This course is an introduction to the work of Guy Debord and the Internationale situationiste, which is often credited having played a significant part in triggering the near-revolutionary events of Mai '68. With others in the IS, Debord developed a radical understanding of the relation between art and politics in the cultural revolution he aimed to provoke. Debord was a prolific composer of tracts, articles, reviews, books, memoirs, and films, and students will also read work by others in the IS including Bernstein, Vaneigem, and Viénet. The students and teacher may also have video screenings outside of class at a time to be determined on the first day. All work is in English. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
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Special Topics in Literature: Globalization and Culture
This course takes as its subject the proposition that "globalization" is a paradigm or episteme within which individuals interact differently with one another and with cultural production itself. We will consider 1973 a key marker in this transition into "globalization" because of a number of important changes in financial markets, technologies, and geopolitical history. If forms of cultural production such as the novel and the feature length film dominated the 19th and 20th centuries through the 1970s and had (according to social scientists) an important role in developing concepts of nation, empire, etc., what does the epistemic shift into globalization tell us about the role of literature and culture in the digital age? What happens to the novel and the feature length film after 1973, cultural forms now putatively anachronistic? The course introduces and examines theories of globalization and culture, as well as related fields (postcolonial theory, poststructuralist literary theory, postmodernism), in order to grapple with these and related questions. Along the way, we study films and read captivating works of fiction produced since 1973, both on their own terms and for instructive lessons on how to understand that elusive and ever changing present we find ourselves in. Literature and films from the U.S., Europe, North Africa and the Middle East (all readings in English or English translation). Counts toward the American Literature and the Comparative & World Literature specializations.
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