Fall 2017 Courses

Four PAL courses will be offered Fall 2017.

•  Comparative Modernism across the Arts, Corina Stan and Gabriel Richard
• Wittgenstein and Literary Theory, Toril Moi
• Film-philosophers/Film-makers, Markos Hadjioannou
• Stimmung and Film Aesthetics, Inga Pollmann

Details (including course numbers) are included below.

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Comparative Modernism across the Arts

Instructors: Corina Stan and Gabriel Richard

Time: Wed 4:40-7:10

Cross-lists: English, Romance Studies, French, Literature, German, Music, International Comparative Studies

Note: This is a collaboration between Dr. Corina Stan (Assistant Professor in English) and Gabriel Richard (Visiting Professor in Romance Studies, First Violin in the Paris Orchestra, First Violin of the Thymos Quartet). No pre-requisites; students will have the opportunity to choose the topics of their class presentations and written assignments based on their interests in particular art forms, and receive individual specialized guidance from the instructors.

This course explores modernism as a rich mosaic of intermedial aesthetic practices, focusing closely on intersections between music, visual, and literary arts. This exploration will often take us behind the scenes of modernism, listening in on conversations in literary salons that inspired composers, or looking over the shoulder of writers jotting down ideas in diaries, while listening to music. Consider, for example, the lively portraits of artists emerging from Gertrude Stein’s unusual Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; or Parade (1917), produced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with costumes by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, and a scenario signed by Jean Cocteau; or Oskar Schlemmer’s eccentric piece of Bauhaus brilliance, the Triadic Ballet (1922), partly inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1913), both emancipated from the constraints of theatrical and operatic traditions that had dominated Western art for centuries. And Schoenberg, of course, acknowledged that his musical style had changed dramatically when he composed to Stefan George’s poems from The Book of the Hanging Gardens, which, in turn, were influenced by the synaesthetic qualities pursued by the French symbolists (Mallarmé was a great inspiration).

How do we account for these intermedial practices, and how do they enrich our understanding of literary modernism, as well as of the ways modernism has constantly reinvented itself – all the way to the present day? Can we understand “the contemporary” if we do not engage with modernism?

In keeping with the insistence, in New Modernist Studies, on broadening the framework of modernism spatially, temporally, and conceptually, in this course we will map out some of the major networks of artistic influence that have generated intermedial artworks. Our excursus will be presided by two major figures of the second half of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose asymmetrical friendship was born under the auspices of their shared fondness for music and philosophy, and later ruined by aesthetic and ideological differences. “Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian,” Nietzsche wrote. We will see that, where Wagner’s aim was to absorb all arts into the grand spectacle of the music drama, many later modernists thought of their work as an index to other arts; we will explore Rimbaud’s “methodical confusion of all the senses,” Gauguin’s work in Tahiti and his influence on German expressionists, O. Dejours’ Song of the Blue Rider (inspired by the painter Franz Marc), A. von Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony (to lyrics by Rabindranath Tagore), Aimé Césaire’s dedication of his Notebook… to Wifredo Lam (and the latter’s closeness with Breton’s circle), the work of El Lissitzky in Soviet Russia, and his influence on Bauhaus and De Stijl figures. In addition to the indispensable manifestos that punctuate the period we think of as “modernism” (from Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises and Tristan Tzara’s Dada, to de Andrade’s Cannibalist Manifesto), we will also engage with some major literary texts that intersect other art forms, such as the Sirens episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s final section of The Waves (partly inspired by Beethoven’s quartets), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (we will watch Luchino Visconti’s film, and analyze the use of Mahler’s Adagietto), excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and possibly from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. We will close with two films, Time Regained (1999) by Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, based on the last volume of Proust’s novel, and Faust (2011), by Russian director Aleksander Sokurov.

In preparation for the course, students might enjoy reading through Alex Ross’s richly informative volume The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) and Jed Rasula’s History of a Shiver. The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (2016).

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Film-philosophers/Film-makers

LIT 620S; AMI 620S; VMS 622S; ENGLISH 620S; DOCST 620S; THEATRST 620S

Professor Markos Hadjioannou

Course description:

This course is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students interested in the intersections between film, critical theory, and continental philosophy. It offers a wide-ranging understanding of film philosophy, as an analytic and interpretative mode of understanding cinema as a mode of existential query, cultural production and social interaction.

Over the course of film’s history, we see a number of shifts in how cinema has been interpreted by film critics, philosophers, psychologists, critical theorists, etc. The main issue at hand has been to understand what cinema is, how we can come to interpret a visual culture with such a pervading effect on 20^th century society. More recently, this trend has culminated with a subsection of film theory and continental philosophy alike—what has been termed “film-philosophy”. This focus takes as its inspiration the work of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Stanley Cavell, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Rancière amongst others. Cinema, for these writers, confronts us with questions of being, belonging, identifying, feeling, responding, and participating in reality, in the world, in our own bodies, and in the societies within which we reside. More so than this, film-philosophy sees film-making as a procedure of philosophical thought—an act of thinking about the world, a (re)presentation of the process of thinking, and an interpretation of the world as an act of thought. In other words, film-philosophy takes as its premise that films are themselves acts of philosophy.

With this in mind, this course will look at how cinema has been discussed by the aforementioned philosophers, but also how their work has impacted the scholarship of contemporary film theorists. Beyond these writers, our weekly meetings will also focus on the film-makers whose works present us with modes of philosophical thinking. Here we will look at a large variety of short-, medium-, and feature-length films, and from experimental, to documentary, and fiction films. Examples include David Lynch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Agnès Varda, Ari Folman, Michael Haneke, Terrence Malick, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Abbas Kiarostami, Alfred Hitchcock amongst many others.

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