Category: Archive courses

“The Architecture of Hurry”:  British Modernists Confronting “Modernity”
This seminar will consider how British writers during the first three decades of the twentieth century responded to the social, cultural, and technological changes that were rapidly transforming their lives. The prevalent belief that modern industrialized society was in a state of crisis intensified during the years leading up to the Great War, which intensified a mood of increasing anxiety about the future of civilization.   Virginia Woolf’s famous remark that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed,” suggests that the process of modernization had impacted interiority itself.  Significantly, for Woolf and other modernists, this awakening to a new world called for correspondingly new approaches to the writing of fiction and poetry, which we will explore through reading works by T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, and of course, by Woolf,  herself.
The emphasis on interiority that characterizes several of these works is paralleled by the growth of psychoanalysis during this period—as an explanatory tool for both individual and social malaise—and it will be one focus of our attention in this seminar.  Another will be on changing attitudes about class, sexuality, gender roles and family relationships.  Depending upon the interests of members of the seminar, we might also explore other issues in relation to these texts, such as the conflicted history of modernist canon formation, the significance of personal relationships and coteries in literary production, contemporary British politics, science, anthropology, and popular culture. 
Texts:
M. Forster, Howards End; D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow; Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems; Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point.

“The wilderness needs your whole attention,” wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder about human perils in 19th-century American prairielands: “Sadness is as dangerous as panthers and bears.” Since her lifetime, and however ironically, the perils of wilderness are no less complicated and various—physically, emotionally, spiritually, technologically, politically. 1n 1992, for example, within a few months of proudly walking solo into the Alaskan wilderness, Christopher McCandless died from a natural poison that he himself tragically harvested and ingested. In 2012, Sherry Turkle in Alone Together cast a skeptical eye on fervent techies who romanticize the Web’s “wilderness” as purely creative “otherness as thick as a jungle”–thus blinding themselves to possible dehumanizing consequences of inhabiting uncritically that landscape.
Then until now, creative writers as diverse as Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild), Cheryl Strayed (Wild), Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) and Andy Weir (The Martian) have weighed in variously on this wilderness critique, just as Sean Penn, Jean-Marc Vallée, Ethan and Joel Coen, and Ridley Scott have employed a variety of digital innovations to adapt those wilderness print narratives from print to screen, quite literally amplifying wilderness themes while diversifying audience receptivity.
The contemporary print representation and film adaptation of wilderness forms the focus of this course. Course texts will draw from a variety of literary genres and may include some of the following print and/or film adaptations: The Homesman, Away from Her, In the Bedroom, We Need to Talk about Kevin, The Social Network, Tracks, Up in the Air, Smoke Signals.
Requirements include: enthusiasm for the seminar topic; sometimes leading and always actively participating in class discussions of the print and film texts; a short annotated proposal and bibliography on your term-end research project; a class presentation of your research ideas; and the project itself, a 12-15 pp. scholarly research essay due at the seminar’s conclusion.
The course is intended for participants in a variety of disciplines spanning English graduate program’s literature/language/culture/theory/creative writing tracks.

This course focuses on the emerging “knowledge formation” of performance studies. It includes discourses concerning the
relationship between text and practice; performance as a reflection of society, a witnessing to an experience, or a challenge to social structures or ways of knowing; emerging ideas of audience reception theory; and so forth.  By the end of the course, students will have
a basic comprehensive knowledge of some of the canonical theorists and texts associated with performance studies,
a knowledge of several recent case-studies to which these theories can be applied for deeper understanding, and
a knowledge of the ways in which meaning is produced through both textual and performative discourses.

This course examines the historical avant-garde, focusing on three major media: the manifesto, performance (including theatre and cabaret), and film. Case studies include the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera, and Fernand Léger and Dudly Murphy’s Ballet Méchanique among others. We will start by examining the major early scholarship about the avant-garde: by José Ortega y Gaset (1925), Renato Pogiolli (1962), Peter Buerger (1974), and Matei Calinescu (1977). These theorists are largely responsible for the most enduring narrative about the historical avant-garde: a culturally marginal movement unified by artists’ radical critique of the past and uncompromising commitment to social change the values of a utopian future. We will also read the alternative narratives of more recent historians who searched the archives in order to establish the actual reception of avant-garde film and performance.
From its beginning, the avant-garde was an international movement and its major figures were often in direct contact with one another, working and exchanging ideas. This international aspect was reinforced by the rise of Stalinism in Russia and Nazism in Germany, which forced many avant-garde artists into exile. A large part of the course is dedicated to understanding how avant-garde ideas, performance, and film circulated among the three major cultural centers of Moscow, Berlin, and Paris. We will also be looking at how the political movements of anarchism, fascism, an communism informed not only avant-garde aesthetics, but also its production and reception.

Visiting Professor, Edward Shanken, author of Art and Electronic Media (London: Phaidon, 2009) will be teaching a graduate seminar that will explore historical/philosophical conceptions of truth and honesty with particular attention to art.
We will consider a broad range of texts from the western philosophical tradition (e.g. Hegel, _Lectures on Aesthetics_,” Neitszche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” Derrida, _Truth in Painting_,) as well as non-western philosophical approaches to the topic (e.g. Nagarjuna’s _The Middle Way_, Huxley’s _Doors of Perception_.)
We will also examine  the notion of honesty, particularly in the context of clinical psychology (e.g., Blanton, _Radical Honesty_) but also in connection with ethics (Habermas, _Moral Consiousness and Communicative Action_.)
We will consider these concepts in relation to the work of artists such as Critical Art Ensemble, David Dunn, Ken Feingold, Lynn Hershman, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, and Alvin Lucier.
Final projects will consist of a substantial research paper or a finished artwork supplemented by a clearly articulated theoretical statement.
The goal of the seminar is to apply insights from these theoretical traditions and artistic practices to your own critical practice; in other words, to find truth and honesty in your own work and process.

This course explores key events and movements in African American performance as an important factor in the emergence and development of the African American public sphere. Topics include the opening of the African Company in 1821, the first African American theatre company in New York City; black drama and abolitionism; the Harlem Renaissance; black performance during the Great Depression; the Black Arts Movement; performance and post-racial utopias at the turn of the 21st century; and the Black Lives Matter movement, among others. In trying to understand how African American performance helped create a black public sphere, we will be engaging with theories of the public sphere and critical race theories of performance.

This course focuses on the emerging “knowledge formation” of performance studies. It includes discourses concerning the
relationship between text and practice; performance as a reflection of society, a witnessing to an experience, or a challenge to social structures or ways of knowing; emerging ideas of audience reception theory; and so forth.  By the end of the course, students will have
a basic comprehensive knowledge of some of the canonical theorists and texts associated with performance studies,
a knowledge of several recent case-studies to which these theories can be applied for deeper understanding, and
a knowledge of the ways in which meaning is produced through both textual and performative discourses.

This course explores how three major twentieth-century discourses about the body—feminism, queer theory, and disability theory—have informed western performance practice and scholarship. While we will review the history of these three discourses, we will mostly focus on how they have evolved in the last decade and on their relevance to present-day performance scholars. We will also examine how, as the theoretical questions changed, different types of sources became important to scholarly discussions: text-based drama, non-dramatic theatrical performance, and non-theatrical social performance practices. We will place our conversation in the larger context of western intellectual history, including events such as the linguistic turn and the affective turn.
 

Since the 1980s, the performance of race has posed some of the most intriguing and challenging problems to practitioners and scholars alike. What does it mean to stage race critically or to watch it critically? If there is one thing that all parties agree upon, it is that representing and understanding race correctly is impossible. The inevitable gap between practitioners’ intention and viewers’ reception is broader and more treacherous in performances to which race is central than in any other. In fact, some scholars consider this gap definitive of all racial performances: theatrical and non-theatrical.

This course examines some of the major twentieth-century critical debates about racial representation.

What are the specific advantages and disadvantages of specific performance contracts (realism, epic theatre, etc.) for staging and viewing race critically? What distinguishes social performances of race from other performances of identity? How has the history of blackness defined and limited all thinking about race in the western world, and how can we get beyond the “black-white binary” in critical analysis? How have psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other theoretical schools contributed to our understanding of racial encounters in the theatre and beyond?

One of the most topical issues in contemporary theatre scholarship is the triangular relationship among theatre, other representational media, and technology. Inspired by media critics such as McLuhan and Baudrillard, the majority of theatre and performance scholars who study this question have placed their discussions in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, focusing on the emergence of digital media and its effects on live performance. This course, by contrast, attempts to study the topic historically, starting in the early modern period. Our major task will be articulating the (sometimes tacit) theories of representation that emerged as new technologies changed the perceptions and daily practices of people in the west.