| source Duke (X) |
level |
department Literature (X) |
This course invites the student to participate in an alternate reading of the history of science in Western Europe from the 17th century to the end of the 19th century, one which focuses on the key role played by imaginative and fictional texts. We will test Hugo GernsbackÂs seminal definition of the now familiar genre of science fiction, that it Âmust be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story, by taking it back in time. In doing so, we will ask how fiction written by practitioners, critics, and enthusiasts of phenomena now organized by the scientific disciplines  physics, biology, anthropology, medicine, demography, etc.  not only commented on but actively helped to determine what scientific knowledge was and is: its acceptable practices, its role in society, and its possible futures. In retelling the story of how Western science attained its privileged position, we will seek to understand how the fate of civilization itself came to be so closely tied to the future of science and technology. Readings will include Francis BaconÂs New Atlantis, Cyrano de BergeracÂs Voyage to the Moon, Mary ShelleyÂs Frankenstein, Jules VerneÂs Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and H.G. Wells The Time Machine, among others.
Score: 9.256218 Details | Listing | Web page
LIT 20S.02
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Basic film theory and history of motion picture technology. Introduction to experimental, documentary, and narrative forms of Third World, European, and United States cinema. Economics and aesthetics, popular genres with emphasis on the science fiction film. Some titles screened may include: Citizen Kane, Strangers on a Train, Un Chien Andalou, The Terminator, The Battleship Potemkin, Blackmail, Alien 3, Run Lola Run, Chinatown, In the Mood for Love, and Memento.
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The Film/Video/Digital Capstone Course is a project-based course
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This course takes part in the growing public scrutiny of methods employed by states and their proxies to gather intelligence --methods, from surveillance to torture, that have often prioritized national security over human rights and even human life. We will explore: trauma, memory, and documentation in theaters of the Cold War and its afterlife through filmic, ethnographic, and psychological studies of terror and paranoia, statecraft and insurgency, with a critical focus on political secrecy and transparency. Screenings and analysis of narrative and documentary films; selected readings of ethnographic and literary texts. CCI, EI, ALP
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This will be a course on theory and methodology within the context of three general rubrics: 1) mode of production, or industry 2) apparatus, or the technology of cinematic experience and 3) text, or the network of filmic systems (narrative, image, sound), we will work through and examine a set of concepts (star, spectator, narrative, filmic statement and enunciation, the gaze, suture, sexual and racial difference) that have emerged over the past decades as the most powerful interpretive tools available to the practice of film analysis. Our emphasis will be less on the appreciation of film, but rather on clarifying what is at stake in the act of critical reading.
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Course Title: The Seeable and the Sayable: Cinema/Philosophy
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FVD 108 is not offered in Spring 2009, however, FVD 108B is offered.
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This course focuses on womenÂs changing status in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe during the transition from central planning and communist ideology to a system of markets and capitalism. How have women fared during this transition? And have there been differences across the countries of Eastern and Central Europe. And if so, what accounts for these differences?
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French-language theatre and cinema in Canada reflect the social and political changes of the last forty years. This course will examine how performance reveals gender construction and gender roles, as well as attitudes toward sexuality and sexual difference. In addition to analyzing plays and films by Francophone Canadians in English translation, we will also see how immigrant playwrights dramatize different social and religious attitudes toward sex and gender. Among the authors to be studied: Marie Savard, (Mine Sincerely), Denise Boucher (The Fairies Are Thirsty), Brossard et al (A Clash of Symbols), Dussault (Mommy), Laberge (Night), M. Tremblay (La Duchesse de Langeais, Hosanna), L. Tremblay (The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi), Bouchard (Lilies), Dubois (Being at Home with Claude), Farhoud (The Girls of the Five and Dime), Micone (People of Silence, Addolorata). Texts and films in English, knowledge of French useful.
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In this course, we will explore the multiple ways in which different communities in the U.S. both organize and imagine family, friendship, and sex. We will approach our topic from a range of perspectives, viewing popular films such as Gangs of New York, Rize, and X-Men 3: The Last Stand, reading novels about lesbian vampires and Chicana girl gangs, and analyzing texts by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and feminist theorists. We will be especially keen on examining the stakes of different relationship forms. How do certain relationships accrue value as more legitimate, desirable, and significant than others, and what the consequences are for those who do not participate in them? How do Âfamily values function in political discourse? Why do alternative versions of friendship and kinship sometimes appear threatening, and what resources, forms of knowledge, and critical tools do they offer those who participate in them?
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There are more slaves now in the 21st century than during any other period
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Featuring the work of Miuccia Prada, Karl Lagerfeld (Chanel), John Galliano (Dior), Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, Nicolas Ghesquiere (Balenciaga), Yves Saint Laurent, Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy), Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Helmut Lang, Rodarte, Boudicca, Gareth Pugh, Rick Owens, Viktor&Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela and others. The aim of this course is to push us to develop a critical approach to fashion, directing us toward the field known formally as Critical Fashion Studies. Some of the most innovate fashion designers currently draw inspiration from and have collaborated with notable writers and philosophers (Baudrillard, Calvino, Boudicca), directors (Wim Wenders, Yohji Yamamoto), and architects (Prada and Rem Koolhaas), to produce not only thoughtful collections, but museum exhibitions and critical retrospectives that address social and political issues. Some of the topics examined in this course: * The formation of an avant-garde collective that is taking issue with mass consumption and mass distribution under late capitalism. * Designers' constant reevaluation of aesthetic terms under which they are expected to labor and produce. * Fashion designers response to issues such as globalization, ecological concerns, the fate of the body with respect to technology, and the global production of subjectivity. We will pay special attention to the history of aesthetic theory and the philosophy of art, small-scale production and the link between ethics and pleasure. We will also explore new technological developments and the emergence of `concept clothing.' Reading selections and reference material will pull from these sources: Kant, Sartre, Benjamin, Lyotard, Hegel, Levinas, Blanchot, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Marx, Bloch, Freud, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Dufrenne, Adorno, Foucault, Kristeva, Bachelard. Barthes, Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Cixous, Jameson, Vattimo, Debord, Simmel, Baudrillard, Calvino, Ballard. Popular writings will include editorials from magazines such as W, Purple Magazine, V Magazine, Acne Paper, Hint, Another, Flaunt, i-D, A Magazine, LÃfficiel, Vogue, Vogue Italia, Vogue Paris, Vogue Nippon, Visionaire.
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This course will focus on experimental poetry and related arts (particularly music) from the Romantic era to the present. We will focus especially on different understandings of what makes a poem--or piece of music or a film--"experimental," and we will consider at some length similarities and differences between experiments in art and experiments in science. (We will consider as well the role of self-experimentation in both science and art.) This course involves many experimental components, including readings of experimental poems, auditing of experimental music, and viewings of experimental film, and students will have opportunities to reflect informally on these experiences. However, the primary goal of the class is a theoretical understanding of these experimental experiences, and the course will facilitate this analytic approach by means of assigned readings and several medium-length, formal essays.
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What does it mean to live authentically? What is it to be an individual? Is it possible to believe seriously in anything, or in anyone? What is the unique significance of the inevitability of one's own death? Why should one live at all?
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What does it mean to live authentically? What is it to be an individual? Is it possible to believe seriously in anything, or in anyone? What is the unique significance of the inevitability of one's own death? Why should one live at all?
Score: 9.256218 Details | Listing | Web page
What does it mean to live authentically? What is it to be an individual? Is it possible to believe seriously in anything, or in anyone? What is the unique significance of the inevitability of one's own death? Why should one live at all?
Score: 9.256218 Details | Listing | Web page
What does it mean to live authentically? What is it to be an individual? Is it possible to believe seriously in anything, or in anyone? What is the unique significance of the inevitability of one's own death? Why should one live at all?
Score: 9.256218 Details | Listing | Web page
What does it mean to live authentically? What is it to be an individual? Is it possible to believe seriously in anything, or in anyone? What is the unique significance of the inevitability of one's own death? Why should one live at all?
Score: 9.256218 Details | Listing | Web page
What does it mean to live authentically? What is it to be an individual? Is it possible to believe seriously in anything, or in anyone? What is the unique significance of the inevitability of one's own death? Why should one live at all?
Score: 9.256218 Details | Listing | Web page
Experimental Art and its Ethics Since 1945 covers all major avant-garde movements of the post World War II era, and concentrates on the conceptual and theoretical impact they have had on the social, political, and cultural conditions of this period. In the aftermath of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust, the capacities of art to express the ethical dilemmas of humankind were questioned. Nevertheless, artists responded to those unprecedented events with coherent and powerful works, and again after September 11th 2001. We will examine the moral, ethical, political, and social exigencies of art, from the existential aftermath of World War II to identity politics, from HIV/AIDS, rape, incest and child abuse to pornography and scatology, from the stateÂs destruction of art to the dilemmas of the post-biological age of genetic engineering; and we shall accomplish this goal through the systematic study of the stylistic development, changes in media, and conceptual orientation of the avant-garde from 1945 to the present. The ethical dimension of this course will consider how the discipline of art confronts cultural concepts of good/bad and right/wrong, how principles of conduct governing aesthetics are carried out in art and its institutions, how standards of behavior, character, or the ideals of character are portrayed in art, and how all of the answers to these questions effect society and culture.
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The contemporary internationalization of cultures on a primary U.S. model poses a challenge to alternative forms of storytelling all over the world and particularly in less industrialized countries. We will be examining the interaction between the global market place and the ways in which different artists and communities reject, interact, and adapt to the situation and how this affects their messages. Among the worlds we may be looking at are: ET, the Extraterrestrial, Forrest Gump, SchindlerÂs List, Pig Earth (by John Berger), The Color Purple, Field of Dreams, Back to the Future, Urga, The English Patient and my own Death and the Maiden.
Score: 9.256218 Details | Listing | Web page
While it is common to hear the present era described as Âsecular and Âmodern, these twin epithets often lack a clear meaning. This new course will explore the relationship between these two key concepts from a variety of disciplines and genres of writingÂin particular literature, theology, sociology, and philosophy. Among the questions we will take up are the following: a) How does the notion of a Âsecular world relate to the rise of experimental science and to the reorganization of knowledge as a system of Âprofessions embodied in the modern research university? b) What kinds of narratives (of progress, of decline) have helped consolidate the widespread notion that we now inhabit a Âsecular modernityÂ? c) Often the process of secularization is causally linked to the rise of modern disciplines and their notion of knowledge as a professional commodity (a.k.a. ÂinformationÂ). If we accept that claim (which, implicitly, we seem to do just by being here and doing what we do), what vantage-point is left for us from which to evaluate the Âsecular and the ÂmodernÂ? IsnÂt any such perspective already prepossessed by those very disciplines and methods associated with a secular modernity? d) Are there limits to the project of nineteenth-century Liberalism and its commitments to pluralism, social progress, and an overwhelmingly economic idea of human flourishing? Is it sufficient to conceive of modern society strictly in terms of Âhorizontal (utilitarian) relations between anonymous individuals and in a language of efficient causes? Or is there something profoundly wrong with that model, as has been argued by a number of major intellectuals and writers who have dissented from the majority view in creative and uncompromising ways (e.g., Goethe, Schopenhauer, Newman, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche et al.). e) What are the consequences of a radical critique of modern, secular, and liberal society as these writers have variously proposed it? Is it that modern society still requires some Âvertical point of reference to the Âsacred (Newman, Dostoevsky), or that it has simply not succeeded in shedding its metaphysical, Christian baggage (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche)? -- A syllabus for the class has already been posted at a website for this course (see below for the URL). Readings will mostly be selections from a wide array of major voices in a) literature (Lessing, Goethe, Coleridge, Blake, Hölderlin, G. M. Hopkins, Dostoevsky); b) philosophy (Hume, Kant, Nietzsche); sociology (Comte, Weber, Durkheim); cultural criticism (Coleridge, M. Arnold, Nietzsche); and theology (Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Newman).
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Re-Imagining the Early Modern Mediterranean:
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German fairy tales of the Romantic era, including both the "literary fairy tales" by known authors and the "folk fairy tales" commonly deemed children's literature. Comparisons to other fairy tale traditions, notably by Perrault and Basile, providing a broader context and perspective. Comparison to the Disney contributions elucidating our own preconceptions and prejudices. Special attention to the literary, feminist, and historical elements of the fairy tale genre.
Score: 9.256218 Details | Listing | Web page