Foundations in Critical Studies: Representation

Instructor: Aiden Gleisberg
OAK / CRTSD–200 / 15 sessions
Prerequisite: ENG1
July 8–August 15 (no class 7/18), Mon./Wed./Thurs., 6–9 p.m.

This course introduces students to some of the major schools of thought that have influenced the understanding and practice of the arts in the modern era and after. This semester the course particularizes these aims by taking up questions of representation as they have been critically formulated and reformulated in the history of Western thought.

Examining a diverse collection of texts written by a variety of thinkers, the class investigates:

• what it means to represent—literally, to re-present that which is, is not, or could be
• Whether as words, images, or sounds, how representations fundamentally shape, as well as potentially alter, the aesthetic, psychic, and sociopolitical worlds we inhabit, past and future
  *What the limits of representation are and how can we think about and experience these limits? Is it possible to represent the apparently unrepresentable?

Rather than settling on single answers to such complex questions, our primary goal is to think critically about the multiple ways they have been pursued. Major sub-themes of the course are truth and lying, origins, self and otherness, gender and sexuality, authorship, the unconscious, subjectivity, aesthetics, capitalism and commodity culture, political collectivity, race, colonialism and imperialism, space, time, and history.

This course satisfies the Foundations in Critical Studies requirement or an H&S elective.