The Senses and the Subject in Cinema and Poetry
ENGL 310
Spring 2018 not offered
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In this course, we will study a mixture of emotionally stimulating and taxing cinema and lyric poetry to intensify our capacity to articulate a notion of the senses, which presumes some notion of the subject. The cinema and poetry selected invoke several national traditions and political events that will pressure our thinking of individual sense experience and how it reaches toward others to fight the effacement of the human subject. While these two art forms might seem like strange neighbors, we will think of cinema and lyric poetry as "repositor[ies] of synesthesia" wherein one feeling can dub into another--an image stimulating an effect on hearing, for example--in measured intervals of time that are generative of images.
The films and poetry selected will carry students into cuts of Sweden, Germany, Spain, Mexico, France, United States, Senegal, Mali, and Japan at distinctly urgent moments in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The threads that will sew the course's images together and bind them to the human subject and senses are the death of God, displacement, migration, fascism, colonialism, globalization, and, of course, love. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(CBST-MN)(CSCT)(ENGL) |
Major Readings:
The course will select from some of the following films and poets' works:
Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) and Winter Light (1963); Michael Haneke's White Ribbon (2009) and Code Unknown (2003); Alejandro González Iñarritú's Biutiful (2010); Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000); Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también (2001); Haile Gerima's Bush Mama (1979); Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1979); Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl (1966); Abderrahmane Sissako's Life on Earth (1998) and Bamako (2006); and Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976).
We will read select lyric poems by Robert Hayden, Ana Castillo, Tracy K. Smith, Tomas Tranströmer, and Eduardo Corral, and select essays by Roland Barthes, Frantz Fanon, Alain Badiou, and Mae Ngai. (All but Corral will be on Moodle.)
Students should obtain the undergirding critical texts of the course:
Susan Stewart, POETRY AND THE FATE OF THE SENSES (2002)
Judith Butler, THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF POWER: THEORIES IN SUBJECTION (1999)
Eduardo Corral's chapbook, SLOW LIGHTNING (2012)
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Examinations and Assignments:
Students will write a few short papers and a final paper. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course fulfills the Theory requirement and contributes to the Theory and Literary Forms concentration of the English major. |
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