violence, and whiteness. When possible, we will study art objects firsthand to attempt to come to terms with how they shape, and are shaped by, racialized ideology; notably, in the permanent collection of the Palmer Museum of Art. Overall, this course aims to interrogate complex and often challenging ideas about race, ethnicity, identity, and visuality.

 

This graduate seminar investigates the development of the discipline of art history by critically examining the ways art-historical writing has changed over time. Members of the seminar will read foundational texts dating back to the establishment of the discipline as well as those that represented significant contributions to new approaches and debates. Topics covered might include aesthetics, style, iconography, connoisseurship, formalism, constructions of history and social history, and museology, as well as the impact on art history of other fields such as philosophy, anthropology, and critical studies of gender, race, and identity.

 

This course will introduce students to foundational and emerging methods of studying the book (broadly conceived) as a material object and the relationships between such methods and early modern literary study. Work in bibliography, book history, and related sub-fields (especially around Shakespeare) long assumed a default stance of political neutrality in its emphasis on the ‘facts’ of textual production and transmission. But this pretense has been challenged in meaningful ways over the last two decades. We will study a range of new approaches to telling textual histories, that is, methods that center gender, sexuality, race, and social class—both in theory and practice. There will be a special focus on intersections of literary content with book design (format, typography, illustration, cover art, &c) in the case studies we consider. We will also pay special attention to the advantages, limits, and potentials of the digital mediation of books, especially given how new forms media literacy are fast becoming indispensable for remote research. At the time of writing this description, my intention is to design the course around early modern (and related) book objects in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library. Students should expect a series of short, experimental, and low-stakes research/writing exercises leading up to a conference paper and class conference at the end of the semester.

 

A practical and historical approach to film theory and analysis. This seminar develops critical visual literacy by examining a range of practices in cinema study, with emphases on the relation of film to literature and the analysis of film meaning. The course asks how to read a film, and considers the multiple ways that films combine framing, movement, editing, narrative, character, and genre toward the production of culture, ideology, identity, desire, poetic imagery, and community. Students will explore a wide range of critical methods, and will view one to two films per week. Readings will range from novels to classic film theory, cultural studies, belles-lettres, film criticism, radical poetics, apparatus theory, media theory, and contemporary philosophy.

 

The course examines the Frankfurt School’s critical theories regarding visual strategies for representing and challenging urban consumer culture.

The course will examine critical theories by members of the Frankfurt School regarding visual strategies for representing and challenging urban consumer culture. The course will center on German Marxist theories about how the rise of urban mass culture at the beginning of the twentieth century produced Modernist forms of visual representation. The course will examine how the spread of fashion-driven behavior had dramatic implications for aesthetic theory, film, architecture, and literature. The course will provide a survey of the most important works in the German critical tradition and the major thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. These include Georg Simmel, Georg Lukacs, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, among others. Students will learn how these modern theories relate to the German Idealist tradition, particularly Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, as well as the history of German Marxism. Topics include the psychology of the metropolitan individual, the commodification of culture, money, and interpersonal relationships, the architecture of shopping, visual advertising through posters and photography, and cinema as a means of understanding social relations, as well as the role of visual media in public debate. The course will consider how modernist architecture, particularly from the Bauhaus school, redefined urban spaces and introduced new functionalist designs. The course will examine how Frankfurt School thinkers responded to the provocative design proposals presented by modernist architects. Students will examine specific modernist designs for consumer products to examine the relationship between the appearance of a commodity and its use, in order to understand how appearance and function are interdependent within modernism. In broad terms, class discussions will focus on such questions as: How does the relationship between the visual image and society change under industrial capitalism? What political functions do visual images have in consumer culture? What visual mechanisms does the “culture industry” deploy to organize public consciousness? What critical responses are available to visual artists within a mass-market economy? The course will provide students an historical understanding of early twentieth-century German consumer culture and its visual representation, while also offering them critical intellectual tools to understand the social and economic implications of visual images within consumer culture. The course will be taught in English with readings in both languages.

 

With the rise of Spain in the sixteenth century as a trans-European and global power, social, political, and aesthetic ideals were aligned with the court, empire and modernity. This course will focus on how major poets of Habsburg Spain used artifacts as material sites of discourse to explore connections to antiquity, cultural memory, political and social events, space, self-representation, and status. Artifacts range from large decorative objects, like tapestries, paintings, and frescoes, to trinkets and accessories. The course will examine how objects are carriers of culture and history; how tapestries and paintings are used to explore questions of patronage, social networking, and gift-giving as well as to celebrate and critique the politics and ideology of empire; how  mirrors and portrait miniatures are used for examining questions of introspection and self-reflexivity of an incipient modern subject; and how inscriptions on tombs and urns explore the interplay between orality and writing, voice and memory. The course will also deal with theories that subtend the production of texts: space, ruins, the city as text. Since the topic is part of a larger European phenomenon, the course will include Spain¿s cross-cultural relations. This course will be taught in Spanish. Students are encouraged to give oral presentations in Spanish, but may write their papers in Spanish or in English.

 

SPRING 2021

 

This graduates seminar will examine the ways that digital and computational tools and methodologies are reshaping the practice of art and architectural history. Questions we will examine include: What is the genealogy of digital art history, and how does it relate to the broader field of digital humanities? Who are its leading theorists, practitioners, and critics? What kinds of infrastructure—funding, journals, professional organizations, research centers, etc.—have emerged around it? What scholarly questions are well suited—or not—to digital or computational analysis? How should digital scholarship be evaluated? What are the existing and potential impacts of digital tools and methodologies on museology, and on teaching and learning? The seminar will be conducted in close collaboration with guest faculty in and outside of Art History with relevant expertise. No specialized knowledge related to digital technology is assumed or expected.(Eli

CAS597.004 “Media and Memory”
Professor: Ekaterina Haskins
Tuesdays: 2:30 – 5:30 PM

Although the concept of “memory” suggests individual recollection or ability to recall one’s experiences, the main presumption of this course is that most memories of the past take shape and persist through a variety of representational and performative mechanisms (discursive, visual, spatial, and bodily). In the past twenty years, collective memory has become a lively topic across the humanities and qualitative social sciences in the wake of global political and technological transformations. The goal of this course is to explore the workings of collective memory from several disciplinary vantage points, including history, philosophy, rhetoric, anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, and visual studies. In addition to developing a comprehensive multi-disciplinary theoretical perspective on memory and its mediation, we will also practice interpreting specific cases of mediation by focusing on artifacts and sites of memory—photographs, films, museums, and monuments, both physical and virtual. Upon the successful completion of the course students can expect to

• be able to define and trace the theoretical lineage of major concepts in memory studies
• be able to synthesize the insights of major disciplines involved in the study of collective memory
• gain proficiency in critical analysis of memorial artifacts, sites, and practices

 

ENGL 549 “Shakespeare: Adaptation, Appropriation, Non-Adaptation”
Professor: Garrett Sullivan
Tuesdays 2:30-5:30PM

This course performs two main tasks. First, we will discuss nine Shakespeare plays in detail, with an eye to their engagement with early modern politics and culture. Second, we will study a number of films that exist in explicit or oblique relation to those plays, as adaptations, appropriations or non-adaptations. The course is divided into three sections, each of which will include plays and films. The first section focuses on adaptations (e.g., Hamlet and Michael Almereyda’s movie of the same name; Othello and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara); the second takes up appropriations (e.g., Henry IV and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho); the third considers what Eric Mallin has termed non-adaptations: films that “unconsciously deploy and so do not merely repeat, produce, or aridly contest Shakespeare” and that “go about their business without constricting loyalty to or paralyzed reliance on canonical precedent.” Each of the non-adaptations will be a movie by Alfred Hitchcock (e.g., The Merchant of Venice and Strangers on a Train). Throughout the semester, we examine key texts for, and central issues within, the study of intertextuality and adaptation; these will include works by the likes of André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Julie Sanders, Thomas Leitch, and Robert Stam.

 

ENGL/PHIL/WMNST 597 “Black Existentialism and AfroPessimism”
Professor: Claire Colebrook
Tuesdays: 2:30 – 5:30 PM

Rather than seeing Black existentialism and Afro-pessimism as philosophical movements that add the question of race to mainstream theory, this course will look at the ways in which writers such as Franz Fanon have been crucial for existentialism and post-structuralism. One of the most provocative theoretical and aesthetic endeavors of the twenty-first century, Afro-pessimism is uniquely poised to make sense of post-apocalyptic culture: the current cinematic and novelistic fascination with the end of the world can be read both as the end of the world of white privilege, and as the possibility of another non-worldly mode of existence. N.K. Jemisin’s novels, to take just one example, depict a cosmos and narrative arc that spans the ending and beginning of multiple worlds. Jordon Peele’s cinematic achievements allow for a theorization of blackness that is at diagnostic of post humanism, and the fetishization of black embodiment.   This course will read the theory, philosophy, cinema and fiction of Afro-pessimism. Writers to be studied include Orlando Patterson, Franz Fanon, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, N.K. Jemisin, Calvin Warren, C. Riley Snorton and Frank Wilderson.  Films to be studied include Jordan Peele’s Us and Get Out, Howard Alk’s The Murder of Fred Hampton, and Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door.

 

GER/VSTUD 597 “Photography, Race, Genocide”
Professor: Sabine Doran
Wednesdays: 6:00 – 9:00 PM

This course explores the role of photography in the context of the racialized politics of genocides and their aftermaths. The course aims to critically examine photographic evidence of genocidal violence, revealing the long shadow of modern genocides from colonialism, to the Holocaust, the Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan genocides, to the present. At the intersection of modern constructs of race as they culminate in genocidal violence, the course investigates the political and ethical potential of photography. Topics include: the spectrality of photography and its origins (W. Benjamin, Barthes, Flusser, Sontag, Batchen); the civil contract of photography (Azoulay); atomic light (Lippit); studies in black and white (Sheehan); constructs of race (Kant, Nietzsche, Fanon, Bernasconi, Moten); modern genocides (Kiernan); memory’s edge and after-images (Young, Didi-Huberman); photography in film and literature:Hiroshima mon amour(Resnais);Ararat(Egoyan),The Photographer(Jablonski),Austerlitz(Sebald);The Missing Picture(Penh); race after technology (R. Benjamin). Seminar conducted in English – via zoom.

 

FALL 2020

Art History 597 “Critical Approaches to Art History”
Professor: Daniel Zolli
Tuesdays: 6:00 – 9:00 PM

Ideas, perhaps more than art and artists, have shaped art history. In this course, we will consider the major concepts that inform the way art historians work. One of the primary goals of this seminar to give students a sense of how art-historical scholarship has evolved and the issues that govern it today. While the first four weeks are devoted to historiography – to the history of art history – subsequent meetings will put a current issue on the laboratory table for our collective, microscopic scrutiny. These include (e.g.): agency and “object-oriented ontology”; temporality; scale; the material and technical turn; media archaeology; new developments in postcolonialism; parafiction; gift and exchange theory; globalism; ecocriticism; and intersectionality. In this way, the course will offer students a set of models – a toolkit – for approaching their own work within the field. By the end of the course, you will not only be familiar with the debates that preoccupy art historians today, but you should also have an idea of where you fall within them and how you would like to shape them in the future. What aspects of art history are worth preserving? What must be changed? What should be the discipline’s goals going forward?

 

English 597-004 “Recovering the Black Past: Writers, Artists and the Archive”
Professor: P. Gabrielle Foreman
Tuesdays: 2:30 – 5:30 PM

This interdisciplinary class examines the archival, theoretical and artistic challenges and opportunities created by Black archival absences, that is, by the historical scraps and languishing ghosts of an often irrecoverable Black past. Literary scholars and art critics have noted the “archival impulse” in recent African American poetry as well as the “historic turn” in contemporary art. Centering our work in Black historical archives, we will be examining the work of cutting-edge contemporary Black poets, theorists and visual artists. The class will include slave narratives, early treatises, etc. alongside contemporary Black poetry and essays by writers such as Tyehimba Jess, M. NourbeSe Phillip, Kevin Young, Marilyn Nelson and more. We will also examine Black visual art by those who regularly mine and meditate on the Black past-present: Glen Ligon, Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems and Wilmer Wilson. In addition to archival work on significant but dis-remembered Black movements, we will read interdisciplinary theorists and critics such as Michel Rolph Truillot, Huey Copeland, Daphne Brooks, Marcus Wood, Tavia Nyong’o, Saidiya Hartman and Salamishah Tillet. Project-based final assignments as well as traditional final papers almost certainly be an option. Students from all departments are welcome.

 

English 597-008 “Media/Culture”
Professor: Matthew Tierney
Tuesdays: 11:15 – 2:15 

This course will map the intersection and divergence of two related interdisciplinary fields: cultural studies and media studies. Our approach will be both genealogical and methodological. Genealogically, we will explore how differing scholarly argots emerged to describe class, race, gender, and empire in their most material forms of expression. Methodologically, we will explore and employ a wide range of critical tactics: some still dominant, some nearly lost to time, and all available for recovery in the urgent present. Beginning with two major field retrospectives (one by Ioan Davies; the other by Armand and Michèle Mattelart), we will trace the lineaments of a study of residual, dominant, and emergent cultural hegemonies, as it arose in the mid-20th century alongside a study of media as a composite of ideological apparatuses. The first ten weeks of the class employ a toolbox approach to four objects of study that are shared by both fields in their formative years: cultural production, cultural imperialism, ideology, and technology. The final third of the course applies this toolset to a reading of several new books at the intersection of digital studies, feminist studies, critical race studies, political theory, and media philosophy.

 

German  534 “History and Theory of German Film and Photography”
Professor: Sam Frederick
Tuesdays: 6:00 – 9:00 pm

This course examines the history, theory, and practice of German photographic and moving picture technology from its origins to the digital age. The course will be structured around important innovations in visual technology, including (but not limited to): 1) the pre-history and invention of photography, 2) pre-cinematic moving pictures (Anschütz), 3) the invention of cinema (Skladanowsky Bros.), 4) sound and color innovations, 5) video, digital, and installation work. The aim of the course is to provide an historical overview of visual culture in which the radical shifts inaugurated by new technologies are examined in terms of their aesthetic, philosophical, and political impact. In the German context these shifts have been examined by important theoreticians of visual culture (most notably Arnheim, Balácz, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Flusser) whose work has changed the way we think about our relation to images.

Sessions will focus on topics such as: ontology of the celluloid image; the “New Vision” of Weimar photography; post-war Austrian avant-garde cinema; the rubble film and the limits of space; Nazi aesthetics in the feature film; the problem of “capturing” time in pre-cinematic experiments and early cinema; the “Other” of Wilhelmine cinema; Weimar-era animation; the politics of New German Cinema; feminist cinema in the GDR; new digital media and the future of the cinematic.

Viewings to include films by Mack, Rye, Wegener, Murnau, Lang, Ruttmann, Sagan, Reiniger, Fischinger, Pabst, Fanck, Riefenstahl, Sierck (aka Sirk), Harlan, Staudte, Beyer, E. Schmidt, Wicki, Kubelka, Tscherkassky, Kluge, Fassbinder, Wenders, Reitz, among others.

Readings will be available in German and in English. Class discussion will be in English.

 

German 597 “Gothic Romanticism”
Professor: Daniel Purdy
Tuesdays/Thursdays 4:35 – 5:50 pm

This course will investigate how German and English Romanticisms construct space in order to 1) organize interior feelings, along the axes of knowledge, sexuality, and power; 2) establish a domestic terrain and boundaries for the nation state; 3) define differences between home and foreign spaces. Gothic architecture, ruins, paintings and landscape gardens will precede texts that lead us through ancient Italian labyrinths, psychic caverns, neo-gothic monasteries, cartographic landscapes, broad boulevards, dark alleys, and bureaucratic compartments. We will also ponder the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. Romanticism stressed the unique qualities of place. The poetic descriptions of natural sites such as the Rhine, the Danube or the Alps will receive our particular attention. Primary theoretical authors include: Kant, Schlegel, Benjamin, Goethe, Hegel. Discussions and most readings will be English.

Spanish 597 “Latin American Photography: Archives, Practices, and Theories”
Professor: Marco A. Martínez
Fridays: 8:00 – 11:00 AM

This seminar will examine Latin American photographic archives considering the perspectives from practicing artists and theoretical traditions. By looking closely at a number of literary, historic and theoretical materials, we will address questions about the nature of the visual archive; photo techniques and reproductions; dynamics of memory and forgetting; national imaginaries; and photography as a mechanism of resistance and as an instrument of social control. Some of the aesthetics that we will study include the exotic and the picturesque and modernist photography (politically engaged and otherwise). We will focus on the work of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor García, Nacho López, Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, Silvina Frydlewsky, Daniela Rossell, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Enrique Metinides, and Gian Paolo Minelli, among others. Readings for this seminar will be drawn from contemporary criticaltheory in art, philosophy, history, and popular culture and will be mostly in Spanish.

 

Spanish 597 “The Cinematic Pluriverse of Pedro Almodóvar”
Professor: Matthew Marr
Tu/Th 4:35 – 5:50 PM

This seminar will examine the cinematic imagination of Spain’s most internationally celebrated filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar. Topics to be considered will include Almodóvar’s lensing of gender politics, sexuality, multiculturalism, and national identity in post-dictatorial Spain; his nimble negotiation of the local and the global; his taste for cinephilic self-referentiality and hybridity of genre; and a distinctive tendency toward thematic idiosyncrasy: all of which are signature features of his postmodern ‘brand’. Significant attention will be devoted to approaches and trends within the vast corpus of scholarly criticism dealing with the filmmaker’s oeuvre, and our engagement with film theory will arise organically out of the references from these texts. Some basic tools, techniques, and language of film analysis will be considered, as will a general understanding of field-specific norms of film studies as practiced in North American and U.K. Hispanism.  This course will be taught in English and Spanish.

 

Spring 2020

VSTUD 561 “Visual Culture Theory and History”
Professor: Daniel Purdy
Tu/Th 4:35 – 5:50 PM

“Visual Culture Theory and History” covers theories of the visual and visualization from ancient formulations in Roman rhetoric in the memory arts and ekphrasis to modernist forms of the book arts, graphic novels in particular, material culture (from popular consumer culture to high-design fashions and objects), architecture and urban spaces, film and television. Our overarching aim will be to understand the theoretical texts that define the field of Visual Studies. Our discussions will include the work of the Frankfurt School, French post-structuralism, feminist psychoanalytic film theory, and contemporary German media studies. The course will engage with avant-garde aesthetics as a mean of understanding the visual potentials provided by twentieth-century technologies.

 

ARTH 515 “Seminar in Modern Art: Paris in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Professor: Nancy Locke
Wednesdays 2:30 -5:30

The invention of lithography ushered in the age of mass media in the nineteenth century. Senefelder’s new medium jumped from its origins as a fine art reproductive process to its new status as instigator of political critique in newspapers that featured a lithograph—often a portrait-charge—on the front page. Photography might have originated with artist-scientists’ experiments in the 1820s and ‘30s, but by the time of Archer’s invention of the collodion negative, the new medium was revolutionizing image making, and it put portraiture into the hands of the middle class.

This seminar will look at the explosion of visual media in the nineteenth century, from pamphlets printed during the French Revolution to color posters at the fin-de-siècle. Making use of materials in Penn State’s Special Collections library, we will consider all kinds of mass media and fine art reproductions, as well as maps, guidebooks, and illustrated books. Ways of imagining the city of Paris—at home and abroad—as well as ways that Paris imagined its others, whether suburban or colonial, will be considered.

 

German 597 “Horror”
Professor: Kobi Kabalek
Wednesdays 6:00PM – 9:00PM

This seminar surveys various depictions and concepts of horror in the different German societies. We will read theoretical and empirical studies from various disciplines to ask what constitutes horror as an emotion and genre in each case and how it is expressed through a mixture of the fantastic and the real. The materials include horror films and thrillers, artworks, photography, and literature, but also visual and textual depictions of the monstrous and shocking in descriptions of criminality and the political language of Imperial Germany, during WWI, in the Weimar Republic, in Nazi propaganda before and during WWII and the Holocaust, in postwar memories of Nazism, as well as in various conceptualizations of the respective social and political menace in East, West, and unified Germany. The course thus suggests looking at diverse experiences and realities in Germany using a cultural prism that combines emotion and imagination. This course is taught in English.

 

German 597 “The Politics of Color in Visual Culture”
Professor: Sabine Doran
Mondays 6:00PM – 9:00PM

This seminar explores the politics and aesthetics of color in visual and literary media. Whether associated with particular moods or mental states (“red with anger,” “pale white”), with particular ideologies (Communist red, the environmental Greens) or with particular races (black for African Americans, white for Caucasians, red for Native Americans, yellow for Asians), color has always been seen as an index of meaning. Yet the broad cultural significance of specific colors is rarely been addressed. Reduced to its symbolic – that is, highly conventionalized – function, color is typically understood as a fixed system of reference that is easily decoded. However, this approach to color obscures its dynamic nature, its culturally conditioned ambiguities and dualities. “Every hue, real or imagined, bodes a world,” writes Jeffery Cohen in his introduction to Prismatic Ecology. Ecotheory beyond Green (2013) and it is in the in the vibrant worlds of colors that climate changes, both politically and ecologically, emerge as they energize movements (from “Black Panther” to the “Yellow People Revolution”) and reflections on the color of skin, contaminants, plants, atmospheres. Readings and viewings include Goethe’s Color Theory, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Kieslowski’s Color Trilogy, Kurosawa’s Ran and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing – to look at perspectives that recognize the complex nature of color and its inscriptions in political networks. This course is taught in English.

Fall 2019

ARTH 515 “Seminar in Modern Art: Race and Representation in American Art”
Professor: Adam Thomas
Wednesdays 2:30-5:30 PM

This course focuses on theories and representations of race in the art and visual culture of the United States. Organized around a series of chronological case studies, the bulk of this discussion-based course is devoted to a range of media produced between about 1850 and 1950. We will read and analyze recent scholarship addressing examples of painting, sculpture, photography, prints, and ephemera. As we consider the centrality of race to the American experiment and its visual legacies, topics include, but are not limited to, slavery, power, assimilation, violence, and whiteness. When possible, we will scrutinize art objects firsthand to attempt to come to terms with how they shape, and are shaped by, racialized ideology; notably, in the permanent collection of the Palmer Museum of Art and in the temporary exhibition Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman. In sum, this course aims to interrogate complex and often challenging ideas about race, ethnicity, identity, materiality, and visuality.

Art History 551 “Historiography of Art History”
Professor: Nancy Locke
Tuesdays 2:30- 5:30 pm

Although writings on art date back to antiquity, the discipline of art history was founded in the

eighteenth century. “All history is contemporary history,” wrote Benedetto Croce, and the

same could be said for the history of art: its questions have been formulated and its methods

framed in ways that remain inextricably linked to their times. This graduate seminar will

examine a range of texts from Winckelmann to more contemporary thinkers. Topics to be

covered include style, aesthetics, iconography, formalism, social history, gender studies,

Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and deconstruction. As a group, we will practice the

fundamentals of formal analysis and attribution. Participants will write brief papers each week

(first eight weeks) to analyze the principal points of the methods and approaches under

consideration. A final presentation and paper on a single major figure in the field will also be required.

 

German 597 “Bauhaus 100”
Professor: Daniel Purdy
Tuesdays/Thursdays 4:35-5:50 PM

“Bauhaus 100” will examine the history and legacy of Modernism’s most important school of design, founded in 1919.  We will review the aesthetic and political agendas within avant-garde Modernism generally by concentrating Bauhaus’s central teachings about the relationships between architecture and design, the body in its social environment, and the radical potential of new media in redefining experience.  In addition to reviewing the architecture of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Hannes Meyer, we will devote our attention to Bauhaus innovations in photography, dance, theater, painting, fashion, and publicity.  As we reconsider the established (masculine) dogma of High Modernism, we will turn attention to women’s innovations in Bauhaus design, particularly the metal-work and collages of Marianne Brandt, in order to formulate more complexly gendered critique of industrial design and media. We will also examine Bauhaus ideas as they circulated in the Americas in the second half of the century, in order to consider how the field of Visual Studies emerged during the Cold War through the reception of photography and theory generated by László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes.  Finally, we will look to the 1960s design of Dieter Rams in order to reveal the links between Apple and Bauhaus. Taught in English and in conjunction with Bauhaus Transfers, an international symposium on September 19 – 21, 2019, sponsored by the Department of Architecture and the Max Kade German-American Research Institute at Penn State.

Spring 2019

Art History 514 “Seminar in Baroque Art: The View from Vesuvius, Art and Architecture of Southern Italy”
Professor: Robin Thomas
Mondays 2:30-5:30pm PM

Unlike Rome, Florence, or Venice, Naples and Southern Italy has not received the same scholarly attention. However, during the baroque period the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were among the most vibrant centers for artistic production in Europe. Political connections with Spain and trading ties to other parts of the Mediterranean meant that the realm stood at the crossroads of cultural exchange. In this rich milieu Caravaggio’s works were enthusiastically received, Artemisia Gentileschi’s career thrived, and the Valencian Jusepe Ribera’s practice was launched. Meanwhile less well-known architects and sculptors such as Domenico Fontana, Cosimo Fanzago, and Giacomo Serpotta helped transform the buildings and interiors of Naples, Palermo, and Catania into some of the most exuberantly baroque spaces in Italy. This seminar will focus on this region during the period from 1600-1750. It will be centered on the art and architecture produced during that time, and will also pose larger questions about geography, cultural exchange, literature, gender, theater, music, economics, and political history.

CAS 597: “Visual Rhetoric”
Professor: Anne Demo
Wednesdays 2:30 – 5:00                                                                       

In the twenty years since W.J.T. Mitchell argued for a “pictorial turn” in the humanities, the study of visuality has preoccupied diverse disciplines and inspired a number of subfields. With the rise of immersive technology and ubiquitous documentation, approaches to mediation, spectatorship, and circulation are being reconfigured with increasing attention to sensation, materialism, and ethics. This seminar will look back on key points of overlap between visual rhetoric, mass communication, and visual culture as a foundation for surveying the current transition in theorizing about vision and affect in contemporary public culture. Course readings will feature recent work by Robert Hariman and John Luciates, Lila Chouliarki, Laurie Gries, Roger Stahl, Lisa Parks, as well as the forthcoming edited volume, Unwatchable.

 

ENGL/VSTUD 580 “Graphic Novels”
Professor: Scott Smith
Tuesdays 11:15 – 2:15

This seminar surveys the creative medium of comics and graphic novels, as well as the growing field of Comics Studies. The course provides instruction in the form and history of the comics medium, and the traditions of its criticism and scholarship. Covered writers, genres, forms, and traditions may vary. Creators might include Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Art Spiegelman, David Mazzucchelli, Phoebe Gloeckner, or Charles Burns; some traditions, forms, or genres might include memoir, graphic medicine, underground & alternative comix, web comics, superhero comics, travel writing, or journalism. The course considers significant methodologies and theories in Comics Studies, with attention to current and historical approaches. Finally, students read a selection of criticism and scholarship keyed to assigned primary texts and topics.

 

ENGL 597.002 “Race, Gender, Medium”
Professor: Matt Tierney
Wednesdays 2:30 -5:30

This course examines theories and expressive practices of medium and mediation. The very word “medium,” as it turns out, need not be constrained by the influential definitions given to it by Marshall McLuhan and Clement Greenberg. Attending to a wider and more political genealogy of the term, from Waldo Frank and Mary Douglas to Nancy Fraser and Jacques Rancière, we will explore the term’s applicability to contemporary struggles over race and gender. Entering the terminological flux, we will read foundational readings of digital and visual media (like those of David Marriott, Lisa Nakamura, Elizabeth Grosz, and Fred Moten) alongside significant recent work (like that of Mel Chen, Sara Ahmed, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Ashon T. Crawley). We will see what happens when an object or substance that is familiar to the study of race and gender (like land or body, archive or university, death or breath) gets re-imagined as a medium.

 

GER 592 “German Orientalism”
Professor: Daniel Purdy
Tuesdays/Thursdays 4:35-5:50

Reading theorists from Edward Said to Robert Bernasconi, we will examine the development of a particularly German style of Orientalism.  Along the way we will consider the issues in using contemporary categories on historical images and texts. While Orientalism among German writers may be distinguished from French and English variations, the different cultures all share the same images and texts as sources for their representations.  We will consider the relationship between first hand travel accounts, first to each other, whereby each traveler writes in response to his predecessors, and then to domestic European syntheses of these travel narratives.  Topics include: The intercultural conventions of hospitality concerning the treatment of strangers. The Balkans and the Black Sea as zones of confrontation between Christians and Muslims. Leibniz’s engagement with Chinese philosophy in the context of fashionable Chinoiserie and his disparagement of Ottoman Turks.  The cultural negotiations implicit in Enlightenment depictions of religious tolerance. Is German Orientalism more concerned with Biblical exegesis than colonial power?  Topics include: The coalescence of Berlin’s museums in the nineteenth century as related to Prussian railroad building and archeology in the Ottoman Empire. Romantic fascination with religions on the Indian subcontinent, stretching from Novalis to Schopenhauer to Hermann Hesse.  German hippies in India.  Franz Kafka and other Habsburg writers’ ironic appropriation of China as a political foil.  Anti-Semitism as Orientalism.  The adequacy of world-systems theory as a means to describe the cultural negotiations inherent in Asian trading relations. Asia as depicted in Nazi ideology.  The revitalization of Muslim stereotypes in immigration and assimilation debates across Europe.  The self-conscious maneuvering around Orientalism in contemporary transnational writing in German. Early German cinema and photography about China. Werner Herzog documentaries about India. Readings and discussions will be in a mix of German and English.

Fall 2018

 

VSTUD 502 “Visual Studies in Digitality”

Professor: Grant Whytoff
Mondays 2:30 – 5:30 

The luddites, the philosophers, even the tech evangelists all seem to be in agreement that living in a digitally networked world has changed something about the way we understand ourselves as both individuals and members of a public. In a moment when digital media are complicating some of our foundational assumptions about everything from democratic consensus to the nature of privacy, the elementary work of technical description has taken on new significance. So too has the value of research in the humanities for putting these developments into necessary perspective.

This seminar will introduce a range of frameworks from across the humanities useful for thinking through the history, ethics, and aesthetics of digital media. Units on emerging approaches to contemporary digital infrastructures (questions of the public, selfhood, privacy, algorithms and inequality) will be paired with an overview of the most influential paradigms in media studies to guide us through these more contemporary issues. Concepts from our readings will be operationalized with weekly exercises that will include an introduction to digital methods in the humanities as well as tactics for (among other things) protecting against government surveillance. Students will leave with the basic computational literacy necessary for informed scholarship that both critiques and utilizes digital media.

Art Education 597.001 “Including Difference”
Professor: Karen Kiefer-Boyd
Wednesdays 6:00-9:00 PM

Students will learn and develop teaching strategies that deconstruct disabling, systemic, social constructions and explore how people are using comics, films, and other popular media to discuss/expose issues of trauma, (dis)ease, and (dis)ability. Themes include decentering the normal, disability, feminist disability studies, universal learning design, inclusive museums and enabling structures, affect and embodied sense-abilities, intersectionality, subjectivity, politics, assistive technologies, (re)presentation, visual culture, response-abilities, archives, and performative research.

 

Art History 597.001 “Colonial Urbanism in South Asia”
Professor: Madhuri Desai
Wednesdays 2:30-5:30 PM

As a historical episode and as a world-wide practice, colonialism has shaped much of the modern world. Urban forms and spatial configurations in cities across the world have been shaped wholly or tangentially, by this legacy. Cities in several former colonies were created to fulfill colonial aims or to be symbols of modern, post-colonial, national identities. Similarly, architectural and urban practices and expressions in former imperial centers such as London were as much the result of an imperial imagination as they were of migrations engendered by colonialism. The seminar explores this relationship through a focus on the experience of British imperialism and colonialism in South Asia between the late-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. How was imperial power channeled through architecture and urban space? What was the experience of colonial modernity for South Asians and how were its political, economic and social manifestations mediated through the built environment? We will explore urban spaces and architecture created within the intertwined relationship of colonialism and modernity.

Early sessions will be devoted to an overview of pre-colonial and early colonial urbanism in South Asia. Subsequent sessions will include focused readings and discussions of four urban case studies – Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi and Lahore, as well as an introduction to the histories and theories of anti-colonialism, nationalism and postcolonial perspectives. Later in the semester, sessions will be concerned with comparative case studies of French and Italian colonialism in North Africa, as well as instances of postcolonial urbanism in South and Southeast Asia. The concluding session will include a discussion of post-imperial London. The larger aim of this seminar is to develop analytical abilities for the critical study of modern urban environments in general and colonial urban environments in particular. Weekly readings are assigned and grades will be based on class participation, reading responses, and a final research paper and presentation.

 

CMLIT 570 “Global Surrealisms”
Professor: Jonathan Eburne
Thursdays 2:30-5:30 PM

This course addresses the poetics, politics, and visual culture of surrealist movements and their repercussions around the world. Founded in Paris soon after the First World War, the surrealist movement strove—according to the group’s earliest manifestos—to “change life” and “transform the world,” claims adopted from Arthur Rimbaud and Karl Marx, respectively. From the early 1920s through the contemporary era, the surrealist movement grew from a local group of French and German poets and artists into a truly international movement, gaining adherents in Brazil, Mexico, Haiti, Martinique, the United States, Egypt, Senegal, Japan, Argentina, Chile, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Spain, and England. Beyond formal incarnations of “surrealism” as a discrete, organized collective movement, the anticolonial politics and non-national forms of surrealist artistic and political experimentation have been variously taken up, debated, contested, or otherwise adapted by artists, writers, organizers, and activists on every continent. Combining an interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and indigenous cultures (in which some members of the group trafficked as collectors and, occasionally, dealers) with a commitment to radical leftist politics, the surrealists approached many of the great issues of the twentieth century with an intensity that could be as comical and as playful as it was deadly serious. Games, group activities, and public scandals were as much a part of the movement’s repertoire as any so-called major works of literature or art. In addition to providing an introduction to the study of global surrealism, this course will study the movement’s adaptations and transformations as a case study in cultural transmission.

Students in the course will be encouraged to draw from primary sources in surrealist (or anti- or para-surrealist) essays, poems, art objects, and political tracts, as well as from secondary readings in cultural and artistic criticism, in pursuing new research on global incarnations of surrealism: North Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc. This course will coincide with the inaugural conference of the ISSS: The International Society for the Study of Surrealism, which will take place at Bucknell University from November 1-4, 2018, and which students in the course will be encouraged to attend.

 

English 557 “Authors and Artists”
Professor: Christopher Reed
Thursdays 6:00-9:00 PM

“Ut pictura poesis” This statement, originally articulated by the ancient Roman poet Horace, has been quoted and debated ever since. Links between art and literature have exerted a formative influence on the development of modern fiction and poetry as authors and artists in various avant-garde groupings collaborated and competed to generate modes of artistic expression appropriate to modernity.  This course examines those interactions. Our objectives are to bring together for comparative examination
— Formal or generic relationships between texts and images at particular historical moments; under this rubric we will consider issues such as ekphrasis
— Creative collaboration and cross-pollination between writers and artists, which have been crucially important in the history of literature and poetry; examples include Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, Virginia Woolf and Post-Impressionism, Gertrude Stein and Cubism
— Conceptions of creativity as these have been expressed by writers using the figure of the artist; texts in this category range from Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, through Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, to Paul Auster’s appropriation from the performance artist Sophie Calle

This course explores the ways knowledge of literature and skills in critical reading can be rewardingly brought to bear on the visual arts, and considers how visual art can illuminate the workings of literature both for individual readers and in the classroom. This course is open to graduate students in any discipline. Please contact the professor if you have any questions about enrolling.

 

German 540 The Holocaust in Visual Culture and Theory
Professor: Sabine Doran
Mondays 6:00-9:00 PM

This seminar studies representations of the Holocaust in art, museums, literature, and film. We will examine theoretical questions involved in any attempt to capture what appears to be beyond our comprehension in terms of moral outrage and the sheer scale, inhumanity, and bureaucratic efficiency of the violence perpetrated by the Nazis. We will focus on the ways in which “trauma” has become a key analytical concept in these debates. We will discuss literary works, such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, films such as Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, The Pianist, The Tin Drum, The Photographer, A Film Unfinished, as well as photographs, poems, installations, and other artifacts. We will also confront questions of memorialization, national guilt, survivor’s guilt, stigmatization, and the ethics of historical representation, in theoretical readings by Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Hayden White and others.

SPRING 2018

VSTUD 501 “Visual Culture Theory and History”
Professor: Sabine Doran
Mondays 6:00-9:00PM

“Visual Culture Theory and History” provides a broad exploration of theories describing the aesthetic, psychological, and social significance of visual images, as well as the media processes inherent in creating visual experiences. The course will define Visual Studies as an academic field within the humanities. Topics will generally include the image in classical rhetoric, media theories about images, visuality and post-colonial theory, semiotic analysis of images, the cinematic image, gender and visuality, consumer culture’s use of images, spectatorship and social identity, television history, images and the construction of space, the relationship between word and image in books, experimental manipulation of visual images in art, images in performance both theatrical and social, the history of photography, and technologies of image production. The class discussions will elucidate the interdisciplinary effects of image production, reception, and circulation in modern media environments.

 

Art History 515 “Haunted American Art”
Professor: Adam Thomas
Wednesdays 2:30-5:30 PM

This graduate seminar delves into the art and visual culture of ghostliness in the United States. All manner of paranormal phenomena and occult beliefs are fair game. Whether trading in blatant gothic tropes (haunted houses,
doppelgängers, graveyards) or treading the borderline between phantoms and hallucinations, many artists have reckoned with questions of ghostliness and representation. We will attempt to untangle some of the different aesthetic categories associated with this elusive and expansive topic through selected episodes in the history of American art. From the sublime horror of a Thomas Cole landscape in the nineteenth century to the eerie silence of an Edward Hopper interior in the twentieth, paintings will be the jumping-off point for investigation of a range of media. Spirit photography, proto-cinematic technologies, illustrations, and literary texts, for example, are all fodder for scrutiny. This course engages a variety of critical approaches throughout the semester as we consider the importance of haunting to ideas about race and repression, the disenchantment of modernity, the so-called “spectral turn” in cultural theory, and haunting as a methodological disposition in the writing of (art) history itself.

 

Art History 597 “Plastics”
Professor: Sarah Rich

This class will investigate the historical importance of plastic in visual and material culture. While the term “plastic” originated in English at the start of the 17th century, denoting the additive technique of sculpture through modeling (as opposed to subtractive techniques of carving), the word quickly morphed into an adjective describing substances generally hospitable to transformation. In its latter function, plasticity would become paradigmatic of Modernity itself, effectively capturing the era’s ethos of instability. With the advent of synthetic and petroleum products, material plastic became a chief ingredient in everything from radios to nylon stockings, and in the process became an emblem of technology’s triumph. As decades progressed as its environmental impact became more clear, however, plastic reversed its connotation and increasingly became emblematic of technology’s destructive power.

As we explore the subject, we will look at specific uses of plastic in art (plastic paints, styrofoam, celluloid, plastic tubing, inflatables, nylons…), at properties often associated with plastic (oozing, melting, hardening, softening, bending, molding…), and at artistic movements that explicitly expressed interest in “plasticity” (from early and mid 20th century movements such as De Stijl and Abstract Expressionism to Andy Warhol’s traveling psychedelic party known as “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable”). We will also explore vitally important tributary themes such as the spread of consumerism, the democratization of design, youth culture, the petroleum industry, credit cards, plastic surgery, the mutability of identity, artificiality, toxicity, and sustainability.This course will benefit from many important objects, events and speakers that will be available through the Palmer Museum’s forthcoming exhibition of plastic in contemporary art (opening in February 2018).

 

ENGL 549 “Shakespeare” 
Professor: Claire Bourne 
Thursdays 8:00-11:00 a.m. 

“If the play is a book, it’s not a play.” Stephen Orgel’s famous adage exemplifies the once and future tension between page- and stage-based critical approaches to the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In this seminar, we will examine the critical genealogies of this tension, some of which were instrumental in the foundation of English as a discipline. We will put these histories in conversation with the range of contemporary—early modern—documents that testify to the multi-modal status of plays—manuscript, print, performance, &c. Through a series of case studies drawn from the Shakespearean canon (and one or two from outside of it), we will study the range of material processes by which early modern plays were “published” on both stage and page during and after Shakespeare’s career. Our focus will be the documents used to facilitate performance; evidence of the varied relationships between playhouse and print-house in early modern England; and strategies used by playwrights, printers, and publishers—and, later, editors, typographers, and book designers—to remediate performance texts into matter fit for reading.

This seminar will familiarize students with foundational and current scholarship in bibliography, book history, performance studies, and theater history. Together, we will engage with a variety of methods for studying performance and books via textual archives (including Penn State Libraries’ Special Collections and a number of key digital repositories), and ask how these methods have shaped media history, editorial theory, pedagogy, and our sense of “the literary.” The methods we practice in this course are portable—applicable to earlier and later materials—and therefore useful to students who do not work on drama or the early modern period. Students working on earlier or later periods are therefore encouraged to enroll.

 

ENGL 583.001 “Aesthetics and Materiality” 
Professor: Claire Colebrook 
Thursdays 2:30-5:30 p.m.  

In the wake of various new materialisms and new aestheticisms this course offers a genealogy of contemporary theories of art, matter and affect. Beginning with Adorn’s Aesthetic Theory a series of readings will explore the following questions: does the very concept of the aesthetic already presuppose a normative and racially/sexually specified subject? What is the relation between aesthetics and politics? Is the question of that relation itself problematic? Does it make sense to talk about feminist, queer, indigenous, black, queer or disability aesthetics, or is ‘the aesthetic’ a transcendental category that allows for a more profound questioning of such political identities?

Reading:
Theodor Adorno, from Aesthetic Theory 
Paul de Man, ‘Kant’s Materiality’
Deleuze and Guattari, from What is Philosophy? 
Deleuze and Guattari from A Thousand Plateaus 
Bernard Stiegler, ‘Kant, Art, and Time.’
Bernard Stiegler ‘The Quarrel of the Amateurs’
Rita Felski, from Beyond Feminist Aesthetics 
Fred Moten, from In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition 
Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art 
Tobin Siebers from Disability Aesthetics 

 

SPAN 597 “A Poetry of Things: Material Culture in Habsburg Spain”
Professor: Mary Barnard

With the rise of Spain in the sixteenth century as a trans-European and global power, social, political, and aesthetic ideals were aligned with the court, empire and modernity. This course will focus on how major poets of Habsburg Spain used artifacts as material sites of discourse to explore connections to antiquity, cultural memory, political and social events, space, self-representation, and status. Artifacts studied range from large decorative objects, like tapestries, paintings, and frescoes, to trinkets and accessories gathered in “cabinet of curiosities.” The course will examine diverse topics such as: the city as text, specifically how a “pilgrim”  and learned humanist from Spain reads Rome’s ruins and museum artifacts, a dynamic palimpsest of objects that are carriers of ancient culture and history; how objects like tapestries and paintings are used to explore questions of patronage, social networking, and gift-giving as well as to both celebrate and critique the politics and ideology of empire; how  mirrors and portrait miniatures are used for examining questions of introspection and self-reflexivity of an incipient modern subject; and how inscriptions on tombs and urns explore the interplay between orality and writing, voice and memory. Since the topic is part of a larger European phenomenon, the course will include Spain’s cross-cultural relations with Italy, a major source of objects, ranging from archaeological discoveries in Rome to paintings and printed books. The course also will consider the role of early modern collectionism in textual and artistic production.

This course will be taught in Spanish. Students are encouraged to give oral presentations in Spanish, but may write their papers in Spanish or in English.

 

Fall 2017

Art Education 597 “Transdisciplinary Creativity: Eco-Social Justice and Art Education”
Professor: Karen Keifer-Boyd
Wednesdays 6:00-9:00 pm

This course engages with eco-art collectives and movements that are building response-abilities to take on the world’s urgent environmental problems through transdisciplinary creativity. Topics will include: feminist new materialism, environmental ethics in the anthropocene, speculative design and additivism, diffractive methodologies, affect methodologies, visual mapping, data visualization, dark matter witnessing, speculative standpoints, science-based art, place-based art education, and STEAM curricula.

 

Art History 597 “Seminar in Primitivism”
Professor: William Dewey
Mondays 2:30-5:30 pm

The history and development of European and American twentieth-century art have been influenced in a number of ways by the “discovery” of “Primitive art” and the often associated, notions of “Primitivism.” The terms “Primitivism” and “Primitive art” have now become problematic and are rarely used because of such issues as colonialism, racism, and the continued economic disparities between the so-called “Developed” and “Third” Worlds. The terminology, however, was frequently used throughout the twentieth century and so is retained for our purposes to trace the historic development and use of these terms, rather than implying that the art referred to was either crude or unsophisticated. This seminar examines how fascinations with all things “Primitive” have shaped Western art, revealing more about the Western Imagination than the “Other”. While the idea of Primitivism has a relatively longer history, pertaining to theories of ways for regenerating and revitalizing Western culture, we will primarily be looking at the way it has been conceived of as contributing to the practice and theory of making and writing about art in the twentieth century. In this seminar we will look at some of the art and writings of both artists and theoreticians as they encountered these “Primitive” art forms for the first time at the beginning of the nineteen hundreds, and developed theories of “Primitivism,” especially from the 1940s through the 80s. Significant attention will be paid to the 1984 “Primitivism” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, and the extensive, critical backlash it generated. We will read The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress and Paris Primitive, which recounts the creation in 2006 of a monumental museum dedicated to “Primitive Art” in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower: the Musee du Quai Branly. We will also read the new catalogue of the 2016 exhibition dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other.

 

FREN 597.1 “The Era of the Great ‘Francophone’ War, 1914-2017″
Professor: Jennifer Boittin
Wednesdays 5:30-8:30PM

This course takes a sociocultural approach to the centenary of the Great War in three parts: the war itself, the interwar years and contemporary reverberations of the war. With a focus upon the field of visual studies via objects such as film, photography, Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams and graphic novels, we use the prisms of race, gender and class to pursue a multidimensional approach of the war and its memory in France, Belgium, West Africa and the Caribbean among other spaces. This course will be taught in French.

 

FREN 597.3 “France in Ruins: Wounded Spaces from 1945 to the Present”
Professor: Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire
Mondays 6:00-9:00PM

Ruins have been at the center of the French imagination since the sixteenth century, representing in turn the decay of the pagan world, its architectural genius, the height of the sublime, and a cradle for earthly pleasures or for the inquisitive mind. The two World Wars, with their landscapes of broken metropolises and scorched earth, changed the literary reading of this spatial motif in radical ways. Nonetheless, it persisted, taking dominant albeit unique shapes in the literature we will study this semester, which will include Jean Genet, Julien Gracq, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, François Bon and Élisabeth Filhol.

This seminar will adopt a poetic approach to the texts, while remaining open to the theoretical perspectives that the students will bring forward through class discussions, an oral presentation and a variety of written assignments. The seminar will also include a substantial component dedicated to the visual history of ruins in European architecture, painting, photography, and film.

While discussions and readings will be in French, students who are not enrolled in French and Francophone Studies are strongly encouraged to enroll and may write their essays in English.

 

GER 597 Media and Romanticism
Professor Daniel Purdy

This course will examine the juxtaposition between the deterministic claims of contemporary German media theory and the poetic inwardness of Romantic writing. The course readings will commence with the early poetry of Goethe and Wordsworth, in order to consider how these authors struggle with the media technology of their own era as they seek to establish an autonomous poetic voice. The class will examine canonical Romantic literature to consider whether subjectivity is largely determined by cultural techniques and media technology? The course will also consider how late Romantics used media technologies in their own construction of poetic experience. How did communications media around 1800 address the Romantic desire for immediate sensations? Central to our discussions will be the concept of the “Romantic image.” Why did Romantics place such great importance on visual images as their ideal form of aesthetic perception? What is the relationship between the image and tone in Romantic writing about Beethoven’s music? To enhance our reflections, we will read recent media theories by Friedrich Kittler, Jochen Hörisch, Bernhard Siegert, Wolfgang Ernst, and Willem Flusser in relation to some of the most important literary works of German Romanticism (broadly defined): J.W. Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Bettina von Arnim, among others.

This course will be offered in English.

 

CMLIT/SPAN 597.004 “Race, Performance, and Possession in the Americas
Professor: Sarah Townsend
Thursdays 6:00-9:00pm

This course will take a hemispheric approach to examining the connections between race, performance, and “possession”— both in the sense of property ownership to spirit possession. We will explore the complexities of this term and ask what it can tell us about the equally complex notions of “race” and “performance” by studying theater, performance art, films, literature, historical documents, music, etc. from throughout the Americas. Possible topics include: the exhibition of racially   marked bodies and “scenes of subjection”; examples of racial impersonation such as blackface performance; slaves as objects of conspicuous consumption and the racialization of conspicuous consumption in the present; Haitian vodou, and links between zombies and whiteness in recent popular culture; avant-garde engagements with ritual practices of trance; struggles over copyright and cultural appropriation; and the politics of archives and museum collections.

This course will be taught in English, with all materials available in the original (English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French) and in English translation.

 

SPAN 597, “Spanish Cinema Studies: Current Methods and Theoretical Approaches.” 
Professor: Matthew Marr

This course will focus on current theoretical trends in Spanish film studies.  Moving beyond a set of traditional methodologies rooted in film history, genre studies, notions of a “national” cinema, auteurism, and/or formalism, much recent work in the field has embraced the insights of scholarship from areas ranging from sound studies to geocriticism, from ecocriticism to disability studies, from the politics of social activism to televisual and media studies.  While foregrounding critical readings which have broadened the field in this regard, this course will also emphasize—as a secondary concern—the fundamentals of reading film.  It will offer an overview of cinematic practices vis-à-vis performance, cinematography, sound, direction, editing, and production, namely with the goal of enhancing students’ ability (as seasoned literary critics) to move beyond the application of interpretive tools bound to the realm of narrative. This course will be conducted primarily in English, though a few critical essays and all films will be in Spanish (most will have subtitles in English or Spanish).  Students may write papers in Spanish or English, but are encouraged (though not obligated) to develop their skills in both languages by writing in their weaker language for at least one assignment.