Aesthetics Out of Bounds: History and Art Outside the Frame
with Michael Witmore and Melissa Ragona
Course Schedule and Information
All lectures are scheduled
for 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm McConomy Auditorium, University Center, unless
otherwise noted (at this point only Tom Smart and Colin MacCabe will be
speaking in theAdamson Wing, BH 136A). Students must complete required
readings by the day on which they are listed. As per below, readings will
be assigned on three occasions: for class meetings on the Tuesday prior
to any given lecture; for the Monday lectures themselves, and for the
Tuesday seminars that follow each visiting lecture. Please check the schedule
for times of meetings, lectures and seminars.
This schedule is subject to change.
SPRING SEMESTER WITH MELISSA RAGONA
Part 1: Theories of Performativity
Tuesday, January 17 SEMINAR:
1:30-3:20pm —Introduction to Course
Reading:
JL Austin’s How To Do Things With Words (1962) (excerpt)
Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)”
from The Theater and its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 89-100.
Nicholas Daly, 'It": The Last Machine and the Invention of Sex Appeal."
LITERATURE, TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY, 1860-2000, Chapter IV,
PART 2: Contingent Structures of Performance
in Theater, Film, and Architecture
Monday, January 23: LECTURE: 5:00-6:30pm Joseph Roach
(introduced by Kristina Straub, Department of English).
Reading:
Joseph Roach, “History, Memory and Performance,” and “Echoes
in the Bone, from Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 1-71.
"It" Theatre Journal 56 (2004): 555-568.
Chris Rojek, Celebrity (Reaktion Books, 2001) (intro)
Tuesday, January 24: SEMINAR:
1:30-3:20pm with Joseph Roach
Reading: SAME AS JANUARY 23. Required Screening: The
Butcher Boy (1997) (and other films tba)
Monday, January 30: LECTURE:
5:00-6:30pm Colin McCabe (introduced by Peggy Knapp, Department of English)
Reading: excerpts from:
'Performance' (London: British Film Institute 1998)
'On the Eloquence of the Vulgar' (London: British Film Institute 1999)
Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (UK: 2004)
Tuesday, January 31 SEMINAR:
1:30-3:20pm with Colin McCabe
Reading: same as January 30 and TBA
Tuesday, February 7 SEMINAR
1:30-3:20pm
Judith Butler’s “Body Inscriptions, Performative Subversions”
Bodies That Matter (1993)
Same as above (see January 23) as well as: Mikhail Bakhtin, “The
Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources” from Rabelais and
his World (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1984), 303-67and
others TBA
Tuesday, February 21 SEMINAR: 1:30-3:20pm (discussion
on Smart)
Reading: selections from:
Reinventing the Museum, editor Gail Anderson (AltaMira Press:
2004)
Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances (Discussions in Contemporary
Culture, no. 10), editors Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (New Press: 1999)
Monday, February 27: LECTURE:
5:00-6:30pm Tom Smart
Reading: same as February 21
Tuesday, February 28: SEMINAR: 1:30-3:20pm with Tom Smart
Reading: TBA
Tuesday, March 7: SEMINAR 1:30-3:20pm discussion on Roth
Reading: selections from:
Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography and the Urban
Landscape (2001)
Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century
(2001).
••MARCH 13-17 SPRING BREAK SPRING
BREAK SPRING BREAK••
Monday, March 20: LECTURE:
Michael Roth (introduced by Elizabeth Bradley, Department of Drama).
Reading: Same as March 7
Tuesday, March 21: SEMINAR:
1:30-3:20pm with Michael Roth
Reading: TBA
PART 3: The Truth of Things
Tuesday, March 28 SEMINAR:
1:30-3:20pm
Reading:
Graham Harman, “Objects” and “The Problem of Objects”
in Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things
(Chicago: 2005)
Bruno Latour, “What is a Quasi-Object?” in We Have Never
Been Modern (Harvard University Press: 1993)
Susan Stewart, “The Souvenir” from On Longing: Narratives
of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the souvenir, the Collection (Duke
University Press: 1993).
Selections from: Lorraine Daston, Things That Talk: Object Lessons
From Art and Science (Zone, 2004)
Monday, April 3: LECTURE: Lorraine Daston (introduced by Michael
Witmore, Department of English).
Reading: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,”
Representations, No. 40, Special Issue: Seeing Science (Autumn,
1992), 81-128.
Tuesday, April 4: SEMINAR:
1:30-3:20pm with Lorraine Daston
Reading: Same as Above (see April 3) as well as: selections from: Paula
Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture
in Early Modern Italy (University of California Press: 1994)
Tuesday, April 11 FINAL PRESENTATIONS- DAY 1
1:30 PM to 4:20 PM
Tuesday, April 18 FINAL PRESENTATIONS-
DAY 2
1:30 PM to 4:20 PM
Part 4: Archaeologies of Gendered Performances
Monday, May 1: LECTURE: 5:00-6:00pm
Katheryn Linduff Gender and Chinese Archaeology with Sun Yan (editor,
Linduff), Altamira Press, June 2004
"The Beginnings of Metallurgy from the Urals to the Yellow Rivers,"
(editor, Linduff), Mellon Press, April 2004;
Tuesday, May 2: SEMINAR: 1:30-3:20pm
with Katheryn Linduff
Reading: Same as May 1 and TBA
Initial Resource List for Theories
of Performativity:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (selections)
J.L. Austin, "Pretending" and How to Do Things with Words
John Searle, "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts"; "The Logical
Status of Ficitonal Discourse"; "Re-iterating the Differences:
A Reply to Derrida"
Emile Benveniste, "Subjectivity in Language"; "Analytical
Philosophy and Language"
Jacques Derrida, selected essays including "Signature Even Context"
(from Limited Inc); "Declarations of Independence";
"Admiration de Nelson Mandela"
Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (selections)
Jean-François Lyotard, selections from The Postmodern Condition
and The Differend
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
and selections from Bodies that Matter
Slavoj Zizek, selections from The Sublime Object of Ideology
and Enjoy Your Sympton!
FALL SEMESTER WITH MICHAEL WITMORE
Tuesday, August 29: SEMINAR 1:30-3:20pm
—Introduction to Course, Theorizing "The Visual"
Viewing:
Please arrive having viewed Trinh T Minh-ha's Reassemblage,
available in the Hunt Video Library.
Monday, September 12: Film Screening: Night
Passage: 4:00-5:30pm (Chosky Theatre); LECTURE:
5:30-6:30pm Trinh T. Minh-ha, "The Transcultural
Passage"
(introduced by Melissa Ragona, Department
of Art).
Reading:
Reading: Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3-33; Laura Mulvey, “"Visual
Pleasure in Narrative Cinema," Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975),
6-18; Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “’Who is Speaking?’
Of Nation, Community and First Person Interviews,” with Isaac
Julien and Laura Mulvey, in Framer Framed (New York: Routledge,
1992), 191-212.
Tuesday, September 13: VISITOR'S
SEMINAR 9:30-11:00am with Trinh T. Minh-ha (246a
Baker Hall)
Reading:
Review the above (see September 12). Read Trinh T. Minh-ha with Lynn
Marie Kirby, "Time Paths" in The Digital Film Event
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 60-81.
Tuesday, October 4: CLASS MEETING
1:30-3:20pm — Space and Attention
Reading:
Jonathan Crary, “Modernity and the Problem of Attention,”
from Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern
Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 11-79. Sigfried Kracauer,
“The Mass Ornament,” from The Mass Ornament: Weimar
Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005), 75-88.
Monday, October 10: LECTURE:
5:30-6:30pm Franklin Toker, "Fallingwater and the Resistance
to Modernism in the United State" (introduced by Hilary
Masters, Department of English)
Reading:
Franklin Toker, "The Buzz that Made America Buy It," from
Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann,
and America's Most Extraordinary House (New York: Knopf, 2003).
Tuesday, October 11: SEMINAR:
11:00am with Franklin Toker (Note Time Change)
Reading:
Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 353-404.
Tuesday, October 18: CLASS MEETING 1:30-3:20pm — Inside/Outside
Reading:
Gilles Deleuze, “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought,” from
Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982), 94-123. Jorge Louis Borges, “The Garden of Forking
Paths" in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964),
19-29.
Monday, October 24: LECTURE: 5:30-6:30pm Giuliana Bruno
(introduced by Franco Sciannameo, Center for Arts in Society).
Reading:
Giuliana Bruno, “The Architecture of the Interior,” from Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 205-46. View in Video Library in Hunt: Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
Tuesday, October 25: VISITOR’S SEMINAR
11:30am to 1:15pm with Giuliana Bruno
Reading:
Henri LeFebvre, “Spatial Architectonics” from The Production
of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Blackwell, 1991),
169-228.
Tuesday, November 8: CLASS MEETING
1:30-3:20pm — The Shape of History
Reading:
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1968), 69-82; 217-52.
Monday, November 14: LECTURE: 5:30-6:30pm Thomas McEvilley
(introduced by Susanne Slavick, School of Art)
Reading:
Brian O’Doherty with Thomas McEvilley, Inside the White Cube:
The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999), 1-64.
Tuesday, November 15:
VISITOR'S SEMINAR: 8:00am to 9:00pm with Thomas
McEvilley
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