Spring 2010 Course Offerings

(also ENGL 4074, ARTH 4934, VISST 4934)
Spring.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.   
M. Jacobus
T 12:20 - 2:15

‘Painting is, first, an affirmation of the visible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears’ (John Berger).

What makes us see (or not see) and what does Berger mean by ‘an affirmation of the visible’? This course will take a psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and philosophic lens to visual art and writing about it. Since Oedipus and the positing of castration anxiety, the founding myths of Freudian psychoanalysis have been concerned with the dynamics of sight and unseeing, looking and blindness, and the appearance and disappearance of the object. Lacan theorizes the Gaze; Merleau-Ponty explores the phenomenology of perception; Derrida posits the blindness that inhabits self-portraiture, Barthes and Benjamin reflect on photography as forms of seeing--subjective, technological, and historical--as well as the mark, the aura, and the trace.  Underlying each of these topoi are assumptions about the importance of perception and affect, and the means by which it is mobilized, interpreted, and historically located.

Seminars will cluster around selected aspects of the visual—including looking, knowing, facing, fearing, feeling, and writing—as represented in theory, painting, drawing, video-art, photography, and graphic art, including calligraphic art. Alongside the main texts, we will read psychoanalytically inflected art criticism and visual theory, including some notable examples of ‘art writing’, as well as writing in, or as, art, by critics like T.J Clark and Mieke Bal and theorists such as
Benjamin, Derrida, and Barthes who are noted for their interest in the visual. Seminars will include case-studies focused on selected artists and writers who have prompted significant re-readings and reinterpretations of the visual, or whose work engages theoretical and perceptual issues so as to mobilize new forms of seeing and meaning-making in their practice. This course will interest students who are interested in literary theory, visual theory and visual culture, as well as those primarily interested in the visual arts. 

Mary Jacobus is Grace 2 Professor of English and a Fellow of Churchill College. She came to Cambridge after twenty years teaching at Cornell University, where she was Anderson Professor of English and Women’s Studies; prior to crossing the Atlantic, she taught at Oxford. Her work is both literary and interdisciplinary, and is currently energized by the range of projects and disciplines represented at CRASSH.

(also FREN 4935)
Spring.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.   
S. Tsai
R 12:20 - 2:15 

We will inquire into the production of subjectivity, or rather, the production of mode of existence, in the reign of the Second Empire in France, based on Emile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). In Zola’s work, the Second Empire provides a perfect example to study how the reconstruction of the capital city, compounded by modernist technologies of vision and sound, had paradoxically extended the range of cultural mobilities, while the power structure of the empire tried to secure the control over the identification of individuals through regulations of immobility. Subjectivation as mode of production, a conceptual device developed by Zola and further elaborated into the critique of modernity by Foucault and Deleuze, evokes the genealogy of ethics and the production as a process of “becoming condition”. While Foucault stressed on the notion of modernity as an “attitude,” or a “mode of relation” in regard to “today,” Deleuze postulated that the question to be asked about the production of the subject needs to take into consideration every singular position taken in a specific way of seeing, speaking and acting. We will discuss Foucault and Deleuze’s ideas of the “fold” along with the theory of the “screen” and the notion of “simulacra” of Zola in the context of network/mobility. 

Shuling Stephanie Tsai, currently teaches as associate professor in the French department of Tamkang University in Taiwan. She chaired the department from 2001-2006 and established in 2001 a master program in French contemporary thoughts. She obtained the Ph.D degree in French Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with dissertation entitled “L’expérience de l’absence chez Maurice Blanchot: l’approche de l’ éloignement,” and taught, from 1986-90, as graduate teaching assistant (French 101-204). The major themes of her research have been anchored around the construction of subjectivity and the notion of “modernity”. Her research interest covers the most influential contemporary French theories and writers, such as Blanchot, Levinas, Deleuze, Kristeva and Duras. And her recent studies also inquire into the reception and the translation of French theories in Chinese.